Hilarious DTS Fact #3: Beware The Student Who Fell Off The Deep End of Theology

One of the most hilarious facts about DTS is the dire warnings of students who go off the deep end in their theological studies and leave seminary—perhaps as graduates—with no love left for Christ. 

This sounds like it would not happen very frequently—especially in a culture that is adamantly opposed to any teaching that gets close to articulating modern apostasy among Christians—but apparently it does. In every class, and at every juncture, you will be bombarded with the sad narrative of So-And-So, whose name has been withheld in order to spare his family and friends the eternal shame. So-And-So came to seminary on fire for God, and couldn’t wait to study the deeper principles of the Word. But somehow, somewhere (probably from skipping too many chapels, you), So-And-So gave up on his passionate conviction. He became a purely intellectual automaton—a robot of theological knowledge. Too much theology killed off his faith. 

[EDITORIAL NOTE: OF COURSE HE DIDN’T LOSE HIS SALVATION. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A TEMPORAL STATE OF MISERY IN WHICH HE EXISTS ON THE PERIPHERY OF GOD’S GRACE, BUT IS STILL TECHNICALLY IN IT. YOU MAY PUT DOWN YOUR STONES NOW.]

This tale of woe is ubiquitously repeated. It is such a grave danger that the current Spiritual Formation program was started, in part, as a countermeasure to this inexorable slide into spiritual irrelevance for the budding young Bible Scholar. It is  the most consistently issued jeremiad on campus: there is a danger in gaining all this knowledge, so approach it fearfully, trembling at its greatness, wary of its danger, and with one foot still firmly planted in the Dobsonite-Young-Earth-Let’s-Ban-Halloween camp. 

If all the oft-repeated stories are to be believed, we must conclude that there is a veritable hotbed of spiritually shallow young people matriculating into graduate theological study without much experience thinking outside their own church culture. Perhaps the young seminarian in question grew up in a house of believers, attended a reasonably well-populated middle-class, mostly white megachurch, and faithfully went to youth group every Wednesday night instead of doing bong hits. He went to outings at Six Flags, saw David Crowder live 624 times, knows every Chris Tomlin song by heart, and attended every one of the candle-lit, frank discussions on sex that he thought were edgy (but which all youth pastors for 40 years have done). He dutifully went off to Bible College, where he studied Greek for the first time but avoided any dangerous literature or art or paper-writing. He had late-night discussions with his roommate about the inherent fineness of the girls on the other side of campus. He dreamed of marrying a nice blond Christian girl who could sing and play piano and had a heart for missions. He felt God’s call to seminary. He applied. Of course he was accepted (his youth pastor was an alum), and now he’s here. And by his second year, much of the theological framework in which he had happily existed has been challenged. The world is not as he thought it was—and he’s about to have to enter it for the first time. 

Of course this kid is disillusioned. The study of God’s Word is a bit more complex than Bob Jones University made it out to be, and all this exciting new knowledge is giving that Abeka culture a run for its money, in his mind. But the real, unspoken danger in this story is the fact that So-And-So is now thinking, instead of simply obeying. Up until this point, his spirituality was purely a function of his acquiescence to authority. Now that he’s thinking for himself, he’s kind of dangerous. 

The stories are repeated, apparently, as a warning to not think too much. Or attend chapel more. Or be a functioning part of a Spiritual Formation group. But it would ultimately serve the Greater Purpose of Hilarity for So-And-So to come back to campus one day. Would he appear disoriented, wandering aimlessly around campus muttering entire phrases he memorized from Dr. Campbell’s dissertation? Would he remain seated in front of the foot-washing statue, staring into space? Would he try to attend class? Would he confusedly try to open his old mailbox? Would security be required to escort him from the campus? How would DTS change if So-And-So happened to amble onto the pristine Calvinist scenery from his sojourn out in the world? This, I suspect, would be a Hilarious Fact to itself.

WHEELS-OFF NEWS REPORT: Worship Leader Fired For Using Real Drums In Church

Dallas (AP)—a Worship Pastor from a nondenominational megachurch in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has resigned under pressure to explain his controversial decision to use real drums in worship service instead of the popular electronic v-drums. Rev. Jerrod Crunchfauser delivered a resignation letter to the senior pastor of OCICTYC (Our Church Is Cooler Than Your Church) Wednesday morning. 

The decision came after a firestorm erupted following Sunday morning’s service. Many churchgoers were heard hissing disgustedly about the authentic sound of actual drums in church. 

“It’s disgraceful,” said one person who asked to remain anonymous. “I thought all of the non-denoms had gotten the memo that only fake drums were to be used in service.”

Another churchgoer displayed more anger: “Who does he think he is? Did he think he could just change the way people do things?”

