This Coffee Talk is written from the Mentor’s perspective. Your Mentor is your guide through the Academic Jungle. This Coffee Talk is a humorous, yet needful statement about what lies before you.
A safari through the Academic Jungle is one of the most rewarding ventures a person can undertake. An Intellectual Garden of Eden, the Academic Jungle has wonderful fruit trees (most of them bearing fruits of truth) that God has planted for our enjoyment. But, just as the Enemy feverishly worked to get our first parents kicked out of the Garden of Eden, he is working constantly to keep their descendants out of the Academic Jungle. And, it is a simple point of logic to conclude that if the Enemy wants you out, then the best thing you can do is go in.
As an Embryonic Scholar, you must put on your Thinking/Learning Cap (that’ll protect your mind), and put on your breastplate of love (that’ll protect your heart), and put on your grammar glove (that’ll help you catch everything that will be thrown at you in this venture). I, as your academic guide, will now lead you into the jungles of style, content, logic, punctuation, and format.
While on this safari, you must be careful not to let yourself be attacked by the, “What’s-he-talking-about?-I-know-what-I-mean-by-that!-Is-he-so-stupid-that-he-can’t-read animals.” These little critters can jump up at any time from any page, and it is disastrous for your health if you allow them to bite you; they will suck your blood and then they get big and strong. Once they get big and strong, they can control a student, by “What’s-he-talking-about! mind control,” and finally the victim will commit the dreaded Academic Suicide. It is a sad sight to behold. I have seen good, well-intentioned students fall prey; so be very careful.
Also, there are small insidious insects that live on the leaves of the “give-me-a-break bushes.” As you pass through the Academic Jungle, you will be brushing your body against their branches and leaves. If you get “give-me-a-break bugs” on your clothes, they will slowly but steadily work their way onto your skin. When they do, they begin to bite and pour in their “I’m-not-stupid venom” (sometimes called the “Give-me-a-break venom”). This venom will lead the victim to think such unappreciative thoughts as,
This guide is being too picky. This ridiculous guide is constantly saying, ‘Be careful for the comma cactus, don’t drink from that sentence spring, don’t eat the redundant radish, watch out for grammar gulch.” Good grief, does he think I’m stupid? Besides, half the stuff he is cautioning me about seems pretty innocuous to me. Give me a break; I’m-not-stupid!
This “Give me a break!” mind control can lead to more than just a lack of appreciation; it sometimes leads to an actual hatred for the guide. When this happens, the victim generally sets out on his own to fend for himself.
At first he feels that he can survive without the guide. But, after traveling a few miles into the Academic Jungle, the victim falls prey to every sort of animal and insect in the jungle, all of which have only one goal, kill the Embryonic Scholar. And, without the guide to help the sojourner, they will succeed.
I have seen promising scholastic embryos who struck out on their own (these are called the Dropouts) without their guide, and when they come out of the Academic Jungle (if they ever do), they all have the same mind-controlled attitude; it goes something like this:
I used to be an academic, but I discovered that there was no life in the desert-land of academia. So, I repented of “dissecting and investigating” God’s Holy, Living Word. Today, I just let the Holy Spirit teach me, and now I have life, and I have it more abundantly. No more dry, academic scholarship for me. From now on, I just want life and a true relationship with my Creator.
The mere sounds and intonations of these words rolling off the lips of a Dropout is the impetus of the bugs and pesky animals of the Academic Jungle to burst out in uproarious laughter. More than one carnival was initiated because a promising Embryonic Scholar was aborted before academic birth.*
This lofty sounding rhetoric convinces many untrained Christians—who cannot, for whatever reason, take a grand tour of the Academic Jungle—that academia is bad. The untrained stand just on the borders of the Academic Jungle and peer in, wondering why any person with life and a relationship with God would want to sacrifice that relationship for that “dry, dusty, dead religion of academia.” They have been told over and over by the aborted that “too much learn’n—or school’n—will sap the life right out of ya.” One of the untrained, a Mr. Stan, told a Ph.D. that God couldn’t use him because he had “to much school’n.”
Last year, Stan bought his Minister’s Ordination Papers from some guy calling himself The Right Reverend Bishop Jack Spade, of Las Vegas, Nevada.
To the untrained eye, many areas of the Academic Jungle look safe. But, since you have never been here before, I must warn you that what meets the eye is only the surface. Now such a statement may seem elementary, but that’s exactly what gets folks in trouble: the idea that it is all elementary. Many of the future Dropouts have already cultivated the erroneous idea that, “As long as I put my feelings on paper and pray, that should be good enough.” But, in the Academic Jungle (as in a good study of the Bible), your feelings by themselves can lead you into error . . . or even academic death.
Remember, a soft, warm fuzzy leaf on a bush may feel nice and even inviting, but it may harbor the seeds of your own academic demise. So, if I, as your guide, say “Don’t Touch That!” but you do so anyway, I cannot, and will not, be responsible for the consequences.
All I can say, as we set out to enter into the Academic Jungle, is Trust Me, I have been here before, as a student and as a guide. And, though I am not perfect, and though there are things that I too have not yet learned about this strange and wonderful jungle, I truly have your best interest in mind. Therefore, I pledge to do my best to help you traverse the Academic Jungle and come out as a scholar.
Do you recognize the name, Gregg X. Steven?—No, you don’t. And why? Because he aborted! He was slated to become one of the heroes of the faith and help lead the church to doctrinal purity, but his energy got ahead of his logic; and when that happened to, who is now called “Good ol’ boy Greg,” he became nothing more than a footnote in Christian history. He now preaches that a Christian should have health, wealth, and prosperity. By the way, last month his old rust bucket of a car was found along the roadway. It broke down on his way to a Dropouts-Only Meeting, at which he was the 3rd-choice back up speaker. The title of his sermon: “I’m-not-stupid! Give-me-a-break! God’s got a 1,000 Hills of Cattle, and I’m Ordering Steak!”
Send comments about this, or any, Coffee Talk to Rick Walston at: CES @ ColumbiaSeminary.edu
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