Editorial Board The Revd Keith G Jones MA The Revd Dr Parush R Parushev JUDr Petra Veselá The Revd Dr Ian M Randall The Revd Docent Dr Ivana Noble Linas Andronovas MTh Lina Andronovien÷ MTh Tim F T Noble MEd The Revd Dr Peter F Penner Issued three times a year Subscriptions: 1€ 4 per year within Europe and the Middle East $20 per year to the USA Individual copies 150 czk Enquiries regarding subscriptions to [email protected] Enquiries regarding articles to [email protected] ISSN 1213 – 1520 Registration Number: MK ČR E 10511 International Baptist Theological Seminary of the European Baptist Federation, o.p.s. Nad Habrovkou 3, Jenerálka, Praha 6, CZ 164 00 Czech Republic IČO: 25741683 Produced by the IBTS Journal Team NEW IBTS PUBLICATIONS Mapping Baptistic Identity Towards an Understanding of European Baptist Identity: Listening to the Churches in Armenia, Bulgaria, Central Asia, Moldova, North Caucasus, Omsk and Poland Edited by Rollin G Grams and Parush R Parushev 2006, 250 czk + p&p, ISBN 80-87006-01-1 Ethnic Churches in Europe A Baptist Response Edited by Peter F Penner 2006, 475 czk + p&p, ISBN 3-937896-42-2 To place an order please contact [email protected] Contents 3 Journal of European Baptist Studies Volume seven No. 2 January 2007 Contents Editorial 4 The Revd Dr Parush R Parushev ‘To give the first place to spiritual fervour’: 5 – 20 Priorities for seminary education The Revd Dr Ian M Randall Identity, Ethnicity and Spirituality 21 – 29 Some Personal and Practical Reflections from a Middle Eastern Context Dr Paul Sanders Theological Education in a Context where the Church Lost its Body 30 – 37 Dr Roland Spjuth Spirituality and Ethnicity in Holland 38 – 49 Dr Henk Bakker Book Reviews 50 – 56 4 Journal of European Baptist Studies Editorial This edition of JEBS offers a collection of papers presented at the European Baptist Theology Teachers’ Conference which took place, along with the Fourth Forum of the Consortium of European Baptist Theological Schools, at IBTS in June 2006. Participants of the conference reflected on the theme of ‘Spirituality and Ethnicity’ and on the contribution of theological education to Baptist identity and spiritual formation. Using history as a medium, Dr Ian Randall (UK) addresses the issue of shaping spiritual leaders by taking a closer look at the 150 years of theological education and spiritual formation at Spurgeon’s College, London. He emphasises the original vision of the College founder for establishing a ‘truly spiritual college’ and connects Spurgeon’s vision with the contemporary realities of ‘earthed’ holistic spirituality as an important part of training for ministry. Dr Paul Sanders (Lebanon) reflects on the evangelical identity and spirituality in the Middle Eastern and North African ethnic contexts. He associates identity with ethnicity and reviews the dynamics of their interrelations. Taking a lead from the biblical view on ethnicity and identity, he reflects further on eight specific challenges that evangelicals experience in relating their ethnic identity to Christian spirituality in the Islamic context. As the current Coordinator for the Network of the Scandinavian Academy for Leadership and Theology, Dr Roland Spjuth (Sweden) reviews the theme from the perspective of secularist and individualistic Scandinavian cultures. He is probing into the challenges posed by a culture of fragmentation, self-centredness and subjective well-being to the sense of Christian belonging. Admitting the pervasive cultural influences on Christian theological education, he is looking at James Wm McClendon’s communitarian insights as a remedy in providing for integrated spirituality, community formation and togetherness. The theme of spirituality and ethnicity is taken further by Dr Henk Bakker’s reflections on challenges faced by theological education in globalised pluralistic and multi-ethnic Dutch culture. He suggests overcoming loneliness and estrangement and developing robust Christian spirituality of togetherness by building upon the insights into the perichoresis of the Trinity developed by the Eastern Fathers. The Revd Dr Parush R Parushev Academic Dean, IBTS ‘To give the first place to spiritual fervour’ 5 ‘To give the first place to spiritual fervour’: Priorities for seminary education In 1987 the Association of Theological Schools in the USA drew together twenty-three members for a research seminar on the question: ‘In what important respects, if any, is character formation central to theological education?’ The focus was North America but the issues are relevant to Europe. Major papers were presented by George Lindbeck (Yale Divinity School) and David Tracy (Divinity School, University of Chicago), with responses from – among others – Douglas John Hall (School of Theology, McGill University), Jane I. Smith (Iliff School of Theology) and Robert Meye (Fuller Theological Seminary). To some extent the focus moved from discussion of character formation to the broader (as I see it) issue of spiritual formation. Three different views were offered about the extent to which such formation should be a programmatic part of theological education. The first view identified theological education with formation. The second did not make this identification but saw spiritual formation as a necessary element in theological education. In the third view it was not possible to teach spiritual formation.1 George Lindbeck’s paper, ‘Spiritual Formation and Theological Education’, has proved to be prophetic. His analysis was that spirituality had ‘tended to be banished from theological education even as an object of study’. He anticipated, however, that this could change, and that within seminaries there would be ‘greater attention to spirituality’ in the future.2 This is indeed what has happened. The greatly increased attention given to spiritual formation has been a marked feature of seminary education in the past two decades. In this study I want to reflect on the issue of theological education and spiritual formation by looking at Spurgeon’s College, London, a European seminary which is 150 years old this year, having been started by Charles Haddon Spurgeon in the early years of his remarkable ministry in London, a ministry stretching over three decades until his death in 1892.3 During most of the past 150 years it has been the largest Baptist seminary 1 D H Kelsey, ‘Reflections on a Discussion of Theological Education as Character Formation’, Theological Education, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1988), pp. 62-75. 2 G Lindbeck, ‘Spiritual Formation and Theological Education’, in Theological Education, Vol. 24, Supplement 1 (1988), pp. 10-32. Other papers included in this volume are D Tracy, ‘Can Virtue be Taught? Education, Character, and the Soul’, D J Hall, ‘Theological Education as Character Formation?’, J I Smith, ‘Spiritual Awareness and the Formation of Character’, and R P Meye, ‘Theological Education as Character Formation’. For further reflection on these discussions see R J Neuhaus, ed., Theological Education and Moral Formation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992). 3 The best recent biography of Spurgeon is P S Kruppa, Charles Haddon Spurgeon: A Preacher’s Progress (New York: Garland Pub., 1982). There is scope for further work on Spurgeon. 6 Journal of European Baptist Studies in Europe. Out of all Spurgeon’s many endeavours, the College was, he insisted, his ‘first-born and best beloved’. ‘This is my life’s work, to which I believe God has called me’, he said, ‘…To preach the Gospel myself, and to train others to do it, is my life’s object and aim.’4 I want to draw out some themes in the area of spiritual formation that were important to Spurgeon and attempt to see how these have been re-interpreted in the life of the College.5 In 1998, in ‘Traditions of Spiritual Practice and the Practice of Theology’, published in Theology Today, David Tracy argued: ‘The devastating separation of spirituality and theology in theological education must be undone.’ He suggested that as part of that enterprise it was important to ‘face and heal the separations modernity has bequeathed us and postmodernity is happily undoing: the separation of feeling and thought, form and content, practice and theory’.6 Spurgeon’s College is examined here as an example of one tradition of spiritual practice. In 1870 Spurgeon, as President of the College (the Pastors’ College was the name at that time), said in the College’s ‘Annual Report’: ‘It appears to us that the maintenance of a truly spiritual College is probably the readiest way in which to bless the churches.’7 The emphasis on ‘a truly spiritual College’ was at the heart of Spurgeon’s concept of ministerial training. There are now a considerable number of books that offer accounts of how individual theological colleges or seminaries have developed.8 Also some journal articles have looked at specific themes within the stories of well-known seminaries. In 2003 Darrell Guder wrote an illuminating article, ‘From Mission and Theology to Missional Theology’, in which he traced the way that thinking within Princeton Theological Seminary in the USA had developed in the area of mission and theological education from the nineteenth century to the present.9 The same year saw the publication in Theological Education of a study by H. Frederick Reisz, Jr., looking at how spiritual formation is assessed in a seminary community. Reisz used as an 4 W Y Fullerton, C.H. Spurgeon: A Biography (London: Williams and Norgate, 1920), p. 227. 