Taught to quote great men. Never asked to read God first.
Last night got me pretty upset.
I was helping my daughter with homework. Freshman. Christianity class. Big Christian university, fully accredited. Second assignment I've helped with. Same pattern as the first.
Topic: the Trinity. Sources: Augustine. Aquinas. Calvin. A handout. Quote them, weigh them, write it up with reference notes.
So I'm reading it and asking myself, where's the text?
It's there. Sort of. Proof texts. Little verses holding up big names. None of it in context.
Think about what that does. Nobody asked her what Genesis says. They asked her what she thinks of what Augustine thinks. That's two steps away from God before she writes a word.
Conclusion first. Great men second. Scripture last, as decoration.
Then one question frames her own beliefs. I tell her, that's not what Scripture says. Write it down. Be brave.
She got uneasy. That bothered me more than the assignment. A Christian kid at a Christian school, nervous about putting her own study on the page.
So I say, if your professor asks, tell her your dad's teaching you to be a Berean.
She says, Dad. The professor doesn't read these. A computer grades them.
Huh.
The Bereans searched the Scriptures to see if it was so. My kid gets scanned to see if she matches.
Here's the part that doesn't sit right. This is the good version. College at least does the digging for you. Seminary's worse. Even where they teach Hebrew and Greek, you dig inside a denominational fence. When the text and the statement of faith disagree, guess which one wins.
Am I biased? A hundred percent. Not sola scriptura polished by men. Read it like a Jew.
Follow it all the way down. Classroom. Seminary. Pew. One guy talking. Nobody engaging. That's where the whole thing lands.
On purpose? I don't know. Doesn't matter. Nobody has to plan it.
I keep landing back at Sinai. We're all men. God is God. And we're still telling Moses, you talk to us, don't let God talk to us. The middleman just brings a handout now.
Systems protect themselves. Always have. Read John 11. Watch a council do the math on one man.
That's why the elite wanted Jesus dead. Pharisees, Sadducees, didn't matter. He taught people to think past the system.
Same thing with Tyndale. Strangled and burned for giving the plowboy a Bible he could read himself. Same thing with Bonhoeffer. Hanged while the official church fell in line.
And Jesus laid his life down anyway. For men who had no idea what they were doing. Ultimate forgiveness.
So here's what really bothers me. It's not that people believe the wrong things. It's that they've been trained to submit to logic. Not to think on their own.
That's what kept me up last night.
