STUDY

Confession: I’m an intellectual omnivore. I read widely and deeply. I read for ideas that can be tested against other ideas because as Albert Einstein said, “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest are details.”

Martin Luther was not only a reformer of religion; he was a reformer of education as well [if this was a scholarly paper I’d put in a footnote here referring you, gentle reader, to some letters he published – but that’s what Google is for]. The two went hand in hand for him. He was convicted that the knowledge of the liberal arts provided the best context for the study of scripture. Not only would ministers who were educated in this manner better serve the church, the members of the church would better know God and His work in this world by means of such learning.

 

Einstein again --"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."

The Bible is interwoven with and is seminal to Western history and culture. From the majority of the visual arts, to music [from Bach to Leonard Cohen], and to literature, philosophy, and law -- the Bible is an undercurrent that flows inexorably from our past to our future.

I have the opportunity to acquire wisdom, the wisdom of those who have gone before when I dip into that undercurrent. Others have faced the same struggles that I have about God, life and its meaning, why bad things happen to good people. When I have studied, I began to see the ways the current flows in, under and through our culture, our institutions, our communities and our lives.

There was a time when I thought of myself as spiritual but not religious. I didn’t need to study much if at all. Then I discovered that that is like picking up a musical instrument for a few minutes each week and expecting to become a virtuoso. Study is practice. I had to create time to learn. Like any document that has its roots in another age, I needed to understand the context in which the Bible was written. Adult Education classes, reading commentaries – these are formal ways of learning, but it was the informal ways; conversations with friends, hearing a speaker make a reference I wanted to understand more deeply, listening to music that captured my imagination and seeing a story played out that resonated with me.

God’s thoughts still elude me, but I sometimes get a glimmer of the breadth, depth and majesty of them when I see His work in this world through the hands and words of those who have studied before me.

Paul S.