5 I have drawn out other themes in A School of the Prophets (London: Spurgeon’s College, 2005). 6 D Tracy, ‘Traditions of Spiritual Practice and the Practice of Theology’, Theology Today, Vol. 55 (July 1998), pp. 240-1. 7 Annual Paper Concerning the Lord’s Work in Connection with the Pastors’ College [titles vary a little – hereafter AP], 1870, p. 4. 8 See, for example, my account of the origins, development and impact of London Bible College (now London School of Theology), Educating Evangelicalism (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000). For an illuminating and also highly entertaining treatment of two (deliberately unnamed) theological schools in the USA, see J W Carroll et. al., Being There (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9 D L Guder, ‘From Mission and Theology to Missional Theology’, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 1, New Series (2003), p. 36. For background on missional church and missional theology see D L Guder, ed., Missional Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998). ‘To give the first place to spiritual fervour’ 7 example his own institution, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary.10 Within the Baptist context William Clemmons, retired Professor of Christian Spirituality and Myers Professor of Pastoral Ministry at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois, wrote, in 2004, a review article about spiritual formation in Baptist seminaries in America during the past twenty-five years. Clemmons drew especially from illuminating work done by E. Glenn Hinson and Molly T. Marshall.11 This study of Spurgeon’s College will interact with these and other studies and will seek to explore some of the aspects of formation within a European Baptist seminary. My intention is to seek to contribute to ongoing reflection within European Baptist life about this issue.12 A crucial element in C.H. Spurgeon’s thinking about the spiritual development of ministers was the belief that healthy spirituality flourished when people were in touch with ordinary life – rather than detached from it. His vision was for an ‘earthy’ spirituality. This was clearly set out by Spurgeon in his magazine The Sword and the Trowel in 1870 (fourteen years after the College was founded), when he spoke about the life of the students at the College: The young brethren [until the 1960s all students were male] are boarded generally in twos and threes, in the houses of our friends around the Tabernacle …The plan of separate lodging we believe to be far preferable to having all under one roof, for by the latter mode men are isolated from general family habits… The circumstances of the families who entertain our young friends are generally such that they [the students] are not elevated above the social position which in all probability they will have to occupy in future years.13 Spurgeon did not want a College community isolated from real life. In 1923, when the College moved to its present site in South London,14 it became a residential community – a move away from Spurgeon’s ideal – but with the growth of congregation-based training from the 1980s this changed. Within English Baptist Colleges the congregation-based model 10 H F Reisz, Jr., ‘Assessing Spiritual Formation in Christian Seminary Communities’, Theological Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2003), pp. 29-40. 11 W Clemmons, ‘Spiritual Formation in Seminary Education’, Review and Expositor, Vol. 101, No. 1 (2004), pp. 41-66. For further Baptist contributions over this period see A Davis and W Rowatt, eds., Formation for Christian Ministry (Louisville, Kentucky: Review and Expositor, 1988), especially the essay by Bill J Leonard, ‘The Spiritual Development of the Minister’, pp. 79-93. 12 For an outstanding contribution to this reflection see the volume of papers published by IBTS: P F Penner, ed., Theological Education as Mission (Prague: IBTS, 2005). 13 The Sword and the Trowel [hereafter S and T], April 1870, p. 149. 14 The College began in the basement of Spurgeon’s church, The Metropolitan Tabernacle, at the Elephant and Castle, London, and then later moved to a nearby building. 