The Challenge of Theological Education in the 21st Century

　　President Cho, trustees, faculty, staff, students, and honored guests. It is an honor and a privilege to share this day with you and to bring you greetings from President William D. Underwood of Mercer University.

　　New beginnings are always important, and I am confident that the new beginning we celebrate today, the inauguration of our friend, colleague, and mentor, the esteemed president Dr. Joshua Cho, will mark an era of advance in the history of the Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary that will shape its character for the rest of this century. President Cho brings to this office a keen mind trained here at HKBTS, and at Yale University Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, two of the finest schools in the United States. He is a dedicated minister, a distinguished teacher, an experienced administrator, and a visionary leader. A loving husband and father, and a devout Christian, President Cho has been uniquely led to the challenges that lie before him and before HKBTS, so what we bear witness to today is the movement of God’s spirit among us in raising up a new leader for the Seminary as it fulfills its mission by preparing men and women called of God to reach Hong Kong, Asia, and all the world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

I. The Theological Foundation for Theological Education

　　Theology is technically “the study of God,” and theological education is grounded in God’s redemptive plan for the ages. God called Abraham to become the father of a people through whom God could bless all the families of the earth. The covenant with Abraham was a two-sided covenant. God promised to bless Abraham with people (the father of a great nation) and land (the promised land), but at the same time God charged Israel with the responsibility of being a blessing to all peoples (Gen 12:1-3). There are two threads to the divine mission: blessing and redeeming.

　　God took a second great step by responding to the cry of the people of Israel in Egypt. God called Moses to lead the people out of bondage. Then, at Sinai, God gave Moses a message for the people. They would know God through their history, through their own experience, and through divinely inspired teachings. Because they would come to know God as their Redeemer and Sustainer, they were to live among the peoples of the world and introduce others to God.

　　Sin led to the division of the kingdom and finally to the Babylonian captivity. During this captivity, a man of God pointed to the promised Redeemer in the four Suffering Servant passages (Isa 42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50:4-9; 52:13-53:12). The references to the Servant probably begin with the nation in mind in Isaiah 42 and later refer to the remnant. However, the Servant is clearly personal in Isaiah 53. The fulfillment of God’s calling requires that God’s people “bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 42:1) and establish “justice in the earth” (Isa 42:4). The prophet recognized that it would be “too light a thing” for the people of the covenant merely to “raise up the tribes of Jacob”; their calling was to be “a light to the nations” (Isa 49:6), so that “all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God” (Isa 52:10).

　　When the fullness of time came, God sent forth His Son (Gal. 4:4) into the world. Jesus Christ was the agent of the Kingdom of God, the divine Word that became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Jesus was the climax of God’s redeeming activity under the old covenant (Matt 3:15), and he carried on to completion what God had begun with Abraham. He initiated the new covenant, and rather than a land and a nation Jesus called people from all nations to the kingdom of God. But the purpose was the same: to call a holy people through whom God can bless all the peoples of the earth.

　　The life and teaching of Jesus made clear that the love of God was always leading on, reaching out to those in need. In John 12, when the Greeks requested to see him, Jesus pondered the meaning of their coming in relation to his mission. This encounter led Jesus to express the basic principle of his life, which must also be that of his disciples: “a grain of wheat falling into the ground abides alone if it does not die; if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” Jesus chose the way of self-sacrifice, which was also the way to fulfill his vocation. To live for the glory of God—that is, to live so as to make known the very character of God—was the purpose of his life. He taught his disciples that this was also to be the purpose of their lives because to be his disciple is to share his mission.

　　After the resurrection, Jesus met the eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee, where he affirmed, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me” (Matt 28:18). On the basis of this reality, he pointed them to the mission of the Church, which we may translate, “Going therefore, disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you …” (Matt 28:19-20). There is only one imperative here; it is “disciple.” The going, baptizing, and teaching are all aspects of that imperative. We disciple by teaching others “to observe all that he commanded us” and in this way to come to the knowledge and fellowship of God.

　　The apostle Paul articulated the fullest understanding of God’s eternal purpose in the Epistle to the Ephesians. Ephesians 1:3-14 is one sentence in Greek, but it introduces a synopsis of God’s plan for the ages, “the mystery of his will” (1:9), unmatched in human experience. Almost as a refrain after three stanzas, Paul repeats three times the purpose of human life, to live for “the praise of his glory” (vv. 6, 12, 14). God’s purpose was set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him (1:10). Christ is the Head of the Church (1:20), “which is his body” (1:22), “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:22). Paul’s great insight is that Christ came to create one new humanity in himself, abolishing the barriers that separate Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, thus making peace. The Christian’s purpose and goal in life, as here set forth by Paul, is to bring all persons to know God through Jesus and someday to see them stand alongside Christ fully mature in his likeness.

