What is a seminary?

[py3ak]

C.S. Lewis and the idea of the theological seminary.

In "Our English Syllabus" (which can be found in Rehabilitations and Other Essays) C.S. Lewis draws a distinction between vocational training, education, and learning.

Schoolmasters in our time are fighting hard in defence of education against vocational training; universities, on the other hand, are fighting against education on behalf of learning.

Although he does not talk about it, I suppose that vocational training would go on at technical institutes and places like that. Education is carried on at the school, and the university is the place for learning.

Let me explain. The purpose of education has been described by Milton as that of fitting a man 'to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of peace and war'. Provided we do not overstress 'skillfully' Aristotle would substantially agree with this, but would add the conception that it should also be a preparation for leisure, which according to him is the end of all human activity. 'We wage war in order to have peace; we work in order to have leisure.' Neither of them would dispute that the purpose of education is to produce the good man and the good citizen, though it must be remembered that we are not here using the word 'good' in any narrowly ethical sense. The 'good man' here means the man of good taste and good feeling, the interesting and interested man, and almost the happy man. With such an end in view education in most civilized communities has taken much the same path; it has taught civil behaviour by direct and indirect discipline, has awakened the logical faculty by mathematics or dialectic, and has endeavoured to produce right sentiments̵—which are to the passions what right habits are to the body—by steeping the pupil in the literature both sacred and profane on which the culture of the community is based. Vocational training, on the other hand, prepares the student not for leisure, but for work; it aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician, a good scavenger, or a good surgeon. You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves. That is how they were distributed in the old unequal societies; the poor man's son was apprenticed to a trade, the rich man's son went to Eton and Oxford and then made the grand tour. When societies become, in effort if not in achievement, egalitarian, we are presented with a difficulty. To give every one education and to give no one vocational training is impossible, for electricians and surgeons we must have and they must be trained. Our ideal must be to find time for education and training: our danger is that equality may mean training for all and education for none—that every one will learn commercial French instead of Latin, book-keeping instead of geometry, and 'knowledge of the world we live in' instead of great literature. It is against this danger that schoolmasters have to fight, for if education is beaten by training, civilization dies.
(...)
That is my idea of education. You see at once that it implies an immense superiority on the part of the teacher. He is trying to make the pupil a good man, in the sense that I have described. The assumption is that the master is already human, the pupil a mere candidate for humanity—an unregenerate little bundle of appetites which is to be kneaded and moulded into human shape by one who knows better. In education, the master is the agent, the pupil the patient.
Now learning, considered in itself, has, on my view, no connexion at all with education. It is an activity for men—that is for being who have already been humanized by this kneading and moulding process. Among these men—these biologically simian animals who have been made into men—there are some who desire to know. Or rather, all desire to know, but some desire it more fervently than the majority and are ready to make greater sacrifices for it. The things they want to know may be quite different. One may want to know what happened a million years ago, another, what happens a million light-years away, a third, what is happening in his own table on the microscopic level. What is common to them all is the thirst for knowledge. Now it might have happened that such people were left in civil societies to gratify their taste as best they could without assistance or intereference from their fellows. It has not happened. Such societies have usually held a belief—and it is a belief of a quite transcendental nature—that knowledge is the natural food of the human mind: that those who specially pursue it are being specially human; and that their activity is good in itself besides always being honourable and sometimes useful to the whole society. Hence we come to have such associations as universities—institutions for the support and encouragement of men devoted to learning.
You have doubtless been told—but it can hardly be repeated too often—that our colleges at Oxford were founded not in order to teach the young but in order to support masters of arts. In their original institutions they are homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge; and their original nature is witnessed by the brute fact that hardly any college in Oxford is financially dependent on undergraduates' fees, and that most colleges are content if they do not love over the undergraduate. A school without pupils would cease to be a school; a college without undergraduates would be as much as a college as ever, would perhaps be more a college.
It follows that the university student is essentially a different person from the school pupil. He is not a candidate for humanity, he is, in theory, already human. He is not a patient; nor is his tutor an operator who is doing something to him. The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students. And that means they ought not to be thinking about each other but about the subject. The schoolmaster must think about the pupil: everything he says is said to improve the boy's character or open his mind—the schoolmaster is there to make the pupil a 'good' man. And the pupil must think about the master. Obedience is one of the virtues he has come to him to learn; his motive for reading one book and neglecting another must constantly be that he was told to. (...)