8 Journal of European Baptist Studies was introduced first at Northern Baptist College, Manchester, and then at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Spurgeon’s followed. The most notable innovations in Baptist ministerial training in England in the 1970s took place at Northern, where the ‘Alternative Pattern of Training’ was pioneered. Michael Taylor, the Principal at Northern, had in mind ‘not a quasi-academic community but one that is actively engaged in mission in an actual situation’.15 The church-based pattern at Spurgeon’s, which now applies to about two-thirds of ministerial students, is that they spend two days a week in College, one day in personal study, and three days working for a church – either serving as part-time pastors of smaller churches or working in a team of ministers in a larger church. For Spurgeon’s College and for the wider Baptist tradition of ministerial training, intentional church experience is formative. All College students have supervised church ministry experience. C.H. Spurgeon saw the connections between the College and the worshipping life of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where he was minister, as vital. Involvement in church activities kept students in touch with the realities of ministry. Church involvement, said the first Principal of the College, George Rogers, in 1866, ‘contributes much to their [the students] social and spiritual welfare’. A great deal of this involvement was enjoyable, although there was also a need to learn about more difficult congregational issues such as church discipline. Rogers argued that lack of contact with ‘a flourishing Church’ was a ‘serious deficiency in a College education’.16 In the course of the ten years following its commencement, the College (as Rogers noted in 1867) increased rapidly – from one student to between eighty and ninety.17 Rogers himself, who was not a Baptist but was a Congregational minister, was described by Spurgeon in 1870 as someone ‘of Puritanic stamp, deeply learned, orthodox in doctrine, judicious, witty, devout, earnest, liberal in spirit’.18 The relationship between Spurgeon and Rogers was marked by mutual appreciation. In the 1880s Rogers reflected on how the College’s connection with ‘a pastorate of great order, extent, and vitality’ had produced results that had ‘exceeded the most sanguine expectations’. The real work in ministry, he added, was being done by those ministers who prized spirituality. 19 15 M H Taylor, ‘Ministerial Training and Theological Education’, The Fraternal, No. 164 (May 1972), p. 18-26. 16 S and T, March 1866, pp. 137-8. 17 G Rogers, ‘An Outline of the Origin, History, Method and Success of the Pastor’s College’, in Outline of the Lord’s Work by the Pastor’s College (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1867), pp. 19-20. 18 S and T, April 1870, p. 146. 19 AP, 1883-84, p. 6. ‘To give the first place to spiritual fervour’ 9 By emphasising churchly formation, Spurgeon’s College tradition has not simply equated theological education in the classroom with spiritual formation. Rather, as Gordon T. Smith argued in ‘Spiritual Formation in the Academy: A Unifying Model’ (1996), the view has been that ‘spiritual formation within the academic setting is most effective when the classroom is both affirmed and complemented, and where vital elements of the spiritual life are nurtured, taught, and encouraged in settings in addition to the classroom’. For Smith, these other elements are experiences of retreat, service, spiritual direction, and worship. He adds that seminaries ‘most able to integrate spiritual formation and education are those with a clear sense of their history, their heritage, and their spiritual tradition’.20 Gordon Smith’s stress on integration is in tune with David Tracy’s hope that there is currently an ‘undoing’ of the separation of feeling and thought, form and content, practice and theory. However, Smith does not explore, as the Spurgeon’s tradition has done since its beginnings, the ways in which there can be an integration of church and seminary. The Spurgeonic vision – certainly not always achieved – has been to keep students in close touch with church life and with ‘ordinary theology’,21 or ‘primary theology’, as explored (for example) in a conference at IBTS led by Parush Parushev on ‘Primary and Secondary Theologies in Baptistic Communities’.22 Spurgeon believed that students who lost touch with ‘ordinary theology’ and whose aim was simply to parade their advanced theological knowledge would fail to touch ordinary people’s hearts.23 This approach resonates with Susanne Johnson’s argument for the place of orthokardia (‘a heart rightly formed before God’) as well as orthodoxis and orthopraxis, and it is significant that Johnson speaks of theologians and educators accepting that ‘the primary means for spiritual formation is living closely in a community of believers who themselves know well the Christian Story and who are deeply and actively engaged in its practices’.24 20 G T Smith, ‘Spiritual Formation in the Academy: A Unifying Model’, Theological Education, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1996). 