”Our notion of truth has always been to behold God, our chief end,” Barnes said.
The Rev. M. Craig Barnes, a Presbyterian pastor and educator chosen to lead one of the nation’s oldest seminaries was inaugurated and installed Wednesday as the seventh president of Princeton Theological Seminary.
The service, taking place in the afternoon inside the Princeton University Chapel, began with Mr. Barnes and delegates from other schools and churches marching into the gothic cathedral style house of worship. In song, prayer and scripture readings, the crowd helped to usher in the man who has been leading the seminary since January.
Later, Mr. Barnes, 57, climbed the steps of the elevated pulpit to deliver a roughly 19-minute inaugural address entitled “beauty and truth.” As the audience looked up to him, he stressed the importance of those “twins” finding each other in “our ethics, our choices to do what is right and our commitment to spend our lives in the things that make a difference and reunite Heaven and Earth.”
”Our notion of truth has always been to behold God, our chief end,” he said.
”Why do our professors stay up all night trying to get their lectures just right?” he continued. “It’s not to convince a student who’s on the right side of an argument. It is only to wipe away the smudges we’ve placed on the spectacles of Scripture, than we can more clearly behold. And we need to behold so much more than we need to win arguments.”
To illustrate his remarks, he cited living examples of seeing how seminary faculty consoled a fellow professor whose adult son had died suddenly. In that instance, he said, the “truth of grief was met by the beauty of compassion.””So our task here,” he said, “is not just to talk truth but to help our students, churches, the world around us to behold it.”
William P. Robinson, chairman of the seminary board of trustees, spoke during the ceremony, first addressing the seminary community. He called on them to “let Craig Barnes be Craig Barnes, because that is the best Craig Barnes he’s got. And it’s a really, really good one.”
He asked them to support and pray for the president, to let him lead from “his strengths, from his passions and from his call.”
In his remarks, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber talked of the “historic and strong” ties that have bound his college and the seminary, started in 1812.
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