WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A SCHOLAR?

THE SIMPLE TRUTH ABOUT SCHOLARS

    For over 3,000 years, scholars have been treated with respect in their cultures. Who are they, and how can they be evaluated? Several facts are important to remember. First, scholars are just people like anyone else. They have the same personality traits that are found in the culture as a whole. Some are kind, patient, and loving people. Some will bend over backwards to help you. Some are humble and are only interested in finding the truth. These are the heroes in the field, but they are not the majority. Most scholars are just people who work at the job of teaching. They try to keep up in their field, but are generally overworked. They run between classes, committee meetings, and student advising. They try to find the time to write articles and books so that they can survive in a publish or perish world, but the demands of life make it hard to get that accomplished. They work with people who generally agree with them, and they just don't have the time or energy to worry too much about people who don't share their world views. There is also a dark side to scholarship. Some teachers are just abusive and enjoy putting down other people. Others are proud, angry, and violent. Academic murder happens constantly as some on the dark side of the field attack others to prove their own importance. Scholars are saints or sinners, positive contributors to the culture or just a vain and empty presence in life. In short, they are just normal people.

    The differences between scholars can be seen by comparing two teachers in a seminary that I once attended. I assume that both men  departed this life some years ago, and I assume that both men are in heaven today (although I have not kept up on the lives of either man). I will not mention their names, and I'll call them Fred and George. Fred was a very proper British professor who had written a number of books and articles. Fred role played important scholar quite well. He walked around campus with a great air of importance. Students walked into his class with reverence. They were impressed with themselves that they were able to learn to interpret Scripture at the feet of this great man. Fred only talked to the best students in class, and the rest were generally beneath him. Yet when I read his books, I found rather little in them that had not been said before. In class, he simply went through the Greek text parsing the verb forms. I sat in the back of the room with my copy of Hans parsing guide open. He agreed with the parsing guide every time. The class that I had with him did not add a great deal to the students' understanding of God's Word. I used to anger him intentionally out of general immaturity. I'd pass him on the sidewalk surrounded by his entourage, and I'd say something like, "Morning Fred, fine day isn't it?" I had no right to address him by his first name. So he would stare straight ahead, grind his teeth, and stomp away.

    The second man was a professor that I'll call George. He was a quiet and serious person. No one said very much about him, and he was just there. He lived alone in a little house in the ghetto. He spent a lot of time working with kids in the neighborhood. Few people at the school seemed to be very impressed by George. In reality though, he was one of the best text scholars in the world. In a reality based evaluation, he was a better scholar than Fred. The academic world has both kinds of teachers. When evaluating scholars, it is far more important to look at the actual value of their work instead of their reputations in the field. Unfortunately, you usually need a doctorate and many years of experience to evaluate the work of other scholars. Most people don't have the background to know who is really important and who is just pretending to be important. So image and sales skills are more vital to career success than academic gifts. People will often see you the way that you present yourself.

    Another truth to remember about scholars is that they are rarely more intelligent than anyone else. They have just spent more time in school, and they have learned more facts. There is a lot to be said for common sense. People who have less education but who work from correct presuppositions may read the Bible correctly while people who have several degrees may completely misunderstand what they read. Of course, it is only partly correct to say that scholars have learned more facts. People tend to be either "right brained," "left brained," or neutral. People in the neutral category tend to have mediocre memory skills and average innovative skills. They may succeed quite well in the field, but they have to work hard to get there, and they contribute rather few new ideas to the field.  Right brained people tend to be very creative, but they have poor memories. Left brained people tend to have very good memories, but they have a hard time with innovation. The difference between these ability sets was once thought to be caused by the hemisphere of the brain that was dominant, but that explanation has not held up. The difference between right brained and left brained people is real, but it is more complicated than was once thought. The distinction is important for understanding scholarship because scholars tend strongly to be left brained people. Memory skills are the coin of the realm in academia. People with strong memory skills remember course material, get good grades, and advance in the academic orbit. People who are highly innovative but have weak memory skills tend to get poorer grades. So they tend to leave the academic orbit at an earlier time. When left brained people teach, they either emphasize facts or survey authors in the field. They tend to have internalized what they have been taught, and they tend to believe that well known scholars are important regardless of whether they are right. When right brained people are able to finish a degree and teach, they stress broad concepts and build new interpretive systems. Left brained people succeed in their careers, but right brained people change the world. Very rarely, someone comes along who has both outstanding memory skills and great skills at innovation. People like that may rise to the top of the heap in academic especially if they also have good political skills. In a life time of being involved directly or tangentially in the academic orbit, I've only known a couple of people like that.

