It’s a bit of a tired joke, but it makes quite a good point. One man finds another on his hands and knees under a streetlight. “What are you doing down there?” he asks. “Looking for my keys” the man responds. “Did you drop them around here?” “No,” the man replies, I dropped them about fifty yards farther on, but the light is so much better here.” How easy it is to mistake that which we can know with that which we need to know.
Consider for a moment the biblical qualifications for an elder. Paul, on more than one occasion, gives us a list. An elder should, for instance, not be quarrelsome, not greedy for money. In one of his lists Paul puts down thirteen qualifications. Twelve of them are issues of character. One of them, not so much. Elders are to be “apt to teach.” Like the man looking for his keys under the streetlight, we have come to measure the qualifications of a pastor by the one quality that has some semblance of an objective measurable standard- a GPA.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Of course it is a good thing for a pastor to be able to handle the text well. The capacity to interact with the original languages can be quite helpful. A familiarity with the historical creeds and the issues the church has wrestled with over the centuries is valuable. Grasping the fundamental principles of logic can help keep a pastor on the doctrinal straight and narrow. I’ve not only been a student but a professor at the college and seminary levels, and am not ashamed for having been so.
That said, what does it say about us, and our commitment to the sufficiency of Scripture, about our capacity to see past our cultural blinders, that we see a seminary education as essential, while the Bible says not a word about seminaries at all? How well are our seminaries training us when we don’t even know to ask this fundamental question? I suspect it is because we are still caught in the grip of modernism whose sacrament has always been education. We think education is good for what ails us.
For some of us I’m sure that’s true. For most of us, however, our failures are not grounded in knowing too little, but caring too little about what we know. Ignorance is low down on the list of destructive influences in our lives, well below stubborn, prideful, and, no surprise here- quarrelsome and greedy for money. I get that these more pressing weaknesses are often easily hidden or disguised. They must, however, be in some sense knowable or Paul would not have given us such a list.
I am certainly not suggesting that pastors must have no sin struggles. Mercy no. What I am saying is that by and large in the evangelical church those qualities we value most are not the ones the Holy Spirit tells us to value most. We have what we have because we want what we want, because we don’t submit to the Word of God. Which is why we can’t seem to find our keys.