The Philosophy of the Seminary: Convocation 2006

by L. Gordon Graham, Henry Luce III Professor of Philosophy and the Arts

My title—“the philosophy of the seminary”—is deliberately ambiguous. To all but philosophers probably, it signals an interest in the underlying rationale of the seminary as an institution. What are seminaries for? What is their most basic point or function? These are questions, I take it, that everyone in a seminary has reason to be concerned with, so that any attempt to address them is likely to be of general interest. Alternatively, the phrase “the philosophy of the seminary” might refer to the kind of philosophy that it is appropriate to teach and study in a seminary. What special focus, or limitations, does teaching in a seminary imply for someone whose intellectual training and profession is that of philosopher? Obviously, having been appointed to a chair of philosophy in this seminary after 30 years of studying and teaching philosophy in universities, the second question is of more immediate concern to me. But what I hope to show is that the two questions are connected, and that even the brief exploration possible in the limited space available, can provide illumination for others as much as for me.

I

I begin with the first question. What are seminaries for? Where should we turn for an answer? One possibility is the past. We might look at the origins of the institution and the intentions of its founders, with a view to redirecting our activities more clearly towards their realization. But, though knowing the history of an institution is always important for those who work within it, the past cannot tell the present what to do. This is partly because all the institutions plausibly called seminaries (whether or not they actually go by that name) do not have the same origins, and in some cases, the founders’ intentions are known only in a very broad way. But more importantly, no historical inquiry, however well conducted, can tell us what seminaries are for today? Times change in ways that make the aims of founders irrelevant, and in some cases founding purposes simply cannot be realized or continued. This is not a remark about seminaries in particular. As medicine has changed, so medical schools have changed, and it would be both futile and wasteful for one of them to set about teaching blood letting and the use of leeches, just because these were important elements in the curriculum established by the founders. I am aware, of course, that there are important differences between theology and medicine, and I will return to them briefly. In principle, though, the same point applies. The world in which this seminary was established is vastly different to the world of today. Consequently, any return to the past as a guide to the present runs the risk of contemporary irrelevance.

Acknowledging this might lead us to switch our attention, from the past to present and from thence to the future. Perhaps we will discover the rationale of the seminary if we ask what functions we need seminaries to perform now, and how we are to anticipate their role in years to come. But once again, this is not a very promising approach. Laying too much emphasis on contemporary relevance runs the risk of falling victim to passing fashion, and thus being without any abiding purpose. Focusing too much on anticipated need ignores the fact that human beings are strikingly bad at predicting the future, despite a seemingly irresistible inclination to do so.

These observations ought to be commonplaces. Yet it is often necessary to highlight them because of a widespread contemporary assumption. This is the belief that making provision now for what the future is predicted to require is the mark of prudent resource management. In reality, it is a way of thinking that runs directly counter to the paradigm of prudence, a paradigm most evident in the familiar practice of insurance. Taking out insurance is prudent precisely because we do not know what the future holds, and it is an obvious mistake to think that, if I never fall ill (as it happens), it was irrational for me to have paid all that money on health insurance.

The conclusion seems to be this. Anyone in search of the philosophy of the seminary in the first sense will not be helped by looking back at original purposes. Attending exclusively to present conditions, on the other hand, makes us susceptible to passing fashion, while predicting the future is hazardous. Where then can we turn in trying to determine on reasonable grounds what the institution to which we belong is for?

II

The answer, I suggest, is philosophy is a rather stricter sense, that is to say, neither the history of the institution, nor its contemporary or future social function, but rather, the enduring ideas that underlie the intelligibility of its activities. Of these, I shall focus on the idea of ‘being educated in a discipline.’ This is an amalgam of two concepts that are best considered separately—education and discipline.

