Seminaries: Should We, Shouldn't We How Some Start Off Good & Why They Go Bad
Vern Peterman · Oct 26, 2003
Church History, No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262259582309

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Today we get to talk about a favorite subject. Seminary. Cemetery, yes. There we go. So this is it. Seminary. Should we? Shouldn't we? How some start off good and why they go bad. How's that for a mixed bag? First of all, I think we need to ask you a very important question.

What's the difference or what are the differences What are some of the differences between a seminary and a church? Yes, never lets out. OK, good. OK, seminary is a school, OK, with everything that goes along with it. OK, a seminary might be more intensive. Not always, but a lot of times people in seminary are just just doing seminary, whereas churches Quite often, people who are doing other things.

Gail? You have to pay money to go there, okay? And what's interesting, what's interesting at a church, you know, especially, a lot of churches do, they go and pass the plate, and I've seen some of them that do it more than once. You know, here we specifically don't. As a matter of fact, we kind of keep it a secret. You know, I have to really hunt it down if you want to put some money in the box. But yeah, it's a rare seminary that doesn't have a pretty good fee to charge. What's that? An underground plate. An underground plate. Okay.

I talked to one fellow who had recently gone to Dallas Seminary down in Dallas, Texas, and at the end of one year, he says, I threw everything I had at it, and he says, I got $10,000 student loan debt just from the first year. So yeah, it can be steep. A few years ago I checked into it. It was about a thousand bucks a class. It was about the rate.

What else is the difference between a seminary and a church? Think of a seminary as preparing pastors. Typically. How about missionaries? Maybe preparing missionaries or something like that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Some other differences? Yeah. Could be more theoretical at a seminary. There tends to be less of a focus on how does it apply to life. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Yeah.

Because there is a line there, a very fine line shown through the seminary. Sure, sometimes there is a divergence there, isn't there? The church might be teaching one way and the seminary the other way. There is a free way. Yeah, okay. Nancy? In the church, we talk about teaching the church.

The seminary is more focused on giving a classroom, How many times do you find a church mentioned in the New Testament? A whole bunch, okay? How many times do you find a seminary mentioned? That's a real puzzler, isn't it? But we send the guys off to get prepared at a seminary to be at a church, but Scripture never mentions it. Hmm. Gale, he started raising hands. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. Yes, Tom. Yeah. Okay. Let's take a look.

What I'd like to do is kind of walk through some slides here. I want to make one little correction from last week. This was pointed out to me, so if you got your notes from last week, it should be Old Testament and Old Testament, not, it said New Testament there. That's correcting last week's slide there. Okay. Here's Acts 19, 8 through 10. And so here's Paul.

He enters the synagogue. and then finds the folks in the synagogue are not all receptive, so what does he do? He withdraws from them and takes away the disciples, that is those from the synagogue, and reasoning daily in the school of Tyrannus, it was a secular school and he apparently just kind of rented the whole space. This took place for two years so that all who lived in Asia heard the word of the Lord both Jews and Greeks.

Was this a seminary? Tom? Okay, one is it's short, okay? Is this a seminary? What's different? He's preaching the gospel. Okay, that's one point. Anything else? Ah, okay. Do you see it as separate from the church here? Is this church or seminary? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

All right, Tom. It's right nearby and he basically, you know, gets this lecture hall. Suppose we take the location issue out of it. Largely, I mean as it's been pointed out, largely this is an evangelistic focus, isn't it? Yeah? Okay, yeah. And notice it wasn't, let's hole up here, but it's a place for broadcasting. So this is kind of a unique situation, yeah.

We know nothing else about the school of Tyrannus. It was likely something that was already existing, not a Christian seminary or something of that sort. If anything, it was a secular place that he likely rented or something of that sort. We know nothing else about this particular school. Let's ask the question again. Was this a seminary graduation? Next chapter here. Here's Paul speaking to the elders from Ephesus. He's got all the elders from Ephesus. He's talking to them for the last time. And here's what he says.

For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. Be on guard for yourselves, again speaking to the elders then, and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be on the alert, remembering that day and night for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified."

Seminary or church? Church context. This is elders, right? in the context of the church, teaching them. There was a period of time there, it's definitely that. Carol? It sounds very similar to what we've been doing here at Urgent, being able to take teachers, so it's not such a replacement. If you look at it, you don't see a seminary context. You do see that, yes, there's some focused teaching. Yes, that's going on. but you don't see it in a seminary context where let's take people out of where they live and put them some other place for several years and then relocate them and spread them around.

