# What Is True Scholarship?



## greenbaggins (Dec 16, 2009)

Is the following true scholarship? Or is true scholarship something else?



> And Jesus said unto the theologians: “Who do you say that I am?”
> 
> They replied: “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed.”
> 
> And Jesus answered them, saying: “Huh?”



I have huge problems with the idea that scholarship is simply a huge vocabulary. Nowadays, someone can some up with something that sounds scholarly simply by using a digital thesaurus. In this post, I want to challenge specifically the idea that true scholarship consists in writing for other scholars. It simply does not consist in that. What is merely the outside packaging of something does not constitute what is inside.

True scholarship, in my opinion, consists of mastery of the material. It consists of a specific kind of mastery, as well. It means that a true scholar can explain his field in such a way that a middle-schooler can understand it. That has to be a fairly complete mastery. There has to be understanding of the concepts, not just of the words. In the quotation above, for instance, there is a sentence where the words are so obscure that the meaning is not obvious. If there is any meaning in the sentence, it has been hidden by the difficult words.

However, there is an opposite extreme, as well. There can be a reaction against false scholarship which is equally problematic. The problem then is that people can think that there can be no true scholarship at all. And, as a result, in the interests of making people understand, the content is dumbed-down. There can be a pride in simplicity for simplicity’s sake. It manifests itself when people say “Well, I’m not going to give a lecture now, I’m going to give something that people can understand.” Now, that kind of thinking does not always result in this dumbing down. However, it often can.

To apply this to pastors, I believe that the best route to go here is to have a mastery of the content. One can also say it this way: that a pastor ought to be completely mastered by his content. He ought to be mastered so completely by the deep things of the Gospel, that he can make anyone understand it. He ought to be able to use simple words to describe difficult concepts. Of course I am not saying that the Gospel is inherently difficult to understand. However, as Peter says, there are some things in Paul that are difficult to understand (it’s a good thing that understatement is not a crime!). These difficult things are still valuable for the sheep to learn. If they are to learn them, then we need to be able to explain difficult things in a way that is easy to understand.


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## rbcbob (Dec 16, 2009)

Is not scholarship the intense rolled-up-sleeves of the mind exhaustively searching out a matter? And after comprehending the matter there next comes the question of "what do I do with this?"

Now comes the question of "who are the intended beneficiaries of this labor?" Identifying those recipients will dictate the vocabulary used in presenting the fruit of the scholarship.


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## jogri17 (Dec 16, 2009)

Generally I agree though on this subject Dr. Carl Trueman makes the point that there are many intelligent persons who are do not merit the usually self-designated term ''scholar''. They usually just memorize secondary sources and can just repeat what other persons say and sound intelligent when in really they are just commiting verbal plagerism. To get to the point where one can truely merit that title is not about what level of knowledge you think you have in comparison to others it is how others in the field react to your writtings in books and peer edited journals. No true schollar made his name by posting on a blog or chatting in chatrooms. I am inclined to say that advanced degrees are important but not 100% necessary in all cases (John Frame being a great example) and where one earns the degrees makes a difference. Don Carson is very smart but if He didn't go to cambridge would anybody really listen to Him with just a MDiv? I doubt it. On the other hand there are plenty of persons who went to unacreditated schools that are great (i.e. puritan) and they sure know their stuff. I guess it all depends on whether you believe theological education is a servant to the church BUT IS INDEPENDENT or that theological education ought to be under the authority of the Church. And your view on that matter will greatly determine whether or not your writtings will be well received by the more liberal theological world withwhom we have an obligation to interact with to some extent.


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## Pergamum (Dec 16, 2009)

greenbaggins said:


> is the following true scholarship? Or is true scholarship something else?
> 
> 
> 
> ...





> in this post, i want to challenge specifically the idea that true scholarship consists in writing for other scholars. It simply does not consist in that. What is merely the outside packaging of something does not constitute what is inside.
> 
> True scholarship, in my opinion, consists of mastery of the material. It consists of a specific kind of mastery, as well. It means that a true scholar can explain his field in such a way that a middle-schooler can understand it.



amen!


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## smhbbag (Dec 16, 2009)

There are a few examples of this true scholarship in the movie Gifted Hands, the story of Dr. Ben Carson - a masterful neurosurgeon who succeeded despite growing up in a very hard place.

