Transcript
It is amazing what is said to people who have led in worship and preached at the door after service. Dr. George Buttrick, late of New York City and Madison Avenue Church, used to tell about some of his experiences in shaking hands with parishioners. One lady said to him, Oh, Dr. Buttrick, every sermon of yours is better than the next. Another lady said, Oh, what a message. Are you going to publish it? And he said, Yes, madam,
posthumously. She said, I can't wait to read it. I have also heard, and this was not from Dr. Buttrick, of the minister who received at the door this particular salutation, had I known you were going to be good, I'd have invited a friend. It is amazing. Some of us have been very humbled, even after four and five years in pastoral ministry, to be greeted at the door by the name of our predecessor. I've had that in
a couple of areas, and in one case, my predecessor was 32 years older than I. But Dr. Gillespie has never been greeted at the door by anybody saying anything like that. Anything that I would say about the president and his wife, you will soon discover. And therefore, I'd like to say many things, but they will be redundant in a few weeks and months. Those of you who will meet President Gillespie in chapel as he preaches will
realize that he has that Trinitarian grace related to faith, hope and clarity. We're grateful for the wisdom and the caring and the direct pastoral scholarly presentations at worship. In fact, you have to really try hard to avoid a good theological education if you worship under his preaching. The Princeton Seminary has been fantastically blessed in its presidents. We were founded in 1812, and we've only had five presidents. Now, that doesn't mean that they endure forever. It just
means that there was a long time when we didn't need a president. The first president of the Princeton Seminary came to us from Princeton University, where he was president, and came and accepted the call, Francis Landy Patton, to be president of Princeton Seminary, where he was also a professor. The next president who came, came to us also as president and professor, J. Ross Stevenson. The third president is the man after whom this building is named, and
he was John Alexander McKay, who was Dr. Gillespie's president and was my president. His successor for 23 years, Dr. Stevenson had been president, I believe, for 21 years, Dr. McKay for 22 years, his successor, Dr. James I. McCord for 23 years, and now, if your mathematics is good, president for the next 24 years will be Dr. Thomas Gillespie. He is a wise man, he is a loving man, and his sight, despite the fact that he wears
glasses, is supremely good, only something happened today that on your 10th reunion, you ask him and he may tell you, actually it had to do with the first lady of the, I'm going to tell them, had to do with the first lady of the seminary. I said he was a smart man, he didn't have to be too smart to marry Barbara Gillespie, he had to be very smart to have her marry him. Today in chapel, there
was a lady sitting on the left who happened to be the lady who is sitting on his left now, as Dr. Gillespie came in, he said, when my wife comes in, will she be with you? And I said, she's over there. And he looked, he said, no, that's not my wife. I said, pretty though, isn't it? She said, yes. Well, that telescopes 10 years, you don't have to wait. Very seriously, we are tremendously blessed. In the
leadership of our seminary, each of our presidents has brought a timeliness and gift. It's been providential across the years, those who have used that term, I've used it well and wisely. I don't think when you bring your umbrella and it rains, it's adequately, theologically accurate for you to say, oh, it was providential, I brought my umbrella. No, no, you were just smart or lucky, you know, luck is part of life too. The French savant Jean Cocteau
was asked if he believed in luck and he replied, me oui. How else do I account for the success of those I despise? But Princeton Seminary has been blessed far beyond luck and far even beyond smarts. Been blessed prophetically, been blessed by God, been blessed in its leadership and his now so blessed. And it's my honor to present to you the president of our seminary, Dr. Thomas W. Gillespie. Thank you, Dr. Crawford. I have a certain
need to explain my comment to you. It falls under the category of self-justification. But when you kiss your wife goodbye in the morning and two hours or three, four hours later she has had her hairdo changed, it is a bit disconcerting. And I did not recognize her, I tell you the truth. But let me introduce to you the woman with whom I have been living for 33 years, my wife Barbara Gillespie. So Barbara, would you
stand please? Just to tell you really how old I am, my first year here this building was under construction so that our class was the last of the eating club classes and the middle year was the first year here in the dining room. That was 1951-52 and then 1952-53 and then we graduated the following year. Mrs. Gillespie and I had the joy of being married that senior year. There was no CRW in those days.
