Why You Shouldn't Go to Seminary

The desire to go to seminary isn't completely innocent. We can be tempted to a spiritual pride that comes from mistaking intellectual knowledge for spiritual maturity.

Over the last week, I spent a lot of my energies working on a pair of videos, with which I launched my YouTube channel, “The Natural Theologian.” The first was roughly based on last week’s post, “On Being a Natural Theologian,” but targeted to a wider audience. Non-Christians and those of other faiths might appreciate it, so why don’t you send a link to it to someone you know? The video is called, “What Is a Natural Theologian?”

In the second video, “Don’t Go to Seminary,” I share my misgivings about the intellectual and spiritual path I took educationally. Related to my concern that theology shouldn’t be too narrow, I worry that seminary itself, as the path to becoming a smart, mature Christian, is also too narrow. There are dangers to seminary - intellectual, spiritual, and yes, financial - about which few people talk openly. The video and complete transcript are below.

One of my long-term goals is to develop a theology and philosophy that resists this narrowing and that sees possibilities for Christian action and growth in all areas of human life and the economy. Along with that comes the question of what is the best educational foundation for being a thoughtful Christian, a course of study that prepares one for a Christian life but without robbing one of time and money or narrowing one’s career possibilities. Take this video as the first installment of that longer-term project.

Oh - and please subscribe to the YouTube channel, and like the video if you enjoy it! While you’re at it, like this post on Substack! (I used to think “likes” represented the downfall of civilization; it turns out that “likes” are one of the most human things you can do.) And please forward this post to someone you think will appreciate it or my other writing.

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Video: Don’t Go to Seminary

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Transcript:

I'm Joel Carini, “The Natural Theologian.”

Don't go to seminary; that's my message today.

Now, why would I say that? I myself am a graduate of a seminary. I call myself a theologian. I obviously got something out of that seminary, some kind of formation or shaping in who I am. But I would not necessarily advise my younger self to do the same, and there are some of you who are thinking about attending seminary as well, perhaps as a way to train for ministry or to gain theological knowledge more generally. But I think you should have some second thoughts, and here's why.

There are some thoughts that I couldn't have had until I went to seminary, and they influence the way I view it and what seminary did to me and does to others, whether it's the right place for those of us who want to go there.

There are three things I want to think about, and the first one has to do with the motivation for going there.

1. Mistaking Knowledge for Maturity

Now, the kind of person who wants to go to seminary is probably like who I was at the age I'm thinking about, highly motivated to gain biblical and Theological knowledge. In particular, our growth spiritually as Christians has begun to focus on, “How can I build my biblical and theological knowledge?” and that being the answer to Christian maturity and growth spiritually. Now, there's a danger there. Maybe you can already see it, and thats of equating spiritual maturity with theological knowledge.

Now seminaries often caution against this and bring up the issue that we don't just want to be eggheads and emphasize that you're here to be a pastor to care about people, but the confusion still comes through. There's a structural and institutional side to that where the institutions need to figure out what really is their purpose. They're heavy academic institutions, but then they have this connection to the church and ministry and the personal, and it's a little bit confused. But that confusion then transfers over to those of us who want to attend.

And I really do think there's a narrowing that happens. The desire to study the Bible and theology is often derived from that desire to grow as a Christian. Or there's probably an analog for other faiths to build your knowledge related to your religious faith. But the danger is that there's actually a narrowing of our view of ourselves as people and as Christians or Believers, that we'll begin to think of spiritual maturity primarily in intellectual terms. We'll begin to think that if I just had the answer from the Bible and the whole of Christian theology when anyone asked, if I could just footnote every sentence I utter with a biblical passage, then I would really show that I know what's going on. I'm a solid Christian. I'm mature. I really deserve to be at the front of the congregation.

Now some of these dangers are inherent with the ambition to do anything leadership-wise, and we shouldn't be totally cautious about going out, taking any action in the world, assuming any power, or ever trying to pursue a position of prominence and responsibility. Those are good things, but there's no getting around that they all invite mixed motivations, and I know that for myself, that motivation was definitely mixed.

It's also just a confusion - the idea that I will be able to lead the people of God the best if I can answer every question from the Bible. The stereotypical thing is that the 95% of what you learn at seminary, no member of a Christian congregation is ever going to ask you about. From day one, you're going to be hit with thorny practical questions and things that you think of as below your area of expertise entirely, that are the pressing questions and the ones that you're really going to have to answer and that will display your capacity for leadership in a Christian church. So there's a real danger there - spiritually confusing intellectual knowledge for Christian maturity.