    Perhaps the most striking characteristic of scholars is a profound faith in the belief that scholarship is important. Sometimes, scholarship is important. Scholarship can find a cure for cancer or produce a new energy source. It can help pastors understand why members of an immigrant culture take offense at apparently normal behavior. It can help parents understand why women are often depressed after the birth of a child. It can produce a carbon fiber aircraft or a way to anticipate the effects of global climate change. Sometimes scholarship simply works better than foolishness. When you sharpen an ax, it cuts more wood. While a world full of practical value can be drawn from scholarship in general, not all fields of study  are equally useful. In far too many cases, Biblical scholarship is largely irrelevant to the life of the church. I saw an example of the irrelevance of scholarship a few years ago at a regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I heard a frustrated young professor explain how she had lost her position because she defended rather conservative views. After being unable to find employment in the field, she published a few articles that represented a radical left wing feminist position. Those articles gained her a teaching position, but to keep her job, she had to continue to publish articles that she did not believe. At another conference, I heard her ask the members of a sectional why most of the material that they discussed at the meeting meant nothing to people in the pews. That was an outstanding question even though it was ignored by the group.

    Before I was laid off from teaching, I used to assign both conservative and liberal books in my graduate and doctoral classes. I thought it important that students learn to understand both traditions. The students complained that the left of center books were of no value at all in their pastorates. They were right, and I was wrong. While some books may be very important in the politics of the field, they may be of almost no value when a pastor, elder, or teacher tries to build the spiritual life of his congregation. Too much of contemporary scholarship is simply irrelevant to the life of the church. Yet within the field, teachers consider these books to be important, and an understanding of them is thought to be basic to the academic pursuit. Sometimes conservative teachers assign left wing books to make the accreditation agencies happy. More often, they assign liberal books as a way to demonstrate that they are important scholars. As such, they want their students to begin the process of becoming important scholars too even if that gives the students little that they can use in the pastorate. Solomon would call that vanity and a striving after the wind.

    Another important value of scholarship is a firm belief in the primacy of the new. Acts 17:21 noted that the Athenians and their visitors spent their lives telling or hearing some new thing. That is still at the heart of the academic quest for truth. Entrance into the community of scholars requires finishing a doctorate, and that usually requires writing a dissertation. There are a few basic requirements for a dissertation. It must survey almost everything that was ever written on a subject, and it must be presented in proper form. However, that is not the heart of the project. The central requirement for a dissertation is that it must make a claim that has never been made before. That is easy for a right brained thinker but very hard for a left brained person. Right brained scholars often produce new ways of looking at their disciplines, but their new approaches may be completely wrong. Left brained scholars usually produce dissertations about some minor detail in the data that could be of little significance to anyone not involved in that discussion. For example, any number of masters theses and doctoral dissertations in recent years have explored the implication of the chiastic structure of a passage. Well OK, many biblical passages have a chiastic structure, but isn't there something more important in the passages? Whether a dissertation reflects right or left brained skills, it has to be new and unique. A dissertation has to make a new contribution to the field and make a credible case that the new idea should be accepted. There is no requirement in the field that the idea be right. It just has to be new. When articles are printed in professional journals, the normal expectation is that the article also make a new point that hasn't been made before.

    When students survey the academic discussion about a topic, the expectation is that they discuss the newest books and articles on the topic. The assumption is that the most recent study must be the most complete and authoritative work. That assumption is often wrong. The constant quest for some new thing leads to an endless variety of positions being defended on almost any topic. If you work on a controversial biblical passage, your search for academic opinions will usually turn up over a dozen different ways that the passage has been understood. That happens because the field is always looking for a new and unusual way to view a controversial passage. Then the field is able to debate at length the merits of different approaches to the passage. It makes the academic process possible. Another consequence of the primacy of the new is that older conservative books and articles are shoved over the horizon as obsolete and irrelevant. The primacy of the new often leads to suppression of the truth. In Romans 1, Paul stressed that God's judgment would fall on those who became arrogant and boastful, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. The determined assault against God's truth is a common feature of the academic orbit. That assault is often seen in the Humanities, and it is seen especially in fields related directly or tangentially to Biblical Studies.

    Another reality is that each scholar works from his or her own presuppositions, and people who work from mistaken presuppositions are unlikely to arrive at accurate conclusions.  Presuppositions are terribly important, and they have a huge impact on the positions taken by almost any scholar. Presuppositions determine the evidence that each author selects as important, and presuppositions determine the way that the evidence is evaluated. I began my seminary career at Westminster Seminary. Their Greek scholars were solid men. They worked through a book like Romans in great detail and with complete academic honesty. After studying the text in great depth, they proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Paul was essentially a Calvinist. I also studied at Concordia in St. Louis. Their New Testament professors were equally capable and honest men. They analyzed a book like Romans in just as great detail. After working through the text at length, they concluded that Paul was essentially a Lutheran. I've had friends who studied at Dallas Seminary. Dallas also had fine Greek scholars. After working through the text in great depth, they concluded that Paul was essentially a Dispensationalist. No matter how much people try to be honest, they usually end up finding in the text what they assume should be there. When they do make the leap of faith to a different interpretive model, it is usually one of the other commonly supported models in the field. Few people create new perspectives. Even when they don't just find their own position in the text, they find their own set of interpretive options in the text. At all levels, and in all academic disciplines, that is one of the greatest problems with scholarship. All of us bring things to the evidence that shape both our selection of the evidence and our interpretation of the evidence. None of us can read the biblical text without the blinders of our own culture, our own experiences, and our own beliefs.