Why does anyone need to be educated? Answers to this question vary. One very common, and recurrently popular answer, or range of answers, is broadly utilitarian; education is useful, both to the educated and to society at large. Sometimes, in elaborating this answer, people mistakenly confuse education with training. One important difference is this. Training has a specificity that education does not have. It always makes sense to ask what training is for, and to expect a straightforward answer, usually couched in terms of a specific task. Anyone trained as a plumber should know how to fix the water supply. Anyone trained as a doctor should be able to deal with illness in a way that someone without that training couldn’t. But education does not result in such specific skills. The person educated in history or philosophy or mathematics or physics may be able to do things that others without that education cannot, but they are not equipped with any distinctive skill that will serve a specific purpose. Nor is this a peculiar feature of these ‘academic’ subjects. The most fundamental education any of us ever receives is to learn our native language. But learning how to speak does not specify what it is we are to say.

Of course, the terms education and training are frequently used in ways that do not rigorously follow the conceptual distinction I am making. It is common to refer to medical or legal education, for example, even though doctoring and advocacy are specific skills. Nevertheless, the distinction is a real one, and that is why contrasting education with training can prove useful. One question it allows us to ask is this. Are seminaries engaged in education or in training? ‘Training for ministry’ is such a familiar phrase that we might be inclined to opt for the second rather than the first. And yet there are important considerations that tell against this inference. First, in the contemporary church, ‘ministry’ is not one thing, and if the seminary is indeed in the business of training, it is for ‘ministries’ in the plural. This then raises a question about the integral nature of its curriculum. Can all these different ministries be served by the same curriculum? Second, it is a fact that not all seminary students are training for ministry, and in the United States of late, the proportion of those who are not is rising. Third, among this proportion are Ph.D. students. For many of these students it is teaching and scholarship, not ministry, that is the end in view. Moreover, potential Ph.D. candidates are expected to be among those who secure the highest grades in the Master of Divinity program, and Faculty often regard advancement to Ph.D. as the supreme mark of a good student successfully taught, even though this might imply the abandonment of a career in ministry in favour of academia.

All these considerations point to education rather than training as the purpose of the seminary—a generic education that will serve the student in a variety of ministries or none, while also providing a good foundation for the acquisition of that important passport to the academy, a Ph.D. Yet, to pronounce education rather than training to be the goal of the seminary is also problematic, because this puts it at odds with the character of higher education as a whole. A distinctive feature of college education in the United States, resulting in part from the important model provided by the Scottish universities, is its modern replication of the medieval structure of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ faculties. The liberal arts college is the equivalent of the medieval lower Faculty of Arts, and the graduate law and medical schools are the equivalent of the higher faculties of law and medicine. Whereas the lower faculty provided a generic education, the higher faculties had the task of providing specific training for the professions of medicine, law, and the church. Now in the medieval scheme of things, theology was also a higher faculty, and though as I noted earlier, the foundation of seminaries in the United States arose from many different causes, it seems evident that some of them at least were thought of theological equivalents of the medical and law schools—in short, graduate schools whose purpose, accordingly, was not a general education, but a specific training.

The conclusion appears to be, then, that we cannot fix on either training or education as the principal purpose of the seminary. This may simply confirm some people in the view that the philosopher’s characteristic pursuit of conceptual clarity has little value as an approach to the real world of affairs. Why not just say that seminaries offer both education and training, and the mix of the two is perpetually adjusting itself in accordance with the changing enthusiasms of teachers and aspirations of students?

It is indeed true that one of the philosopher’s occupational failings (regularly exhibited since the time of Plato) is the pursuit of greater rational order than human life generally admits of. At the same time, philosophical questions are often genuinely challenging ones. So see why it is important to press the distinction between education and training in the seminary, we should turn to the second part of the idea I identified as important, namely the concept of a discipline.

