Southwestern Baptist seminary announces school focused on Bible preaching

The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is ready to give its graduates the ability to preach straight from the Bible.

On Oct. 21, the seminary’s board of trustees approved a new School of Preaching that seminary President Paige Patterson expects to begin next fall with 200 to 250 students.

David Allen, who currently serves as dean of the School of Theology, was named the founding dean of the new school.

The conservative seminary is teaching students to follow the Bible as inerrant and to drill down for the literal meaning in the text.

“With the founding of the School of Preaching, Southwestern Seminary proclaims an identifying commitment to train called, capable and courageous preachers to bring the good news of the ancient text to the darkened heart of the modern world,” said Lash Banks, chairman of the board of regents in a press release.

All students will be required to learn ancient Greek and Hebrew so they will be able to do text-driven preaching in which the sermon comes directly from the Bible.

“There’s a general dumbing down going on in education today,” Patterson said. “Our program is something of a throwback to the 1800s I guess. We’re going to have the knowledge. We’re not going to have to depend on a few scholars.”

Learning Greek and Hebrew can be a challenge for some students, and Patterson said that some do not make it through the program but that most persevere.

“We have students who come to us and plead to us and say they can’t do this,” Patterson said. “My greatest joy is taking the student who thinks they cannot do this and showing them that they can.”

As part of that education, students must also be well versed in the humanities.

“We went back to the books of the Western world as being central to the curriculum,” Patterson said. “We insist a baccalaureate student read Darwin, read Freud. He will have read everything in the world, much of which we disagree with.”

But the school will also add 21st-century technology to its curriculum. Like many other schools, it will have smart classrooms to reach students around the world.

That means students who cannot come to the Fort Worth campus will be able to take part in classes online.

“Online students in Asia, South America, Africa or Europe can actually participate in the class even though they are on the computer,” Patterson said. “Some may be taking the class at two o’clock in the morning, but they will be able to participate.”

Patterson said the seminary has the faculty for the new school.

‘We’re excited,” Patterson said. “It’s a grand experiment. Nobody has ever tried it before.”

The seminary has 3,694 students, with about 3,100 in the graduate programs.

Craig Blaising, executive vice president and provost at Southwestern, said the new school is the next logical step for the seminary.

“We’re coming into the life of the convention at a time when the conservative reformation has accomplished its task, but the next stage is to bring out the meaning of that in the preaching in churches,” Blaising said in a statement. “We have the battle for the inerrant Bible being taught in the seminaries, but now is the issue of preaching the Word. It has to be preached, and this is the place to [learn how to] do it.”

This story was originally published October 23, 2015 at 12:56 PM with the headline "Southwestern Baptist seminary announces school focused on Bible preaching."