Slideshow image

In this era of social media, we've all been exposed to people who have a knack for irritating and offending people they have never met.  If you peruse comments on blogs or online forums to any extent, you know precisely who I'm talking about:  the person who can't seem to read anything without making sure everyone learns that they disagree and why, often in copious detail.  So much for the global community.

I've been blogging for years.  I've seen countless samples of incoherent, apoplectic screed.  Those don't bother me. The dialogue I find disturbing hits me in my soft underbelly.  As someone who has spent many years as a pastor and in college classrooms as a biblical studies instructor; I care that people want to learn Scripture.  In my experience, a single overbearing spirit can poison the learning environment with disturbing speed and efficiency.  The internet is the natural habitat of the indociles textus habitantis (Latin for "unteachable web dweller").

You would think it would be easy for a professor to (pardon the pun) teach this type of student a lesson.   But this species often comes with an immunity:  their appeal to ignorance as a virtue.  Bringing up why the unteachable soul needs to rethink their dogmatic conclusion because of a point of Greek or Hebrew grammar has little effect when they have been trained to be suspicious of scholars.  Appeals to Christian character are harmlessly deflected when the target equates being uninfluenced by research with "defending the faith" (a tortured use of Jude 3).

I am not recommending that Bible students bow to everything scholars say.  For one thing, that would be impossible since scholars often disagree. For another, even scholarly conclusions are influenced by presuppositions.  A committed Bible student needs to respect scholarship, not bow to it.

No one earns advanced degrees without learning a great deal.  That effort does indeed separate the scholar from most people.  But the way to judge what a scholar or teacher says is not by extolling the virtues of ignorance.  Instead, the committed Bible student will put in long hours to either confirm or critique what a given scholar says.

God doesn't smile with more affection on someone who knows little about a subject, especially when that subject is the Bible.  Willful resistance to thinking hard and long about the book we say is inspired is anything but a gift of the Spirit.