Monday, November 2, 2009

Pastor/Theologians

This was posted on Michael F. Bird's website a few weeks ago. This is from a paper by Kevin Vanhoozer. The final paragraph is particularly challenging. May God give us a new perspective on pastoral ministry.

Seminary faculties need the courage to be evangelically Protestant for the sake of forming theological interpreters of Scripture able to preach and minister the word. The preacher is a “man on a wire,” whose sermons must walk the tightrope between Scripture and the contemporary situation. I believe that we should preparing our best students for this gospel ministry. The pastor-theologian, I submit, should be evangelicalism’s default public intellectual, with preaching the preferred public mode of theological interpretation of Scripture (emphasis mine).