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How is the cultural shift of the 21st century impacting students? How are today’s Christian students doing as they enter colleges and seminaries? Today, we have Dr. Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on to discuss these topics and to hear his take on classical Christian Education!
Episode Transcription
Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.
Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again. I'm Marlin Detwiler, and you've joined us for Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Dr. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Welcome, Dr. Mohler.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Marlin, it's great to be with you. Thank you.
Marlin Detweiler:
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself personally. We always like to hear that people with significant titles like you actually have real pasts and real personal experiences.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Yeah, absolutely. I grew up as a little boy in Florida. There aren't that many Florida natives.
Marlin Detweiler:
And what town?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Lakeland, Florida.
Marlin Detweiler:
Oh my goodness! Yeah. That's not far from where we live, actually, in the wintertime.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, I thought that was just normal for all humanity and, you know, just running around in shorts in January, but grew up in that part of Florida when it was very much a settled community. It was it was more like Alabama than California. And just a wonderful Christian family, Christian parents, Christian grandparents. I could ride my bicycle back and forth between Grandparents House and Plant City, Florida.
It was idyllic, and Florida was just very safe. And then an enormous amount of social transition came into Florida about the time I became a teenager, 12, 13 years old, and the population exploded. You know, it quadrupled over a period of time. And the biggest thing is, is there were big new ideas coming in. And I was in the public school system, which in Polk County when I was in elementary school was basically just fine. It was just a local elementary school that had been built in the 19th century. And, you know, all the teachers were Christians, and it was an intact society. My dad was with Publix supermarkets for many years– decades.
And my dad started store number five. That tells you something. Yeah. And he became a senior manager in the company and went down, store manager. He loved working in the stores. And he went down to South Florida, where Publix was expanding because the population was exploding. So I was 13 years old when we moved to South Florida and I walked right into the educational liberal experiments of the 1970s.
And I mean, I walked into the school without walls, you know, no more sage on the stage now, just a guide on the side. It was groovy. It was a disaster. And so I walked into the idea of the intersection of ideology and education as a 13-year-old. And I'll just tell you, I wasn't buying it, Marlin.
It was a complete mess. I went into the school bathroom, you know, between two classes, and I smelled marijuana for the first time. And I knew what it was because that's what it had to be. And so I walk out, I pass a teacher, and I said, “Somebody's smoking marijuana in the bathroom.” And then I noticed the person smoking marijuana bathroom was the teacher. And he was my teacher. And he looked at me, and he said, “I got a roomful of 13-year-olds, I’ve got to do something to get through the day.” And, you know, I just thought, well, you know, this is a new world. I just caught my teacher smoking in the bathroom. But it was, of course, the ideological stuff.
I was this conservative Southern Baptist, 13-year-old rule keeper, and, you know, it really threw me into a life project. And that's why I told it that way. It threw me into a world-life project of trying to understand the worldview of the people around me. And what in the world was producing this kind of nonsense.
And I think that was central my calling as a Christian theologian and scholar and teacher, and leader of an institution of several thousand students and someone who is giving my life to the intersection of Christianity and culture.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you have definitely done that. And I've watched your work, and I see that you're doing it with no apparent level of bashfulness. So thank you for that.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
I don't think you can be bashful about this. You know, I think we're living in one of those rare moments of a great cultural shift. The tectonic plates in the society are moving. And, you know, this is just not a time for quietude.
Marlin Detweiler:
I couldn't agree more. Well, you've been you've really led into my next question here. As the president of the seminary, how long have you been in the position of leading the seminary?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, you know, Marlin, I have to walk into some rooms where there's a portrait of me as president 30 years ago or so. If you want to teach people the Greek understanding of mutation, just look at that oil portrait of me, that's 30 years. I'm now in my 31st year as president. So, you know, I spent a generation as president of the school.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I knew was a long time, and that really is helpful. I'd like to hear you talk about what you've observed in seminary life and in students in particular then versus now.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Yeah, well, you know, I think the first thing I would say is radical change in the students. And so the students who come to us now, both at Southern Seminary and Boyce College, and so you can say we have, you know, between 6,500 and 7,000 students, about 1,200 undergraduate students, and the rest are graduate students. At both levels, they are far more serious human beings than was true 30 years ago.
