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.