2. Intellectual Narrowing

Now, I happen to like knowledge. I went on from seminary to do a master's in philosophy, which then set me up to get into a Ph.D. in philosophy, which I'm now halfway through. So I like knowledge, but even just on the front of knowledge and academics, there are other problems with seminary also. Prior to seminary, I had been at a Christian liberal arts college, and when you have an entire faculty of professing Christians, people who call themselves Christians but have been to the best graduate schools in all the fields of human knowledge in the country and beyond, their thinking is not your standard “backwoods evangelical Christian” kind of thinking. It's a bit broader, and that's good, and it can be bad. It can be too broad, and that was certainly my worry while I was at College. I wanted to be the more conservative one, I wanted to be the one who stuck to the script a bit more.

But then when I showed up at seminary, it didn't take too long before I saw that there was an equal and opposite error, and that error was to ignore all the other fields of human knowledge and to think that all the answers to the questions of the Christian life could be contained in conclusions that were come to 400 or more years ago.

And that's nothing against, for me, the theology of the Reformation or the confessions of that era or any of it. It's simply to say that that isn't supposed to replace all other kinds of knowledge and of practical wisdom prudence for the rest of life. The Westminster Confession, for example, one that I studied, is an incredible summary of Christian theology, at least in one theological tradition. You know, tweak a few points that some people no longer hold, and it could really just summarize the core of, and not a minimal core but a pretty solid core of Christian theology. But it's going to leave a lot of questions unanswered, and that's okay. It should.

But when we were at seminary, all of a sudden, the curriculum of human knowledge has narrowed from say with the liberal arts, you've got the sciences, you've got the humanities, you've got theology and philosophy, you've got technical fields, and you've got people studying health and nursing and everything. And at the Christian College, we talked about integrating our faith with learning, so these all kind of held together and could be part of the Christian life.

Well, then at seminary, the curriculum includes almost none of those subjects except theology and a couple of forays into neighboring fields like philosophy and history. Even there, the theology is particular to one theological tradition, and the forays into philosophy or otherwise are by people often not in those fields, and they can sometimes even be dismissive. My seminary took a particularly dismissive approach to philosophy, not to mention within theology to other theological traditions.

Now, what that ends up doing is it increases that sense that I can have all the answers. It plays into that spiritual pride. Whereas if you think Christian wisdom concerning the world would actually require knowledge and expertise in all these vast areas such that none of us will ever complete that project by ourselves. You would need a university of different Christian individuals pursuing different fields.

When you lose that, you think, oh man, if I just study Bible and theology, I will get all the answers. And what's most important is that you assumed that starting point instead of continuing to re-examine it and test it against other fields of knowledge and not assume that you even understand that foundation fully but might have to revisit it and inform it with other disciplines. For example, your knowledge of the Bible might need to be informed by archeology and history, literary theory, philosophy, and so on. Your understanding of theology might need to integrate, say, there's a doctrine of man, of human theological anthropology. Well, that might have to interface with real, traditional anthropology, like, the social science anthropology, not to mention psychology, human biology, and so on.

And when you view the world as though only biblical and Theological knowledge is necessary, you start to ignore the world. Let's say a person has a psychological problem that brings them into Christian Counseling. Well, if you know that the Bible has all the answers, you might very well ignore what's right in front of your eyes, which is someone with a particular problem that's been best described by human psychologists.

Now I don't want to paint that as an either-or - the fact is the Bible really does deal with human reality. The idea that the Bible is just an answer book, just giving us these quick pad answers, is a terrible way to read the Bible too. Our reading of the Bible should be informed by our experience and knowledge of human nature, and vice versa. These things can play into each other, and the idea that one is totally prior to the other, it's just not true.

We all encounter the Bible having encountered humans plenty. We already have empirical, experiential knowledge of humans when we open up the Bible, and it tells us this thing is wrong or have greater faith in Christ or something. It doesn't mean we can't also incorporate knowledge of human beings, that life's hard and they can't always do the thing that you tell them, and they have real psychological issues sometimes. That's just one example.

So this problem of knowledge and the narrowing of all knowledge down to what is just the biblical and theological, this then plays into that spiritual pride that I began by talking about.

3. Spiritual Pride

Now moving towards my conclusion or at least my third and final point on this is that there's a lopsided view of Christian growth in maturity and of seminarians aspiring to be pastors in relation to the rest of Christians.

The question of how to deal with clergy and laity has always been around for Christians. You've got the sense that there are certain people who can be super Christians, maybe they become monks, but often in Protestantism anyway, Protestant Christians, we don't have monks and all the Catholic stuff religious orders, so we end up officially saying there's no real divide between pastors and the laity, the normal Christian people.

But then in practice, we've got the professional Christians who get paid to be Christians and everybody else. As you're going through seminary, you get the sense that in that space of three or four years, you've gained all the knowledge necessary to be a mature Christian leader for the rest of life. I mean if you went right out of college, you might be 25, 26 years old at the end of this process, and the fact is everything you gained in that period, you can be pretty confident that no one in your congregation when you become a pastor unless they decide to go to seminary is ever going to match you in theological and biblical knowledge.

