Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 36:141 (Jan 1879)
Article: Theological Education
Author: Anonymous

BSac 36:141 (Jan 1879) p. 182

Theological Education

No. I. —An Appeal For Higer Theological Training

The church of Christ has a twofold mission in all ages of the world: a mission to grow in two different, but allied, respects. The church begins with a few souls who receive into themselves the gospel, and grows forward in numbers until it wins and embraces the whole world of souls. Its mission is to convert the world into the church. But it also begins in crudeness on the part of the individual and of the church as a whole, and grows forward toward ripeness, symmetry, perfection of Christlike character. Its mission is to make itself a wise, righteous, holy, and blessed church.

The church of Christ in the present age meets, in the attempt to carry on its twofold mission, with especial resistance, either active or passive, from two classes of society. With respect definitely to the work of the pulpit in England, a writer in the Nineteenth Century says: “There is the great working class at one end of the scale, and the great cultivated class at the other. Does not the one regard the pulpit with rough indifference, and the other with polished scorn?” In our land, also, and in the present age, there is, we believe, a pressing, an alarming, demand upon the church to fulfil its twofold mission in respect to these two classes.

It is in full view and confession of this demand that we make this appeal for a higher theological training.

We base our appeal primarily upon the necessity laid upon the church to evangelize and edify the working classes. Much culture in varied theological studies is often supposed to hinder men from evangelizing those whom some are pleased to call “the masses of the people.’’ Higher theological training of some ministers might, it is conceded, help in the work of unfolding the Christian character of the cultivated class, as well as in the polemics of Christianity; but at the other end of the scale the impression prevails it would be a hinderance rather than a help. The drift of our practical activities in the churches, the avowed belief of large sections of leading denominations, the attitude toward thorough culture of many of our revivalists, evangelists, and some of their most ardent coworkers, the astonishing successes of uncultivated men in work with the lower classes, the failures of cultivated men in efforts at the same kind of work, the presence everywhere of a shallow form of utilitarianism, have all combined with other causes to create this impression.

BSac 36:141 (Jan 1879) p. 183

This impression is mistaken. The failures arising from the sin which is in us are not to be charged upon a culture which we have not obtained. The pride, ambition, and indifference to the condition of the lower orders of th...