III

Whatever else we might say, it is evident that the modern seminary welcomes and encourages students for the degree of Ph.D., and it regards the emergence of doctoral candidates from among the M.Div. students as a an indicator of the excellence of both the institution and its Faculty. Now this implies that the ultimate test of higher education is its ability to produce the next generation of teachers and scholars. Once again, in so far as this is true of the seminary, it is not uniquely true of it. At any university, the mark of the most successful student of a discipline is that he or she becomes one of its practitioners. Thus the best undergraduate physics students proceed to a Ph.D. program, and the best Ph.D. students become physicists, a progression mirrored in all the disciplines. It is this progression, usually, that determines the curriculum. What students are taught first is the essential groundwork needed if they are to master more difficult material, and mastery of this higher level then puts them in a position to engage in original research and scholarship of their own.

This is, I take it, a familiar picture. Yet to view higher education in this way—as a developmental track from novice to professional—has a curious, not to say unwelcome, implication. It implies that for most students higher education is both a failure and a waste of time. If the principal purpose of each stage of the curriculum is to prepare students for the next, then for those who do not do well enough to proceed  or who choose not proceed, education in the earlier stage is pointless. If the purpose of learning elementary Greek is to give students the foundational skills of the translator, it is a waste of time for those who never go on to translate. And the same point can be made about any subject, practical as well as theoretical.

For my own part I do believe that a great deal of the curriculum of colleges and universities falls foul of this criticism. Just as courses in medical school are designed around the assumption that those who take them are going to become doctors, so the content and range of courses in the natural sciences is most often determined by the implicit assumption that the students who take them are preparing to become scientists. The difference is, of course, that while nearly all medical students do become doctors, the large majority of students taking science courses do not become scientists. The same mistaken assumption can infect education in other disciplines—psychology courses for psychologists, economics for economists, history for historians. Even philosophy courses are often aimed almost exclusively at the training of professional philosophers, despite the demonstrable fact that only a tiny proportion of the students taking these courses will ever secure such a position.

Now what of seminaries? How is the content of the core curriculum in a seminary education to be determined? Is the model that of the doctor or the scientist? Neither seems right. There is no one ministry in whose core skills it would be appropriate to train all students. Neither can we seriously sustain the idea that the curriculum should be built on the assumption that all students aim to be theologians, biblical scholars, or church historians, when we know very well that they do not. But what other possibility is there?

IV

The answer I want to suggest is this. The proper aim of the seminary is indeed that of educating students in a discipline, but key to understanding this aim is the realization that ‘discipline’ here means what it originally meant—not an academic subject, but the life of Christian discipleship.

To be disciplined in our actions is to follow a rule. This is why academic disciplines are so called. The enemy of history, science, philosophy or theology is fancy. The proper pursuit of a discipline requires us to subject our thinking to a rule of inquiry and to believe only those things that can be shown to accord with it. The alternative is to believe those things that we would like to be true, or the beliefs that political expediency requires, or the beliefs that conform with conventional opinion. All such grounds of belief are to be contrasted with intellectual integrity. This consists in faithfully following a rule of belief formation that we have not invented for ourselves, but inherit from those who teach us. This reveals the importance of the past for the present—not that we should try to recreate the past, but that we should acknowledge the impossibility of beginning de novo in the present.

Now the main point I want to make is that discipline in this restricted academic sense is only one application of a more general conception of how life is to be lived, namely in accordance with a rule. The church in the course of its history has thrown up some very specific conceptions of what that rule might be—the monastic rule of St. Benedict, the austerities of Calvin’s Geneva, the simplicity of the Quakers, and so on. These differences are great and important, but all of them describe a life that is to be contrasted with an alternative, one correctly identified by Christianity’s arch critic—Friedrich Nietzsche—namely, the life of the ‘free spirit’ in which the central concept is self-affirmation. ‘To thine own self be true’ is an immensely popular ideal, more colloquially expressed as ‘doing your own thing.’ and it is radically at odds with Christian discipleship, because it denies any need for, and attributes no value to being educated in a discipline.

