Everything I Needed to Know (About Research) I Learned in the Seventh Grade

I’ve been grading final papers in my master’s classes. The students were to write a paper on an aspect of Paul’s theology – his understanding of the Torah, his pneumatology (understanding of the Holy Spirit), his hermeneutic (method of interpretation) in interpreting the Old Testament. My current crop of students tends to make the same mistakes students have made in this kind of assignment everywhere I’ve taught; namely, they confuse “research” with “book reporting.”

You see, at a certain level (high school; college, perhaps), it’s okay merely to report what the so-called “experts” or “authorities” or “scholars” have said about a subject, providing the reader with something of a “Reader’s Digest” or “Cliff Notes” version of the scholarly “consensus.” But in graduate school, where students are required to move beyond mere “book reporting” to real “research,” that’s no longer sufficient. At the graduate level, students are expected to sift the evidence themselves; draw their own conclusions; stake out a claim on the subject and climb out there on the branch with the others, as it were. And so, when I get a paper on, say, Paul’s pneumatology, that only catalogs (or worse, counts!) the views of the scholars on the subject as though that “settles it,” their grades suffer accordingly. That’s not “research,” I tell them; that’s merely “book reporting.”

Real research (irrespective of the discipline!) is evidence-based. As such it does three things: (1) it lays bare the evidence, as we now know it; (2) it follows the evidence wherever it leads; (3) it draws whatever conclusions the evidence demands. Period. Anything else is not “research.” I learned that (wait for it!) in the seventh grade at Canal Point Elementary School. That’s right, elementary school. My teacher at the time, Mr. Threlkeld, spent considerable time teaching us this wonderful method for acquiring truth called “the scientific method.” It was he who taught me to begin with the question and the evidence, rather than to “rig the results” by starting with the answer and ignoring the evidence. I cannot tell you how helpful that method has been to me through the years! I do not believe that I could do any serious thinking on any subject without it.

And that’s what I’ve tried to pass along to my students, wherever I’ve taught. I instill in them the fundamental notion that real research always conducts a “conversation” of sorts with the evidence. In the course of the conversation, it’s fine (indeed, even desirable!) to expand the conversation to include others who have looked at the same evidence (the opinions of the so-called “scholars”). But good research methodology always begins with the question, not the answer; with the evidence, not the scholars; with the primary conversation, not the secondary ones. I tell my students: “Until you’ve explored the evidence yourself, it’s best to lock the scholars out in the hall. Don’t let them in yet! If you let them in too soon, they’ll bully you, bias you, bludgeon you into their way of thinking. Begin your conversation with the evidence, not the scholars; and then, after you’ve carried on an extensive conversation with the evidence, it is all right to let in the scholars as ‘conversation partners’ and ‘colleagues’ with you. But do it too early, and you’ll only see what they want you to see!”

Unfortunately, it’s an error that is not confined to biblical studies – starting with the answer rather than the question; citing the opinions of the “scholars” as though that “settles it” without ever having explored the evidence. We’ve witnessed the same phenomenon in the field of the so-called “hard sciences” quite recently in the news surrounding the revelation that some “scientists” may have “doctored the data” on global warming so as to bias the evidence in favor of their preconceived perspective (read “answer”) that global warming is man-made. The case has been made, apparently with evidence, that some scientists (not all!), committed to the “answer” already pre-determined, conspired to drop from their research models any data that did not conform to their desired conclusion. When challenged at this point, their response has been curiously (and disappointingly) un-scientific: Well, even if we did fudge the data, the overwhelming consensus of the “experts” is that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. Well, that surely “settles it,” doesn’t it? We’re asked to trust the “consensus” of the same “experts” who fudged the data to begin with! I learned better than that in the seventh grade! Real research only treats the data as “evidence,” not the opinions of the so-called “experts” who can be, and often have been, quite wrong about their “assured results.”

Is global warming a natural phenomenon or a man-made one? I don’t know, but I do know this: Only the evidence will establish it.

And so, here’s a novel idea! Why don’t we start with the question rather than the answer, look at all the evidence and not just some of it, follow it wherever it leads us (whether it’s where we want to go or not!), and then draw whatever conclusions the evidence demands?

Mr. Threlkeld would be so proud.

What Are the Odds?

The church I currently serve as Intentional Interim Pastor has a Christmas tradition of collecting and filling shoe boxes for the Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child Shoe Box Project. Each family is asked to get a shoe box and fill it with items that children in third-world countries might like to have as Christmas gifts – pen and pad, small toys, scarves for cold winter climes, flashlights, coloring books and crayons, stuff like that. On Christmas Sunday, the altar of the sanctuary will be filled to overflowing with the shoe boxes which will then be transported to Charlotte for eventual distribution to needy children all over the world. Our shoe boxes will join literally millions of others from all over the country prepared and distributed each year through the auspices of Samaritan’s Purse. It’s a good thing, and our church really enjoys it. But I didn’t know how good until I heard Franklin Graham, Executive Director of Samaritan’s Purse, tell this story.