Now bringing this to bear upon the point mentioned in the title, "Into what category does a theological seminary fall?" Dr. R. Scott Clark has stated that seminaries are university theological faculties in exile. That would seem to indicate that seminaries are places of learning, as opposed to education or vocational training. This does not mean, of course, that only those should go to seminary who have the inclination to devote their existence to studying the family life of the Perizzites. As Lewis goes on to say

Such is the ideal. In fact, of course, Oxford has become in modern times very largely a place of teaching. I spend most of the term teaching and my tutorial stipend is a part of my income no less important than my fellowship. Most of you, perhaps, have come here with the idea of completing your education rather than with the idea of entering a society devoted to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. What do these changes mean? They mean, I think, that a temporary immersion in the life of learning has been found to have an educational value. Learning is not education; but it can be used educationally by those who do not propose to pursue learning all their lives. There is nothing odd in the existence of such a by-product. Games are essentially for pleasure, but they happen to produce health. They are not likely, however, to produce health if they are played for the sake of it. Play to win and you will find yourself taking violent exercise; play because it is good for you and you will not. In the same way, though you may have come here only to be educated, you will never receive that precise educational gift a university has to give unless you can at least pretend, so long as you are with us, that you are concerned not with education but with knowledge for its own sake. And we, on our part, can do very little for you if we aim directly at your education. We assume that you are already human, already good men; that you have the specifically human virtues and above all the great virtue of curiosity. We are not going to try to improve you; we have fulfilled our whole function if we help you to see some given tract of reality.
I dare say some of you are wondering by now what all this has to do with the English syllabus. I am just coming to that. From what I have said, it follows that on my view a freshman hesitating over the choice of a Final School is quite on the wrong track in asking himself, 'Which gives me the best general education?' He may be compelled to ask, 'Which qualifies me for the best jobs when I go down?' for unfortunately we have to make our livings. The necessity which thus limits his choice is, as it were, an external necessity: poverty will prevent one man from becoming an astronomer as blindness may prevent another from becoming a painter. But to ask for the best 'general education' is to ask for one's schooldays over again. The proper question for a freshman is not 'What will do me most good?' but 'What do I most want to know?' For nothing that we have to offer will do him good unless he can be persuaded to forget all about self-improvement for three or four years, and to absorb himself into getting know some part of reality, as it is in itself.
The qualification 'as it is in itself' is here important. At first sight it might seem that since the student cannot study everything he should at least study a bit of everything; that the best Final Honour School would have a composite syllabus—a little philosophy, a little politics, a little economics, a little science, a little literature. There are many objections to such a discipline, but I will mention that one only which is central to my argument. The composite school, as its very name implies, has been composed by some one. Those little bits of various subjects are not found lying together in those quantities and in that order which the syllabus shows. They have been put together in that way artificially by a committee of professors. That committee cannot have been following the grain and joint of reality as reality discovers itself to those actually engaged in the pursuit of learning. For the life of learning knows nothing of this nicely arranged encyclopaedic arrangement. Every one of the suggested subjects is infinite and, in its own way, covers the whole field of reality. The committee would in fact be guided by their idea of what would do the students good—that is, by a purely educational idea. In reading such a school, therefore, you would not be turned loose on some tract of reality as it is, to make what you could of it; you would be getting selections of reality selected by your elders—something cooked, expurgated, filtered, and generally toned down for your edification. You would still be in the leading strings and might as well have stayed at school. Your whole reading in its scope and proportions would bear the impress neither of reality nor of your own mind but of the mind of the committee. The educational ideals of a particular age, class, and philosophy of life would be stamped on your whole career.
The objection will naturally be clearest to us if we consider how the subject we know best would fare in such a school. There would be a little bit of literature. What would it consist of? Obviously, of great works, for we should have to make up in quality what we lacked in quantity. Perhaps a few great 'classics' each from French, German, and English. As a curriculum for a schoolboy, nothing could be more liberal and edifying. But you see at once that it has very little to do with a knowledge of literature as it really grows and works, with all its ups and downs, in any actual country. It may train your mind and make you in the Aristotelian sense a better man; but are you not old enough now to cease being trained? Is it not time for you to venture to look on reality in the raw?