It is not possible here to explore further the proper conception of Christian discipline. In the space remaining I must return to the second question implied by my title—what kind of philosophy ought to be taught in a seminary?

V

Against the background I have been sketching, we may say that philosophy is more properly considered a sub-discipline, than a discipline. Such a claim will generate anxiety amongst many, though not all, philosophers. They will see it as an endorsement of John Locke’s conception of philosophy as an underlaborer. In modern versions of Locke’s conception, natural science is the master to which philosophy is underlaborer, and its role is to clear away the conceptual confusions that hinder the advancement of science. In the context of the seminary, a more plausible conception is philosophy as the handmaid of theology. This too is a conception with a considerable pedigree, but while a good many contemporary philosophers are willing, and even anxious to endorse the service to science, philosophy in the service of theology will find very few philosophical advocates.

For reasons which cannot be elaborated here, my own view is that the conception of philosophy as either underlaborer or handmaiden is to be rejected. Philosophy is subservient to no intellectual purposes other than its own. This means that philosophy courses at a seminary are not properly restricted to those that are helpful to the study of theology. So if, as I suggest, philosophy is a sub-discipline, its subservience must lie elsewhere. And so indeed it does. Engagement in philosophical thought is only meaningful as part of a human life, and if the best form of human life is Christian discipleship, it follows that philosophy is subservient to Christian discipline.

What does this imply? What it does not imply is what philosophers often fear it does—that the explorations of philosophy are to be confined within limits prescribed by religious dogmas—a fear that the church’s actions have not infrequently warranted. To see its true implications, we have to think of philosophy as an activity, an activity of mind rather than body or soul, and then give this activity its proper place within the life of discipleship. The life of the mind is at its most vigorous and enriching when the business of thinking is required to meet the demands of clarity, consistency and comprehensiveness. Philosophy is the discipline of forming our beliefs in accordance with these demands. It does so at the same time as asking questions about the most fundamental aspects of human existence—the true, the good and the beautiful as an ancient formula summarizes them.

To teach philosophy is to stretch and invigorate the minds of students as they seek to arrive at clear, consistent and comprehensive beliefs about these fundamental topics. To teach it well is to inspire in them the desire to start on an intellectual journey of their own. That journey may not last much longer than their college days, but even so, properly directed, it can generate both new and enduring intellectual depth. If I am right, such depth is possible only through voluntarily subjecting our minds to the rules of a discipline. But it might nevertheless be asked whether its acquisition, however valuable, is plausibly construed as an aspect of Christian discipline.

It is of course the case that neither intellectual prowess nor academic accomplishment is a necessary ingredient of faithful discipleship. Indeed the simple hearted may encounter fewer obstacles to faith in God than do the highly intelligent. But Christians who find themselves with an inquiring mind cannot wish it away, or suppress its activities for fear that their faith will be undermined. They have to find a way in which the full flourishing of intellectual activity coheres with their calling as Christians. In the case of philosophy, the source of that coherence is this. Philosophical understanding can sustain, and even generate, spiritual virtues. It does so in two ways. First, grasping the profundity and complexity of a philosophical issue ought to result in the humbling thought that the human mind is a glorious gift, not something of our own making, and contra the aspirations of artificial intelligence, not something we could make either. This gift of mind can be taken for granted. It can even be ignored. It can also be something we actively care for and enjoy. Philosophy is one mode of that intellectual care and enjoyment, a practical acceptance of the gift of mind. Second, because philosophical inquiry takes place on which we might call the edge of human thought, among its effects (as one writer has put it) is ‘making wonder secure.’ That is to say, engagement in philosophy can awaken in us a keen sense of the astonishing power of the human intellect while at the same time giving us an equally keen sense of its limits. So considered, philosophy thus becomes a means by which gratitude and humility are instilled in us. Both are antidotes to hubris, that Promethean pride that is humanity’s besetting sin. This is why, as it seems to me, philosophy can rightly claim a place in the seminary.