Retrospective

This has been the final week before the beginning of the fall semester at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Our faculty has spent most of the week on in-service meetings. These meetings are complicated by the fact that Central Seminary is closely related to both Fourth Baptist Church and Fourth Baptist Christian School. While each of these institutions has its own distinctive mission and purpose, the three together share a common vision and a mutual ethos.

Friday (the day that In the Nick of Time is sent out) will be student orientation. Central Seminary is receiving upwards of twenty new students this year. Times have changed, though, and many of these are enrolling to take programs that are delivered through modular courses. In fact, I’ll only be teaching one semester course during the coming four months, a course in expository preaching. Most of my classroom work takes place in modular offerings these days.

The week has given me reason to reflect upon my own seminary experience. I left for seminary the week after I graduated with my BA from Faith Baptist Bible College. Debbie and I left Ankeny pulling a twelve foot trailer behind our 1976 Chevy Nova. The trailer contained all of our worldly possessions. The little 250 straight-six engine could hardly handle the load, and I had to drive carefully to keep the car from overheating. We spent the night west of Omaha, and as we slept a front swept through. We drove the rest of the way into Denver in a cold rain. The day after we reached Denver I unloaded the trailer in snow—my first experience with the eccentricities of Colorado weather.

Originally, I had not planned to attend seminary. I thought that I had received a decent education at my college (I still think so). I was eager to get into ministry. Seminary seemed like a pointless delay. Then Bryce Augsburger, president of Denver Baptist Theological Seminary, visited our church and gave me just a glimpse at the contribution a bit more education could make. Later, I found myself sitting across the table from a staff member at Faith, debating the merits of seminary. He had never gone beyond college, but he had become fully convinced of the value of graduate-level education. As I recall, I was whining about how long the process would take. His response was to ask, “How long did it take Moses to get ready for his ministry?” That shut me up, at least for the moment.

In the end I compromised. Denver offered a one-year MA program. That’s what I would take, and that is why I found myself unloading a trailer in a June snowstorm.

My problem was that my mind was not yet awake. I was not accustomed to living and working in the world of ideas. I simply did not understand the importance of thinking well and reading broadly. That summer, however, three factors combined to shake me out of my intellectual slumbers.

First, as a graduation present my father had given me a copy of Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There. Reading this book was my first exposure to a Christian interpretation of Western intellectual history. In retrospect, Schaeffer’s discussion was quirky and often skewed, but he did one important thing for me. He gave me permission to be interested in the life of the mind. He began to impress upon me the connection between philosophy, art, and theology, arousing a curiosity that had long been dormant.

Second, I set myself to read through A. H. Strong’s Systematic Theology. This task was facilitated by the fact that I was working as a security guard, which gave me some opportunity to read on the job. Though Strong’s theology was sometimes erroneous, I found myself grappling for the first time with a serious theological writer and thinker. Strong often challenged my assumptions and forced me to think through my reasons. Consequently, my theology began to become my own—and, more to the point, I began to want to make it my own. Furthermore, I again glimpsed how theological ideas are connected, not only to each other and not only to the Bible, but to all ideas in every department of life.

Third, I found two new friends. They were actually old acquaintances who had gone on to study philosophy in a non-Christian environment. We found ourselves drawn to each other by a common and growing love of ideas. I already had a heart for the Lord and for ministry—now I began to see that what I thought would determine how I ministered. I began to understand that people did what they did because they thought what they thought.

By the time I began classes in late August, I had been primed for an experience that I did not know existed. What I found was that seminary learning operated at an entirely different level than undergraduate study. Day by day we were expected to do the very kind of thinking that I had learned to relish over the summer. From the first day at seminary I was pushed and prodded by my professors to question my assumptions, to rise above my prejudices, and to justify my ideas. Furthermore, I was challenged by their example to do my thinking in a atmosphere of love for and dependence upon Him by whom and for whom all things exist.

By the end of the second day I knew that I wanted as much of this as I could get. I began to glimpse just how unready I was to face the choices that I would have to make in real ministry. I began to understand that I needed tools to help me think as well as to help me perform. Before the end of the first week, I had prepaid my tuition through an entire four years of MDiv and ThM education.

Along the way I held pastoral positions in two churches. After graduating, I went on into a senior pastor and then into church planting. In retrospect, not a moment of that time in preparation was wasted. It was not even a luxury. It was a necessity. I genuinely believe that I would have failed if I had gone into pastoral ministry directly from college. Worse yet, I might have succeeded at doing the wrong things.

So I am grateful for friends like David Loops and Mike Hodgin, and later Norm Weiss. I am thankful for professors like Robert Myrant, Charles Hauser, Myron Houghton, Ralph Turk, and Robert Delnay. I am deeply grateful for the sacrifices of those men and women whose contributions made my seminary education possible. Most of all, I am thankful for God’s merciful Providence that put me upon a road that I could not have foreseen and did not know existed.

After years of pastoral ministry, I am now a professor (we’ll overlook that brief stint as an administrator). I don’t claim to be as learned, gifted, or spiritually mature as the people who taught me. Nevertheless, I look forward to having some small part this year in providing some of the tools that future ministers of the gospel will need.

This essay is by Kevin T. Bauder, Research Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary. Not every one of the professors, students, or alumni of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.

O My Soul, What Means This Sadness
John Fawcett (1740–1817)

O my soul, what means this sadness?
Wherefore art thou thus cast down?
Let thy griefs be turn’d to gladness,
Bid thy restless fears be gone;
Look to Jesus
And rejoice in his dear name.

What tho’ Satan’s strong temptations
Vex and grieve thee day by day?
And thy sinful inclinations
Often fill thee with dismay?
Thou shalt conquer,
Thro’ the Lamb’s redeeming blood.

Tho’ ten thousand ills beset thee,
From without and from within,
Jesus saith he’ll ne’er forget thee,
But will save from hell and sin:
He is faithful
To perform his gracious word.

Tho’ distresses now attend thee,
And thou tread’st the thorny road,
His right hand shall still defend thee;
Soon he’ll bring thee home to God!
Therefore praise him—
Praise the great Redeemer’s name.

O that I could now adore him
Like the heavenly host above,
Who for ever bow before him
And unceasing, sing his love!
Happy songsters!
When shall I your chorus join?