Not a Bible Professor? You Still Need to Be Biblically Literate

A few years ago, while serving as an academic administrator at a Bible college, I sat across from a graduating senior in our business program for his exit interview. He loved his professors in the major, and he loved his Bible and theology courses. He’d gotten a lot out of both. Still, something was missing. His business faculty hadn’t shown him how to connect the two departments. He left discouraged. He wasn’t alone. Over about three years of exit interviews, I heard some version of the same thing from many graduates outside our biblical studies programs. To be sure, we’d given these graduates a close-knit community, faculty who mentored them well, and serious study of the Bible. But we had failed to keep one important promise: to help them bring those things together so that graduates could enter their fields as people formed by Scripture. Their professors were capable and caring experts. Yet arranging this connection for their students called for something more than their own graduate programs likely had included. That preparation needs to begin with the teacher’s own formation. Professors at Christian universities, Bible colleges, and theological seminaries start from different...