From time to time I’ve struggled with scholarship. Now, I find myself in a doctoral program where, you guessed it, I have to deal with scholarly material. Part of my struggle has been because the Bible seems like such a short, in many ways, book. After all, it has been around for a very long time and it seems like it shouldn’t be _that_ hard to figure it out.

I’m warming to the idea and after reading this quote from N. T. Wright’s The Last Word (which is an excellent book by the way), I’m starting to change my view on issues surrounding scholarship.

“A plague on all your scholarship; we just believe the Bible.” This is simply unsustainable. Without scholars to provide Greek lexicons and translations based on them, few today could read the New Testament. Without scholarship to explain the world of the first century, few today could begin to understand it (as often becomes painfully evident when people without such explanations try to read it aloud, let alone expound it). Scholarship of some sort is always asswned; what the protest often means, unfortunately, is that the speakers prefer the scholarship implicit in their early training, which is now simply taken for granted as common knowledge, to the bother of having to wake up mentally and think fresh thoughts. Again and again, such older scholarship, and such older traditions of reading, turn out to be flawed or in need of supplementing.Today’s and tomorrow’s will be just the same, of course, but this does not absolve us from constantly trying to do better, from the never-ending attempt to understand scripture more fully. It is my own experience that such attempts regularly result in real advances (measured not least in terms of the deep and many-sided sense that is made of the text), and that even making the effort almost always results in fresh pastoral and homiletic insights. To affirm “the authority of scripture” is precisely not to say, “We know what scripture means and don’t need to raise any more questions.” It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even if that means cutting across cherished traditions.