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1. Dr. Clark, there are certainly things on which we disagree, but not this one.

   As you mentioned in your message, seminaries today typically have degree programs that are not intended for ordination and there is no legitimate reason why women shouldn’t be able to, as my wife did, receive a M.A. in Christian Education and a second M.A. in Marriage and Family Counseling.

   I do think, however, there is a sincere misunderstanding about this subject in the Dutch Reformed world. While many major historic American universities began as seminaries to train ministers — think Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — they added non-ministerial courses of instruction fairly early, and as a result, American Presbyterian churches have understood since at least the 1700s that the same institutions that train ministers can train other people for other purposes. Saying that the seminary faculty can grant non-M.Div. degrees wasn’t much of a change from saying, for example, that Harvard or Yale could have professors teaching other subjects than those being taught in their Divinity Schools.

   That hasn’t been true until quite recently for the Dutch where seminaries were almost entirely for training of ministers, with a few rare students, usually male, in other degree programs with the intent of preparing themselves to do advanced graduate study and become college professors without being ordained, or perhaps unordained Bible teachers in a Christian school.

   I personally ran into this with large numbers of laymen, and even quite a few ministers, who were shocked when I announced my engagement to a woman seminarian. This wasn’t limited to the conservatives. A well-known “progressive” CRC minister saw us holding hands while I was reporting on one of the Christian Reformed synod meetings, and said, “Shame on you.” To this day I don’t know for sure if he was mad at me, at my wife, or both of us. What I found out later is that he didn’t understand that my wife’s degree was not an M.Div., and had confused her with a female Korean seminarian who had gone to Calvin Seminary years after us and was in the M.Div. program.

   There are seminaries today which view themselves as entirely focused on preparing men for ministry. That’s fine, and it used to be the norm in many ecclesiastical circles outside American Presbyterianism.

   But it’s not the American Presbyterian tradition, and it’s not fair to insist that Westminster change its practice to something that would be a radical change from the way not just Westminster but also many other conservative Presbyterian seminaries have operated for generations.

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