Americans are busy people who continue to conquer a big place which has, since the eighteenth century, offered wealth and great influence to those who work hard and who produce a product or service valued by others. Education, per se, has not always been valued for itself. Presently, undergraduate education is highly valued—judging by what the market is willing to pay—as a means to future success. Judging by her graduates, however, what is being sold to the student is not always education, at least not as that idea has been traditionally defined. What the culture values is the economic result of having attended an undergraduate school and having obtained a credential. Evangelicals (and too many Reformed folk) are children of this anti-intellectual culture, and they often look at the training of pastors in the same way. They like the credential and the license it brings to serve the church, but they do not seem to care for the process or even the substance of education as much as they desire the credential.

This antipathy for genuine education appears in a variety of ways, but one way in which it has manifested itself is in the proliferation of ad hoc seminaries where the faculty is unqualified, not residential, or non-existent. The problem is, since many undergraduates have not received a proper education either in high school or in college, as they are considering where to attend seminary, they are poorly prepared to evaluate what constitutes a good seminary education. For starters, they do not know what are the marks of a true school. Let me propose three: genuine learning, genuine faculty, and proper recognition.

Genuine Learning

Without genuine learning there can be no true education. By learning I do not mean only or primarily the dissemination and accumulation of information. This is what many students think (or have been taught to think) education is. This class of student thinks that the teacher is in possession of information that the student must have in order to complete the course and get on to the “real work of ministry.” The information collector sits in class and busily transcribes (almost always by computer now) every word from the teacher’s mouth without stopping to evaluate the character or significance of what is being said. Every word is treated as if it were as important as every other word. When the information stops flowing the collector stops typing. Analysis, if it occurs, is delayed to the end-of-term cram session.

Nor do I mean, moving to the other end of the spectrum (as I learned from Thomas de Zengotita and am being reminded of by Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me) what the narcissist assumes.¹ The narcissist is the sovereign arbiter of what is to be known, what should be learned, and what (if anything) shall be learned in class. If the teacher’s goals match up with the narcissist’s, so much the better for the teacher.

By genuine learning, I mean memorizing the grammar, understanding the logic, and mastering the rhetoric of a discipline. The grammar is the basic stuff of any intellectual enterprise. In my discipline (church history), the grammar is composed of the facts of the biography, circumstances, and intellectual history of a given person, episode, or movement. For example, it is impossible to study the Council of Nicaea without understanding when the Council met, why it met, and under what circumstances it met. These things must be mastered before one can analyze the significance of the Council and its product (the Nicene Creed). Genuine learning considers the internal structure of a discipline both in general and in particular. Thus, the student of history must understand how history itself works and how and why things unfolded in any particular case. Third, a student must learn the language of a discipline, that is, how to talk about it intelligently and even how to explain it to others. If you cannot explain something to someone else, how well do you understand it yourself? Yes, there is intuitive knowledge, but schools cannot major in intuition!

Finally, a genuine education requires a student to think well and clearly, to be stretched, to develop critical faculties. More than once, I have heard from students in various schools that they chose this or that school because, in effect, they were sure that school would not challenge them to re-think or even think through their convictions. In other words, such students choose a school because they are confident that it will reinforce their existing convictions or even validate their prejudices. Let me illustrate. I recall, some years back, receiving a paper from a student (in order to be excused from a preliminary course) which proposed to show that a view propounded by a certain (then) faculty member was wrong. It does not matter exactly what the issue was except that it was one on which there are a variety of reasonable, well-grounded views and about which there is no clear unanimity among orthodox scholars. Now this student may have been correct in his conclusion, but what troubled me was that the student knew the correctness of his conclusion before he had ever engaged in a thorough or careful study of the matter. The student had not learned a syllable of Greek or Hebrew (or any other ancient languages or any modern European languages for that matter). He had not engaged with any higher-level critical study of the issue in any way, nor was he capable yet of doing so. But he was undeterred in his confidence. It never occurred to this student that he might be wrong or that he could be wrong or that there might be things which he needed to learn before coming to iron-clad conclusions. A year or two later, the student transferred to a school where he was confident that his certainty would not be disturbed, and I suppose his confidence was well placed. I submit that such an approach does not constitute genuine learning.

Real learning is often painful because it requires a genuine student to put to death familiar and cherished notions and to confront new and unfamiliar ones. It causes self-examination and that is usually painful. It requires not only the acquisition of new skills, which can be difficult, but also the formation of new ways of thinking, which is never easy. True education is a counter-cultural undertaking. One must break from the prevailing culture of “busy-ness” and enterprise (whether commercial or religious) in order to become educated, because real learning takes time, patience, and sacrifice.

A Proper Faculty

Above, I suggested a few marks of genuine learning as opposed to the mere accumulation of information or the collection of credentials. Here I want to distinguish between those schools that have a proper faculty and those that do not.

One of the difficulties that prospective students face in evaluating possible seminaries is that of determining the quality of the faculty. My own experience is not atypical. When I came to seminary in 1984, I knew virtually nothing about the seminary except that Jay Adams taught there, that my good friend and fellow member of St John’s RCUS (Lincoln, NE) loved the school, and that it was in San Diego and had a famous name. To be sure, I expected that it would adhere to rigorous academic standards, and I knew (and know) Chuck to be a very good and thoughtful student and a reliable guide. I suppose they sent me a catalogue, but I do not remember reading it very closely.

