Seminary is Not a Church

This is a good article from my prof James Hamilton about what seminary can and can't do, as well as perhaps should and shouldn't try to do. Here are the opening paragraphs. 

In my humble opinion, seminary students should seek from the seminary what the seminary exists to give them, and the seminary exists to give them the Bible. Let me be quick to add that the seminary’s main purposes include systematic theology and church history, but God has revealed himself in the Bible. Let me say that again, because it’s that important: God has revealed himself in the Bible.

Seminaries exist to teach people the Bible, which means seminaries exist to teach people Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, introduce them to the Bible’s big story, and teach them how to read that story parts and whole.

This means that there are many jobs the seminary does not exist to do: the seminary is not a church. The seminary is not an evangelistic crusade. The seminary is not your small group, your missions and evangelism coordinator, or even your pastoral internship.

I have often heard preachers comment on some pastoral difficulty then say, “They don’t teach you that in seminary!” I usually think to myself, “nor did they intend to; nor were they supposed to.”

Cars don’t sprout wings and fly, and they don’t teach you to pilot a plane in Driver’s Ed. Evaluate a car, or a Driver’s Ed. class, according to what it is intended to do. The seminary is built to prepare people for ministry, yes, but it’s a school. That bears repeating: a seminary is a school. This means, by definition, that a seminary is not a church. So the seminary is preparing people for ministry, but it can’t do everything necessary to prepare people for ministry. It’s not built to do everything necessary to prepare people for ministry. It’s built to be a school.

-James M. Hamilton,  http://jimhamilton.info/2012/03/26/use-the-right-tool-for-the-right-job-gospel-maturity-for-seminary/#comments

What I Found Written on the Bathroom Stall Yesterday

We stopped to use the restroom at a Panera Bread on Bardstown Road, the hipster capital of the world. On the stall, some white person in skinny jeans had carved:

Question the status quo.

Beneath it, in an obviously different hand, someone had replied,

But do you have an answer? 

Sexual Immorality: The Downward Spiral of Our Rationalizations

"Consider sexual promiscuity. The official line is that modern people do not take sex outside of marriage seriously any longer; mere moral realists say this is because we no longer realize the wrong of it. I maintain that we do know it is wrong but pretend that we do not...

...Another tactic is inventing private definitions of marriage. Quite a few people 'think of themselves as married' although they have no covenant at all. Some even fortify the delusion with 'moving-in ceremonies' featuring happy words without promises. Unfortunately, people who 'think of themselves as married' refuse the obligations of real marriage, but demand all of its cultural privileges. Rationalization is so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Such demands make the cultural protection of marriage more difficult. 

Yet another ruse is to admit that sex belongs within marriage but to fudge the nature of the connection. By this reasoning I tell myself that sex is okay because I am going to marry my partner, because I want my partner to marry me, or because I have to find out if we could be happily married. An even more dangerous fudge is to divide the form of marriage from its substance--to say 'We don't need promises because we're in love.' The implication, of course, is that those who do need promises love impurely, that those who do not marry are more truly married than those who do.

This  last rationalization is even more difficult to maintain than most. Love, after all, is a permanent and unqualified commitment to the true good of another person, and the native tongue of commitment is, precisely, promises. To work, therefore, this rule requires another: having deceived oneself about the nature of marriage, one must now deceive oneself about the nature of love. The usual way of doing so is to mix up love with the romantic feelings that characteristically accompany it, and call them 'intimacy.' If only we have these feelings, we tell ourselves, we may have sex. That is to say, we may have sex--if we feel like it. 

Here is where things really become interesting, because if the criterion of being-as-good-as-married is sexual feelings, then obviously no one who has sexual feelings may be prevented from marrying. So homosexuals must be able to 'marry;' their unions, too, should have cultural protection. At this point suppressed conscience strikes another blow, reminding us that marriage is linked with procreation. But now we are in a box. We cannot say 'therefore homosexuals cannot marry,' because that would strike against the whole teetering structure of rationalizations. Therefore we decree that having been made marriageable, homosexuals must be made procreative; the barren field must seem to bloom. There is, after all, artificial insemination. And there is adoption. So it comes to pass that children are given as a right to those from whom they were once protected as a duty. The normalization of perversion is complete."

--Jay Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

 

Can We Be Too Christ-Centered?

"There is no such thing, in Christian life and thought, as being too Christ-centered. But it is certainly possible to be Father-forgetful and Spirit-ignoring. At their best, and from their roots, evangelicals have avoided that. In recent decades, though it requires vigilance to make sure we are presenting the evangelical message with recognizable Trinitarian connections. What Would Jesus Do? He would do the will of the Father in the power of the Spirit. He would send the Spirit to bring us to the Father."

--Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything 

Christianity is Christ

"Christianity is Christ. The person and work of Christ are the rock upon which the Christian religion is built. If he is not who he said he was, and if he did not do what he said he would come to do, the foundation is undermined and the whole superstructure will collapse. Take Christ from Christianity, and you disembowel it; there is practically nothing left. Christ is the center of Christianity; all else is circumference."

--John Stott, Basic Christianity (1958 A.D.) 

Knowing God and Knowing About God--Both...And

"Unfortunately, some have erroneously concluded  that--because knowing God is more than intellectual familiarity with the facts about God--we may get along well enough without them. Thus, what for many passes as the knowledge of God is in fact a mindless, contentless, self-generated feeling of spiritual exultation. Indeed, on occasion I have actually heard it said that theological propositions concerning the nature of God are actually an obstacle to knowing him in any real and lasting way. One almost gets the impression that for such people theological ignorance is heavenly bliss! But we must guard against such careless extremism lest we think that because intellectual apprehension is not sufficient for a genuine knowledge of God, it is not necessary. It is, in fact, the foundation upon which all valid Christian experience and godly fervor are built. In the absence of biblical information concerning who God is and what he is like, we may find ourselves worshiping "foreign gods," if if not a "god" fabricated from our own self-absorbed imaginations. The point of this warning is simply to emphasize that knowing God is a 'both...and' endeavor. It is both thinking great thoughts about him and living in such a way that those thoughts spark loving, joyful, exhilarating obedience."

-Sam Storms, The Grandeur of God (1984 A.D.) 

Away with Tropical Icebergs! Shamrocks Begone!

"When most Christians hear the word Trinity, their immediate mental response is to reach for an analogy: Is the Trinity kind of like a shamrock, or like the three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas), for instance, the one substance H20 being ice and water and steam? They do this, I think, because of a mental habit of associating the Trinity with a logical problem, the problem of reconciling three and one. But while there is a time and place for coming to terms with that problem, and while analogies can offer some limited help on that occasion, we have learned something different from the shape of the economy of salvation. We have learned to associate Trinity with the incarnate Son and the outpoured Spirit. 

When we talk about Jesus, sent by the Father to work in the Spirit, we should know that we are talking about the Trinity. Our thoughts and affections should jump to the Gospels and the gospel, the story of Jesus and the present encounter with him, rather than to shamrocks and steaming icebergs. The whole point is that the presence of the Son and the Spirit themselves, sent by the father into the economy of salvation, is the Trinity. The eternal Trinity is the gospel Trinity. These person in the gospel story are not what the Trinity is like--they are the Trinity. We will see how this changes everything about how we look for the signs of the Trinity in the various elements of the church's life and work. For now, it is enough to underline the new mental associations...that we gain from attending to the economy [of salvation]. Away with tropical icebergs! Shamrocks begone! In the gospel we have God the Trinity." 

-Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything