I joined the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in 1986. It was a vibrant place, with 1,200 American and international graduate students who came to Deerfield, Illinois, because of the way TEDS combined academic excellence and church service.
That paradigm has now shifted. The Association of Theological Schools reports that dozens of member schools have either closed, moved or merged in the past few years due to declining enrollments, demographic shifts and financial constraints. Alas, this year TEDS is joining these ranks in emigrating to Canada.
These changes obviously affect faculty and students, but the effects on the church, and outreach, are less obvious but just as real and far-reaching. The common assumption is that theology belongs in the schoolroom, not the sanctuary—hence the relative lack of concern about the epidemic of seminary closures—but I beg to differ.
School’s Out.
The shuttering of seminaries is a symptom of a more profound change. Explaining the underlying causes of this sea change was one motivation for Christian Smith’s new book, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford University Press). Smith charts the demise not only of seminaries, but of historic Christianity.
It’s well-known that more and more people identify as “spiritual but not religious.” People trust nurses more than pastors. Organized religion is passé. According to Smith, large-scale social forces have conditioned us not simply to think but to feel religion as culturally obsolete. For an increasing number of people, Christianity—like fax machines, folding maps and floppy disks—no longer feels needed or useful.
In a secular culture with no place for religious authority, the language and grammar of Christian faith comes across as irrelevant or even unintelligible. For many today, the statement “Jesus’ sacrifice paid the penalty for sin” is like something out of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
Sunday (Sans) School
Meanwhile, the church has further distanced itself from theological education, either by eliminating or rebranding what used to be called Sunday school. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Sunday school was a cultural institution in its own right, one of the primary means for fostering biblical literacy and for learning to think Christianly.
During its heyday, Sunday schools were the church’s key means of outreach, especially in small towns and rural settings (see Anne M. Boylan’s Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 [Yale University Press]). It was certainly instrumental in my own parents coming to faith: My mother began reading the Bible in order to answer the questions I brought home from the Sunday classroom.
Here too, however, secular culture has done its work, turning what should have been a day of prayer and theological training into practice or game days for youth soccer and Little League. Emblematic of the diminished cultural influence of Sunday school, in 1974—150 years after its founding—the American Sunday School Union changed its name to American Missionary Fellowship, and then to InFaith in September 2011. Churches still offer various children’s programs, so vestiges of past practice remain, less so the rubric “school.”
Is it just a coincidence that, as Sunday school disappears, classical Christian education has become increasingly popular? Why do these Christian families—particularly Catholics and evangelicals—want to reclaim the traditional liberal arts, even Latin? Part of the answer is that parents want their children to be formed by something other than popular culture. The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) was born for such a time as this.
A classical Christian school exposes children to great works of literature, a biblical worldview and critical thinking. The aim is to prepare them not for a career but for life. A liberal arts education trains students to use their freedom (“liberal” as in pertaining to freedom) for which Christ has set them free (Gal. 5:1) rightly, and to do so in all areas of life (“art” as in the art of living).
Like the classical schools of ancient Greece, the aim is to form whole persons, not professionals, citizens not of Athens, but the gospel (see The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education [Plough Publishing House]). This involves knowing who you are in Christ. As Smith points out, contemporary culture encourages children to think about their fundamental identity quite differently: “Being a person of color, gay, disabled, a feminist, Southern, white and so on eclipsed religious affiliation in meaning.”
School of Worship
If a liberal arts education provides training in how to live well, then surely the church should be the place where people learn how to use the freedom we have in Christ to live well, with others, to the glory of God. Classical Christian education isn’t for kids only.
The idea is neither outrageous nor novel. The patristic scholar Frances Young has a chapter on the “school-like” character of early churches in her study of early Christianity, Scripture, The Genesis of Doctrine in Early Christianity, Vol. 1 (Eerdmans). The most important thing Christians learn is how to read the Bible, a text that both informs and forms, instructs and transforms. This, she argues, was why doctrine—right teaching—was necessary. The church’s claim to teach the truth of Scripture is why the church fathers called the church a schola Christi: a school of Christ.
A quote attributed to Jennifer Aniston reads, “I don’t have a religion. I believe in a God. I don’t know what it looks like, but it’s my God, my own interpretation of the supernatural.” Is it? Is it subjective interpretation all the way down? Having a personal relationship with God is wonderful—unless it becomes a license for individuals to decide for themselves who or what God is to them. I doubt many of us would be comfortable if our airline pilots learned to fly like that. Yet, oddly enough, many people don’t seem to mind if their pastors lack formal training.
Perhaps that’s because they fail to appreciate what’s at stake. If a pilot fails, the plane cannot accomplish its mission: getting from one place to another. Something much more consequential is at stake in church when pastors fail in their mission of making disciples.
God gave us Scripture for teaching and training in godliness (2 Tim. 3:16). The Bible is not culturally obsolete, because it remains eminently useful for this purpose. So does the church. It, too, is part of God’s outreach, and curriculum.
As the law serves as a pedagogue to bring sinners to Christ, so the gospel helps people to know God and learn Christ and, in so doing, come to know themselves and the ultimate purpose of life.
What is that purpose? According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, it is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Jesus gives a similar answer, and an informal theological education, to the woman at the well: God the Father is seeking people who know how to worship him in spirit and truth (John 4:23).
The church is a classical Christian school that trains disciples to worship in truth (orthodoxy; right thinking) and spirit (orthodoxology; right devotion). Evangelism is the church’s speech to the outside world, but worship is where it learns its grammar. Training pastors to shape worshipers is the true end of theological education, and worship the supreme Christian liberal art.