    Another important thing to understand about scholarship is that the career of a scholar is fundamentally a sales position. A teacher's ability to have a successful career is based partly on the ability to convince schools that he or she is the best person to hire, to convince students that he or she is worth hearing, and to convince the public that his or her book are worth buying. All of that involves sales skills. Success in the field also requires a strong sales team. As a scholar, your sales team consists of the people who are willing to call you important if you call them important. They are the people who will require students to buy your book if you require your student to buy their books. They are the people who will discuss your work in their books and invite you to speak at their schools if you do the same. That may sound like a crass way to describe the field, but it is true. Networking with like minded people is a basic life skill for a scholar. Many capable men and women have had little success in the field because they can not convince others that they are important. That failure can devastate a career. That is also one reason why teachers compete to read papers at professional conferences and to publish articles in professional journals. Only a few of the papers actually teach anything true and valuable. Too often, they are just intended to sell the author's importance both to their own institutions and to the field as a whole. Of course, the papers also look good on resumes. The highest goal that can be obtained in the struggle for academic status is to give the key note address at a conference, to have all of the gathered scholars listen with rapt attention, and to have one's words accepted as authoritative because of one's reputation. Those who can pull this off have really arrived in the field even if they have nothing to say that is actually true.

    It is also important to realize that good scholars can be recognized partly by their mistakes. A few years ago, I met a professor from one of the state university campuses in Wisconsin. We began talking about how we did scholarship. I told him that I'd learned equally in two different ways. First, I'd found material consistent with what I already believed. That material developed my positions in constructive ways. Then I noted that I'd learned at least as much by being wrong, finding out that I was wrong, and changing the direction of my work. The other professor told me that he could never admit that he was wrong about anything. He noted that if he did so, "They would eat me alive!"  The ability to learn and grow is essentially the freedom to be wrong. Scholars can learn rather little if they work in an environment where they can not afford to admit that they are wrong. Yet even in some of the best conservative seminaries, far too many teachers are either unable or unwilling to admit when they have misinterpreted the evidence (or have simply missed the important evidence entirely). The need to recognize our errors is so central  to the search for truth that scholars who teach almost the same things that they have taught for twenty years are probably not free to learn and grow. It is fair to ask if they have been willing or able to be wrong.

    Of course, that is an accurate but naive observation. The whole nature of the academic enterprise is opposed to it. How does the academic debate really work? People are equated with positions. When a teacher begins his career, the teacher is expected to lay out a position, teach it, and defend it. The teacher is expected to build and defend this position throughout his career. Then the academic debate can continue. To understand this, think about the debate between Piper and Boyd. Since both men maintained consistent positions, any number of books and articles could be written about the conflict between them. Evidence could be added to their positions by their supporters, and both men's positions could be placed into a broader historical perspective. Doctoral candidates could write dissertations putting a new spin on the debate. All of this would have become difficult or impossible if either Piper or Boyd had changed positions significantly. You can't throw a book at a moving target. That's why people who change their opinions in significant ways are viewed with suspicion in the field. They are assumed to be of less value as scholars than people who can defend a consistent academic position throughout their careers. As soon as you admit that you are wrong about anything, other scholars may in fact "eat you alive." So there is a lot of pressure in the field at least to claim to be right (even if you suspect deep in your soul that you might not be). That tends to manifest itself in the choice of evidence. Otherwise honest and diligent scholars will pay attention to the evidence that supports their case and just downplay or overlook the evidence that could refute their claims. That is not being dishonest. It's just being human.

    Pride can easily carry away people in the field. Pride is the original sin. The more it dominates a person's thinking, the less likely he or she is to see the truth. While some scholars are humble and gracious men, the nature of the field militates against that virtue. The need to look important can so easily lead to an overestimation of a person's own ability. Solomon's words in Proverbs 27:21 are always true in an academic context. Solomon observed that silver is tested in a crucible, and gold is tested in a furnace. (They were used to determine if the precious metals were fake, and they told how much base metal was mixed with the gold.) Then Solomon observed that a man was tested by the praise that he received. The way that people respond to praise determines their true character. It is common for people to enjoy being told by their students that they are important scholars. After enjoying it, teachers begin to expect it, and then they begin to require it. Then it becomes harder and harder for them to admit the limitations of their ability or to recognize when they are wrong. The praise of students and peers is the greatest hindrance to learning in the field.

