When we say "our" we mean our Baptist seminaries. They were founded by our Baptist people, endowed with Baptist money, and are supplied with students for our Baptist ministry by our Baptist churches.The relation between the denomination and its schools is reciprocal. There is obligation on both sides. In recent years the rights of the seminaries have been much emphasized. The right of "academic freedom" has been much exploited, and sometimes with rather vague notions as to what is involved in the phrase. But the mutuality of the relationship and obligation is easily seen when we ask a few pointed questions. Has the denomination a right to establish and maintain theological schools? Has it a right to expect that the schools it supports shall be ex¬ponents of the life and ideals of the denomination? Surely no one will answer these questions in the negative. We return to our question, "What has the denomination a right to expect of our theological seminaries?" There are several things to be said in reply.
First of all, our seminaries should rank with the very best in scholarship and teaching ability. The members of their faculties should be alert men, keeping in vital touch with the needs of the ongoing kingdom. They should speak with authority in the realm of scholarship. In the true sense they should be open-minded men. But openness of mind is merely a condition to something higher. An open mind achieves little or nothing as long as it is merely open. The mental state must become static before it can become efficient. Scholarship as a mere quest for truth must become con¬viction before it can achieve power. The denomination should enable its seminaries to rank with the best. No Baptist student should have any vital excuse for attending a non-Baptist seminary.
Again, we have a right to expect that our seminaries will produce the practical results required for denominational and Christian efficiency. The churches want and need preachers, men who can feed the flock of God. They want and need pastors who can tend the flock. They want and need men who will be evangelists, soul-winners, personal workers, men who know how to bring truth home to the individual heart. The churches need and want executives, men who are not lost in the rather complex task of organizing and directing church and Sunday school. The denomination also needs leaders, men of vision, of courage, forward-looking men, who see the latent forces around them and know how to call them forth, and who are willing to give time and thought to great denominational enterprises outside their own local churches.
These are some of the practical results called for by the denomination. It is for these ends seminaries were founded. It is for them they are maintained. Some seminaries seem to forget them. They pursue other aims, academic and remote from the realities and urgent tasks of the churches. A keen observer remarked a while ago that "some seminaries are the fittest place to unfit men for the ministry, and the unfittest place to fit men for the ministry that can be imagined."
This leads to the next requirement. Our seminaries should turn out men with positive convictions. The denomination has a right to expect this. Here we mention a fundamental principle that is often overlooked. Education, and especially theological education, is as significant for what it trains a man from as for what it trains him to. Few theological teachers will attack directly perhaps the deity of Christ, the atonement, the resurrection, the second coming of Christ and related facts of the gospel. But some so ignore them or so stress other things that these drop out the student's consciousness. Apparently they are regarded as minor matters. The redemptive element of Christianity thus passes away. It becomes a form of ethical culture, one of the many human attempts to find God, but with no finality or unique authority. A Christian without an atonement, without redemption from the guilt and power of sin, without the supernatural, whatever else it may be, is not the Christianity of the New Testament.
We believe this point needs to be greatly emphasized today. Negation rather than affirmation has been the rule in many learned circles during the last few decades. The result has been that theological thinking has often lost the positive note. There are some writers who produce lengthy books without indicating clearly at any point their own views. They are obsessed with the ideal of "disinterested" methods of study. Intellectual neutrality is their guiding star. Not only is there no jangling and blatant theological asservation, but no faintest pianissimo of doctrinal emphasis. The fog bank is preferred to the granite rock. In their reaction from extreme forms of dogmatism many have lapsed into indifferentism. Genius is employed in the herculean task of avoiding giving offense. Ponderous and learned treatises are put forth to show that nothing is worth contending tending for. Many seem to think that protest against the ancient and accepted is a suitable nourishment for man's spiritual life.
