Spiritual Abuse and Westminster Seminary California: A Letter From an Alumnus
Note: The following is from a letter I received by an individual who has asked to remain anonymous. The writer is a fellow alumnus of Westminster Seminary California. The writer has provided an honest and heartbreaking account of his experience at the seminary and Reformed churches that is reflective of many others. I have reproduced the contents of the letter unedited.
Dear Mr. Cho,
Like you, I graduated from Westminster Seminary California. I appreciate that you are willing to be honest about some distressing things about our school as well as the topic of spiritual abuse. For what it’s worth, I wanted to share my own experiences at the seminary and Reformed churches. I hope this may be helpful.
The other day, I was talking with a friend on the anniversary of my seminary graduation about how ill-equipped we were for pastoral ministry. We realized that several important things were missing that weren’t ever touched upon during our time in seminary. It got us thinking. What did we glean? Why did it seem so empty? Why did ministry feel like we were desperately trying to find resources on how to actually minister to people in our day? Was our entire Westminster Seminary California education a waste of time?
It got me thinking about the gaping holes in my experience in Reformed churches and what I didn’t learn and how it has left devastating consequences for real ministry for myself and many pastors I know.
One such glaring topic that is in the news almost daily is abuse. We never had to discuss or read about abuse in any of its forms. Seminary didn’t equip us to deal with the real issues of physical or sexual abuse in congregations. We weren’t instructed in how to deal with police on such issues or what the civil law requires. The gospel’s relationship to justice in our day was never touched on in a practical manner. Justice in our context was given a vacant expression.
Mercy ministry was hardly touched upon. We didn’t get any advice or help in knowing how to create or lead a church in the correct use of the diaconate or mercy ministry. Helping people with their physical needs and the church’s responsibilities towards its congregants was never touched upon in any practical way.
The biggest niche of church members was never taught — married couples. We never had a required class on marriage counseling. We weren’t required a single book on the topic. We had a one week course on counseling in general that barely scratched the surface and ended up being biblicist in its approach to difficult issues. Pretty remarkable…
My Reformed seminary education didn’t equip us to deal with any real framework for ethical issues surrounding us today. Most classes that even touched on ethics were left nebulous, esoteric, and impractical. We talked about the catechism, the proof texts, and moved on. Any viewpoints dissenting from the radical “two kingdoms” model was mocked and ridiculed: “No one could be so stupid to be a Neo-Calvinist or believe in transforming culture. That’s an over-realized eschatology!” We were required to write a speech defending some position that we could’ve done without having taken the class. In other words, there was no coherent worldview (for lack of a better word) conveyed in our entire seminary education. Philosophical inquiry was openly ridiculed and mocked.
Another thing that we came away with was the ridiculous notion that if we got the Reformed lingo down, we would really have the secret knowledge necessary for ministry. Sadly, students who didn’t learn the “Reformed speak” couldn’t follow along in class, but for those who knew it, it ended up being empty cliches and shibboleths on who was in the “in group” and who wasn’t. There was very little educating going on. Frankly, the professors’ academic research and lectures were pretexts to prove that our lineage and thought in the Reformed tradition was not only legitimate but the only sane expression of the “Truly Reformed.”
I’ve had conversations with people who have objected at this point and said,“Well, you can’t expect everything from a seminary. They did the best they could. They gave a lot of great tools for the future that helped you on your way. No one is perfect. At least they got the gospel right!”
I get it. I really do. No school is perfect. Nothing is what it seems and no education is impervious to problems. We are all finite sinners who are doing the best we can. But there’s more to the story than that. There’s more to seminary education than “getting the gospel right” and being able to discuss Turretin like a boss. There’s more to church life besides Word and Sacrament and the confessional litmus test. But, not according to my seminary education and the ministries and parachurch organizations that surround and support the Westminster Seminary California view of gospel ministry.
When I started seeing the gaping holes of my education, it started waking me up to other problems. It’s easy in this context to be enraptured by seminary for the first couple of years or to even go the whole time really blind to the realities around you. Some people even leave the seminary continuing to sing its praises, and that’s great. I wish them all the best. They can live in that world.
