Spiritual growth and continuous work to achieve this growth are among the expectations that God places upon Christian believers. The ultimate goal of spiritual formation is to become closer to God in order to discern, understand, and realize His purpose for oneself while staying true to the teachings of the Bible. Being a moral, ethical religion at heart, Christianity does not offer an easy and straightforward way to spiritual formation.
A believer does not achieve spiritual enlightenment through mere external manifestations of faith by completing rituals and uttering prayers. On the contrary, the spiritual formation of a Christian often demands hard and determined intellectual work in order to not merely follow the pre-set forms of worship but to become closer to understanding God. This course has aided my spiritual formation and hopefully improved my ability to approach learning as a necessary component of faith that makes one closer to God’s truth. In particular, the course repeatedly highlighted how faith may motivate learning and how learning about the Bible textually and interpretatively may bring one closer to understanding and experiencing God and His presence.
Faith as Motivation for Learning
One way in which this course has aided my spiritual formation so far is by stressing the importance of faith as a motivation for learning. The Scripture says: “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). When I think of these lines as applied to me, I do not interpret them at face value – that is, thinking that God inspires primordial dread, forcing people to learn under the pain of severe punishment.
Rather, this course has aided me in viewing the reverence of the Lord as the “first and controlling principle of wisdom.”1 Since God is the creator of the reality that surrounds us, reverence before His creative power that achieved it is a powerful motivation for learning. Interestingly, even secular philosophers recognize the motivational power of faith as a fundamentally positive force for learning, recognizing the immense “motivating and inspirational power” that faith can bring to the study of many disciplines.2 I already knew about the motivational power of faith before taking this course, but it helped me understand better how it may become a strong foundation for learning specifically.
Methodology of Combining Faith and Learning
Motivation is one thing, but the methodology is just as important. For my part, this course helped me understand that studying theology is not about acquiring God’s truth immediately in its totality but about gradually becoming closer to understanding divine will and intent. Historical study of the past, including biblical past, has moved from one extreme to another. A positivist approach claims that scientific methodology allows true-to-fact, objective and exhaustive knowledge of the past, while postmodernist thought posits that “history writing as such is… impossible” because of its absolute subjectivity.3
The course has told me that a proper approach to the study of the biblical past is neither – rather, it is gradually achieving a better understanding of the past without claims of absolute objective knowledge. While it might be tempting to view theology as a “black-and-white discipline” with definite answers to every ontological, epistemological, and ethical inquiry, that would be an immense oversimplification.4 It would be far too presumptuous to claim the objective understanding of God’s design in all its complexity – but this is not the reason to forego learning as a way to understand it better.
Combining Learning and Faith to Recognize God’s Presence
Apart from the things listed above, this course has also strengthened my understanding of learning not merely as a supplement to faith but as an important part of it. Learning about God is not just “learning about him cognitively as an object of exegetical inquiry” – in the sense of the original Hebrew text, it means experiencing him intimately and interpersonally.5 A person willing to learn but with no faith will likely found him- or herself among those who are “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). On the other hand, those who have technically embraced faith but applied no intellectual effort to it risk repeating the situation of the Israelites in Sinai, who, despite their once-proclaimed devotion, have “not yet learned of his great character” and, thus, could not enter the Promised Land.6
Recognizing the presence of God requires both faith and intellectual preparedness, and lacking in either may leave the person incapable of experiencing the Lord. This strengthened understanding of the mutual necessity of faith and learning in becoming closer to God is a crucial result of this course for me.
Recognizing Subtleties of the Bible
Finally, the course has also impacted my spiritual formation by making me more aware of the necessity to trace subtleties in the Bible. To say that the Scripture is nuanced and subtle, employing “an array of… indirect means in developing the narrative” would largely be a truism.7
The subtleties of the original Hebrew text are well-known and mentioned particularly often in the context of translation.8 Yet what I learned is that no detail is accidental, and they all serve an eventual narrative purpose. For example, one may read that Ruth worked in Boaz’s field “until the barley and wheat harvests were finished” (Ruth 2:23). One may easily neglect the “barley and wheat” part, but it is important because two months pass from the beginning of the barley harvesting season to the end of the wheat harvesting season. This small passage highlights Ruth’s virtue – she worked for Boaz for months yet remained modest and did not pursue a relationship with him for her own sake. The importance of reading the Bible inquisitively is one of the essential things for my spiritual formation that this course helped me to learn.
Conclusion
To summarize, the course has aided my spiritual formation in more than one sense, and most of these influences were related to the importance of combining faith and learning in one’s lifestyle. To begin with, I have reinforced my understanding that faith can be a powerful and crucial motivation for learning and also came to know that even secular scholars recognize it as such. Apart from that, the course has also aided me in understanding the methodology of learning about the Bible. Instead of pursuing positivist objectivism of postmodernist nihilism, theological learning focuses on gradually becoming closer to the truth, just as faith focuses on gradually becoming closer to God.
One more significant impact on my spiritual formation was a strengthened understanding of how both learning and faith are crucial for a Christian. The lack of each may leave one unprepared to recognize the presence of God, meaning the two must function in accord within a person’s lifestyle. Finally, I have also learned of the necessity of reading and re-reading the Scripture inquisitively, as the seemingly little details an immense amount of meaning to the text.
Bibliography
Alter, Robert. The Art of Bible Translation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019.
Arnold, Bill T., and Brian E. Beyer. Encountering the Old Testament: A Christian Survey, 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015.
Cook, Maeve. “The Limits of Learning: Habermas’ Social Theory and Religion.” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2016): 694-711.
Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. A Biblical History of Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
Wilson, Marvin R. Exploring Our Hebraic Heritage: A Christian Theology of Roots and Renewal. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014.
Footnotes
- Bill T. Arnold and Brian E. Beyer, Encountering the Old Testament; A Christian Survey, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 295.
- Maeve Cook, “The Limits of Learning: Habermas’ Social Theory and Religion,” European Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 3 (2016): 695.
- Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press: 2003), 44.
- Marvin R. Wilson, Exploring Our Hebraic Heritage: A Christian Theology of Roots and Renewal (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2014 ), 3.
- Ibid., 119.
- Arnold and Beyer, The Old Testament, 87.
- Provan, Long, and Longman, Biblical History, 92.
- Robert Alter, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019), 44.