In fact, being married as a student was still frowned upon, although grudgingly allowed. And the seminary made absolutely no provision for housing for married students. If you wanted to take that on, that was your responsibility. And so the apartments around the community were passed on from generation to generation and when you finally knew you were going to be married and needed an apartment, you began to court the favor of some senior who was going to move
out the following year. But that was for us a memorable year and we look back upon it with great joy. Our children always said that when the folks prayed, they would point the prayer rug to Princeton and there's some truth to that because of the very special place that this seminary has in our lives. I really don't want to be maudlin about it and you are in no position yet to understand personally what I'm about to
say, but I do believe the day will come when you will look back upon your years here, whether it be one year in the Th.M program or two years in the MA program or three years in the M.Div program or 50 years in the Ph.D. program. You will look back upon these years as some of the richest years of your life. You will make friends here that will be lifelong friends, the kind of friends that you
will not see for five or ten years at a time and when you meet them at a general assembly or some other church conference, you'll pick up the conversation right where you dropped it the last time you saw them. Look around the room, these are your classmates. God in his providence has brought you together to be here at this time and I hope that that will have special meaning for you, that you will develop deep and
abiding friendships. You cannot and will not be the personal friend of everyone in your class, that's just beyond human capacity. But I do hope you will have a very intimate circle of friends and a wider circle of people that you know and care about and whose lives and careers you can follow over the years with great joy and in some cases great surprise. And it will surprise you to discover what God will do with your lives
over the years. The class of 1954 is still in a state of absolute shock that I have been called to be the president of this seminary. But you're in for a truly marvelous time. I covet that for you. I was out of here over 20 years before I was able to come back. We are Californians and born and bred and our two churches that we served 29 years kept us in California and it's a long way
from there to here. But I remember coming back for a week of study leave and arriving late at night but still on West Coast time and walking around the campus really indulging myself in old grad nostalgia and standing out in front and looking up at Alexander Hall where I did not live. Brown Halls where all the great ministers have come from in this seminary and some of the lights were still on and I share with you
the experience that I had. It was just a sudden overwhelming sense of gratitude to God for the gifts that had been given to me by the faculty and the administration and my fellow students over 20 years before. And after 20 years of practicing what they had taught me to believe and understand and to do I suddenly realized what a very special place this is who comes to Princeton Seminary. But I do hope it will be your
experience that 20 years after your graduation you might come back and stand in front of one of the buildings that symbolizes this whole campus and all that it is and have that overwhelming sense of gratitude to God for the gifts that will be given to you now as you enter into the program that you have enrolled for. The topic that I wish to speak to you about tonight, that's just the prologue, that's for free, the topic
is the ABCs of Seminary Life. The ABCs of Seminary Life. The A as you might well imagine stands for academics. I have been a pastor for 29 years. I have not been an accommodation for those 29 years. I've been a pastor and I make absolutely no apologies to you or to anyone else for the fact that you are going to have your tails worked off here academically. You have friends, classmates, associates from your university days who
tonight may be beginning their medical school experience. And medical schools do not apologize to medical students for expecting them to work very, very, very hard. And they simply say if you want to be a doctor this is the price. And if you don't want to be a doctor, good day, good wishes, good bye. No one's compelling you to study medicine. You have friends and your law school experience. And the good law schools across the country do
not make it easy to be a lawyer. They make it difficult. They even tell the entering class that a third of them will not be there for the second year. I make no apologies to you for saying that you will be expected to work hard academically here at Princeton Theological Seminary. You may be reading more than you've ever read before. You may be writing more than you've ever been asked to write before. You'll be asked to
think hard about the most precious thing in your life, namely your faith, which is what makes theological education for so many such a painful experience. Because you're looking at that upon which you have based your life. That to which you are now willing to give the rest of your working life. And it is difficult. It is just plain difficult to have many of your basic beliefs, basic convictions challenged or even threatened by expansion. We had our
faculty retreat this last weekend up in the Poconos and we were talking about the CH01 and CH02 courses. If you haven't heard about those yet, you will as soon as the middleers and seniors arrive and they will dump all over the 01 courses. And they will tell you how terrible they are and how inhumane they are and how non-Christian they are and all the rest. But you will work harder in the 01 courses than maybe
in any other course because we're laying foundations in those courses. Foundations which for some of you may be old hat if you've had a religion major or if you've had exposure in your college or university experience to history, maybe you're a history major. Most people who come to seminary are not history majors. In my generation it was amazing how many engineering majors God called into the ministry during their junior or senior years of college. And who
