Lesson 7: The Canonical Horizon
Your Guess Is As Good As Mine
One problem with the extensive information superhighway is that anyone can find out anything with the click of a mouse or the tap of a finger. Suddenly everyone thinks that they are experts, and true expertise is arrogantly ignored at best, or condemned as elitism at worst.
Tom Nichols, a professor and expert on international affairs, shared some shocking examples of this alarming trend in his book, The Death of Expertise.¹
Nichols tells the story of a medical student in 2013 who sent out a call for help on an assignment on Twitter, saying, “I can’t find the chemical and physical properties of sarin gas [sic] someone please help me.”² Moments later a world-renowned expert reached out to her with a brief correction, “noting that Sarin isn’t a gas and that the word should be capitalized.”³
The student responded with “a string of expletives”!⁴ The shell-shocked expert replied, “‘Google me. I’m an expert on Sarin. Sorry for offering to help.”⁵ But the student doubled down on her outrage.
And it’s not just Twitter! Our centers of higher education are not exempt from this deadly attitude. Nichols relates an exchange that took place at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire sometime during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s.
The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a lecture on President Ronald Reagan’s plan to develop space-based missile defenses, which he strongly supported. An undergraduate challenged Jastrow during the question-and-answer period, and by all accounts Jastrow was patient but held to his belief that such a program was possible and necessary. The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up.
“Well,” the student said, “your guess is as good as mine.“
Jastrow stopped the young man short. “No, no, no,“ he said emphatically. “My guesses are much, much better than yours.“
—Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, 82-83.
Do Jastrow’s words sound arrogant to you? But if he truly is an expert (and he was), this isn’t pride but simply reality.
Yes, you enjoy the widespread availability of materials to help you explore the ten doctrines of systematic theology, and of much leisure time to read books on those ten doctrines. But don’t let these blessings puff you up so that you confidently think you don’t need to learn from anyone else, or that you are an expert.
God has given us pastors and teachers to build us up (Eph 4:11–12)—these are extrabiblical sources! And writers also stimulate our spiritual growth, many of whom are or have been pastors, whether they lived hundreds of years ago or in the 21st century. We need these sources to rightly understand the Bible.
After all, a biblically-qualified pastor who has been rightly studying the Bible full-time for decades, a biblically-faithful professor with two PhDs who has been accurately writing about the Bible since the 1960s, a great-grandmother who has been learning from faithful pastors and studying the Bible prayerfully her entire life—even their “guesses” are “much, much better than yours.”