A number of people have asked what I think about the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church. They’re most concerned about the Convention’s assent to consecrating Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. This does not bother me a whole lot, partly because (a) I support the ordination of gay and lesbian Christians, as well as supporting the church’s recognition of and blessing on their relationships, and (b) if I’m wrong about that, it will not be the first time I or the church have been wrong about something, and I trust that the Spirit will make that clear sooner or later. That puts me in a minority, so far as I can tell; most of the people I encounter already know that they’re right, and have no patience for waiting around for the wrong people to be expelled from the church. So far as I can tell, this is a disagreement that will take a long time to settle, and I hope that those who oppose ordination and blessing will stick around so that we can attain a shared perspective on the outcome. Then again, there are still monophysite churches 1500 years after the dominant streams of Christianity concluded that this was theologically erroneous, so I am not expecting any sudden resolutions to this problem.
What does have me worked up is the Convention’s perspective on the role of seminaries. As part of Convention’s deliberation on helping the Episcopal Church grow, legislators had the helpful ideas that seminarians should (a) have to take courses in a second modern language, and to attain “cultural competence” in a second culture, and (b) to inculcate a cornucopia of leadership skills for intercultural ministries. Now, I hasten to add that I’m positively fervent about people learning other languages, am firmly positive about cultural awareness and competence, and agree that clergy need organizational skills in order effectively to fulfill their ministries. I agree with that, and I’m pleased that Seabury’s curriculum places a very high priority on breaking down provinciality, and in raising up organizational skills (the church’s principal practitioner in this area, John Dreibelbis, is a valued colleague here). And the Convention did note the increasing problem of student debt, though I wasn’t knocked out by any commitments to fund seminaries more adequately.
At the same time, I wonder where these new expectations will fit into the seminary curriculum.
We have three years of courses to work with. Students already arrive with less rich acquaintance with Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before; if one assumes even an elementary familiarity with any of these topics, one risks losing a significant proportion of the class right from the outset. In order to attain a working minimum understanding of the faith that clergy are presumably promulgating, they need as much of the three years of study as can possibly be allotted — but less and less course-time addresses understanding the faith, and more and more involves administering it. If few students now study either of the languages in which the Bible is written, how many will take that venture up once they’re required to learn Spanish or Chinese? If few students now attain a thorough understanding of how the church has arrived at the theological principles by which it strives to live, how many more will take on the effort once their curriculum fills up with courses on accounting and change management (can change be managed?)?
We run the very real risk of raising to church leadership a generation of students who know a great deal about small groups, organizational culture, and leadership skills, but have only a superficial familiarity with Christian faith. Moreover, by institutionalizing this imbalance in seminary curricula, we explicitly communicate the church’s sense that it’s organizational expertise that’s really important, and that the gospel and its implications are something people already know enough about anyway.
This comes around back to the kerfuffle about the soon-to-be Bishop of New Hampshire, as most of the arguments on this topic have evinced only a trivial engagement with theological reasoning. As one (Baptist) grad-school friend of mine observed in an email,
Here in the local Episcopal community the split is between those who privilege the Enlightenment over Scripture (they see the issue solely as a matter of “rights” and imagine themselves to be sitting at the Greensboro lunch counter — . . . white liberal guilt at its best) and those who privilege the Scripture over the Enlightenment (they see themselves as God's last bastion of resistance against barbarism — garden variety conservativism).On the whole, I have seen more thoughtful and wise theological arguments on the part of conservative opponents of Robinson’s ordination, perhaps because they sense the necessity of pulling out all the stops, and perhaps because conservative leaders at least care that they present some plausible theological case. On the other hand, the conservative case tends to suffer from the limitation that it uncharitably assumes its own self-evidence, and fails to take seriously any dissent.
At least part of the doctrinal poverty of the Robinson debate, I am convinced, lies in the priorities the Episcopal Church evinces for its clergy: not thorough engagement with Scripture or the church’s malleable identity through history or the ways the church has struggled to attain clarity with intensely complicated issues before, but how to avoid triangulation and how best to organize a capital campaign. Again, family systems theory is illuminating, and churches need new roofs — but at a time when every other sentence includes the word “schism,” I persist in suspecting that the people of God need a little more.
As David Weinberger reminded me yesterday, the truth lies in complexity, and I am no doubt accountable for having oversimplified several dimensions of the Convention’s deliberations. If we all had more time to work on these questions together, perhaps some flase simplicity would give way to rich appreciation for the patterns of our agreements and disagreements. For what it’s worth, I haven’t heard any complaints about the way the General Convention was organized and administered.
