Wednesday, March 23, 2011
The Dangers of Study
Justin Taylor quotes BB Warfield:
We must remain in the mystical - without it, there is no alternative that what Warfield describes.
We are frequently told, indeed, that the great danger of the theological student lies precisely in his constant contact with divine things.This is a great diagnosis, but the disease is more than the mundane "familiarity breeds contempt." Rather the problem is the structures, intellectual, physical and spiritual, that we build on top of the simple truth of Christ. In an effort to do things well, we come to rely on our understanding, not His.
They may come to seem common to him, because they are customary.
As the average man breathes the air and basks in the sunshine without ever a thought that it is God in his goodness who makes his sun to rise on him, though he is evil, and sends rain to him, though he is unjust; so you may come to handle even the furniture of the sanctuary with never a thought above the gross early materials of which it is made.
[...]
God’s stately stepping in his redemptive processes may become to you a mere series of facts of history, curiously interplaying to the production of social and religious conditions, and pointing mayhap to an issue which we may shrewdly conjecture: but much like other facts occurring in time and space, which may come to your notice.
It is your great danger.
We must remain in the mystical - without it, there is no alternative that what Warfield describes.
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