On Tyndale House, the Old Testament, and the Promises and Pitfalls of Biblical Scholarship with Peter Williams and Will Ross

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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On Tyndale House, the Old Testament, and the Promises and Pitfalls of Biblical Scholarship with Peter Williams and Will Ross

March 6, 2025

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

Recently, Peter Williams, Principal at Tyndale House in Cambridge, preached at Christ Covenant Church for its missions week. At the end of the evening service, Kevin sat down with Peter and fellow Cambridge-alum Will Ross, who teaches Old Testament at RTS Charlotte, for a discussion about the importance of Tyndale House and its mission to foster faithful, biblical scholarship for the church. The group also talked about apologetics, the Septuagint, being confident in the word of God, and not being so smart that you believe stupid things.

Chapters:

0:00 Sponsors

2:32 The Surprising Genius of Jesus

6:27 On Tyndale House

14:42 Christianity in the Cultures

17:42 Sponsor Break

19:45 On the Old Testament

29:15 On Confidence in God’s Word

31:55 On Biblical Scholarship

37:24 Until Next Time…

Books & Everything

Understanding God's Word: An Introduction to Interpreting the Bible

The Supremacy of God in Preaching

GPTS | A Sacred Calling

WTS | Biblical Language Certificates

The Surprising Genius of Jesus: What the Gospels Reveal about the Greatest Teacher

Transcript

This episode of LBE is brought to you in part by Crossway, publisher of Understanding God's Word and Introduction to Interpreting the Bible. What is more important to the Christian than reading the Bible? And if you're going to read the Bible, which you should, we want to know how to best interpret the Bible. This is by Pastor John Nielsen, who presents six hermeneutical tools, hermeneutics is how you interpret something, how you interpret the Bible, and demonstrates how to use them effectively to improve personal or small group Bible studies.

You get a copy of Understanding God's Word, wherever books are sold, or go to crossway.org plus, sign up, get 30% off. Another book recommendation from our friends at Desiring God, grateful for them sponsoring LBE, the books, The Supremacy of God in Preaching. Recently, we had a preaching workshop, here, that I was privileged to do with Pastor John, and I put right at the top of my best preaching books, the ones that I love have influenced me most.

And that top three was this book by John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching. The book points to examples like Johnathan Edwards, and draws upon Piper's own time in the pulpit to help us make much of God. Even if you're not a pastor, you'll benefit from this, help you learn what preachers are trying to do.

And for the preacher, it will help you rediscover the kind of preaching that magnifies the majesty of God, and stirs souls to worship. Greetings in salutations. Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything.

This is a special episode that was recorded at the end of an evening service here at Christ Covenant Church. We had our missions week and in town, we had Peter Williams, who is the principal, that means the head of Tindale House at Cambridge. And at the end of the service, he came up along with Will Ross, who's a member of our church and teaches Old Testament, and reforms theological seminary here in Charlotte.

He also is a Cambridge PhD and so knows Pete and Tindale House. So they came up onto the platform and interviewed them for about 30 or 35 minutes to talk about Cambridge, Tindale House, Old Testament. They're both Old Testament scholars, so enjoy the rest of this conversation.

Peter, thank you. That was a whirlwind of blessing and connections and genesis on steroids in the parable of the two sons. It's great.

My question is, and if anybody's listening to this later, go back and listen to Pete's sermon that he just gave here this Sunday night as he was talking about Jesus' knowledge of the Scriptures. I'm wondering, I have not read your book on the surprising genius of Jesus, I should. Is this the sort of thing that you're pointing out, or is that taking a different angle? Yeah.

Okay, can you say more about the surprising genius of Jesus, and what prompted you to write that book? Who are you trying to reach with that thesis? I'm not sure who I was trying to reach. So with my book, Can We Trust The Gospels, I was very clear I was trying to reach engineers. And I had that, engineers in my mind, who want to know, does something work? Is it true? Skeptics, that sort of thing.

But with this, I felt it was something I needed to put out there and would be an interest to a number of people that I'd been teaching this story for a number of years, interactively seeing more and more in it, and suddenly when it went well, not suddenly, but it eventually came together, oh yeah, this is a comprehensive two-level story with massive detail for scribes if they're into who know Genesis really super well. It just came together and I thought I need to share this with people, whoever's going to find it useful. And I wrote it in a simple way so that someone can start with no knowledge of the Bible and just start in at that story.

