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Dalen Jackson's Installation Address PDF Print E-mail
Comments on the Occasion of my Installation as Academic Dean Baptist Seminary of Kentucky
Dalen Jackson

Expressions of Thanks
Thank you.  To my family, for your support and love that has allowed me to pursue this calling, thank you.  To those of you who have helped form me along the way as my teachers, mentors, colleagues, and academic leaders who gave me the opportunity to practice this calling, thank you.  To my students, who have humored me and challenged me and trusted me and grown with me, thank you.  To the churches that have supported and welcomed and partnered with BSK, enabling and sharing in my calling, thank you.  To the trustees of BSK, for your unqualified affirmation and support, thank you.  Most of all, to our President Greg Earwood, whose contributions to the life of this seminary as well as to my own calling as a minister and educator are innumerable and frankly extraordinary beyond description, and who in all honesty was the real first academic dean of Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, thank you.

A Vision for BSK
I would like briefly to say a few words about my vision for what we will teach and how we will teach here at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky and some of the challenges I believe we face as we work toward the fulfillment of that vision.  I do feel a bit presumptuous sharing my vision of the Seminary; so many others—including many of you—have dreamed and envisioned and willed the seminary into existence, and I feel very fortunate to have been one of the beneficiaries of that foresight.  And for those of you who are my colleagues and my students here or even former students, much of my vision for the Seminary will sound familiar to you, as I have so often addressed these topics while we were eating lunch, or in class when I was supposed to be talking about something else, or in any number of informal conversations and harangues.  Indeed, this vision is still evolving, and I look forward to the days and months and years ahead as the vision continues to unfold within this community.

Church and Academy.  First, and foremost, I believe that the Seminary is here for the sake of and in service to the church.  For those of us in higher education, this immediately creates a tension because our vocation has been defined to a significant degree not by the church but by the scholarly academy.  And so one of our most important challenges in terms of what and how we teach will be to navigate this tension between our need to serve the church and our compulsion to serve the academy.

As we prepare students for ministry, we must constantly and always be mindful of the contexts in which they will live out their calling to ministry, among people in our churches most of whom have never parsed a Hebrew or Greek word, never written or even read an exegesis paper, never followed a lectionary, at least not that they were aware of, never read Karl Barth, and often don’t know Martin Luther from Martin Luther King.  But they do genuinely believe in God, and they’re looking for guidance as they seek to know what is good, and what does God require of them.  They need encouragement to reflect on what it means to be faithful to Christ in their homes and at work and in their communities and in this fragile world, what it means to live in the grace of God in times of joy and sorrow, in contentment and unrest.  Anything and everything our students learn must be intrinsically connected to those contexts.

Now, at its best, academic scholarship interrogates the way we have traditionally acted in those contexts, the beliefs we have held, the frameworks that have shaped our thoughts, and the primordial attachments that have unconsciously shaped our allegiances and our deepest commitments.  In this pursuit there is great value.  But there is danger, as well, if this academic scholarship becomes an end in itself.

Many of us experienced seminary in the past as a place that presented a vast body of knowledge to be mastered—to be objectified and analyzed and subjected to critical inquiry.  And, frankly, this felt good.  We realized that our folk ways of interpreting scripture and construing our understandings of God were full of inconsistencies and sometimes even bigotry, and that many of our assumptions about God and the Bible would not stand up to the scrutiny of our modern understandings of the world.

Our systems of higher education represent a whole industry dedicated to this critical inquiry, to scientific and philosophical scrutiny of every aspect of, in this case, theological knowledge.  Now, this theological/religious studies branch of the larger academic-industrial complex offers a great many valuable resources to us, but it also can be a place of great self-absorption, a black hole that can demand endless time and energies in the pursuit of ever narrower and ever more-fragmented knowledge.  And even the body of knowledge that emerges from this academic-industrial complex is often subtly skewed by the interests of the various divisions within the academy to justify our own existence and the interests of the individual members of these guilds to demonstrate the productivity of our own analyses and critique and synthesis of knowledge.

The tension between being able to provide practical, off-the-shelf wisdom for our churches and mastering these vast stores of information available from academic scholarship as well as the methodologies that generate them—in three years, no less—offers a complex challenge.  I don’t have a final answer to this challenge, but I would like very briefly to explore some underlying tensions that I think will help us think about how to address it.

Local vs Global.  For one, there is the tension between local and global theological perspectives.  As we incline ourselves to ministering in our churches here in Kentucky and in our surrounding states, we have to recognize that the identities and the concerns and the rhythms of those churches are overwhelmingly shaped by local forces.  The late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil once suggested that “All politics is local,” and so, too, in our churches all theology is local.  That’s not to say these identities and concerns and rhythms of our churches are not shaped by a variety of forces, ancient and modern, many from popular culture, and from a wide range of traditions.  But most of the folks in our churches don’t think much about the forces that have shaped their churches and their ways of thinking about God.  They have experienced God on Sunday morning in their own sanctuaries and sometimes on Wednesday nights, and during the rush of revivals and the silence of retreats, and in mission service that has stirred their hearts.  They know God in a genuine sense from these particular, culturally framed, mostly very local, experiences of God, and the leadership they are looking for from a seminary is people who can sustain and build on the very best of those experiences.

