WHEELS-OFF NEWS REPORT: DTS Student Arrested After Expressing Pro-Enlightenment Views

(AP—Dallas)-- Dallas Theological Seminary campus police were called to quell a disturbance in TODD Hall late Friday evening following a Theology class in which a student took a pro-Enlightenment stance.

Details were scarce, but several sources reported that the student may or may not have meant the stance to be deliberate.

“I was there,” said Wendy Schlietternhausenshen. “I knew that Matt was just thinking out loud through the issues, and didn’t mean to actually come across as pro-Enlightenment. He would never do that.”

The professor of the class was visibly shaken as the student in question, Matt Towers, was escorted off campus.

According to Schlietternhausenshen, the incident began around 7:30 Friday evening in a Theology class, in which Towers asked a question about the role of the individual in the process of salvation. He danced nimbly around Arminianism, but was unable to keep from connecting the notion of “standing before your maker as an individual” with the Enlightenment-era ideals of similar value.

As the class began to discuss the ramifications of the emphasis on the individual in postmodern church culture, that connection immediately caused Towers trouble. While being led out of the classroom in doctrinal shackles, Towers offered a rushed explanation:

“I temporarily thought that the real culprit in self-centered modes of worship today was existentialism, which is a 19^th century German concept that has invaded our culture on all levels today, rather than the Enlightenment. It was only momentary, and I immediately apologized and professed by undying devotion to the idea that anything American is bad because it’s commercial. I’m sorry!”

After regaining control of the chaotic classroom in which several students were believed to have begun momentarily thinking for themselves, processing Tower’s comments, the professor immediately underscored the official attack stance against the Enlightenment: “The Church is community, and we have become individuals, but we should be collective in nature. Let us bow our heads and pray that Matt may find his way back into our community that we just threw him out of, and that when he returns he is driving a Prius.”

Though the class seemed somewhat disturbed, the professor attempted a soothing explanation of the evening’s events: “this is the real problem with the Enlightenment—the belief that the individual can think for himself. Now open up your notes and let’s continue this Power Point.”

Hilarious Facts About DTS #4: The Ubiquitousness of the Lengthy Prayer

If you graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary with a Th.M. degree, you will have earned 128 hours credit. This means that you will, on average, spend around 1500 hours in a classroom environment in the course of your degree plan. 

Of these, the average DTS student may reasonably expect to spend approximately 732 hours in prayer.

By "prayer," I don't mean actual prayer so much as being an unwitting member of an audience to someone else's prayer. It doesn’t take a prize-winning sociologist to notice that prayer on the DTS campus is a marathon, not a sprint. When asked to pray audibly, the average DTS student or professor will go easily above and beyond the common understanding of prayer as “communication with God”—and proceed directly to “small speech delivered to a broad audience in order to demonstrate mastery of theological principles.” This writer has yet to clock a campus prayer at anything less than 5 minutes, and many have logged record-pushing marks of 9 and 10 minutes. It is a fact of universal acceptance among DTS alum that a long prayer is a correct prayer. 

The old narrative comes to mind of former President Lyndon Johnson asking his chief of staff to pray over their cabinet meeting (possibly the last Democrat to do this). The chief of staff bowed his head and began to pray, but his voice was largely inaudible. “Speak up!” barked the President. “We can’t hear you!” The chief of staff raised his head humbly and remarked, “with all due respect, Mr. President, I wasn’t talking to you.” This story might be seen as wholly unremarkable in a seminary classroom. The prime audience of the average campus prayer is the campus, not God. 

There will be the required taking of prayer requests, and the pre-prayer discourse about the importance of prayer, and then there will be the prayer. Your greatest hope, if you’re in the classroom, is that Jesus returns before the prayer is over. If that doesn’t happen, your next best hope is that the professor does the honors, rather than a student. For if a student is called upon to intercede audibly before the Almighty, he will absolutely mount a filibuster of positively Presbyterian proportions. The goal is either to be remembered for his impressive prayer, or to be remembered as one upon whom NOT to call on for prayer in the future. 

The next cottage industry could well be a t-shirt sold in the bookstore that reads, “My Prayer Kicked Your Prayer’s Ass”. Of course, it would have to have a picture of Baalam on the front in order to squeeze the merchandise past the censors. 

It dawns on the objective observer that long prayers might have the unintended consequence of turning people off from prayer. If I knew, for example, that every day at 9:30 AM I would have to bow my head, close my eyes, and turn off my thinking mechanism in order to listen to a prayer, I might reasonably be expected to begin dreading that moment. Of course, this would be a wrong response to a necessary evil: public prayer is important. And, ostensibly, most of the seminary students will go on to become pastors in Baptist churches, in which they could legitimately be voted out of the pastorate for preaching less than a 7 minute prayer in front of the congregation. And so I must (and will) dutifully bow my head and close my eyes and pray to God in my own head. Of course, God and I can generally cover most of our material in around a minute in one setting, after which He is generally expecting me to go do something of value. 

However, I do not hold against my fellow seminarians their propensity for loquacious public prostration. When called upon to pray, they have rightly concluded that it is Show Time. Woebetide unto the student who surreptitiously checks his email during prayer—this is akin to a drama class not paying attention during a student’s monologue. We are a hostage audience to this incidental verbosity, and we know full well that our time will ultimately come, as well. For this reason, many of us have written out and memorized our lines, in order that we might have more material than we typically have. 

I can imagine my fellow seminarians praying over their food, and not actually having time left to eat it afterward. Think of it as a sort of hunger strike for Jesus….a testament to their level of dedication to the Marathon Prayer. It is truly an impressive display of religiosity that is unparalleled in any other setting.

I am considering suggesting a curriculum amendment that would allow us to actually receive course credit for prayer. If this idea is implemented, it would grant Independent Study credit to any student who has already sat through more than 200 hours of prayer. 

I can only pray, of course, that I would be automatically grandfathered in. But that prayer would probably be too short, and my application would be denied.