Interesting, huh? Instead, he was where they were living and they continued on in that context, where they were in the context of the church. Now, here's another question. Was Paul telling Timothy to found or maintain a seminary? This is 2 Timothy 2.2. Paul says, "...the things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also." Is that a seminary or a church? First of all, where had Paul just sent Timothy? The very first part of 1 Timothy tells you.

Right, he sent him to Ephesus to deal with what? Right, they had problems with false teachers there. He says, I want you to go deal with that. And then in the context of the church at Ephesus, he's telling them this. He's not telling them, you know, start a seminary and get people coming out with degrees. It was a church context. That's what he was spelling out here. Okay, let's take a look here further.

I put in quotes here, the first Christian seminary, and I also put a question mark. First Christian seminary, as some would define it, was in Alexandria, Egypt. It started in the last part of the 2nd century. By the way, these were buildings built afterwards, but still in Alexandria.

And here are the leaders. On the plus side, they actually just met in homes, one person at a time, teaching in the homes. On the minus side, this is where a lot of the allegorical teaching got founded. This fellow Origen was interesting. He was a fellow who really widely propounded allegorizing all of scripture. The whole thing, start to finish. To him it wasn't spiritual unless it was allegorized. This was back in our fifth Sunday of church history.

We had this back and forth pendulum swing through the centuries. And one of the things that you find is that this seminary idea followed the pendulum swing. And one of the things that happened here was that monasteries were actually the first ones to really set seminaries in place. They'd have monasteries and you'd go away to this monastery. So again, what was it? It wasn't in the context of the church with people in everyday life. It was isolate yourself and learn something. Interesting. That's where the isolation and learn pattern began. Now, what we find in the first monastery schools was Jerome's Monastery School in Bethlehem.

This was the guy that translated the Bible into Latin. The Vulgate, have you heard of that? It was that version that was pronounced in later centuries to be the inspired scriptures by the Roman Catholic Church. And then in Italy, after that, was another tradition of monastery schools.

The next one that came up, look at the pendulum swing going the other way, Scholasticism. Boy, we're really going to get academic about this. So here's this pendulum swing in Scholasticism. And here's the way it worked. You have the monastery schools, then there were some cathedral schools, schools associated with some of these cathedral buildings, and then the rise of the universities in like 1100, 1300, 1200, 1300, 1400. In there was where the whole university system got started, including all the bachelors degrees and masters and the whole thing. It was on that that the seminaries got founded. That was the basis for it, and it came out of the Catholic Church tradition.

You had the emerging universities coming out of medieval Europe. Heidelberg, which is right near where Heidi's from, right? And then down into southern Europe there, and then you see the Oxford, Cambridge, which are still the great places of tradition on the British Isles.

Yes? In the time of Martin Luther, the content of all science It was so much that everybody could learn. I mean, the talent was much. Yes. You could essentially get all of the... You could learn everything that they had to teach. Geology, medicine, and everything. Yeah, yeah. The time of Luther. Yes.

And matter of fact, they didn't have all the different specialties that you have now. Now there's degrees in things we never heard of. Why? Because we got all these specialties. At the time, it was, you go to a university and you learn everything there is to know. That was it.

One of the things that also happened here was they didn't just teach the Bible, they also taught Greek philosophy. Frequently Plato and especially Aristotle. A lot of Greek philosophy was interwoven into this and that was pretty standard stuff at that point in time. They learned logic and grammar and things like that.

One of the other things to think about You can't buy any printed books. So a lot of times you'd go into a class and the teacher wrote stuff down and you wrote it down too and you're dipping and writing and dipping and writing and there's your book. So it was a matter of doing a lot of your own copying. To go out and buy a bunch of books was just unbelievably expensive. So typically you would copy things yourself you would study the same material for all the depths you could.

It reinforces the point Helmut was making. It was difficult to disseminate information, so you pretty well had a limited pool of things that you could teach them, and that was it. The leaders of the Reformation were mostly university graduates and professors. That's something else that doesn't always come out. Martin Luther attended the University at Erfurt.