Rev. Crunchfauser didn’t offer an explanation; only a bewildered look on his face as he slunk shamefully out of cleaned-out office. A gauntlet of staff members lined either side of the hall as the disgraced worship pastor slowly made his way through them. A military march was performed on the v-drums as he faced the senior pastor, who sternly eyed Crunchfauser as he performed the defrocking ceremony. The senior pastor then reached up toward the Worship Pastor’s lapel and removed his honorary David Crowder backstage passes and tore them in two, scattering the pieces on the floor. He then stepped on the Crunchfauser’s Toms shoes, leaving dirt from the horribly raped environment on the sensitive cloth shoes. “You have made us the laughingstock of other churches,” intoned the senior pastor. “Only if we returned to singing non-existentialist hymns could we be more embarrassed than we are now. Take the devil’s authentic instrument out of this house of praise. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

It was not immediately known how many years it had been since a Protestant megachurch used actual drums in a service; many experts suggested it may have been as far back as the days when people sang out of carefully edited hymnbooks, instead of illiterate power point presentations slapped together at the last minute. For his part, Crunchfauser seemed genuinely repentant of his crime. Shaking his head, he mumbled something about working harder to be a good conformist in the future as he climbed into his Chevrolet Volt. 

The church is having a drum-burning session Saturday night, and the entire congregation is expected to turn out to support the destruction of the drum kit. Many churchgoers voiced anticipation that Saturday was too far away. 

“That authentic sound was scary…like the devil himself was playing,” said one woman. The official church statement in the bulletin read: “The offensive instrument has been removed. That sort of sound is not safe for the whole family, and we will immediately return to the soft, soothing saccharine sounds of fakery.” 

Less clear is the impact on the church’s impressionable youth group. Some adults claimed that they had caught some of their children scouring YouTube for actual bands that used drums in years gone past. A great deal of collective nervousness pervades the churchgoers with respect to how soon the children can forget the terrifying sound of real drums once and for all. 

“We will continue to use v-drums and sing Chris Tomlin tunes,” said the senior pastor, who also asked to remain anonymous, “until we get the next memo from the Millennial Generation Cross Cultural Ministry representative, once they graduate from seminary.”

Musical Education #2

Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed

Two of the greatest and most underrated guitar players who ever lived demonstrate how they each had more talent in their fingernails than all the CCM pop singers put together. 

Wheels-Off Poll for Week of 16 Aug 11

The Evangelical and Global Warming

While I think the broader point that Christians are frequently wrong on extra-church issues (and frequently wrong on doctrinal ones, too…a topic for a different blog post), I think the contention that global warming and Copernicus’ findings are moral equivalents of one another is problematic on several levels. 

First, scientific findings like Galileo’s and Copernicus’ have withstood the test of time. They have quite simply been around long enough to go unchallenged. The global warming hypothesis is so recent that many can actually remember when the same crowd was going around predicting global cooling. Factually, the ideas put forth by Vice President Gore and the Western European cabal of Kool-Aid Drinkers have not stood up well to actual challenge—and that’s just in the same decade in which they were made famous. After the scandal involving the emails of East Anglia University, most of the rational world understands a hoax when they see it. Christians should not be in the business of jumping on bandwagons of questionable repute—whether that bandwagon be Republican or Democrat. And the global warming thing is, quite frankly, pretty questionable. For every True Believer who claims that it’s man-made and demands that we all drive Priuses and listen to the Indigo Girls, there are two or three equally reputable scientists who view the same data and offer different conclusions. For many, the belief that Man is capable alone of destroying God’s great earth smacks of an arrogance typical of the godlessness inherent in Marxist thought—but unbecoming to the Christian. Ironically, the greater community of global warming evangelists resemble the classical definition of “religion” in the strictest sense: they have a creation/destruction mythology, a salvation (by works) message, and punish nonconformists with excommunication from the community.

Second, those of us who would like to be objective about this issue keep running into another pesky problem: the proposed solution. If the Warmers didn’t all fall lock-step into the same formation of collectivism in order to solve the “problem,” the rest of us wouldn’t be so suspect. Why is it that the only solution to the problem of colossal planetary warming and eventual destruction is that a strong, centralized governmental entity must be empowered to strip property away from one sector of humanity and redistribute it to another? I say the “only solution” because IT’S THE ONLY SOLUTION THAT’S EVER BEEN ADVANCED BY THE WARMERS. I am old enough to recall that that was the primary argument of the militant feminist movement, as well: a societal ill exists, and the only solution to it is a form of Marxism. A movement loses instant credibility with freedom lovers whenever it advances collectivism, for the end result of collectivism is always totalitarianism—and totalitarianism definitely does not honor God. I would venture a guess that the only Christians left who don’t have a problem with  collectivism are those too young to remember the Soviet Union, or have read Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 (I might be wrong, but it’s just a guess). 

