Introduction

Harvard University, the oldest and most prestigious university in our country, was founded by the Puritans in 1636. The purpose for its founding was stated as follows:

“After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, rear’d convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the Civil Government: One of the next things we longer for, and looked after was to advance Learning and puputuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.” (American Higher Education, A Documentary History, p.6)

It is evident that the need for a well-trained and godly Ministry was uppermost in the minds of the founders of Harvard. In the seventeenth century, most graduates of Harvard became ministers and school teachers, serving the Puritan or Congregational communities of New England.

   

Nonetheless, when Yale University was founded in 1701 as “The Collegiate School of Connecticut, some in Massachusetts supported a new “school of the prophets” as they called it, because of liberalizing trends already present at Harvard.

The hope that Yale would prove more conservative than Harvard was short-lived. Forty-four years after Yale was founded, the well known evangelist, George Whitefield wrote concerning both Harvard and Yale: “As for the Universities, I believe it may be said, Their Light is now become Darkness, Darkness that may be felt” (op cit, p. 64).

Neither Harvard nor Yale were able to defend the ch1,1rches of New England from unitarianism, the teaching that denies the divine trinity, and consequently also denies the deity of Christ. Unitarianism worked a great desolation in the churches of New England following the American Revolutionary War.

Still another theological school, Andover Seminary, was founded at Andover, Mass., in 1808, in order to do the job that the existing schools were failing to do.

Today both Harvard and Yale have departments of religion. They both are well known as academically sound and prestigious universities. But the approach followed in the average classroom is wholly secular and the religious departments of these two universities are strongholds of Liberal Christianity.

I had the privilege of spending three weeks in New England last May. One gets the impression that most New Englanders are almost embarrassed by their religious roots and wish to remove themselves from these roots as far as possible. Even the church founded by the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, became unitarian and a rival church has arisen to carry on with trinitarian teachings.

What has happened in New England illustrates that which has occured in the history of the Church again and again. Colleges and seminaries that were founded to advance the faith, in a short time began to attack the faith from within, and all the good intentions of the founders went down the drain.

An Important Question

This fact poses a very important question! How do we know that Mid-America Reformed Seminary will be any different from other schools of higher learning that have been founded in the past? What guarantee do we have that we at Mid-America can keep the faith? People have already asked that question of me. Some have even made of it a rhetorical question , for they believe that there is no way that an educational institution can remain true to the vision of its founders.

Can we keep the faith? That’s an important question and I hope to address that question this evening.

What is it that causes institutions of higher learning, both colleges and seminaries, to forsake the faith? I have no absolute answer to that question, but I know at least part of the difficulty, and that is this: Any Christian College or Seminary must handle non-theological knowledge as well as theological knowledge. Or, in other words, they must deal with knowledge about the world as well as knowledge about God. Somehow Christian scholars must unite this worldly knowledge with their theological knowledge, and that’s not easy.

In the days before tractors became common, farmers and others worked with horses and mules. I am told that it was easier to get two horses to work together or two mules to work together, than to get a horse and mule to pull one wagon or to pull one plow, side by side. Yet it could be done if a farmer knew his animals and worked with them patiently.

Combining knowledge from the world with knowledge from the Bible is like trying to get a horse and a mule to work together. It can be done but the person in charge must know what he’s doing. There is always a danger that knowledge from the world will crowd out theological knowledge, until the theological knowledge is twisted out of shape or shrunk so much that it becomes useless.

That possibility is clear in the case of a college, where from the world, knowledge in the form of history, philosophy, physical science, social science, and other subjects must be taught. But is that danger also present in a seminary? Why not forget the knowledge gained by studying the world around you and study only the Bible in seminary?

It would be nice if we could do that but there is no way that we can. For example, there are certain Greek words found only once in the New Testament. If we are to know what these words mean, we must study secular Greek literature to find their meaning. The same goes for Hebrew. We must not only study the Greek and Hebrew languages; we must also study the culture of Biblical times in order better to understand the Biblical message.

Can the findings of physical science also guide our interpretation of Scripture? Science tells us that the world is round. We keep that knowledge in the back of our minds as we read the Bible, don’t we? But what about our reading of the first 3 chapters of Genesis? Where does science enter here? You see how quickly the questions get to be rather sticky.