However it does seem that conceiving of the seminaries as places of learning would require some adjustments in our approach. For one thing, seminaries do in fact give vocational training (it is often a selling point that the professors are actively involved in ministry of one kind or another, for instance, and many seminaries do require an internship or something similar: in fact the very idea of such a how-to class as "Homiletics I" gives the game away). A further evidence is that Dr. Clark himself has used the analogy, in arguing for educated ministers, that we would not want an uneducated (or an Internet-educated) doctor or lawyer, where a brick-and-mortar seminary is functioning as vocational training for ministers, as a medical school is vocational training for doctors. And is anyone willing to assert that no seminary engages in education? That no seminary has a vision of what 'the good man' looks like and that they attempt to produce that good man through their curriculum?

So what is a seminary? What ought it to be, and what is it in actual fact, due to confusion, to financial pressure, to disestablishment, or whatever other cause?

 

[cih1355]

Your question made me think of a question. What would be the difference between earning an M.A. in Theological Studies or Biblical Studies at a seminary and earning the same degree at a Christian university?

 

[py3ak]

I don't know, Curt. It doesn't seem to me that most American universities are very much institutions of learning, but more a mix of vocational training/politically correct education; but then my expertise is not great.

 

[R. Scott Clark]

In fairness, when I say that theological seminaries are university faculties in exile I'm not speaking prescriptively but historically or descriptively. This is what happened.

Prior to the modern period theological seminaries (there used to be seminaries of various kinds hence the need to distinguish one type of sem from another) didn't exist as we know them. Theological training happened in Academies (e.g. Geneva) that were or became universities. This trend developed over centuries as cathedral schools became universities with specialized departments or faculties (namely Arts and Theology and perhaps Law).

As a consequence of the Enlightenment(s) theology faculties were gradually turned into religion departments and most of those were ultimately closed as "science" became narrowly defined in Modernist, materialist terms and even the generic study of religion as a social phenomenon became irrelevant.

When we explain our vocation at WSC we speak about training our students in the art of theology but we also train (70%) them to fulfill a specific ecclesiastical vocation. In this we are a bit like law and medical schools. There is a broader aspect to learning but there is also a vocational and more focused aspect to their studies. We're not what used to be called a "vo-tech" school (e.g. those places that train people to fix computers). In a vo-tech becoming a broadly learned person is not very important but knowing the latest computer code is.

We're not a university but we do bear some historical relation to a university. We're not a vo-tech school but we do train students to fulfill an ecclesiastical vocation. We also prepare a small number of students to fulfill other vocations (e.g. academic or other).

 

[greenbaggins]

In fairness, when I say that theological seminaries are university faculties in exile I'm not speaking prescriptively but historically or descriptively. This is what happened.

Prior to the modern period theological seminaries (there used to be seminaries of various kinds hence the need to distinguish one type of sem from another) didn't exist as we know them. Theological training happened in Academies (e.g. Geneva) that were or became universities. This trend developed over centuries as cathedral schools became universities with specialized departments or faculties (namely Arts and Theology and perhaps Law).

