Being a Devout Student
August 15th, 2008 by Sean
I came across this quote from Karen’s email list a little while back (she sends quotes each day):
The devout student is the best of all students. There are too many who are devout, but not students. They will not accept the discipline of study and of learning, and they even look with suspicion upon the further knowledge which study brings to men. There are equally too many who are students, but not devout. They are interested too much in intellectual knowledge, and too little in the life of prayer and in the life of service of their fellow men. A man would do well to aim at being not only a student, and not only devout, but at being a devout student.
–William Barclay
Dr. Barclay has a lot of good things to say. I really appriciate how he puts it.
Let me comment for a sec: We pride ourselves in being called “Bible students”. We like to hold firm to Acts 17:11, where the Bereans searched the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul was saying was true.
Yet, there is a difference between the 1st century Bereans and us 21st century Westerners; we are far removed from many of the contexts surrounding the biblical literature. They spoke another language (sometimes 2 or 3), lived in another part of the world, with another social context, another worldview, another heritage, another political system, etc.
A devout student, today, has to admit that all of these things are actually there, and secondly, has to strive to seek to understand them in order to best understand the world in which Jesus and Paul lived and breathed.
Dustin
I totally agree. We need to move beyond the naive conception that we can approach the text without bias to the understanding that what we really need is to recover their bias and then to read their words in light of that bias.
Agreed. Many people try to approach Biblical research in an “unbiased way” and other skeptics claim it isn’t possible to be unbiased, so they scrap all of it. Endeavoring to understand the bias of the first century Christians sounds like the perfect balance between those two extremes.
Another balance is one Anthony Buzzard spoke of in the Basic Bible Doctrine class last fall. He talked about how the evangelicals have great faith but often based on faulty exegesis because they aren’t “scholars.” On the other hand many scholars tend to be “liberal” in that they can put together sound exegesis but many of them don’t really have a strong personal faith in God, which is why many evangelicals take what the liberal scholars say with a grain of salt. The ideal balance that we are endeavoring to achieve would be between the sound exegesis of the liberal scholars and the strong personal faith of the evangelicals.
I hear what you are saying but this must be an oversimplification. There are plenty of evangelical scholars who are quite brilliant. What is endemic is their approach to biblical truth. They have a post biblical set of creeds (like Nicaea or Westminster or whatever) and then they set out to do scholarship to confirm these creeds. I’m not saying this is their conscious effort, but it is certainly there subconsciously and whenever and evangelical scholar through honest scholarship comes to an understanding that is not part of the creed he is blackballed by the evangelical community as liberal or postmodern or emergent or whatever. Liberals could care less what the creeds say, they are doing history. Even so, I have some beef with the liberal historical methods which have major built in assumptions.
Yes, I believe it was meant “in general” although there are certainly exceptions on either side.
Perhaps I should have worded it differently. Rather than saying their faith is based on faulty exegesis because they aren’t “scholars,” a better way to put it would be that their faith is based on faulty exegesis because of their approach based on post-Biblical creeds. This is in contrast to “liberal” scholars who tend to get closer to the historical faith of the first century, but don’t always believe in it personally. We endeavor to maintain the balance of getting past the creeds to the historical first century faith, but making it a real and personal faith, not just intellectual knowledge.
In light of that, what would be your beef with the liberal historical methods? What built in assumptions do you see them having?
Mark,
Check out my paper from last April’s theological conference, pages 12-15 in which I discussed my complaints with the liberal methodology (click here).
For one, liberals will bracket out the miraculous as something that cannot be verified as history. If it cannot be repeated in a lab or in a testtube, then they throw it out as something that the early church made up.
We need to be aware of this because it has serious implications on the biggest miracle: the resurrection of Jesus.
Of course, our standard response is asking “How did the early church get started if the resurrection did not happen?”
Dustin
Dustin,
exactly right. NT Wright identifies seven mutations in resurrection theology between 2nd temple Judaism and early Christianity that he is certain cannot be explained without an actual grave-emptying resurrection. Here are his seven:
He goes into more detail about these in The Resurrection of the Son of God. Excellent read (though I haven’t finished it yet).
To Sean’s #4 comment:
Peter Enn’s over the last six months was booted out of Westminster because of a book he published on the problem of the OT. This is just another example of the “confirming the creeds” approach to history and exegesis. Though I can’t say I entirely endorse (what I’ve heard about) Enn’s approach to the problem (I haven’t really heard a balanced approach yet, but I do have a book on it in my wishlist
)
And Dustin’s comment is dead on. If Christianity is a truthful, and historic religion, we shouldn’t be scared in finding out other truthful things we did not know, or better history we did not know. On some level, Christianity must be restorative (to the times of Jesus), and another, progressive (application to our time). Not that the Scriptures specifically teach a non-contextual “timeless truth” applicable to everyone in every situation - but rather that there is a story underneath all the situations and predicaments we read. And we are called to live according to that story. (More on story to come, I’ve been saving up a good post).
Its a matter of hermeneutical methodology. We all grew up being told in Sunday School something along the lines that “The Bible is a magic book”. We are then told to interpret it, within a vacuum, and to bracket out anything historical, contextual, cultural, etc.
Sadly, this view of the Bible is shared by most professing Christians. We have a lot of re-educating to do!
Dustin
PS: I also heard of the prof that was dismissed from Westminster for saying that the OT may have been authored by God and man. It is the above written mindset which ignorantly removed a devout student.
That’s if you weren’t Roman Catholic. We were told that we couldn’t interpret it at all. That was the job of the Church. We had to just accept what was taught.
Sean,
I read your paper, Looking for the Historical Jesus, and it is very inspiring. I think we are at a historic time regarding theology and especially the Kingdom Gospel.
I have a small question, though. You mentioned (on p. 9) that in modern times, the understanding of the Kingdom “first appeared in 1892 with Johannes Weiss’ book.” But Joseph Marsh’s book, The Age To Come was published in 1851. And I reviewed some older books about the Kingdom, back when I was in Syracuse, including one by James Sabine published in 1842. Surely there were other books about the Kingdom before 1892. Did I misunderstand something?