The Christ-Centered Seminary by Marty Culy

A Christ-centered seminary will teach and constantly reflect the foundational confession of our faith: “Jesus is Lord” (Rom 10:9).  It will bring every subject, every lecture, every interaction, every opportunity for corporate worship—everything—under the lordship of Jesus Christ.  It will teach and model what it means to view all areas of life through the grid of a distinctively Christian worldview—a worldview revealed through the Word of God.  It will provide a context for students to explore what it means to be a disciple of Christ in the particular vocation to which God is calling them. 

A Christ-centered seminary will be founded upon Jesus’ unequivocal call to men and women to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Him (Matt 16:24).  It will teach and model self-denial rather than self-actualization; putting obedience above one’s own dreams and passions; living to glorify the Master rather than seeking to be fulfilled.  It will emphasize the absolute call to absolute devotion that Jesus places on everyone who bears His name: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26-27).   

On the one hand, a Christ-centered seminary will intentionally teach students not to “love the world.”  For God has told us “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15).  Such a seminary will work hard to train students to recognize what loving the world looks like and to help them abandon any such love of the world.  It will train students to walk in the light (1 John 1:6-7), not on the edges of the light where they can smell and taste the darkness, but right in the middle of the light, as far from darkness as they can get.  It will teach students to embrace the fact that Jesus tells us, “Be perfect … as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48); Peter tells us, “just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do” (1 Pet 1:15); and John tells us, “Everyone who remains in him does not sin” (1 John 3:6).  This lofty standard of holiness that is set for us should not surprise us since “without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14).  Truly Christ-centered education will emphasize the ubiquitous call of the Scriptures to live holy lives and will engage the common and destructive fallacy that relegates such calls to “legalism.”   

On the other hand, a Christ-centered seminary will teach and model for students what it means to “love the world” as God loved the world (John 3:16).  It will emphasize the need to be other-centered rather than self-centered.  It will seek to open students’ eyes to the needs all around them, both within the church and “out there.”  Students of such a seminary will be trained to seek out and rescue those who are lost wherever they are found through the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ; they will be taught to view everything they own as resources entrusted to them by God for his kingdom purposes rather than for their own self-indulgence; and they will have faculty who model what laying down their lives for others looks like.   

In short, a Christ-centered seminary will exalt and imitate the Jesus of Scripture, while exposing the many “false christs” that are rampant in our churches. It will resist the temptation to turn to worldly wisdom to answer the challenges of our day, recognizing that the Gospel is “the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16); the Scriptures are sufficient to make every follower of Jesus “thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16); and Jesus alone is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). 

“Extravagance and Pragmatism” – by Dale Dirksen

John 12:1-8

 1Six days before the Passover, Jesus arrived at Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. 2Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. 3Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.
4But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, 5“Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” 6He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it.
7“Leave her alone,” Jesus replied. ” It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial. 8You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.”

Marva Dawn wrote a book called A Royal Waste of Time. In this book, she observes that often expressions of worship in the Bible seem to have no pragmatic value. They are offered, apparently, without much benefit to the one who offers. There is a sense of abandonment of “what’s in it for me.” Imagine the pragmatist watching the prize winning bull go up in smoke in the Jerusalem temple. It seems that one of the elements of this story of spikenard John 12 is one of a kind of extravagance that is not pragmatic. A costly offering is given freely and criticised immediately. I wonder what it did for Mary. Did she say, “That was a great worship experience; I really need to do that again soon”?

Judas Iscariot had a good point. Why waste this resource with so little visible return? You would think that Jesus would agree – after all, he did care about the poor. Yet, in this situation, Mary’s irresponsible act of centering her extravagant offering on Jesus is received with approval. There is a sense of participation in something bigger than the simply pragmatic.

I believe that pragmatism remains a high value in seminary culture. We are dominated by the values of efficiency and success. We also have high demands on our lives. Many expectations require us to choose between things and activities that are all good. We tend to choose the pragmatic in most cases. What if we chose extravagant instead? How might a seminary professor choose the kind of extravagance that Mary modelled? How might a seminary become known for these kinds of offerings? Maybe the most significant kind of extravagance we could demonstrate in seminary is related to time. Our time is increasingly our most precious commodity. We often feel that we don’t have enough of it (although, everyone has exactly the same amount). What if we set aside ideas of the practical and gave time extravagantly? How might we be Christ centered in light of how we use our time?

I believe this will relate to the sense of participation in community. The academy is radically oriented around individualism. We do our studying by ourselves and often have to protect our time by avoiding others. As we consider the possibility of Christ centered community, this becomes even more important. How might we develop a sense of Christ centeredness in our seminary community? Maybe this is where we choose the “wasteful” option and give extravagantly of our rare spikenard (time) for the purpose of not just personal relationship with Jesus, but learning how to be a community that is centered on Christ?

On March 20 we will be invited to participate in an offering of time related to prayer. Staff, faculty and student leaders have been invited to do it together. This seems like a non-pragmatic thing to do in late March. But maybe setting aside these hours will be one example of an extravagant and Christ centered offering?

Dr. Dale Dirksen

Poets and Theologians

I came across these reflections in some reading I was doing today. It is by H. Richard Niebuhr. Worth some contemplation for those wondering about why theologians do what they do.

“Now one task of theology is develop this reasoning in faith [i.e., Niebuhr says that Psalm 8 is an instance of beginning in faith in God and proceeding to the visible world]. Hence it often undertakes to ask and answer, within the context of faith, the Psalmist’s question, What is man in the world of which God is the principle? . . . Such theological theory presupposes faith, but must develop the rational elements in it. As expressions of faith the statements of such theology will  almost always be somewhat inferior to the utterances of poets and prophets. A theologian qua theologian could no more have written the 8th Psalm than archaeologist qua archaeologist could have written ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’; yet the theologian’s development of the reasoning in faith is no less closely related to faith than is the Psalmist’s development of the aesthetic form. His work is a work of reason in the context of faith. God is the ultimate object of his inquiry, but, of course, God as present to faith.”

H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 14-15.

For more on “the art of theology,” I’d recommend taking a look at Bill Erlenbach’s post on his blog (you can find it listed in our blogroll to the right).

DG