Seminary & Congregation: A Lovers' Quarrel?
With responses from two seminary presidents (George Brushaber, David McKenna) and two pastors (Martin Copenhaver, William Willimon).
Leonard I. Sweet
July 1, 1984
The following article, which appeared last January in Theology Today, is reprinted here with permission. We also asked two pastors and two seminary presidents to respond to its ideas. To speak of the relationship of the "seminary" to the "church" is to reveal a conceptual canker on the church today. For the seminary is as much the church as the local congregation. As near to the church as smoke to flame, to position the "seminary" against the "church" is to position the seminary against itself. The academy and the chapel are part of the same whole-the body of Christ. They need each other, for the church is incomplete when either is missing. I
The most prominent feature of theological education today is the rediscovery of the congregation. For the past forty years, and indeed ever since seminaries breathed the air of biblical criticism, the body of Christ has not been fully united. Various organs of that body, the mind (theological seminaries) and the heart (koinonia congregations), have each been prone to say to the other, "I have no need of you" (1 Cor. 12:21). The beginnings of theological education in America were quite different. Ministers were then trained to be "masters of the common faith," in Glenn T. Miller's marvelous phrase. The connection between the faith of the members of the church and the faith of the "doctors of the church" was, up until the last two decades of the nineteenth century, an intimate and trusting one. But the way higher criticism was taught shattered this relationship, as ministers began to be trained in a faith quite different from their people. Just five years ago, for example, an extremely bright seminary student rejected my pleas for the development of a colloquial theology based on the reconnecting ...
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