In an endeavor to illustrate this vital principle, let us apply these tests to the leading branches of our theological training. We naturally and very properly note Bible teaching first. It is generally recognized that unless a Bible teacher engages in frequent ministry of the Word through evangelistic or pastoral contacts with the people, he inevitably becomes theoretical, bookish, and detached from the imperatives of workaday gospel ministry. His teaching may be most scholarly and yet fail to meet the very real arid practical needs and challenges of the sin-touched lives to whom his students must soon minister.
He may be profound and yet speculative, and thus his emphasis be remote from the utilitarian needs of the young ministers in training in his classes. His class instruction may be sound enough, interesting, and true; yet it may smack of the classroom and the cloistered study. To meet the need and expectation of this movement, his instruction must be keyed to the tremendous problems and expectations of life. The students need to be led to grapple with more than hypothetical problems. They need help in adequately meeting the very real challenges and multiplying errors of the militant religious world about them. Satisfactory Bible teaching must ever be cast in the mold of realism if it is to justify itself before the bar of expectation both of God and of His church. This is being increasingly sensed, and measures are under way to strengthen our teaching at this point.
The same principle likewise applies to the other departments in the ministerial training field. Take Biblical languages as a further example. If the Greek and Hebrew teacher is out of touch with actual soul-winning ministry—the average problems of everyday evangelistic and pastoral responsibility—his teaching tends to become more and more removed from the daily imperatives of his students as they go out into public evangelism. He may be erudite in the technical knowledge of his field, but in stressing the great words or features of a book in Holy Writ, for example, he may miss the vital things that are needed to impress present truth and to combat the subtle errors that confront on every hand today. His work should be so sound that it will automatically guard the worker against unsound exegesis—the plague of many a minister and a detriment to the church.
The great danger is that the language teacher will emphasize the things that are stressed in the seminaries and universities of a nominal Protestantism that has abandoned many of the genuine Protestant positions of the past. We cannot and must not follow their lead. They not only are misplacing the emphasis today but are opposing the positions of doctrinal and prophetic truth that we are bound before God to declare to mankind. Their attitude is often anti-Adventist. We must keep our language emphasis soundly Adventist and aggressively practical. Thus only will it be a tool for righteousness.
The same principle holds in the field of history. Emphasis can very easily shift from those phases and epochs of history that God emphasizes, over to the things that secular and skeptical historians are wont to stress. And conversely, there may also be the tendency to neglect what they are prone to minimize or decry. There is danger of dwelling too much upon aspects of history having little or no utilitarian worth, and of failing to arm our students with facts, sources, and concepts that really meet the practical demands of presenting truth. Participation with our evangelists in expounding the historical fulfillment of prophecy will keep our historical interests, study, and emphasis in practical fields, as well as provide the over-all historical picture imperative for balance.
The principle is similar in the realm of research technique. A teacher may be master of the theory and mechanics of research. He may be able to instill a knowledge of how to use library facilities and to work in sources, how to find and organize facts, how to conform to the accepted form of outline, documentation, progression, and related technicalities, and yet fail to instill the spirit of reverent, constructive research and the passion for present truth, and guide into worth-while quests.
It is possible to remain a research theorist and never make a worth-while personal contribution—never really do practical, intensive, and extensive personal investigation that exemplifies the science and the art of sound research. The teacher of research should ever lead the way in incessant contribution that clarifies, fortifies, and upbuilds truth, and exposes fallacy in evidence, or unsound argument in error. That is the kind of research needed in Seventh-day Adventist theological education. So again the practical, the utilitarian, is the obvious test. It is possible to be so bound by the letter of worldly canons of research as to miss the spirit and the goal of genuine Christian investigation. This we need to shun as we would- the plague, or it will do to us what it has done for the Protestant movement of the past.
Or, take pastoral training, as it is popularly known—that is, practical field work or laboratory evangelism. Surely this must be practical. Yet this phase has been one of the weakest links in our entire chain of ministerial training. Seldom has an active, experienced evangelist been attached to a college Bible department to give such essential training. Sometimes it has been attempted by a teacher who has never had evangelistic experience—or whose experience was fifteen or twenty years in the past. Evangelism has completely changed in the last two decades, and most classroom teachers are wisely reluctant about conducting field training on a swivel-chair basis. As a result of these freely acknowledged lacks, most of our young preachers have been sent forth without adequate experience in the elemental problems and procedures of evangelism.
In fairness to our youth in training, in fairness to the conferences receiving them into internship—not to mention the public for whom they are to labor—present plans to yoke a successful evangelist with the classroom instructors to meet this crying practical need should spread to include every college. Many a youth completes his college ministerial training without having had responsibility in a student effort, never having had actual evangelistic preaching experience. Such an anomalous situation calls for immediate remedy.
One other field must suffice by way of illustration. That is the teaching of sacred music to our future gospel workers. These youth are going out into direct evangelism among non-Adventists. It is easy to develop the studio attitude, and the institutional concept of an idealistic hymnody for the worship of the church, and to decry the imperative music of evangelism—the message-giving song, the witness song, and the appeal song, of high standard and quality, designed to move hearts toward God and to influence decision for Christ and for truth. It is so easy to become critical and condemnatory of that which has been the established handmaiden of soul-winning evangelistic and revival preaching back through the years, yes, the centuries.
It is highly desirable to lift the standard here. But it is easy to drift unwittingly into the subtle reasonings of the schools of music of a nominal Protestantism that has lost its vision, its message, and its mission, and is concentrating on the aesthetic adornment of its messageless services. It is noticeable that those who criticize the evangelistic song are rarely ever personal soul winners. They are seldom connected with evangelistic efforts. They do not carry the burden of helping lost men and women find God in meetings specifically designed and conducted to that end. A little actual experience in this field would change the emphasis of the studio and aid in giving our ministers the practical fitting so greatly needed in soul winning.
Such practical realities are the rightful expectation of the advent movement—practical ministerial training in Seventh-day Adventist training institutions. They were created and are maintained primarily for the equipping of a sound, competent, virile Adventist ministry. We shall veer from the course originally set before us at the peril of failure to meet God's expectation in this hour of supreme challenge and opportunity. This must not be.
L.E.F.