came here with no philosophical training, no historical consciousness, just hard sciences. That's tough. What are we trying to do for you in CH01 and CH02? To take you from the time of the apostles to the present time, not only in the history of the western church of which we are all apart no matter what our particular denomination may be, but also even to extend it to include what is called the world churches, the churches of the
great mission and to develop in you what is called a historical consciousness. A historical consciousness. An awareness that the world really wasn't created the day before you were born and that Jesus didn't live last week. But that we are related to one in faith who lived two thousand years ago in a totally different world from the world you and I know. And to have you develop an appreciation for the fact that there have been countless thousands
of people in different lands in different centuries who have believed in Jesus Christ and who have believed in Jesus Christ differently than you and I believe in Jesus Christ. And who have given structure to their churches and structure to their theological understanding and structure to their sense of mission in ways in which we don't. And to realize that in all of that diversity and all of that difference God's spirit has been at work which doesn't destroy
and totally relativize what you think and believe but it does make you humble. And a certain grain of humility is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to be a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we're going to work you academically and you like all the other classes that I've known these last three years will complain and moan and groan. But don't come to me with your problem. You're expected to do that. You're going to
go out most of you and practice ministry. You're going to go forth and not only speak of God you're going to speak for God. Many if not most of you will stand in pulpits or behind lecterns in congregations and say hear the word of the Lord. You will read or study a passage of scripture and then you will preach. How dare you? How dare you speak for God? And yet it is precisely to that task that
we have been called. All I'm saying is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is so big and so deep and so rich that not one of us nor all of us together can wrap our mind around it and claim that we understand it fully that we have it all neatly packaged and all we have to do now in seminary is learn the how to's. How to preach. How to run a session meeting. How to organize a
Sunday school. What will happen to you through your academic work here is that you will be shaped. And that means you will be changed. And that means growth and growth is always painful. And that's a part of the price that God is calling you to pay to prepare yourself for the ministry of the gospel in and through the church. And I know that's true out of my own life experience. This seminary is a place where you
can learn that it turned me every way but loose during those three years. The only church I knew was the church on the corner where I had been raised, baptized, nurtured, loved, forgiven, endured, challenged. That was the church for me and I suspect that's true of many of you. Your home church, wherever it is, that's what you think of when you think of church. John Mackay, who Dr. Crawford has referred to, was a man who painted
in great, great broad strokes and introduced me to the church ecumenical. The body of Christ across the ages and throughout the world. And I didn't want to think about the church across the ages and throughout the world. I just wanted to prepare to go minister to that little church that I was going to be called to when I got my BD and got on with it. But he wouldn't let me do it. And he wouldn't let
my class do it. And he wouldn't let the whole generations that went through here in 20-some years under his presidency, he kept painting that picture of the body of Christ that's bigger than the church you know and bigger than the church you have known and bigger than the church that you will ever know. And confronting us with the fact that we are members of that church. And I will tell you that that vision impacted seriously
the way I practiced ministry for 29 years. And attitudes toward other churches in the community where I serve. Attitudes toward my own denomination. Dr. Kirkland said this morning or this afternoon, attitude is everything. It truly is. Academics, however, is not simply a matter of what is called in Roman Catholic circles theological formation. I hear this a lot from students. I hear it a lot from the church. People want to make a distinction between theological formation on
the one hand and spiritual formation on the other hand. So that one can go to seminary and take an academic program and get one's degree academically as if that was theological formation but then you could do that without spiritual formation. And spiritual formation then is something else that you do. It's learning to say your prayers and it's learning spiritual disciplines and maybe it's having a spiritual advisor and all of these sorts of things. The tradition out
of which I as a Presbyterian come challenges that dichotomy. That simply is not so. You cannot be formed theologically without being formed spiritually. Because the Christian faith is more than doctrine. It is primarily a relationship between you and our God and you and me and all the others. And you cannot think about this God and about the nature of that relationship with God and about the nature of the relationships that we are called to enter into
with one another purely in an abstract way. What you believe about God in the doctrine of God will impact your prayer life. And your prayer life will have a direct impact upon your doctrine of God. So that if you are not praying regularly and daily as you go through your years at Princeton Theological Seminary, that is saying something very clear about your doctrine of God. And what it is saying is that God really isn't very important.