21 See J Astley, Ordinary Theology (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2002). 22 Held at IBTS, 24-28 August 2004. Proceedings of the conference are to be published by IBTS. For the background thinking see J W McClendon, Jr., and J M Smith, Convictions: Defusing Religious Relativism (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994) (Originally Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), and McClendon’s Biography as Theology: How Life Stories Can Remake Today’s Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974) and his three-volume systematic theology: Ethics (1986), Doctrine (1994), and Witness (2000), all by Abingdon Press. McClendon speaks about first-order and second-order theology, the latter being ‘theology about theology’. 23 AP, 1870, p. 7. 24 S Johnson, ‘Christian Spiritual Formation in an Age of “Whatever”’, Review and Expositor, Vol. 98, No. 3 (2001), pp. 312, 328. There are other helpful articles on spiritual formation in this volume. For a more extended series of arguments in favour of close bonds between seminaries and congregations see S 10 Journal of European Baptist Studies This raises questions about the relationship between scholarship and spirituality. It was a regular complaint in early Spurgeonic rhetoric that there was too much stress on scholarship in the seminary training offered for ministry. ‘Collegiate training’, George Rogers noted in 1866, ‘had hitherto been limited to a particular class of candidates, and to a particular kind and amount of education… The literary attainments of our ministers, it has been said, must advance with the literature of the age.’ Rogers asked if students trained in this ethos were known to have more impact as ministers and he answered with a resounding ‘No!’ It was against this background that the College had been formed and had developed – it was claimed – as a ‘new method of collegiate training, better adapted to the real wants of the age’. 25 Many of the College students in the early decades planted new Baptist churches.26 One of Spurgeon’s passionate concerns was to reach the working classes. ‘The language of half our pulpits’, he pronounced in 1870, ‘is alienating the working classes from public worship’, and in typical style he stated: ‘Now the devil does not care for your dialectics, and eclectic homiletics, or Germanic objectives and subjectives; but pelt him with Anglo-Saxon in the name of God, and he will shift his quarters.’27 From the beginning of the College’s life, as David Bebbington puts it, there was ‘no attempt to compete for scholarly distinctions or to turn theology from a vocational into an academic subject’.28 Yet the College did not see careful scholarship and spirituality as in complete conflict. Indeed in 1870, with the overstatement to which he was prone, Spurgeon lamented the ‘unlettered condition’ of many people in England and blamed the poor English educational system, which was, he considered, far behind that in Scotland.29 W.Y. Fullerton (who was a student at the College, then a pastor-evangelist and finally Home Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society), in describing the Friday afternoons Spurgeon spent with the College students, recalled that Spurgeon would read from shapers of English literature such as John Milton, William Johnson, Christian Spiritual Formation in the Church and Classroom (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1989) and also J H Leith, Crisis in the Church (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), esp chapters 3-5. Johnson is a Methodist and Leith a Presbyterian. 25 S and T, January 1866, pp. 41-3. For more on the ‘real’ work, as understood by Rogers and others, see M J Quicke and I M Randall, ‘“The Real Wants of the Age”: Spurgeon’s College, London’, American Baptist Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 2 (1999), pp. 118-30. 26 I S Drummond, ‘The Spurgeon Legacy’, CNAA BA Dissertation (1990), p. 44. This dissertation has a detailed analysis of the church planting strategy and achievements of Spurgeon. 27 S and T, April 1871, p. 218; cf. AP, 1870, pp. 5-6. Also see D W Bebbington, ‘Spurgeon and the Common Man’, Baptist Review of Theology, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1995), pp. 63-75. 28 D W Bebbington, ‘Spurgeon and British Evangelical Theological Education’, in D G Hart and R A Mohler, Jr., eds., Theological Education in the Evangelical Tradition (1996), pp. 219-20. 29 AP, 1870, p. 12.