Is Book Knowledge All You Need?
While living in Texas, near Southwestern Adventist University I was good friends with a theology student and his wife. They just had a new baby when I called one evening. The husband was quick to get off the phone with me. I thought nothing of it, but apparently he thought he owed me an explanation when he called back the next night.
He explained he had an argument with his wife when I called. His wife was trying to breastfeed but wasn’t succeeding and was becoming frustrated. He then started instructing her how to breastfeed, and she became very angry at him. I asked him, “How in the world can you tell your wife how to breastfeed?” His answer was the classic example of how some people overestimate book knowledge when he very authoritatively responded, “I read it in a book!”
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There are some things you just can’t learn in a book. A book might make you smart, but it can’t make you compassionate, understanding and caring, and those are very important traits in a Christian missionary.
Around the same time, I talked to another theology student who was telling me how wise his grandfather was but then lowered his head in disappointment and said, “but he never got a degree, so all of his knowledge was wasted.”
Degree or no degree, knowledge is never wasted. Too many confuse a degree with an education. There are actually many people who are educated through personal studies and practical experience who do not have degrees, and there are people with degrees who have no practical knowledge. And, of course, there are plenty of people with both practical and theoretical knowledge. Those are the best!
It has been many years since that night I called my friend in Texas. He has gone on to become a wonderful pastor and an even more gracious, caring and understanding husband and father. He has learned some great things from books, but it has taken more than books for him to learn to be caring, compassionate and understanding. It takes experience. It takes time alone with God in prayer as well as reading the Good Book.
When I am encouraging a Bible student who is discouraged with doubt and disappointments, they will listen a little as I quote Bible promises, but they really become attentive, when I tell them how I have applied those verses in my life when I too have been disappointed and discouraged.
I can easily understand why my friend’s wife got so frustrated with him when he was trying to instruct her because of what he had read in a book. Book knowledge is great, but it is pretty useless unless you yourself have put it into practice and succeeded. And I seriously doubt my friend ever put that book knowledge on breastfeeding into practice! Therefore with all the book knowledge in the world, he had no right instructing his wife how to nurse their baby. Likewise, unless we are putting Bible teaching into practice we cannot expect others to listen to us.
