Why Scholarship Matters in the Church

By Robert F. Hull Jr.

It was Tertullian (ca. ad 200) who famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church?” (Prescription Against Heretics, 7). Ironically, his own polished rhetoric shows his indebtedness to higher learning, which enabled him to write essays both in Greek and Latin in the service of his faith. Moreover, had he not been schooled in philosophy, he could not have argued so skillfully against it.

Scholarship Matters

It is still not unusual to find high-level scholarship derided as a sterile, if not dangerous, undertaking for those who would teach and preach the gospel. After all, as long as we have the Bible, why do we need people with PhDs to tell us what it means?

But scholarship matters to the church at large, and to Christian churches and churches of Christ. Here are four reasons why:

1. We would not have Bibles were it not for scholars.

Scholars collected the hundreds of hand-copied portions of Scripture and edited them into the first printed Bible and scholars made the first translations into Aramaic, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac to serve the needs of Jews and Christians for the Scriptures in their own “heart languages.” All who read the Bible in any language are deeply indebted to people of stunning erudition, such as Origen (185-215) and Jerome (347-419), not to mention such modern textual scholars and translators as Bruce Metzger and Eugene Nida.

Moreover, the work of sifting out the most reliable ancient texts and turning them into the most faithful contemporary renderings is ongoing. From Alexander Campbell”s translation of the New Testament (The Living Oracles, 1826) to the work of Greek textual critics such as Paul McReynolds of Pacific Christian College and Carroll Osburn of Abilene Christian University, to Charles Taber”s coauthorship of The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969), to Lewis Foster”s work on the New International Version of the New Testament, scholars from the Christian churches and churches of Christ have faithfully served the church universal with their scholarship.

2. The worldwide mission of the church has always required good scholarship.

The apostle Paul may not have been a scholar in the formal sense, but he made it his aim to “take captive every thought” for Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). He quoted poetry and debated with philosophers, not because he was thrilled with learning, but for the sake of the gospel. The great thinkers of the early church””Origen, Justin, and Irenaeus””were mission-driven. Andrew Walls, the great missiologist, claims the challenge of the church in the 21st century is to develop a scholarship that can “think Christ into the entire cultural framework of Africa and the Asian countries,” where the faith is spreading so rapidly (“Christian Scholarship and the Demographic Transformation of the Church,” Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century, 166).

This will be a task as demanding for modern missionaries as thinking Christ into the Hellenistic culture of the Mediterranean world was for Paul and his successors. We cannot afford to draw a line between the doers and the thinkers. The global mission of the church demands the best scholarship we can develop.

3. The spiritual health of our own congregations requires good scholarship.

The time is long past when we could deceive ourselves into thinking all our churchly beliefs and practices are guided by Scripture alone. Shocked? Consider the following three examples:

“¢ In the 1850s it was not hard to find church leaders insisting, on the authority of the Bible, that slavery was a perfectly appropriate institution, one that was sanctioned by God in both testaments. As far as it went, that was a good, scriptural argument. Nevertheless, I am prepared to argue that slaveholding is morally indefensible in contemporary society.

If you agree with me””and I hope you do””you will need to rely on a more adequate interpretive principle than “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” You will need the guidance of people who know something about the social world of early Christianity, and moral philosophy, and logic; in fact, you will need the help of scholars.

“¢ For centuries Bible editors and translators disagreed over whether the person associated as an “apostle” with Andronicus in Romans 16:7 was Junia, a woman, or Junias, a man. No informed person has any doubt today that it was Junia, a woman. It wasn”t armchair detective work that established this as a certainty; it was patient, thorough, and highly sophisticated scholarship (see Eldon Jay Epp, Junia the First Woman Apostle [Fortress, 2005]).

“¢ Where in the Scriptures do we find definitive guidance for planting, organizing, and directing a megachurch with a paid staff of a hundred? What would Paul have thought of the worship ministry team or the community concerns committee, let alone of an executive pastor? We have to go way beyond the New Testament to support these practices, and I think we can support them, but only with considerable scholarly work on the theology of community, theories of leadership, worship, and ecclesiology, and a great many other issues.

