I Am No Scholar

Bertie has read that book every day since she was fourteen and she has never once finished a sentence about it.

They meet on a Wednesday, seven or eight of them, in the side room with the mismatched chairs. It is not a class. Somebody reads a passage and then people say what they see, and it is one of the better hours of that week for everybody in it.

And Bertie says the most interesting things in that room, and every one of them arrives with a disclaimer welded to the back of it.

"It seems to me he is speaking to the ones who stayed, but I am no scholar."

"I always thought that was the same woman as in the other one, but do not go by me."

"That word comes up twice, does it not, though I would not know."

Sixty-one years of daily reading. She has a Bible with a spine held on by tape and another in a drawer that belonged to her mother, and she could tell you where things are in a way that people with degrees frequently cannot, because she has lived in the book rather than studied it.

And there is not one observation in six decades that she has let stand on its own.

Callum has come to that group for about two years. He is thirty-four, he did eighteen months of proper study before some plans changed, and he is not a show-off: he mostly listens, and when he does say something it is usually to ask what somebody meant.

And in the spring he asked Bertie a straight question about a passage, because he genuinely wanted to know what she thought.

And she said, "Well, I would say it is about the delay rather than the doubt, but you would know better than me."

And Callum said, and everybody heard it, "Bertie. I did eighteen months. You have had sixty-one years."

She laughed and moved it on, the way she does.

But her friend Ida, walking out to the car park, said, "He is right, you know."

And Bertie said, "Oh, I am no scholar."

And Ida said, "You did it again."

Now let me ask you how long you have been ending your sentences that way.

Because if this is yours, you have got a phrase. But I am no scholar. But do not go by me. But I could have that wrong. But I am sure somebody has looked at that properly. And you attach it to true things, small good honest observations, and you have been doing it so long that you no longer hear yourself do it.

From childhood you have known

Paul writes to a young man he has trained, and when he comes to describe where that young man's faith actually came from, he does not name a teacher or a school.

And that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.2 Timothy 3:15

From childhood you have known. Timothy did not begin with instruction. He began at home, with a grandmother and a mother, hearing the writings before he could have parsed a sentence of them.

Which are able to give you the wisdom. And notice where Paul puts the power. Not in the teacher, and Paul is the teacher writing the letter and could easily have put it in himself. In the writings, which are described as able, on their own, to do the thing.

So hear this said over you, walking out to a car park in the dark. You have known these writings for six decades and they have been at work in you the whole time, and the phrase you keep attaching to the end of your sentences is not humility, it is a habit. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses later as the one who breathed all of it, and He is not restricted to working through people who have been to a school.

Now let me be careful, because this article is very easy to write badly and I have no interest in doing that.

Nothing here is against study.

Callum's eighteen months are real. Somebody who has spent time on a language, or on a period, or on the shape of a whole book, can hand you in five minutes what would take you eleven years to find, and it would be a foolish woman who refused that. Paul himself is writing a letter of instruction in the very passage we are reading. The next verse is about Scripture being profitable for teaching.

And the movement this site is named for did not despise learning. They were, by a distance, the most educated people in their country. They founded universities. Their ministers were expected to know languages.

They also built a school in every parish, and those two facts belong together rather than in tension.

That is the whole point and it is worth saying plainly: the reason they trained people so hard was so that ordinary people could be taught well, and the reason they built the schools was so that ordinary people would not have to depend on it.

You are somebody who reads it. That is a real category and it is the one those schools existed to produce.

And here is what the disclaimer actually costs, because it is not free.

It takes a true thing that a room needed and makes it optional.

When you say a good observation and put but I am no scholar on the back of it, you have handed everybody permission to let it go past. And in a room like that, where people are genuinely trying to see something, that is a real loss, and it has happened perhaps a thousand times.

You are able to say what you see and let it stand. The written word says the sacred writings themselves are able to give wisdom, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the illuminating, and neither of those clauses has an entrance requirement in it.