A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Eugene H. Peterson is the James M. Houston Professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia. This article is reprinted with permission from Fuller Theological Seminary’s Theology, News and Notes, October 1993.
The most frequently voiced disappointment by the men and women who enter seminary has to do with spirituality. They commonly enter seminary motivated by a commitment to God and a desire to serve their Lord in some form of ministry, and then find that they are being either distracted or deflected from that intention at every turn.
They find themselves immersed in Chalcedonian controversies; they find themselves staying up late at night memorizing Greek paradigms; they wake up in the morning, rubbing their eyes, puzzled over hairsplitting distinctions between homoousian and homoiousian.
This is not what they had bargained on. Their professors seem far more interested in their spelling than in their spirituality. They find themselves spending far more time on paradigms than in prayer.
I grew up surrounded by warnings regarding the dangers of seminaries. The sectarian tradition in which I was reared had no use for learning. Thinking about God got you into nothing but trouble. Only believe. And praise! The brain was more or less bypassed as the Holy Spirit filled the praising heart with blessings.
Seminaries were regarded as the graveyard of spirituality. Seminaries were where men and women lost their faith. The doomsday warnings that today’s youth get regarding drugs and “safe sex” for me were all posted on seminaries. The brain, if used to carry out basic everyday functions (like counting out change and reading the comic strips), was considered fairly harmless. But if it presumed to think about God and his ways, to ask hard questions and read big books, it was almost certain to develop a malignancy which would spread rapidly to the soul. Intellectual cancer was the highest known cause of death of the soul. Many of the warnings had stories attached to them. I knew some of the people in those stories and had no reason to doubt the validity of the warnings. The only prudent thing to do was avoid seminaries at all possible costs. Bible schools were acceptable, for one had to learn something or other, but seminaries with their intellectual intensities and spiritual laissez-faire were too dangerous to risk a vocation.
But despite the warnings and the stories, I went to seminary. Not without considerable trepidation, but I went. And now, forty years later, having not only gone to one seminary but having taught at half a dozen others, I have found no evidence that any of the warnings were wrong – or even exaggerated. Seminary education is dangerous – and many have lost their faith in its classrooms and libraries. Many others though not taken out in a coffin, have been left crippled or stunted in ways either subtle or conspicuous.
All of us, pastors and professors alike, who have attended seminaries, returned to them from time to time, and continue to send men and women under our spiritual care to them, know this. It is no secret. None of us has come through unscathed.
By and large, a seminary is not a congenial place in which to nurture spirituality – a life of prayer, a community of love, a risky faith. A seminary is a place of learning, learning about God to be sure, but still learning. Ever since the Enlightenment split between the heart and the head in the seventeenth century, schools have not been easy allies in a life of worship, prayer, and the love of God. Talking about God is almost the antithesis of talking to God. Even though the same words are used in the talk, they are not the same thing at all.
But if the seminary is not a congenial place for spiritual formation, neither is any other place I have inhabited. I haven’t found it any better in the congregation, home, retreat centre, or ocean beach. I haven’t yet attempted the monastery (they wouldn’t let me bring my wife), but I am good friends with some who have, and they report similar conditions.
Not only that, but I keep running across holy men and women in seminaries in the guise of professors and students and staff. They are no more frequent, but certainly no less, than in other places I have lived and done my work. If the seminary itself is not holy ground, it does not prevent bushes from breaking into flame from time to time and evoking holy responses. “Midian Theological Seminary” would not be an inaccurate generic name for our schools of theology.
Spirituality, it seems, is not a function of place or curricula. I spent my formative work years in my father’s butcher shop, carving pork loins and grinding hamburger. That is where I learned much of the spirituality that I have been working out ever since. It has been supplemented, of course – challenged, corrected, redirected, developed, sidetracked, abandoned, and then taken up again. But that, and my mother’s prayers and presence, provided the raw material that the Holy Spirit has been working with ever since. It took me a long time to recognize that rather simple and obvious fact. But once I did, I quit expecting either persons or institutions to provide for me what was already sitting in my backyard.
And from the moment of that recognition, I was freed from a lot of grumbling and complaining in the wilderness.
It is the same for all of us. Seminary does not provide the materials for spiritual formation, but a particular condition in which the formation takes place for a relatively brief period of time.
The condition is characterized by words – not spoken, words written, words read. Books, containers for words, are everywhere. Classrooms, designed for the audition of words, are the primary architecture. Computers, a technology for the recording and retrieval of words, are ubiquitous. Seminary is a world of words.
Recognizing this is essential in dealing with matters of spiritual formation in the seminary. For the main question is not, as it so often is put, What can we do to make the seminary a better place for spiritual formation? but, rather, How can we enter into and embrace the unique condition that constitutes the seminary in such a way that we grow up into the maturity of Christ Jesus?
The distinctiveness of the particular word-world comprised by the seminary has to do with the “Word made Flesh,” the Logos which Jesus Christ incarnated. Logos is God speaking the world into being, Jesus crucified and raised for our salvation, the Holy Spirit shaping a holy life in us. Logos is the word spoken personally by a personal God in such a way that persons can respond to and participate in it. The personal response is formed through a life of obedience and prayer.