Because I think we typically, with Leonardo da Vinci, you say he's a genius because he's got the paintings, Mozart, he's got the symphonies, and you say, well, Jesus is a genius because he's God. And that's a correct thing because as in God knows everything, God, no one's more creative than God and so on. That's it.

But I'm saying that's absolutely true, but I've actually got a piece of genius that we can show you. This is a masterpiece three-minute story. No one has ever told a three-minute story like this in all a world history.

And a lot of the top storytellers, like I know Dickens or Tolkien, make good stories by making them go on and on and on, right? Jesus is able to do it exactly the opposite way by giving you this really short story and other ones which just have such a lot of depth. Well, just what you said several times looking at the different, there was a man who had two sons. Once you start highlighting that, think, well, of course, someone who's steeped in this, and the point you brought out describes really, really new this.

Most of us can start making those connections, but American examples, if somebody said, we the people or we hold these truths to be self-evident or someone said, four score and seven years ago, you just drop down in some cultural memory, and these men would have been so much more steep memorizing it. So it's a thesis that is convincing to me. Have other people pushed back and said, well, that's sort of parallelomania.

You're finding things that aren't there. Only a small amount. And the thing is, various people like Kenneth Bailey has already made a lot of the links with the story of Isaac's sons, Esau and Jacob, Tim Keller, Blessed Memory, makes the argument about Cain and Abel.

And I think it's really when you see it all together that the more of them there are, the more to actually, it sort of reinforces that. And it's the fact that almost every single phrase can be traced to something like that. So at Sunday School this morning, and many of you were there, you saw a video and just a little bit of introduction to 10 Dale House, but I want to make sure everyone knows about this.

So tell us what is 10 Dale House, how long has it been around, and why does it make any difference to four or 500 Christians sitting here on a Sunday night in Charlotte, North Carolina? Yeah, so 10 now has been around for 80 years, and it's a Bible research center. And you can think of it in different ways. You can think of it as a West Point for training evangelical leaders.

You can think of it as that, you know, there are people living in the shire and they don't know that there are these people sort of keeping them safe outside. So I'd like to think a lot of people at the forefront of defending the scriptures have come through that. So there's no bigger concentration of Bible scholars in the world.

Obviously it's not that we train the majority, but that we train a bigger concentration than any other place. And we don't do that by offering a great library, and community, and accommodation, and people living there. So Will and Kelly spent lots of time at Tinder House.

And yeah, it's great. So Will Ross friend and part of this church teaches at RTS Old Testament. What was your intersection with, how did you get to Cambridge? Not heard of Tinder House when I was in seminar, I went to Westminster at Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

And during my time there, bumped into something called the Septuagint, which we can come back to if you're interested. Well, we shall. It's an interesting thing, at least in my opinion, but I'm biased in that way.

I tell my students every time someone says, quotes the Septuagint, Will Ross gets his wings. Okay, we'll come back. So in the course of discovering this wonderful thing called the Septuagint, I was working as a teaching assistant for Greg Beale, a New Testament scholar who was at Westminster at the time.

And when I got into Cambridge to study Septuagint, Dr. Beale said, we should, you should certainly go study at Tinder House. And I said, what's Tinder House? And so I got on the internet and I found it and it's an incredible research center is how I tend to describe it. It's not part of the university per se, but it's in town.

People come to Cambridge and say, where's the university? The answer is, it's everywhere. It's all around you. And Tindell House is there as a sort of headquarters for high quality, the highest quality biblical scholarship at, I would say, the world's leading university.

And it's a place where you can build community among scholars who are like-minded, studying scripture, high view scripture, wanting to study at a very detailed level. It was an incredible place to work. So I asked this question over lunch and I'll ask you well.

So there's a lot, I mean, I just look out here, here's Greg Salazar's planting in church in town, got his PhD at Cambridge, right behind him, Chad Van Dixhorn, took Chad a little while. He did more than the average bear, got a lot done at Cambridge. I went to the University of Leicester, whose motto is, elite without being elitist, which means, we're not Cambridge, but give us a try.

Would I take it to me? Why is it, I'm teeing you up here. Why is it that when I think about people in our circles, you could go on, Josh Moody, who's at college church in Wheaton, has a PhD from Cambridge. Why don't we hear Oxford? Why is it that Cambridge? Is it because of Tindell House, or is it more evangelical friendly? Why so many people in our circles do you think more so than the other school there? I think it's a mixture of things, and Tindell House is certainly part of that, and sometimes it's what we do, and sometimes it's what happens before what we do.