    Beyond that, the way that our culture structures the teacher/student relationship is more or less patterned after the parent/child relationship. The professor teaches his or her world view and grades students on the basis of how well they understand (and too often agree with) the teacher's world view. That leads to a subtle form of condescension and odd kinds of power relationships. When teachers interact with each other, they often evaluate each other in the same spirit. A scholar who critiques or evaluates another scholar's work is often taking the superior role of authority. It is so much safer and more effective to evaluate other peoples' work than to produce original work of your own. If you evaluate another author's work, you are playing parent to their child or teacher to their student. You are placing yourself at a higher level. Beyond that, other scholars in the field are unlikely to critique or evaluate your own evaluation of someone else. So your comments are relatively safe from attack. If you produce original work, everyone else will try to shoot you down. That's just how the field works. The need to look like an authority is central to career success, but it does not always make people more effective teachers. For the good of the students, teachers should encourage students to think for themselves. To be honest, teachers should always encourage their students to disagree with them or even correct them, but that rarely happens.

    The last thing to remember about scholars is that their work tends to be of inconsistent value. An author may run on for fifty pages and say little that is really true or profitable. Then suddenly, the author may make a few points that are brilliant and very useful. To find the limited amount of gold, it is often necessary to wade through a ton of straw. An interesting example of that can be seen in George Mendenhall's book The Tenth Generation: The Origins of the Biblical Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Mendenhall taught at the University of Michigan, and he had originally received his degree in a Lutheran seminary. Twenty years before writing this book, Mendenhall had shown to the field of Biblical Studies the significance of the international treaty pattern. That was a huge contribution to the field, and it's importance continues today. Mendenhall's book The Tenth Generation was an odd mixture of valuable material and mistaken concepts that were based on liberal presuppositions. Mendenhall wrote his book partly to argue that Israel began as a slave revolt in the Canaanite culture. He believed that the lower class fled into the highlands, pulled together their culture, and became Israel. That is far from the Bible's explanation for Israel's origin. Then on pages 67-8, Mendenhall added an excursus called "The Miracle at Zaz: Christmas 1966." This two page section followed a chapter about the glory fire at Sinai that simply put the Exodus glory motifs into the context of similar religious claims in the ancient Near East. Then Mendenhall added this excursus. With it, he jumped from ancient myth to contemporary culture. Zaz was a small town in southeastern Turkey. Mendenhall's excursus was drawn from a tape recorded interview with the town's Syrian Orthodox priest made by Jack Bazalgette. Three days after Christmas in  1966, a woman named Meryem called the village elders to her house. She was a righteous woman who had been bedridden for two years. She warned the village leaders that all of the fighting in the city had to stop or something terrible would happen. Then she told them that a light was shining in the town's broken down church. Meryem could not have seen the light from her bed, but she told the town's elders to go see it. When people from the town entered the church, they found a bright light shining through the walls. Candles were burning and an oil light on the ceiling was lit. Its oil flowed out of the lamp onto the floor. As word of this spread, people from the town filled all the containers that they could find with the oil. The next morning, several men arrived from a village five miles away. They said that they had come to help repair the damage from the fire. They said that they had seen the fire in the distance from their town. After this, the feuding stopped and the villagers began rebuilding the church. The question is, why would Mendenhall insert this story in the middle of a moderately liberal book? Did he intend the account of Zaz to be taken as true? Did he intend it as a modern example of a similar kind of myth? The excursus was presented as something that really happened. Whatever Mendenhall's purposes may have been, the story itself is very interesting, and it preaches really well. Never assume that a book has nothing to teach you because it is based on presuppositions that you do not share.

HOW DOES THE ACADEMIC WORLD REALLY WORK?

    It is important to understand that most academic institutions function for their own benefit rather than the welfare of the students  (whatever they may claim to the contrary). That topic was explored recently by Mark C. Taylor in an essay titled "Doctors of Miseducation." Taylor's essay was originally published in the New York Times, and it was reprinted in the Star Tribune on 5/4/09. Taylor chairs the religion department of Columbia University. Taylor wrote in part:

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). ...

    In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. As departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. ...

    The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn't conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That's one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course - with no benefits - than it is to hire full-time professors.

 Taylor's essay is quite a condemnation of the way that doctoral programs are run in the university system. Taylor suggests that for the welfare of the institution, students are encouraged to enter doctoral programs at great personal expense even though there are no realistic expectations that the student will be able to use the degree for employment in the future. To a lesser degree, the same criticism could be raised for undergraduate or masters level courses of study. Schools are interested in their own financial well being and their own academic status. They only rarely care what the consequences of their decisions are for the lives of their students. For example, there is almost nothing that a graduate could do with a masters degree in a field like Egyptology, and very little that a graduate could do with a doctorate in the field even though ancient Near Eastern programs continue to churn out graduates in fields like that. The country is full of people with expensive pieces of paper hanging on their walls to no jobs resulting from the degrees. When you graduate with an undergraduate degree, masters, or a doctorate, your degree might lead you to a good career, or it might just help the school pay its bills. Most schools are relatively unconcerned whether you find a job with their degree as long as they can pay their bills.

