Calvin Seminary and its Board of Trustees want to maintain their monopoly in the training and licensure of candidates for the denomination’s ministry. President De Jong recently emphasized that again in a contribution to “Soapbox” in The Banner. He seems to feel that things will be better for the church if we keep all our eggs in one basket. But history has not proved this. In several instances students who have studied at Westminster Seminary were more theologically alert and had stronger Reformed convictions than those who had studied at Calvin Seminary. That is not only my own observation; elders have made similar comments.
With respect to the whole matter of licensure, we should keep a few things in mind:
1. The initial reason for having seminary students take one year of study at Calvin Seminary no longer holds. At the time the rule requiring such study was made there were few Reformed seminaries on the scene, and the church was concerned to ensure that future ministers would receive a Reformed training. (Even then, I do not consider the reason valid: classes could examine men as to their Reformed convictions and qualifications. Some men, like J. G. Machen, come out of liberal seminaries with stronger Reformed convictions than before.) Now, however, we have several other Reformed institutions which can do the job as well or better than Calvin: Westminster, Mid-America, Reformed in Jackson, Gordon Conwell, etc. And most can teach the courses students are expected to take in Calvin’s last year equally well.
2. Church communions such as the R.C.A., O.P.C. and U.P.C. have classes (presbyteries) license candidates, and some of their spokesmen are surprised that we give this important matter into the hands of a Board, contrary to good Reformed church polity.
3. When one looks at the history of licensure in the CRC, he finds that the Board itself, and also committees appointed to study the matter, never questioned the right of classes or consistories to examine and license candidates. Already in 1924 we read that “Curatorium does not contest the right of the respective Classes to do this for their own area.” This was repeated as late as 1983 in these words: “The report does not question classes’ rights to license students to preach in their churches, but it stresses that this does not promote good order.” Van Dellen and Monsma in their older edition of the Church Order Commentary make the same point: “We do not mean to say that Classes have not the right to license young men belonging to one of our Churches . . .They have this right. “Also in 1924, the consistory of the La Grave church overtured synod to amend the rule, since the rule would “seem to encroach on the Reformed principle of free study and might lead to absurdities as, for instance, in the case of a theologian who has spent four or five years at Princeton Seminary, but has not attended our school.” There have been such absurdities, but fortunately, there have also been several exceptions to the rule.
4. One cannot avoid the impression of a kind of paternalism that is behind the rule. In 1954 one reads in the report of the Board of Trustees that it desired to acquaint “immigrant ministers” (from Holland, J.T.) with the CRC, and that this could be done by having them “spend some time on the campus of Calvin College and Seminary.” It reads as though there were a special aura of holiness on those campuses, a kind of halo , and by walking around them one might imbibe some of this aura by way of osmosis—an example of “provincialism” if there ever was one!
I believe it is time that we re-examine this whole matter, and return to the Reformed principle that “‘the Church itself is held responsible for the purity of doctrine and of life. As the Church controls the ministry by its exercise of discipline, so the Church must likewise control the entrance into this office” (Report of Study Committee, Acts 1946).
