What Exactly Do You Do at Seminary?

By Reed Metcalf

“So what exactly do you do at seminary?”

This is not an uncommon question from friends, family, and even your spouse when you are at seminary, and it’s an understandable question; seminary is a path that few take, so few know what it entails. The answer is that we train for ministry via practicums, papers, workshops, reflection groups, prayer, internships, language-learning, lectures, and, most notably, lots and lots of reading. For a 120 unit MDiv, we are supposed to have read 60,000 pages of academic works by the time we are done. Yikes.

But this is all ultimately done as service to the church and dedication to God. The abridged version of Fuller Theological Seminary’s mission statement that I heard from then-president Richard Mouw during my first week as a student was, “Fuller exists to equip men and women for the manifold ministries of Christ and his church.” Our various means of training to be leaders all come down to serving God and his church, and that means even our waist-deep expeditions through books.

With that in mind, the Fuller Blog is starting a series of reflections on some of the works we read during our degrees. How do specific books inform our study of the Bible? How can these books be useful to the church? Those are the questions these posts hope to answer.

We’ll kick off our first series of reflections on some works by the heavy-hitting Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar who has had a huge impact on evangelical readings of the Old Testament in the past few decades. You’re welcome to read along with us through Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination, Theology of the Old Testament, and Ice Axes for Frozen Seas, but don’t feel obligated. You don’t need to read the originals to understand and get something from these reflections (I hope!)

Posts will happen every Wednesday; tomorrow will be our first. We’ll do ten posts on Brueggemann, with our last post landing the day before the man himself shows up in Pasadena to speak at the Fuller Forum. (Nifty, eh?) What will we work through after that? We’re not sure yet. We’ll figure it out after we knock out some of this other reading. For now, Brueggemann.

Reed Metcalf is the editor of the Fuller Blog and a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary (MDiv, ’14). You can follow him on Twitter at @reedmetcalf.

You can follow Fuller Seminary on Twitter at @fullerseminary.