Today, of course, with the advent of the web, it is much easier to learn about a faculty. Even with the arrival of easily found information, however, one still must make sense of it all. One reasonably objective way to evaluate whether a seminary faculty is qualified to provide a true education is to look at their credentials.

A century or more ago it was relatively common for teachers at the seminary level to lack a PhD or to have an honorary doctorate (e.g., DD) as in the case of the founder of Westminster Seminary, J. Gresham Machen. None could doubt Machen’s scholarship or learning, and few in his day did. Today, however, because of changes in the academy, because of professionalization and specialization of academics, most college and seminary teachers have some sort of doctoral degree. Thus, it has become expected that anyone who teaches at the undergraduate (BA/BS) or graduate (e.g., seminary or MA/MDiv) level will have a doctorate; but are all doctoral degrees the same? Do they all reflect the same quality of research and scholarship? This is a sensitive area but one that needs to be probed. With the rising expectation that seminary teachers will have a PhD, combined with American ingenuity, there have developed classes of doctoral degrees that are not all the same.

The standard academic doctoral degree is a PhD (or in one case, DPhil). A PhD is not necessarily a degree in the field of philosophy per se, but it is an earned degree awarded to students who (typically in the USA in some branch of the liberal arts) have completed an MA (or two), passed two years of coursework in preparation for comprehensive exams, and successfully completed and defended a sustained, detailed, piece of original academic research grounded in original sources and accounting for the relevant secondary literature. This research is conducted under the supervision of an experienced faculty member and sometimes under the supervision of an entire committee and is presented to a committee and defended orally. Such a program usually takes not less than five years and frequently as many as seven years to complete. In the UK and Europe, doctoral research presupposes a more rigorous secondary and post-secondary education and is thus not always as lengthy but usually no less rigorous. Typically, this work is undertaken in an accredited (to be addressed in under the third mark) university setting and under the supervision of a recognized (e.g., properly credentialed and academically published) scholar in a given field. A select few seminary PhD programs have, in certain instances, outstanding scholars which help to compensate for their relative lack of resources as compared to those available to state schools with public funding or to prestigious private schools with large endowment funds.

Not all PhDs are the same. There are schools that do not meet the criteria for the first mark discussed in this article that regularly bestow PhDs upon graduates on the basis of research that would not merit such recognition in university or even in an accredited seminary. A real PhD thesis will be accessioned in a library in an accredited school and shall have been subject to genuine peer review. These second-class PhDs, however, lack the substance of an actual PhD. In medieval terms, such a PhD is a mere nomen. It is a name only, a fiction, and not a reality. I am aware of schools that award such PhDs that are not available for review by the academic community and that are not subject to peer review.

In some cases, however, even accredited schools are capable of awarding second-class PhDs. A few years back I was asked to serve as an outsider reader or referee of a PhD thesis being done at a large, well-known evangelical seminary. I read the thesis and found it interesting and suggestive but lacking in several ways. The student had made a good start, but it was evident that he was not expert in his field. The thesis demonstrated ignorance of basic works and skills in the field. It could have been an MDiv honors thesis or perhaps an MA thesis, but it was not yet ready for prime time. I sent my evaluation to this effect and suggested that the student needed about two more years of study before submitting the project for final approval. Imagine my astonishment when, two weeks later, I saw a notice that this fellow was now the Rev Dr So-and-So, PhD. Normally, in a university setting, a recommendation like that by an external reader would be decisive. I guess this school will not be sending me any more PhD theses to evaluate.

Before a prospective student invests thousands of dollars and thousands of hours into a school, he ought to determine whether the faculty of a given school is properly educated (which is a matter of substance) and properly credentialed (a matter of form). Do most of the faculty have real, credible PhDs from real, credible (e.g., accredited) schools with a track record of outstanding scholarship? Here is one clue that something may be amiss: Does the seminary faculty hold their PhD degrees from the same school in which they teach? This is not a fatal problem, but it raises questions. Here is a second clue: Is the seminary run by a single family? Here is a third question: Could this faculty hypothetically teach elsewhere, at a real, well-recognized school?

There is also a class of so-called “professional” doctoral degrees, for example, the DMin, which are aimed at busy professionals who do not have time to leave their profession to return to school for a traditional academic course of study. The professional doctoral degree does not usually meet the tests set out above for an academic degree. In the interests of full disclosure, my school had a DMin program for many years, but we closed our program at the same time many seminaries in North America began theirs. Typically, these programs do not require knowledge of original or foreign languages; nor do they require original academic research. This is not to say that there are no good DMin projects. There are, but they are the exception rather than the rule. The nature and proliferation of this degree is such that David Wells complained, in print, some years back about the “DMin-ization” of the church.² He was getting at the problem which lies beneath the need for pastors to augment their credibility by becoming “Rev Dr So-and-So, DMin.” There are schools who have faculty members whose credential is a DMin. Again, this is not fatal, but caveat emptor. It is fair to ask why a faculty member has a professional and not academic degree, and whether that degree is sufficient preparation for the course of study in which the instructor teaches. I am not thinking here of visiting or adjunct faculty but rather about full-time, residential faculty.

Having considered the credentials of a proper faculty, the next part will continue by considering the publications of a proper faculty before addressing the third and final mark of a true school: proper recognition.

Notes

1. Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (NY: Bloomsbury USA, 2005). Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (NY: Atria Books, 2007).
2. David Wells, “The DMin-ization of the Ministry” in No God but God: Breaking With the Idols of Our Age, ed. Os Guinness and John Seel (Chicago: Moody Press, 1992), 175.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on the Heidelblog in 2009.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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