Tag Archive - theological education

Reimagining Education

January 25, 2011 in Academia, Culture with 18 Comments

Last night at a parents’ open house, I was exposed to the work of Ken Robinson for the first time.

Robinson is attempting to lead the charge to entirely reconceptualize what we’re doing in education. The current model has as its impetus the preparing of people to serve an industrialized world, and it has as its goal the production of university professors.

But how do we prepare people to join in a different world, a different economy, and to capitalize on other sorts of gifts that are not professorial in nature?

Here is a nice, animated intro to the sorts of things he’s pushing us to consider:

He also gave a 2006 talk at TED that has become rather legendary:


These talks resonated with me for a couple of reasons.

One chord they struck is associated with the persistent nagging feeling I have that seminary is a really weird way to prepare people for pastoral ministry. This has long seemed to me predicated on an idea of “preparedness for ministry” that is strangely university-like in its understanding of education, and perhaps too much a child of the enlightenment in its anticipation that the educated mind will produce an enlightened actor.

The other reason I listened with interest is that Fuller is in the middle of an MDiv curriculum review. Here we are wrestling, in the narrower context of theological education, not only with the particular questions of what sorts of classes we want to teach, but also with the larger concerns of how to fit our product into the 21-century world.

What does it mean to be a school that does not exist for the perpetuation of school, but some other purpose outside itself–in our case, women and men equipped for the manifold (and boy do we ever mean “manifold” these days!) ministries of Christ and his church?

What do you think? [How] Does Seminary education need to change to take better account of not only the changing world but also who we are as people?

Why Blog? Further Reflections

August 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, blogging, Culture with 5 Comments

Way back in January, when I launched Storied Theology, I posted a few thoughts on why I got back into blogging. Having been in the saddle now for eight months or so, I have a few more reflections. I think it’s good for our theological debates and it’s a wonderful source of continuing theological education.

Ben Myers recently published an article in which he processes some of the dynamics of blogging as theology. I commend it to you.

My own experience with this world of biblioblogging is that it has been a great way to more quickly become part of the biblical studies community, especially with other young New Testament PhDs. When I go to our annual conferences, I know dozens of late-20s to mid-30s scholars and/or scholars in training. I have gotten to know some of their work, and am able to have conversations about theological and biblical topics both online and offline due to the relationships that this medium has helped create.

The positive relational angle also manifests in the debates themselves. I take my recent exchange with Dan Wallace to be a case in point. I’ve never met Dan, he just popped up in my comments a couple days ago. We’re in the process of hashing out some differences over Jesus, the Law, and the nature of biblical authority. This is a low-key, non-polemical context. In the online world I don’t feel so much ownership of my position that I couldn’t change based on the discussion. It’s not peer review and doesn’t need to be.

The blogsphere is broadening how I develop relationships with biblical studies colleagues whose feedback and challenge makes my own thinking better.

And this bleeds into the second set of points. The blog is great for Continuing Theological Education (CTE). And I mean this in two directions.

One is what I’ve just alluded to: it’s good for my own CTE. People challenge my thoughts and my thoughts become more articulate, or my positions change, or I learn about a resource I was previously unaware of. This also happens in the process of writing itself, of course. But as often as not the place I learn or have my perspective shifted is in the push-back or extensions of the thought that happen as you, the reader, jump in on the comments.

But one way that I have been more excited about the CTE angle recently has been from the presence of former students on the blog. One challenge we biblical scholars face is that everyone comes into our class knowing how to read the Bible and what it says, and we engage in this lengthy process of trying to reframe thinking, to give new theological constructs, to transform our students’ imaginations.

And, believe it or not, even with a superb teacher such as myself, sometimes this takes longer than one 10-week quarter.

One exciting thing I’ve seen on the blog over the past 8 months is students continuing to come around, to wrestle with some of the big-picture ideas and how they work out in he details. The blog becomes an on-going post-classroom experience in which I can keep the educational conversation going–and where a number of students have shown that their understanding of what I’m up to (for good or for ill!) is continuing to crystallize.

And so, the blog must go on.