Some years ago, Franklin Graham and his team were in war-torn Bosnia delivering their Samaritan’s Purse shoe boxes to children who had suffered the ravages of war and ethnic cleansing. Almost all of these children had lost someone close to them in the genocide. A woman with Graham’s team was passing out shoe boxes to eager and delighted little children when one little boy approached her. She handed him a shoe box and said: “Merry Christmas; Christ loves you.” The little boy replied: “But I don’t want a shoe box for Christmas; I want parents” (his parents were killed in the ethnic cleansing leaving him orphaned). The woman stammered: “I’m sorry, son; I don’t have any parents to give you for Christmas, but I do have this nice shoe box.” He reluctantly took it and opened it. Inside there was candy, crayons, some toys, a writing tablet, and in the bottom, the photograph of the couple who had prepared and given the shoe box the boy received, a childless couple who had been praying that God would give them a child. They enclosed a picture of themselves and on the back, their address. The boy wrote them to thank them for the shoe box, and they responded. Back and forth the letters went, until finally they decided to travel to Bosnia to meet the little boy. A few months later they adopted him and became his new parents.

What are the odds?

There were literally thousands of shoe boxes stacked up in front of the woman distributing them to a hundred eager outstretched hands. What are the odds that she would pick the one shoe box prepared by a childless couple praying for a child, and give it to the one little boy whose only Christmas wish was for new parents?

What are the odds?

About as much as a virgin having a baby, or a dead man coming back to life again!

A Few Good Men...or Women

A layperson asked me the other day, “Why is Joseph mentioned in Jesus’ genealogy if he’s not really Jesus’ father?” Good question. Matthew 1:16 says: “and Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, the one called Christ” (my translation).

There are probably two reasons really. One is that in ancient times (as today) one’s ancestry was traced through one’s father. We call this one’s “surname” or “family name.” Matthew has already tipped his hand in his opening statement that it is his intention to trace Jesus’ ancestry back to David – “The scroll of the genesis of Jesus Christ, son of David (who was) a son of Abraham” (my translation). Matthew knew that the ancient Jewish tradition was that Messiah would be a descendent of David (see my blog “What a Strange Way to Save the World”). Hence, it was important to trace Jesus’ family heritage back to a “Davidid,” a descendent of David, and Joseph, Jesus’ foster father, was a Davidid.

The other reason is stated in verse 19 – “and Joseph, her (betrothed) husband, being a good man and not wishing to stigmatize her, decided to divorce her quietly” (my translation). In that culture of arranged marriages, betrothal (Hebrew kiddushin) was a legally binding agreement codified with a legal document called a ketubah (marriage contract). And we think prenupts were our idea! And so, when Joseph learned that Mary was pregnant, and that he was not the father, he decided to do the honorable thing and divorce her secretly. How is that “honorable,” you ask? Because the law stated that a woman guilty of such an indiscretion should not be divorced but stoned! (Deut. 22). Joseph’s secret plan to divorce Mary was actually an act of grace, and quite probably, love. He was, you see, a good man. And so, when the angel reveals to him in a dream that Mary had not been unfaithful to him, but that the child in her womb was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Joseph not only “bought it,” he breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Mary and I have decided to move our wedding date up.” He was, you see, a good man.

He was a good man because when the crisis came, he didn’t do the expedient thing or the popular thing or the politically correct thing or even the prudent thing; he did the right thing. He did it because he was a good man and that’s what good men do – the right thing. That’s what makes a man “good,” finally; when the chips are down, he does the right thing. It's not about being "the life of the party," or having a good personality or being affable or popular or well-liked. It's not about being someone who works and plays well with others. It's not even about being polite or gentlemanly or kind. It's about doing the right thing - period. Let’s be clear about that. If being a “good man” doesn’t mean that we do the right thing, then the word means nothing. I sometimes hear people express astonishment when someone they knew and trusted and believed in betrayed their trust and did the dishonorable thing, the wrong thing, the bad thing, the evil thing. They say: “I just don’t understand it. He’s such a good man.” Apparently not.

It would have been so easy for Joseph to cut his losses, wash his hands of the whole “affair,” so to speak. But he didn’t. He did the right thing, the honorable thing, the good thing, because Joseph, you see, was a good man.

That’s all, it seems, God ever needs to get things going in the right direction in our world – a few good men or women who are willing to do the right thing – not the popular thing or the expedient thing or the politically correct thing or the profitable thing – but the right thing, because they’re good men and women.