He had his B.A. and his M.A. there and began to study law. That's what it is. Pardon? Oh, it's a U. Oh, OK. But you know, it's funny. But that's the spelling that I had in the source that I got it. Yeah, it could be. OK. Well, look at that. See, I got it spelled the other way down below. So it's a typo. OK. Erfurt Wittenberg receiving his doctorate in 1512. OK. And then here's John Calvin. By the way, he was the one Reformation leader that didn't start off as also being a priest. He was always a university professor. Academician, from the start.

Paris and Strasbourg. I spent about an hour in Strasbourg. I didn't like the way they drove, and I left. Anyway, finally established an academy in Geneva in 1559, just a few years before he died. He said, OK, we're going to do some more of this. And the academy was what? A Calvinist seminary. Cemetery, I almost said. OK, seminary. The first seminaries in America. Now they're all famous schools, but they're hardly decent seminaries. Harvard was established in 1636. The idea was to train pastors. Here is why they established Harvard.

The classical way of bringing a pastor on board was that a pastor was trained under another pastor at a church. That was the usual means of bringing pastors up to speed. What happened is they had these people spreading west, and the movement out west was rapid, and people were heading off into the woods and everything, and it was real tough to get that same pattern producing enough pastors. And so they said, well, we've got to get something to accelerate this. So they founded Harvard with nine students at the start. And then, as you see there, during that century, A little over half of those graduates then became pastors. But the goal was, we want some well-trained pastors to come out of here. Gail? Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine that? Only 16 years after, we just first get this colony started, and then we got to get a seminary going. Yeah. Very shortly thereafter.

Here's drawings of the college about 1767 there. When Harvard began to slip, I put that in quotes there, Yale was formed. When Yale began to slip, Princeton developed. Interesting pattern that what you see is, okay, we'll start one, and we start another one.

Dartmouth was a missionary training school. That was the idea. We had a lot of these Ivy League schools. I think there's only one of them that didn't start off being a missionary or pastoral training program. And so we had all these schools developing.

Now, I'm going to have a bias here in what you see from here on out. And the bias is going to be in the direction of tracking the seminaries along the Presbyterian line. So I'm just telling you it's biased. That's right. That's right. There's a reason for my bias, however, as we'll see here in just a little bit. This is an objective bias. The next generation of seminaries.

In 1808, the Congregationalists, which is kind of like a close cousin to the Presbyterian denomination, in New England founded Andover Theological Seminary in Connecticut. They had a large library and three full-time faculty members. By the way, that was exceptional for a start. Most of the seminaries started with, you know, we've got a building, we've got a teacher, let's go. Okay? So this was really exceptional. But by 1811, the Presbyterians started Princeton. Okay?

Again, they started, you know, a small beginning. But then there was just an explosion by comparison of seminaries. In a five-year span, three seminaries were begun in the Northeast, and within 50 years, 60 seminaries had been started in America. Tom? Yeah, so it was just this massive starting of them and it wasn't accidental. It was because of what was happening there in the United States.

At Princeton here you've got this prominent theologian who kind of was the classical guy of the beginnings of Princeton. He started there like the year after the school was founded. I've got several of his commentaries and things of that sort. They're public domain, so you frequently will see them on the internet. A lot of folks will print those up and make those available. He taught there. Look at the span of time that he taught. It was quite a stretch. Basically up till the time of his death. And one of the interesting things, he was fond of saying that Princeton never had any new ideas. Nothing new ever originated at Princeton. Okay, during his time there.

His idea was, we're not here to originate something, we're here to tell you, you know, this is the solid line. Now, what's that? All right, here's further on, you have Benjamin Warfield with another one. He didn't start immediately after Hodge, but was another well-known one in that line. And again, up to 1921.

Something I found very interesting about this fellow's personal life. He lived right immediately across the street from the seminary. His wife was an invalid the entire time that he taught there, as long as, like for decades, as long as she was alive. And he would teach and then run across, take care of his wife, and then run back, and run back and forth, back and forth, taking care of her. So amazing. So he's a real faithful fellow. There's no question about that.

Anyway, in spite of this fellow's being there, one of the things that began to take place was a doctrinal decline. The thing that split was the church started taking more liberal views of scripture. What do I mean by that? Looking at scripture not as the inspired word of God, but more along the view it's inspiring. It is no longer looked at as this is real historical truth, beginning to see a divorce between Christianity connected to history and what's taught in scripture.

So that divide started taking place, and you started seeing it affect areas of psychology, origins, things of that sort. Even Charles Hodge opposed Darwin, but interestingly enough, even though he was considered kind of the stalwart of doctrine there at Princeton, He did not believe that the early chapters of Genesis were literal. He took them as allegory, but still opposed Darwin on philosophical terms.