What I mean is, I think Will didn't know we existed before he came, but some actually choose to come to Tindell House, to Cambridge because of Tindell House, because they know their heart is prone to wander, so they say, I want to be in an evangelical fellowship, and some think, I don't really care about that so much, and so Oxford gets plenty of students, but I think fewer at the end of their doctorate would be evangelical in biblical studies. I agree with that, and I can imagine what it would have been like to go through a doctoral program at another place without the kind of evangelical community that we had at Tindell House for these sort of high caliber intellectual conversations about difficult topics, and study of scripture, and so forth, and the challenges that are coming from the biblical studies academy, but I also think there's an element where, you know, again, to go back to Greg Beale, Greg Beale went to Cambridge, and there are other people that you see as a younger scholar, a seminary student, you say, okay, where did they go? There's something of a accumulating effect there, I think that a lot of roads leave in similar direction. My supervisor, John Coffey, went to Cambridge, so it all roads leave back.

How did you find it will, you know, for a lot of us, maybe some people here have visited, and it's a beautiful place, or you've seen shots in different films, but I mean, it is a special place, Oxford, and Cambridge are, and you can go ahead and say Cambridge is the finest in the world, at least in your part of the world. What was it like to be a conservative Bible-believing, confessional Christian, are Christians welcome there, people indifferent, is it hostile, and what's the attitude more broadly to a 10-day-of-house? So maybe a student perspective, and what do they feel about 10-day-house? So it's been almost seven years since I was there, so it may have changed even since then, but I get into all the British schools I applied to, and none of the American schools. I think that gives you something of a glimpse into the British university scene.

I think my experience was British academics don't really care what you believe, as long as you do very high quality work. There's less of an ideological bias against evangelicals. There's some of that to an extent, but I don't think it's quite as pervasive and heat seeking like it is in the United States and in the universities here.

So my experience was generally collegial, friendly. There were certainly times where heat conversations would take place in a seminar discussion at T or something like that, but overall I found it fairly receptive actually. And I think that's the case, and I've heard that.

Do you think, is some of that because evangelicals are such a smaller percentage of the population there? People feel like benign neglect is a safer path? I think absolutely. There's this funny analogy where in a different area, I think Nigel Endes Cameron says that how conservative a lot of abortion laws, sorry, embryo experimentation laws are in a country in Europe is inversely proportionate to how large your pro-life movement is. Bigger pro-life movement means more liberal laws, and whether it's push or pull, I don't know, but let's put it this way.

Evangelicals are so tiny as a number in Britain. People don't feel threatened by them. And that has some positives.

I mean, obviously, it's not great being a tiny minority, but it does mean that there are openings. I would add to that too, that I think there's an extent to which faculty members at the university understand that students who are most likely to be very interested in studying the Bible at high level are the people who love the Bible. And so there's a certain sense of having to deal with the fact that evangelicals are where the university's bread is buttered for incoming students.

And will, speaking as American, you grew up in Pennsylvania. Yeah. Grove City.

Went to Grove City. Grove City then Westminster then. What was, you know, spending years there, what seemed different to you as an American Christian? And Pete, you said you've been here 70 times, 70, so a lot of times.

He's very septuagental. Yes, very septuagental, biblical. So then the question reverse, what seems different knowing us so well compared to your British context? We'll start well.

He's being culturally. Yeah, but you know, and especially as it pertains to the church. Yeah, sure.

Yeah, I would say, I mean, there's maybe a lot of latitude how you could explain it, but I would say that Britain is a much more post-Christian culture in the sense that there's really no assumption that anyone's a Christian. This is different in the north where I grew up in Philadelphia area versus down here even. There's more of an assumption down here.

People are probably Christians in Pennsylvania. That's much less so in England. It's far less so even even further.

So it's a weird sort of bifurcation because there's really very little assumption that there's Christian practice, Christian commitments in the population at large. And yet there's also a state church. And so one of the things we loved about being in England is when it's Christmas time, it's Christmas time.

Everyone, it's Christmas everywhere. It says Merry Christmas. People say Merry Christmas.

There's no attempt to have it be holidays. So it's more overt and it's less overt in sort of the same way, it's different ways at the same time. Interesting.

Yeah, I'd say it is just different. I think things have a way of finding a balance which reflects the views of the population if you like. So at one level we have a monarchy, but it can't really do anything.

