ANSWER<\/strong>: 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 \u201cJ,\u201d the anonymous psalmist, and Second or Third Isaiah. Never a word of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek thrown in, either.<\/p>\n Actually, I\u2019ve 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, \u201cUnfair!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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\u2019t very powerful. By definition, I would say. Nor should they be more powerful than they are.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cwell-meaning liberal\u201d for a pastor \u2013 the phrase says it all \u2013 they don\u2019t mind having a pastor who studies at all hours of the day and night. They\u2019ve seen worse.<\/p>\n They go right on voting Republican \u2013 or not \u2013 regardless. Furthermore, I am in Lake Wobegon country, where, as Garrison Keillor points out, \u201call the women are strong.\u201d I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n In short, a decent congregation, and there are thousands of them in this land, hundreds of thousands across the world \u2013 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.<\/p>\n (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 \u201cavoid ruining old churches\u201d as an academic and a Christian? I remember someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-4417131724865857912?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")