Here is a link to a brief interview with the new warden of Tyndale House. Tyndale house is a world-renowned library for biblical studies housed in Britain. It is evangelical in founding and mission. Well worth the read. I particularly like the succinct statement of why scholars matter for the church.
Check it.
http://theologica.blogspot.com/2007/08/interview-with-peter-williams.html
Monday, August 27, 2007
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2 comments:
Thanks for the link - I haven't had time to read the entire interview yet, but I skimmed it and did look particularly at his answer to the church and academy question. I agree with his answer (that biblical scholarship should be in service to the church).
The question I now wrestle with, as a former academic turned church pastor, is from the other side: how does the church interact with biblical scholarship. In a time when many (most?) churchgoers are, for all practical purposes, biblically illiterate, how do I bring biblical scholarship into contact with the people I serve in a way that is helpful to them?
From my perspective it seems like that interaction would depend greatly on the attitudes of the churchgoers. I think a lot of those who are bibilically illiterate are that way because they choose to be. It seems like many people are content not to know much, taking the attitude that this is why they employ a pastor. They pay him to know things so they don't have to. I would say for these people any ammount of interaction wouldn't do a whole lot of good until the attitude is changed.
On the other hand, I think there's a lot of people out there who are biblically illiterate who would love to change that. For these people it seems like there are a few options. The option I've encountered most often is for the church to teach from the Bible - telling people what this passage or that passage mean. The second option that I think we should do more of is to teach culture and context to churchgoers. I think the main obsticle most people run into is that we are very far removed from the culture the Bible was written in and to. It seems that most people could read and study more on their own if they understood the culture more... there's a lot of things that make more sense when we don't try to view them through 21st century American cultural lenses.
So my personal thought is that we should try to shift our interction to meet this need through biblical scholarship, rather than focusing so much on teaching specific passages.
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