Real interesting. So the foundation for slipping had already begun. What's real interesting is when this started hitting the fan, the Presbyterian Church went through several splinters there. What's interesting is that the first splinter took place from Princeton Seminary. They had sort of a shuffle on the board, and so a lot of the people on staff ended up leaving before the church splits began. Then they got the Orthodox Bible, and Evangelical Presbyterian churches were the offspring of that split. Yes? The liberal part remained behind? Yes. The liberal part remained behind in the mainline church, and it also remained behind in the Princeton Seminary. That was the flagship of seminaries.

Yes, very much so. So what had happened is the groups that didn't tolerate that shift then split off into extra groups. And we'll talk about more of that in a bit. You had your hand up? Yes. Very good point, and it will be interesting to see what happens, for example, with the Episcopal Church, you know, having appointed a gay bishop. They've got some deviations a lot earlier, but yeah, what you'll see is it's the more conservative groups that will, you know, say, raise their hand on that and, you know, make an issue out of it. Now, we distributed this back in our fifth meeting as well.

This was kind of the the splits of the Presbyterian church. By the way, this doesn't show all the details. This is a quick summary. But on the left-hand side is the early 1700s and kind of the origin of some of the Presbyterian churches. And now what I'd like us to take a look at is this little area we've got in the red box there. That's the focal point of the area we're talking about.

The Presbyterian mainline denomination was aligned there with Princeton Theological Seminary. splitting away from that was the Orthodox Presbyterian denomination and they founded the Westminster Theological Seminary. Notice I put that slightly ahead because actually the seminary split off first and then the denomination split off. Then you find the Bible Presbyterian denomination, notice how close behind, and they first founded Faith Theological Seminary and then a couple other more recent Western Reformed and Cohen Theological Seminary started since on the West Coast. And then from there, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church noticed a time delay.

And by the way, that's not the current Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Because what happened is this one joined with another one, and the current Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which started a little over 20 years ago, picked the name up because it was available. So there's actually two over the last century. Two different evangelical Presbyterian churches.

Over the last half century. How about that? Still a split. Still a split. Yup. Here's some key personalities. You may recognize some of the names. By the way, give me help with the name of this M-A-C-H-E-N. How would you pronounce that? Machin. Machin. See, now nobody would pronounce it that way. I hear J. Gresham, Machin, Machin, different things, but not like that.

But anyway, he was one who led with the founding of the new seminary, and just as the church was starting to split off, he died. First day, January 1. J. Oliver Buswell was another one. He headed for a while at Wheaton. Have you heard about Wheaton? He headed Wheaton. He was also, by the way, the one who told John Walvoord I think you ought to go to Dallas. He ran unsuccessfully for Secretary of Education in the state of Illinois under the Prohibition Party. So, real interesting background there.

Francis Schaeffer. Recall reading some of Francis Schaeffer's works? The God Who Is There? Those kinds of books. He was involved in that split as a young man. and Carl McIntyre, who died just last year. Carl McIntyre had been one who had led a lot of, I would say, fairly radical fundamentalist type things. I remember when Nancy and I were in college, he led a group of 15,000 Bible thumpers in support of the Vietnam War. He was a real bold personality.

But here are some personalities that were involved in this split. And they went different directions, dividing along different lines, but saying, we can't handle this liberal bent that the seminary is taking. And so they founded different seminaries and different denominations.

Here's an assessment by, and this guy I'm quoting, this is Dr. Joseph Paipa, and he is a Princeton, excuse me, He is a, not Princeton, but he is a Presbyterian seminary professor. So he says, hardly a day passes that I do not think about the fact that no Christian institution of learning has ever remained faithful to God, none even as long as Princeton. We come out of a tradition in which our ministers were normally the best educated of anybody in the culture, but today we have the worst generation of Presbyterian ministers in the history of American Presbyterianism. Amazing! That's a Presbyterian educator. This is a seminary professor.

He is observing the fact, and the point that I'll make here, that I can't see any seminary that even remained true to what it was founded upon for a century. I can't find any. And I've talked to other people that have researched it and studied church history. They can't find any either. None of them for a century has stayed solid on what they were founded upon. Okay, let's look at Dallas Theological Seminary. Real interesting. The reason I have this bias in selecting the Presbyterian denomination is because Dallas Theological Seminary really came out of the Presbyterian denomination.