And so that's where you have church representation in the House of Lords, but that means like the Anglican Church, but that means we never get a Christian view on mainstream TV. So it's like, so I would say the church numbers are very small within the UK, but not shrinking. And there's a lot of church planting going on.

And a lot of seriousness about Christianity. So a difference say in the two countries was with COVID, a lot of churches in the US, as I understood, lost numbers. That was a big thing.

Like churches in the UK did not, you know, I mean like they had lost the numbers before. But by the time we had COVID, we didn't have a sort of periphery of people who are sort of on the edge not that involved who are just going to say, oh, I'm not going to go anymore. So our numbers grew.

So I just think it's just very different. And I suppose the other thing is our main orientation is secularism all the time. I've only ever had a secular education and we have very few Christian schools.

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Both of you Old Testament scholars, you say so sometimes, Syriac, is that your your first academic love? Yeah, I did some. Well, I mean, who among us doesn't have Syriac at the top of the list. Why does it seem like, and correct me if this is wrong, why does it seem like, of all of the typical disciplines in a seminary curriculum like RTS, it seems like it can often be hardest to find a good Bible believing, an air and sea believing Old Testament scholar, even harder than church history, systematics, even New Testament.

So is that accurate? And if so, why is that? I think it is accurate. I think we haven't yet had a lot of role models. And whereas when people are debating, say the dating of the gospels, they might be dating a few decades this way or that way.

When people are dating stuff in the Old Testament, it's a lot more. And let's say, yeah, people don't, I mean, I'm actually in the process of trying to write a book on the reliability of the Old Testament. I think there's a ton of good evidence, but I don't think it's all necessarily been seen together for what it is.

So I think people are looking for, they hope they're going to find Abraham's tent, you never will. And I think part of it is people have wrong archaeological expectations of what you would find, things being true, that can be it. But yeah, the Old Testament is absolutely wonderful and full of evidence for its own truth.

So please get that book done. You've written a great book on the gospels and there are a lot of good books on the gospels. And there's just fewer that I can think of off the top of my head aimed at, can you trust the Old Testament? What are, as you're writing this and you've been teaching on this for years, Pete, what are one or two of the main defeater arguments that people have a hard time believing and therefore not trusting in the Old Testament? Well, I mean, of course it begins at the beginning of the Old Testament and a lot of sketches about the early chapters of Genesis, but it really goes right the way through till about the Babylonian exile where most people believe in that.

Now, with David, I think there's archaeological evidence, things turning up with the name David, there are some people who are trying to be skeptical or maybe there was a David, but maybe he didn't do much. And I think an important thing, and we've got to think about this doctrinally, is you don't trust the Bible because of an archaeological discovery. Before archaeology began really just over 200 years ago, all our forebears trusted scripture because of what it said on the pages of scripture.

And if I say, I'm going to trust God when something is verified by something other than God, I'm really saying I don't trust God. But God graciously gives us these extra assurances like he does to Gideon, who has extra miracles that he shouldn't need, because he is kind to us with our doubts. And so that's where I think there are good signs of that, but we shouldn't need them.

So as you have some opportunity to interact with students at Cambridge, he says sometimes they even will have classes at Tindale House. And your colleague Simon Gatherkoll is another great scholar there who's writing the thick of things at Cambridge. As you talk to people, besides just Old Testament, what are the issues that people are bringing up, why they can't believe, why they don't come to church, why they can't trust in Jesus.

Is it sexual revolution stuff? Is it something else? Yeah, I mean a lot of ways you don't necessarily get into those sort of conversations, a huge amount. A lot of like in the academia, people like to talk about ideas out there rather than their own beliefs. And you're like, so they discuss how do these ideas work.

And that's what happens in a seminar academically is people are talking about plausibility and different ideas, but they're not saying about what they believe. That's what they would talk about maybe after a seminar if you're in a really personal context. But it can be quite hard to do that.

And in fact, a lot of academics in Cambridge would almost never reveal their hand on that. So I remember my Old Testament professor after dinner one time letting out that he did believe that the resurrection actually happened. And this is a professor who had written all sorts of pretty critical stuff on the Bible.

And I said, would you think there were any other miracles that happened in the Bible? And he said, no, I don't think so. But it took a lot of to get even that. Because a lot of the time you're dealing with shy academics, they don't want necessarily to be really out there.

It's not about their beliefs. They spend their time dealing with arguments. So Will, you talked about the Septuagint.

