Don't Get Too Attached to Any One Scholar

Most anyone who has read my articles or blog posts for any length of time knows that I really like William Lane Craig. In point of fact, one of my projects this summer has been to read the extremely expensive scholarly works of Craig, that virtually no one I know has ever read. I do this via inter-library loan (hooray!), and I’ve read Time and the Metaphysics of Relativity (where Craig shows that the Einsteinian interpretation of spacetime and Special Relativity is fundamentally predicated on old-line verificationism, which has long since been shown to be incoherent), and I’m in the process of reading The Tensed Theory of Time, which will be followed by his The Tenseless Theory of Time. Craig has been a huge influence on my philosophical and apologetic thinking. I’m a Molinist, for crying out loud! Aside from my initial interaction with apologetics through Ravi Zacharias, he was the first apologist I read that dealt with the classical arguments for God’s existence.

All that said, I have to follow my own advice here: don’t get too attached to any one scholar. Why? Well, first, it’s not helpful to have a myopic view of any one man who isn’t the one and only Jesus Christ. As an example, I once checked out a school who was absolutely in love with a particular scholar (this fact was unbeknownst to me at the time). Although it wasn’t a policy or anything, every person I spoke with independently told me I should really read and absorb absolutely everything said by this one guy, and he was the greatest, and theology without this guy was pretty bad off, and so on. I’m not saying all this to insult the school (that’s why I’ve tried to give no dead give-away details); I’m just saying such a view of a finite person gives blind loyalty to someone for whom it is not due.

Second, even if you can overcome the first problem, having myopia with respect to a scholar can blind you to theological/philosophical insights from those whom you would not normally (or maybe ever) read. This is huge: why cut yourself off from insights into the truth? I used to preface nearly every quotation of a scholar with something like, “Now, I don’t necessarily agree with everything so-and-so says,” because I felt like if I quoted from someone, it implied I agreed with all sorts of things. Why would I think a thing like that? You don’t have to agree with everything (or even most things) in order to learn from someone.

So what should we do about it? We should seek to apply sound biblical, theological, and philosophical principles to people around us—especially other Christians. This will help us get at the truth—truth we may not ever have realized had we been so myopic. No, I am not saying you should wholesale agree with all sorts of things. And I do recognize that, occasionally, actually often, there are many sources that would have very little to say that could help you biblically, theologically, or philosophically. My major thrust is not for you to learn from every man, but rather for you to learn from more that one man, or more than one type of man.