Take another area. In seminary we teach apologetics, the defense of the faith against unbelief. But apologetics is dependent on philosophy, which is taught in college. Systematic theology has also been influenced by philosophy, and we had better know what that influence is. We come to ethics. How are God’s people daily to live lives pleasing to their Lord? That’s a very earthy question isn’t it? One needs knowledge of contemporary life in order to answer it properly.

In short, there is no way that a seminary can be a monastery that seals itself off from the world and studies only the English version of the Bible. Seminary professors as college professors, are teamsters who have to get the horse of biblical knowledge and the mule of secular knowlege to pull together at the same time in one direction. And I’m suggesting to you this evening that it is precisely at this point that many seminaries begin to go astray.

Seminaries can easily go astray if their professors do not establish the proper relationship between general knowledge and sacred knowledge, or in other words, the proper relationship between in formati on that is gathered from the world and information that is given to us in the Bible. The Bible itself defines the ideal relationship in two important passages, to which we now t urn.

Transformation

In Romans 12:2, the Apostle Paul speaks of transformation. He says, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (RSV). Romans 12 begins the ethical section of the book of Romans. When Paul penned these words Christian behavior was uppermost in his mind. But here, as everywhere, doctrine and ethics, theory and practice, go together. You can’t really separate them.

“Do not be conformed to this world,” says Paul. Has it ever occurred to you that seminaries are very much tempted to conform to this world? They are sometimes under pressure from both state and federal governments to conform to certain standards. (This, by the way, was one of the problems already faced by Harvard in the 17th century. In its case the colonial government of Massachusetts and the imperial government of t he British Empire gave cause for worry.) Seminaries can also be pressured by accrediting agencies to set up programs or appoint professors that they otherwise would not set up or appoint. Seminaries are also pressured by their own students. Prospective students ask, Does this school have academic respectability? Existing students demand a sound academic program and are often less concerned about the spiritual quality of that program. Seminaries felt the need to appoint professors who have advanced degrees, and this need may unduly influence their choice.

If a professor does not have an advanced degree, he is encouraged to get one. This is a problem especially for Christian colleges. Christian professors go to secular universities to get their degrees and then are expected to know how to teach in a Christian way. It takes people of exceptional character to do that and do it well. Even on the seminary level, the choice of conservative seminaries offering the doctorate is very limited. There is no automatic assurance that one who goes for an advanced degree will hold to the same conservative position when he has completed his studies, that he did when he began.

Seminaries and seminary professors are under constant temptation to conform to the world. Aside from the matters I have just mentioned, virtually every seminary and every seminary professor has a desire for recognition. We like to be known as scholars, as leaders in our field, as people to be reckoned with. This desire for recognition, though legitimate in itself, can easily pervert one’s vision and twist his understanding, so that the fort of conservative Reformed Christianity he intended to defend, he abandons in favor of views that appear to be more easily defended.

This can be illustrated in our approach to the Bible. It is well-known that seminaries and entire denominations begin to go astray when Christians begin to chip away at the authority of the Bible as God’s infallible revelation to man. Princeton Professor L. A. Loetscher has nicely documented that process in his book, The Broadening Church.

Why then do Christian leaders even begin the process of chipping away at the Bible? They will often describe it for you in terms of “academic respectability” or “mental honesty.” Often when you pry a bit, you will find a desire for acceptance by those whose approach is more liberal than theirs. And as they pursue this goal of acceptance, the need for Christian, child-like faith is lost from sight.

“Be not conformed to this world.” That’s a directive that ·we who do theology must ever keep in mind. The Christian world view bears an antithetical relationship to the secular or compromising world view that many in Western academic circles have adopted. There is much that we can and must learn from non-theological scholarship, but we must always be vigilant lest the tail of non-theological scholarship begin to wag the dog of biblical study.

“Be not conformed,” says Paul, “But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.That word “transform” mean literally, “Change the form,” Some Christians have read this and concluded that their style of living must be so different from the world around them that people can pick them out a mile away. The Amish, for example, reject modern means of transportation, and dress very simply. They still travel by horse and buggy, and dress in black and white.

But when Paul wrote, “Be transformed,” it was not his intention that Christians reject the outward trappings of their culture. Paul said, “But be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” All change in outward behavior must be preceded by an inward change that permeates all our thinking. In Jesus Christ we have new hearts, but we also have new minds. Many Christians believe that their heart belongs to the Lord but their minds belong to the secular world. They live in a dualistic world in which their heart is Christian but their mind is secular. They shuttle back and forth from one world to the other, and while in the secular world they accept uncritically many of the conclusions of secularly oriented scholarship.