And people probably encountered that in a book or they've heard a pastor. But what is a Septuagint? Why are you interested in it? Why should we be interested? I became interested in it because I wanted to do Testament studies first. But I started to like Greek.

And so I became a little bit torn over this. Then I found out that there's an ancient Greek translation of the Septuagint, which was produced by ancient Jews, mostly in Egypt, perhaps some in Judea as well. And so this sort of allowed me to access the Old Testament through Greek and Hebrew as well.

But Septuagint is primarily the Greek translation of the canonical Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. But it also gets bundled together with a lot of what we would call deuterocanonical or apocryphal books, books like First and Second Maccabees or Judith. So it's the literature of ancient Jews as well as the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

So is this the Bible Jesus read? No, although there's certainly good reason to believe that Jesus and New Testament writers had access to scriptures in Greek. But at this time, there are no books per se. There are scrolls.

There are manuscripts. So it's not as if it sits on a shelf in a nice, tidy binding. They pull off consult like we would do here in a pew Bible.

But yes, scripture is circulating in a number of languages, Greek and Hebrews, some in Aramaic as well at this time. So when the New Testament and a number of places seems to be deliberately quoting the Septuagint using that, are they consulting libraries? Does the synagogue have a copy? How is that transmission coming down to the New Testament? Yeah, so a huge question, probably a few things to say would be yes, there are going to be copies that are available. Paul says to Timothy, make sure you bring the scroll.

So he's got some copies personally that he has access to or calls around with them. Having a whole scroll would be very cumbersome. They're very heavy, very long, very expensive.

So not everyone's got a copy. The synagogues are going to be the places where you have a sort of public reading, high quality reading copies. And they would have Hebrew scrolls and Greek? Potentially depends on where you are.

You're more in a sort of urban, educated setting. You might be more of Greek speaking context, Greek speaking Judaism. Otherwise, you're going to have scriptures in Hebrew.

But these are read and taught, sport over on Sabbath day, and taught in the home to some extent as well. So do you have a take home example when people or students or your dear wife or children want to know more about the Septuagint that you have? Here's what Daddy learned and helps me understand the New Testament and insight, something you've got an illustration that you often use. I don't actually know.

It's that narrow that I'm not sure I've got a sort of salient lesson for why to love the Septuagint from a New Testament perspective. I guess I would say that a lot of the value for Septuagint in my opinion, when it comes to more of apologetic sort of purposes, it's the oldest testimony to the Hebrew Bible. So it's a very ancient translation.

So it gives us a great reason, a great level of competence in the antiquity and reliability of the Hebrew Bible. So it's more on a general level, and I think it's encouragement, utility lies. So as you've studied it, what has it's helped you? Ah, this is this is sometimes there's a fear, okay, there's 10 day a house.

We're going to go to Cambridge. If you really, really study these things, you really get into it, you might walk away. Yeah, you're going to find scary things.

Yeah, find scary things. So no, it's the opposite, I think. And I teach Hebrew in my first Hebrew class, I start to explain how ancient Hebrew texts have no vowels in them.

There's just consonants. The student students always balk at me and say, how does this work without vowels? How do we know that the vowels that were later put on are reliable? Were the vowels inspired? The vowels were not inspired to stick in conversation. The Westminster Bible thought they were not.

Some people thought they were. Can ask Dr. Van Dijk's one afterwards. But the answer to that is, well, you can go and look at the Septuagint.

Septuagint translates a consonantal text, no vowels, in the way most of the time, just as we would expect. So again, this is a way that we can see the antiquity and reliability of scripture. So just one or two more questions.

One of the things I really appreciated this morning, and especially tonight, was your emphasis on us having confidence in God's word. I wonder if you could say more about that. Distinguish it between an arrogant kind of bravado.

But I do think it's the case that Christians, and maybe it's more so in Britain, Americans sometimes, we got the bravado thing down. But we can be very unsure of ourselves and insecure in public spaces. So how do we, without just poking people in the eye, have a proper confidence in God's word, especially as we talk to non-Christians and we live our lives in the public square? So I think it begins with confidence in God.

I mean, those of us who are Christians, we know our lives have been changed. We know what God's done in our lives. We've got that.

But I think it's natural as humans to oscillate and sometimes to be uncertain. And I think we need to remind ourselves of the gospel. I mean, who could make the gospel up? I mean, just a story, it's no one can do that.

And so it's reminding ourselves of all of these reasons we have to believe. And when you look out at the world, you see people who are lost. You see people who don't have the answers.