All it takes for God to change the world is a few good men or women. And when He does, can Christmas – Emmanuel, “God With Us” – be far behind?

Marking Time

What time is it? we sometimes ask. The question is asked as though there were a standard, uniform reply expected. But if you’ve traveled very much in the world, you know that there’s not. In most places outside the USA, time is told according to a 24-hour clock. “It’s 14:21,” you’re likely to be told anywhere in the world but here. Here we say, “It’s 2:21 p.m.”

The same is true when you ask the question in the larger sense, not clock-time, but calendar-time. Not everyone’s calendar begins in January and ends in December. Know anyone who celebrates the Chinese New Year or Rosh Ha’Shana? We don’t all “mark time” the same way, do we?

Ask a Christian that question and if s/he knows “what time it is” (alas, not all do, but that's another blog), you’ll not get “clock-time” or “calendar-time;” you’ll get “Gospel-time.” Since the earliest church, Christians believed that, with the coming of Jesus Christ into the world, time as we had known it had come to an end. A new world called “the Kingdom of God” had broken in and broken through signaling the “beginning of the End.” The word Christians gave to that “coming” was Advent, Latin for the “coming” of Christ into the world as Bethlehem’s Babe, effectively bringing an end to the world as it had been.

But the birth of Christ was just the beginning of the End, not the end of the End. The end of the End will take place, Christians believe, at Christ’s Second Advent, or “Second Coming,” as it is sometimes called.

And so we live between the Coming of Christ and the Coming of Christ. And in between we live as though the End has already happened, at least the beginning of the End. That’s how Christians “tell time.” Each year in the church we “mark time” by remembering Christ’s first Advent and hoping for and anticipating His Second Advent. That’s why in the church the new year starts not on January 1, but on the first Sunday of Advent. It’s our way of reminding ourselves, and announcing to the world, that that’s how we Christians “mark time.”

Haunted by Hesed (2 Sam. 9:1-7)

If I were to ask you to tell me a story of “friends,” what story would you tell? Shakespeare told the story of Hamlet and Horatio. Never was there a truer friend than was Hamlet to Horatio and Horatio to Hamlet. “My good friend, Horatio,” Hamlet called him. “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince/ and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Horatio said that; he was talking about Hamlet. Hamlet and Horatio were friends. And when his friend, Hamlet, lay dying in his arms, victim of the villainous treachery of his step-father’s vile plot to poison his step-son and rival, Horatio contemplates suicide as a sympathetic act of “friendship” for his friend, Hamlet. But Hamlet stops him and says: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart/ Absent thee from felicity a while/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/ To tell my story.” And so, says Shakespeare, the only reason you know the tragic tale of Prince Hamlet is because his friend, Horatio, lived that day to tell his story.

“Tell me a story of ‘friends,’” says Shakespeare, “and I’ll tell you the story of Hamlet and Horatio.”

When the Bible tells a story about friends, it tells the story of David and Jonathan. David, the shepherd boy, had won a favored place in the court of King Saul with his much heralded victory over the Philistine giant Goliath and for his bravery and courage in the Philistine wars. Soon after he was brought to Saul’s court, a deep, abiding friendship began to develop between Saul’s son, Jonathan, and the “stripling” David. The Bible says “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” Like boys will do, Jonathan and David made a pact with each other to become “blood brothers,” we used to call it. “Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.”

But when David’s military prowess began to outstrip even Saul’s (“Saul killed his thousands, David his ten thousands”), Saul began to be fearful that David’s popularity was becoming a threat; and so the King’s admiration for this precocious lieutenant gave way to jealousy and then to rage and finally to murderous obsession. On more than one occasion Jonathan interposed himself between his mad father’s jealous rage and David, constantly speaking to Saul in David’s behalf, commending him to the King as a loyal and faithful servant. But Saul would have none of it. And when crazy old Saul called Jonathan and his servants together and told them to hunt David down and kill him, Jonathan, risking his father’s ire, warned David and hid him out until he could escape Saul’s wrath, saving him from certain death. And even though David succeeded Saul as king and ruthlessly obliterated every potential rival to his throne from the house of Saul, he was nonetheless haunted by the memory of his friend, Jonathan, and the grace he had shown him long ago.

So powerful was that memory, so haunting that grace, that the opening scene in the official court history of David’s monarchy begins with a picture of the King poignantly crying from his throne: “Is there anyone left of the house of Saul to whom I might show kindness for Jonathan’s sake?” That word translated “kindness” is hesed in the Hebrew. It’s the biggest little word in the Hebrew Bible. It’s been translated “loving kindness,” “covenant faithfulness,” “steadfast love,” “kindness,” as in this text. But the best way to render it, I think, is grace. “Is there anybody left in Saul’s house to whom I might show grace for Jonathan’s sake?”

