How To Render To Caesar

How Not to Render to Caesar
2 Kings 15:1-16:20

A recent graduate of our seminary was telling me on Friday that the seminary faculty is divided between people who avoid saying things that students would disagree with and people who don’t mind saying such things. The logic (she thinks) is that the problem with saying things that students will disagree with is that it may issue in negative student evaluations, and negative student evaluations may mean you don’t get tenure. So the second category of professor tends to include the people who already have tenure. Now, if the graduate is right, the professors’ logic is full of holes; students have diverse views, so whatever you say, you will be disagreeing with some of them. I make a point of doing so, and it’s not the reason I get negative evaluations (unless the students are hiding their real reasons for those). Further, in tenure meetings I have never heard such considerations taken into account. Yet it is of course the case that the things we say and do are influenced by our assumptions about the views of people with power over us (for instance, our students—or our congregations, if we are pastors)...