Some Christians tend to be suspicious about scholarship and distrust what they disparage as "book learning". Real religion comes from the heart, they say. The more books you read the more likely you are to fall into error. Just stick to the Bible, it's all you need.
This is a sad limitation to put on the grace of God, who gives insight and wisdom to scholars through the books they read and the conversations they share. Study enriches the whole Church. A pastor who doesn't read widely when the opportunity to do so is there will probably preach dull and uniformed sermons – and wide reading includes things you don't agree with as well as things you do.
But learning isn't a substitute for faith, though it can enrich it immeasurably. Sooner or later, even the wisest scholar has to answer the question: what does Christ mean to me?
Here are three scholars who did that and expressed their deep faith in God.
1. Blaise Pascal
Pascal was a 17th-century French scholar. He had an amazing mind: he was a mathematician, a physicist, an inventor and a brilliant writer. Religiously, he was nothing in particular until he had a strange, mystical experience when he was 31 years old. He died only eight years later, having never told anyone about it, but on the night it happened he wrote it down and sewed it into the lining of his coat. His servant found it after his death. He wrote: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars... Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God...Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy...This is life eternal that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."
It's as though having spent his life among the philosophers and scholars, he'd suddenly been given a vision that made all of those arguments, all the books and letters and degrees and papers seem trivial.
2. Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas was an Italian who lived in the 13th century. He was one of the greatest theologians and philosophers the Church ever produced. Philosophers still use his work as a building block today. He taught at universities in Cologne and Paris; he was a special adviser to to the pope, he wrote dozens of books and engaged in tremendous academic battles with other scholars.
After a long, glittering career, he suddenly stopped. When his secretary urged him to continue, he said: "The end of my labours has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me." He said: "I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw."
It's said he had a vision in which Christ spoke to him and said, "You have written well of me, Thomas." But his writing became trivial to him compared to the revelation of God he'd received.
3. Karl Barth
Barth is a modern theologian who died in 1968. He's often regarded as the greatest theologian of the 20th century. He wrote and spoke courageously against the Nazis. Barth wrote dozens of books and millions of words. He became rather famous and was pictured on the front of Time magazine. People flocked to his lectures. Towards the end of his life, someone asked him after a lecture if he could summarize his whole life's work in one sentence. He said, "Yes, I can. In the words of a song my mother taught me: "Jesus loves me, this I know/ For the Bible tells me so."
These three men were all great scholars. But they found their way to the heart of faith, which is belief and trust in a risen Saviour.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
