The historiography of theological education within the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church presents, upon examination, a paradox worth stating at the outset: the institution established for that express purpose, the Orthodox Theological Seminary at Kottayam, did not, for nearly a century and a half following its foundation, fulfil in any substantive sense the function for which it had been created.
The seminary was founded in 1815 by Metropolitan Pulikkottil Joseph Mar Dionysius (MOSC), with the material support of Colonel John Munro, then British Resident in Travancore, the express object being the provision of modern education to clergy and laity alike. Mar Dionysius's death the following year placed the institution under the direction of Low Church Anglican missionaries, who denominated it the Syrian College. These missionaries adopted a persistently critical posture towards established Orthodox liturgical practice, generating continuous friction with the local clergy, with the practical consequence that families continued to prefer the traditional Malpan schools for the education of candidates for the priesthood. In such schools, a Syriac-scholar priest, styled the malpan (from the Syriac malphono, "teacher"), provided instruction on an individualised, apprenticeship-based model. The missionaries withdrew from the seminary's administration in 1836. Between 1850 and 1889, the seminary buildings served instead as the headquarters of the reforming party within the Church under Palakunnathu Mathews Athanasius. Pulikkottil Joseph Mar Dionysius II (MOSC) subsequently founded a distinct institution at Kottayam in 1889, designated the M. D. Seminary, which continued in operation as the Church's principal training establishment until 1959; its effectiveness during this period was considerably circumscribed by the widening internal schism between the party favouring an autocephalous Catholicos and the party maintaining absolute obedience to the Patriarch of Antioch.
Two structural preconditions
The eventual transformation of theological education cannot properly be understood without reference to two prior developments, neither primarily concerned with clerical training, but each supplying a necessary precondition for what followed.
The first was episcopal and administrative in character. In 1876, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Peter III, convened the historic synod at Mulanthuruthy, an assembly of priests and lay representatives that reorganised the Church's governance at both the diocesan and parochial level, bringing the individual parishes under regular episcopal authority for the first time. The proposal to divide the Church into seven dioceses was then brought forward in 1877, at a separate meeting held at Veliyanad, Alappuzha, as a follow-up to the Mulanthuruthy synod. This administrative reorganisation supplied the scaffolding without which later, more properly educational, reforms could scarcely have been sustained.
The second precondition was competitive, arising from developments internal to the wider Christian community of Malabar. The formation of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, originally constituted as the Reformed Syrians, presented a challenge the Orthodox Church could not decline to answer. Revival preachers invited from Ceylon and Madras, together with the Bible conventions and revival hymnody they introduced, drew considerable numbers of Orthodox laity into their orbit. The Orthodox Church's response was to organise Bible conventions and study classes of its own, under the leadership of St Gregorios of Parumala (MOSC), to invite laymen into an expanded preaching and teaching role, to establish Sunday schools for children and prayer meetings for adults, and to absorb a considerable body of Protestant revival hymnody into its own para-liturgical practice. The Church had, in this period, learned to teach its laity before it had properly learned to train its clergy.
The seminary transformed, 1942 onward
Systematic theological education, in the strict sense of a graded and examined curriculum, began at the M. D. Seminary only in 1942, coinciding with the arrival of a new generation of teachers trained in Europe and the United States. Affiliation to the Senate of Serampore College in 1964 conferred the capacity to award the four-year Bachelor of Divinity degree. The appointment of Fr Paul Varghese, subsequently Metropolitan Paulose Mar Gregorios (MOSC), as Principal in 1967 inaugurated the most consequential period in the seminary's institutional history: under his direction, the seminary's most able students were regularly dispatched abroad for doctoral study, to Paris, Louvain, Rome, Germany and Leningrad, returning upon completion of their studies to join the teaching faculty. From the 1970s onward, the faculty was consequently youthful, rigorously trained, and disproportionately influential within the wider Church; very nearly every celibate priest among this generation of seminary teachers was in due course elevated to the episcopate.
