Transcript
To be the president of almost any institution today is to earn your fatigue, you come by it honestly, to be responsible for five different degree programs at least, to be initiating wisdom into each of those areas, to have a constituency of alumni of many thousands circling around the world, to be the president of Princeton Theological Seminary is to be claimed by the church, local and the church universal, and on top of that to continue as a
member of the faculty is a great art, and beyond that to nourish a very high powered board of trustees is another art, and to be related in a pastoral way to those that are nearest and dearest is a gift. If I were to use a word about President Gillespie or two words I would say kind astuteness, do not let the kindness however deceive you, it is not a public relations ploy, it's a genuine interest and those
of us who have counted him as a friend for years are grateful for that. Do not be deceived either because there is a combativeness about him, he knows that certain things in the world and the church should not be, and he cares mightily that they shall not be very strongly in the future. So for many vantage points we are blessed and privileged, and if I'm not presumptive let me say what several have shared with me, even
if you do not want a good theological education you are apt to get one or one almost a good theological education if you go to chapel on the days that President Gillespie is preaching. You will meet him from many vantage points, meet him officially and formally tonight as our president whom I present to you. They tell me I'm wired for sound, can you hear? Let me begin by introducing two special people who are here. One is
a brand new member of our faculty who has moved here without his wife because she's home trying to sell the house. But he is here tonight and I want to introduce him to you and have you greet him, Professor Ulrich Mauser, Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis. Ulrich would you stand and just take a quick bow. And let me also introduce to you my bride of 37 years. Our first year of married life was
here at Princeton Seminary during my senior year. Our children grew up saying that mom and dad when they put the prayer rug down always aimed it at Princeton and lo and behold we were called back here some seven years ago to this office and so for us it was in a real sense of coming home. My wife Barbara Gillespie. Now in spite of all the kind things that Dr. Crawford has said you need to know that
I am not faster than a speeding bullet. I do not leap tall buildings in a single bound and you will never see me walking on the water. I am with you a fellow human being who is a believer in Jesus Christ and a member of his church and like you years and years ago I heard God's call to ministry and was just crazy enough to answer that call and ended up as a student here at Princeton
Theological Seminary all the way from California. California Californians are today the second largest state contingent in our student body. We have over 700 living alumni in California alone which indicates that the place is totally corrupt. We came here actually I looking back I remember I never applied any place else. I didn't know there was any place else to apply. We had a very lively and dynamic church with many collegians in it and during the years that
I was growing up there I think 25 of us heard God's call into the ministry and went off to seminary and we all came here. And there was one member of our church in every class as I came through this institution there was one of the senior class and one of the middle class and me and then it just followed right straight through. So we all came to Princeton Seminary because that's where all of our pastors
had gone to school. This place has a great deal of meaning for me. This building that we're in tonight was constructed during my first year at the seminary. Prior to eating here we ate in eating clubs scattered about on Alexander Street and on Mercer Street which are now faculty homes. But it was Dr. McKay's great vision to form a campus center to bring the whole community together because he realized that community and our faith teaches us
this that community is symbolized and realized in the common meal. And that sharing the eating hour with one another was a way of building the community of Princeton Theological Seminary and so this building was constructed in 1951 and 1952 and from then on every generation has enjoyed its decor and its cuisine both. This is a special night for me because it gives me an opportunity to share with you some things that are very important to me
and also to stand here absolutely green with envy because I really do I'm jealous of you. I would love to be where you are. I would love to be starting again only if I knew what I already know. But I will tell you that I would do it gladly and these three years as difficult as they may be in terms of work and as agonizing as they may be as you take your faith apart a piece
at a time and examine it and put it back together again. For all of that if you hang in there this will be a marvelous experience in your life and God will use these three years and God will use the faculty of this institution and God will use you and the other students to minister to one another and to effect growth and maturity in your life. So you are standing on the threshold of some of the
most special times in your entire existence and I tell you the truth I'd love to be doing it with you. Dr. Crawford has assigned me my topic and so I will speak to you briefly tonight on our theological task. I want to emphasize that it is a task and a task includes work. For many people that's an obscene four letter word but theological education is work. It's hard work. It's not a 40 hour week. You will
