Thanksgivings for Calvin Seminary's PhD Program

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Giving Thanks for Calvin Seminary’s PhD Program

Posted by Laurence O’Donnell in Dies und Das 

On 9 October 2013 Calvin Seminary celebrated the twentieth year of its esteemed PhD program. The celebration’s program included Dr. James De Jong’s brief retrospective on the original vision for the PhD program and how it was established. Prof. Richard Muller delivered the plenary address, “Reflections on Two Decades of the Ph.D. Program,” after which his former students and colleagues presented him a surprise, massive festschrift overflowing with no less than 55 contributions: Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
After watching the presentations I am even more grateful to the Lord for granting me—no doubt the least of the cadre of scholarly sojourners seeking the office of doctor with which to serve the church—a place in this program at this time in its existence and with these teachers.

I
t is clear from the presentations that that the program was designed with specific ends in mind: to attract students from all over the world, to maintain a high academic standard with an emphasis on research and writing, and to specialize in Reformed catholic theology. And it is also clear that, twenty years into the program, a legacy of attaining the desired ends has been established—no doubt due to the two decades of hard work and wise leadership of the program’s leaders, Professors Feenstra and Muller, coupled with full support from the first-class faculty and library. There is much here for which God may be glorified for his abundant mercy and grace upon the program and upon its leaders.

The results of the program speak for themselves—literally!

Her graduates are teachers, writers, professors, and institutional leaders in stations all over the globe. Even in the minute back corner of Christ’s garden in which he has planted me, the NAPARC world, the influence of CTS PhDs looms large both in numbers of teachers taking up stations in NAPARC seminaries and in the ever-growing body of top-tier publications, especially in the field of Reformed historical theology, flowing from the pens of CTS PhD’s.
To give a handful of cases in point (cf. the archive of downloadable CTS dissertations):

• Jordan J. Ballor, Covenant, Causality, and Law: A Study in the Theology of Wolfgang Musculus, Refo500 Academic Studies (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). See also Dr. Ballor’s Get Your Hands Dirty and editorship of the Journal of Markets & Morality.
• J. Mark Beach, Christ and the Covenant: Francis Turretin’s Federal Theology as a Defense of the Doctrine of Grace, Reformed Historical Theology 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). See also Dr. Beach’s editorship of the Mid-America Journal of Theology.
• William Ames, A Sketch of the Christian’s Catechism, trans by. Todd M. Rester, Classic Reformed Theology 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2008). See also Rester’s translation of Petrus van Mastricht, The Best Method of Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2013), a foretaste of Rester’s forthcoming multi-volume translation of Mastricht’s Theoretico-practica Theologia.

As one who is halfway through the program and who has hit no small amount of speed bumps along the way (even some large ones such as “The Awful German Language,” as Mark Twain put it) I can testify to the program’s rigor. This is even more true following the transition from the trimester system to the semester system according to which students now write three twenty-five-page papers each term. But more importantly I can testify to the program’s wisdom. Though the means are painful (let me tell you, three papers per term for four terms plus course reading, assistant teaching, foreign languages, etc., was no walk in the park either for me or my family), the ends are starting to come into view.

I am different now than when I started the program three years ago. I care about bigger (catholic) issues. I am owning up to my own background with its limitations and prejudices. I’m learning, albeit ever so slowly, to read different languages (and hence to outgrow my monolingual, Anglophone narrowness), and I am learning to read differently (critically) in my own language. I write differently—with concrete aims and genre-appropriate methods. I teach differently—focusing on primary sources and fostering critical thinking. In these ways I see the program beginning to bear fruits in my life, and for that I give thanks to God.

While I stare down the still long, windy way to the PhD marathon’s finish line, it is an encouragement to be reminded along the way not only that the sowing in tears is designed to yield harvests of joy in due time but also that over the past two decades the Lord God has manifestly blessed this program with exceptional teachers whose living epistles are blessing Christ’s bride all over the world.