    If that is how schools really work, how do academic disciplines work? One of the better recent discussions about the nature of the academic world was an article written by John Baines titled "Restricted Knowledge, Hierarchy, and Decorum: Modern Perceptions and Ancient Institutions" (Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 27 (1990): 1-23). Baines wrote about the field of Egyptology, but his comments can be applied to many disciplines. Baines wrote his article partly to explain why topics like pyramid power had no place in the field. Baines noted that most fields of study were closed. That meant that there were only a limited number of people who would be recognized as scholars by other people in the field. Baines suggested that anyone who wanted to enter the field had to be initiated (by doing things like receiving degrees from the right institutions). They had to accept the right perspectives, develop the right skills, attend the right conferences, and belong to the right societies. Baines noted that anyone who defended positions different from those accepted in the field would be accused of not knowing the material and not having learned the correct methods for work in the field. Baines noted that real changes in a discipline only occurred when new ideas or evidence enter the field from outside. However, new evidence was most likely to be accepted when it was first defended by someone inside the discipline. Baines also noted that those who were considered to be outside of the walls of the discipline could often provide a service to the field by warning about inconsistencies in accepted positions. Baines then used that basic perspective as a basis for studying the idea of hidden knowledge in ancient Egypt. Baines' observations are important because they illustrate why it is so hard for people who are not part of an academic discipline to offer suggestions that are considered seriously by people within the walls of the discipline. Those who are considered to be outside of the walls of a discipline usually do not have a voice in the debate. When they offer suggestions, they are shunned and ignored. When they don't go away, they are attacked. If they are right, their influence may affect the field 50 years later. Any number of historical examples of that principle could be discussed. 

THE EVIDENTIAL STANDARD OF SCHOLARSHIP

    Another aspect of the academic world must also be understood. Real scholarship always grows from the primary evidence. In both Biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies the primary evidence is both the archaeological artifacts and the ancient texts. A real scholar never relies on an ancient text that he or she can not translate. The reason for that ethic is that translations of texts are often speculative to some degree. If Egyptian literature is used as an illustration, New Kingdom texts from the Mosaic era are rather well understood. Middle Kingdom texts from Israel's patriarchal age are far harder to translate and understand. Old Kingdom texts from the Pyramid Age are even harder to translate. Often half the words in a text can really only be translated in a tenuous way, and the text may refer to religious ceremonies that are not understood at all. That is typical of the field. So two or three published translations of a text may be very different from each other. The translation problem can also be seen in the history of Ebla studies. Twenty years ago, it was popular to make rather strong claims about the texts from the ancient city of Ebla. Surprising parallels were claimed between the Ebla texts and the Old Testament. However, Ebla was very early in the literary history of the region. Usually, a sign at Ebla could represent several different letters, and authors would assume that a word should be read in a way that agreed with their preferred understanding of the text. Other readings of the same word were almost equally possible. More recently, it has become popular to deny most of the earlier readings even though many of them are still possible. That's why scholarly work on almost any text requires some grasp of the difficulties behind any proposed translation.

    In Biblical studies, scholarship demands that the texts be read in the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. When authors depend on published translations of the text, their work will rarely be accepted as scholarship. That ethic is so strong that (at least among left brained scholars) biblical scholarship is often little more than linguistics. There is often an implied assumption that if the words of the text are translated correctly, the passage is understood correctly. The problem with this mindset can be seen by looking at a couple of English expressions. If someone from the 1960's said something like, "Cool man, that's really groovy." The words can be translated correctly into another language, but the translation will have almost no meaning. Words mean what they say in a cultural context. When Nixon declared, "I am not a crook!" That statement can only be understood against the context of Watergate. When studying the Biblical text, it is equally necessary to study both the linguistic meaning of the words and the cultural setting of the passage. Left brained teachers tend to stress the meaning of the words while right brained people tend to stress the cultural parallels. Both are equally important.

HOW CAN YOU BECOME A SCHOLAR?

    There are several rules that have to be followed if you want to give the impression of scholarship. The first rule is that assignments submitted or papers presented must always be letter perfect. The academic world is never waiting to welcome young graduates into the fold. Instead, there are always far too many people who are looking for reasons to exclude others from the field in order to prove their own importance. Academic murder is a daily occurrence, and once someone has been declared to be outside of the discipline's walls, it is very difficult for that person to get back into the good graces of the field. One of the worst crimes that someone can commit is to have a word spelled wrong in a paper presented for evaluation. A single word spelled incorrectly will prove to everyone that a person's work can not be trusted. For those of us who are radically right brained, that can be a nightmare. I wrote both my master's thesis and my doctrinal dissertation before personal computers were invented. Before spell check, I had huge issues with spelling (and it remains less of a problem for me yet). On the rough draft of my master's thesis at Biblical Seminary in 1981, I even misspelled the names of two of the three men on my thesis committee. That kind of thing is seen in the field as being completely unacceptable. I learned that the hard way. I've always made it too easy for left brained thinkers to nit pick my work. If you want to be considered a scholar, you simply can not afford to do that.

