Transcript
Scott Anderson: Paul, one of the chapters in your book is entitled "The Missing Community" and in that chapter, you kind of lay out some of your concerns about highly individualized spirituality or a highly privatized spiritual life that many pastors feel isolated and sometimes then, even embrace that isolation and they just live very, kind of, out of the public eye, so to speak.
When Seminary Becomes Your Spiritual Community
And you note that some of that conditioning is learned in seminary, some of their academic training where a non-local church setting became sort of the locus of their spiritual community in their life. And seminaries can do that and even other para-church type ministries where leaders work can become the center of their spiritual community. Why is that such a danger and how do we break that cycle and really function as joints and ligaments as a local church for pastors?
Paul Tripp: Well, I think that there are big, huge cultural things that I'd like to say and move down more to the specific, but the hugest cultural thing is the unique form of western culture Christianity. If you take an archetype of Western culture that we all love is the self-made man. It's the individual grit. I faced it, I did it. It's Frank Sinatra singing, "I did it my way," and we love that heroic thing.
If you look at that from a biblical standpoint, you'd have to argue that a self-made man is always poorly made because we weren't designed to live that way; but there is a privatized "Jesus and me" form of Christianity that is very popular in western culture that's just not biblical. It's not "Jesus and me".
Two Essential Communities
It's "I've been called to these two essential communities, community with God -- oh, by the way, God doesn't just do community, He is a community, so that's interesting -- so community with God and then, community with other people and I'm only where I was hardwired to be when those two communities are vibrantly living in in my heart.
Now, what's the weird culture of seminary? I mean, I have no problem with academizing the faith. I have no problem with people are going to be in ministry to learn the theology of scripture well and to develop facility, but it's not a church; and that sort of "I sit in my desk. I learned this body of information. Nobody around me knows me at all. They don't know me".
I mean, some seminary situation, they may not even know my name. It's the most individualized and personal thing. That environment cannot be a replacement of the church, which is the locus of this Christianity that is deeply relational where I can't say to another person any more than my hand can say to my eye, "I don't need you."
Needing Others Is Not Weakness
For me to say whatever level I am that I don't need other human beings in my life is a statement of gospel irrationality. It's just not true. It's a delusion. And so, to the degree that the academic environment allows me to be comfortable with matriculating in Christianity unknown, to that degree, it's harmed me.
Now, let's talk about the culture. If you would go back to seminary culture a hundred, a hundred fifty years ago, every professor was a former pastor, every professor was a church man. But with the specialization of theological education, what began to happen is people got into the classroom because they were experts in their field and so, because the people now who are teaching seminary students haven't come out of the church, what lives in the classroom is a desire to make you an expert in this area of study, but not passion for the life and ministry of local church.
So less and less does a seminar classroom feel anything remotely like what the church is like, but I get comfortable with that being my Christian community and I carry that into my relationship to the church; and I live this privatized, individualized form of Christianity which, again, just can't work.