Even in seminary training we can fall into this trap. I believe that we have done just that when we define preaching in terms of contemporary communication theory rather than in terms given to us in the Scriptures. In the area of pastoral counseling, we may choose to use the secular psychology to solve spiritual problems, but when we have chosen to do this we are living in a dualistic world that shuts out the Bible from solving the practical problems of everyday life.

When our minds have been born again or renewed, we will know what truly Christian ethics is. We will be able, in the words of Paul, to “prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Transformation and a knowledge of how it takes place –this will help a seminary to chart its cou rse and stay on the course it has charted. But transformation alone is not enough. There are many plants which when they stop growing, start dying. The monks and nuns of the Middle Ages who fled the world around them in order to live behind the walls of monasteries and cloisters, thought that they were drawing closer to the Lord. But often they neglected His commands to be of service out in the world, and they soon discovered that when they entered the monastery there was no way that they could leave their sinful hearts at the door.

As we seek to be transformed by God’s powerful work in our hearts and minds, our goal is not a small community of Christians that is isolated from the world. If this were our goal, we would be advocating a sort of Protestant monasticism and we would have lost the power of the gospel to touch and redeem every aspect of life in this sin-stricken world.

Propagation

Paul advocates transformation. But he also advocates propagation. He does this very clearly in I Corinthians 10:5, where we read: “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

Paul makes clear in this passage that Christians must never be content with a rear-guard defensive action that seeks to build the walls high enough so that the enemy cannot get in. He makes clear that the “laager mentality” that draws up the wagons in a circle because this is the best defensive position when one is under attack is not the normal Christian outlook. We must rather press the attack on the enemy.

When Joshua captured the city of Jericho the city itself was destroyed and all those living in it, except for Rahab and her family. But the gold and silver and the vessels of bronze and iron were put into God’s house to be of service to Him. In the Christian encounter with the world there are some ideas that must be destroyed because they are flatly opposed to God’s Kingdom. But there are others that can be taken captive and put to the Master’s use.

Paul makes clear that some ideas are to be destroyed when he says, “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God.” Let us look at some modern examples. The Puritan churches of New England were an easy mark for divergent teaching because of their loose denominational structure. But during the 17th and 18th centuries they also did battle with a wave of rationalism that swept in from Europe. Rationalism makes man’s reason the final judge of what is true. Rationalism crowds out faith and cannot live with an infallible Bible. Christians ought to expose and destroy rationalism wherever it seeks to govern Christian thought.

Here’s another example of an idea that must be exorcised by Christian theologians. Ever since the days of Immanuel Kant, Western Society has tended to divide life into two great compartments: the religious and the secular . Not only that, Western Society in general has caused the religious side of life to shrink and the secular side to expand. Such compartmentalization is an unbiblical approach and Reformed Christians particularly ought to oppose it with all their strength. We must tear it down wherever we can.

A third idea follows from the second: Many Americans now believe in ethics determined by court decision. If the courts sanction homosexual practice, it must be

O.K. If the courts do not punish adultery or sexual perversion, there is nothing wrong with it. If the courts allow abortion, it’s permissible. The move to legalize euthanasia is already gathering steam and who knows what might be next. Laws for human behavior are no longer given by a God in heaven, but by the United States Supreme Court which has power to declare even those laws backed by the majority of the people to be null and void, if these laws don’t happen to coincide with the pagan world view of those who sit on the bench. Here is a stronghold that Christians must destroy if at all possible. As I said earlier, there is an antithetical relationship between Christian thought and pagan thought, and we gain nothing–in fact we lose profoundly—if we try to blur the distinctions between these two systems.

Taking Captives

The idea of propagation is pressed by Paul in still another way in II Corinthians 10:5. He says, “And take every thought captive to obey Christ.” When you take captives in war you don’t kill them. You take them with you and sometimes you use them to help you win the victory, as the American Air Force did with certain Japanese captives who willingly cooperated after they were prisoners.

Paul, of course, is not talking about people but ideas. He has his eyes on the horizon. He is carrying out a cosmic struggle with the forces of evil in the world. He says in I Corinthians 10:3, 4: “For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds.”