Here was Louis Bray Schaefer. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in the year 1900. went to Presbyterian churches, stayed with Presbyterian churches. When he passed on the leadership, when he died in 1952, the year I was born, he passed on the leadership to John Walvoord. John Walvoord was Presbyterian. So there's a long-standing background there, and yet what do you see? Here's the Evangelical Theological College, which is the first year it was opened. That's what they called it. So now let's see what happens here.

Now you've got Schaefer dying in 1952, so John Walvoord gets the baton and he carries it on through 1986. He died December of just this last year. And there have been three presidents since. You've had three that have stepped in and kind of filled in since Walvoord retired in 1986.

Some of the names of some of them. You heard of some of the names? Chuck Swindoll was one who was there. He was the second of the three. Mark Bailey is the one more recent. I was over at John Wolbert's house when he wrote the recommendation letter for Mark Bailey.

And yet, things have continued to slip. It was about a year ago, Dr. Leitner, who used to teach at Dallas and Tyndale, where I went, was let go from Dallas. Mark Bailey gave him his termination and said, you made too much noise about the doctrinal slip here, you're gone. They cut him loose and said, you're out of here. So now he's teaching at Tyndale, but not at Dallas. So here you have this slip taking place.

DTS, though DTS has long had a reputation for being biblically sound, recent years have seen the encroachment of Progressive Dispensationalism, that started there about 20 years ago. Daryl Bach, who still teaches there, he's the guy on the lower left. He and Blazing were a couple of guys that together established Progressive Dispensationalism. It's kind of a compromise between Amillennialism and the classical Dispensational view that had been taught since the founding of Dallas Theological Seminary.

See, Lewis Barry Schaefer had been a good friend of Schofield. The two of them spent about 20 years together. Lots of time talking and studying and teaching together and helping one another in various ways. So there's lots of contact there. Now, here's Schofield who had a part in founding classical dispensationalism. Now you see the association there. slipping away with the introduction of progressive dispensationalism.

Open theism. Now, what do I mean by open theism? That's the idea that God doesn't know everything. God doesn't really know the future. As a matter of fact, prophecy in the Bible is not telling you what's going to happen. It's characterized among open theists as God's best guess. or a broad outline with a lot of details that could or not come to pass. Open theism also teaches that God likes surprises. This is open theism.

Now, I hear a lot of chuckling, and that's fine. It is laughable, except for one thing. Two years ago, next month, Colorado Springs was a meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. They had a vote there just to kind of get a poll, how many open theists we got, okay, of the people there, and it was quite a few people from all of evangelical thoughts. Excuse us. Whoa.

Yes, accidentally, I didn't know it. The vote, anyway, the vote that they had led to 70% supporting a classical understanding of God, 30%, almost one-third, almost one in every three people believed in open theism, that God has a limited understanding of things, God likes surprises, God doesn't control things, He's not sovereign, and He's not all-knowing. That was almost a third of the attendance, and the number is slipping more in that direction, and being introduced at Dallas Theological Seminary. Yeah, that idea was not even considered in the realm of being orthodox. Yes, that's a good way to put it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a recent sweep. Yes. Tom? Yeah. Yes, this falling away is expected. That's a good point. Falling away is expected.

There's one thing, I think, to think on this whole mess and that is that what's bizarre is that when the Apostle Paul came into the various pagan cultures, the gods that they worshipped were similar to the gods of open theism. The gods did not know the future clearly. The gods did not have sovereign control. Now, what are we teaching in Christian seminaries? The same thing that Paul opposed vigorously in the first century. Yeah? I once had a good charismatic Catholic friend who said to me, at the apology, he believed that God was positive. I was blown away by that. Well, you know, it's interesting because what's happened, Catholicism embraces so many things.

I mean, you talk about it being one church organizationally, but there is a vast array of teachings within Catholicism. And most people are not aware there are a whole bunch of Catholic churches, including some that have completely isolated themselves and just focused on Mary. I got on one website, there's a Catholic Church in America, and they just think the Pope is the worst guy on planet Earth. And so, anyway, if you start researching it, there's a whole bunch of Catholic Churches. The Roman Catholic Church out of the Vatican in Rome has a wide range of teachings that come under that umbrella, including the open theist view. This open theism is not exclusive to Protestantism. It's also a Catholic view among some Catholics. Yes, Gail? Yes, that's right.

