Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 46:1 (Mar 2003)
Article: Editorial
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 46:1 (March 2003) p. 1

Editorial

I still remember vividly a Canadian summer over a dozen years ago that put my scholarly career into a much-needed historical perspective. The reason I would like to share this with a wider audience is my conviction that such a bird’s eye view is vital for anyone working in academia. Not that scholarship is the only, or even most important, kingdom ministry. Very likely, God’s final verdict on what were the most valuable and vital contributions to his cause in this world will differ from ours, and there are many viable (and probably more important) ways to serve our Lord other than through scholarship or writing. Nevertheless, there are some of us whom he did in fact call to such ministry, and I believe that we would do well to reflect on our place in the larger scope of things from time to time. Perhaps this editorial can be of use at least for some of our younger scholars. In this regard I do share Millard Erickson’s concern (expressed in his presidential address in the present volume) that we be of help if we can, and while I am not quite as “chronologically gifted” as he is, please indulge me as I share how I learned to see my scholarly calling in proper perspective.

I spent the summer of 1989 in Hamilton, Ontario. I would get married later that year, and so part of my time was taken up with gearing up for the wedding with my Canadian fiancée. During some of the remaining time I embarked on an independent study in the history of biblical interpretation. One of my professors at Columbia Biblical Seminary, Dr. Paul O. Wright, had, at my request, put together a program of reading that would acquaint me with some of the major contributions and contributors to Old and New Testament scholarship in the last two centuries or so. So I worked my way through Stephen Neill and Tom Wright’s Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 and Werner Kümmel’s The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, plus Ronald Clements’s One Hundred Years of Old Testament Interpretation. As I plowed through these works in the backyard of Elsie Lavary, the elderly lady who had graciously opened her home to this soon-to-be-married scholar-in-the-making, I learned several lessons.

Feeling the weight of history on my shoulders, it dawned on me that the best I could realistically hope for (and probably not even that!) was to appear in a footnote when future histories of biblical scholarship would be written. Now some may say this is entirely the wrong focus-away with such morbid introspection and self-centered navel-gazing! And they would be right to a certain extent. On a grander scale, it has been said that American presidents, for example, are increasingly self-conscious about the way history will remember them, to the extent that they may build their p...

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