Subject: EXPLAIN REPLENISH |
Bible Note: Tim, if I may, I'd like to add a thought or two that may relate in some way to your statement, "I do not believe that education or learning are bad things." Well, neither do I and certainly agree with you. Christians are nowhere commanded to check their brains in at the door when they enter a church building, as C. S. Lewis once pointed out. ..... But regarding education and learning, their worth and trustworthiness depend in good measure upon who does the educating that leads to the learning. Or, one could say, the kind of crop harvested depends in no small measure on the kind of seeds sown. In many of our universities today -- and, yes, in our seminaries as well -- secular humanism is being taught instead of orthodox theology, evolutionism is taught as fact and creationism as a myth, practices the Bible calls perversion are being defended as being acceptable alternate lifestyles. The list goes on. ..... Perhaps the greatest threat -- the real Achilles' heel -- to sound doctrine in the churches today is the pandemic ignorance of Scripture found among a great many church-going Christians. For nearly a quarter century I taught an adult Sunday School class and was overwhelmed by the woeful lack of basic Bible knowledge among class members, even though the majority of these people were quite intelligent and literate, many of them having advanced degrees. They had a little knowledge about the Bible, but as Alexander Pope put it, "A little learning is a dangerous thing." ..... It's easy enough to assume that an otherwise literate person knows the Bible well. What Mark Twain said when asked to give his definition of a classic of literature might appropriately be applied to the Bible as well: "Something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." It was from the witty pen of this humorist that we get another wry observation: "Nobody is more ignorant than the educated person when you get him off the thing he was educated in." --Hank |