He’s haunted by hesed, gripped by the grace of a friend in whose debt he stands. Three times in this text the word hesed is used. David knew that he hadn’t made it to his present position without the love, trust, loyalty, support, belief, and faith of his friend Jonathan. And so haunted by hesed, driven to gratitude by the memory of grace, he lavishes “kindness” upon his late friend’s crippled son, Mephibosheth, for Jonathan’s sake.

Is there anyone who doesn’t know how David feels? Haunted by hesed,graced in a thousand selfless ways by persons whom we know not what to call save “friend,” who believed in us and trusted us and stood by us when they need not have done so, but did so because they were our friends!

I’m haunted.

I lost a dear, dear friend recently. Dr. George L. Balentine, “Dr. George” as he was lovingly called, was not just my friend, he was my teacher. It was he who taught me to love the Scripture, the Word of God. He taught me that, as a Christian, you really can’t talk much about what Jesus would do until you know what Jesus actually said, and there is only one place where you can discover that – the Scripture. He opened up the Word of God to me and taught me to listen for that Voice that echoes through its pages.

He was my first Greek teacher. I took every Greek course he offered, and some he didn’t! When I had taken every course the college offered, he and I cobbled out our own – he had me translate over the summer of 1973 Allen Wikgren’s Hellenistic Greek Texts. I still have the syllabus. I read Philo, Josephus, Xenophon, The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, Plutarch, and the Greek Magical Papyri. I met each week with him in his office and we’d open the text and I’d read it in Greek and translate it for him. I fell in love with Greek – classical Greek, hellenistic Greek, modern Greek. I read everything in Greek I could find! When I went to Southern Seminary in the 70’s I had had so much Greek that there was no Greek there I could take, so I taught it! But he made it clear to me that he wasn’t interested in Greek for Greek’s sake. He wanted to hear the Voice echoed through the biblical author’s writings without its being garbled in translation. He wanted to talk to Paul, not with someone who was talking with Paul. So he mastered Greek so that he could eliminate the middle man.

I still remember his standing in his NT Greek classes and holding up the Greek NT and saying: “Gentlemen, this is the New Testament. If you don’t read this, you don’t read the New Testament!” Though he was a patient and caring teacher, he was demanding as well. He told us that he had reduced the Greek grammar that must be memorized to an irreducible minimum but that the verb and noun endings simply must be mastered. And he said: “Now Gentlemen, if you don’t learn your Greek endings, not even the grace of God will save you on test day!” Under his influence, I threw away my English translations and read only the Greek New Testament.

He had been in and out of my life for nearly 40 years. He was my teacher in college; he married Cheryl and me 39 years ago; he preached my installation when I was installed as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Raleigh. During that sermon, he noted that he had been my first New Testament professor in college; that he had performed the wedding for my wife and me; and that he had recommended me to the Search Committee at First Church Raleigh. Then he quipped, “Everything he knows; everything he is; everything he has he owes to me!” Everybody laughed. I didn’t. In ways not even George fully knew, he was right. His name is on my college diploma, my marriage license, and my life.

George developed an inoperable brain tumor and died within about three years of the diagnosis. At the time, I happened to be living only a few hours away. Cheryl and I sometimes wonder if God, in his providence, did not place us near George and Sue at that particular time in their life and ours so that when they needed us, we could be there for them. We spent as much time as we could with them during his final days. I watched him slip away from me, and it was more painful than you can imagine. But George had always been there for me. Now it was my turn to be there for him.

When he died, this loving pastor, erudite professor, warm and caring husband and father, I lost the best and most consistent friend I ever had. On the night before he died, he and his childhood sweetheart and devoted wife, who followed him to the grave one month to the day after he died, lay in beds side by side at an area hospice. They pushed their beds together so that they could hold hands one last time during that last, long cold night. He told her that he wasn’t afraid to die, that he really believed all that stuff he’d preached and taught all those years.

And as he drifted off into the sleep of the saints, he whispered to those who stood guard over God’s sheep, “I hear a Voice…calling my name.”

When I was in college, I graded for George one semester when he was overwhelmed with his work as Dean. In gratitude, he gave me a copy of the definitive Greek-English Lexicon, much, much too expensive a book for a struggling college student to afford. And in the front of the book, he inscribed these words, in Greek, of course: “…a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Those words haunt me to this day!

Ever been “haunted by the grace of God?” Is there someone who was/is to you the very presence of Christ…someone whose name is indelibly inscribed in your heart and on your life? Someone who haunts you with hesed?

In the Church, we have our own name for Thanksgiving; it’s called “Eucharist,” Greek for “thank you.” Why not use this Thanksgiving to “do a David” and say “thank you” to someone whose hesed haunts you, whose integrity inspires you, and whose grace grips you in its grasp and won’t let you go. Hurry…while you still can!