HQ

One of my teachers at school used to joke about slow students. "You're going to be here with a white beard one day" he'd say. I don't quite have a white beard yet but I am certainly not done in the classroom. Learning, once you catch the bug, is pretty hard to stop doing. We are all life-longer learners. In fact, the longer we think of ourselves as learners, the better. I'd rather be still asking difficult questions when I finally get a white beard than think I know it all already. If you want to keep learning here are some tips: Read something you don't understand. This sounds nuts, but I live by this. If I read  only the things that I understand or that are only slightly above my head I won't learn much. So I try to read ambitiously. If I don't get it, I read it all. Then I read something related to it and read it again. Some day I either move on or, on those days when study seems glorious, I get it. There is nothing quite like  getting it. ...

How much better it is to get wisdom than gold! And to get understanding is to be chosen above silver  (Proverbs 16:16) Most attempts to reconcile faith and scholarship are in terms of personal faith and the task of scholarship: how do I, as a Christian and a scholar, integrate what my faith with my academic task? While this is a worthy question, there is a more fundamental question that should precede it. To see this consider what we mean by "faith." There are at least two ways of taking the term.  [1] In a subjective sense faith means the believer’s trust in God and his word. However, Jude uses the term “faith” to denote the content of Christian belief (Jude 1:3). [2] In other words, what we Christians consider to be true. If we take faith-scholarship integration to be a question of how we relate the content of the Christian faith and the task of scholarship we are left we a slightly different, but more fundamental question: If the Christian faith is true what a...

Just how do faith and academic studies relate? More particularly, how should students relate their beliefs to their studies? Before we examine the relationship between faith and study we should figure out what we mean by faith and study. Faith, simply put, is as a set of beliefs. A Christian believes, for example, that Jesus Christ is God. She does this not because she can see God in Christ through her eyes or logically deduce that the man Jesus is necessarily God, but by  believing  Christ's and the apostles claims. She might also say that God, the Holy Spirit affirms the truth of scripture to her. Faith, then, in basic terms, is a set of basic commitments, assumptions that have come to be believed in some manner that relies on God's revealing of them and the Christian's trust in God. Let us also say that this kind of faith is Biblical faith in that this kind of faith believes the content of scripture to be the revealed words of God ...

It is very nearly time to return to school. For those who are about to hit the books again I have three helpful thoughts. Well, they helped me: