Re-education.

These days, presbyteries routinely bring in ministers who don’t know Greek and Hebrew.  We don’t care.  It is a requirement we readily waive when applied to ministers transferring from other denominations.  This provides cover for waiving it for everyone.  We are disintegrating into a multi-tiered system with ministers having wildly different levels of education.  And it is eroding faith in our “requirements” when they are no longer really required but easily and regularly evaded.  

We Presbyterians once prided ourselves on having well-educated ministers.  We even stuck to these guns in the 19th century when the Methodists got the jump on us evangelizing the frontier because, with lower educational standards, they could ordain and send out ministers a lot quicker than we could.  Baptists did even better with no standards at all.

Early in my career I was in a clergy Bible study with some who did not know any ancient languages.  They basically picked a Bible translation they liked and treated it like gospel.  If the study Bible of their choice said it, it was true.  At best some would find a scholar who said what they wanted to hear.  But the idea of actually reading, or at least being able to look up words in the actual Greek text was beyond them.

Education is increasingly seen as a bureaucratic “hoop” to jump through.  What we need, we are told, is shovel-ready ministers literate in Facebook and Zoom.  Ancient dead languages, ancient dead doctrines, and anything else judged ancient and dead, are a waste of our time and energy. 

Without maintaining deep intellectual roots, Christian faith blows with every contemporary trend.  American Protestantism has settled into an unremittingly “popular” religion, simplistic, shallow, and dressed-up and watered-down for public consumption.  It is refitted and ungraded to be all relevant and useful, adapted to the lowest common denominator or the latest business fad.  Maniacally adapting, not to the Word of God which becomes increasingly amorphous and translation-dependent, but to the demands of marketing and technology, we curdled into the church-of-what’s-happenin’-now, and ceased being recognizable as a Church of Jesus Christ.  The Church adapted itself to some more tangible, measurable, and socially valued models, like psychology and politics, imported from secular authorities.  It became the American Civil Religion, designed to excuse, allow, and defend the worst aspects of our national identity.  And individual Christians got it into their heads that the point is to have it their way.  Like the old Burger King commercial.  

All this can only happen if Jesus Christ gets set aside and viewed through a dense cultural filter.  Discipleship is dismissed as “works righteousness,” and all but prohibited.  It is reduced to mere citizenship, at best.  At worst it is drowned in a toxic sludge of nationalism, capitalism, militarism, and racism.  It becomes little more than a vague spiritual veneer painted over a corrupt, unjust, shallow, and violent way of life.

Of course, education per se doesn’t solve anything.  Especially when so much of theological education is forced into Modernist categories and methodologies that are inherently hostile to the gospel in many ways.  It is not like things were going splendidly back when we did enforce those old educational standards.  Knowing Greek and Hebrew, and the details of historical doctrine, didn’t generate much actual discipleship.  We were missing Wisdom, which is the core of what we are about and the inner meaning of doctrine.  But Wisdom has no place in seminaries that are essentially graduate schools.

The Reformation famously ditched monasteries for schools.  Ministers wore (and still often wear) not monastic or priestly robes but black academic gowns.  It was a scholarly, intellectual movement at least as much as a spiritual and theological one.  But schools quickly became secularized educational institutions that ultimately believed/trusted in the State, the market, individualism, rationalism, and empirical science.  In none of these places is discipleship rooted in prayer and spiritual community even intelligible.  “God” is just a stand-in for ego, which is how a fundamentally imperialist institution would work.

Such was Christendom in its Protestant form.

MY POINT IS EMPHATICALLY NOT THAT WE SHOULD GO BACK 

TO ENFORCING OUR PREVIOUS STANDARDS.  

RATHER IT IS TO APPRECIATE THIS SITUATION OF DISINTEGRATION 

AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO RE-GROUND CHRISTIAN EDUCATION. 

1. A stronger, more intentionally maintained foundation in basic understanding of the emancipatory spiritual and political content of both the Bible and the doctrines of the orthodox Church would benefit our mission by giving it a  reliable foundation for meeting the challenges of today’s chaotic and dangerous environment.  It would especially distinguish us from the counterfeit and corrupt versions of Christianity prevalent today.
2. It is imperative that education be wedded to spiritual practices, especially the Biblical foundation of fasting, generosity, and prayer, with prayer including a vigorous and profound grounding in meditation/contemplation.   
3. This requires expression in a revived ecclesiology that lifts up and recognizes the authority of the gospel community.
4. Finally, the point is always discipleship: we live a life together rooted and grounded in love, expressed in justice that challenges idolatries and participates in the liberation of poor and oppressed people.

+++++++