Critical Junctures: Theological Education Confronts its Futures

During the 1980s, an extensive literature critical of North American theological education appeared. It challenged basic and widely accepted premises of theological study: its orientation toward clerical tasks, its conceptions of theory and practice, and the way studies were structured in a fourfold pattern of Bible, theology, history, and practice. Deploring the fragmentation that clericalism, theory-practice dualism, and disciplinary dispersion had produced, many of the authors called for a unifying theological emphasis, by which they meant that theological study should form habits of intellect and character that enable a person to make theological judgments. In the same period, however, social trends and developments pushed theological schools to diversify, offering new specialized programs for ministers and laypersons as well as new program formats for older, less mobile students. The call for unity and coherence and the countervailing trend toward diversification and diffusion will force theological schools to make choices in the 1990s that will influence the shape of religious life and leadership in the century to come.