Are Seminaries Putting Their Blue Days Behind Them?

America’s mainline Protestant seminaries are in crisis, but so far they seem to be spending more energy dodging tough choices than preparing for the future. A recent article at Inside Higher Ed describes the enrollment collapse at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. Luther is one of the most important Lutheran seminaries in the country, but its status wasn’t enough to insulate it from the forces upending seminaries everywhere. Enrollment fell off sharply, and the institution ”was running multimillion-dollar deficits, spending down its endowment and relying on loans.”

The seminary’s response? It’s making some painful cuts, letting go of some staff and reducing the number of degree programs it offers. Luther isn’t alone; seminaries all over the country are facing tough choices.

In many cases, survival has required selling off property or losing independence. More seminarians enroll later in life than in the past, meaning that seminaries often don’t need buildings filled with dorms and apartments. Others have worked to develop online programs, requiring less of a physical footprint, and selling or leasing their additional facilities.

These may be steps in the right direction, but they are baby steps at the beginning of a very long march. Higher ed is in trouble in every branch of learning, but the crisis facing seminaries is worse than that facing any other professional degree program. Seminaries, and especially those serving mainline Protestant denominations, have to change faster than law school or PhD programs if they want to survive. And selling some property or firing some staff, though sadly necessary in many cases, is just the start to a wrenching period of transformative change.

In effect, these churches are clinging to the ministry model that dominated mainline churches in the 20th century. Seminary leaders act as if the average seminary grad will still earn an average salary in an average church, that that salary can still support the loan payments that keep tuition levels high enough to support a traditional seminary, and that denominations or rich believers can and will make up the difference between tuition and cost. These assumptions are almost certainly false.

As noted before, the modern American church, especially among mainline Protestants, but also to some degree among Catholics and evangelicals, got mixed up in the blue social model. The clergy became a ‘profession’ like the others. People pursued careers in the ministry, complete with grievance procedures and pension programs. Denominations built up regional and national organizations that were staffed with professional staff. Progress was seen as replacing volunteers with certified, graduate educated professionals: Directors of Sacred Music and Directors of Christian Education. People built lots of buildings they couldn’t afford to maintain. From an organization perspective, denominational bureaucracies were like GM and IBM in the 1950s and 1960: hierarchical, growing every year, and offering employees jobs for life.

Neither Jesus nor any of the twelve apostles could get a job in any self-respecting mainline church in America today; none of them had a degree from an accredited seminary.

So part of America’s contemporary religious crisis has to do with the decline and fall of this blue model church, and any solutions to that crisis need to involve creative ways of transitioning to a post-blue era. More and more mainline Protestant ministers can expect to be part time or volunteer. The traditional denominations (each with a network of expensive seminaries and bureaucracies) will have to consolidate. Church bureaucrats will largely need to disappear.

This means that seminaries will have to change much more fundamentally than firing a few professors or selling off some dorms. Christianity is going to have to be more of a mission and less of a profession in the future. It may be that future ministers will learn the trade the way Peter learned from Jesus and Timothy from Paul: they watch the masters at work, and start their own pastoring careers under the supervision of someone they respect.

It’s not surprising that most seminaries and denominational bureaucracies would rather think about anything than the collapse of their business models. But rethinking the way the churches work is an essential part of the mission of Christian leaders today, and their failure to engage bespeaks a much broader failure to grasp the challenges of our times.

Pivoting off of the Inside Higher Ed piece, Rod Dreher asks about possible solutions to the wider troubles facing US seminaries. He writes:

What liberal Christians will say is, “Be more liberal!” What conservative Christians will say is, “Be more conservative!” Neither strategy seems suited to the nature of this crisis.

Dreher is completely right that the problems facing seminaries aren’t just theological. And it’s more than a question of budgets; penny-pinching won’t see them through the storm. It’s time for new leaders with vision and imagination to take the church beyond the blue. Since the colonial era, the genius of American Christianity has lain in the ability of new generations of Christian leaders to reinvent institutions, find an authentic theological stance and voice that appeals to each new generation, and put Christianity in the forefront of individual lives and social challenges from age to age.

