Academic Conversion Part 1

On a personal note:

David Hubbard of Fuller Seminary once made the comment, "I am not a scholar who happens to be a disciple, but I am a disciple who happens to be a scholar. That statement reflects my philosophy and sentiments exactly. Academics and scholarship are a means to serve Jesus Christ. Teaching, and all that goes with it, is a vocation and a calling to be used to help build the kingdom of God.

I have not always thought that way. Soon after my conversion, I entered college with little direction or idea of what I wanted to do with my life (note: I did not say "what the Lord wanted me to do with my life" -- such a concept was quite foreign at that time). My first college class was Old Testament Survey taught by Marvin Wilson -- when I left that class on the very first day, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Again, I did not necessarily see this as the Lord's hand, but rather a personal desire and decision. But as John Flavel once said, "some providences are like the letters of the Hebrew language, they must be read backwards." I look back now, of course, and I see God's hand in all of it.

Along with my conversion came an insatiable desire to learn, a yearning that I had heretofore been wholly unfamiliar with. So at nineteen years old my education truly began: I had to learn how to read properly, how to write properly, and how to speak properly. An all-consuming desire to be an educated/civilized person took control of everything. By the time I finished my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in my own mind I had become an academic. This was the driving force: I wanted to be accepted in academia, not as a Christian scholar, but merely as a scholar. My early writings reflect such a drive: such stellar pieces as "Storehouse Construction in Iron Age Israel," "Building 5900 at Shechem Reconsidered," "Beehive Buildings of Ancient Palestine," and "Iron Age Pits in Israel" (in which I deal with the topic of ancient mouse droppings!) just flowed from my pen. In some ways, I had become the academic technician writing stuff for the academic community, and for that community alone.

Teaching college students for thirteen years at Grove City College helped to take some of the luster off of the academic/professorial image, but, in reality, it was not until I came to Reformed Theological Seminary that I had an academic conversion. In an interview at the time of his retirement, I. Howard Marshall was asked if he regretted anything regarding his vocation as an academic. He said, "I think looking back I would like to have done more to bring together the academic study of the New Testament and the problems expounding Scripture and using it in the church." That is my vocational conversion: I do not want to come to the end of my teaching and writing career and have a similar regret. We need not hide or compromise our scholarship, but we must serve the kindgom with it -- we must drive our scholarship to the church.

End Part 1