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Academics Spew Out Their Indigestion

After reading countless articles and books on biblical topics through the years, I have concluded that the world of academia has perpetrated one of the monumental travesties of justice in the history of religious studies. That travesty is that the majority of intellectuals who have attempted to digest the Bible have developed indigestion to one degree or another and often spew out the results of this indigestion to the general public in the form of bewilderment with God, incredible presuppositional theories, and/or blatant animosity toward God and the ways in which God is revealed.

This is because many biblical scholars have not experienced a transcendent encounter on a personal level with the living God of the Book they are meticulously studying.

The Bible is first and foremost an account of “the mighty acts of God,” as the eminent Harvard scholar G. Ernest Wright put it. It is, therefore, an absolute prerequisite for anyone who is writing about how God acts to have met God one-on-one. Attempting to evaluate the ways of God with only knowledge or scientific formulas, but without a transformational experience with God, is equivalent to attempting to become an authority on fishing without having ever gone out with a master fisherman. No one is really qualified to evaluate or to speculate about spiritual experience unless that individual has literally met God in his/her own spirit.