If you grew up in church, you may have heard a warning before you left for college. The professors will try to take your faith. They will push evolution on you, or atheism, or both. And you may have heard a verdict on someone who came home asking questions: he got too smart for his own good.
Take that sentence seriously for a moment. It says that past a certain point, knowing more about something makes you worse at it. Nobody believes that about anything else.
Where we trust the educated
When your child is sick, you want the doctor who went to school the longest. When you drive across a bridge, you are trusting an engineer you will never meet, and you are glad she studied. The pilot, the pharmacist, the electrician, the person who wrote the software in your phone: we hand our lives to educated strangers every day and never think about it.
We also change our minds, constantly, and call it progress. Doctors bled their patients for two thousand years and stopped when the evidence came in. We moved the earth out of the center of the universe. We learned that handwashing saves lives, that the continents drift, that the stars have ages. Every one of those meant someone saying, out loud, that what we had believed was wrong. We do not remember those people as having gotten too smart. We name hospitals after them.
Archaeology, history, and the study of ancient languages are the same kind of knowledge, built the same way, by people who spent their lives at it. They are also exactly the tools you need to read a book written in Hebrew and Greek, in a world that ended two thousand years ago.
Where we stop
Then we open the Bible, and the rule flips. New information about the text is treated as an attack. The person who learned it is treated as the problem. A question is a symptom. It is deemed spiritual warfare.
Here is the strange part. The Bible you own is already a product of the scholarship you are being warned about. The people who translated it learned the languages in universities. The footnotes that say "some ancient manuscripts read" are textual criticism, on your nightstand. The newest translation changed "inn" to "guest room" in the Christmas story because scholars looked at how Luke uses the word elsewhere. A line about three witnesses in heaven dropped out of 1 John because it is in no Greek manuscript from the first thousand years. Your Bible has been changing its mind on the evidence the whole time. Nobody lost their faith when the innkeeper left.
What the authors could know
Reading honestly also means reading the authors as people who lived when they lived. They described the sky the way everyone around them did.
So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky.
Genesis 1:7-8
A solid dome, with water above it. Pillars under the earth. The sun stopping in the sky. That is how the ancient world pictured the cosmos, and the writers wrote from inside it. Noticing that is not an insult to them. It is the first thing a careful reader does with any old book, and the Bible is an old book before it is anything else.
The same honest reading notices where the text says two things. Genesis gives two animal counts for the ark, a page apart. Matthew and Luke give two different family trees for Jesus. The oldest copies of Mark end at the empty tomb. You can read all of that and keep your faith, and many people do. What you cannot do is read it and pretend it is not there.
Why it matters
Here is the whole argument in one sentence: a person who has only ever heard one side can be convinced of anything by whoever gets there first.
That is not a modern idea. It is in the book.
The one who first states a case seems right, until the other comes and cross-examines.
Proverbs 18:17
Education is the cross-examination. It is the second voice in the room. It is the difference between reading meaning out of a verse and reading it in. Without it, you are not choosing what to believe. You are keeping whatever you were handed, and defending it with whatever you were handed to defend it with. That is true of medicine and it is true of scripture, and the Bible knows it. It praises the people who checked.
These Jews were more receptive than those in Thessalonica, for they welcomed the message very eagerly and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so.
Acts 17:11
but test everything; hold fast to what is good;
1 Thessalonians 5:21
Luke opens his Gospel by saying he investigated before he wrote. Paul tells a church to test everything. The Bereans are praised, not scolded, for checking the apostle against the text. The people who wrote these books expected to be examined.
The fear underneath
Underneath the warning about professors is a real fear, and it deserves a straight answer: if I look closely, it might come apart.
Two things are true about that. First, the people who look most closely at the Bible for a living, in seminaries and divinity schools of every kind, mostly go on to lead churches. What they learn there is no secret. Looking closely is their job, and the faith survives the looking in most of them. Second, nobody can tell you what you will believe after you learn what the text says, who wrote it, and how it reached you. That is not a flaw in the learning. It is the point of it.
An uneducated person can be convinced to believe anything. That is the sentence to carry out of this. It is the reason you want a trained surgeon, and it is the reason to learn what the Bible actually says before anyone tells you what it means. Whatever you believe at the end, you will have chosen it with your eyes open. That is the only kind of belief that is actually yours.
Sources
- Genesis 1:7-8; Proverbs 18:17; Acts 17:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:21; Luke 1:1-4 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, notes on Genesis 1, 1 John 5, Luke 2
- John Barton, A History of the Bible, on how the Bible has been read, translated and interpreted
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, on 1 John 5:7