Ministry & Learning
While attending graduate school in Chicago I took several classes at McCormick Theological Seminary. One was a very fine course of lectures under the church historian Thomas A. Schaefer, a Jonathan Edwards scholar. I was struck that I was struck by an offhand remark he made: "Presbyterians have always valued a learned ministry." What impressed me at that moment was the strong realization that I was part of a tradition that did not. It is not that I had no awareness of this before, only that Prof. Schaefer's remark all of a sudden brought it starkly home. My free-church revivalist tradition was not, as some are, actively suspicious of learning, but neither did it value it as the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Churches have. That essentially theological, confessional, churchly sort of learning was optional as a qualification for the pastorate, even where seminary degrees were favored, and had little force whenever it became poised against the prophetic word.
Opposition Between Priestly & Prophetic Elements
One of the dangers of learned ministry is its tendency to institutionalize and professionalize, and so insulate itself from the energies carried in the prophetic charism, preserving itself behind a vision of the Church that does not represent a whole including both elements. I agree with those who observe that in the sphere of orthodox faith at least from the Mosaic age forward, it is doubtless God himself who has maintained true religion in the perennial opposition of its priestly and prophetic elements, one continually establishing and stabilizing in recognizance of the Church as the immovable ground and pillar of Truth, the other critical, and at odds with the imperfections of an establishment that can only in this world be a partial image of what exists fully only in the world to come.
In Christ the prophetic and priestly ministries are perfectly conjoined and drawn into the eschaton, there remaining, the opposition gone, his kingdom on earth being brought at all times into the kingdom of heaven until the End which is the Beginning. The polar strains between prophet and priest persist in the Church on earth for its discipline, which is in this regard unlike the Church in heaven, where they are together, and at peace. It is for this peace that we pray when we say, "Thy kingdom come."
I think it necessary for those responsible for oversight in the churches to bear in mind the goodness, the divine establishment, of the tension between the ministries of fixity and movement, and to bend their wisdom to understanding and cultivating both in their kairotic times and places, striving to know through prayer and the accession of holy wisdom in the Great Tradition where and on what matters one must be unmoving, and where one must be critical of what can arise out of sinful men's devotion to any perceived fixity that relieves them of the responsibility of listening to the voice of the living God, which is to say, the responsibility of the abundant evangelical freedom we are given to respond to that voice—a freedom such as was given to the Man who named the animals brought to him by their Maker (!) so that (consider the deep significance of this) "whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name." It is this cultivated wisdom that is to handle what presents itself to the Church as new in, for example, music, and is meant to settle many other questions to which there may be right and wrong answers, but no easy ones—none that can be properly resolved without this wisdom.
Perversions of the Prophetic & Priestly Impulses
There is a diabolical perversion of the prophetic impulse. It is a hallmark of liberal religion to talk about the God who is surprising, who is always doing a new thing, who disrupts our expectations, who cannot be confined or limited to our conventions, because it uses these true observations of his character as a living God to justify its torsion of his eternal Word, to crucify Christ by means of false doctrine. It is true that any conception of God as simple or as unmoved must be understood in terms of God who is a living person, who, as his created analogues do in their own way, with all the movement of infinite life, remains uniquely the same identity. I live in a religious world, however, whose intellect is dominated by the desire to re-image God away from the received symbolics of the Church, that is to say, by idolatry. It is this "liberal" spirit such as I have spent their lives fighting, so are numbered among the conservatives by the dominant culture of minds developed in modern religious thought.
It might have been otherwise, for there is also a perversion of the priestly emphasis on fixity. The Gospels depict the coming of our Lord at a time and place where what we would call religious conservatism prevailed in the Jewish magisterium, of whom we may take as typical Saul of Tarsus, who swam strongly in the main stream of Temple authority. The Lord, taking Calvin's advice, continually scandalized the Pharisees. It is no coincidence that it was to one of them he announced the highly disruptive notion that one must be born again, for to a son of Abraham this would portend a radical and wholly unacceptable departure from his ground of being. This dominical mandate has historically proved more amenable to the wandering Gentile than those to whom were committed the oracles of God.
Had I lived as a learned Jew in that age, I believe any positive interest I had in Jesus of Nazareth would have to have been so compelling that I was able to place to the side his outrages against the laws of the Sabbath in particular, and could culminate only in rejection of his wild antinomianism, leaving him unmourned on the cross he deserved—or eventual acceptance of him as the Lord of the Sabbath, and thus as the Son of God in the singular sense Christians believe he is. Kyrie eleison. How can we know how to judge in any of these matters, to escape becoming damned fools of one kind or the other, except by the grace of God?
Sought in the School of Christ
My conclusion on Thomas Schaefer's remark, now that I have considered it for many years, is that a learned ministry is not a matter of preference: the necessary gift carries with it the requirement (among others) of intelligence and knowledge, lack of either being a sign it has not been given. This, however, is very ambiguously related to accredited schooling amongst either the priests or the prophets, which should be taken for what it is worth in candidates to be sought first and only in the school of Christ. One appreciates the old Flemish proverb on what we would call seminary training, that you can send an ass to Paris but it won't make a horse of him. A good horse can become a better one in Paris, but only if he remembers what he is and where he comes from, keeping in mind the many asses who have gone there to gain nothing but longer velvet ears and a louder bray.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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