Christians cannot simplify withdraw from the society in which they live and permit it, as the common expression goes, “to go to the dogs.” They must take captive all that which can be redeemed; they must turn it around and put it to use in the service of the King. Some have said that we must seek to establish a Christian counterculture, but the term “subculture” would be a better term. The Amish have established a counter-culture because they have rejected much of the education and the technology of contemporary society. That’s not our intention. We intend to be in the world but not of the world. For that reason the term “sub-culture” is a better term.

In this connection the Dutch missiologist, J.H. Bavinck, uses the Latin term possessio to describe a Christian’s relationship to the world around him. Possessio means “to take possession” and has been describ ed by Bavinck as follows: “Christ . . . fills each thing, each word, and each practice with a new meaning and gives it a new direction” (Introduction to the Science of Missions, p. 179).

Here is an example of how this might work in practice. We know that there is a great deal of sex and violence on television, not to mention the gross materialism of many of the ads. We could react to this by saying: TV must be destroyed. We will begin by tossing out all the TV sets we have in our homes. Furthermore we will bend every effort to close down as many television stations as we can.

But there is another way. We can recognize that the evil of television does not lie in the technology of television, but the way in which it is used. We can take advantage of the fact that cablevision has made it possible for alternative broadcasts to find their way into the home. Not broadcasts that preach at people day after day, but broadcasts that analyze the news from a Christian perspective, broadcasts that use drama as an art for m that provides wholesome entertainment whether the themes are religious or secular. Rather than destroying or attempting to destroy this pri mary method of communication in America today, we must capture as much of it as we can and make it obedient to Christ.

For those who say that this is too much to expect, I would like to remind you that when Christian schools were founded, some said that it couldn’t be done. Nonetheless people with vision stuck to their guns and insisted not in applying some cosmetics to a system they couldn’t control, but in making the schools their captive in order that they might serve the living God. We must continue to make captives for the Lord in every area of society today.

At Mid–America Reformed Seminary we are training ministers of the gospel. It is important that church officers do not leave their teaching and preaching ministry in order to be immersed in political activism, social welfare, or business ventures. At the same time we must know what is going on in the world and we must encourage church leaders to give instruction to God’s people regarding their behavior in the midst of a culture that does not recognize the supremacy of Christ.

Paul does not say “Take some thoughts captive to obey Christ.” He does not say, “Take religious thoughts captive.” He says that his aim is to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.” And that ought to be our goal as well. We ought to destroy that which is diametrically opposed to the gospel, and that which is not, we ought to cleanse, to baptize, and to incorporate into our own system in order that it may serve that system. In this way, we will not simply defend the faith; we will propagate the faith. We need transformation; we also need propagation, that the knowledge of the Lord may cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, that all whom He has chosen to everlasting life may begin to enjoy this life while it is still the day of grace.

Conclusion

Harvard was founded to train ministers of the Gospel during the 17th century. Yale was founded, partly to make up for problems at Harvard, at the beginning of the 18th century. Andover was founded to make up for problems at both Harvard and Yale, at the beginning of the 19th century. Gordan-Conwell Seminary was founded also in New England during the 20th century in order to carry on an evangelical tradition that the other schools had abandoned.

But even Gordon-Conwell is not having an easy time of it. According to a recent report in Christianity Today a Gordon-Conwell professor has recently resigned under pressure because of his views on Scripture. And so the struggle goes on. It is not an easy struggle. T he problems are complex. But our God did not call us to spend our time on this earth lying in a bed of roses. He rather calls us to put on the full armor of God and do battle with the forces of evil wherever they might be found. Rest assured that our efforts will not be in vain, for Jesus has assured ·us in John 16:33: “In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Will Mid-America Reformed Seminary do better th an Harvard and Yale? When it comes to size and prestige, these are large and influential Ivy League schools, and even the attempt to compare Mid-America with one of them is presumptuous. But when it comes to a robust, Reformed, evangelical, view of Scri pture and its application to contemporary society, I trust that Mid-America Reformed Seminary will do much better than Harvard and Yale.

Will she continue to do better as the years go by, or will she also go the way of so many other schools? That depends at least in part on whether her professors take seriously what Paul says in Romans 12:2 about transformation and in I Corinthians 10:5 about propagation. Pray for us, brothers and sisters in the Lord, that the word of God may run and abound and that this school may serve its purpose for many generations to come.

(This is Dr. Monsma’s convocation address Aug. 31, 1983 at Sheldon, Iowa. The school of which he is the academic dean is at Orange City, Iowa.)