I loved seminary.  I continue to believe in it.  I would be completely unprepared for the priesthood had I not done seminary.  In fact, I might be the poster child for pre-seminary idiocy and indifference to the workings of the church.  Seminary is the training ground, afterall, for the future leaders of the church.  Seminary changed my life.

My own experience, and the experience others tend to discuss, is what isn’t covered in seminary.  So often, even in seminary, I would hear people say derisively “we should’ve learned that in seminary” (insert random insignificant subject).  The belief being that seminary is not supposed to raise up church leaders and priests/clerics, but church middle-managers that are adept at juggling church finances and soothing the hurt egos of parishioners.  The subtext of these discussions is that the role of the priest in a local congregation (which therefore must define the roll of the priesthood within the church at large) is as an office manager that spends his Sundays blessing crackers and his afternoons visiting nursing homes and hospitals.  If this is the true corporate identity of the priest, then count me out.  Get the bishop to take the ordination back with a “psych!”.  In that case, I don’t want it!

But it isn’t.  What we learn in seminary isn’t supposed to be about being a better middle manager, but being a disciple of Jesus, a worker for the Kingdom of God, and a vessel for the Holy Spirit to lead the church.  We read scripture, we wax theologically, we laugh at our ancestors and we get our hearts broken in internships–that’s seminary.

What I described in the previous post was a dim view of the influence of politics–not in the issue sense, but the bureaucratic one.  The influence of who gets to say what when and who is allowed to have an opinion.  You know, typical hierarchical BS.  Except that I do think there is something else that is interesting about what seminaries are supposed to be: an insurance policy.  Yes, a bureaucratic insurance policy, but a useful one.

Though some may feel stifled by seminary, it is an institutional insurance that its leadership will be exposed to new and different thinking.  In my experience, the people that had a hard time with seminary fell into two camps: either they lost their sense of call or they didn’t want to be exposed to new ideas.  In my mind, I wonder if the Tony Jones’ friend is representative of the former.  But just as often, it is the latter.  I had several classmates that hid behind an image of something like “liberal intolerance” that was more like “the stupid professor is making me read books that say things that offend me” or “here is my list of assigned reading that my fringe denomination condones as orthodox”.  For these students, reading any Biblical scholarship that didn’t automatically agree with their preferred dogma was inherently heretical.  In other words, they were afraid that their faith may not hold all of the answers.  Shocking!

For this latter component, seminary serves as the opportunity to discern the openness the postulant for ordination may be toward learning new things and being exposed to different ways of thinking.  This is an obvious and necessary safety net.