(First question for John Hobbins) How do you go about relating your academic interest in Biblical languages and interpretation to your pastoral work? How do you understand the responsibility of Christian academics specialized in Biblical studies? What is involved in trying to “avoid ruining old churches” as an academic and a Christian? I remember someone once saying that their understanding of their role as a professor in seminary was to “minimize the damage” that graduates would do to the people of God. Some would say that we academics are in fact the ones more likely to cause damage. What’s your view on this?
ANSWER: My seminary professors [at the Waldensian Seminary] in Rome were classical Barthians, which means I was trained to keep my knowledge of biblical languages and higher criticism completely below the surface in my pastoral duties. From the pulpit, therefore, the biblical authors are Moses, David, and Isaiah, not “J,” the anonymous psalmist, and Second or Third Isaiah. Never a word of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek thrown in, either.
Actually, I’ve changed my ways on the last point. A colleague of mine, whose Greek is pretty bad, was telling me how he throws in Greek in his sermons and explains the text based on a (pseudo-scientific) riff on a particular Greek word. He said his congregation loves it. I thought to myself, “Unfair!” So now I throw in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, you name it, now and then. I try to avoid imparting pseudo-knowledge, but hey, nobody is perfect.
I love to teach Hebrew to high school students. I hope to get to the point in which I will work closely enough with the public schools to offer it in school, every day, during school hours.
I don’t think academic pastors do more damage than non-academic pastors (if anything, the opposite is true). The statement that they do a lot of damage says more about academics who think that, and their sense of self-importance. Academics, though, aren’t very powerful. By definition, I would say. Nor should they be more powerful than they are.
At least in the kind of congregation I serve, where a core of people are serene believers and have come to expect, in a United Methodist context, that they will have a “well-meaning liberal” for a pastor – the phrase says it all – they don’t mind having a pastor who studies at all hours of the day and night. They’ve seen worse.
They go right on voting Republican – or not – regardless. Furthermore, I am in Lake Wobegon country, where, as Garrison Keillor points out, “all the women are strong.” I’ve learned to let them run the show (actually, no: I work hard to raise up male leadership, but you get my point). They are very good at what they do. It gives me a lot of time to study.
In short, a decent congregation, and there are thousands of them in this land, hundreds of thousands across the world – is virtually indestructible. If you really try hard to destroy a decent congregation, you are more likely to give it a new lease on life.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In