    Even typos in a paper are a serious issue. If a student presents a student paper at a theological conference, the student will often begin by making a formal apology for a typo on page 7 of the paper. Even a single typo requires a public act of contrition, and it demonstrates that the student has not yet arrived at scholarship. Incorrect formatting in things like footnoting will also rule someone out of consideration as a scholar. Another unpardonable sin is to quote from a source and not get the quotation letter perfect. That teaches anyone who reads the paper that it is not written by a scholar. Not only must quotations be correct, but any claim made about another author's position must understand exactly what that author was trying to say. We need not even discuss here all of the issues that surround plagiarism. There are at least six forms of plagiarism, and any of them can cause a student to fail a paper, fail the course, or even be removed from the program depending on the policy of the school. All of this may seem like a stiff requirement for high school or college students who are used to handing in rather sloppy papers, but it is the expectation in the field. Always remember that scholarship is to a large extent image and sales. If you want to be considered a scholar, you have to look and act like a scholar. Of course, none of this has very much to do with truth. You can write a scholarly paper that is presented in a proper academic form but that is completely wrong. The truth of a paper only rarely enters into the grading process.

    The next requirement for scholarship is the requirement for collegiality. In theory at least, you simply have to be nice to the people with whom you disagree. Scholars are expected to have no emotions in their work. They are supposed to be detached and objective. They are supposed to discuss quietly the differences between positions and the evidence that can be used to support various positions. They are never supposed to attack other people for what they believe or to care too much about the consequences of positions that are defended. People who violate that rule of behavior can be called before the committee on collegiality at a theological conference, and they can be ostracized in the field. OK, that's the theory, but what is the reality? I was at a Society of Biblical Literature regional conference a few years ago. I questioned the consequences of a position that a rather far left of center speaker was defending. One man suggested that I should be brought before the committee for not treating the speaker with enough respect. In the same conference, a student was approved to read a paper titled, "Strategies to Use against Our Enemies the Evangelicals." The demand for collegiality is too often a club used to put down opposition while any attack against conservative theology goes unquestioned. At another conference, I noted that a speaker's claims about modern philosophy resembled something that Solomon (I think at least...) made in Ecclesiastes. Immediately a lady in the back of the room screamed out that the god of the Old Testament was an evil and vile being that no one should ever worship. That kind of thing would never be questioned by the committee on collegiality.

    I used to follow the Ancient Near East list serve that was run by the University of Chicago, and I'd make an occasional contribution to the discussion. The ANE list was followed by many of the best men in ancient Near Eastern studies, but it was not a moderated list. That means that no one approved postings before they were put on the net. People just wrote whatever they wanted on the list. Far too often, people were just mean and nasty to each other. The webmaster warned the list members several times that they had to tone down their attacks against each other. Finally, the University of Chicago simply shut down the list serve. That's the reality in the field. The issues involved in Biblical scholarship are terribly important. They are life and death, heaven and hell. The future of the church and the world pivot around them. So it is always necessary to balance the requirement of collegiality with passion for God and His righteousness. Never let anyone convince you to act as if God and His truth simply did not matter very much. Nothing on earth matters more than God and His Word. At the same time, don't drive people away from the gospel by being obnoxious.

    I saw a great example of that principle at Westminster Seminary. I took Van Til's course in Apologetics. I learned a great deal in the course because he assigned two term papers for one course that were graded both on content and length. To pass, they each had to be 40 pages long. To get an A, they each had to be 100 pages long. That's the old Westminster before they cut the course work in half and hired a Practical Theology department. Van Til taught Presuppositionalism. He believed that it was a waste of time to argue theology with people. The right thing to do was to tell people that the were covenant breakers and that they had to repent. Van Til's students were often dangerous people. The could be really obnoxious, and they could rapidly drive people away from the faith. Yet Van Til's method worked very well for him. It worked for Van Til because he put his arm around someone's shoulder. Then  with God's love shining out of his eyes, he would tell the person that he was a covenant breaker who needed to repent. People melt in response to love. Among other things, that's a great lesson for how to do scholarship. Never abandon your values to gain academic acceptance. Always stand up for God's Word. Yet always do it in a way that makes people feel loved. That's the heart of what collegiality is all about.

    The next thing that you have to do to be accepted as a scholar is to be thorough in your work. That's a small statement for a huge task. If you want to discuss a passage, first you have to read almost everything that's ever been written about the passage. If you are working with a controversial passage, you may have to read hundreds of books and articles so that you can be sure that you know all of the relevant evidence and all of the important positions. Scholarship is a huge amount of work. That's why it typically takes students from four to eight years to write a doctoral dissertation. When I wrote my paper on Israel's sea crossing, I learned a couple of new languages, and I worked my way through over 800 academic books and articles. Even then, I missed a lot. There are few short cuts to doing good work. Part of being thorough is also working from the original languages. Don't present work for consideration as scholarship that rests on translations of the Biblical text. Such work may be of great value for the church. It may be profound and innovative. It is unlikely to be accepted as scholarship.

