The Portable Seminary

I am always trying to read something big, like a Systematic Theology book. These normally take me a good while (sometimes more than a year) to read, but I think it is good to hit upon a bunch of ideas again and again, so that I don't forget them, or learn new things. This book caught my eye as I liked the premise, that this book would be a good summary of theological education, hitting upon a bunch of standard topics that you might cover in a theological degree.

The first few chapters of this were on the Bible with a chapter on each of the original languages. I learned a few things in the Hebrews chapter, about how the language works being more grounded in objects and real actions, as opposed to Greek which allowed for complex logical writings. After this, the following 7 chapters were your pretty standard systematic's on each person of the Trinity, salvation and the church. I think most of these articles were taken from the Baker Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.

The next chunk of chapters was on Biblical Theology, with overviews of the Old and New Testament and the inter testament time. In these chapters, there was a good background and a quick overview of every book in the Bible. After this, was a chapter on apologetics and world religions. I thought a better placement after the Bible overviews would have been the five chapters on church history right up to the almost present day. I really appreciated the section on the church in the middle ages before the Reformation, I think I learned a few extra things and it was written in quite a fresh way.

The final chapters in this book felt a little like a smattering of subjects you may do such as missions, homiletics, leadership, ethics and Christian education (teaching). The chapter on Missiology put forward quite an in-depth model for understanding and engaging culture, but I don't think I really understood it much. The chapter on Christian education, was pretty much about education in general as it was about cultural ways of learning and different learning styles.

Especially when it came to mission, culture and recent church history, this was American centric. There were bits about engaging with Spanish and African-Americans, in their recent church history Australia didn't get a mention (while some of the Pacific Islands get a bit of a mention).

One glaring issue I think this volume had was that it was missing a chapter on pastoral care. I don't know what that is saying about the Bible colleges in America, but at least in my degree, I had a few subjects on pastoral care, dealing with active listening, reflecting back on what people say, living in tension and trying to be really present with someone in their suffering, while not bringing up anything about yourself. I think this would have been helpful.

The real limitation of this whole book I found was that it didn't have much depth to it, even though it is over 700 pages. This book wouldn't get you through a theological degree. Really each chapter felt like readings you would get for week 1 of each subject. There wasn't much engagement with the ideas, but more just a simple presentation of them. There was no space in the history chapters to really read anything from the original sources, the chapter on Apologetics didn't really engage much for or against debate or historical development of the arguments. I know this is because you really can't put everything in one book.

There were helpful bits here and there in this book, but if I am honest I did put down this book for about 3 months before I decided I was going to finish it. If you already have some sort of church history and theological encyclopedias you probably have all the content here. This is just arranged better by topic.