devote hours and hours and hours and hours and hours to the reading list and to the preparation of papers and to preparing yourself for examinations. But it is not meaningless work. It's not just moving the papers from the right side of your desk to the left side of your desk. It's not just busy work. It's purposeful work. It's preparing you to undertake that great calling which God has issued to you to enter into the life of
the ministry of the Church of Jesus Christ not only in this land but indeed as you look around across the world. And I think God has every right to expect you to work and to work hard as you prepare yourself to do the work of the ministry in whatever form that takes for you. Not everybody here is going to be a pastor as Michael Livingston reminded us this morning and that's true. Not everyone here is going
to go on to be Ph.D-ified and be a great teacher. Not everyone here is going to be a Christian educator but we're all going to go and do something in the name of Jesus Christ and this is the time and this is the place for you to prepare yourself to do that. Now a lot of people come to seminary thinking that it's going to be Camp Winona. That we're going to gather around the campfire every
night and sing the old songs and hold hands and just have a mountain top experience. And how disappointed they are when they come to Princeton Seminary and everyone is not every hour of the day in a prayerful mood. That there are times when you feel you're more in the valley of the shadow than you're on the mountain top. And that's alright. That's par for the course. The ministry is like that too. And make no mistakes about
it. I compare what we are about to a medical and a legal education. You know there was a time in the European universities when the three major curricula were medicine, the law, and the ministry. These were the three professions that required academic training. And I want you to always be mindful as you go through your time here whether it's one year in the Th.M program or two years in the MA program or three years in the
M.Div program or forever in the Ph.D. program. I want you to remember that while you're working here there are others, your contemporaries, who are at that very moment also preparing themselves to be physicians. Our son-in-law is a physician and I know how hard he has worked to prepare himself to meet the people day by day that he ministers to as a doctor. He's a rheumatologist. People come to him in great pain. And he brings
to bear all those things which he learned at the university, all that chemistry, all that biology, he brings all of that to bear upon each individual person. And all the hours he spent in the laboratory, all the hours he spent going through the services, everything that he's learned along the way he brings to every single person that he ministers to day in and day out in his ministry of medicine. And I want to say to you
that you're not going to get off the hook any easier than he did. And that the people who will look to you one day for leadership in the church have every right to expect you to be as well educated as any physician they turn to during the week. Our son is a lawyer and I know how hard he has worked to become a lawyer and to pass the California bar which is next to a miracle. And
I know how many hours a day he put in to his studies and I know how many hours a day he puts into his law practice. And I want to say to you that the ministry is not any easier than being a first rate lawyer in today's world. So while you're using your time and your energies and your skills and your abilities to prepare yourself for ministry here at Princeton Seminary, there are other people of your
age across the world in the medical schools and the law schools who are working themselves to the bone in order to be able, qualified doctors and able, qualified lawyers. And God has a right to expect you to devote to your studies what it will take to make you an able, qualified minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Now people say, why does it have to be so hard? Why can't the ministry be fun? I mean like
it was when I first became a Christian or when I heard that call and the joy and the enthusiasm. Why does it have to be so doggone difficult? Well, because life is doggone difficult. You know, there are people in the research labs who are trying to break the mystery of cancer. And they're doing that and they're devoting their lives to it and the very best of their minds to it because that is a physical problem, a
biological problem that we all want to see broken. And it just takes a lot of work to do that. Why is the law so doggone complicated? Why is your income tax form, the simplified version I mean, so complicated? I wrote to my congressman. I wanted to thank him for the new simplified tax because prior to that I could always do my own. Now I need an accountant. Because the land in which we live and the law
under which we live is indeed complicated. And you don't just become a lawyer because you're in love with justice. You don't become a doctor just because you're in love with health. And you don't become a minister just because you're in love with Jesus. You become a minister when you know something that enables you to minister in such a way that it truly becomes an instrument of God's grace. Now if the Spirit of God does not bless
the work of our lives then there is no ministry worth talking about. But God can use sharply honed tools even more than God can use the dull ones. And that's what we want to become, each one of us, the very best that we individually can be. See, God knows what He's doing when He calls us to ministry. God knows you, He knows your abilities, He knows your limitations. And yet God said, I can use that person,
