My first minor setback occurred during my freshman year, when the morons on Princeton’s English faculty inexplicably failed to be dazzled by my freshman essay. (“You show a hint of promise, but you need to work much harder on your writing.”) …

Until that point, I had never really appreciated what a liberal education is all about. An essayist inThe Chronicle has put it this way: “A liberal-arts education … is about the recognition, ultimately, of how little one really knows, or can know. A liberal-arts education, most of all, fights unmerited pride by asking students to recognize the smallness of their ambitions in the context of human history ….”

Head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education to read this wonderful piece about the need for humility in the Academy.

Also, shout out to liberal-arts education.

The medieval church, and in large measure the later Reformation churches, preserved the canon of the Old Testament but largely subsumed its theological voice to categories taken from systematic or dogmatic theology. The result was, in considerable measure, a monochromatic view of the canonical witness. The polyphonic voices of the Old Testament with their unsettled diversity of witness were often pressed into artificial unity through systematic categories brought from outside the text itself. Attempts to describe the Old Testament’s theological witness often used the categories common to systematic theology. Elements deemed inconsistent with church doctrine were ignored or treated as marginal to the theological understanding of the Old Testament.

Did the reformation overly systematize the Old Testament narrative?

With family income shrinking, and tax revenues dwindling, choices had to be made. One of the first places looked at was those costly ivory-tower humanities scholars. How could one justify paying salaries to people who spent years studying minutiae but not producing anything of measurable economic value?

Research in computer science, engineering, finance, and hard sciences that led to technological and medical discoveries was preserved. Humanities research in fields such as history, religion, philosophy, and literature was cut. Eventually humanities research slowed to a trickle. Departments shrank and then collapsed. The university became a technology lab and trade school.

Read the rest from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

To be more explicit: first-century Jews, like all other peoples, perceived the world, and events within the world, within a grid of interpretation and expectation. Their particular grid consisted at its heart of their belief that the world was made by a good, wise and omnipotent god, who had chosen Israel as his special people; they believed that their national history, their communal and traditional story, supplied them with lenses through which they could perceive events in the world, through which they could make some sense of them and order their lives accordingly. They told stories which embodied, exemplified and so reinforced their worldview, and in so doing threw down a particularly subversive challenge to alternative worldviews. Those who wished to encourage their fellow-Jews to think differently told the same stories, but with a twist in the tail. The Essenes told a story about the secret beginning of the new covenant; Josephus, a story about Israel’s god going over to the Romans; Jesus, a story about vineyard-tenants whose infidelity would cause the death of the owner’s son and their own expulsion; the early Christians, stories about the kingdom of god and its inauguration through Jesus. But one thing they never did. They never expressed a worldview in which the god in question was uninterested in, or uninvolved with, the created world in general, or the historical fortunes of his people in particular.

The New Testament and the People of God, N.T. Wright

How Jewish is Christianity? What role does one’s answer to that question play in how much emphasis is placed on Systematic (vs. Biblical or Historical) Theology? Were the Hebrew Scriptures or those who read/wrote them concerned with a systematic approach to what they were presenting?

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties. Something that if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellow human beings.

No doubt this can easily relate to our media obsession. I think it also has some pretty significant implications for historical and theological studies.

For one, they know that something is wrong. Several of our medical friends share different thoughts on theology and religion, but they all agree that there is something wrong with sickness, disease and pain. And if they don’t, then they aren’t very business savvy – it would be a silly decision to enter a profession that relies on people being concerned about being well if you don’t agree that there is something inherently wrong with not being well.

Not only do they know that something is wrong, but they see it as their role to fix it. No doubt there are several motives for entering into a health care profession, some of which are quite poor. But overwhelmingly the people I know are pursuing this career because of a true desire to help people. For some reason they are able to study for hours on end (or in rare and strange cases they just get biology) and want to use that gift to help those in need. That is worth recognizing.

I think the real root of why I love health care professionals is because health care itself is a beautiful shadow of a greater reality. A broken arm in need of restoration found in a great and competent healer screams the Gospel. A disease that has corrupted an organ enough to require replacement in order for the patient to truly live is an eye-opening picture of Regeneration. And sometimes, when all is said and done and death still comes, there remains a sobering reminder that we are not invincible. But every once in a while the unlikely treatment works, the MRI comes back negative or results simply defy explanation we are reminded of the events of Easter morning, when the old ways of death and decay were defeated and the prelude to our future restoration in Christ had begun.

So, health care professionals (and those still studying), this is what you are a part of. I know you won’t all agree with all of this, but thanks for what you do. I admire your work and attitudes, and probably don’t tell you enough.