We recieve quite a few search hits either looking for seminaries or asking about them. As a person who is wieghing seminary vs secular NT PhD programs, I wanna ask our readers and other authors a few questions on this topic.
1) What are some good seminaries? What are some ones that you would recomend staying away from? Why?
2) What do you look for in a seminary?
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5 Comments
hmmm…how about NEGST (Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology)?? I hear that it’s pretty good. I guess we’ll be able to tell you more next year… :).
I’m going to back up and ask you a few questions first if that’s alright.
I’m assuming you want to end up with a career in Academics, correct? And we’re talking specifically PhD programs right?
If you want to go the academics route, where would you want to teach/work? Do you want to work in a state school? seminary? liberal arts college? private Christian college? Do you want a job where you do lots of research, or focus more on teaching? Further, what do you want to focus on? What could you see yourself writing a dissertation on?
These are pretty important questions that (IMO) have a pretty solid impact on the kind of schools you should pursue. If you want to work at a school like Southwest Baptist, that means you don’t apply to "liberal" places like Harvard or seminaries associated with "liberal" denominations like UCC or PCUSA. Likewise, if you want to teach at a state school, a degree from most seminaries won’t get you far.
Your interests are also incredibly important. If you want to work on Nag Hammadi texts, then you don’t apply to any seminaries, and you don’t apply to schools like Brown or Vanderbilt because they just won’t be able to help you. Likewise, if you’re interested in say text-criticism, don’t apply to Harvard because no one here would be able to help you. One of the big questions departments ask themselves when looking at PhD applications is whether they could even help a student do what they want to do. Hopefully you’ve already determined a positive answer to that question before you even apply to a school.
Anyway, let me know your answers to some of the questions above and I could likely help you explore some options on some schools. My knowledge of seminaries isn’t as strong as my knowledge of the major secualar programs, so I’m sure there are others who could help suppliment my advice with information on that end.
Honzo,
great question. Dan and I have asked ourselves the same question. so far, we’re looking at http://www.ses.edu. it has great faculty and it’s afffordable.
The problem for me is that I already have a huge student loan from my business degree. Wish I had known about Christian apologetics 10 years ago. Never too late though.
SES also has online classes - you can get a Masters in apologetics online. Imagine Normal Giesler grading your paper….
Trinity International is good too. It has a bioethics degree -
http://www.tiu.edu/divinity/
is the nairobi school for real? That may be really affordable.
Cheapham,
I don’t really care much about research, my heart lies in teaching. My interests are varied, but I am really digging these thomas texts I am looking at right now. This has perked my interest in Rice and April Deconnick, who has done a lot of work on Thomas texts and I really appreciate her approach to the texts and to scholarship in general.
I’d love to teach at a Bible College or Seminary but you have to pick the right denominational schools and if you have any good original ideas - see what is happening with Enns. The refusal to critically examine their presuppositions scares me away from this avenue.
Tiffany,
I must say, it is one of the places I am thinking about looking at.
E.I.
I have looked long and hard at SES a few times. I have a high level of interest in Christian ethics and “new apologetics.”
I’m doing the same stuff, although I’m interested in studying World Religions, religious diversity, and Christian reponses.
I think I would rather teach at the Bible College/Seminary level and that points me more towards schools like Southern Baptist or Trinity International. The Southern Baptist seminaries scare me off a bit, just because I disagree with some of the approaches to things like evangelism and the more extreme fundamentalist tendencies.
Location is pretty big, too, as my family and I don’t want to move too far away from the rest of our family, but it looks more and more that we may have to because of my interests. Close schools would be places like Duke, UNC, UVA and that type, but the seminaries I’ve looked at don’t fit or are further away.
Long story short, I’m right there with you.
peace