Three cheers for Greek geeks!

There is always lots of talk about the role of academia in the church. Much the conversation is overwrought, including many of my comments, on both sides. Blanket assertions, baseless recriminations, gross exaggerations abound. I have touched on this topic before but I want to keep thinking about it. I also want to put in a good word for academic study in the church, in its proper role and for the proper purpose.

I think we can agree that Christianity at its heart is a simple religion, a religion that confounds the wise and learned and appeals to the simple and unwise. Christ chose His disciples from fisherman and social outcasts. His herald, John the Baptist, was a kind of eccentric loner who lived in the wilderness and ate bugs. We often see in the New Testament the stark contrast between the learned religious elite who are unbelievers, persecuting the church, and the simple men who stood for Christ in spite of their lack of education.

On the other hand, it is pretty hard to read the Bible in English unless someone translates the original languages into the vernacular. The same goes for the hundreds of other languages out there that allow missionaries to give people the Word of God in their own language. The academics in the church have done a wonderful service for the people of God in translations old and new. In America with Bibles in every hotel room and overflowing the shelves of bookstores, we take the English translations of the Bible for granted but we often forget the painstaking and probably grueling task of translating ancient documents into English while being faithful to the text. I am grateful that so many scholars spent so much time making the Bible as available in English as possible, whether in print or online. What could be more precious than the Word of God in a readable format, not the province of the intellectual elite who can read the original tongue but readable by the simplest of people in the language they speak?

There is a place for deeper studies of theology and doctrine, people willing to dig really deep, to get after source material. There are many controversial and false teachings that crop up and thank God for men who have put in the time to refute these errors where they crop up. There are some incredibly gifted theologians in the church and again I thank God for them. When crackpot theories come out, we need sound scholarship to refute them. Whether it is counter-cult apologetics or silly stuff like ‘King James Only-ism’, the academy is a useful place to hash issues out. Of course plenty of really dangerous and kookie teaching comes from academic institutions too, so having a PhD is not a safeguard against heresy.

Where the possible problem rises up is two-fold. First, the academics in the church in many cases have stopped serving the church and started serving the academic community. Christian academics for the sake of academics, with a goal of getting published and recognized instead of serving the Body of Christ, is self-serving and sinful. If you use your own gifts for your own glorification, even hidden under a veneer of false humility, it is sinful and prideful and incredibly dangerous.

Second, there is the notion that those who lead in the local gathering of the church must be those who meet the proper academic credentials, credentials that are absent from Scripture but present on virtually every pastoral job posting. I think seminaries have a vital function as bastions of learning but I don’t think they should be vocational education schools for ministry and I also don’t think (as I have stated often before) that they should be enclaves of learning for those willing to pay tuition but rather they should instead be places of sending where the academics among us go out from their ivy covered halls of higher learning to serve the church. Writing journal articles that are so complex and confusing that only other academics can understand them may get you published in a theology journal but don’t do much to edify the Body of Christ.

In spite of these issues, there certainly is a place for scholarship and academia in the Body of Christ. There is nothing especially noble in being as ignorant as possible nor is there anything noble in puffing one’s self up with pride in the academy. As long as everyone uses their gifts to support and edify the Body and bring glory to Christ, we will be alright.