Everyone who is important to you and to your life, you make it a point to spend time with. That may be your wife or your husband, it may be your friend, it may be the person across the hall. You spend time with the people that matter to you and if you spend no time with God. That tells me at least a great deal about your theology of God. Theological formation is spiritual formation. How can you be
formed and how can you study the doctrine of redemption without being drawn into the redemptive process itself? How can you struggle with the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins without appropriating for yourself the reality of the forgiveness of sins? How can you struggle to know what the Apostle Paul meant by grace if you don't want to experience what grace is yourself? How can you speak of the love of God in Christ if you do not want
the love of Christ to constrain you as Paul says? And the answer is you can't. Now if you wanted merely to study religion in an academic, abstract, non-involved way, I tell you honestly you should have gone some place else because we will not encourage you to do that here. Academics is the heart of this institution and we want you to be well trained when you go forth to practice ministry in the church. B, beliefs. We
all come to Princeton Seminary with our beliefs. Let's put it on the table right where everybody can see it. We're here because we're believers. And if you were not a believer, you wouldn't be here because that's one of the requirements for admission. Now do you say do I have to be a super duper believer? No, just a believer. You believe something or you wouldn't be here. But look around the room. I'm here to tell you friends
that your most precious beliefs are not shared by everybody in this room. Now the easy way to handle that is to say they're all wrong and I'm right. And that's the way many handle it here and they become very ugly over the three years they're here. They got their fists up all the time. What do you believe? Who do you want to know? God is love. Believe it. I am not in any way depreciating your beliefs
because I have my own and frankly I worked hard for them and field tested many of them over many years. But what I want you to understand and I hope you can grasp this and take it to heart is that there is an important difference between belief and your beliefs. We're back to the relationship again. You believe in God, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the triune God. You trust that God with your life. You
have committed your life to this God. You want to serve this God with your life. You want to honor this God by your life. You really want this God to use your life in ministry to make a difference in the lives of other people. That is the reality. And I think we all share that in common. Where the differences begin to emerge is then how we begin to understand what all that means and what it means
for us. You say to me, well are there no truths to Christianity? Yes, there are. But Christianity is founded upon one who is the truth and that's different. Paul speaks of the unsearchable riches of Christ. Unsearchable riches of Christ. Christ himself transcends our theologies. How does they are but broken lights of the? What I want to do if I could is to set you free to examine your beliefs in such a way that you'd be free
to change how you understand something without thinking you have lost your faith. Does that make sense? That you could change a belief without in any way hurting your belief, your faith. We want you not to be shattered by your experience at Princeton Seminary. That is really not why we are here because those of us who are here are here because we believe God has called us to this place and we're putting at your disposal what God
has taught us over the years of our collective lives in order that you may indeed be a deeper and more profound and more sensitive and more compassionate and wiser believer. We do not want you to go forth from Princeton Seminary with the attitude, oh well it doesn't matter anyway what one believes. I'm not saying that. I think it matters a great deal. I think truth is involved in questions of doctrine. But what I do believe most
profoundly is that when I stand before the Lord Jesus Christ in the judgment, he's not going to give me a theological examination. I would like to have the privilege of talking over a few things on the side with him. We always think of judgment as negative. I don't know why that is. The judgment may well be you've done good. You've done real good. These are all the things you were right about. I'd like to hear that.