As a consequence of the Enlightenment(s) theology faculties were gradually turned into religion departments and most of those were ultimately closed as "science" became narrowly defined in Modernist, materialist terms and even the generic study of religion as a social phenomenon became irrelevant.

When we explain our vocation at WSC we speak about training our students in the art of theology but we also train (70%) them to fulfill a specific ecclesiastical vocation. In this we are a bit like law and medical schools. There is a broader aspect to learning but there is also a vocational and more focused aspect to their studies. We're not what used to be called a "vo-tech" school (e.g. those places that train people to fix computers). In a vo-tech becoming a broadly learned person is not very important but knowing the latest computer code is.

We're not a university but we do bear some historical relation to a university. We're not a vo-tech school but we do train students to fulfill an ecclesiastical vocation. We also prepare a small number of students to fulfill other vocations (e.g. academic or other).

Yes, the Enlightenment (er, rather, the Endarkenment) has a lot for which it must answer. I just finished reading Edward Farley's excellent book entitled Theologia, in which he makes many of the same points you just made. This touches deeply on the subject about which I am writing my thesis.

 

[Backwoods Presbyterian]

"Endarkenment"

 

[py3ak]

Dr. Clark, thanks for picking up on this thread. In your view is WSC functioning as a theological seminary in an ideal world would? Do you think it's wonderful or merely necessary that 70% of the students are there for, in essence, vocational training? Do you think that your institution would be more of an institution of learning if you were able to concentrate on research without having to teach students? And if I can take advantage of your attention, do you think that you or other professors, in Lewis' language, treat the students as human or as candidates for humanity?

 

[R. Scott Clark]

Dr. Clark, thanks for picking up on this thread. In your view is WSC functioning as a theological seminary in an ideal world would? Do you think it's wonderful or merely necessary that 70% of the students are there for, in essence, vocational training? Do you think that your institution would be more of an institution of learning if you were able to concentrate on research without having to teach students? And if I can take advantage of your attention, do you think that you or other professors, in Lewis' language, treat the students as human or as candidates for humanity?

I'm not sure how to answer this question. If I say, "in an ideal world..." one could say, "Aha, I knew it, seminary education is flawed!" Nevertheless, things could always be better. I'm not entirely sure what is implied in your "ideal world" scenario. I'm not a very good "ideal world" thinker inasmuch as it entails rolling back 250 years of history, in some respects, to a world that doesn't exist.

I can say what things I would change to improve our ability to educate students:

1. Students would come to us knowing the Reformed confessions. Most of our students, even those from confessional Reformed congregations, do not know their confessional standards. Our churches could begin addressing this problem as soon as the next Sabbath.

2. Students would come knowing English. Many of our students, even those from elite schools, don't write or speak very well. An increasing number of students can't say what a noun or a participle is! This is highly problematic at the graduate level. Our secondary and undergraduate systems are failing us.

3. Students would come knowing at least one other language beyond English. Latin would be extremely useful. Our curriculum was designed in 1929 with the assumption that students would come knowing Greek!

4. Students would come with a basic knowledge of world history and the history of philosophy and ideas.

5. Our students would come with sufficient financial support from their congregations so that they could concentrate on their studies.

6. Our faculty regards students as humans made in imago Dei. Surely all of us, in Christ, are being made more human as we are renewed in Christ's image. If I understand the question our faculty regards our students in the light of our anthropology and soteriology. I guess that what Lewis is getting at (he would appreciate my ending the sentence with a preposition).

7. When I mentioned the university I wasn't thinking of the modern research university. I'm impressed S. Schwenn's book, Exile From Eden about leaving the Univ of Chicago (for Valpo) because he did not simply want to be a researcher but he wanted to teach and to form character in young people. In the older univ. system teachers taught, they formed people. The Weberian notion that teaching is a burden to be shed in favor of pure research is not ideal for seminary education nor is it terribly useful for any school. I learn from my students as they learn from me. I research as a teach and teach as I research.