    Another important idea to grasp is that scholarship is not really about what the Bible says, and it is not really about what happened in history. Scholarship is about scholars. That may be why it is called scholarship. You can write a paper that uses a hundred biblical passages in an innovative way. The paper may be a very valuable study, and it might be completely true. It isn't scholarship. To write a scholarly paper, it is necessary to talk about the scholars. The paper should survey what half a dozen scholars claim, trace the way their presuppositions affect their use of the evidence, evaluate which position seems closest to the truth, and add your own spin on the evidence. To write a good quality scholarly paper, it is important to talk about the most important scholars who have addressed the topic. How do you know who the most important scholars are? You read a dozen books or articles on the subject and check who other authors discuss. These are the important scholars. Why are they important? They are important because they are the ones that everyone discusses. If you want to be thought a scholar, you have to begin by discussing them too. Of course, the fact that everyone discusses them does not at all mean that they are correct. Most important scholars are wrong most of the time. Yet to be scholarly, you have to talk about them. As an example, you could write a paper on the origin of the nation of Israel. To write a scholarly paper on the  topic, you would have to talk about what Gutwald did to Mendenhall's theory. Then you have to talk about Noth's theory about an amphictyony (which is a group of 12 tribes united by shared sanctuaries). You would have to talk about how the archaeological evidence is understood by authors like Mazar on one side versus Finkelstein on the other. You would have to address the arguments raised by Thompson and Lemche. Nowhere in the paper would there be very much room to summarize what the Bible really said. That's an academic and scholarly paper.

    One of the most important things to do if you want to be thought a scholar is to identify with one of the camps in the field. Each discipline is divided into camps that approach the evidence in different ways. In the arena of Biblical Studies, there are young earthers and old earthers. There are conservative Evangelical scholars who believe in an 18th Dynasty exodus. There are conservative Evangelical scholars who believe in a 19th Dynasty exodus. (Those may seem very similar, but ancient Near Eastern culture changed very rapidly. Everything from Abraham to David looks very different from the standpoint of an 18th or 19th Dynasty date for the exodus.) In the mainstream (liberal) orbit, there are authors who defend the documentary hypothesis and who assume that real Old Testament history began during the United Monarchy. There are authors who just assume the documentary hypothesis and who are mainly interested in distinguishing between the goals and purposes of each redactor. There are increasingly Minimalists who don't believe that anything in the Old Testament was really true. There are authors who are mainly interested in finding literary genres for material in the Bible, and there are people who are mainly interested in the sociological or even economic significance of the text. There are feminists and liberation theologians who use the biblical text to defend their social agendas.

    To be accepted as a scholar, it is important to decide which of these approaches you want to defend. Then it is very important to network with other people who defend roughly the same positions. Remember that scholarship is a sales position. To convince anyone that you are a good scholar, you have to know your market. Find opportunities to meet the people who are thought to be the important voices in that part of the field. Ask them questions. Ask them for help correcting your perspectives. Tell them why you value their work. Build bridges and relationships. Then you might have a chance to find a job in the field. Avoid iconoclastic positions that put you outside of any major group in the field. You can not be a scholar by yourself any more than you can be a used car salesman on a desert island. You have to have a market for your work if you want to turn scholarship into a career. To be important, you have to be important to someone for some reason.

    It is also very important to get into print as soon as possible and as often as possible. Academia is a publish or perish world. However, it is equally important to write high quality material. Publishing poorly researched or crack pot material hurts your reputation far more than it helps. How can you break into print?  When thinking about publishing, there are several decisions to make. The first is whether to write a book or an article. Generally, articles are easier to get into print. When you start writing, it helps to aim your work at small religious magazines. Choose one. Read a dozen copies of the magazine. Decide the kind of essay that they print and how they structure their articles. Then write an essay and send it to the editor to evaluate. Remember to include a self-addressed envelope with postage so that the editor can send it back. Don't ask a publisher to pay postage to return something to you. It may help to contact the editor first and ask him or her what kind of articles he or she wants to read. There is not a lot of academic status in that kind of thing, but  it can teach you a lot about publishing.

