I think I figured out why I’m a little nervous about this scholarship thing. It’s because of my reasons for wanting to “be a scholar.” I want to be a scholar so that I can take what my field is doing and make it useful for laypeople. No, more than just useful - I want it to make a difference to the way they interpret the Bible, and thus to their beliefs, faith, and ultimately their lives.

Maybe that seems like a high and lofty goal, and I know I’m only one person, but I want to be one small bridge between the ivory towers and everyone else. I don’t have to be well known, or known at all, but if a well known scholar was to read something I wrote, or hear me speak, I’d want to know that I could be considered respectable, i.e. a “real scholar.” Right now, I see that the layperson has very few people to look to whom they can trust for good scholarship. The result is a lot of popular theological rubbish that most scholars scoff at - but the layperson never even knows there’s another way of looking at it, because the same scholars that scoff really aren’t interested in enlightening anyone - most certainly not Christians!

This all stems from my faith - I care about laypeople because I care about the Church. I guess I feel like that makes me a bit of a weirdo in the scholarly world. But, as Calvin reminded me, for every person who writes books and articles and yaks about this or that, there are who knows how many who are just out there teaching, maybe writing an article here or there, but they just care about the students. I go a little further than that - I care about the students, but I also care about the people they will affect with what they learn. (At a Bible college, I could be teaching future pastors, for instance.) So maybe I’m not as much of a weirdo as I think; there are most certainly others with similar passions out there. I guess I just feel a lot of pressure to “perform” correctly.