Recently, Zondervan has put out several “Advice to Student” videos featuring Bible and theological professors from around the world. As the school year begins, I thought I’d share some of these videos.
Keep the primary literature primary.
My seminary–Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
If you’re doing seminary without significant involvement in a local church, as the saying goes, “You’re doing it [sic] wrong.”
Over the past two years of seminary I’ve become more and more convinced of the church’s importance in my (and others’) seminary education. It takes a church to raise a Christian. And equally so, it takes a church to form a seminarian. As such, I am convinced that going through seminary without significant involvement in a local church (i.e., not just attending, but being involved in ministry) is incredibly harmful to one’s seminary experience and formation process.
Let me share with you at least three reasons why.
We learn a lot of valuable stuff in seminary. But seminary can’t provide us with all the training we need. (Get your Greek out!) It’s a para- (“alongside”) church organization, not a para- “this-is-all-there-is!” organization.
If you know me to any significant degree, you will likely know that I’m quite passionate about retaining the natural link between theology and practical matters. There’s a statement I say occasionally that my wife likes to call my ‘life motto’:
Everyone’s a theologian. Everything is theological. And all theology is practical.
In other words, I can’t stand it when people drive a wedge between theological understanding and practical matters (e.g., you often hear this when people speak of ‘heart’ versus ‘head’ and things like that, as if the Biblical view of man is partitioned like that). In my view, these things are mutually inclusive and interdependent.
Having presented that caveat (or better, complementary comment), I love what Paul Tripp is saying here. It’s challenging and pastorally perceptive.
It is quite easy in ministry to give in to a subtle but significant redefinition of what spiritual maturity is and does. This definition has it roots in how we think about what sin is and what sin does. I think that many, many pastors carry into their pastoral ministries a false definition of maturity that is the result of the academic enculturation that tends to take place in seminary. Permit me to explain.
In Carl R. Trueman’s book The Wages of Spin: Critical Writings on Historical and Contemporary Evangelicalism, he included a chapter entitled,”What Can Miserable Christians Sing?”
The answer to that question, Trueman answers, is the Psalms and specifically the Psalm’s model of lamentation.
Of this short chapter Trueman states,
This little piece which took minimal time and energy to author has garnered more positive responses and more touching correspondence than anything else I have ever written. It resonated with people across the Christian spectrum, people from all different church backgrounds who had one thing in common: the understanding that life has a sad, melancholy, painful dimension which is too often ignored and sometimes even denied in our churches.
He describes his purpose for writing as
to highlight what I saw as a major deficiency in Christian worship, a deficiency that is evident in both traditional and contemporary approaches: the absence of the language of lament. The Psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, contains many notes of lamentation, reflecting the nature of the believer’s life in a fallen world. And yet these cries of pain are on the whole absent from hymns and praise songs.
He sums up the thrust of that chapter as follows:
There is nothing in the typical book of hymns or praise songs that a woman who has miscarried a baby, or a parent who has just lost a child to cancer, can sing with honesty and integrity on a Sunday.
The desperation and heartache of such moments are things which we instinctively feel have no place in a religion where we are called on to rejoice in the Lord always. Yet there is a praise book which taps such emotions and gives the broken-hearted honest words with which to express their deepest sorrows to God.
It’s called the book of Psalms; and its recovery as a source of public praise in the Christian church can only help the church overcome its innate triumphalism and make room for the poor and the weak.
In short, he says, in the Psalms “one finds divinely inspired words which allow the believer to express their deepest pains and sorrows to God.”
After David and his fellow Israelites make their offerings for the future building of the temple, David praises God. In 1 Chronicles 29:14-16 he says the following.
14 But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you. 15 For we are strangers before you and sojourners, as all our fathers were. Our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding. 16 O Lord our God, all this abundance that we have provided for building you a house for your holy name comes from your hand and is all your own.
David’s speech here hits me in the gut—
Kirk E. Miller 