I'd like to know what part of it I had right as well as what part of it I'm sure I don't have right. Only my problem is I don't know which is which. Let me see. What I'm coveting for you is a personal freedom to grow theologically while you're here and not expect the seminary simply to reinforce everything you've already been taught and not to challenge everything that you've been taught, but to enable you to see
how much more profound and how much more subtle our God is than we give God credit for. See the challenges of campus life. Well, we've talked about some of them. You're going to be challenged theologically. Some of you are going to hear things that are going to make you madder than hell. Some of you will leave because you can't handle it or don't think you should. That's okay. We'll honor that if that's your decision. We've never
said that Princeton Seminary is for everyone. It is not the answer to every maiden's prayer. So you will be challenged, but not only theologically. I think you're going to be challenged much more deeply than that. You see everyone in this room is here because he or she believes that God has called them to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem of the world, right? I mean you want to learn something
here that's going to enable you to be in ministry and to make a change in the world. You want to make a difference. The question is, are you going to be, while you're here, a part of the problem or a part of the solution? Now every conceivable issue that's alive in the world today is debated on this campus and should be. And should be. And it is amazing the levels of self-righteousness that can develop in
the student body. You know the definition of a fanatic is someone who does what God would do if God had the facts straight. And we can become here very, very fanatical about many things. Many things. The problem is that in our zeal to reform the world, we do not live the Christian life on this campus. In our great zeal to get out and straighten out the world itself, we do not indeed establish here a viable Christian
community. I hear that from students again. There's no Christian community here. And you know why? Because you don't create it. The administration cannot create community. The faculty cannot create community. It can encourage it. It can create a community. It can encourage it. It can cry for it. But only you can create it. Now we will, I'm sure, this coming year be giving a lot of attention to what's going on in South Africa. And we should. But
I want to tell you that there's apartheid on this campus. And it is imposed on this campus by the students of this campus, not by the administration and not by the faculty and not by the Board of Trustees. I remember coming back here as a pastor and just observing. I'm telling you it's straight now. And I'll always speak straight with you. I may not always be right, but I'll always be straight. Okay? And I was amazed
to see how the dinner tables were formed. Not just on one occasion, but on occasion, after occasion, after occasion. Were people eat together on the basis of their race? Were they eat together upon the basis of their nationality? Or were they eat together on the basis of their sex? That's apartheid. And it rings hollow with me to have the student body castigate the Board of Trustees of this seminary when in my vision they stand under God's
judgment themselves. It will not be long before you will smell each other out. You'll find out who's congenial theologically and you will drift together and you will mix and socialize and eat with people who think like you do and who will scratch your back and they'll scratch yours and you'll think that the whole world is just like you. And that's comfortable. It's also crazy because the whole world isn't like that. And we'll have the self-styled
liberals, you know, all over here at this table and then the self-consciously evangelical over here at this table. And never mind of the presbyteries and the classes and the dioceses and the conferences and then they'll meet head on. What are we going to do here to build the community of faith? How many friends are you willing to develop across racial lines, across the sexual difference, across theological convictions? How many people are you going to really
care about who are not like you in so many ways? I think that's the biggest challenge you face while you're in the community. And you'll be standing up sounding about as righteous as I must sound to you right now. Telling your people all the same things I'm telling you and then not understanding why in the world they won't do anything about it. Community comes out of our own hearts. I hope you don't do, but you will.
