Theological education has become an exotic and mysterious enterprise, at least to the general public. Most Americans think seldom of theological seminaries, if at all, and most conceive of them as something like graduate schools for religious professionals--teaching religious people to do whatever it is that religious people do.

Even inside the church, some confusion about theological education clouds the picture. Laypersons often assume that the seminary exists as a factory to turn out preachers--freshly minted and ready for immediate call--ready to be wound up and set in motion. The view from the pew is of interest, for it reveals the widespread impression that seminaries can do everything necessary for the preparation of ministers, even if the churches have given little attention to their own responsibility.

The most malignant confusion about theological education exists within the seminaries, and is writ large across the accrediting agencies and coalitions of seminaries. This is not a recent development. Writing in 1954, H. Richard Niebuhr found little clarity as he presented a survey of theological education in America: "Great confusion prevails in some quarters about theological education. What, it is asked, is the meaning of this ministry? For what purpose are we educating? The situation in some circles of theological educators seems to be similar to the one found among certain foreign missionaries and sponsors of foreign missions. They know what they are doing is important, but an understanding of the strategy of their work, a relatively precise and definite understanding of its meaning, is lacking."

Richard Niebuhr, like his brother Reinhold, was one of the paladins of American Protestantism at mid-century. The confusion he found among theological educators was, he noted, the same as that found among missionaries. They were not at all certain of their mission, their task, or their message.

Liberal Protestantism had lost confidence in the Bible, in the Gospel, and in the unique mission of the church. Progressively, its theological schools grew less and less theological; its missionaries grew less and less evangelistic; its bureaucracies grew larger and more powerful, and theological education became the engine for doctrinal dissipation, moral relativism, cultural revolution, and the death of once-great denominations.

Evangelicals had better pay close attention to this pattern. This kind of alarm is often met with bemusement and dismissed as hyperbole, but the nagging reality of what theological seminaries can become and can destroy is affirmed by history and seen in the ruins of churches once faithful, now empty.

In reality, the very pattern so easily traced within liberal Protestantism is increasingly evident among evangelicals as well. The same compromises are demanded; the subtle concessions are rewarded. We dare not deny the obvious. Some evangelicals now present the arguments once made by liberals--only a half-century delayed.