They are not brought here by cultural Christianity, and they're not trying to find themselves. They're young people. And you want young people to do all the things God wants young people to do at that stage in life, but they are far more serious than their parents were and far more serious than any previous generation of students, in my experience.
So they're coming in. They've already been fighting intellectual battles. They've already been fighting, I think as the Apostle Paul talks about in terms of spiritual warfare, and they're very much intellectually curious. They're serious students. They're fun! They're joyful to be around. They're not scared, but they are very serious and sober-minded.
And so that's a pretty significant distinction. They're also taught by teachers. And this means often before they come to us, they're taught by very serious teachers who understand what is at stake. I think that's also something new. So. Well, we can talk about all kinds of horrible things that are happening, and they're all true in the larger sphere. When you ask what kind of student comes to Boys College or Southern Seminary, they're coming more serious, better prepared, more spiritually mature than in previous generations. And I would say otherwise, they wouldn't be coming.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's that's wonderful. Do you find that at Southern that the typical seminary student has graduated from college some time ago, has worked for a bit, and is now moving into a ministry calling or do they come right out of college?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Typically, it's about half and a half. Most of them are still pretty young, but it's about half and half. From the very beginning of my work in theological education, I have believed that it is best to follow a classical structure in which you keep students in study if possible. So, I really put an emphasis on getting 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds to come to campus. Young men called to pastor. And it is because of their habits of study and their habits of learning. And you know what the half-life of an academic season is. You just bring more with you at 22 or 23 academically. Now you don't have as much with you in terms of life experience. And sure, it is a tradeoff.
Marlin Detweiler:
That's interesting. And it's it's very encouraging to hear the seriousness. I consider that to be an optimistic outlook in a way that's really, really encouraging. There's been some talk recently that seminaries are moving towards lessening standards, especially as it relates to biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew. What's going on at Southern, and what is your thinking? What's your part of that conversation?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, we still require both Greek and Hebrew for all Master of Divinity students. We think anyone who's going to be a pastor ought to have that background in the original languages. And as you know, and you kind of premised your life's work on this language study is more than the study of a language. It is a mental discipline that introduces you into a world.
And so I try to tell students that it's not just how to understand a Hebrew sentence or a Greek sentence, it's how to understand the Hebrew mind and the Greek mind. And you'll never do that if you can't enter into the language. Understand the language world. Now, I'll be honest, like everyone else, we're in a situation in which some decisions are made outside of us, you know, extraneous to us.
So what we decide in terms of the curriculum can be undecided by what you just might call the market. You know, in other words, where students are. And by pastors who are encouraging students and directing students. And so we're going to have to fight this. But this is true for a long time. I mean, this was a 19th-century problem. So this is not a new problem.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I think it's so hard for us to realize the benefit of something when we're swimming in its water.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Right.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. How will Greek benefit me? Well, it's hard it's hard to give a good answer to that if you're on the inside of it. And it's also hard on the outside of it. And I think the idea of being– imbibing all of the culture and having a sense of the world into which Christ was born. Is a way that sometimes makes sense for people. What else do you see?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, and you probably know excuse me, I just started to say… so you probably know that those are two different challenges with Greek in Hebrew. Not so, you know, kind of speaking to I think a lot of your schools and teachers and parents are if I have to prioritize one or the other, I'm going to prioritize Greek. Because Greek comes with the added benefits of, you know, quite frankly, tying into Western civilization. And especially if you combine it with Latin, that's an incredible power of language and knowledge and a set of mental skills that comes. Hebrew is more difficult.
Marlin Detweiler:
I don't know the number of students or sections between the two - I know the Greek overwhelms. Between that and Hebrew. Of course Latin is very important to us as well for similar reasons to Greek. But language mastery and the whole idea of a real depth and being able to communicate is one of the many benefits. What else do you see? What does the horizon look like for the seminary as it prepares the next generation of church leaders?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
You know, I've dedicated my life to this. I firmly believe that the seminary is the right answer to the question. You know, how are pastors in any significant numbers going to be trained for faithfulness in ministry? And, you know, the seminary world is collapsing, that is not a word of prophecy. That is that's just an honest word.