Theology can be debated; liberal, conservative, protestant, catholic, fundamentalist, modernist. There is much to be said for each of these positions, and the debates need to continue.

But there’s a much more critical difference: the difference between life and death. There is a lot of dead wood in American Christian institutions today, and the carters are coming to clear it away.

Since most of the christian world are bible worshipers.. much like many Jews are Talmud worshipers.. there’s even some that are church worshipers.. Idolatry has assumed many strange morphing’s of variation..

The Bible is authoritative and God's word to us but nobody that I've ever run into *worships* it.

Jesus constantly quoted Scripture and when He was tempted in the wilderness by Satan MISusing Scripture, He counter with Scripture properly used.

Casting doubt and dispersion on the word is Satan's best tactic. It's the one he use on Eve to get her to sin. *Did God actually say.....?*

Aside from the fact that she shouldn't have bothered debating with the serpent the one verse of Scripture they had, she should have referred to it to make sure they had it right.

the problem isn't Scripture, the problem is not knowing Scripture.

To the extent most christians do NOT have an invisible friend(Holy Spirit)... to get their answers from.. and worship at the shrine of the bible.. and more or less pray to the ceiling fan.. That can get old.. After all what do they even need the Holy Spirit for.. heck they have the bible..

All Christians have the Holy Spirit. If someone doesn't have the Holy Spirit, they aren't a Christian.

But again, the problem is not knowing Scripture. You can't rely on feelings or human logic when it comes to spiritual matters.

Hello, do you not realize that without the Holy Spirit to guide, no one can understand the Bible?

What do you think.?.. is the Holy Spirit a doofus?... I propose “he” is not.. and gets much entertainment from christians attempts to marginalize “HIM” and resort to bible or church worship....

I think it grieves Him when He is marginalized.

No, the Holy Spirit does not become irrelevant.

Scripture is meaningless to those without the enlightening of the Holy Spirit.

1 Corinthians 2:1-15 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—

10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

But we would not know God's special revelation to us without Scripture. Scripture points to Christ. One reason is so that we see our need for a savior, and the other so we could and would recognize Him.

Galatians 3:24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.

By having it in writing, it remains unchanged and therefore can be used as a standard of Truth by which to measure anything we hear of think of. Otherwise, it's everyone determining truth by whatever *leading* they *feel* and feelings are notoriously deceptive.

Prayer for your Dad..

Eternal rest, grant unto him, O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon him. May her soul and all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen

The Framers did NOT believe in "the natural goodness of man.

Dear Sister,

If you absorb the fullness of what the late Fulton Sheen wrote through the lens of where we are today you will find the influence of total depravity and the reaction to it as following in the footsteps of Voltaire(even though Sheen does not mention Voltaire) I mentioned Calvin and Voltaire a few posts ago to Yhaos as two of the most evil influences on societies. Calvin and Voltaire were what the framers followed.

The two are more connected than what most people even realize.

A good friend of mine wrote what others noticed when he said..

Pluralism is the catalyst for merging together the contradictory themes of these three western historical influences into a truly irresistible, degenerative, and ultimately globe-trotting disease. On the surface, it merely seems to outline a pragmatic program of peaceful control of the potential for violence emerging from heretical divisions and the unraveling of naturalist secular society. What is more, it appears to do so with due deference to all the forces active in the society around it. Hence, like the Greco-Roman-Catholic heritage, pluralism claims to respect both law and freedom. As with embryonic naturalism, however, it also presumes that it must defend these goods without reference to supernatural religion, on the basis of secular constitutional, social, and psychological checks and balances alone. Finally, it does homage to the heretical belief in the total depravity of mankind and the absolute incomprehensibility of a fallen universe for two crucial purposes: to find a peculiarly effective sinful tool to harness the divisiveness stemming from any truly serious use of human freedom, and to mock any intellectual effort that might uncover the debasement, contradiction, and ultimate doom emerging from the employment of this instrument in political and social life.

