The End of Theological Education by Ted A. Smith

Fed-Ex, Amazon, USPS, and the other delivery services make frequent stops at the Café, and the books get piled on my desk while the drivers stop for coffee. As the house reviewer, I generally read all of them, though there is often a lag before I can post a review/discussion on the Café site, and sometimes on Amazon’s review site. I read peer reviews of books before I order a new one, and generally that works out well. But it does happen that occasionally I read a book I don’t fully understand, or I find difficulty in conveying it accurately and attractively to Café readers.
 
It took me a while to get the drift of The End of Theological Education [2023] by Ted A. Smith, a Presbyterian minister and highly respected professor, author, and academic dean, now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Divinity [Emory University in Atlanta.]. The light finally clicked when I realized that Dr. Smith was attempting to address for his Protestant tradition what Roman Catholic thinkers/academics have been anguishing over ours—what ever happened to our churches since World War II or Vatican II, and what can we do about our mass exodus [no pun intended.] It later dawned on me that earlier this year I had written an Amazon review of the Catholic theologian Massimo Fagioli’s work on the decline of Catholic education in the U.S. [See review here.]
 
Smith’s title to his work here, The End of Theological Education, can be taken in two ways. Is he addressing the purpose or ends of theological study, or is he preparing us for the funeral of the sacred sciences in their traditional form? If the latter, this would be a massive loss to all Christianity, including the Catholic community. Mainstream Protestantism has a long history in the United States and Europe of pastoral ministry and theological excellence. We forget that almost a century ago Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu [1943] allowed Catholic scholars to use the methods of Biblical research that Protestant scholars had developed as early as 1900. I myself begin my personal biblical thinking and study using the “form and redaction critical methods” developed by Protestant scholars, particularly Germans, in the first half of the twentieth century and taught in my Catholic seminary in the late 1960’s and beyond.
 
Smith, a devout Presbyterian, employs what one might call a “sociological overview” of Protestantism in America, e.g., how did Presbyterians, Methodists, and other churches organize themselves in this country, maintain healthy congregations, and establish strong roots through theological colleges and seminaries. A major factor was timing. Protestantism arrived on our eastern shores of the thirteen colonies long before Roman Catholicism, and it arrived energized by John Wesley and the Methodist revival. While the new American Constitution established separation of church and state, this separation applied only at the federal level; post-colonial state governments still permitted established religions in individual states. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island were three states where the state paid for the upkeep and salary of the [Protestant] pastors. But when the public University of Virginia was established in 1819, Thomas Jefferson threatened to withdraw his sponsorship/endowment because the state planned to charter the school as a religious institution. By the 1820’s, however, the principle of separation of church and state carried the day even at the local level.
 
Through the first half of the nineteenth century the influx of settlers to America was primarily European and Protestant. Minnesota, for example, was a favorite settlement of Lutherans. Mission country extended from east of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. New Protestant seminaries turned out pastors to establish congregations even in small towns. The local churches, in turn, nurtured themselves through numerous parish societies, an excellent model that met civil needs of order and religious needs of catechesis and common Bible study and prayer. Roman Catholic immigrants, for the most part, came later, at a time when large cities were well established: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. There the need was cheap labor. Immigrants were advised to immediately see the pastor for aid and the ward boss for a job.
 
It is not hard to see that the need for Protestant pastors would serve as the impetus for the development of seminaries and religion establishment universities. Increase Mather, Cotton Mather’s brother, was the first recipient of the Doctor of Divinity Degree from Harvard University—in 1692! St. Mary’s Catholic Seminary in Baltimore, the first U.S. Catholic seminary, opened its doors in 1792, and it owned slaves. Smith emphasizes that Protestant seminaries succeeded in large part because of the religious tradition’s then broad understanding of ministry. Protestant seminaries for mission work formed what we would call today social workers and case managers as well as preachers to serve the needs of their congregations and the broader needs of the towns in which they were settled. Thus, across many denominations the “Social Gospel” movement stepped forward to help the poor and kept alive the long tradition of community service; Lyndon Johnson, according to one biographer, was religiously influenced in his youth toward social justice, and of course is famous today for Head Start and Medicare in the 1960’s.   
 
Demographics through World War II reflected the U.S. as a predominantly Protestant country; the election of Catholic John Kennedy to the American Presidency in 1960 was not without considerable controversy. However, after World War II the GI Bill allowed millions of blue-collar Catholic veterans to seek admission to Catholic colleges and others across the country. My father, who mustered out of the service to manage a small country movie house, went to business school in Buffalo on the GI Bill and ultimately became a hospital administrator in 1961. Stories like these are too numerous to count. Regarding church life, while it is true that “all ships rise at high tide,” some were rising ahead of the tide and others were taking on water. Smith devotes considerable time and space to the decline of postwar Protestantism [and religion in general] to “individualization.”
 
It is hard to precisely define the word, though Smith treats it at length [pp. 65-93]. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary example uses the word in a positive sense: “Teachers should individualize their lessons to address differences in their students.” But many observers of religion, not just our author, saw a profound shift from organized churches centered upon God, family, and community, to a dangerous extreme of individualism. For congregations, whose social underpinnings rested upon unified social faith and works, the post-World War II drift toward self-determination of faith would obviously present a major blow to a long tradition of practice. “I am a spiritual person; I just don’t believe in religions” did not become a slogan in the 2020’s; it probably summarized the thinking of Renaissance and Enlightened men of letters, Thomas Jefferson being a good example. But particularly after the two world wars and the Holocaust, no Western Christian religion could be the Biblical “city on the hill” of virtue, and it is hard to criticize any sincere person from despairing of organized religion in the post-war twentieth century.
 
Denominations bound by familial groups and strong bonds would suffer significantly. Smith expresses concern that the post-war Protestant seminaries were not facing the crisis of shrinking denominations. For one thing, divinity school faculties still maintained the unspoken but real principle of “publish or parish,” i.e., academic tenure and reputation still reigned supreme in twentieth century institutions which still awarded professional certifications [degrees] with the same pride as medical and law school. Protestant seminaries were producing future academic cleric-preachers when the cry on the streets called for more soup kitchen clerics.
 
Ironically, Roman Catholics, in its postwar mea culpa, convoked a universal rethinking of its mission in the world, the Ecumenical Council Vatican II [1962-1965]. Having spent centuries developing theology and pastoral practice centered around saving one’s soul in the solitary confines of the confessional, the world’s bishops threw open the windows for fresh air, or in Pope John XXIII’s famous call, “aggiornamento!” The thrust of the postconciliar decades was a more tangible community experience, from worship to social outreach. For years now I have heard Catholics disgruntled with the Vatican II reforms complain that “we’re turning into Protestants.”

There is truth to that. When the first English Masses were convoked in the mid-1960’s, we turned to the Lutherans for “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and other hymns with manageable arrangements that even men can sing. We drank from the cup at communion time; we elected parish councils; our bishops began meeting in synods twice annually. We even celebrated Penance in groups outside the confessional, at least for a while.
 
And yet, no one can say that 2025 is a halcyon year for Catholics generally. Vatican II concluded 60 years ago. Have our reforms made us “better,” however one chooses to define that word? American Catholicism is more divided now than at any time in my lifetime, except that now we are publicly enmeshed in ugly partisan secular politics. Ted Smith does not have magic answers for the turmoil of the times, but his book does remind those of us in other Christian communities that renewal is hard. Hopefully, the seminaries in his faith tradition are teaching the true cost of discipleship, as I hope the seminaries in​ my faith community are doing likewise.