THOMAS: First of all, all students of theology should join a church and participate in church
life and attend church on Sundays and be in a Sunday school class and have prayer times with
folk who are more senior than they are, keep a devotional life,
that the regular habits of reading the Scriptures and prayer. For me as a theological student
that was a lifesaver for me because you can so easily slip into a study habit that is just rote
and you lose touch with reality and you lose touch with what this is all about,
namely walking day by day with Jesus and being involved in a local church is absolutely vital.
NICHOLS: It was a sermon Warfield preached at Miller Chapel at Princeton seminary. The Religious
Life of Theological Students. It's been reprinted, it's out there, I would definitely recommend that
you track that down and read it, he talks about the importance of church. One of the things
Warfield talks about is just the importance of recognizing your calling as a student and in your
work as a student you're glorifying God. I think sometimes we think of studies as a means to an end
and we don't realize that God's working on us now, and God wants us to serve Him and worship Him now
and if you're studying for the ministry or you're studying for some full-time ministry position,
you're not going to all of a sudden once you become full-time ministry just the button will
come on and it'll click and everything you do will be for God's honor and glory.
That needs to be part of your habit now and even as a student you're cultivating that.
So I would just recommend that piece, a great piece of historical advice, just recognize that
it's a calling as a student to study theology and in that we can...in that act, it can be
done for God's honor and for His glory, and as an act of worship and acceptable service to Him.
FERGUSON: I think it's very important that we learn to do even our most scholastic studies
doxologically, that we do them conscious that we are doing this in His presence before His face and
for His glory. I think a couple of other things I would say is make sure you're getting your
theology from your Bible because the tendency I think is in theological students that you get your
theology from your systematic theology textbooks and, you know, all of us here would subscribe to
the view that systematic theology and systematic theology textbooks are really important,
but I think there is a different product in the life, in the person who has learned all of his
theology from a textbook, from the person who has ground that theology out of Scripture.
The other thing I think I would say is, so, you know, those of us who are of a certain age,
when we were students we lived on a very impoverished diet of evangelical literature. Now
there are libraries full of it, but not all of that literature that creates what
I would think of as the architecture of how you think as an intelligent Christian,
not all of that literature has in view the nourishment of your life
and so I think it's important. I think it's important for all students actually, however
difficult it is to create a parallel program of preparation with —excuse the alliteration, it was
not intentional— where you're reading the works of those who are able theologians but who wrote their
theology in a doxological context because I think that will make a difference to your whole future.
PARSONS: Just real quickly, Nathan, to the question regarding dead orthodoxy,
I think it's important that we understand fundamentally that there's really no such
thing as dead orthodoxy and that we recognize that all orthodoxy being true doctrine of Scripture is
alive and it transforms and the Spirit uses it and God's truth goes forth and it changes us, and so I
think it's important that we recognize that. I'm certain the questioner understands that as well.
I think another thing that is really important when so many books are being published right
now by so many men and women who do not know the Lord, but are writing under the name of Christian
and through Christian publishers, that students depending on where they are in their studies,
now if they're doing postgraduate studies, they're going to have to interact usually with authors
and scholars that they're not going to agree with, but at undergraduate/graduate levels,
I think it is very important that they spend the majority of their time reading those
Christian authors, theologians who know the Lord and are pointing them to Jesus Christ.