This institutional growth admits of reasonably precise quantification. Graduate numbers averaged ten per annum between 1964 and 1970, rose to twenty per annum throughout the 1970s, and reached thirty to thirty-five per annum from 1980 onward. The corresponding intake of university graduates rose from approximately five per annum in the late 1960s to some twenty-five per annum by the close of the century; since 2000, admission has been restricted exclusively to candidates already holding a university degree, of whom as many as a third now possess postgraduate qualifications, a small number in engineering disciplines. Annual applications typically number between seventy and one hundred, competing for approximately thirty-five to forty available places, selection being determined by a formal written entrance examination in conjunction with a personal interview conducted before the full faculty. Candidates are ordinarily nominated by their diocesan bishop, by a monastic community, or by one of the Church's constituent spiritual organisations, and are ordained to the sub-diaconate upon the completion of seven semesters of study, subject to the Principal's formal endorsement.
The seminary's present curriculum extends over nine semesters, one of which is devoted entirely to supervised practical work undertaken within the Church's own hospitals, homes for the disabled, orphanages, and mission centres. As of 2010, the Kottayam seminary maintained an enrolment of 161 students under a teaching faculty of twenty-three, four of whom held episcopal rank. Seminarians customarily undertake preaching and teaching duties within the parishes on Sundays, and during the semester recess the seminary organises parish missions, in which faculty and students together spend a full week within selected parishes conducting house visitation, preaching, and Bible instruction for every age cohort of the congregation.
Institutional extension: domestic and international
A second domestic seminary, styled the St. Thomas Orthodox Theological Seminary, was founded at Bhilai in 1995 and subsequently relocated to Nagpur in 1997, with the specific purpose of training missionaries for service in northern India and priests destined for the Church's growing diaspora congregations; it presently conducts a four-year training programme enrolling approximately fifty students.
In 1980, the Orthodox Theological Seminary entered into a formal ecumenical partnership with the Mar Thoma Theological Seminary at Kottayam and the Kerala United Theological Seminary at Trivandrum, jointly establishing the Federated Faculty for Research in Religion and Culture, an institution empowered to confer postgraduate and doctoral degrees under the academic auspices of Serampore University. In the course of three decades of ecumenical collaboration, this joint faculty has trained more than 230 candidates to the Master of Theology level and in excess of fifty to the doctoral level, drawn from men and women belonging to virtually the entire spectrum of non-Catholic churches active in India; it thereby constitutes the largest single body of advanced theological students to be found anywhere in the country, a considerable proportion of whom arrive from the north-eastern states and encounter an Eastern church for the first time upon reaching Kerala.
The Church's engagement with theological education abroad extends, further, to formal arrangements with institutions of the wider Eastern Orthodox communion in North America. Malankara Orthodox seminarians resident in the United States attend, in the ordinary course, the two principal Eastern Orthodox seminaries of that country: St. Tikhon's Orthodox Theological Seminary, at South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, at Yonkers, New York. This arrangement, sustained on an annual basis, situates the training of the diaspora clergy within the broader institutional and academic framework of Eastern Orthodox theological education in North America, and reflects the Church's longstanding self-understanding as a constituent member of the wider communion of Oriental and Eastern Orthodox churches.
Finally, in 1980, the seminary at Kottayam launched Divyabodhanam, a lay theological education programme offering diploma and degree courses in Bible studies, systematic theology, the history of Christianity, and pastoral counselling. More than ten thousand men and women, ranging in age from twenty to eighty-five years, have since completed this programme, which has in turn furnished the Church's women's association, among a number of other constituent bodies, with a genuinely theologically literate leadership at both the parochial and diocesan level. Complementing this programme, the Orthodox Pastoral Education Network provides continuing education for clergy and laity alike, while the Pratyasa Counselling Centre both offers direct pastoral counselling and trains professional counsellors for service across the Church's several dioceses.