Shrinking My World

Reading less to learn more

My friend, Paul, was transitioning out of the military and had moved his family eight hours away. While he was waiting to be discharged my wife and I let him stay down in the basement of our home.

Often, we couldn’t find time to bump into each other, but one morning we lucked out and had an hour to chat. At the time I was taking a class on the Epistle of Romans. I’d read a book on Romans, read Romans probably thirty times, and had written ten papers on the epistle; Paul, as a rule, did not read any books other than the Bible and only listened to sermons. That doesn’t do justice to what Paul was doing, as he was (at that point) reading his bible around four hours a day and had been doing so for years.

Paul asked me how my study of Romans was going and I began to talk about a very particular problem in the book I was learning about. It was a very particular issue scholars were split on. As I was just about to explain the problem, Paul interrupted me and framed the entire problem. Shocked, as I asked him what he thought of it and he gave me a five-minute-deep dive into his thought process on it. I was shocked. This scene played in my head for year. How had he done it? Was he just a genius? But after thinking of it for a few years I realized something.

Paul was a fool.

As a rule, he said he never read anything but the bible, but Paul was fooling himself. By consuming the insane number of sermons he was listening to, Paul had listened to many books on Romans in summary form. He’d gleaned the lessons these books had to offer, but did it through an oral mode instead of the written mode. By avoiding books, however, he’d gotten the idea that going to these resources was somehow hindering Christians and that all they needed was their bible and prayer. Though he was fooling himself, something in what he was saying made sense. The more I thought of it, the more I decided:

Paul was also a genius.

What Paul had done, unknowingly, was unlock the same type of learning that the greatest thinkers in the world had used. Paul limited the number of teachers he’d learn from to only a few. He consumed every sermon they ever had, often multiple times, all while reading his bible and praying through the ideas they had to offer. By listening to a few solid teachers, he’d skipped all of the wasted time those teachers spent reading bad theological concepts and went straight to the gold. I started noticing this pattern everywhere.

Plato sat at the feet of Socrates and dedicated himself to his teachings, afterward imposing his own ideas onto the framework Socrates gave him. Aristotle sat at the feet of Plato and dedicated himself to his teachings, afterward imposing his own ideas on the framework Plato gave him. Augustine was heavily influenced by Ambrose; Aquinas was heavily influenced by Abelard, Aristotle, and Augustine; my friend Phil Fernandes was heavily influenced by Norman Geisler; Peter Leithart was heavily influenced by James Jordan.

By sitting at the feet of their masters, none of these pupils became malformed and deficient clones—but where some of the most creative and deepest thinkers I’d heard of or met. What they did was the same thing my friend Paul had done by accident. They’d found a guy who was giving out the gold and took all the gold from that person to build a foundation of knowledge. “There are books everywhere and only a few are necessary,” says Sertillanges—so true, and the way we find the necessary books in the ocean of mediocrity is the pupil and master model.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a master. There are a few friends I have that are extremely well read, but our temperaments don’t align for the master/pupil relationship. I’ve looked all over and never found a fit. But that doesn’t mean I can’t use this model, it just means I need to dedicate myself to masters who aren’t physically with me.

My masters are James Jordan, Peter Leithart, Norman Geisler, Tim Mackie and Michael Heisler.

James Jordan and Peter Leithart are flexible, biblical thinkers who think a lot about the practices of the local church, something I think is seriously lacking in modern evangelicalism. Their creativity and depth of thought is astounding and, even if I don’t agree with their conclusions, I’m blown away every single time I read anything from these two. What’s more is that the more I listen and take on what they have to say, the more encouraging and penetrating my theological conversations become. That’s something I want to build a foundation on.

Norman Geisler was a rare breed: biblically conservative, philosophically sophisticated, and theologically creative. He does not think the same way as James Jordan or Peter Leithart and holds a lot of contrary views compared to them. This offers a really good balance to the equation. What makes Geisler great, as well, is that he is a Thomist. I really respect Thomas Aquinas and love reading his Summa, but often am confused on how to adapt that to my staunch Protestantism/Evangelicalism. He’s the key to building that framework. Thomism is important to me because so much of reformed/creedal theology is based on the framework of Thomism. By having a solid understanding of it I get a key to understanding a lot of the reformed creeds, which is something I want to move more towards.

Tim Mackie runs the Bible Project. What’s great about him is the thematic work he has done with his podcast. The videos are nice, but each video, which may be about ten minutes on a particular biblical theme, is usually backed by 10-20 hours of discussion about the research he has done on the topic. These podcasts are great because they give me thematic ways through the bible and offer a lot of suggestions for scholarly resources I would never think to look for. I’d like to have these ideas in my mind, rattling around with everyone else’s ideas.

Micheal Heisler was an Old Testament scholar who held a lot of theological views that went against the Evangelical norm. His depth of scholarly learning allowed for him to have an extremely creative theological outlook which added onto orthodox thinking. His views on biblical theology contrasted with the biblical theology of Jordan and Leithart are going to make for many, many hours of serious contemplation on my part. He was on the cutting edge of scholarship and has so much to offer, even though he’s been gone for a few years now.

What these people have in common is the amount of material they put out (and are still putting out). No where have I seen such high-quality output in such monstrous amounts. They cover a lot of the same things, biblically, but cover them from different perspectives. Jordan and Leithart, for example, have 78 hours of podcast material out on Genesis alone—not to mention the numerous books and articles they’ve put out. All the other authors have put out similar levels of content.