A few examples:

He suggested a hemispherectomy (removing half of the brain) for a young child who suffered from nearly 24/7 seizures. The parents were aghast and horrified at what he planned to do, fearing their daughter would be left in an awful state. He calmly explained to them that, with young children, the remaining parts of the brain can gradually assume the function of the missing half, with a high likelihood that she could lead a normal life. He told them, "It's like those brain cells haven't decided yet what they want to be when they grow up. We're just going to give them a new career to dream about."

Similarly, he was thoroughly vexed at how to separate twins joined at the head, sharing parts of the brain. In all previous attempts to separate such twins by other doctors, at least one bled to death. He needed to find a way to stop the blood loss, and nobody had found a way. He said, "Instead of trying to block a running faucet, which is clearly impossible, why don't we disconnect the water source for a while?" By that, he meant stop the infants' hearts for an hour to perform the most crucial parts, and then restart them. It worked.

I fear, though, as you mention, that such wonderful accounts of true scholarship gives some people a disincentive (or a hatred) for learning the big words and tough details. They also might give to laymen a falsely low view of the technical expertise required to pull that off. To ignorant men, the simple middle-school level explanation makes them believe that the skill to perform that task is only slightly above them....when, in fact, it took a couple decades of seriously hard work by truly brilliant people. 

So, I think I would just add a caveat that the true scholar can _summarize_ his work in a way understandable to everyone, especially by way of analogies and metaphors. It would be an impossible task, though, to expect a PhD mathematician, doctor, engineer, or pastor to be able to get across much (if any) of the technical work required to reach the simplicity of the summary metaphor.


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## DMcFadden (Dec 16, 2009)

What is a true scholar? That's easy!!!

In my opinion if you look it up in any reputable Christian encyclopedia or dictionary, you will see the following illustration:







I measure scholarship in terms of mastery of the field, I value it in terms of ability to communicate clearly. For my money, R.C. Sproul is more of a scholar than some of the PhDs I have known.

But, in the church, you can't do better than our own Greenbaggins!


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## Semper Fidelis (Dec 16, 2009)

Agree wholeheartedly. I've had to learn a lot of "vocabularies" over the years. I have two technical degrees, am in IT, and am a Marine. As a Marine, I've moved in and out of different warfighting communities and each has their lingo and acronyms.

I learned a quick lesson many years ago. I had just completed a Masters in EE and was doing a payback tour in acquisition of a new e-mail system for the Marine Corps. I was initially overawed by one of our support contractors and those in the joint environment that were working the issue because I found their talk thoroughly bewildering.

I realized that if I just heard the same terms about 3 times in context then I started to figure out what they meant.

And then I figured out that our support contractor was, um, not too bright.

But she knew the lingo and she had my boss convinced that she was the best thing since sliced bread. Thankfully her contract was not renewed but I learned early on that half the mystique of any profession is its vocabulary. People sometimes hide behind words and can seem intelligent within their circles because they know how to use the words in ways that others don't.

Trade guilds used to operated the same way where they were very secretive about how they did certain things and only passed knowledge from master to apprentice. Once people know that what you're doing isn't esoteric genius or "magic" then the curtain drops. Masons, for instance, were thought to have some mystical knowledge because if you consider how amazing it was that those tradesmen could build massive structures with medieval technology it simply boggles the mind.

Anyhow, this is a long way of saying that scholarship is much more than simply parroting terms. I think it requires imagination and really reflecting on things and taking corporate knowledge and tools in a way that are not intuitively obvious. There are many communicators in my field that are successful in making things work the way that the training manuals indicate but the number of senior people that I know that are truly imaginative and cutting edge can be counted on one hand.

I don't want to press the analogy too strongly because I think there is a danger with imagination that is warned about in the Scriptures. I think the endeavor ought to be focused upon the Kingdom of God and building up the Church. I recently had to exegete Colossians 1 and was struck by how Paul saw his ministry as one of exhausting every single one of his faculties in order that Christ might be formed in the Beloved. In a sense, you see a true scholar of the Word battling against false teachers who were leading the people away with vain imagination trying to convince them that there were other fountains of Truth other than Christ.

As I delve more into the Word, I find myself increasingly stunned out how deep the riches of the Word are. I've walked over ground so many times in my carnality and then return to the same place and see a deep gold mind of Truth that the Spirit has illumined for me. I appreciate all the more the exegetical and theological genius of men like Calvin who didn't have the benefit of a library of commentaries and had to cut through centuries of dross to stab at the heart of the Word. I don't have any illusions of being so great and am content to be used of God in whatever capacity in the Body He has prepared me for but I do know that my pursuit of scholarship is going to be lifelong and never content with knowledge for my own sake but that the Church of Christ would be built up.


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