Reply to Do you depend on your Pastor for salvation, or making it to heaven? What role should a Pastor play?

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Reply to "Do you depend on your Pastor for salvation, or making it to heaven? What role should a Pastor play?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm Muslim not Christian but obviously a relatable matter for all abrahamic religions. I don't get people who can rely on pastor/Imam for a connection with God. They have their value but its limited and anyone but YOU can make you a spiritual person. Imho being kind to God's creatures is the only way for inner peace and whatever "salvation" us humans are searching for. I [b]feel like in the end, pastor/Imam are just professionals earning their living.[/b] They are more about organized religion and rituals than true spirituality. Just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary.[/quote]

I was raised atheist and attended an Evangelical Lutheran college. This concept of there being a “religious professional” is exactly the way the Lutheran pastor who taught the required theology course taught it—and I think this speaks to the point the earlier PP made about the formal theological tradition that exists alongside institutions of higher education and the versions of “pastoring” that don’t.

I feel like I have a pretty good grip on what formally trained theologians think about “prosperity Gospel,” but I do not know what the “prosperity Gospel” guys/gals say about the relative importance of academic training.

OP, what DO they say, if you have a sense of it? Do they have their own institutions of education that they express as being comparable to historic Protestant and/or Catholic institutions of higher education? Or do they see it as irrelevant or actually negative to have formal education?

I see that TD Jakes, for instance, does not have an academic path described in his Wikipedia bio. Whereas when you read MLK Jr’s Wikipedia bio, you absolutely learn that he was a third-generation Morehouse Man and then attended Crozier University Theological Seminary and THEN studied theology at Boston University to earn a PhD.

Whatever you think about the fact that parts of his dissertation were later deemed to have been plagiarized—he clearly thought it was professionally valuable to get the credential. Peer review of his theological ideas was considered desirable.[/quote]

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