I am currently reading Tony Jones’ The New Christians.  It is as close as any book has come to describing the work of the emergent church in the current moment.  It is a great book.

However, I did get to a section that I found deeply troubling. Throughout the book, Tony inserts Dispatches—a short description of a real person with real circumstances.  These are people he has interviewed and written up a descriptor for them.  These dispatches are intended to illustrate the point of the chapter.  The chapter on theology ends with what he calls “Dispatch from Seminary: Legalisms of the Left”.  I don’t intend to give an in depth description of this dispatch, but its basic premise.  Jones describes a friend Bob, an Episcopalian, who was described as leaving behind “a successful career in marketing and consulting” to attend seminary.  He lived in San Francisco, so the seminary of choice was no doubt the one nearby in Berkley.  The long and the short of it is that Bob felt that this seminary was not only too liberal, but had its own sense of fundamentalism—that differences of opinion or thought were not allowed.  After two years, he dropped out and moved to Austin, Texas.

Jones attempts to make this story about two things: institutionalism and politicalism.  His point with the former is that the seminary’s primary interest is not training priests, but defenders of the church, guardians of the institution.  And his point about politics is that the Left is as guilty of blind political ambition as the Right; that the institutionalized political stance is the secondary mission of the educational staff.  I think Jones, like Bob, has missed the essential point of this story.  The point, as best as I can see it, is not the problems inherent with seminaries—let alone this one—but with Bob’s preparedness and theological footing.  As a recent seminary graduate, I can attest to the fact that the time before and during and after seminary is among the most emotionally and intellectually trying times of my life.  You face previously unrealized truths about the church, scripture, and certainly the nature of God.  More importantly, you are asked to face the truths about yourself—about who you are in the midst of this.  You are asked to profess, not the church’s faith, but your own—what brought you to this moment—and to describe your call to ministry.  I can’t help but wonder if Bob’s angst toward his experience in seminary isn’t simply a projection of his own confusion.  Further, his location (San Francisco) should have prepared him for the politics of his seminary.  That he reacted in this way seems to say less to me about the institution than it does about him.

A similar story can be found in David Brock.  His book, Blinded by the Right tells, in part, of his time at the University of California (Berkley) in the mid-to-late 1980s.  It is there that he switches political allegiances because of 1) the perceived excesses of the campus’s liberals and 2) the positivity of a staunchly conservative professor that mentored him.  Brock’s story is, in fact, a tragic one of a rise to prominence in the conservative movement of the 1990s through hack journalism and his subsequent fall as his “friends” cannibalize his political career after he is outed as gay.  Far from an indictment of the Left—or, to some degree, even the Right—this story served to expose the manipulative nature of the conservative movement at the time—and the degree to which it was willing to go to achieve absolute victory.

I see Bob’s case in light of David Brock’s—that his own personal baggage—about faith, spirituality, politics, decency, truth, etc.—is his primary source of angst.  The location and institution merely expose it.  His departure from seminary, though difficult, is probably what he needed.   I hope that somewhere Bob is dealing with why he reacted this way, and so strongly.

I will examine the role seminary plays into this discussion in a future post, especially in light of our current need to re-examine the role seminary has in the church.

Further Reading:

Tony Jones. The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, (2008)

David Brock. Blinded By the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, (2002)