According to rabbinical tradition the holiday should always occur on a Wednesday, because God created the sun on the fourth day.
What grabbed my attention was not the holiday itself, however. It was something Rabbi J. David Bleich, said in the course of commenting on the holiday. “You’ve got to understand that the closest thing the Jews have to a sacrament is study.”1
Rabbi Bleich’s statement stood out for me because it coincides with something several professors on our faculty have been saying for years. The way they put it, the classroom is “sacred space,” where we are drawn deeper into the life of God through the exercise of our minds. But, of course, it’s not just the classroom that’s sacred space. At the end of my son’s first year at Princeton Theological Seminary, he took me to the spot on the seminary campus that had become for him the most sacred place, a particular nook in the library where he studies, reads and reflects, conscious that as he does this he is connecting to the cloud of witnesses of our faith, from Augustine to Serene Jones.
Some of the most extraordinary events I remember from the years I served as a pastor were related to life-transforming moments when church members came to a new understanding of God that re-oriented their whole lives. Study of the Bible and the Christian faith, if not a sacrament, is a means of grace, an expression of that love of God must involve hearts, souls, and bodies, but is never complete until it engages our minds.
Perhaps it should not surprise us as Christians, that study is so crucial to discipleship, not if we remember that the pioneer and finisher of our faith was, himself, a rabbi, and not if we recall that the core meaning of “disciple” is “willing learner.” As a Presbyterian, I often hear various influential voices in our denomination describing our own tradition of a “thinking faith” as elitist. I don’t see it, however, as elitism to think deeply about the God revealed in Jesus Christ or about the character of life to which this God calls us. Rather it is a service we render, perhaps a service to the extended Christian family.
For 500 years Presbyterians have been unafraid to swim at the deep end of the pool. We are not alone in this. Although it is true that the shallow end of faith’s pool is overcrowded these days and the wading pool has a waiting line to get in, there are lots of Christians (Mainline, Evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox) who affirm with John Calvin “the life of the mind as a service to God,” and who know that so great a God deserves our best efforts, including our best thinking.
Michael Jinkins is dean and professor of pastoral theology at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, Texas. He blogs regularly on The Presbyterian Outlook blog — www.pres-outlook.org/blog.html.
