In the wake of the news out of Seabury-Western on Thursday, I thought I would point people to two short articles in this week’s The Christian Century (Feb. 26, 2008 issue).

Nick Carter, the dean of Andover Newton Theological Seminary gives an interview in which he discusses the “Constraints & Opportunities” facing seminaries. Although it takes up only a page and a half, he gives a good overview of some of the problems that have led to the current crisis in some seminaries. He gives some statistics that I didn’t know:

  • Half of all M.Div. students attend twelve seminaries. Unfortunately, he doesn’t list those twelve. Out of those twelve, only three are traditional mainline seminaries.
  • 53% of seminaries have fewer than 150 full-time students.
  • Experts (who?) say that as many as twenty seminaries could go out of business in the next five to seven years.

He raises the question of whether we have too many seminaries, although he doesn’t attempt an answer.

The second article is a report on Harvard’s revamped M.Div. program. Harvard Divinity School retooled its M.Div. three years ago, and the first batch of graduates under the new program graduate this semester. One interesting fact is the HDS now requires all M.Div. students to have three semesters in one of the biblical languages. That is not three semesters spread between Hebrew and Greek but three in Hebrew or three in Greek (I am sure this will make John Hobbins quite happy!). I have suggested before that one year of a biblical language is not enough to make one competent in a biblical language, but three semesters is certainly getting closer (see my post on “Seminary Training in Biblical Studies”). Their M.Div. now features a focus on “ministry studies,” although the article does not define what that includes. One thing I didn’t know was that M.T.S. students make up two-thirds of the student body at HDS while M.Div. students only account for one-third.

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