Today I read the first chapter of Dale Martin's Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal. Chapter 1 is entitled, "The Bible in Theological Education." Martin teaches at Yale.
Martin venures a few of his own opinions in this chapter, but it is mostly descriptive of the current state of the Bible in theological education in America today. He has clearly conversed with a number of different institutions around the country, ranging from Fuller to Chicago Theological Seminary to North Park.
I'll summarize his list of findings from the end of the chapter:
1. The historical-critical method is the dominant or foundational method taught to most students.
2. Most students, however, are not taught to think hermeneutically. That is, questions of where meaning comes from are largely not addressed. Theological education largely assumes a hermeneutical approach (e.g., that the original meaning is the goal of interpretation) without ever truly examining assumptions.
3. Theological hermeneutics largely is not taught, meaning how to appropriate the Bible theologically or how to lead a congregation to use the Bible theologically with integrity.
4. Theological students lack the ability to think theologically, to put together a theological argument.
5. Students are not equipped to integrate various disciplines like Bible, theology, church history, and practice.
6. Theological education is not doing a good job of teaching church leaders to interpret the Bible in creative, imaginative, and sophisticated ways.
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4 comments:
I have got say I disagree at every point I think that is exactly what my theological education has done for me.
Thanks for this summary. I agree that the actual end "use" of the Bible in the local church is significantly different than the way Bible is used in theological education. I believe the Bible is "used" as a tool to make a holy people. While ministers are fairly well trained in uncovering cultural factors, setting the text in context, and producing word studies in their quest to discover the original meaning they are not as well trained in how to use what they have found to make a holy people. This is our challenge of the future.
It's hard to say if those propositions are true without data to substantiate them. But my intuition is that in large part they might be. Theological education tends to be rife with survey courses of material in order to build a base of knowledge that most students simply cannot attain especially in large public universities. If you have to spend so much time building a foundation of knowledge, it does not give you ample enough time to dig as deep as you need to in order to practice some form of critical pedagogy.
Clearly this is not true in a lot of cases, but I have a suspicion that it is. Perhaps gathering data for how people in the ministry use the bible in their professions would be a telling set of data worth probing.
I apologize that I didn't spend the tie to unfold exactly what Martin is thinking with some of these. The list doesn't do him justice.
Let me just expand on the first one. He is arguing that the starting point for biblical teaching in most ministerial training is the original meaning, what the text meant to its first author and audience. Any other meaning thus is brought into dialog with that meaning as the first meaning.
My guess is that he is going to argue for a more Christian literary approach where these texts are read and evaluated as Christians. He will probably call it a species of theological interpretation.
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