As many readers might know, the Institute of Lutheran Theology's seminary and graduate school is called the Christ School of Theology, and we are all about the accreditation of this institution.
When checking our accreditation with the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) find us under The Institute of Lutheran Theology. View our ABHE fact sheet here: https://app.weaveeducation.com/publicFiles/institutionprofilepdfs/Institute_of_Lutheran_Theology-ABHE_-_Association_for_Biblical_Higher_Education_Fact_Sheet.pdf. We have been a full member of ABHE since initial accreditation in 2018. We successfully achieved our first ten-year accreditation with ABHE at the 2023 February meeting of ABHE's Commission on Accreditation.
When checking on us on the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) website, always look for Christ School of Theology. Christ School of Theology is the accreditable entity as for as ATS is concerned. You can find us on the ATS website here: https://www.ats.edu/member-schools/christ-school-of-theology-of-the-institute-of-lutheran-theology. While we have not been officially accredited by ATS's Commission on Accreditation yet, we are already Associate members of the ATS, and are engaged in many activities with them. We are working hard to get our self-study complete this year, and anticipate an ATS visit in February of 2024.
My thoughts in 2005-06 was that a new Lutheran House of Studies was needed that would serve all Lutherans -- especially ELCA Lutherans. This House of Studies, I argued, should be independent, autonomous and accredited, should assume the basic hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation on Scripture, and should be straightforwardly realist in its understanding of God and of theological language generally. ILT, I thought, should be fully engaged with the question of truth, particularly the question of how to connect the truth of theology with the truths of the special sciences.
ILT will begin its fifteenth year of offering classes in the fall of 2023 and, I must say, we are moving forward nicely. I always knew that ILT could produce pastors because we have from the beginning been blessed with great students and a renowned faculty. However, because we are not a LCMS, ELCA or Wisconsin Synod seminary, we don't have an already established market for students studying to be pastors. As our Wikepedia page says, we do prepare pastors for the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations, the Augsburg Lutheran Churches, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC). We are happy to have such important work to do.
However, other seminaries compete with us, particularly within the LCMC and the NALC. While we believe we have the deepest program for students in these two church bodies, our program is quite traditional, with heavy doses of Biblical Theology, History of Theology, Systematic and Pastoral Theology. It takes time to achieve an ILT education and not everybody wants to take the time, or perhaps has the time, to go through a program like ours. But I believe that our age demands more deeply prepared pastors than has perhaps been the case in the past. Accordingly, we shall always serve these constituencies, and we shall always try to grow our ministry programs.
To really effect change in the contour of Lutheran theology in North America, we would need to train perhaps 1,000 pastors over the next 10 years. 1,000 very well-educated pastor-theologians who would take very seriously the traditional truth claims of theology would likely alter the course of the church bodies we serve and the North American Lutheran traditions from which they were born. ILT's Christ School of Theology will always take seriously the task of raising up the next generations of Lutheran pastors, and we hope to train 1,000 pastors -- though to do so in 10 years would demand that more markets become open to us.
From the beginning, however, ILT has had another task, a task parallel to that of raising up the next generation of Lutheran pastors. As I wrote already in 2007, we must raise up the next generations of Lutheran professors and teachers. We must tend to our theological traditions theologically. We need people involved in an effort that will issue in the making of a new class of theologians, theologians who know the the great Christian deeply as it has been understood by the Lutheran Confessions, people who have a profound grasp of the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon and who can adroitly relate this tradition to the contemporary horizon.
From the beginning we have created opportunities in ILT for advanced study, but now we are experiencing something at ILT we could maybe not have expected 17 years ago. Although I knew that ILT must train future theologians, I did not realize in 2005-06, the degree to which God would bless our efforts at building a real theological institute.
The last three years have shown very strong growth in our post-M.Div programming: the STM, the Doctor of Ministry, and especially the PhD. People are seeking us out to study because they trust us to allow them to encounter the great texts of the tradition in creative and fruitful ways. We don't tell the students that the great texts of the tradition must be avoided because they are not sufficiently sensitive to issues of class, sex, race, orientation, etc. We are not deeply suspicious of the western canon as some are. Paraphrasing Barth, we believe that we should take the presuppositions of that canon at least as seriously as our own. Since we trust the tradition, we encourage our students to engage it deeply.
What does ILT's Christ School want to be when it grows up? While I cannot predict exactly what the Christ School will look like in fifty years, I do hope that I know what it will mean to be the Christ School then. To be the Christ School of theology is to take very seriously the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of interpreting those Scriptures. To take these Scriptures seriously means that this texts are not something of the past, but living and breathing documents of today, documents which engage us and open for us possibilities of our being. God's grace is, after all, something he dispenses each and every day, even as we living within the paradigms of the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon. Simply put, the documents confront us with the very question of salvation, the question that separates human beings from the beasts below them and the angels above, the question that will always remain orthogonal to the concerns of AI and the "machining of our culture."
The Christ School of Theology is growing rapidly, particularly at the D.Min and PhD levels. How big might we be next year? If the trends I am seeing continue, we will have between 30-35 PhD students studying in the fall of 2023, 20-25 D.Min students, and 10-15 STM students. This means that 60-75 of our students next fall will likely be doing advanced work in theology.
We celebrate this! It is a God thing! The students are coming from almost all of the Lutheran traditions and beyond these traditions as well. Our ATS headcount of 96 in the fall of 2022 could see another 15% increase next fall. We are building the Christ School of Theology not by watering down who we are, but by embracing it the more deeply. We are not a divinity school, but a flesh-and-blood Lutheran seminary dedicated to taking seriously Lutheran truth claims. In a time in which seminaries are shrinking, ours is growing.
I have been discussing here our seminary and graduate school and have not addressed our undergraduate school, Christ College. Nor have I talked about ILT's library and all of the publishing planned to flow from it. These demand separate posts. Here I have simply wanted to remind all what it means to be the Christ School of Theology. We live the commitment to our heritage while at the same time being wholly vulnerable to our intellectual and cultural horizon. This way of living is, we think, what the theology of the Cross is all about.