The bottom line is, once we start isolating ourselves from scripture as the final authority, then we're just making God after our own image. We're reproducing what the Greeks and the Romans had in terms of their concept of God. Losing something, folks. I mean, it's serious. The last one I mentioned is ecumenicalism. Bennett, the fellow on the right, was the Founders Day speaker four years ago this month. He's Roman Catholic. Nice fellow, but Roman Catholic.

Has DTS been resurrected? At least two seminaries have been established along the lines of what Dallas Theological Seminary doctrinally One of them is Tyndale, where I went and found in 1986. Schaefer, named after Louis Barry Schaefer, found in 1993. Even combined, these two are dwarfed by Dallas Theological Seminary. It basically widens open the gate and saying, okay, there's a variety of beliefs and we'll just embrace the diversity. And so there'll be a wide association of beliefs and we just say that's all fine.

And this decision to have Bennett there, by the way, was a decision of not Mark Bailey, the current guy, but the previous fellow at Swindoll. Yes? Yeah, everybody's got something to contribute, and the bottom line is it's an abandonment of truth. We can't know what's true, so let's not squabble.

Here are some questions. Does the secular professions training model fit Shepherds? In other words, what we do is we say, boy, this guy's got a doctorate degree, he must know what he's talking about. Yeah, the worldly standards as to what's a measure of, does somebody know something, it doesn't fit, right?

Yeah. How about, are seminaries designed to prepare shepherds? Or, let's ask the question, what are they designed to prepare? Yeah, Tom? Yeah, in other words, you've got test takers. Let's ask this, are seminary professors gifted as shepherds? They could be, yes, but it isn't necessarily a connection. So now you've got people primarily who are good at something else, may in fact be shepherds, doing the training for people who are then going to turn around and be shepherds. Very interesting. They haven't seen what a shepherd is. 1 Peter 5 says elders are to be examples. Where are the examples that these future pastors are seeing? You started to say something?

Yes. Ah. Yes. Yeah. Acts 20, 1 Peter 5. Paul speaking, Peter speaking. Both of them say Shepherd the flock among you. They use the word shepherd as a verb, not a noun, and shepherd is an imperative form. Shepherd the flock among you, among you, among you.

Real interesting. Does relocation to a seminary and then to the local church fit the biblical pattern? Is that what you see? So far as we can tell, the classical pattern was the elders were from wherever they were. There was some relocation. We can see that. Timothy, for example, was moved around, but that was more of an apostolic delegate pattern.

The elders from each of the towns, starting in Acts 14.23, were from the towns or cities that they were from. It was the typical pattern. It wasn't that relocation was prohibited.

And I think that's one point I want to make here. What I've been presenting is not terribly positive, right? The reality is though, scripture does not prohibit relocation, it does not prohibit seminary. But what we need to look at is what should the church be. Josiah? Yeah, to shepherd and to minister. My guess would be that a lot of Timothy's learning would be walking from one place to the next, or while helping Paul make tents, An awful lot of it would have been along that line.

Because the high cost of most seminaries is consistent with scripture. Send this guy off, and it's usually more than he can afford, so what's he going to do? He's going to go and hawk, right? Several tens of thousands of dollars, typically. And then he'll go to a church, and the average church is small, and can't afford to pay enough to catch up with what he's gone and hawked for. Strange anomaly, huh? How about the seminary degree? Make one biblically qualified to shepherd a church. What are the qualifications that you see given in scripture for a shepherd?

Paul talks to the elders at Ephesus, Acts 20, and says, the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. It's the Holy Spirit's doing. So all we're doing is acknowledging what the Holy Spirit has already done. Okay, that's the very basis of Paul's warning in Acts 20, okay? Yes, I have given you the whole counsel of God.

Okay. Excuse me, what? Okay. I think the point that I would like to make here, Scripture nowhere prohibits seminary. So don't get me wrong on that point. What it does point out, though, as we read through scripture, is let's not let seminary be something because the church wasn't what it was supposed to be. Get my point?

I went to seminary, and I'll tell you why. It was to make up for what I hadn't gotten at the churches that I went to. And I went to some Churches, I mean, Peninsular Bible Church with Ray Steadman and guys like that. I mean, you thought, well, that's a great place. Ray Steadman, you know, learned from John Walvert. He was under, you know, J. Vernon McGee. He was assistant to Harry Ironside.

