The connection between theological education and the Christian life is essential. We must love God in order to know God and we must know God in order to love God. Hovey’s warning that the failure to comprehend the ways of God will test our faith should not be lost. The difficulty of theology and the limitations of our study are not to hold us back. Rather, they direct us toward God.

In the previous essay I explained three areas in which nineteenth-century Baptist theologian Alvah Hovey provided some help in thinking through the nature and place of theological education. One of these was the idea that theology itself is the master and those who study it are to be mastered by it. In Hovey’s mind, theological education ought not, and cannot, be divorced from the Christian life. It cannot be confined to seminary study alone.

Theological education cannot be confined to seminary because it is by nature a lifelong endeavor. Formal theological education produces a base out of which further study ought to grow. Hovey was aware that not every pastor can attain formal education, and, in some cases, it did not hinder great ministries. John Bunyan, Andrew Fuller, and Charles Spurgeon fall into this category. However, these men had exceptional minds and engaged in lifelong self-education by which they attained, in a roundabout fashion, the recommended theological education. In certain other cases, such as men who receive a call to ministry later in life, theological education is certainly more difficult though still preferable.

In another sense, theological education is part and parcel of the Christian life because there is always an element of mystery or partial knowledge to the practice of theology. This is the distinction between archetypal and ectypal knowledge.

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