Category: Scholarship

The Duty of a Christian Scholar

· Cyril Jenkins 2 Leave a Comment on %s
This past semester I had the happy duty of reading through a Reformation treatise on the Eucharist, penned by the sixteenth-century Lutheran pastor, Joachim Westphal. I chose this for my student, a Lutheran who took to it right away, as it was one of hundreds upon hundreds (doubtless thousands) of late Renaissance and Reformation texts still awaiting translation into English. To date, her translation runs 50 pages and 18,000 words. I’m rather pleased with her. She’s the only student in my 25+ years at the university level I have ever given an A+ to, as I…

The Necessity of Christian Scholarship

· Cyril Jenkins 3 Leave a Comment on %s
“If you make your enemy look a fool, you lose the justification for engaging him.” Oliver Lacon, in John Le Carré’s Smiley’s People. Years ago I became acquainted with the work of the Presbyterian scholar Robert Dick Wilson. A student of the Old Testament, he had taken up the study, one time or another, of some 25+ languages (Hebrew–and Samaritan, Amorite, the Akkadian languages, Sumerian, Hurrian, along with French, German, etc) and used them in his defense of the Old Testament’s reliability. I had a professor at Rutgers, Stephen Reinert, who knew 16. For him obtaining a…