It's Not Vegas, but...(Part 3 of 3)

Maybe I'm the only person who thinks this is funny, but I had to chuckle to myself when I was standing in Westminster Seminary's bookstore and saw the Greek New Testaments for sale that you see in the above picture. On the sales sticker, it said "NOW WITH NEWLY PUBLISHED PAPYRI!" kinda like the kind of sticker you would expect to see on a cereal box advertising a free action figure at the bottom of the box that conned kids into buying the cereal. Only instead of an action figure, here you get an expanded textual apparatus. Theology geek heaven indeed.

Anywho, I did have one final thought about the Seminary that I thought was blogworthy. Actually, it was the one thing I found disappointing about the Seminary. I was thumbing through the school's catalogue, and found a mere two - TWO! - apologetics courses available. "What that about?" I thought to myself. OK, I know that Westminster in California has a reputation for being focused on training pastors and is not as focused on scholarship as Westminster in Philadelphia (where they have reams of systematics and apologetics courses). And, yes, this is a good thing, because we need more people to flock God's sheep than we need navel-gazing academics and ivory tower scholars. But two things about this: 1. we still need the latter, even if not as numerous as the former, especially here on the West Coast and 2. those training for the pastorate need grounding in Reformed apologetics in order to pastor the flock effectively.

This neglect is sad, because John Frame had faithfully and ably carried VanTil's torch there for almost two decades at Westminster West. I don't have any pictures of Frame, but if I did I'd probably have a poster of him hanging on my wall like a kid would hang a poster of his favorite rock band. He became this theology geek's hero after I read his writings that really opened up VanTil's thought to me, and after reading his "Doctrine of the Knowledge of God" cover to cover. Sadly, he left to teach at RTS. According to the people at the Seminary I talked to, and according to this interview with Frame, there were "personal issues and theological ones" that prompted this move.

So with the apologetics guru gone, what happened? Well, on paper Michael Horton is now the professor of apologetics. Now, don't get me wrong: Horton is a good guy, and he is indeed good at what he does. I read him with great profit, and enjoy listening to the White Horse Inn radio program. But he is good at critiquing the trends, theology, and practice of the professing church, not interacting with with unbelieving academia on matters of philosophy and epistemology. "The Modern Mind" is currently the only apologetics course he teaches.

Pastors need to be trained to give a reason for the hope that is within them, and to tell their flocks how to do likewise. I think there is a sad deficiency if a distinctly Reformed presuppositional apologetic is not made a higher priority in the training of pastors, whether at WTS-CA or anywhere else.

Category: Theoblogia