R.R. Reno has an article in First Things in which he publishes his opinion on the seminaries in the United States. The article has the standard conservative slant that you would expect from First Things, and seems to take a fairly one-sided view of theological education. While I don’t know enough to discuss his opinion of all the seminaries, I did want to take issue with a few that he cites. Many thanks to Ben Witherington for drawing my attention to this article.

For starters, I do agree with him that Duke has an excellent divinity school. Richard Hayes and Ellen Davis are wonderful teachers and do a great job at engaging the text at a theological level. If you will notice in my “Currently Reading” section, I am in the middle of a book by Ellen on preaching the Old Testament.

But like most people on ends of the spectrum, whether right or left, Reno views most seminaries as being problematic. He refers to them as being in a “post-Christian” phase or being in a “liberal Protestant death-spiral.” Even Marquette and Fordam are seen as being places where it is hard to get a good theological education. This is standard fare: conservatives see most seminaries as being unorthodox while liberals see most seminaries as living in a dead orthodoxy. I long for the day when we can get past such ridiculous categories of liberal and conservative. They do not map well onto Christianity.

One of the schools he takes to task is Yale Divinity School

Yale [has] seen a decline in serious intellectual life brought on by the intensely ideological agendas of Christian feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, as well as recycled versions of liberal Protestantism.

As a somewhat recent graduate of YDS (M.Div. 1993; S.T.M. 1994), I have to disagree with him. While there are certainly liberation theologians (Leddy Russell is one of the best in the country) and gay and lesbian concerns, these hardly dominate the curriculum. They were not required, and I ended up not taking any of them, although I wish I had had time to do some liberation theology. Most of my classes were very solid theologically, and we were very interested in how the Bible speaks to the church today.

I think a perusal of the faculty who were there when I was there should dispell his theory. First, Ellen Davis and Richard Hayes, whose work he praises at Duke, were both associate professors at YDS while I was there. Steven Chapman and Amy Laura Hall, whom Reno calls “excellent younger faculty” at Duke, are both products of YDS and the Yale doctoral program (and were classmates of mine). For another YDS grad from the same period who engages the text on a theological level, check out fellow biblioblogger Stephen Cook at Biblische Ausbildung.

As for other faculty, you can hardly accuse Brevard Childs of being a “recycled version of liberal Protestantism.” In Robert R. Wilson’s Old Testament class, I learned to engage text on a theological level, something that Reno apparently thinks is lacking. We did the same thing in Leander Keck’s New Testament class. These last two classes are both year long introductions to the Bible that are required of all students and form the basis of most subsequent studies. Some of these scholars are now retired or on the verge of retiring, but they are being replaced by scholars in the same mold. I doubt things have taken such a drastic turn for the worst in the ten years since I graduated.

Basically, Reno seems upset that seminaries don’t teach theology the way he wants. And, of course, people on the ends of the spectrum need a crisis (such as a crisis in academic instruction) to rally people to their cause. Unfortunately in Reno’s case, this means that he finds it necessary to paint the picture bleaker than it actually is. This is unfortunate, as it might end up scaring students away from seminary, thereby preventing them from obtaining the theological education that Reno wishes they had.

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