This is modern scholasticism in the realm of theology. It is so negative and fruitless that it is a wonder it has so long survived. It is a survival in theology in the midst of great forward movements towards constructive thought in every other branch of science. Dogma, in its proper and true sense, prevails in chemistry, and botary, and astromony, and biology, and all other depart¬ments of science. Results, formulated in definite statements, laws, and principles, are declared in all the sciences. Yet with some theology is still
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.Now the denomination has a right to expect that our theological seminaries will sound the positive note. The great, facts and truths of religion must be interpreted. We must have some positive and definite views. Otherwise we might as well call home our missionaries and abandon our great enterprises. We cannot define or defend or propagate an invertebrate gospel. We are not obliged to assume that our dogmatic formulations are infallible. But we certainly cannot safely assume that they are unnecessary. The glory and power of the pulpit have been its positive ministry to man's spiritual life. The denomination surely has a right to demand that its seminaries "do their bit" in the endeavor to preserve the glory of that positive message and ministry.
Again, Baptists have a right to expect that Baptist seminaries will preserve the Baptist message. We have no disposition to underestimate the value of certain forms of cooperation among the denomination. Unquestionably there are some tasks that may well be performed by the combined effort of the various denominations. But these are of a kind which do not affect denominational integrity. Our Baptist mission to the world is not ended. So long as sacramentalism and sacer¬dotalism and infant baptism prevail in a great part of the Christian world, and so long as centralized ecclesiasticisms rule over the spiritual lives of men, the Baptists will have a mission. And when these evils are removed, Baptists will still have a mission to preserve, the supreme values to which they have been committed from the beginning. At the core of our message is the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is this which gives meaning to every one of our distinc¬tive teaching. Baptism, in its form and spiritual significance, finds its true interpretation in the light of this great truth. The spirituality of the church is central in our doctrine of the church, and this carries a whole group of other vital truths along with it.
We must face the facts as they are. Any theological school which attempts to play a non-denominational role and retain the Baptist name and claim Baptist patronage has broken away from its true con-nections. Not until Baptists abandon their own distinctive mission can their theological schools do so. If the latter are to be the true exponents of the life of the people they represent they are bound to recognize the moral obligations imposed upon them by the relationship. The fact is that the denominations are doing the bulk of the work of the kingdom today. Non-denominational agencies have nothing like the momentum and spiritual effectiveness of the great denominations. This simply means that Christianity must be conceived clearly and definitely if it is to be propagated effectively.
We may then return to our question: "What have Baptists a right to expect of their theological seminaries?" and say that the answer to it turns upon the answer to another question, viz., Shall the Baptists abandon their mission as a distinct people and ignore in the future all the particular truths which have made them significant as a factor in the Kingdom of God? And this may be resolved into yet another question: Can Christendom safely dispense with the Baptists as a separate people? And this again implies the question: Are churches practicing infant baptism and hierarchical in polity sufficient exponents of the spiritual life of mankind? We might go on piling up questions. Was the fundamental principal of the reformation a mistake? Are "the soul's autonomy and man's direct access to God" outgrown errors or are they eternal truths?
Baptists stand at a parting of the ways. We may go on to a greater career than ever as a people, or we may evaporate in indifferentism and doctrinal negations. Our seminaries are the most potent factors we have for deciding which road we shall take. And we should add also that in the foreign missionary fields in China, India and elsewhere the conditions and problems of the early Christian centuries reappear in a new form. Shall the old perils of infant baptism and sacramentalism be allowed to honeycomb the work of foreign missions without any corrective influence from the Baptists? The repetition of the early disaster to New Testament Christianity is a possibility. Shall Baptists seek to prevent it by insisting upon their spiritual message in the foreign as well as upon the home field? Our seminaries must in large measure answer the question, and the denomination expects an answer in harmony with our time-honored faith and practice.
=========== [This editorial, from a Baptist periodical, The Watchman-Examiner was reprinted in The Southwestern Journal of Theology, January 1918, pp. 19-24. Published by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The document was provided by Ben Stratton, Farmington, KY. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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