Now, there's something a little bit scary there if, in turn, through this kind of spiritual pride, you've decided that intellectual theological knowledge is basically code for spiritual maturity because you have a sense that you've reached the pinnacle of the Christian life, and no one's ever going to catch up to you; that can't be good for the soul.

Now, add to this a couple of other things about where you are right post-seminary, especially given a kind of conservative Christian Church culture. You've probably dragged a wife through this. Maybe she's put you through seminary and gone through some sacrifices to make that happen. You might have already had kids. You might be, you know, fast-tracking the family and marriage kind of process at the same time as you're going through this hefty education and then assuming responsibility for a whole church.

Well, if you come into that thinking, “I'm basically at the pinnacle of the Christian life, and I'm going to be the smartest and most mature person in the room,” you're setting yourself up for failure. And this has really been brought home to me through my conversations over the last couple of years with a good friend of mine who also went through seminary but also has not become a pastor. And we think to ourselves about this and how these years post-seminary and our own marriage and our families growing have really tested us and forced us to think about questions as Christian guys that did not get addressed in seminary.

And those are much closer to the questions that are core to ministry that really need to be transferred to other Christians: How do you deal with kids? How do you be a Christian father or mother? How do you integrate work and family life? If seminary not only didn't address this but probably exacerbated it, and then you start a pastorate with a sense that you're the spiritually mature one in the room, you're just set up for a real spiritual catastrophe.

Now not everyone who goes to seminary is thinking in this way or is spiritually affected in exactly this way, but as a general pattern, that is a serious danger spiritually. That's the time of life that young men are often going to seminary, and young women, and it's the general structure and incentives and the encouragement of how you're supposed to arrive at seminary and where you're going to go after seminary. It's pretty common, so it's something I think we should pause and consider.

The Alternative

Now what's the alternative? And here I don't have one set answer. I have some ideas, but we start with just the set of questions, and the thought would be to build up from kind of the baseline of what do we actually need in order to become a Christian intellectual, to become a thoughtful person who has something to say that's not the same as what everybody else might have to say or to really offer something to the people of God and being a leader and shaping and forming them and being shaped and formed, well, or any of the other related motivations you might have in going to seminary.

Seminary isn't itself a one-size-fits-all solution. Now as I've gone into philosophy and trying to pursue an area of human knowledge distinct from but related to theology, I definitely have thoughts on the knowledge point, and that's that kind of universal system of here's what Christians or people of faith hold in common as an intellectual, you want to bring something new to the table, even if you were going to be employed as theologian at a seminary, you want to add some piece of this connect it to some other area of human knowledge, not just be enclosed within what you and your compatriots already agree on.

So pursue another related field, maybe you'd become a better theologian if you did a straight-up history degree, go to a master's degree, literally master some other field and see what that brings to the table. Keep thinking about theology. The truth is you can keep up with theological works; you can keep up on what's going on in that conversation once you've had a modicum of theological familiarity with it.

There are other fields where the bar is higher to really get in that, in the Sciences or history or even philosophy, my own field. It's not that easy to get yourself into those fields and thinking in those new ways if you don't start doing so at a young age, so that's worth doing.

Then what you will bring as a Christian thinker intellectual, even theologian, even pastor, is something new, distinct, and helpful. And the same goes for ministry. Sitting in a classroom for three or four years is not necessarily the best preparation for ministry. The fact that you have the sense that it doesn't prepare you for day one as a pastor - that's reason to call into question much of that system.

What if we built bottom-up, thinking, “I'm going to do ministry, and I'm going to encounter my limits, and then I'm going to go seek the education that I need for that. Oh, I realize I need to study the Bible more in this area because I'm having to answer these really practical questions, and I want to be able to give the biblical answer on those and not just the biblical one but informed by these other disciplines.” That's one way to do this, kind of bottom-up.

And then, of course, the real test is simply living the Christian life and, honestly, being a layperson, being a Christian who's not up front in the church, seeing what the travails and difficulties of the Christian life or of attending churches are thinking about those. Maybe over the course of your 20s, maybe even your 30s, and having a view to a ministry that eventually you'll be prepared for, eventually you'll have something to offer to help other Christians mature that you couldn't have just gained in a quick three- or four-year degree.

Now all of that could sound pretty dismissive for those of you who have gone to seminary, are thinking about it, or maybe are even teaching at one or are serving as pastors. And the point is not to discourage anyone. The point is to consider there's a sense that this one-size-fits-all solution didn't really solve each problem. And why not consider other ways of doing it, other ways of satisfying that urge that a young man or woman has to serve the highest good, to serve God, to live the fully Christian life?

So that's my encouragement; maybe I could rephrase it:

Don't necessarily go to seminary.