Lesson from Sem 4: Professors under pressure

While I wasn't as enthralled with the students as I hoped, I enjoyed almost every one of my professors. Some where touchy-feely, some were analytical, some were funny, and some were as serious as a heart attack. Although some were not very good teachers, they were all well trained and really seemed to know their stuff when pressed, with more than one being what I call 'stone-cold brilliant' - a designation I don't use lightly.

As I went through my classes, I found myself consistently wondering why I had never heard the gospel presented in the ways it was in Seminary. One professor (one of my favorites) walked in on the first day of class and said, "I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is that the god you were taught about as you grew up doesn't exist. He's a myth. The good news is that the God of the Bible does exist."

He was right. As I went through seminary, learned about the formation of the biblical canon, learned about textual criticism, learned about church history, and psychology, and hermeneutics, and theology through the ages, it was like scales were falling from my eyes. The journey can't really be described, but it was life-shifting. For me, this shift was in a good direction, for some others, the shift knocked them off their moorings.

The question I kept asking myself, again and again, is why this altered understanding of the Christian faith and of God doesn't filter down to congregations. The answer has to do with what that professor told us on the first day of class.

People don't like it when the god of their childhood is in danger of being altered. People don't like it when they find the very faith that they have clung to - the foundation of their thinking - is actually balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff. People don't like it when they have to realize that our scientific understanding of the world actually should change the ways in which we think about God, reality, and the Bible. People get scared when they are taught about the real nature of truth, or about the real history of the Christian scriptures.

Here's an example - one of the best New Testament textual critics in the world, Michael Holmes, works at Bethel University. (Textual criticism refers to reconstructing the original scripture, which no longer exists, from the many variant scripture documents that still exist.) He was a guest lecturer in one of my Greek classes, and walked us through several text critical issues in rapid fire succession. For someone like me, who saw the Bible as a bulletproof document with no problems whatsoever, these examples were devastating. I felt my world starting to shift. Others in the class must have felt the same way because at least a few, men and women alike, walked out during the middle of class, sobbing. Perhaps theirs wasn't a shift as much as a collapse.

Now, Dr. Holmes is a very strong Christian, very loving and kind, and very good at his job. This scenario is not entirely his fault. But the reality is that Biblical inerrancy like I was taught in church is problematic. The type and extent of these problems aren't well understood (if at all) by most laypeople, yet these issues cannot be historically disputed by any reasonable individual. Can you imagine the response of a congregation to teaching that drives seminary students from class with tears streaming down their face? Would their response be fear and trembling and renewed interest in the God they are so convicted is real, or would they respond in fear and anger towards the messenger out of a wish to preserve their beliefs? What does that then say about their beliefs?

Just imagine the turmoil that would occur if a professor decided to speculate on something that was disputable. What about the implications of the theory of relativity for the second coming of Jesus Christ? What about the implications of quantum mechanics on our understanding of truth and knowledge? What about testing the Biblical claims for prayer and right living against the claims of other belief systems?

Seminary professors are accused of living in Ivory Towers, but as I see it our Christian congregations have put them there. Greg Boyd (who is controversial in his own right) was run off from his professorship because he dared to proposed a theory that, at least to him, made more sense out of scriptures than other widely known theories. I don't agree with Dr. Boyd on spritual warfare theodicy or open theism, but it does take seriously some passages of scripture that often aren't taken seriously enough. Another professor (who has requested to remain nameless) was fired from his professorship for writing a paper speculating that "abstacta" may be co-eternal with God. Essentially, what this means is that abstract concepts, like mathematical truths and logic are not "things" that need to be created, and therefore *could* be co-eternal with God. Again, I don't agree with this view, but it does take seriously the nature of certain truths. This paper had been published for over a year when he finally explained to one of his classes what the paper was really about. A student took issue with the concepts in the paper, and had the professor sacked for "not maintaining orthodoxy".

Incidences like these are not uncommon. So, instead of professors making their work accessible to all, in the hopes that their work might be an aid to the very church-goers who fund them, professors make their work as inaccessible as possible; they enter the ivory tower. They adopt jargon that takes much effort to decode. They use ambiguous language that makes the unsophisticated reader unaware of what they are really saying. They use an abundance of footnotes to intimidate others from criticizing their work. They make their argument philosophical, so that the implications to actual church practice (where the congregation resides) are hard to determine. They refuse to speak up in church to correct misunderstandings or misinterpretations of theology, or the Bible, or of history.

Professors often find themselves between the pressures to affirm the "orthodoxy" that congregations and students demand, and the call they feel God has given them to do profound and scholarly work to further the kingdom of God on earth.

I wonder what would happen if professors practiced church discipleship, teaching ways of interpreting the Bible, of thinking about God and science, and of the history of Christian thought. I wonder how most of the people in our churches would respond. How would you respond?

What would happen if we decided that loving God doesn't mean demanding the exact same formulations generation after generation, as if our ways of thinking about God are perfect and divine, but instead realize that loving God means going on the journey to grope after God, though He is not far from each of us? What would happen if the scholarship we, as Christians, fund actually makes its way into the life of our churches?

If it shouldn't impact us as the Church, then why on earth do we fund Christian scholarship?