Students can get so overwhelmed and excited about it all. Here are real theological rockstars defending the gospel. Confessionalism, a deep historic faith, lots of scholars promoting an airtight case for the faith in an insane world like ours, a compelling reason to be Protestant, arguments for the church and distinctions you’ve never heard of — it all seems so impregnable and airtight. It makes church glorious again. Defending grace alone never felt so good.
But the problems come when you actually see what’s going on in the background. How do they deal with people who are different? How does the system work when sin and abuse are involved? What happens to grace when it is put into practice? What happens when you question anything, however innocently? What does the system do? How do the pastors and professors react?
When I started seeing these issues crop up again and again and again, I started seeing a pattern that wasn’t just shoddy answers and a minimal theology that was pretty impractical and didn’t actually bring the gospel to where people are struggling. I saw a shutdown of real conversation. I saw an approach that doubled down on their authority and self defense mode. I saw people more willing to sacrifice the individual-the “problem”- for the sake of the institution — to save face. Again and again, the answers were to push the problem out of view and away from making the confessional Reformed world look weak or vulnerable. There was no real grace, no real, hard repentance. The closed doors and hushed conversations kept the real insanity out of sight and out of mind to keep up the illusion that this way of doing church and ministry was actually viable and sustainable, rather than a recipe for toxic abuse and disaster.
Historic, Reformed theology was used as a tool of distraction to prevent us from dealing with the issues facing the church today. It was a stick to silence uncomfortable conversation as being outside our expertise or pedigree. Historical confessional language and biblical studies were tools that didn’t ever end up enriching our modern discourse. They prevented it.
When I saw these things happen over and over again, I wondered, maybe something is wrong with the theology. Maybe something is wrong with how they are perceiving the church and what the Reformation actually did. Maybe, they really don’t understand grace after all. Maybe, just maybe…
I had already suspected that things were rotten in Denmark and my background in philosophy helped me see behind the cookie-cutter answers to the ethical issues and the world-church dynamic that left me wondering, how naive could some professors be? The more and more I listened and did the research, the more and more I saw how vacuous, simplistic, and unworkable the answers I was given were. Maybe the seminary critics in the broader church were right after all…
A secular view of public faith was adopted that collapsed the kingdom with the church. A clericalism was being created through the misguided notion that pastors are to be professionals of the Bible. Future ministers were being told to separate from the congregations and not have friends among them. An “us vs them” mentality was adopted. Piety was mocked and real pastoral ministry was reduced to preaching on Sundays. Knowing people and suffering with people was never taught. We were just the Bible guys who could offer the confessional answers from on high.
The education I received didn’t require any face-to-face interactions with professors and could have been done through just reading books. There was no real mentoring or discipling of anyone. Everything was pushed behind a smokescreen of busy work that was pseudo-Academic and unpastoral — all of which really lost their importance after the first year of being there. It was a deadening place for the soul — arid and inhumane. Seminary was the place where piety went to die. Very little education actually happened.
There was a lot of talk about grace but there was never a culture of grace. Pastoral abuse in the surrounding United Reformed Churches (URC) and Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) was covered up and hidden from view because these men were “confessional.” These men were part of the success of the seminary and we couldn’t have their success — which was our success — tarnished. We could privately reprimand said pastors and all would be well. It’s the classic good ole boys club. Pastors who were problems were passed along from church to church to mission field. Never, ever dealt with…
Don’t even get me started on the pastoral abuse of seminary interns and congregations by these men. What we saw was the seminary giving a safe context for an unconverted ministry. The Protestant righteousness by perfect doctrine was the pretext for godless men to find a safe place to hand down the right doctrine from on high. There was no real love for the people in these abusive churches or for the seminary students being psychologically tortured and burned out before ever entering into the ministry.
Students who were involved in addiction, homelessness, and even prostitution were pushed under the radar. These were just singular problems that didn’t need addressing or our pastoral care. After all, we’re an academic institution. “The seminary isn’t the church!” we were told. Even though we’re training the church, leading the church, educating the church, teaching the future church… as pastors. That’s their problem. But I digress…
Most classes ended up being pretexts to teach a biblicist view of two kingdoms, the spirituality of the church or republication of the covenant of works at Mt. Sinai — many intra-Reformed debates that do nothing to reach people with the gospel and harmed the actual witness of the church. The school majored on debates that seemed to be about the gospel (every niche issue they deemed important became a gospel issue) but really were just distractions from the real problems and distractions from getting the gospel out.
