Posted on by Kurt Bodling

humble learning

“I think that it is far commoner at the University to meet men of great attainments combined with sincere humility and charity, for the simple reason that the most erudite specialist at a University becomes aware both of the wide diversity of knowledge and of his own limitations as well.”

Benson, Arthur Christopher. “Books” in From a College Window. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906, p. 57

Comment: Of course, academia is also a place to meet people with no humility or charity at all. They are the people with no real understanding of their tiny place in the breadth and depth and height of all that there is. But I still believe that it is true that in the world of higher learning (and in true religion!) real achievement and sincere humility go hand in hand.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

scholarship’s place

“Scholarship, too, both biblical and otherwise, is certainly important to the individual and to the church as a whole. It is a part of our part in responsible living before God. But it can never stand in the place of experience of the living voice of God, and it cannot remedy or remove our fallibility.”

Willard, Dallas. Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God. Updated and expanded by Jan Johnson. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2012, p. 239

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shallow curious, deep studious

“Curiosity is concerned with novelty: curious people want to know what they do not yet know, ideally, what no one yet knows. Studious people seek knowledge with the awareness that novelty is not what counts, and is indeed finally impossible because anything that can be known by any one of us is already known to God and has been given to us as unmerited gift. … But the deepest contrast between curiosity and studiousness has to do with the kind of world that the seeker for and professor of each inhabits. The curious inhabit a world of objects, which can be sequestered and possessed; the studious inhabit a world of gifts, given things, which can be known by participation, but which, because of their very natures can never be possessed.”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: a Theological Grammar. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009, p. 22.

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contradictions and paradoxes

“Before long it occurred to me to do what historians are professionally equipped to do. Live with a cluttered mental attic; run a spiritual antique shop; resist the impulse to throw anything away. Hang on after the avant-garde rejects. Save, shuffle, classify, enjoy the relics. Eventually shapes emerge. One learns to live with contradictions and paradoxes, but what is new about that in theology?”

Martin Marty in Theology Today, January 1972, p. 472.

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cataloging creation

“The world becomes habitable as a world when its flood of appearances is sorted and cataloged.”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: a Theological Grammar. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009, p. 28.

Imagine for a moment the flood of appearances that overwhelm newborns. That’s what he’s talking about. But, of course, I like the reference to classifying and cataloging.

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breadth of Christian scholarship

“So comprehensive are the labors of the ministerial calling, and at so many points do they touch human life, that there is hardly conceivable a domain of human knowledge which may not contribute its quota to the efficiency of pastoral labor. This is, indeed, a wonderful thing.”

Graebner, Theodore. The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker: Lectures Delivered at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Second, revised edition. St. Louis : Concordia Publishing House, 1925, p. 44.

Consecrating the study of virtually any subject (done in the service of the Gospel), Graebner broadens the fields of labor for Christian scholars and encourages us to follow our interests because one never knows how bits and pieces (or chunks and whole slabs) of knowledge can later be used for Christ by pastors. He then gives practical examples.

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Saint Paul the scholar

“More than this, we may say that Paul was the heir of two civilizations. On the one hand, we have, not only in these distinct references, but in his wonderful mastery of Greek, the scholarship of one who lived in the bright after-glow of Greek civilization. On the other hand, his mind was steeped in the Rabbinical learning of his age. … Thus Paul stands forth as the ideal Christian scholar. Ideal, not only as a man who had received into the compass of his mind the treasures of contemporary culture, but who placed all knowledge and every element of intellectual power into the service of the body of Christ, the Church.”

Graebner, Theodore. The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker: Lectures Delivered at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. Second, revised edition. St. Louis : Concordia Publishing House, 1925, p. 34-35.

Graebner holds up Saint Paul as “the ideal Christian scholar” because of the way he straddles two civilizations, two cultures, serving as a bridge of communication between them for the good of the Church – and thereby helping create a new civilization and culture.

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texts and the student

“The student who fears God earnestly seeks his will in the holy scriptures. Holiness makes him gentle, so that he does not revel in controversy; a knowledge of languages protects him from uncertainty over unfamiliar words or phrases, and a knowledge of certain essential things protects him from ignorance of the significance and detail of what is used by way of imagery. Thus equipped, and with the assistance of reliable texts derived from the manuscripts with careful attention to the need for emendation, he should approach the task of analysing and resolving the ambiguities of scriptures.”

St Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching Book 3, paragraph 1. Translated by R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), page 68.

Augustine thought it important for students (especially students of Holy Scripture) to have ready access to good quality texts. This is really a foreshadowing of the Renaissance humanists’ call to return to the sources (ad fontes).

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curiosity or scholarship?

“Curious knowers typically do not want to identify the knowledge they have arrived at as bearing an intimate link to their own persons or idiosyncrasies or place or interests; and they will certainly not wish to claim intimacy with what they study in the sense that a student occupying a world of gift and participation must. The curious, formed by mathesis, are always different in kind from what they are curious about, so their purpose is not to participate in what they study, but rather to isolate their object, and then to display it like a butterfly pinned in a display case. The voice the curious adopt in representing their knowledge will, therefore, avoid the first person, and will avoid, also, laying claim to the knowledge represented as though it were inextricably linked to the persona, charisma, or skill of the knower.”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite: a Theological Grammar. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009, p. 149.

Griffiths makes a lot out of the difference between being curious and being studious and scholarly. He is in favor of the latter. Curiosity tends to be a mile wide but only an inch deep. Studiousness and scholarship is a mile deep no matter how wide it is.

Look again at his last sentence. He really does not like the stilted artificial voice found in most academic writing. You might recognize it: all third person and passive voice. Griffiths calls us to write like the knowledge we share actually makes a difference. The merely curious keep it at arm’s length.

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the point of writing

“Those of us who are scholars ought not to leave our desks or stop writing our books, but we need to recognize very vividly and urgently the greater whole of which our writing is just a part. If our research, writing, and teaching, do not directly help the poor, we had better make sure that what we do is part of the compassionate, merciful and just work of the Church. But what the scholar, in the disciplined and quiet work of mind and heart, is to do, is the topic for another post.”

Clooney, Francis X. “Compassion and Dialogue Shall Embrace” America Magazine 27 November 2015 < no page number as this was found online >

Note: Whether you’re writing the ‘book to end all books’ or putting together a Sunday School lesson or researching a blog post for your friends to read, it all involves study. And here the point is that if your study (verb) doesn’t take you beyond your study (noun), then it’s both short-sighted and less than it should be.