The Gold Standard and Academic Rigor
The Gold Standard and Academic Rigor
By: Fr. Shawn Barnett
The Unite Leadership Collective has done a great service to our residential seminaries. It has forced them and their proponents to reflect upon the benefits of a residential education in order to justify their own existence. Seminaries, like so many other human institutions, are driven toward self-preservation, and this instinct can easily derail the institution and detract from, if not entirely undermine, its purpose and usefulness. The expediency, usefulness, and superiority of a residential seminary education is not self-evident. The church was around before seminaries existed, before universities even. If you think, like I do, that government workers should be able to answer an email with five bullet points listing their accomplishments from the last week, then the seminary presidents ought to be able to provide at least five clear and compelling reasons to prefer residential seminary education over some form of mentoring. What’s more, they should be able to demonstrate that the seminaries do well what they claim to do.
One of the reasons I’ve seen advanced on this blog and elsewhere for the superiority of residential education is academic rigor. In this context, academic rigor is usually associated with competence in the biblical languages among other things. Who can gainsay that? It is certainly an admirable goal, if not absolutely necessary for the pastoral office, that pastors master the languages. Luther himself wrote, “Although faith and the Gospel may be preached by ordinary ministers without the languages, still such preaching is sluggish and weak, and the people finally become weary and fall away.”
What’s more, competence in the Biblical languages, especially Greek, is a useful–but by no means perfect–gauge for evaluating the academic rigor that might be expected with regard to other disciplines related to the Biblical requirement that a presbyter be apt to teach (e.g. a thorough knowledge of the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions, the ability to speak clearly and persuasively, etc.)
Without academic rigor–and exceptional intelligence–there is practically no way to obtain competence in the languages. Someone could acquire the ability to read and express himself in a modern language without academic rigor, through immersion, but no one can learn ancient Greek without books, and even those books most suited to a natural method of language acquisition (e.g. Athenaze) require a substantial amount of time, diligence, motivation, and the ability to recognize patterns in a foreign script. (The aptitude last mentioned demands a strong working memory and associative memory, both strongly correlated with high IQ.) By competence, I mean the ability to sight-read narrative well enough to detect nuance of expression.
I have a good deal of experience with this as a Latin teacher. I demand and enforce academic rigor. One of my goals is that my Latin students, at least those who persist, be able to sight-read Johann Gerhard’s Latin poimenical works (Meditationes Sacrae, Exercitium Pietatis, Enchiridion Consolatorium) by the time they graduate. (By the way, that’s a pretty low bar when compared with the demands made by the Synod’s preseminary education in the early 19th century when the seminaries only offered a Bachelor of Divinity.)
For me the purpose of academic rigor is to advance my students to the point of mastery in a skill that will give them access to some of the greatest, most foundational works of the Western tradition and Christendom more narrowly in their fullness of expression and beauty. Academic rigor produces a definable, verifiable outcome. I can hand my students a paragraph from Cornelius Nepos with a few glosses in the margins and tell within a couple of minutes whether they have met this outcome. (In my wildest dreams, when we have established the Lutheran equivalent of the Vivarium Novum, I’ll be able to gauge their competence by hearing them speak in elegant, Ciceronian periods. One can dream, right?)
While I was honored to sit under some very talented scholars and pious men during my time at CTSFW and gained much, rarely did I experience what I would call academic rigor. Only once did my classmates and I take an exam that required such extensive recall of the reading and lectures that most of my classmates barely passed and not a few failed. (After that test, which was taken after a week of classes, all the students clearly upped their efforts. It was the best class I had.) Unless the seminaries are only accepting students who score in the top quintile on the GRE, that should be the norm. Most students are, in fact, average. Some students, and not only a rare few, can’t hack it. If you can’t read a book well, if you can’t retain information well, if you can’t follow Melanchthon's argument in Ap. IV, how can you be apt to teach, how can you be a Lutheran pastor?
At the end of three years of study plus a vicarage, most seminarians are mere dabblers. Seminarians have a lot to do, but little of it leads to a measurable standard of mastery. There are, to be sure, exceptions, but only among those who aside much of their assigned reading to read the Scriptures and the Confessions extensively and develop their abilities in the languages. Many seminarians, perhaps a majority, hit their academic high-water mark after passing the Greek qualifier, only to regress in their knowledge of Greek vocabulary and grammar over the next four years. Forget Hebrew altogether!
The hosts of “Lead Time,” the Unite Leadership Collective video podcast, are continually bemoaning the state of vacant rural congregations that would struggle to support a pastor and which might, so they suggest, be better served by raising up a leader locally. While this comes across as a bit disingenuous to me–not only because we do not actually have a pastor shortage, but also because they have platformed a woman demanding unbiblical leadership roles for women and a pastor who complains about being disciplined despite clearly being an enthusiast–they have a point.
My parents belong to such a congregation struggling for its existence and barely able to pay a pauper’s wage even with great sacrifices. In that situation, given what I know about the rigors of seminary education, the claims of academic rigor would not be very persuasive to me. If I were on the call committee and had the option between calling a 48-year old, willing to work bivocationally, who had never been divorced, who didn’t abuse alcohol, who had run a successful business and had a devoted wife and young adult children who go to church every week, who knew the Scriptures well in English and, with some mentoring, could competently conduct a reverent service and preach a clear, Biblical sermon and a 26-year old who had only ever been a student and, despite three years of instruction, might not even be able to sight-read Greek, I would not second guess preferring the former. I don’t think that the concept of trauma bonding would tip the scales for me either.
To be sure, the Biblical requirement that a presbyter, a pastor, be “apt to teach” is more than just one on a list of requirements; functionally it is the definitive requirement bound up with the Lord’s institution of the preaching. But it is only one of the requirements. All of the other requirements have to do with moral probity and a pious example. What Paul writes in Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 3 are, in fact, dominical words (Luke 10:16) and we must not be ashamed of them (Luke 9:26). Seminary admissions need to be able to account for whom they are accepting and the faculties should give account for whom they are certifying. Ecclesiastical supervisors, too, need to be able to give an account for pastors who have “resigned” and stayed on the roster or who have stayed in the positions despite scandalous living.
However, the seminaries cannot produce pious, exemplary men. To some extent, they can control for this in admissions and in judging students’ comportment. They can, however, with some objectivity test for the outcomes of academic rigor as necessary for teaching aptitude. It is not sufficient, but it is necessary. Academic rigor is the one thing they can enforce, and they must do so excellently to satisfy the claim that they offer something that a “watered-down,” non-residential curriculum does not.
This may come across as friendly fire. Most of the Gottesdienst folk I know are vehement advocates of seminary education. They might view this article as fodder for Lead Time. Let’s at least admit that Lead Time has tapped into some legitimate concerns. Synodical leadership and the seminaries are accountable to congregations. That’s a good thing in case you’ve forgotten about the 1970s. If Synodical leadership and the seminaries wish to justify the retention of residential education as the gold standard, then they have to establish persuasively to their stakeholders, the congregations, that it is or will improve to become the gold standard it claims to be.