Bonhoeffer's Seminary Vision (eBook)

Preface

My interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer and in personal, incarnational education began in the late 1970s. Like many others of my generation, I first encountered his writings as a college student. During my final undergraduate semester I took an independent study course entitled Classics of Christian Devotion under the tutelage of Tom Padgett, the chair of our English department. Padgett assigned me works by Bunyan, Milton, and Dante. He also asked me to read Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, and even gave me a pocket-sized edition containing his own marginal notes, a volume I still cherish. At the time, the main impact The Cost of Discipleship had on me was to challenge me to think harder about what it means to be a Christian. Bonhoeffer’s life story, as told in the introduction to the edition I had, also illustrated to me an exemplary Christian life. Padgett’s example was even more important to me than the assigned reading since he showed me how incarnational Christian educators engage students. He remains one of my main models as I pursue the teaching craft.

After taking an MA in English, I began seminary studies. My seminary had three thousand students. The teachers were excellent lecturers, which was important given the generally large sections they taught. But they turned over all grading and general course administration to doctoral students and, despite being generally approachable, did not always seek to spend time with students. The numbers certainly made such personal contact difficult, though not impossible.

In my last year, I took a course in twentieth-century European church history, led by Penrose St. Amant, who had studied in Edinburgh and taught in Switzerland. There were ten of us in the course, the smallest class I attended during seminary. St. Amant assigned me a paper surveying Bonhoeffer’s writings, so I read Creation and Fall, Temptation, the then most recent edition of Letters and Papers from Prison, Life Together, The Cost of Discipleship, and the first edition of Eberhard Bethge’s biography, among other things. I recall St. Amant asking me to please figure out what “religionless Christianity” meant. I was not very helpful on that issue, but my Bonhoeffer reading expanded.

St. Amant also took a personal interest in me and in Jim Dixon, a close friend of mine who was in the same course. On one memorable evening Dr. and Mrs. St. Amant took our wives and us to one of the best restaurants in the city, certainly the best one I went to while a student. After the waiter brought the women roses at the end of the evening, I asked to help with the check. He replied, “Don’t worry about this, House. I am very wealthy.” I learned from another professor that the St. Amants were indeed moneyed people. He taught because he felt called to and liked doing so, and because he enjoyed spending time with interested students. Like Padgett, he was an educator in the incarnational mold.

When I became a college teacher, I kept reading Bonhoeffer’s works. I assigned The Cost of Discipleship in New Testament survey classes and recommended Creation and Fall in Pentateuch courses. In my first ten years in teaching, I served an institution deeply involved in shaping students. Over the years I was able to baptize, counsel, discipline, marry, and even help bury some of our students. Yet it was also at that institution that I first encountered nonembodied, impersonal extension work and the largely financial arguments for offering it. Church work expanded my efforts to care about people in a local context. Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio and Act and Being were particularly helpful as I tried to integrate faith, learning, and service of the church. During these years I supplemented what I had learned from Bethge’s biography with other good treatments of Bonhoeffer’s life.

Since those first ten years, I have been involved in seminary teaching fourteen of the last seventeen years. One seminary I served was large and not particularly personal. While there I tried very hard to invest in students that I could get to know. The seminary had no structural intentionality that helped this effort. The other two seminaries I have served, including Beeson Divinity School of Samford University, where I now teach, are smaller and intentionally personal in purpose and practice, though the first of these was instituting online classes. Through these places and through visiting and teaching at comparable ones in Europe, Australia, and Asia I think I have come to understand better what Bonhoeffer describes in Life Together.

For six years I supervised academic affairs, admissions, and student life at Beeson, which helped me gain perspective on how the parts of a seminary fit together. To try to do my work better I read several histories of individual seminaries and about thirty biographies of persons involved in seminary work. I strived to formulate a more thoroughly theological understanding of how seminary work ought to operate. Regular talks with my supervisor and dean, Timothy George, included the biblical-theological basis of what we were trying to do with our students, staff, and faculty. As part of this quest I examined Bonhoeffer’s seminary work more closely, particularly through the growing number of volumes in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works and the new (and even larger) edition of Bethge’s biography.

The Hodges Chapel at Beeson is a marvel in many ways, not the least of which is the way it depicts the global scope of the gospel and the human price that has been paid for its extension. For instance, it houses six busts of martyrs, one from each inhabited continent. Bonhoeffer represents Europe. For this and other reasons Dean George fairly regularly focuses our community’s attention on Bonhoeffer and the era in which he lived. For example, in 2012 we had a special spring semester emphasis on Bonhoeffer, which was preceded two years earlier by a series on the Barmen Declaration. It seems natural for me, then, to consider Bonhoeffer’s views on seminary education in our setting.

It also seems natural to think about personal, incarnational education because of the nature of Beeson itself. Established in 1988, it determined to limit enrollment to 180 students from the outset and to give these students personal attention and intentional shaping for ministry. A good endowment helps realize this vision, but so does ongoing support, long-term leadership, a carefully chosen and dedicated faculty, teachable students, fiscal responsibility, a home at a university, and self-control that makes adding programs, buildings, and other earmarks of personal agendas unimportant. People can and do matter at such a place.

Over the past twenty years all of us in seminary education have increasingly encountered new technology delivery systems. At first the goal was to use these to enhance courses offered on campus. Then classes began to be offered online, as they had been in old-style correspondence courses. I have seen the tide gradually shift from seminaries having to give a reason to administrators, constituents, and accrediting agencies for offering online courses to giving a reason for not doing so. As church contributions have waned and costs risen, I have seen seminaries look longingly to the web to solve their financial troubles. However, when I have queried others about the theological basis for online education, I have usually gotten blank stares or some statement about how technology is the future and will help seminaries balance their budgets. Once or twice someone has used the Bible’s epistles or a rather broad definition of “missions” as a theological rationale for various forms of electronic courses for credit. Speaking to me confidentially, some academic deans have said that they and their seminaries’ teachers do not prefer online classes to in-person ones, yet have come to accept online courses as a necessary evil of sorts. Several professors have conveyed the same sentiments to me. However, I have also met many administrators and teachers who take on this task with goodwill and hopefulness. It did not surprise me, then, when a few years ago degrees offered completely through electronic means were accredited.

Our seminary has not offered online courses and currently does not plan to do so, which has made us somewhat unusual in our guild. I have taken this changing situation in seminary education as more incentive to continue working toward a clearer theology of seminary education. I have sought to discern what makes education offered face-to-face, electronically, or through a blended version of the two more or less biblical, and I have continued to seek the best way to express a theological basis for the sort of personal education that impacted me.

As I considered these issues, it occurred to me that Bonhoeffer was a seminary director and teacher for a very eventful five years. Some of his most influential books emerged out of and were about seminary theory and practice. So I have turned to his writings once again, this time to try to discern his theology of seminary ministry and to consider if or how to apply his theology and practice to our current situation.

As this book will show, I find that his biblical analysis makes it inescapable to link seminary education, and all fully Christian ministries, to the New Testament’s incarnation principle of the body of Christ, which fits the Old Testament’s presentation of all sorts of education as a face-to-face intergenerational enterprise. Thus, I believe that a biblical theology...