Posted by AKMA at August 24, 2003 04:12 PM | TrackBackAKMA, you have nailed it!
I have waited for your return to hear some of your thoughts on GC. So glad you did not disappoint.
I could go on and on about seminary curriculum, it is a tough, tough deal and every professor there thinks "their" area should receive more focus. What to do, in 3 years time?
Should we develop some sort of pre-req courses that includes especially some Biblical stuff? Would EFM suffice, at least years one and two? Or something the seminaries could develop?
You are right on regarding languages, should Spanish or Chinese be required, you may as well pack up the Greek and Hebrew texts.
As to how GC works - believe it or not, that was one of the main complaints I heard at a recent convocational clericus meeting. Is it past time to think about how we as a denomination go about this stuff? Is our polity so messed up we should just start over? Could we not theologically address the issues Robinson's consent vote brought up, and THEN go about granting or denying consent to his election?
It's a scary time for our church. Believe me, life in good ole Mississippi is far different than at Seabury and not a day goes by that I don't have to talk to someone who is freakin out over this. We need you and the seminaries and others to help us engage this stuff the right way. I am not sure the structure of GC allows that, but I am not smart enuf to know of another path.
Meanwhile, I thank God daily for being led to Seabury and people like you and both John D's and Ruth and Frank and Jim......and all my dear fellow students. Keep it up, PLEASE.
"Students already arrive with less rich acquaintance with Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before; if one assumes even an elementary familiarity with any of these topics, one risks losing a significant proportion of the class right from the outset."
If, as I am sure is true, your beginning students know less about "Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before", what do they know more about?
This question has bothered me ever since, as a tutor in Chemistry at Sydney University, I encountered the first students who had spent six years in high school (compared to the five years I endured). My fellow tutors and I were staggered at how little chemistry/physics/mathematics they knew, compared to those who had spent a year less in high school under the old regime
Something similar happened when, ten years later, I began teaching photography at tertiary level and discovered that my students had only the flimsiest acquaintance with art, music, and literature.
I know that my raising this (well, you raised it first, I suppose) proves my lapse into "old fogeyism" is now irreversible but I'd really love to know what high school graduates know *more* about, given that they appear to know less about any subject we might deem either useful or important.
Posted by: Jonathon Delacour at August 24, 2003 08:45 PMDear AKMA,
Regarding our study of Matthew: bring everything you have. I will bring my fleeting memory of Greek, heck, I'll even spend time this month trying to get some very rough hold on my former skills.
You are right. There is a ballance between administration and Everything Else. What the current seminary curriculum tells me is that seminaries/The Church is reactive. Hello, have we not been training priests for a couple thousand years? Are not our communities responsible for training Christians who know their way around the Bible? Should seminaries be enabling communities that give in to every little thing that makes students uncomfortable?
Wow. Okay...axe grinding here. Sorry.
I am in agreement with you, Father. Pray for us, we sinners. And we shall pray for you.
Posted by: Tripp at August 25, 2003 09:51 AM1. You "haven’t heard any complaints about the way the General Convention was organized and administered," because you missed the review I got at church the Sunday after Convention, from a *very* irritated delegate. Whew!
2. I entirely agree with the observations you make about our curriculum. I continue to maintain that a more scriptural/theological emphasis in seminary education would serve the church better in the long run than many of the other directions we seem to be taking, however well-intentioned.
3. While I am undoubtedly not as prepared for the kind of study you reference as either of us would like me to be, I promise faithfully to work at filling in the gaps, and to keep the whining to a minimum.
Posted by: Jane Ellen at August 25, 2003 07:09 PMI thought of you when this story was in the news, but somehow I knew where you would stand. Interesting about scriptural grounding over considering it to be about "rights". Are there scriptural arguments that would convince the conservatives, or at least ease their minds and prevent a real scism from developing further?
To me, it seems pretty backwards to shift the emphasis from theory to practice (from theology and history of thought to organizational practice). When the student leaves the seminary and begins his or her work in the community, there is ample opportunity to learn about organization and process, but they won't have easy access to scholars who have thought and read deeply about theology.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but organizational issues are pretty generic, and many people within any church community will have experience with them from other contexts. Push this part of the program out of the seminary into something more like the internships and residencies that doctors do after medical school. Combined with better use of communications technology (i.e. the Internet and Blogs), an emerging community network would be a lot more powerful in transferring and sharing practical techniques than anything that can be done in the seminary before the directly facing the real practical problems in the community.
Posted by: Gerry at August 26, 2003 07:42 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Melchior at January 13, 2004 12:54 PMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Roman at January 13, 2004 12:54 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Ninion at January 13, 2004 12:54 PM