And, you know, Marlin, a lot of that's just because so many churches and denominations are collapsing. And so, no surprise, you know, the Harvard Divinity School is not turning out many preachers. You know, if you're shocked by that, you're about a century late. And then you look at all these other seminaries that are basically going by the side.
So the seminaries that are surviving and thriving are very conservative, evangelical Protestant seminaries. But only about a handful of those. Only about six of those. So I'll tell you, when I came to this institution as president 30 years ago, I actually told my trustees, I said, “You know, our goal is to be the very finest seminary on planet Earth. It's also to be the apex predator, because this is a very contested territory. We have to fight for why those who are preaching teach the word of God, need this quality of education and need it in a confessional setting with very clear theological commitments and need to spend the time necessary to gain the requisite skills. We’re going to have to fight for this.”
And, you know, we have fought for we've tripled the enrollment of the master's and the doctorates here over the process of years. But it's an ongoing battle because, you know, in the free church tradition, we can't mandate theological education. And even in the denominations that do mandate theological education, almost all of them had defined downward the amount of theological education or the content of the theological education that they require. I think that's a bad move. But, you know, that means we have to be persuasive. But the fact we have to be persuasive means we have to be really good. So that's not a bad context.
Marlin Detweiler:
Now, things that cause us to keep our pencil sharp and to really keep our game are not bad things. We could all stand to have those in our lives.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
I think it's especially true for schools. I think schools really need to have to be good to survive because otherwise, school is one of those things that can fall into entropy pretty quickly. And that's that's bad. I love the fact we have to earn the credibility of 18-year-olds and 22-year-olds every year.
Marlin Detweiler:
They can present their own challenges to earn it, too, which is a good thing.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, they do know what they're looking for. And then we tell them they're looking for more than they think. But we make sure that it's more than they expected, not less.
Marlin Detweiler:
I love that. You've spent a lot of time as an author as well.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Right.
Marlin Detweiler:
How many books have you written?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
My goodness. 12, 13. Something like that.
Marlin Detweiler:
Good for you. What would you consider to be the most... Well, let me let me back up. Let me hold that question for just a moment. What causes you to write a book?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, look at this picture. I'm in my personal library. I am a creature of books. My parents taught me to read and taught me to love books. My grandmother was a schoolteacher who taught me to love books. I worked my way into a world of books as a very young boy. And I never wanted to work my way out of it.
I worked my way through it. And so I have come to know some of the most incredible people on planet Earth. The Lord has given me the opportunity to spend time with presidents and prime ministers, and yet the most lasting learning has come to me through books. And that's just the way I think my mind works. I think it's the way most minds work.
I also write books because I want to enter into other minds. I want to influence others. I want to seduce some people into an area of learning. I want to prepare Christians for thinking through some issues. I want to help people to understand the times. I mean, some of my books are biblical exposition. Some of my books are cultural analysis, some are theological exposition as well. And it's because I want to model and frankly work out my own calling. And, you know, I write books that I think would have been helpful to me.
And as a leader there, I want to lead with conviction. I lead with ideas. Success for me in leadership is not moving one pile of bricks to another place. It's changing minds, which I hope our minds are more and more aligned with Christ. And so writing books is very much a part of that.
And, you know, I also think the Imago Dei is more about reading than we might know. It's certainly about words, you know, as the Bible begins and God creates Adam and Eve in his image, he speaks to them. And so the language becomes very, very important. And then, very quickly, God's people need written scripture, and God provides that.
And I think that just a part of the structure of how he made our brains is that we need to learn a lot by reading. We learn a lot by other means. But reading is, I think, is the central conduit by which most propositional and reflective material gets into the human mind most effectively.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you would expect me to agree with that for what I do for a living. What would you label as your most effective book and why?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
You know, the very first book I wrote is a very small book entitled Culture Shift, but it was an urgent book because I was trying to help Christians to understand that, number one, most Christians don't think about the culture. They think about parts of the culture, but they don't think about the culture as this omnibus of a reality that the Christians have to think about or should be thinking about all the time and intentionally and structurally and in a disciplined way, biblically. And I think my reading of church history is that Christians don't give this kind of serious thought to the culture until we have to.
