AS I MENTIONED in the previous post, I’ve been a seminary professor for nearly 40 years now. A lot has changed since I first started. We used to be able to take it for granted that most people training to be pastors in this country would want or need to get a seminary education. But this is becoming less and less the case, especially as large independent churches continue to sprout. Many people in local congregations now bear the title of “pastor” or “director” of some ministry without ever having set foot (even a virtual one!) on a seminary campus.

Organizationally, this is often perceived as a marketing problem. And to some extent, that’s true. People need to understand what a seminary is and does, and in a way that meets a felt need.

But there’s a more fundamental problem, I think, that no amount of savvy marketing can solve. I’ve often said it this way: When you’re not required to have a seminary education, you don’t really know why you need it or appreciate its value until after you have one. People go through the process in different ways, bringing their own unique histories with them, and emerge having grown or been transformed in some way. But their experiences of growth are unique and often unanticipated. When you graduate, in other words, you’re glad you did it, but in a way that may surprise you or be different from what you expected at the beginning.

All of us are or should be lifelong learners. You can go to seminary and earn your “Master of Divinity” degree — but really, who’s naive or arrogant enough to think that they’ve mastered divinity? To my mind, when higher education works the way it should, you not only discover and learn new things, but become more humble in the face of what you don’t know. Learning is a never-ending journey with surprising twists and turns.

What, then, do we do with the statement in which the apostle John tells his readers, “You do not need anyone to teach you” (1 John 2:27, NIV)? Here again is the full verse:

As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit—just as it has taught you, remain in him.

Some of you have been part of congregations in which there was a strongly authoritarian and hierarchical power structure. People saw the pastor as someone who was specially anointed by God to lead — which meant that the pastor’s word was not to be challenged or questioned. To disobey the pastor was to disobey God.

So imagine for a moment: what would such a pastor make of John’s words? Yes, of course — I have been anointed by God! That anointing is real, and the Spirit tells me everything I need to know. I have nothing to learn from other human beings, and I don’t have to listen to anyone else’s counsel. If I want to be faithful to God, if I want to abide in Jesus, I have to stay the course and do what the Spirit has told me to do, no matter what anyone else says.

You can imagine how dangerous such a reading would be. And some of you don’t have to imagine it.

But is that what John means?

Again, context is important. What John says in the preceding verse is, “I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray” (1 John 2:26). And in the verse before that, he says “And this is what he promised us — eternal life” (vs. 25).

Again, we only have one side of the conversation, so must to read between the lines. I suspect the situation was something like this. The people who left the community — again, often called either “schismatics” or “secessionists” — held distorted ideas about Jesus but considered themselves to have superior knowledge (which would fit with a Gnostic way of thinking). In their quest to proselytize others, they stirred up some anxiety about salvation: You’d best believe what we believe, or you might be in danger!

I remember, for example, a gentleman who told me he had loved and followed Jesus ever since he was a child. But he had also been taught the necessity of speaking in tongues. He had never done so, not once in all those decades of faithfulness. He thus came to me full of doubt and anxiety. “Am I really a Christian?” he asked, with a tremor in his voice. The unspoken subtext was, “Am I saved?”

If therefore the secessionists were spreading anxiety with their false teaching, then John isn’t saying, “You don’t have anything to learn from anybody because the Holy Spirit tells you everything you need to know.” He’s saying, “You don’t need them to teach you the truth about Jesus, because you already know the truth about Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one teaching you. So if you want to remain or abide in Jesus, just hold onto what you already know and ignore what those people are saying.”

And of course, what would be the point of John even writing a letter if his readers had nothing to learn?

I would love to be able to say that no one with a seminary education would ever read John in such a self-serving way. But I’m just not that naive.

After all, I have a seminary education. I mean, uh, wait…