I can use that man, I can use that woman and can bless that life in ministry. So you may not be the smartest person that ever walked down the pike and not every minister is, nor needs to be. You may not be the most gregarious person that God ever created, but that doesn't matter. God can still use the gift that you are. Remember the five loaves and the two fish? A friend of mine, an elder in
my first church used to say to me, the message is, God can do a lot with a little if He has it all. And I think that's true. So you have answered the call, you have come to Princeton Seminary. I know many of you have struggled about where to take your theological training. You have prayed, you have agonized, you have felt led, and here you are. And we are now beginning our theological task. I want to
emphasize that this is not an extension of college. This is the beginning of ministry. This is not the extension of our college experience. This is the beginning of ministry. You are now beginning. And therefore, it behooves you to bring the kind of seriousness of purpose and the dedication of spirit to this task that is the best that you have to offer. It is an intellectual task because the Gospel, though simple, is profound. Even the Apostle Paul,
who did have some insight into the nature of the Gospel, spoke of the unsearchable riches of Christ. So none of us has ever wrapped our individual minds around it. And none of us can say, I know it all. But the Gospel is there to be understood. Many of the students who come here, maybe most, maybe you, are always trying to play the head off against the heart. To say, Princeton's on a head trip. You bet we
are. You're doggone right we are. We're on a head trip. But in biblical anthropology, you cannot play the head off against the heart. Because in the Bible, the heart is the symbol not of the seat of the emotions. The Bible is the symbol not of the seat of experience. In the Bible, the heart is the symbol of that point where all the dimensions of human being intersect. It is the heart of our being. And that includes
our biological dimensions, that includes our historical dimensions, that includes our cultural dimensions, it includes our linguistic dimensions, it includes our minds. Our minds are a part of the heart. So that when we talk about illumining the mind, we're also talking about warming the heart. You cannot play intellectual pursuits off against spirituality. At least not if you're a Calvinist, and I am a Calvinist. Calvin had some wonderful things to say. Even, you know, it always amazes me.
Lutherans love Luther. I mean, Lutherans really do love Martin Luther. They're proud of Martin. They call him Brother Martin. Maybe that's because he drank beer and sang raucous songs. I don't know. You have the feeling with Luther that once in a while he cracked a grin, right? Have you ever seen a picture of Calvin smiling? I never have. I wonder, maybe he didn't have any teeth. Who knows? But Calvin is such a person of such serious
purpose, and Presbyterians, by and large, only know two things about Calvin, and they're both bad. They know that he had Cervetus burn for heresy, and we gave that up a long time ago. And secondly, they know that Calvin taught double-barreled predestination, and that's kind of embarrassing. But there's so much more in Calvin than just those two things, and one of the things there is in Calvin is a deep sense of spirituality. I read a wonderful
book some 20 years ago now by a Roman Catholic priest on the title, The Spirituality of John Calvin. And what he said about Calvin's spirituality is that Calvin broke through intellectually and philosophically to a new vista, namely that human beings like you and like myself can know God. Not just know about God through the teaching of the Church, through the teaching of the Scriptures, through the teaching of the ministry, but you can know God personally, that
the knowledge of God is a personal knowledge, the knowledge of God is a relational knowledge, so that it is knowledge, and it is knowledge in a relationship, so that as we're using our minds to understand the God to whom we're related and all that God has done to make that relationship possible, that's not just an intellectual exercise. That is a spiritual discipline, and we've located the chapel and the classroom on this campus next to each other
to keep that rhythm alive and to symbolize that rhythm. You're not just thinking when you study, but you're thinking to understand in order that your own life might be informed and enriched, and maybe even changed. Think of that. You might even change your mind about something while you're at Princeton Seminary. God just may surprise you and show you a horizon you've never seen before. God may show you things about the world you've never thought about before,
and show you how the Gospel speaks to situations and to needs which have never come across your mind before. But all of that is not just intellectual, that is spiritual. Your studies are a part of your spiritual life, and I want to emphasize that. If you're studying the doctrine of God, and that does not drive you to prayer, you're studying the wrong doctrine of God. And if in your prayer life you're not concerned to know more
about the God to whom you're speaking, then you ought to stop praying. So don't go through Princeton Seminary playing the chapel off against the classroom, playing the head off against the heart. Those are not really options, biblically speaking. They just aren't. So we want to involve you in a task, and it is a lifelong task. You don't stop this task once you graduate from Princeton Seminary. The best we can do for you in the time that