Because Logos is absolutely foundational and pivotal to what the world is and how it functions, the nature and meaning of history, and everything we are and do, it is extremely important to get it right. Seminary is a school designed to teach us to get it right – to read the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures accurately and appropriately (exegesis and hermeneutics), to develop a theological habit of thinking and inquiry (God, not my culture or my ego, as subject), and to acquire a feel for the ways the human community continually misapprehends the Logos of God – whether willfully or ignorantly – occasionally hears and understands, and sometimes believes and obeys (church history), and gives due consideration to the complexities of the personal, social, and political situations in which this Logos is spoken (ethics). And more!
But always it is the Logos, the Word of God, that determines the subject matter. This is what the seminary is charged to do: honour and understand, teach and consider this Logos. It is no easy task, and requires an entire faculty of specialists in various areas to carry it out.
And now comes the hard part. For as much as the seminary is formed to honour and preserve and explicate the Logos, the words that are used are not the Logos itself, but logoi about the Logos, human words about the divine Word. And because there are so many of them, so many logoi, they sometimes threaten to upstage the Logos itself. And not only threaten, they often do upstage it. And because these words about the Word are not life-giving – not creating, not saving, not sanctifying – in the same fundamental and original way that the Word is, those of us who both speak and hear them get overwhelmed, burdened by the very words (and those who speak and write them) that we thought were going to be our salvation.
Knowledge of God that does not lead to or become prayer to God is, in Evagrius’ analysis, demonic – a spirituality divorced from obedience to God.
Calls go out that the seminary must become more intentional about spirituality and spiritual formation. Requests are made, sometimes as demands, sometimes as suggestions, that spirituality be integrated into the curricula with a seriousness equivalent to Hebrew exegesis and historical theology. However the requests are made, whether stridently or gently, they never seem to amount to much. A course added here and there, a committee formed to report back in a few months, a student questionnaire distributed. But all these and other attempts at solution or reform fail to take into account the nature of a seminary, the conditions, and the ways of spirituality.
The feelings of betrayal and frustration are understandable, but there is no remedy. Or at least no outside, imposed remedy. Rather, the remedy is inherent in the nature of seminary itself, namely as a place of Word and words, of Logos and logoi. Any attempt to make things better by denigrating the intellect or de-emphasizing concern with Word and words is unacceptable. But how do we encounter the frequent and dismaying experience of alienation between God’s Word and our words?
It is an old problem to which first-rate Christian minds have attended in nearly every century of the church’s existence. An approach to dealing with it that I like very much is that of Evagrius Ponticus, sometimes referred to as “Evagrius the Solitary.” Evagrius had the best theological education of his day, studying with the best theologians of the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus, theologians who were also saints. But the last sixteen years of his life were spent in Egypt nurturing a life of spirituality and prayer with the desert fathers. He died in 399 at about 53 years of age.
It was during the Egyptian “desert” years that he wrote about matters of the intellect and prayer with the clarity and wisdom that make him such a good guide for us still. Evagrius used the word logismos for the thought or kind of thinking that gets in the way of, or interferes with, the Logos. A logismos is a thought that gets separated from the Logos and more or less takes on a life of its own, going its own way, doing its own thing. Evagrius uses words like befogged and besotted to describe what happens to our minds when they get filled and busy with logismos instead of prayerfully attending to the Logos.
Evagrius described in careful detail – using his well-trained intellect with great precision – the various ways in which the logismos, the thought that is inattentive or unresponsive or indifferent to God’s Word, no matter what its content (and actual contents could be very good indeed), becomes a diversion from God or even an actual defiance of God. The goal, the highest good of the human creature, it that the knowledge of God and prayer to God converge. Knowledge of God that does not lead to or become prayer to God is, in Evagrius’ analysis, demonic – a spirituality divorced from obedience to God. (See The Philokalia, Vol. 1; London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
It is a simple distinction which, with a little practice, we can learn to make ourselves. The seminary is as good a place as any to begin making these distinctions. In fact, it is probably the very best place to begin doing it, for there is hardly an hour in a seminary day when there is not an occasion in which to exercise these fundamental discernments.
The French have a wonderful phrase, deformation professionale, to refer to maladies that we are particularly liable to in the course of pursuing our line of work. Physicians are in constant danger of becoming calloused to suffering, lawyers in danger of cynicism about justice, and those of us who think and talk and read and write God are in danger of having the very words we use about God separate us from God, the most damning deformation of all.
Saint Paul wrote about taking “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). There is not even a hint of anti-intellectualism in that phrase. He is not banning thought. (Have we ever witnessed a more exuberant exercise of the intellect than in Paul?) But he knows that thought, even when it is about God (maybe even especially when it is about God), soon becomes self-serving, prideful, and (using Evagrius’ bold designation), demonic – if it is not brought vigorously, regularly, and devoutly before the living God in prayerful obedience.
There is a sense in which the seminary cannot do this for itself. But all of us who count seminaries as an important part of the church’s ministry can contribute to the spiritual formation that takes place in them by practising these discernments and posting these warnings at appropriate times and places. It might not seem like much, but an accurate road sign posted at the right place prevents considerable disaster. And an occasional “Capture the logismos” scrawled on a classroom wall wouldn’t be a bad idea either.