I appreciate your thoughts. Please know that this article was not meant to be exhaustive. But I also think it answers most of what you have asked or critiqued and deserves an open minded reread. It seems as though most of your concerns come from these divisions possibly changing the course content, or lessening systematics, covenant theology, or the Westminster Standards (and therefore affecting future generations), but it was firmly stated that is doesn’t and that they are simply academic categories by which departments are divided.
Also, the faculty’s arguments seemed to be made from scripture and from specifically covenantal passages (though the phrase “covenant theology” isn’t explicitly stated). It also is worth noting that in our Covenant Theology classes we are clearly taught a reformed view of the covenants (check out Far as the curse is found by Dr. Michael Williams as one of our standard texts).
And you said the word concerned several times, which I appreciate. Would you be willing to contact the faculty of the seminary to get a better understanding of what they did, why they did it, and how they exegetically got there? There is a faculty email on our website that you can use to contact them. I think it would be helpful for you to get clarity from them and possibly helpful for them to have feedback (other than those who were involved in the process: faculty and the Board of trustees). And if you still have concerns, you can also go through your presbytery since we are accountable to the PCA and the General Assembly as the denominational seminary.
Hope this helps!
I think you may be missing my point.
I was at General Assembly when Covenant Seminary pretty much "announced" to the denomination that oversees it, that it had decided to change the name of the department overseeing a number of disciplines to the department of missional theology. There ensued mostly a period of questions and answers to the speaker as to the rationale for it because no justification had been offered for this change. The president offered that he would present an article describing the reasons for the change, which I have read. I maintain my concerns as expressed.
I know you haven't attended seminary and so I don't want to speak over your head or be patronizing but I didn't state that they failed to offer Biblical rationale for the decision. That said, there is in theology a sort of way to understand the Scriptures that can fall into categories of Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology. Biblical theology covers overall exegetical themes in Scripture - for example, the progressive revelation of the Promised Seed to Christ. It acts as an exegetical (from the text) help to tie together specific passages to see larger themes developing. Systematic theology organizes Scriptural ideas or doctrines as they are presented in the Scriptures. What is the nature of God? What is the nature of the Covenant? What is the nature of sanctification, etc.
Systematic theology would answer the question (presumably): What is the nature of God's mission?
I honestly believe that, in 10 years, people will wonder why Covenant adopted a buzzword for it's main department of theology. My kids, the other day, told me "...kids don't talk like that anymore...."
Missional has been a hip way of describing a whole host of things. I was talking to a fellow PCA pastor who rents from a PCUSA congregation and asked him how the relationship was. He told me that the pastor there was actually a really good guy and was really focused on being missional.
Since the Pastor was a Barthian and into social outreach I can assume it meant the latter. The idea of reaching the community has been associated with being "missional".
In fact, because it is such a vague and hip term, the faculty at Covenant end up having to write: "This is what
we mean by the term missional" and provide a bunch of FAQ.
In other words, if missional meant much of anything solid then it would not require an FAQ. If I wrote that my Seminary was going to name its department of missional theology the department of systematic theology then I wouldn't need an FAQ because everyone knows what the latter is while everyone can bascially make up their own definition of the former. It's like the Marine Corps word "oorah". You can have a whole conversation based on voice inflection but the word is vaguely defined.
So I get back now to the article itself because this is the sum total of Covenant Seminary's explanation on what it means that they have a department of missional theology.
Remember when I wrote about systematic theology and the idea that "what is the mission of God" would be a category of systematic theology. Consequently, a systematic category should have some sort of way to see how it fits within the overall system of doctrine. For Presbyterians, our system of doctrine is the Westminister Standards. This article not only doesn't try to say: "We acknowledge that what we're doing is presenting "missional" as a systematic category and here is how it fits hand in glove with other doctrines like justification, covenant, sanctification, good works, etc."
Rather, the article sort of says: "This is what missional theology is. Based on the Biblical arguments we just made we are trying to show you why this should be considered at the center of how we think about God and our mission. Now,
in addtion to that, we want to assure you that we still hold to systematic theology but that's
over there. That's something else we think about after we've already arrived at our conviction that we've just presented.
Put another way, if "missional theology" is the archetectonic theological idea upon which our system of doctrine should be considered then one would presume that we ought to modify our Westminster Standards to have a Chapter entitled "the mission of God" where we, as a Church, confess that this is what God is about and what all our theological energy and reflection ought to be guided by. My sense, however, is that they seem to think that missional theology is just something that can exist alongside of our system of doctrine and needs no harmonization.
That's what concerns me. Again, mission theology is just a given in the same what that being an inerrantist or confessing the Westminstter Standards is. Yet the three need to be coordinated and harmonized. Inerrancy already arises from the Westminister Standards but does "missional theology". If it does not then should it? Is it up to Covenant Seminary, a denominational seminary, to unilaterally decide that it does?
Finally, I found the article to be a little bit odd in its presentation. It seemed to go out of its way to use "mission" as many times as it could in order to prove that God's "mission" was at the fore. Instead of traditional words like decree it sought to find creative ways to prove the point.
As I noted, I'm very busy. I have thought about taking up these concerns more broadly but it came up here so I thought I'd spill out what I've been thinking about.