we have, and in the energy that you have, the best that we can do for you is to prepare you for entrance into that practice of ministry to which God has called you. That's all. But we want to help you lay some foundations here upon which you can build the rest of your life. I guess I'm just one of those crazy pastors who never ever cut the academic umbilical cord. I've just always been interested in knowing
more and reading books, and used to carve out time. I was a pastor for 29 years before I came to Princeton Seminary. I know where you're going. I've been there. We've been there together. And I want to say that what was given to me at Princeton Seminary so long ago was solid, solid ground. And during the terrible times of the '60s and the '70s when ministers were going down like flies, I never felt that I had
to go back and say, golly, they lied to me at Princeton Seminary. I've got to go back to square one and build all over again, or I've got to get out, get out of the faith, get out of the ministry. What was given to me was not sufficient for a lifetime, but it was adequate to build upon for a lifetime. And that's what I covet for you. So it's a task to which we are called. It's
a theological task. Don't ever apologize for the word theology. It's not a big word these days. We're much more into religious experience, religious phenomenology than we are into theology. This is not a graduate school of religion. This is a theological seminary. And the word theology derives from theos, meaning God, and logos, meaning word. And Christian understanding and Christian ministry has always been oriented to the Word of God. From the very beginning, I was just doing some
research, believe it or not, myself this summer, and was reading Adolf von Harnack and the most obtuse book, his publication on the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, also known as the Didache. And one of the incredible discoveries that Harnack made in 1884 was the fact that way back then in the beginning, it really wasn't bishops and elders and deacons who were the lifeblood of the church, but in the very beginning it was the apostles and the
prophets and the teachers and what they all had in common was that they participated together in the ministry of the Word of God. And it was the Word of God that created the church, and it's the Word of God that sustains the church, and it's the Word of God that judges the church, and it's the Word of God that renews the church. You have come here with your understanding of all that, what that means to you,
and that's wonderful. You have every right to do that, and I affirm you in it, but we're going to turn you every way but loose in dealing with what all that means. And you're going to be asked to look at the Bible maybe in ways you've never looked at it before. You're going to find out what a human book it is, and what a historical book it is that actually somebody way back somewhere wrote this down,
and maybe before they wrote it down, what they wrote down they had heard around the campfires for a long time in stories and sagas and legends and so forth, but all of that is the way God created the Bible and gave the Bible to us, and all we want to do is try to understand how that happened. And just because the Bible has its history and just because the Bible has its historical origins and just because
it comes to us through human culture and in human language, how else could it come to us? In no way detracts from the Bible as being a means of grace. In no way detracts from the Bible being the source of that living Word which continues to inform faith and form faith and inspire faith and bring men and women to faith. So we're going to focus on the Word of God. I hope you all take Greek and
Hebrew. I know you won't, and you're not going to do it because I tell you to. I know that too. I've tried. It didn't work. But I hope you do because the Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew, and if you're going to read the Bible seriously, you ought to know the language in which it was written. If you had a love letter from somebody you cared a whole lot about, you'd want to read that love
letter in the language in which it was written, wouldn't you? And not in translation. So I hope you will take seriously the Greek and the Hebrew. I know American students by and large think they honestly believe they can't learn a foreign language. We have a real hang-up about that as Americans. You go to Europe and a little 18-year-old woman comes to your table and she speaks French and German and Italian and English. She
listens to see what language you're speaking and then she shifts into that language. Well, if an 18-year-old Swiss can speak four languages, certainly I can learn to read three. We're going to rub your nose in the scriptures. We're going to rub it hard. And I hope you'll let us do that. We're also going to show you that you cannot leap from the Bible into the 20th century and back into the 1st century or earlier
times as if nothing of any consequence happened in between. We want you to know about church history and how it is that we got to where we are. How come there are Presbyterians and how come there are Lutherans and how come there are Roman Catholics and how come there are Orthodox and how come there are Baptists and Pentecostals and Assemblies of God and Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists? How come? How did all this happen? Well, it
happened as history has developed. And if you want to know who you are, you've got to know the family story. And the family story is bigger than your immediate family. And people have been working with the scriptures and living out of the scriptures and worshiping God and seeking to serve God across the centuries. You're not the first generation to think of that. And if you know history, you know a lot of the things that won't work.
