What is scholarship?
The Moore College library is a wonderful place to get some serious reading, thinking and writing done. It's also a great place to be distracted by far too many interesting books.
Just the other day I took John Piper's What Jesus demands from the world down from the shelf and, while browsing his excellent introduction and ‘word to biblical scholars’, came across these words from Adolf Schlatter:
I keep myself as free as possible from conjectures and avoid therefore the effort to overturn them. This does not seem like a fruitful business to me. For conjectures are not overturned by producing more of the same. They sink away when one sees that observation is more fruitful than conjecture ... I call Wissenschaft [scholarship] the observation of what exists, not the attempt to imagine what is not visible. Perhaps one will object that the guesswork of conjecture excites and entertains while observation is hard and difficult work. But the Gospel is misunderstood when one makes a plaything out of it.
This, it seems to me, summarizes not only the scholar's task, but the task of all teachers and preachers, and the task of all Christians. The task is to observe what is in the word of God, to act upon it, and to tell others about it.
Observation is hard and demanding work. It is much easier to preach and act upon what you think is the case or should be the case or must be the case, rather than what is the case when we closely attend to what the real existent word of God says.
The Word is not our plaything to conjecture with. It is reality that exists. Our job is to observe and proclaim and obey what exists.