You have to weep. Because the lost go looking, and the doors are shut. Stacey McCain is correct: the last place to find God is an academic theology department: it has reached the point where the Kiwi Presbyterians founded a school fo Ministry and got the senate to make a different degree for training ministers, and so the Religious Studies department is left well alone.

Furthermore, could anything be more absurd than Ms. Massey’s idea that she could get “a good helping of Jesus” at the fraudulently named Yale Divinity School? The place has been implacably hostile to Christianity for decades. The impiety and secularized gnosticism of that decadent institution did much to inspire William F. Buckley Jr.’s monumental work God and Man at Yale. If anyone is seeking “a good helping of Jesus,” probably the last place you’d find it is New Haven, Connecticut, being tutored by the academic High Priesthood of postmodern paganism.

The deities worshipped at Yale Divinity School are a pantheon of bloody idols, chief among which are Equality and Progress. Devotees of the Cult of Social Justice celebrate their perverse beliefs with rituals involving fornication, sodomy and abortion, occasionally organizing protests to demand that U.S. taxpayers fund their heathenish rites. No Christian would dare go near such an ivy-covered Temple of Satanic Wickedness, except perhaps to deliver a prophecy of its imminent doom, then fleeing in haste before Jehovah sends fire and brimstone showering down to incinerate the foul stench of that latter-day Gomorrah

There are problems here. If you are academic, you better publish. You better be cited: your Hirsch Index will be monitored.

You better get grants.

Now, this distorts good studies. Many of the best studies are not popular, and subvert the consensus. That is what science is about: set a hypothesis, do an experiment, and demonstrate that your hypothesis is suported or rejected: ideally, such ideas remain in limbo until a second team replicate your experiment.

THat replication is what Master’s Theses should be. But now, they have to be novel, even more son with a PhD. There are not that many new ideas in any field: if you have one every couple of years you are doing well.

But this is different from scholarship: One needs to review the original taxt, consider how others have dealt with it, and not discount the parts one does not like. In particular, you need to consider the work of previous generations: the past is a different country, and the quality of their analysis can be seen more clearly when the issues of that day have passed.

It is a place for care, for metliculous citations, precise judgement, and a suspicioun of novelty.

Except in the post modern academy, that has rejected the fathers of the church because feelings, and are left pronouncing as if they have authority but without no source, no text, and no acceptance that there can be an understanding or exegesis.

Until this organization reforms, avoid it. Let the theology departments die on the vine.

And call the lost to repent. For it is time on your knees, in tears, that brings change.