8. We understand that we serve the church primarily but we do so in the academy so WSC necessarily straddles two worlds simultaneously. That's our calling. We harvest the best work of the academy (as best we are able and to which we try to contribute) for the well being of the church(es).

Another way to put this, if I understand the issue, is that we pray while we study and study while we pray. We don't divorce the two. Piety should be learned and the learned should be pious.

9. I don't accept the premise that what we do is "essentially" vocational training. We are engaged in teaching the humanities and training for a vocation. We must do both. We're not "essentially" a vocational school even though most of our students are called (or being called) to pastoral ministry.

 

[py3ak]

So if I understand you correctly, Dr. Clark, you would say that the seminary is something of everything which Lewis was distinguishing (in that you do form character, you do pursue learning, and you do attempt to equip for a certain vocation)? And if you were able to improve something you would give less "remedial" information.

I'm sure the faculty treats the students like human beings! That question was directed at whether you saw the role of the seminary as forming character, as educating in Lewis' use of the term in that essay (hence the modifying phrase in the original question). But you answered that under another point. With regard to Schwenn I think Lewis would say (without meaning to be despective) that he wanted to be a schoolmaster, rather than a university fellow.

If I can trespass on your patience for just one question further, I think I can ask one question more precisely. With regard to the teaching of the humanities, do you see it more as helping a student see that particular branch of reality, or as giving them what will be most useful in the formation of a good character?

 

[R. Scott Clark]

So if I understand you correctly, Dr. Clark, you would say that the seminary is something of everything which Lewis was distinguishing (in that you do form character, you do pursue learning, and you do attempt to equip for a certain vocation)? And if you were able to improve something you would give less "remedial" information.

I'm sure the faculty treats the students like human beings! That question was directed at whether you saw the role of the seminary as forming character, as educating in Lewis' use of the term in that essay (hence the modifying phrase in the original question). But you answered that under another point. With regard to Schwenn I think Lewis would say (without meaning to be despective) that he wanted to be a schoolmaster, rather than a university fellow.

If I can trespass on your patience for just one question further, I think I can ask one question more precisely. With regard to the teaching of the humanities, do you see it more as helping a student see that particular branch of reality, or as giving them what will be most useful in the formation of a good character?

Why do I have to choose between them?

rsc

 

[py3ak]

Because, according to Lewis, learning and education are different, and imply a different dynamic between students and faculty.

You have doubtless been told—but it can hardly be repeated too often—that our colleges at Oxford were founded not in order to teach the young but in order to support masters of arts. In their original institutions they are homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge; and their original nature is witnessed by the brute fact that hardly any college in Oxford is financially dependent on undergraduates' fees, and that most colleges are content if they do not love over the undergraduate. A school without pupils would cease to be a school; a college without undergraduates would be as much as a college as ever, would perhaps be more a college.
It follows that the university student is essentially a different person from the school pupil. He is not a candidate for humanity, he is, in theory, already human. He is not a patient; nor is his tutor an operator who is doing something to him. The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students. And that means they ought not to be thinking about each other but about the subject. The schoolmaster must think about the pupil: everything he says is said to improve the boy's character or open his mind—the schoolmaster is there to make the pupil a 'good' man. And the pupil must think about the master. Obedience is one of the virtues he has come to him to learn; his motive for reading one book and neglecting another must constantly be that he was told to.

 

[R. Scott Clark]

Lewis was describing a world that was disappearing from under his feet as he wrote.

Today many Oxford colleges are desperate for funds. They are adopting an increasingly American approach to education because their secondary schools are failing them.

Lewis attended brutal private prep schools (known as public schools in the UK) where he learned much of we do not teach students until they reach the college/university level. Because of the sort of education he had, after he finished his BA, he was ready to become a tutor in Oxon. Few American BA degrees make one so prepared today!