And you can avoid a lot of trouble by knowing history. So take history seriously. Learn about the family. Learn about the story of the family. It'll give you a perspective that you don't have otherwise. This summer we were in Switzerland. My wife has family. Her father was Swiss and immigrated to this country. And we go and visit them every now and then. And we went up to one of the top of the Alps on three cable
cars. If I had known what I was getting into, I never would have gotten into the first one, I'll tell you the truth. And you look down and you say, I only trust a Swiss to do this. But you get up to the top and you see the world differently than you do when you're down in the valley. Oh, is it ever more beautiful? It's just a different perspective. And history can do that for you. We're
going to teach you theology as best we know how. We're going to teach you how to state the faith today. Not just how it was stated yesterday and the day before and last year and in the last century and the one before that. We want you to be able to state the faith today and to state it intelligibly and to state it coherently so that when you say something in a sermon about baptism, it's not contradicting
something you said the week before about salvation. And your people are out there saying, how does that go together? And the truth is, often it doesn't. So we want you to learn how to think contextually and synthetically and how to put it together so you have a sense of the whole. We're going to teach you, if you'll let us, about the practical theological disciplines. How does pastoral care interface with what we know from psychology? How does
ministry interface with what we've learned from sociology? And how does the Christian faith interface with other world religions about which we're hearing so much just in these days? All of these things, how do you preach? I mean, how do you actually start a sermon, move it intelligently along so people with ordinary intelligence can follow it until it comes out someplace where it's supposed to? And people get the point. How do you do that? Well, we'll try
to teach you how to do that. How do you speak so people can understand you? One of the great expectations of American congregations of every stripe these days is they do not want a minister who has marbles in her or his mouth when they speak about God. You know why? Because in the back hills of Tennessee and out on the slopes of sunny California and in the deep south and up in New England states and all
across America, everybody turns in at 6:30 to listen to Tom Brokaw give the evening news. And Tom Brokaw does not get marbles in his mouth when he speaks the evening news. So that the level of expectation of what a public speaker is has been universally lifted up across this great nation of ours. It's probably true across the world. And you and I are judged on Sunday morning how we compare with Tom Brokaw when he gives
the news. We're going to teach you how to speak, and our speech department will probably destroy you before they rebuild, but that's alright. Most of us have to be destroyed before we can be rebuilt. All of these things we're going to try to give you as tools to work with as you go out into the world to make you better prepared to serve Jesus Christ. It's our theological task, but it's our theological task. It's not just
mine, but it's not just yours. It's our task. It's the task of the church. Karl Barth made that point so clearly in 1927. He started writing his Christian dogmatics, and he suddenly stopped in midstream after two volumes and said, No, no, that's wrong. It is not Christian dogmatics. It's church dogmatics. Theology takes place not just in the studies of ministers and in the studies of professors, but theology takes place in the life of the church, and
the whole church is responsible for it. It's very difficult to speak of our theological task today because the world, at least in the United States, the world is anything but homogeneous. In many ways, our society is breaking up into thousands of little bitty pieces. Maybe some of you have read Alan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind. Alan Bloom's an old-fashioned rationalist. His heroes are Rene Descartes, John Locke. But he grew up on that
wonderful vision of the Enlightenment that has inspired the American university, that there is such a thing as reason, and that reason is universal, and that a reason transcends history, and a reason transcends culture, so that whether you're Korean or whether you're American or whether you're African or whether you're European, reason is reason, and you can appeal to reason to establish the truth. And today, Bloom is wringing his hands because that vision is being disintegrated before his