And it's quite interesting. I'm fascinated by politics. And I find, wow, these guys don't have the answers.

And I'm not talking about anyone in particular. It's just like, they've each got their worldview. But that's not going to work.

Politics is about managing problems, gospels, about solving them. And what's actually going to deal with the world's problems of sin other than the gospel. So I think it's reminding ourselves of that.

We have the message that people out there need to hear and to be confident in that and to realize this comes mediated to us through the scriptures that God's given to us that are just amazing. I mean, so whether it's the stories, the sheer diversity that we have within scripture, it's phenomenal. And compare it with anything else, any apocryphal gospel, any other holy book.

We've got the goods. And let's be confident about that. Yeah, this is a good word.

Will, what do you say to someone here who maybe is overly impressed with anyone on this platform and thinks, well, you guys know languages I know enough, but you really know languages. And you guys went to Cambridge. You're super smart.

I'm trying to raise a family. Go to work. What can you tell beloved church people who want to know, but may feel like, I mean, maybe there's somebody I meet who's smarter out there to really believe because the message isn't just believe smart people who went to Cambridge.

What's the word for people? Maybe it's something more they can study or just God's word itself. What kind of encouragement do you give to people, lest we become just bound to experts? Yeah, I think it's an important question because I think we've just in the last few years entered in sort of an age of anti expertise where experts are viewed with suspicion and sometimes with good reason. So yeah, I think there's a balance here.

I mean, I want to inspire my students to the seminary to want to dig deep and put in the work necessary to learn scripture in a detailed way and see all the riches that lie there. It's Jesus's Bible, the study of the Old Testament, at least in particular, is the study of Jesus's Bible. Learning the languages takes work.

It's worth it. But is it necessary? Is there something hidden there that you wouldn't see if you didn't know Greek or Hebrew? The answer to that is a bit of a yes and no, but it's not hidden behind a veil, right? And so the confidence I think that we all ought to walk away with is to go back to this morning. And you're sermon talking about the story of Tyndale.

We have a wonderful tradition of incredible scholars. Faithful scholarship carried out over generations that's been based on the scripture and pursued with passion and diligence in order to convey scripture in an accurate and faithful way in not just English but in languages around the world. So I think we can have a great deal of confidence in it.

It's not that we can't improve on it in little ways here and there, but the core is there. And for most anyone who's had an evening service at Christ coming to church, you probably know the Bible better than 99 percent of the people that you're going to talk to. They may ask questions you don't know.

People ask questions I don't know. You can always say, I don't know. I'd be happy to ask someone who probably has thought of it.

It can point out something. And a lot of times you find people aren't really interested in learning those questions. So you can always talk about what you do know, which is the Bible.

And you know what's in the Bible and can talk about that even if people may have other questions. Just last question for you and I've seen you in different contexts and know that you're brilliant with Old Testament languages and we get a feel for this. And yet a humble churchmen and love Jesus.

What in your studies of the scriptures have you learned say even in the last year or two that have helped you love Jesus more? Thank you. It's a great question. And you know reading the scriptures every day just seeing how things fit together I think is a huge thing.

And then seeing his own provision, I mean God's been so gracious to me in my family in all sorts of other ways. But knowing that he has his purposes even if things go toughly. So I've been enjoying so many different scriptures.

So reading Genesis at the moment again just seeing new things. I never stopped seeing new things. And so it's a sense of infinity of bottomless resource that that's been so encouraging.

And then also the fact you learn so much from other people. So just to turn on the whole thing about people being smart. I've got a terrible center direction.

In bottom of my school art exam and I want people to know that I'm bad at lots of things. And academics are typically have less common sense than others. So there are a lot of beliefs that only people who are academically trained would be stupid enough to believe.

So what that means is when I come to study in scripture I learn a lot from my home group. Studying with people who are not academically trained and they've got eyes to see stuff that I don't see and I got oh that's so obvious. Yeah that's great but someone else needs to say it first.

And so I have learned so much when I've been teaching and interacting with all sorts of people who don't have the training I have. And so just to recognize that the academic training is a technical training. Like the technical training a medic might have or anything like that.

You don't ask the medic to make all of your medical decisions for you about life in the same way. Don't necessarily look to the technician academically for wisdom. You look to them for technical expertise.

Yeah thank you both. Thanks for listening to life and books and everything. This is a ministry of clearly reformed.

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