Madison got his ideas of pluralism from Voltaire. Just read Madison's "multiplicity of factions" and it's as if he copied it from the anti Catholic Voltaire

As my good friend also wrote..

Pluralism’s modus operandi was suggested by Voltaire, outlined by James Madison in The Federalist Papers, and first seriously applied under the threatening conditions provided by an ever more religiously and ethnically diverse nineteenth and early twentieth century America. It has indeed had a truly uncanny history of seducing honest American supporters of the Greco-Roman-Catholic tradition, naturalism, and heresy into thinking that pluralism actually does create a "safe space" of order and security where all of them are free to preach and perfect their various convictions and customs. Amazing as it is to admit, this seduction has continued to be successful even when it has long become crystal clear that honest believers in absolutely anything and everything are required, in practice, to separate all external action from internal thought; that pluralism, its rhetoric notwithstanding, obliges them to live first as schizophrenics, and then as vandals dismantling their own internally "divisive" spiritual and intellectual forum.

I also suggest you read the Encyclical "Libertas" from Pope Leo XIII who warned against much of this..

Some excerpts....

There are others, somewhat more moderate though not more consistent, who affirm that the morality of individuals is to be guided by the divine law, but not the morality of the State, for that in public affairs the commands of God may be passed over, and may be entirely disregarded in the framing of laws. Hence follows the fatal theory of the need of separation between Church and State. But the absurdity of such a position is manifest. Nature herself proclaims the necessity of the State providing means and opportunities whereby the community may be enabled to live properly, that is to say, according to the laws of God. For, since God is the source of all goodness and justice, it is absolutely ridiculous that the State should pay no attention to these laws or render them abortive by contrary enact menu. Besides, those who are in authority owe it to the commonwealth not only to provide for its external well-being and the conveniences of life, but still more to consult the welfare of men's souls in the wisdom of their legislation. But, for the increase of such benefits, nothing more suitable can be conceived than the laws which have God for their author; and, therefore, they who in their government of the State take no account of these laws abuse political power by causing it to deviate from its proper end and from what nature itself prescribes. And, what is still more important, and what We have more than once pointed out, although the civil authority has not the same proximate end as the spiritual, nor proceeds on the same lines, nevertheless in the exercise of their separate powers they must occasionally meet. For their subjects are the same, and not infrequently they deal with the same objects, though in different ways. Whenever this occurs, since a state of conflict is absurd and manifestly repugnant to the most wise ordinance of God, there must necessarily exist some order or mode of procedure to remove the occasions of difference and contention, and to secure harmony in all things. This harmony has been not inaptly compared to that which exists between the body and the soul for the well-being of both one and the other, the separation of which brings irremediable harm to the body, since it extinguishes its very life.

“If you absorb the fullness of what the late Fulton Sheen wrote through the lens of where we are today you will find the influence of total depravity and the reaction to it as following in the footsteps of Voltaire(even though Sheen does not mention Voltaire) I mentioned Calvin and Voltaire a few posts ago to Yhaos as two of the most evil influences on societies. Calvin and Voltaire were what the framers followed.”

I note that you appear to be in dispute with boop, but that you do not directly demonstrate how she is incorrect in her declaration that the “Framers did NOT believe in the natural goodness of man.” Let’s begin there.

Define what you mean by “pluralism” and demonstrate how it applies to the Declaration of Independence, which serves as the philosophical basis of what the Founders believed.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The beginning of the most celebrated words since the words of Christ; written by one man, but at the request of a committee of men who were tasked by a congress representing the thirteen colonies who had thrown off the oppressive yoke of a tyrannical power, to express the thoughts and aspirations of a new people . . . Americans.

Kindly explain, if you will, to boop and I (and for the benefit of others who might be interested) how the product of these men can be characterized as “depraved” and “evil.”

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