I'm going to say it anyway, but I know I'm talking into the wind. I hope you do not label yourselves anything. And I hope you will never label anybody else here anything. Number one, labels don't mean anything anymore. I defy you to tell me what an evangelical is or what a liberal is. I've got too many friends who claim to be liberal evangelicals and evangelical liberals. I had a wedding not long before we left our church
in Burlingame. One of our young men married a Roman Catholic young woman in the Roman Catholic Church. I was invited to participate in the mass. Her parents were devout Roman Catholics. Both of them were charismatic Catholics and the father was on the board of Young Life in San Mateo County. Now I don't know what that does to your categories. It just blows my mind clear out of the water. See, I'm not used to dealing with an
evangelical, charismatic Roman Catholic. I can handle them one at a time, but not in one person. The categories just don't fit anymore. Truth of the matter is that theologically, both liberalism and fundamentalism are reductionist. They both reduce the gospel to less than it really is. Both of them do. Both liberalism historically and fundamentalism historically are reductionist. They're both less than the gospel. So don't do that to yourself. I had a friend who put on his dossier
years ago and I always thought it was crazy and then I grew up and found out that it was not a bad idea. In the Presbyterian Church years ago, there was a place on your dossier to explain your theological position and I went to great lengths to explain my theological. It's no wonder no one ever called me. We were 12 years in one church and 17 in another. Nobody wanted that kind of a minister. But at
that point where you had a whole blank space to describe yourself theologically, my friend was a Christian, period. That's not bad. That really isn't bad. Don't categorize one another because when you label people, you put them in a category and then you no longer have to deal with them as people. You deal with them as labels. And I say to you that is a denial of the body of Christ. You are writing people out that you
are a Christian that God has written in. Well, it sounds awful, doesn't it? Academics and my beliefs are going to be challenged and I'm going to be challenged by all these things. I've got to make friends with people who are unlike me. No, you don't have to do any of that. You can go through a year and three years and you can take all the lightweight courses you can find. You can go out and be an
unprepared, shallow minister of the gospel. Some presbytery somewhere will ordain you. Some church is dumb enough to call you and you can get along for a few years. You can do that. Why shouldn't your class do that? Every other class has done that in part. And you can come in here with your beliefs all inside your iron vest. You've got your armor on and you can just, you know, feed back to the profs what you think
they want to hear and they're not going to get to me. I'm not going to think about that seriously. And you can go out the back door the way you came in the front door and not have changed. You can do that. I've known people who did that. We had members of our class that did that. And I've seen them recently and they still think the same things the way they always thought them. They're very boring
people. And you can go through here and surround yourself with people who look alike and think alike and have a good time. And not give a d*** about anybody else. You can do that. You're free to do that. I'm giving you the freedom to do that. You'd take it anyway so I'm going to give it to you. But what I'm saying to you is if you want the most out of your years at Princeton Seminary, you're
going to have to give everything you have and everything you are and a whole lot more. And the results, if you do, will be truly astounding. I had an elder in my first church. He died at 42 of cancer. One of his famous sayings to me was, as his pastor, God can do a lot with a little if God has it all. You and I, whoever we are, are just a little. The glory is that God
can do so much with it if we just put it at God's disposal. God bless you. I want to know you. My wife wants to know you. We want to love you, care about you, pray for you. One day soon hand you a diploma and watch you walk out the door to do what we've given so much of our life to doing and wish we could be going with you to do it ourselves all over again.
The Christian ministry is the greatest work in the world. It is a great privilege to be involved in its educational or in its pastoral responsibilities or in the special ministries to which God may call us. It's worth every ounce of effort that you'll give it. These are the years that are crucial for you. Make the most out of it and be the very best servant of Jesus Christ that you can possibly be. Let's stand and be
dismissed with prayer. Gracious God, we give you thanks for the love that draws us to yourself and to one another into the bonds of the family of faith, into membership in the body of Christ. We thank you for every individual story of life and pilgrimage and faith represented here tonight. Recognizing that the stories are so different, the paths we have traveled are so diverse, but recognizing also that you have been the companion on the road and
the leader along the way, help us to honor the story that each of us brings to this campus and to honor our own. And to give thanks daily for the grace that sustains us and transforms us and calls us to a life of faithful obedience and obedient faith. Bless each one here during the time of their academic studies. Enable them to grow to be the person you have called them to be through Christ our Lord in
whose name we pray. Amen. Thank you for coming and we'll see you on Monday when it all begins. Thank you.