All the issues you thought were gospel issues, well, that’s when the handy spirituality of the church and two kingdoms came in. They got to determine what they wanted to be gospel issues. And no. Yours is not included. This outlook creates a certain kind of arrogant pastor who thinks he is the shaman of gospel talk and church. Anything not in the purview of the education given at the seminary is deemed liberal, social gospel drivel. The new priesthood has been forged.
Most of the friends I have in pastoral ministry have to unlearn most of the harmful views of people and ministry they were taught and learn on their own how to actually shepherd people — something they never learned. The smugness and intellectual pride has to be shed. The lack of friendship and hostility to the ignorant has to be unlearned. The Christian virtues and practices of godliness must be retaught. Real Christlike ethics had to be regained. You know… the fruit of the Spirit.
These are the toxic problems of what happens when confessionalism is the high mark of faithfulness, rather than the low bar, and when godliness doesn’t matter because the “the gospel is objective bro… oh and we’re two kingdoms.” These are the toxic problems that happen when you’re convinced this is the only faithful seminary in the world that really gets the gospel and preaches Christ. This rhetoric isn’t an exaggeration but part of the marketing used to grab future students. This is what happens when people overlook faithfulness to Christ for the sake of that institutional view that doesn’t really jive with reality. This is the institutional effect of being “Truly Reformed.”
A great example of how this approach to seminary education and church life goes awry is church history. Church history was a great example of the pseudo-intellectual setting. We were given a hard line interpretation of the ancient and medieval church that was simplistic and didn’t actually conform to facts or academic scholarship.
The sins of the past were relegated to the men being “people of their time” and simply swept under the rug. The idea that their doctrines and ethical views might have led or bolstered their sin was never even considered.
When fellow students actually read the tradition, they found something much different. They found the lack of transparency damning. Swimming the Tiber or going Eastern Orthodox became a viable reality to many, combined with all of these other issues…
We ultimately got a gospel that wasn’t big enough to deal with all of life. We didn’t get a gospel that could include real Christian piety or dealt with real sins in the church like racism or abuse or sins of our church fathers. “They were just men of their times…”
We didn’t get a gospel that included sanctification or the Covenant of Grace like our forebears had. We received a truncated gospel that didn’t feel like it wanted to upset white, middle class comfortable, “Ordinary” Christianity. Being “Ordinary” helped us not really take the call of the cross seriously and not become too uncomfortable with the idea of giving up the worship of Mammon.
We liked the parts of the Bible that dealt with justification but not real repentance that involved public restitution and reconciliation. We liked parts of the Bible that emphasized the institutional church but never about the need for love and real community. “That’s pietism!” The professors that actually did say something about love and piety were mocked as pietists by other faculty.
Some might ask, “Why didn’t you bring this up, if this is how you feel? Why didn’t you say anything?” But that’s part of the problem. I did. Countless people have. To elders. To pastors. To professors. To Board members. The list goes on. Years have passed of trying to get to know people, discuss the problems, work toward ecclesial solutions, but all of it is pushed under the rug, conversations behind closed doors, and nothing ever done. All of it was silenced through gaslighting, intimidation, losing jobs, and fear. This has happened again and again and again.
All the while congregants suffer under a new clericalism and pastoral abuse branded and paid for by the “Truly Reformed.” Because “Confessionalism!” “Two kingdoms!” “Law/Gospel Distinction!” “We don’t want to be like those evangelicals who don’t get these distinctions. After all, we have to remind everyone why they need us!”
Students are misled and often convert to Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy. Students carry on in their addiction while going into pastoral ministry bottling up their problems, never being really mentored, waiting to burst like Old Faithful. Suicide, atheism, pastoral burnout… but these things aren’t the “norm,” we’re told.They just happen a lot in this context and from what I’m told this is a pandemic, Reformed seminary problem.