very eyes in the American university. I read an article recently by a professor at the University of Virginia who teaches religion. He said, what's it like to teach religion in the modern American university? He calls it opening a shop at the carnival, that the world no longer speaks the common language. The world no longer honors common norms. You can no longer solve an issue by saying, the Bible says, because somebody will say, well, that's what you
think the Bible says. You can no longer solve an argument or a discussion by saying, well, it's reasonable. Well, they'll say, that's reasonable to you, but it's not reasonable to me. My reason is different. We have entered into what he calls the, what Bakin, the Russian literary theorist, has called the age of carnival, in which it's cacophony. Everybody's speaking. Everybody's hollering. Everybody's hocking. Everybody's trying to sell. Everybody's laughing and enjoying. There's no way to communicate. He
says we have become like Melville's seamen on the Pequod, where Melville describes them each one, a continent to himself, so that they were all islanders. Well, we Americans are the champion islanders because of our rugged individualism and our attitude, no one's going to tell me what to do and no one's going to tell me what to believe. I'll work it out myself. And God love us, let's do it. Let's work it out. But let's work it
out together. Let's work it out in such a way that we learn to build bridges, one to another, not just with a little group that we feel comfortable in. I say this every year at this time to a group like this, and within three weeks it is totally ignored, and I'm going to keep on saying it to them. I have no more breath to say it. Do not repeat. Do not put labels on your fellow classmates
so that you know that one's a liberal, that one's an evangelical, that one's a feminist, that one's a liberationist, and so on and so forth, because the minute you do that, you have stopped taking that person seriously. You no longer have to deal with that human being as a human being because you've got them labeled. You know what they are. What they are is what you say they are. They may not be that at all. They
may be much more than that, but you'll never know. Because you've neatly put people in their categories, and then you kind of coalesce and eat here at night with your friends and people who think alike and act alike and share your causes and your concerns, and it's all very wonderful, and the world goes to hell in a handbasket. How different are we from the world when we do that? Not even a little bit. We are just
the world in Christian clothes. So let's build bridges. Let's argue until the cows come home. Let's argue about things that matter. Let's discuss things that matter. Let's learn from one another about things that matter. But let not one of us be intimidated by other people. Just because somebody feels strongly about something doesn't mean it's true. But let's stay in conversation, and let's stay in relationship, because that's what the Church is, and the Church is bigger than
I am. Thank God. And the Gospel is bigger and better than I know. Thank God. But it is our theological task, and we share it together. So I say to you, welcome to Princeton Theological Seminary. Like Michael Libbyson said this morning, let the good times roll, let the bad times roll too. But promise me one thing, and I'll close with this. Promise me one thing. When that low moment comes for you, when you're ready to hang
it all up and check out, do not leave this seminary without talking to me first, will you? You just come to my office and ask for an appointment, and you'll have one. Because I'd much rather talk to you than I would push those papers from one side of the desk to the other. That's no compliment, I know, but I really would. I really would. I'm here for you. You're what it's about. And I care about the
seminary not because I have wonderful memories of my student days here, even though I do. I care about the seminary not because it's a historic place, and it is. I care about it because of what we're doing here. Because I really care about the Church. And I know the Church needs ever better ministers. I want your generation to do it better than my generation has been able to do it. I really covet that. I want to
hear the footsteps behind me, strong footsteps of other generations coming down the pike as our generation finally retires. I want to know that there are able, able women and men committed to Jesus Christ and to his Church who are following along and who can do it better. Just because you're young doesn't mean you can do it better. That remains to be seen. But you have the opportunity to do it better. And God love you and bless
you. I do hope you will. Thank you.