I understand what Lewis is saying. A college is a gathering of colleagues who are pursuing learning (broadly, research). A school is a place for training.

I think that most American seminaries are probably "schools" in Lewis' categories, they tend toward the vo-tech model. In many American seminaries learning is pushed aside in favor of emoting or mostly practical training.

At WSC we don't accept the bifurcation of the two. We still believe in learning and in learned ministers but we also believe that older pastors have some wisdom to give to younger pastors entering the ministry. The older Reformed model of education entailed learning both theory and practice. Thus, though I understand Lewis' point I don't think that his bifurcation aptly describes what we do or what we're called to do.

rsc

Because, according to Lewis, learning and education are different, and imply a different dynamic between students and faculty.

You have doubtless been told—but it can hardly be repeated too often—that our colleges at Oxford were founded not in order to teach the young but in order to support masters of arts. In their original institutions they are homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge; and their original nature is witnessed by the brute fact that hardly any college in Oxford is financially dependent on undergraduates' fees, and that most colleges are content if they do not love over the undergraduate. A school without pupils would cease to be a school; a college without undergraduates would be as much as a college as ever, would perhaps be more a college.
It follows that the university student is essentially a different person from the school pupil. He is not a candidate for humanity, he is, in theory, already human. He is not a patient; nor is his tutor an operator who is doing something to him. The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students. And that means they ought not to be thinking about each other but about the subject. The schoolmaster must think about the pupil: everything he says is said to improve the boy's character or open his mind—the schoolmaster is there to make the pupil a 'good' man. And the pupil must think about the master. Obedience is one of the virtues he has come to him to learn; his motive for reading one book and neglecting another must constantly be that he was told to.

 

[py3ak]

So Lewis' prediction of the death of civilization was accurate.

It seems to me that some degree of learning is a necessary part of pastoral vocation, but it cannot be held up as intrinsically a pursuit of learning. So Coleridge

Still the Church presents to every man of learning and genius a profession, in which he may cherish a rational hope of being able to unite the widest schemes of literary utility with the strictest performance of professional duties.

 

[R. Scott Clark]

So Lewis' prediction of the death of civilization was accurate.

Well, yes and no. When Lewis matriculated at Oxon it wasn't a monastic community any longer. I'm sure there are monks who rued the day that laity would enter their sacred precincts.

Our students come to us with a great deal of enthusiasm and native ability and they are quite gifted in areas where, perhaps, earlier generations of students were not. The students I'm teaching seem a little more well rounded, less angry, happier, and better able to relate to people than I remember my classmates (no offense guys!) being. Speaking for myself, I was a bit of a fundy still in 1984. Generally I find our students ready to learn. The tragic thing is that so few teachers/schools have been able to teach them or inspire them until now. Doubtless the students themselves are complicit in this. Frequently sem students seem to become more focused in university/undergrad studies when they gain some sense of vocation. Students often do better in sem than they did in their undergrad work and we push them harder than they've ever been pushed before.

There are disturbing warning signs, some of which I've already mentioned in this thread. Neither our Christian nor our secular undergraduate schools (in the generic, American, non-Lewisian sense) seem to be willing to challenge students to become learners (in the Lewisian sense). The hardest thing I do is force my students to think for themselves.

At the same time, I recently gave a talk to a local Classical Christian Academy about the "Role of Dialectic in the Trivium" and parents actually showed up! These were parents of kindergartners and toddlers who are trying to recover classical educational models for their children. This is very encouraging. These children are learning Mandarin! I know 16 year olds studying French at the upper-division undergraduate level and preparing to study Arabic in their off time this summer.

There are encouraging signs amidst the apparent chaos of contemporary education.

 

[py3ak]

Well, the Dark Ages had their Boethius, so even if civilization is dying something may be preserved --and it seems that there may be some people equipped to fill such a role should the need arise. It's not surprising, though, is it, that it is within the confines of the church (and it seems largely the confessional church) that learning endures.