If we’re going to have a free society, we’re going to have people who make choices with which we disagree. If the solution to an alleged “problem” like global warming is that we strip them of those choices, ridicule them for disbelieving us, and forcibly take their property and give it to others—well, then, surely a reasonable individual could conceivably be forgiven for finding the whole movement suspect. 

Lastly, when I think of Christianity philosophically, I am struck by how nonconformist it is, historically speaking. Notwithstanding, the effortless speed with which many younger evangelicals have conformed to a worldview that has been historically hostile to Christian thought has always been disturbing to me and others. Again, I’m probably exaggerating here, but it feels to me like the next twenty-something evangelical who stands up and questions the orthodoxies made popular by the mainstream media will be the first.  When I think of Christians being “led by their noses” by others, it isn’t the Global Warming Deniers who come to mind: it’s the True Believers. Before we place Al Gore in the same sainted category as Galileo or Copernicus, perhaps we could approach the issue with the right mixture of contrarianism and true pursuit of Truth. 

Now many on the other side of this issue will surely label me as an earth-hating heretic because of this contention. Not so, says I: I may not wear Tom’s shoes or drive a Hybrid, but neither do I consider it responsible to litter. I pay steep fees each year to legally hunt in two states, and that money goes to the proper conservation of the wilds in which I spend a good deal of time. I maintain my vehicle and teach my children that we are to be responsible stewards of the earth. I own property and maintain it over and above any municipal codes. I’m not going to sign on to the onerous, freedom-squelching shackling of private citizenry at the exact same moment as the kiddo’s who can’t actually remember the Carter Administration—but that doesn’t make me wrong.   

Yet.

Wheels-Off Poll for Week of 21 Jun

Hilarious Facts About DTS #2: The Seriousness Factor.

This column should not be laughed at. It is not funny. Don’t even smile. This is serious business. 

DTS students are a serious lot. It is not abundantly evident why this would be—although I will advance a couple of theories toward the end of this piece—but it is nonetheless true. If you were to gather all of the world’s CEO’s in one room—pre-TARP, when they were still expected to actually perform serious work  in the private sector in exchange for previously-agreed-upon compensation—and put your Seriousness Meter to work on the atmosphere in that room, it would not approach half of the level of seriousness in a DTS classroom. These cats are serious. Seriously. 

Some have argued that the Seriousness issue gets exacerbated during the first semester at seminary. The majority of DTS students, for example, didn’t get the normal undergraduate education—they went to Bible College, where they deftly avoided any semblances of a classical education.  So when that seminary professor expects them to read a whole book—from start to finish!—there is a certain stress level that is achieved. The phenomenon is so common that it has its own nickname on campus: “syllabus shock.” The average seminary student has to read several hundred pages of non-fiction text in each class, and it apparently is the first time such demands have been made upon them. When they click open the hyperlink on their Macs to read the syllabus reading list, many of them develop heart palpitations. The familiar taut-skinned, vaguely panicked facial expressions begin to take shape during this first semester. But one needs only to study the Serious DTS Student for a moment to realize that this affliction started long before he matriculated to graduate school. 

The first thing an observer might notice about the Serious DTS student is that he doesn’t laugh.  Jesus, after all, is just not funny. The Bible isn’t funny. Historical Theology isn’t funny. The Patristic Fathers weren’t laughing about Arianism; what’s there to laugh about now? I can assure you, gentle reader, that if Moe, Larry and Curly were to appear in front of a gaggle of DTS students, no amount of “nyuk nyuk nyuk” or “why soitenly!” would be enough to elicit even a subconscious giggle from this crowd. In fact, within moments of the Stooges’ appearance in a DTS classroom, a discussion forum would have been set up online to discuss the ramifications of Moe’s clearly Rehoboam-esque approach to leadership over the other two Stooges in a pre-Barthian framework of Jewish ethno-comical stereotypes. One student would argue that Curly’s response to Moe’s eye-poke reflected an Arminian self-determinist response to God’s predestination that his eye get poked. Another student would get his feathers ruffled by this, and would vehemently and passionately argue that this interpretation unnecessarily relied upon a Curly-As-Allegory view, which would be unscriptural. The battle lines would be drawn, and eventually there would be entire Facebook arguments with 3,157 comments chipping in about this topic. 

Even when the most hallowed of professors cracks wise in class, the average DTS student will appear unsteady on his feet, as though he’s not quite sure how to react. Do I laugh? Even a fake laugh? Wouldn’t that be like lying? Would I have to share that with my accountability partner? Was that not meant to be funny? Did Dr. Hendricks repeat that line in his book? WWCSD (What Would Chuck Swindoll Do)?

