the humility of a student

It is unbecoming, certainly, for a twenty-five-year-old seminarian to berate a sixty-year old elder, for example, because the older man holds an outdated interpretation of a Bible passage. There is something prideful about a student (this is a true story, from years ago) who stands and reads thirty pages of Vos's Biblical Theology to a congregation of working people with ninth to twelfth grade education. There is something wrong when a first-year seminarian believes that he must (in the most incomprehensible jargon) lay on his adult Sunday School class all the latest theories about the use of Hebrew prepositions. Such students lack the perspective of seeing theology as a spiritual task. Theology is application. If it doesn't edify, it is worthless. It is not information for information's sake. It should never be a vehicle of intellectual pride.

"Simple believers" often know God better than many learned theologians. Many who lack formal theological training are better elders and deacons than any young seminarian could be. They may know less about academic theology than the young seminarian, but they may well know more of what's important, in greater depth and perspective, and better how to apply it to life. If the young seminarian wishes to rebuke such an elder, he should take 1 Timothy 5:1 to heart. More likely he should not rebuke at all until he learns something of the gentleness and grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. But even more important, the young seminarian should be humble enough to learn from those who have walked with Christ for many years, who have matured through fighting the spiritual warfare. This kind of learning can be just as important as classroom learning in preparing a young theologian for ministry. All of this is an exhortation to students to recognize your own immaturity, how much you don't know, how much you need to grow. You might deceive yourself about this, partly because at seminary you are learning so much technical stuff of which the simple believers are ignorant. Being able to read Hebrew and Greek, and to speak of covenants and supralapsarianism and the rest might lead you to think (quite wrongly) that you know God better than the simple believers. But Thielicke illustrates well how somebody can have a lot of knowledge, while lacking knowledge of the most important sort:

Before the young freshman has
really looked at the cornerstone
of the Biblical story of salvation,
for example, the story of Creation
and the account of the Fall, before
he has come to know the Alpine
peaks of the divine thoughts in
their majesty, he is made familiar
with the mineralogical analyses of
that stone. But anybody who
studies geological formations on
maps and graphs, and learns
mineralogical formulae from a set
of tables before he ever climbs the
Alps, is hardly in a position to
comprehend at all what the Alps
are. IS The simple believer may
well know the theological Alps,
in some ways, better than the
seminarian mineralogist. The
young theologian, for all his
necessary immersion in technical
theology, may well need to know
God much better than he
does, before he seeks to edify his
fathers and mothers in the
Lord.

To summarize: theology, as the application of God's Word to human life, is a spiritual task, and, as such, requires you to have a close walk with God and a willingness to do theology his way. Otherwise, the study of theology can be a danger to your soul. One thing God demands from you is hard work in your studies, a thoughtful interaction with his Word and his world. But he also expects you to make room in your schedule for your other responsibilities, to develop a system of priorities that gives you time for a rich devotional life and enables you to serve others in your family, church, workplace, and in the seminary community itself. Jesus' law of love should prevail in that community, and that (plus a realistic assessment· of your own level of knowledge) can necessitate tolerance of some positions that you don't agree with. It also requires
patience with others who have not achieved your level of technical knowledge (who may, nevertheless excel you in knowledge of what is most important).

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