Email Afterlife . . . The Importance of Study

When checking my email, I sometimes get a report from my ISP that they’ve sent a suspicious incoming piece to the email equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. I’m then directed to go to said place, where I can look at it and give it either an “Okay” or a one-way ticket to email H-E-Double Hockey Stick.

However, not being God and all, it’s sometimes not easy to get to the spot where I can take a look at the red-flagged mail.

More recently, I’ve been told that some of said mail may actually be something other than a Viagra sales pitch from India.

Now, it might very well be that some of you have sent me an email that I have not seen. If that’s the case, the reason your email did not go straight to Frankly-Speaking Heaven, or Paradise, or wherever good email should go (i.e, my inbox) is, ironically, and for reasons explained above, out of my hands.

So, if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t written back (1) I’m sorry about that, (2) it’s (probably) not my fault, and (3) please try again.

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My current read is Alister McGrath’s book In the Beginning, subtitled, The Story of the King James Bible and how it Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001).

McGrath teaches Theology at Oxford and has been writing books in that discipline for many years. Until last week, I’d not read any of his stuff. But now I’m planning to read more from him. He’s a superlative researcher and a good writer too.

Besides teaching and entertaining, there’s something else this book has done for me. It’s revived my confidence in the vitality of scholarship.

Anyone who spends much time hanging around in Western culture these days knows that it contains a strong anti-intellectual current. This evidently goes way back. I remember something that Tom Jefferson wrote to the effect that, if you put a problem to a plowman and a professor, the plowman is more likely to figure it out because he is not bound by “artificial rules” (I think was the expression).

Ever since then, and probably before, one of the most common stock characters in American stories is the rustic who, with simple wisdom, expresses what the scholar, blinded by his “superior” knowledge, cannot see. From “Where’s the beef?” to the Carl character in the movie “Sling Blade,” it seems that we’re surrounded by simpletons who are capable of seeing the truth and saving the day, provided that all the eggheads stop droning long enough to listen.

Now, I’d be the last to say that wise words never come from the mouths of babes. But it seems the observation has gone to seed. Ignoring the truth that even a dead clock tells the right time twice a day, American culture seems persuaded that dumber is not only easier, it‘s better! And besides, who wants to be that other stock character of American myth: the “educated idiot”?

A caveat: I’ve noticed that all such prejudice against expertise fades away once the chips are down and a genuine expert is required. Ask, for example, a well-trained locksmith who’s opened a car with an infant inside on a hot summer day.

To the McGrath book:

“The opening of the third chapter of Matthew’s gospel tells of how John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, and proclaimed the need for repentance on the part of his audiences. The Vulgate [Jerome’s translation of the Bible into common Latin, FB] offers the following account of the ministry of John (Matthew 3:1-2):

In those days, John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying: ‘Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’

Few of the late medieval readers of this text could miss the implications of what was being said, given the highly developed theory and practice of penance of the ear. John seemed to be demanding that they ‘do penance’—that is to say, to find a priest, confess their sins, and carry out any acts of penance this priest might require of them. The Vulgate version of the passage suggested that John’s words were firmly connected to the penitential system of the Church, so that this network of penitence was sanctioned by Holy Writ.”

McGrath goes on to explain how, in the Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) discovered that the Greek original of the passage didn’t have John saying “Do penance,” but rather “Repent!” The prophet was demanding an inward change of mind and heart, which would certainly lead to a changed way of life. But “Do penance”? The biblical text nowhere suggests that anyone do that. But if it weren’t for scholarship, such common knowledge would not be known.

No, not every insight is so revolutionary. But unless people dig, nothing ever gets discovered. What would we be missing without scholarship? We wouldn’t know. I’m glad we do. Study on.