Towards a Unified and Contextual Program in Theology

By Canon Noel Titus

Formal Theological Education was originally an enterprise restricted to those persons whose goal was to serve as ordained ministers of the various Churches in the region. This enterprise began at a time when there was no formal process for ordination, and when aspirants to ordination served with some priest or other minister on the basis of guided reading and instruction. For Anglicans it then entailed a hazardous voyage to England to seek ordination from a bishop, before returning to the West Indies to assume duties in a parish. The process also witnessed the establishment of a variety of institutions over time, beginning with Codrington College in 1745. Although the College’s first graduate was ordained in 1759, it did not attain its exclusively Theological status until it was restructured in 1830. For more than a decade after that, the College had to resist strong challenges to its mission, on the part of those who saw it as a College for the sons of the gentry, and eventually accommodated itself to a dual purpose – offering Theology alongside Classical and other areas of study.

Other institutions were started by Churches in Jamaica and Trinidad, as well as in Antigua for a short while. Among those started were Caenwood for the Methodists, one for the Moravians in the Virgin Islands in 1885, Calabar for the Baptists in 1843, in St. Andrew’s, Jamaica in 1877, and much later for the Roman Catholics St. Michael’s in Jamaica and the Seminary of St. John Vianney and the Uganda martyrs in Trinidad in 1943. This last was started as a Diocesan College, becoming a Regional seminary in 1970. While each did much good in catering to the needs of its own denomination, none could be said to be either fully viable or to have the necessary resources for a satisfactory execution of its tasks. All of these institutions in their turn would have appreciated the challenge of preparing persons for the ordained ministry in a context of limited human and financial resources. This limitation would prove to be the most intractable problem for the Churches throughout the history of this enterprise. ...

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2February
The article is excellent and we need to rethink on this line if our theological programs are to be effective and relevant to the context.
Solomon - Nagpur, India