Much higher learning

A modest proposal for a new seminary | Andrée Seu

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

Eight miles north of where I sit, in Bucks County, Pa., William Tennent built the colonies' first seminary in 1726. Some ministers referred to it derisively as "the log college" because Tennent and his sons built the thing out of logs, and because he thought farm boys as promising for soul-saving as the fancy Harvard grads. The building, roughly 20 feet square, was at the eye of a Great Awakening that swept from Maine to Georgia, all of it "marked by fervent praying and powerful preaching" (J. Edwin Orr, The Re-Study of Revival and Revivals).

So it can be done. You can learn Greek and Hebrew and keep your first love. But there is always "a tendency to lose Jesus," as Dr. D. Clair Davis once summarized 2,000 years of church history for me. The log college became the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton. Harvard, then Yale, then Princeton drifted from Christ, without a shot being fired: "the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts" (C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).