Shouldn't that have been great? Okay. Not bad, but guess what? I found out it wasn't enough. Now, so I think the key is not to sit here and dance all over seminaries and say that they're bad, but the point being, let's look at what scripture says the church is to be, and let's not let the church be less than that so that seminaries look at it as having to make up for it. Does that make sense?

That there may be a place to supplement, there may be a place for indeed some intensive studying, But as the standard fare for preparing people who are going to then turn around and equip the church, Scripture doesn't make that as the main provision.

The church instead should be the place where that preparing goes on. And we get into Ephesians 4. He gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints, including more shepherds. including more teachers. Whatever service people have to offer, it is the church that needs to be the primary place doing the preparing.

Look at what the result is for the building up of the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of the faith. That's, by the way, contrary to the point Nancy was bringing up. Not the diversity of the faith. The unity of the faith. and to the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ."

I went to a seminary that was doctrinally sound, and was created to try to reproduce what had been lost at Dallas Theological Seminary, to be quite blunt. Many of the people who taught there used to go to Dallas, or taught at Dallas sometimes simultaneously, or like Dr. Leitner used to teach there. But what's interesting as you look at this is, while seminaries are giving you academic background, look at where this is to take us. Knowledge of the Son of God. And I would suggest to you that that goes beyond what you can answer on a test. That's personal knowledge. And this happens in the context of a church.

And a seminary is not going to be the kind of place that produces it. Here's one characteristic of a seminary, and that is that rather than having continuity over time, you might have continuity of staff, but people come to seminary and then they're gone. They go somewhere else. And so you don't have a continual building up of the people there. Once you get somebody, you know, they've gone through the seminary, they go somewhere else.

The church picture is one where there's a continual up-building of the body. and it goes on over time and it remains there. Yeah, yeah, it's a stepping stone. You don't see quite that stepping stone picture here in Ephesians, do you? It's a different model.

So I think, you know, the bottom line here, I don't want to sit here and say, well, seminary is a bad thing and all that. I think, however, that it's important for us not to look at the seminary as a replacement for anything that's going on in the church. At best, it might be a substitute. And I would say that there may be opportunities for a seminary in conjunction with a church to assist in places where people haven't gotten sufficient training elsewhere.

In some sense, that's kind of what we're doing here. We've got the Saturday morning Greek class. We've got these electives, things of that sort. We don't want people to get in a place where they say after having been here ten years, you know, there was something I didn't get at Holly Hills, and so I think I'll go to seminary to get it.

It's not to diss on seminaries, but the point being that the church needs to be what it's supposed to be so the people are equipped. so that we have these end goals and results in mind, including the one right after that, not being thrashed about by wind of doctrine. Any other comments, questions?

Yeah, Josiah. One thing, I know there's just a Bible college, but I didn't really have to go to the Bible college, but there was a few tribes mentioned, was that it was an incubation for some people. Like, the Bible college only really worked for some of those people. Okay. The people that came there, they went there because their parents were missionaries, and they just wanted to send them to war. Right.

So they came to this Bible college for some other reason. They even got kicked out, and they were sad. If you're not at the Bible college or seminary line of thought, then you're out of there. You're going to be pushed out. Say the final exam here is a doozy.

Yeah, it's considered, here's the standard thing that you do, you go to seminary and that's the answer, right? But it's a cultural assumption that we've developed. The reality is that what we see in scripture, seminaries are, it's hard to pull a seminary out of any of the texts of scripture. What you do see consistently, though, is this is the church, and this is what the church is like, and this is the building up of the body of Christ that takes place in the church.

And you don't see this, you know, kind of phenomenon taking place. The other thing that we've done is to kind of take the mold. You've got doctors and lawyers and, you know, teachers, and you've got these various professions, and the pastor is just one of those. You know, and you just kind of, here's the mold, and you stamp them through the same kind of a mold.

Should we be using any kind of pattern from the world you know I? Went through business school, and there's a whole lot of things there that were real interesting to learn But I sure don't want them applied to the church. You know Well, we've run out of time, so let's let's pray pray for the seminaries to Lord we do thank you for the fact that we have guidance from your word as to how the the church is to grow and to be built up and that the focal point is not the grade on the test but that we have a knowledge of you and that we serve one another out of that personal relationship with you. Thank you Lord for the ways that you have been using the church body to build each of us up and we just look to that to continue here even as we meet here this morning. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.