Scholarship

Be ready to fall on your face in worshipful adoration. You are so fortunate to be on the same planet with scholars. Genuine scholars are very useful. Every home should have at least several of them.

But worship them and their elevated positions? What for?

Tell you a little secret. The best of them died a long time ago. The new guys are really going over things that have been covered many times and long ago. It's a living for them though.

Bob Hope told about a man who had a car painted red on one side and blue on the other. He said that if he ever was involved in an accident, he wanted to hear the witnesses argue about what color his car was.

That's how I feel about modern Bible scholarship. A new theory can make your career. You might even get a book contract out of it.

For Pete's sake, it has all been done, long ago and far away. After almost two thousand years, I figure that the time for scholarship is long over. We are in the time of application, and just plain reading the results of such men as Luther, who unlocked the Bible and translated it into common language.

Once in college I was looking at a set of books on biology. I found two contradictory ideas presented. One book said that large brain size indicates intelligence. The other said that is not brain size but brain organization that was the real indicator of intelligence. This obviously was written for kids just out of high school.

A teacher of logic, a very nice lady, listened as I pointed this out. It was recreation for me. She thought I had spent a lot of time with these books to have found such a gem of senseless logic. I told her it was about as hard as finding sand at Miami Beach.

In the study of a pastor of a Presbyterian church, I mentioned that Calvin's Institutes were a perfect guide to some major doctrines. He lamented that he was no longer certain of this. Later, he said he was a reader of Kierkegaard. Now that is worldly wisdom.

I really feel that those who are uncertain of their faith often take refuge in "scholarship". They reason their way out, but can't reason back in.

The results of the learning of languages are readily available in study Bibles, in the Septuagint, and concordances. Besides these efforts lies the realm of endless speculation and contradiction. Once we have the Word, in our own language, we do not need so-called scholars.