Christian Colleges and Seminaries

Republished with permission (and unedited) from Central Baptist Theological Seminary. (The document posted at Central’s website within the last couple of weeks.)

Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

The following is reprinted with permission from Paraklesis, a publication of Baptist Bible Seminary. The article first appeared in the Summer ‘09 issue.

Why learn Hebrew and Greek?

I want to address just one facet of the question in this essay. The primary purpose of Baptist Bible Seminary is to train pastors. We have made a deliberate choice to focus on only one narrow slice of graduate-level biblical-theological education. I am thinking first and foremost of the pastor when I think of the place of the biblical languages in the curriculum. In its biblical portrait, the central focus in pastoral ministry is the public proclamation of the Word of God. There are certainly other aspects of pastoral ministry, but it can be no less than preaching if it is to be a biblical pastoral ministry.

How does preaching relate to the biblical languages?

I have some serious concerns about the state of the pulpit these days. My concern could be stated fairly well by adapting the wording of 1 Sam. 3:1 and suggesting that biblical preaching is rare in our day, and a word from God is infrequently heard from our pulpits. Some of today’s best known preachers echo the same sentiment. John Stott, for example, says that “true Christian preaching…is extremely rare in today’s Church.”¹

As those who stand in the pulpit and open the Word of God to a local congregation, pastors have the same charge as that with which Paul charged Timothy: “Preach the Word” (2 Tim 4:2). That is an awesome responsibility. The apostle Peter reminds us that “if anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God” (1 Pet 4:11).

The following press release is reprinted from Central Baptist Seminary. It appears here unedited.

^{Note: This article is reprinted from The Faith Pulpit (April 1999), a publication of Faith Baptist Theological Seminary (Ankeny, IA). It appears here with some slight editing.}

^{Read Part 1.}

What is happening today is not new, and it is not isolated to only a few rare incidents. Let us note and learn from some examples from the past.

Andover Seminary. Andover was started in 1807-1808 because a Unitarian had been appointed as professor of theology at Harvard. Every attempt was made to safeguard the new school’s orthodoxy. Yet within 75 years, the school’s faculty was promoting views way out of line with traditional orthodoxy, and during its 100th anniversary year—1908—it became identified with and moved back to the Harvard campus! (See: Ernest Gordon, The Leaven of the Sadducees, Chapter VI, “The Looting of Andover.”)

Rochester Seminary. Rochester Seminary had as its president from 1872 to 1912 (a forty year period) the well-known systematic theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong. Strong’s Systematic Theology is still required reading in many conservative colleges and seminaries today. Yet we are told, “Strong was in his own mind generally open to the consideration of new ideas, and his students were taught to think for themselves, so that, as one alumnus wryly reported, ‘in from one to ten years after graduation a goodly crop of ‘heretics’ is found on the alumni roll.’” (See: “Academic Freedom…” by LeRoy Moore, Jr., Foundations, January- March, 1967, X, #1, p. 66.) When Henry Vedder wrote his stinging attack upon the Bible and its essential teachings he dedicated that book (The Fundamentals of Christianity) “…to my teacher in theology, Augustus Hopkins Strong,” as did also Walter Rauschenbusch, the well-known prophet of the Social Gospel, in his book on A Theology for the Social Gospel where he states: “This book is inscribed with reverence and gratitude to Augustus Hopkins Strong…my teacher, colleague, friend…” Yet Dr. Strong, after touring several mission fields later in life, spoke out against liberalism. He observed:

Note: This article is reprinted from The Faith Pulpit (March 1999), a publication of Faith Baptist Theological Seminary (Ankeny, IA). It appears here with some slight editing.