No disrespect for professors; I learned a lot from them. That is not the world they live in. They live in the world of two thousand years ago; they need to. I don’t mind, it is just the nature of vocation and the gospel. Some of us do one thing, some of us do others. I am a pastor and I try to be professor. Regent called me a professor after I had left Christ the King; after I had been there for six weeks I said, “I am not a professor. I care about these students and I can care less [about the title].”
I was teaching a course in prayer. How do you grade someone’s prayers? I went to the president and the dean and I said, “You’ve the wrong person. I am not a professor.” They said we knew that. So I was free to be a pastor with the name of the professor.
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Preaching: As you look back at what you did in The Message, are there some things you look at now and wish you had done that differently, perhaps phrased differently?
Peterson: Surprisingly, I don’t. Every once in awhile somebody will write me – it happened a lot earlier – and they’ll ask me about something, question me and I changed it. It wasn’t quite the right way and so in the next edition it was changed. There were not more than fifteen or twenty of those cases.
No, I don’t; that is what makes me feel good. It feels like The Message wasn’t a one-off thing. It was cumulative. I had been living this long enough that I could trust my hunches, my intuitions. The basic linguistic thing behind this is that the Bible is speech. It is not written; it all originated in speech. There is a liveliness about speech that is not in writing. I was really trying, all the time I was doing it, to get this written word to get its voice back, the voice of the Scriptures.
There is too much Bible study these days and not enough Bible living. We’ve got these evangelical churches becoming so scholastic and it has really killed the Bible. The thought of all these people trying to preserve the truth in scripture – which is important to do, I am grateful for their work – but I wish more that we would be concerned about the livability of scripture.
I was talking to a friend not long ago – he is a Pentecostal president of a seminary – and I was saying this. He said, “I am not sure it is true anymore, but in its early days that is what drove the Pentecostal church – that everything is livable. We just take it for granted that it is truth. What we are concerned about is not fighting for the truth, but insisting on the livability.” That is one thing that The Message can convey, that livability. And that is what pastors are for. Pastors are not professors; we are not trying to explain things, defend things and we are in the ball game trying to get people base hits.