    If you want to write an article that can help you build an academic reputation, it helps to publish in a professional journal. That is hard to do. Remember that they are professional journals because they require professional level work. A typical first article in a professional journal is a brief recap of the main arguments in your doctoral dissertation. That's the level of research required for an article. After you get a reputation for quality work, it becomes easier to get an article accepted (especially if you study or teach in the school that publishes the journal). Also, be sure to read several articles in the journal to see how they format articles. Most journals either publish their requirements for an article's structure in one volume of their journal or post the requirements on their web site. Many different formats are in use at the same time, and an editor will not read an article unless it is written in the format used by that journal. An article accepted in a professional journal usually has to suggest an idea that no one has defended before and back it up with dissertation level research. Don't embarrass yourself by submitting poorly researched work. It will not be printed. Read almost everything that has ever been written on a subject before beginning your own suggestion on the topic. If that sounds like a huge amount of work, it is. However, if you want to find a place for yourself in the academic world, there is no quick and easy way to do it.

     The alternative to writing an article is to write a book. The general rule for any book is to start by writing one sample chapter. Then send a publisher a table of contents, the sample chapter, and a brief overview of the content of the other chapters. Tell the publisher who you think will buy the book and what it's potential market may be. Always write exactly for that market. Then ask the editor if he or she wants to read the whole book when it is finished. Always include a return envelope with postage. Also, always expect rejection. For a first book, you will have to send query letters to a dozen publishers before you find someone willing to read the manuscript, although you must only send it to one publisher at a time. Even if a publisher agrees to read the book, there is no guarantee at all that the publisher will be willing to publish it. Reading the book only means that you have your foot in the door. Always remember that publishing houses are in business to make money. That fact has to drive everything that you write. Almost no publisher will spend his own money to print your book unless he is fairly certain that he can do so for a profit.

    If you want to write a Christian book, there are three ways to go about it. First, you can write a Christian novel. It is almost impossible to get something like that published. Perhaps one person in a hundred who writes a first novel can actually get it published (unless you go to a vanity press and pay them to print it). Also, that kind of thing will not get you any academic status.

    The second way to go is to write a detailed academic study of a subject. The level of research has to be doctoral dissertation level (as in read everything that has ever been written on the subject first and work from the original languages). When you write a book like that, you are unlikely to find anyone willing to spend his money to print it. Most publishers will only invest their own money in a book that is written by someone who already has a lot of academic status. Then the author's name can sell the book. The rest of us can't get into print that way. There are two ways to get an academic book in print. The first is to have it printed by a publisher who will print the book if you pay his costs. Typically, it will cost you around $4,000 to get a book in print that way, and you will only recover a few hundred from royalty payments. The other way to print an academic book is to teach in a large school and require students to purchase your book as a text for your courses. Then persuade the school book store to purchase 400 copies of the book. If a book store is willing to place an order for 400 copies, several publishers will print almost anything regardless of the content. Most academic books are published that way. However, there is also a reaction setting in against that pattern. At a university level, that is increasingly being seen as a conflict of interests. Teachers are increasingly only being allowed to use their own books if they convince a committee that it is the best book currently available on the topic.

    The third way to publish a book is to write for a lay audience instead of an academic audience. You can write a marketable book by doing one of five things. 1) Write a book that gives people authoritative reasons for believing that they are right. Almost no one will pay money for a book listing the reasons why they are wrong. Many people will happily invest in a volume that proves them right. 2) Make people feel good. Talk about joy or blessings. Talk about the nobility of a denominational tradition. Talk about the great things that the Gospel in doing in people's lives both in this country and elsewhere in the world. People have enough problems of their own, and they look for comfort and encouragement. 3) Write a book that frightens people. People will buy doomsday Christian books for the same reason that they watch horror stories. 4) Write about worship in ways that bring people closer to God. To write this kind of book, you have to have a very close walk with the Lord yourself. A theological education tends to work against the ability to write this kind of book. That's why seminaries are usually called cemeteries by people who study there. Seminaries turn a relationship with God into a topic of theoretical study, and they dry out people's faith as often as not. 5) Write a self-help book. There is always a market for a book about 50 ways that you can use the Bible to control your kids. You can make a career showing people how to succeed in the things that they are doing anyway. The limitation of books aimed at a lay audience is that they will not give you a lot of academic status. The way to make a career with that kind of work is usually to start your own ministry and teach seminars or conferences around the country. Books like that may or may not be of very much value when looking for a teaching position. However, if you develop a large reputation from writing such books, a school may hire you so that your name may attract students to the school. If you develop a large reputation by writing books for a lay audience, you may also be able to attract giving to a school where you teach, and schools may hire you to add to their bottom line.

    Of course, the alternative to all of this is to just  spend your life looking for the truth. Unless the methods above are followed, that search is not likely to lead to a successful career. Whichever set of goals you choose to pursue, the best advice you can follow was given by Solomon in Proverbs 3:5-8. Solomon called his readers to trust Yahweh with all their hearts and not to lean on their own understanding. Solomon called his readers to acknowledge Yahweh in all of their ways so that He would make straight their ways. Solomon warned his readers not to think that they were smart but to fear Yahweh and turn from evil. Then He would heal their lives and bring a fresh spirit to their souls.

Copyright © 2009 Dr. Rodger Dalman
Last modified: 08/11/09