The Upper Limits

“A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”

A couple of months ago I discovered a new word. Don’t laugh. It was “autodidact”.

It’s not a difficult concept. An autodidact is simply a person who is self-taught rather than formally schooled. Despite being a voracious reader for six decades, to the best of my recollection I had never come across “autodidact” before a friend used it in conversation, prompting me to inquire, “Er, what is that?” I was embarrassed, but only slightly. English has an awful lot of words. I have a decent vocabulary, but some of the words I know are only useful in limited, very specific contexts. Autodidact is certainly one of those.

You Too?

So, now I know, and I was kind of excited. After all, an autodidact is me to a T. I didn’t know there was a word for how I learn and what I do. Not a complimentary one, at least. I just thought I was a mutant.

Even after skipping a grade, I always found school tedious. My mind was invariably going somewhere else. The teachers always seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace, and I desperately wanted to get to the part where they told me something that: (1) I didn’t already know; and (2) actually interested me. That proved a tough combo, as there was a great deal that didn’t interest me and not much at my grade level that I didn’t know or couldn’t work out for myself. Even back then, I read incessantly, often during classes in another subject. Every lunch hour was straight into the library, grab another book off the shelf, and read until the bell rang. After school, I might or might not do my homework, but I would always read, sometimes deep into the night, even if it was nothing more edifying than Stephen King. At least my vocabulary and wild imagination improved.

Out the Door and Into the World

One day in grade ten, my English teacher asked her class, “Who’s going to university?” To my surprise, I was the only person in the entire room of at least 30 kids who failed to put up his hand. That number included an estimated fifteen who would probably not end up going after all, among them perhaps two or three who still had serious motor issues in tying their own shoelaces and chewing gum without biting their own tongues. But no, in their own minds they were all university material, no matter how bizarre that concept may have appeared to anyone else. I knew I was not, not because I couldn’t handle the material, but because I couldn’t imagine anything more excruciating than four more years of a routine I was already finding unendurable. I intended to graduate high school as speedily as possible and never to darken the door of any kind of educational facility again, preferably for as long as I lived.

Let me confess something worse. I still suffer through 45-minute sermons, and in a non-trivial way. Few speakers can hold my attention that long. Most local churches don’t give speakers that much time. Ours does. My elders put a premium on Bible teaching. The men who open our meetings generally lead us in three hymns of three verses each, open in prayer and provide a short form recitation of the week’s announcements. Then they hand over the mic and scurry to their seats. The speaker may be great, he may be awful, or he may just be there, but he’s got a uniform 45 minutes to say his piece.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3

What gets me through the average (or worse) Sunday morning sermon is this: that I can go away and independently test for myself everything the speaker says, investigate to the outer limits anything with which I disagree, and come away knowing more than I knew when I sat down, even if I didn’t learn it directly from the sermon. For that reason, there are Sundays when I thoroughly disagree with the speaker and come away instructed and edified in ways I never anticipated going in. For the autodidact, even a barrage of error may be a tremendous blessing. The process of cross-checking a perceived error will bring you right back on track.

Now, I’m not about to tell you everyone should be an autodidact. It’s not even possible. I know some very intelligent people who cannot read like I do, or who barely read at all. They process information differently, and that’s great for them if they do it well. In the first century, almost nobody had a home copy of the Old Testament scrolls he could consult to evaluate what God might be saying to him personally. The fact that everyone who wants them today can have multiple Bibles and innumerable interpretation aids would have boggled the minds of first century Christians. We are truly privileged. We are at the end of the ages, and God may as well have written it all down for us. Blessings everywhere, and thank you, Lord.

Exceeding the Teacher

What I will say is this. A disciple is not above his teacher. Train him in everything his teacher knows, and perhaps he may eventually become his teacher’s equal. But he cannot possibly exceed him, can he? His outer limit in the knowledge or wisdom department is pre-set, determined by the level to which his instructor has attained. That should be a big concern to anyone who loves the Lord Jesus. If sitting in an audience listening to 45-minute sermons is how we are all ingesting Bible knowledge, what that means is precisely this: every subsequent generation of Christians will be slightly less spiritually insightful than the previous generation. At very best, they may match their elders. It cannot be any other way. That means at some point we lose more than we gain by subsisting on second-hand information. There must be another way. Surely the Lord has not left his people to succumb to the spiritual equivalent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Let me spell it out: every Christian needs a plethora of regular, alternative sources of spiritual insight. If that sounds too obvious to be worth mentioning, consider that I fisked a blog post two years ago from a terrific pastor who in good conscience sincerely believed that the spiritual growth of everyone in his congregation was primarily determined by the level of faithfulness with which they attended and scrutinized his sermons. That plain terrifies me. No matter how fantastic their Bible teachers, no church can provide everything a growing believer requires in one to three hours a week of lecture format. It’s absolutely impossible. That is not how the Lord purposed for his church to grow. We cannot subsist on one source of truth. We must be drinking constantly, and drinking from sources our Bible teachers in our local church may not know about or even approve.

Auto-Whatever

Personally, I recommend individual study, but for that you have to read. Listening to a podcast or watching YouTube videos of even the most skilled expositors will not get you there. But if you are not an autodidact — and most Christians are not — then just make sure you get a regular diet of alternative teaching sources. That way the Holy Spirit can speak to you through different individuals rather than only through a single source.

Who knows? In cross-checking, testing and confirming what they say, you may discover you have more autodidact in you than you currently imagine.