Editor’s Reflections -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 26:3 (Summer 2012)
Article: Editor’s Reflections
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Reflections

William David Spencer

“Skip a meal, if you must, but buy this book!” That was the professorial exhortation eager students would take to heart when I was in seminary. In those days before personal computers and the various BibleWorks-type programs, the most precious of such must-buy books were the reference books.

Many days we would go to the reference section of the bookstore and thumb longingly through various volumes, clutching the little money we were earning as student assistant ministers in various churches, storing it up for that great sacred event—in my young mind approaching something like the stirring of the waters of the pool at Bethesda (John 5:7)—that rare, unpredictable, wonderful phenomenon: the bookstore clearance sale day.

On end-of-the-semester sale days, as soon as the door opened, everybody would scurry to the shelves or to the long table set out in the center of the little seminary bookstore, jostling each other as we hunted for the books we thought would be most helpful in what we imagined would be our future ministries. This being New Jersey, some of the competition could get pretty stiff. One assistant professor, I recall, tried to wheedle a copy of German Lutheran pastor and psychologist Kurt Koch’s Christian Counseling and Occultism out of a student who got to it first. As I remember, his plea was that he would have a wider use for it than the student would, but the look on the student’s face and the death grip he had on the book suggested it was time for this hapless young prof to ask the publisher for a desk copy.

The fact is, when, for the better part of a semester, one has been eyeing the lone copy of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church in its old lovely light green wrapper, and in an instant someone else makes it to the shelf a hair’s breadth earlier and buys it out from under one, even the most saintly can turn surly.

For me, as a New Testament major in the Greek and Hebrew language tracks, the crowning moment came when A. T. Robertson’s classic A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research—all one thousand, four hundred and fifty four pages (stuffed with insights), which had been marked at a hefty $25, was suddenly slashed to $19.55—an unheard-of 20 percent discount! Two copies had been on the shelf. One was left. I dove on it like a tackle at the Super Bowl. I doubt if the president of the seminary could have talked me out of it had he been there. To me, it was like finding the key to the Scripture itself. Sure, I knew I would not be able to understand most of it at that point in my fledgling studies, but I also knew I would keep learning, and bit b...

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