One half-expects the student’s head to begin swiveling uncontrollably, with sparks flying from the circuits which have shorted out above the skull. And heaven help the non-fabled professor who isn’t a household name—and still tries to be funny. If he isn’t sufficiently hyper-literalist and supralapsarian in his humor, he will most definitely find his name in an online discussion board calling for his ouster. 

Jokes? Nothing—even though most of them will derive their political sensibilities from Jon Stewart before the evening is finished. 

Impressions? Crickets. This writer has personally seen drill sergeants laugh at impressions that would render the DTS student stone-faced.

One-liners? Forget it. If it was meant to be funny, God would have put it in the New Testament. In the original Greek, of course. The Nestle 2^nd Edition—not that pretender Thayer. I know those clowns over at Criswell try to parse the 2^nd aorist active indicative in the new school manner, but we do things old-school here. Oh, yeah? Well, perhaps your God humor would be more understandable if it were derived from a more socially relevant rendering of the text. And so forth. 

These cats don’t laugh. Ever. 

Why, you ask, would this be? I would like to advance two theories here: 

Theory One: Fear. Plain and simple, many DTS students are just afraid. For one thing, DTS is a confessional institution, which means you have to be in agreement with the doctrine and practice of the seminary. Horror stories abound like viruses about students who deviated a fraction from the 7-plank stance—and were summarily dismissed within 12 hours and escorted off campus by officious-looking DTS campus police, their mailboxes reassigned before they stepped off the curb. DTS students are a little afraid of this, and think if they find the wrong thing funny they’ll get the axe. There is also a fear of failure. After all, the average DTS student has just spent four years avoiding literature like Dickens, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ovid, Faulkner, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. That stuff, after all, is godless and therefore irrelevant. If it’s not in the Bible, or not written by Swindoll, or not otherwise a non-fiction work generated by a fellow seminarian, then it’s not worth reading. Now, suddenly, professors are expecting them to read a lot more. Ok, not exactly a LOT more….and it’s still 99% non-fiction (that way no one has to deal with any pesky allegories or symbolism or metaphors)…but it’s enough of a jump to instill actual panic in the heart of the average Bible College grad whose definition of a reading assignment was the complete collection of Jack Chick tracts. When such a student is suddenly on the campus of a world-famous seminary, and the world-famous professors are asking them to read books—books!—it can lead to momentary cardiac arrest for some of them. 

Probably the biggest fear of the average DTS student, however, is the Fear That Remains Unmentioned—the fear that he will not sufficiently distinguish himself to the extent that he can become the pastor of a large, trendy, urban megachurch immediately following graduation. He has spent years fantasizing about how he is going to revolutionize the church culture world with his Facebooking and blogging and Twittering and catchy videos and edgy worship, and if he’s not on the top of the heap he won’t get those interviews. There is, statistically, the possibility that he will have to be a small church pastor. This is akin, in the DTS student consciousness, to Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell. 

Theory Two: the average DTS student is just really tightly wound. The average age of a DTS student is around 24, but they all look about 36—with the stress lines around the eyes and mouth, the hunched-over posture, the beaten-down expression and the slow zombie walk of the damned. If anything goes awry at all in their carefully planned-out existences, there is the danger of flipping a cog. If a professor seems to deviate from the Six Literal Days motif, the average DTS student could well have a heart palpitation. If a book written before 1970 is assigned, or if a paper must be written that is greater than two pages, a minor stroke could occur. It simply may not be reasonable to assume that this condition is a function of seminary at all, but rather was pre-existing. Perhaps they are always serious—even at home. Perhaps when watching Jon Stewart at night, they don’t laugh then, either. Perhaps their girlfriends and spouses keep a sizable supply of anti-constipation medication handy for evenings with Super Seminarian. If this theory is correct, it might also be advisable to keep some blood pressure medication around, as well. 

It is unclear whether or not DTS itself is aware of the Seriousness Factor. First-semester students are frequently called into the counseling center to give account of a heightened score on the MMPI—but apparently only the laughers are called in. The MMPI doesn’t appear to focus on the Seriousness Factor.

This Hilarious Fact about DTS is bound to only get funnier, especially when a DTS student finally realizes that God has a sense of humor (just read the story of how God heard Sarah laughing at His promise and instructed her to name her son “laughter.” That’s GOLD). 

If the gentle reader has enough DTS Facebook friends, there is one hilarious experiment that he may perform for his own amusement. Post any random thought on Facebook—about sports, politics, life, or even fire ants—and sit back and watch the show begin. But if you’re going to laugh within earshot of the DTS student, make sure you do so in allegory form—that way he won’t understand it and be offended at your lack of Seriousness.