Academic scholarship, of course, tends to specialize in global thinking.  The modernist impulse that drives much scholarship seeks answers that are applicable in all situations for all people at all times.  And so the answers that scholars often come to in regard to questions of biblical interpretation or theological belief or moral and ethical decision-making may feel foreign to the people in our churches.  After all, scholars have sifted information from far and wide, considered multiple perspectives, and devoted years to careful analysis of issues that church people might never have questioned or explored at all.  

Sometimes the scholarly tendency is to look at the churches’ perspectives dismissively, valuing only the rational, information-rich approach scholars have applied to the questions.  Sometimes the churches’ tendency is to look at the scholars’ perspectives dismissively, valuing only the practical wisdom that has allowed their own communities to maintain a comfortable equilibrium.  As a seminary, we must not be merely the mediator of this dispute, but we must find constructive avenues where the best of both traditions can meet and benefit from each other’s strengths.

Oral vs. Written.  Another, perhaps related, aspect of this tension between church and academy may be tied up in the differences between primarily oral ways of communicating and knowing and written and typographic ways.  The earliest apostles of the Christian message expressed their understandings of the risen Christ in an environment influenced by writing but still largely oral.  They chose their words with great attention to the way they sounded and persuaded and conjured up powerful images.  They chose words and phrases they could easily remember as they repeated their story, words and phrases which also lingered in the memories of their hearers.  They incorporated already well-known images from the Jewish scriptures as well, turned of course in such a way as to fulfill their own purposes of demonstrating God’s unbroken pattern of activity down through the ages and now in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Even in their written versions, as the books we know as the New Testament, this earliest Christian message retained much of its oral character.

As these texts were incorporated as witnesses to the rule of faith in the increasingly literary deliberations of the early fathers of the church, the message took on a more interiorized character, with more concern for precision and detail.  Writing allows us to systematize and analyze significantly larger and more complex bodies of information.  And so there undoubtedly has always been some distance between the official and literary theological formulations of the church and the popular understandings formulated and sustained through oral and visual traditions.  In the more ancient traditions of the church, for example, we see this in popular devotions such as the rosary, the veneration of saints, the stations of the cross, and various prayers that have continued to stand alongside the more official doctrines and sacraments of the church.  

The introduction of the printing press increased literacy exponentially and hastened not only the reformation and its focus on the biblical texts, but also an increasing emphasis on rational thinking in all areas of human knowledge.  In our modern theological scholarship we are heirs to an enlightenment tradition adopted by mainline American churches, a tradition of intense analysis of vast quantities of ideas with an increasingly global perspective.  As I have already suggested, this kind of thinking offers a great many correctives that benefit us and our churches when our local, seemingly common-sense and simple ways of construing the gospel actually begin to reflect more our own cultural values and biases at best, and at worst become a means of legitimizing our privilege and power in a world of much injustice.

Still, traditions rooted in passionate preaching and folksy teaching have continued to thrive in our churches, strengthened by the advent of the secondary orality of mass media, with radio and TV preachers and best-selling authors serving up mass quantities of images that define who God is and what it means to be faithful Christians. These largely oral formulations of the gospel conjure up visceral images of the faith that often overpower analytical reflection on theology, or at least limit it to a subservient and compliant role.

Of course, many of us first came to know the God of Jesus Christ under the influence of those kinds of images.  At Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, we must find ways to value both popular oral types of understandings of the Christian message and analytical, rational understandings.  In biblical studies, studies of church history, theology, preaching, missions, pastoral care, education, in all areas of the life of the seminary we must pay heed to good, sound, theology and theology that sounds good and resonates with lived, human experience.

So how do we hold together church and academy, local and global perspectives, oral and written styles of knowing?  In each case, we must find ways to help each enrich the other.

Well, first, we must do it within a community, no matter how much we value certain traditions of individualism within Baptist life.  We must seek out and learn from Baptist models of valuing community and the healthy and robust incorporation of tradition from the broad witness of the historic church.  We must build bridges between our churches and our scholarly communities, two-way bridges, with room for conversation and fellowship.  

We must never stop listening carefully to what our churches need, to what they say, to how they feel, to what they believe.  At the same time, we cannot overlook the tendency we all have in our local traditions to domesticate the gospel message to serve our own purposes.  Academic scholarship can provide a global perspective that helps us identify our own self-centeredness and our blithe acceptance of an inheritance of privilege and dominance that may well not represent the servanthood that God has called us to in Christ.

Finally, the focal point for our engagement between church and academy must not merely be an exchange of information.  Instead, we will do well to continue and recommit ourselves to a focus on forming and reforming our identities and our understandings of what it means to live faithfully as Christians and to lead others into lives of faithfulness to God in Christ.  The “spiritual” formation classes that anchor our curriculum must not be the only place that formation of our hearts and minds is taking place.  Information will have a place in all of our courses, but formation must be central.  If that information is merely stored away in a compartment of our brains separate from the parts that engage our will and our heart and our spirit, it has no more value than a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

And so we focus not so much on “understanding” material in any merely cognitive way, but on habits and practices that grow out of a deeper engagement with ideas and information, habits and practices thoroughly imbued with theological reflection and spiritual discernment that reason alone is not able to provide.  

Books, information, ideas, all will inform us on our journey.  Our traditions, the wisdom of our communities, our intuitions and even our imaginations will also guide us.  But let us listen and wait for the very spirit of God to form us, in God’s own image, into the likeness of Jesus Christ.
 
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