And, you know, the turning point in history, there's shifts in history when Christians say, okay, we got to think about this, really about this a lot. Can we serve in Caesar's army? Yes. Can we bend the knee to Caesar? No. How do you train a 15-year-old boy to walk through the streets of Rome to go and pick up something for the family and come back knowing what he's going to pass? How do you how do you negotiate that? What does it mean that Paul wrote the predominant number of his letters to the metropolitan cities of the Roman Empire, to the Christians who were there? What does that tell us? In the Reformation, in the medieval period, in the synthesis between the secular and the sacred, between faith and reason in the medieval period, and then the breaking apart of all this in the modern world, those tectonic plates shifting turned out to be really crucial times.
And my argument, the first book, Culture Book Culture Shift, is that we're living through one of those of and Christians better be aware. This is a process of cultural change. We're experiencing a shift from one culture to another. Yeah. And so that was that first book.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, I would make the comment– it is so hard to make observations about the fishbowl that we live in. Yeah, when it's, it's the water that we swim in and we don't have the outside context, which is the value of study, the right understanding. What, what thoughts do you have from having written that book and other books on culture, The Gathering Storm being one of them for how we better assess the time in which we live?
I had a conversation with one of my children, for example, who made a comment once, and I challenged him on it. That thought today is really no different than 40 years ago when I was his age and 35 years ago that it's just a matter of another step. And I wanted to say no, I don't think so. How do we how do we better assess our world in the context of all of history and that which ought to be?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I tell people they need to think of culture not as a movie that just keeps playing, but they need to think of it like a seesaw in a playground. There is a point at which when civilizational change is happening, you know you're going uphill. But then there's a point at which the thing teeters and goes the other way.
And, you know, then it's equally hard to go the other direction or to hold to what was in the on the other side of the fulcrum. And, you know, because one of the best ways to teach physics is put two kids on a on a seesaw. There are very few models of any society that has tipped in one direction that has ever been pulled back any significant amount.
And I say that because I've devoted my life to studying cultures and civilizations, and there are very few models. And so you end up with in the modern age, this is how you end up with conservatism. This is how you end up with the right, so to speak. It's the people who say, look, the direction of this change, at least a lot of this change is not healthy.
And that's why, you know, Christians and others who are true conservatives in this sense and holding to kind of classical continuing patterns of life and eternal truths and verities, we are now on the defensive. And it's because, again, the incline is now in a direction in which all the energy is running away from us. And so one of the things I try to help both in Culture Shift and The Gathering Storm, for example, is to say in The Gathering Storm we have far more recently kind of 20 years later is here's what that acceleration looks like. So last night, Marlin, I was looking for something in my study, and I found something else. And that happens all the time. And I found –.
Marlin Detweiler:
It takes a lot longer to get it done then, doesn’t it?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, you know, it's an occupational hazard. You surround yourself with tens of thousands of books, you know, you've got tens of thousands of friends. And every once in awhile one cries out to you, you don't expect. And so that's how I found the book. It is this symposium undertaken by conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians back in the early 1980s. And so, you know, some people that you would recognize immediately from that era are here.
Marlin Detweiler:
I remember it well and R.C. speaking into it.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Yeah, I only remember them William Bently Ball you know he was a Catholic attorney, and then you had Chuck Colson, and you know this just, just other people. And anyway, here's the thing. None of them saw the transition coming, not one of them. Not when they’re laying out all the challenges. You know what? They used the words boy and girl, man and woman with an absolute lack of irony.
And you look at that, and you go, okay, I was an adult. I was a married man then. And so when people say we're living in the same society, just know where we are inhabiting terra incognita. And I don't mean to give a whole lecture here, Marlin, but this is not just one more step in one direction. This is a coerced, ideologically driven reformulation of the most basic understanding of what it means to be human. Yeah, that doesn't happen every decade. Thanks be to God, by the way.
Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And here we are faced with the opportunity to live it and deal with it.
Well, that kind of leads me to my last set of questions. You've been exposed to the movement of classical Christian education. Having spoken at the ACCS, the Association of Classical Christian Schools Conference, what did you observe? What have you observed in seeing that from a distance and from a standpoint of being a step removed from it?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Well, I'm kind of a step removed from it, but I'm not many steps removed from it.
Marlin Detweiler:
Well, you know, K-12 are particular in that sense. I don't mean that you're removed from the idea of classical education. So, yeah, please understand. That’s what I mean.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
I just want to say, look, I want to be as engaged as possible by turning out as many teachers from Boyce College and as many scholars in both the college and the seminary to help the movement of classical school education. I don't point to many hopeful institutional developments, Marlin. Over the course of the last 30 years, I think classical– Christian classical schools are at the very top of that list.
So hear me and look, I put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. The investment of this institution and my personal encouragement as much as is possible. And also, I mean, Mary and I have three grandchildren. Two of them are school age, and they have done every single school moment of their lives a part at Potomac Classical School, you know, in Alexandria, Virginia.
And we exult in that. And so, in other words, we put our grandchildren where our commitments are. Obviously, their parents are the ones who made that decision. But their parents are our daughter and son-in-law, and are completely committed and are deeply invested, and themselves understand exactly what is at stake.
Marlin Detweiler:
What difference has the classical education renaissance, the resurgence of it has been around long enough now for it to have been the education of students that you've gotten in college and certainly and also at the seminary. How would you describe the value of that education for them in comparison to alternatives?
Dr. Albert Mohler:
They know a little something.
Marlin Detweiler:
Is that a good thing? Knowledge can be corrupting.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Knowledge can be corrupting. But on the other hand, Deuteronomy 6 tells us the first responsibility of parents in the economy of God's people is to teach our children. When we sit by the door, and when we walk through the way, and our rising up and are sitting down, I mean that this is it. This is the entire enterprise, which is why where you find Christianity, you find schools. And always have from the beginning.
But I know why you're asking this. It's not just it's not just knowledge, it's also wisdom. It's knowing how to connect the dots. But, you know, the older I get, the more I think I am with the classical Christian educators. And by that, I didn't mean that as a brand, just in terms of the classical stream of Christian educators.
And that is unapologetically putting facts and data into minds and then working at connecting the dots. I think one of the stupidest things in the educational liberalism of the seventies was they tried to connect dots when there were no dots.
Marlin Detweiler:
So well put.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
I love it that we've got, you know, a five-year-old grandson who, you know, is learning things. He doesn't have a clue how it connects to anything. But you know that young little mind and his eight-year-old brother who's, you know, we've walked through, you know, the entire timeline they memorize in terms of human history, memorizing language blocks and literature. They don't know how these things connect yet. But in their hearts and in their minds, structures are being built. And then they're surrounded by biblical truth. They're in a gospel church. They're in Washington, D.C., where the word of God is being just pumped into them.
They have godly parents who are raising them, and the nurture and the admonition of the Lord and incredible parents who have experience as diplomats for the United States government and senior staff in the United States government. And they're surrounded by very powerful people there at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, you know, but they know them as brothers and sisters in Christ, and they know them as those who prize learning and faithfulness. And it's just the sweetest thing. I am not just because of pragmatic reasons but in deep, principled reasons. I'm about the biggest fan of classical Christian education you could find.
Marlin Detweiler:
That kind of perspective, honestly, is what gets me up in the morning. And it is exciting to see the hope that comes out of classically educated kids, classical schools, and the things that are going on. You have been wonderful to talk to. Your energy is contagious, and don't want to keep you any longer than you agreed to. You have been a wonderful guest.
Thank you, Dr. Mohler.
Dr. Albert Mohler:
Marlin, it's great to talk with you. And, you know, anything we can do to help you of all people, you know where we are.
Marlin Detweiler:
I do know where you are. Folks, you have joined us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian Education with Dr. Albert Mohler. Thank you so much. Again.
