The warrior

Lawson Stone, of Asbury Seminary is doing a 365 day project: one photo per day. That's no big deal, except it is a self-portrait and usually contains some good insight. Today's rings very true for me. Here's a snippet:

The uninitiated, the new student in a biblical studies program, seminary, or young scholar, encounters a gaggle of disconnected methods, a cacophony of voices, and a chaos of ideological values, typically supported by the power and resources of the scholarly guild, tenure review committees, and major publishers. It confuses, but it also dazzles and hypnotizes. The literary critic and philosopher George Steiner has pilloried the tribalized academy as “…covens which celebrate this or that rite of explication.”

And, we might add, eager for new initiates. The student began simply enough with a love for God and his word and a desire to study scripture responsibly, rigorously, and faithfully. But now she feels an undertow, a pull toward the fashions, predilections and preoccupations of the academy. A new acculturation begins to take place, the desire to please a particular professor, to appear on top of the latest trends, current, relevant…to whom?

Then there are the insistent demands of a church that is all too often in the tank with popular culture and impatient with analysis and reflection in its rush to be relevant. We demand that God speak to our problems right now, and any explanation of the Bible that isn’t “practical” is rejected. The concept that we might need to set our needs and agendas aside and simply listen to God…who does that? But in fact, if I don’t think the Bible applies to my life, maybe it is my life that is in the wrong place!

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Do read the whole thing; very insightful. Biblical studies can indeed be a dangerous place...
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