　　Theological education, therefore, is the equipping of men and women called of God for the mission of the church, and that mission is grounded in the history of God’s redemptive activity.

II. Challenges Facing Theological Education in the 21st Century

　　Theological education faces unique challenges in our generation, however, advances in technology, communication, and travel have resulted in nations and societies becoming increasingly interrelated, with inevitable tensions and conflicts.

　　Materialism is rampant, and rapid sociological changes and perceived threats to long-held values and traditions have produced a world-wide wave of political and religious fundamentalism as people seek to perpetuate their way of life and view all threats to it as evil. At the same time that Christianity is threatened by the hardening of its tradition so that it cannot adapt to change, however, it faces the threat of relativism which can dilute its good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, so that it has nothing to offer the peoples of the world. As Stephen Shoemaker has said, “the world is now too small for anything but truth and too dangerous for anything but love.”

　　Theological education in the 21st century will have to judiciously enter into dialogue with other religious traditions while obeying the command to make disciples and teach all that Jesus commanded. We will have to dare to hear others as we want them to hear us, to learn from other faiths without compromising our own, and offer our good news in the confidence that what God did in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was unique in all human religious experience.

　　Every generation has developed new models and structures for the church. The early church started with charismatic leadership (apostles, prophets, teachers), but found that it needed the structure of elders, pastors, and deacons to protect it from false teachings. The history of Christianity in Europe witnessed the development of the Roman Church with all its tradition and hierarchy, monasteries that preserved Christian learning through the dark ages, and the Reformation that breathed new life into the church. In our own time the church has taken many forms, from prayer and Bible study groups to megachurches, with pastoral models that range from shepherds to chief executive officers. Often missionaries have carried patterns for the church based on their home societies, but now every nation and people must find appropriate models and structures for the church. Theological education should aid in this process by teaching the mission and basic elements of congregational life (worship, teaching, fellowship, ministry, and evangelism) so that emerging models can be envisioned and refined.

　　One of the paradoxes of our time is that people are hungry for spirituality yet suspicious of organized religion. At the same time, materialism, secularism, and relativism prove to be empty philosophies of life, and there is that divinely shaped void within us that cries out for an experiential knowledge of God.

　　We live in a noisy world, however, and the Christian message must compete with all the other voices in the media and the marketplace today. Here the witness of Christian communities is important because through its corporate witness the church, when it is faithful to the gospel, can have an incarnational presence. To be effective in our secular cultures, the church needs ministers who are intellectually prepared to lead the church, articulate the Christian faith, and engage in dialogue with secular leaders and spokespersons for other religious traditions. Here again, theological education is vital.

　　As we have seen, the prophet Isaiah called Israel to “bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 42:1, 3, 4). The call for justice is an essential part of God’s redemptive work and therefore of the mission of the church. It is also the standard by which the Christian community will be judged in the 21st century. The church will either give voice to the oppressed and marginalized or it will be dismissed as just another organization promoting its own advancement. The church will either make a difference in the world or it will be ignored by those who are looking for something they can believe in, and a cause and a community that can give meaning to life.

　　Never has it been more important for churches, ministers, and individual Christians to model honesty, integrity, and authenticity. We live in an age of suspicion, when every leader and every authority is exposed to public scrutiny. Every Christian whose life is not consistent with the faith we profess exposes all believers to the charge of hypocrisy. Christians can never treat others impersonally, or as means to advance our own individual or congregational ends. Instead, the church needs to offer the one thing it has to offer: a saving knowledge of the love of God revealed in the person of Jesus.

　　Along with the call to justice, the church accomplishes God’s work by bearing witness to God’s love for each and every person. Deeply rooted in Judaism and Christianity is the commitment to the infinite value of the human soul, the belief that every person is a unique and beloved child of God. In his farewell to his disciples on the evening before his death, Jesus said, “By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). The story of John A. Broadus should be repeated as an example for every teacher. Broadus wrote a classic textbook on preaching, A Treatise on the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons (1870), that is still in print over a century after its publication. The manuscript was a compilation of his lectures for his first preaching class, for which he had only one student and he was blind.

III. Conclusion

　　The prophet Habakkuk looked forward to the fulfillment of God’s work, when “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab 2:14). The challenge before us has never been greater, but today we bear witness to the ongoing leadership and empowerment of God’s spirit in our midst, raising up a new leader for the Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary, and new leaders for the church in the 21st century in all of you who are students and faculty here. And so with the apostle Paul we can pray “to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Eph 3:20-21).