Doubtless you can think of other issues that require careful scholarship in order to support the health of the local congregation. Here”s a question to get you started: How should we deal with Paul”s instructions to women in Ephesus that they should not braid their hair, wear expensive clothing or jewelry, or teach and have authority over men (1 Timothy 2:9-11)? When you look out in your congregation and see a woman with a PhD who is department chair at a local university and who teaches and has authority over hundreds of men, how do you explain that Eve”s sin (1 Timothy 2:14) has disqualified her from ever holding a position of public authority in the church? However your congregation may tackle this issue, you will need more than “the Bible tells me so.”

Pastoral ministry has been described for centuries as “the cure of souls,” as a kind of spiritual medical practice. Who would want to be served by a physician who did not have the best education available to him or her? It is sometimes said that thousands of persons have ministered faithfully and effectively without a college education, let alone seminary studies. I honor that truth; my father was one. But it is also true that thousands of persons once served as physicians without a medical degree.

Preaching and leading congregations has come to be one of the most difficult and demanding of all vocations””at least as difficult as managing and serving a large caseload of medical patients. If we expect our ministers to be responsible interpreters of Scripture, good counselors, effective and trusted preachers, as well as skilled pastoral leaders, we had better be sure they have been prepared by teachers who are trained specialists in all of these fields.

4. We must continue to foster some students into scholarship to teach the next generation.

True, our primary goal in graduate theological education is not to produce other professional scholars, but to prepare preachers, hospital chaplains, cross-cultural evangelists, and other frontline workers. But if we do not also foster some students into the ministry of scholarship, who will replace those of us who teach? Today, more than ever before, it is crucial that schools of the church be preparing scholars for the church.

Increasingly, one finds in theological education generally too many graduates from the religious studies departments of secular universities. A recent Auburn Theological Seminary study also points out the worrisome decline in the number of PhDs graduating in the fields of practical ministries. Who will produce the research, write the books, and give leadership to the fields of Christian education, preaching, worship, and church planting if we do not nurture scholarship in these fields?

And we should be concerned not just for our own schools and churches, but also for the education of others within the worldwide church. Just as preachers and teachers of this movement have profited from the scholarship of the church through the centuries and across the world, we ought to give the benefit of our best scholarship to serve the wider church.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has produced a long list of scholars in service to the worldwide church. The same is true of the churches of Christ, whose scholars have served in recent years on the faculties of Yale, Emory, Notre Dame, and Princeton Theological Seminary, among others. Their books and articles are standard works in their respective fields. Abilene Christian University, Pepperdine, Harding Graduate School of Religion, and David Lipscomb have done wonderful service to the kingdom of God by fostering a steady stream of students into vocational Christian scholarship and supporting them financially along the way.

Although scholarship among the Christian churches/churches of Christ has lagged behind the other two streams, this is changing. Now some of the graduates of our schools are showing up on the faculties of schools outside of our own tradition and the books and articles we write are becoming standard texts and reference works in the “industry.”

I used to be a little defensive about the number of Emmanuel graduates who have gone on to earn PhDs, but when I realize how many of these graduates are serving on the faculties of the colleges and seminaries of our own and other institutions, I am made aware of how essential it is to continue raising up generations of men and women who combine faithful discipleship with rigorous scholarship for the sake of the kingdom of God, I rejoice to know this is also happening at our sister seminaries, Lincoln Christian Seminary and Cincinnati Bible Seminary.

They Need Each Other

So, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Much, in every way. I realize some aspects of doctoral education can be toxic to faith; but this is true of undergraduate education also, even in Bible colleges. There is no port of safety on the sea of higher education, no harbor protected against all the stormy questions raised when we study the Scriptures in their original languages and in their historical and cultural settings. But there is also no port of safety in the local congregation, no harbor protected against all the strains and demands of daily pastoral work.

Athens and Jerusalem need each other. When I think of the scholars who helped form me, shape me for my vocation, it is both Athens and Jerusalem that made them effective. Robert Fife”s service as a minister of the gospel to frontline soldiers in World War II marked his teaching as surely as did his rigorous scholarship. Toyozo Nakarai”s chapel prayers at Emmanuel were every bit as important as his lectures on the prophets. Beauford Bryant”s zeal for the gospel informed his teaching.

But, in every case, the reverse is also true: Bob Fife”s ministry was enhanced by his scholarship; Toyozo Nakarai”s piety was only enriched by his study and teaching of Hebrew; Beauford Bryant”s preaching was chock-full of insights gained from studies at Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, Tuebingen, and Edinburgh.

Thank God for faithful scholars who are committed to the service of the kingdom of God. May their tribe increase!

Robert Hull is dean at Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, Tennessee.