Some Good Advice for Young Theologians Too

Here's some advice for young historians from a young historian that I think applies equally to young theologians, bible scholars and ministers. 

When you start out studying history — when you begin as a graduate historian, you are nothing; you are not even the history books you’ve already read, because you’ve probably misunderstood or not appreciated some fundamental aspect of them. You are an infant: the first eighteen or twenty years of your life were spent stumbling, coming to terms with living, with the world and with yourself. By the time you get to my age (23) you’ve had maybe four or five years of actual consciousness, self-awareness and self-understanding. You are now about five years old. Then, and only then, the real work begins.

Sadly, when I graduated from seminary and had reached the ripe old theological age of 5 or 6 I considered myself to be a seasoned veteran and was a regular source of angst for those around me (which is not to say that I am not capable of producing angst for those around me today).  I wish I had heard this advice then, but then again, I wouldn't have listened to them anyway, smart as I was and all. 

But having said that, this historian does give some further advice for how young theologians can use their time during their theological youth.

And the work is: Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof. That is to say, you should be able to look back on it six months for now and not be completely stymied as to why you’ve organized things that way. (The present versions of ourselves are invariably the biggest idiots, and six months will make that clear).

What this all takes is patience — more patience, sometimes, than I am good at. I am impatient to know things, and impatient for things to make sense more quickly; and the discipline (ah, that apt term) just doesn’t work that way. A colleague of mine told me that he’s been Only Collecting for over ten years, and can now knock out a 3000 word paper in under two days, simply because all his material is already at hand; it exists in the stuff he’s picked up in his intellectual infancy and adolescence, which at the time he didn’t know how to use, and perhaps didn’t even know was important.

As theologians and ministers we are collecting more than what we read, we are collecting experiences and conversations and counsel and other things.  The bottom line is that during the time when we are probably the most full of ourselves - those years during and immediately after our studies, the time when we most tend to think we know it all - those are the years we must be ever more devoted to learning.