Poverty and a PhD
Image by Candelario Gomez Lopez from Pixabay
We often hear of those who are disadvantaged and miss out as a result. Rarely do we hear about those who rose above their circumstances. Dr. Sam Saldivar has one such story. The child of migrant laborers who picked cotton and packed thirteen people into a house with one real bedroom, Sam valued learning. This love of learning came from a father who quit school in 4th grade to become a farm laborer in Mexico.
Every person is valuable; made in the image of God with a capacity to learn.
What follows is an approximate transcript of a podcast interview with Dr. Sam Saldivar:
[01:01] Mike Gray: Well, welcome today to Sam Saldivar, who is theologically trained with expertise in the Old Testament. Welcome, Sam.
[01:12] Sam Saldivar: Thank you. Shalom!
[01:14] Mike Gray: Thanks for being here today.
[01:16] Sam Saldivar: It's my pleasure.
[01:17] Mike Gray: Let's start with, I guess, a little bit of your journey. How you decided to pursue theology. Are you from the US originally or . . . a little bit of that kind of story.
[01:30] Sam Saldivar: I was born in Harlingen, Texas, to Hispanic, Mexican parents.
[01:40] Mike Gray: Had they immigrated recently?
[01:42] Sam Saldivar: Yeah. So, what happened with that was my mother . . .So, my grandparents on my mom's side used to come over into the States to work the cotton fields.
[01:53] Mike Gray: Okay.
[01:53] Sam Saldivar: And during one of those times, my mom was born in Brownsville, Texas. They grew up in Mexico, right across the border cities Matamoros made infamous recently by the four African Americans who were kidnapped. That's where I grew up. It was very violent. Yeah. So, I grew up in a very poor situation. My parents didn't even live in the city. They lived outside of the city, which gets even more rural. It was dirt floors and palm roofs and that kind of a thing.
So, my parents were born there on a little ranch. When they got married, it was discovered that my mother had US. Citizenship. So, when they first got married, they wanted a lot of kids. They wanted twelve kids. And so, they got married and they prayed for twelve children. And obviously it takes money to be able to support everybody, so there's not a lot of money to be had where they grew up.
So, they moved over into the States, kind of looking for a better situation for their children—kids. So, the Lord granted them their request. There was one miscarriage in there. And so, my dad grew up there in Brownsville. I was born in Harlingen. The Lord saved them when they were in their teen years. So, I grew up in a Christian family. So that's my kind of cultural background. I grew up biculturally. I felt like I was still very influenced by the American culture, but every weekend we'd visit my grandparents, so very immersed in that culture as well, and grew up speaking Spanish and English at the same time, bilingual from the beginning. At our school, they wouldn't let us use our native tongue—no Spanish allowed in Brownsville, Texas. You have to speak English. I wish they would have let us speak more Spanish, because I would have learned it a little better from the beginning.
For some reason, all of us were just naturally successful at school. So, there was a reputation that my siblings left for me when I went into elementary school. They were straight A students, and so when I went through it was another one of these Saldivars. We expect all A's It was a very good private school that because of our status as migrants, we were allowed to attend for free there: Castanieva Elementary. Basically all of my siblings have gone on to pursue either teaching degrees or we have a couple of nursing people in there also. That kind of carried along into my nieces and well, nephews for sure.
So, I grew up there in Brownsville, Texas, and we moved to Florida when I was going into junior high, because what ended up happening there in Texas is we had a small house, had 13 people. It was one and a half bedrooms, one bath,
Mike Gray: one and a half bedrooms?
Sam Saldivar: Yeah, it was one full bedroom and then a little kind of storage space that my sisters used as their bedroom. Our one bedroom we had two sets of bunk beds in there, and we had a queen size bed. So that was my parents’ bed. And the boys were on the two sets of bunk beds in that same room. And then my other half bedroom was for my sisters, so we didn't have a lot growing up. My dad was working a minimum wage type of job. He was the only one working, so that made it challenging, for sure. And so, we moved to Florida, for some of my uncles had heard of better opportunities in Florida, so we went to Florida. And then after about a year of kind of learning what jobs you don't want, there was this misconception that if you're Hispanic, even though you're an American, you automatically go work in the fields. So, we went to work in the fields. That first summer, I was very young, I don't know, around eleven. My first experience there in the fields in Florida doing cucumbers and tomatoes. And then the second time so we came for a summer, and then we came back, and it was kind of like, wait a minute. We don't need to be . . . There are a lot of jobs besides working with—not that there's anything wrong with those jobs—but you can go work at Burger King and flip some burgers. Or for all of us who were in high school and junior high, a lot of my older brother, he got into engineering. Like I said, we were all—the Lord—gave us an ability to understand things quickly from my dad. He quit school when he was in fourth grade. I like to say he did that to pursue an agricultural career. He was in poverty. There in the school system. He wasn't really learning much, and he wasn't enjoying it. So, my grandmother told him, okay, if you're going to quit school, you have to go to work. Okay? So, the fourth grader went to work, and he would bring home beans to put on the table and a little bit of pocket change.
So, he taught himself. He had a really good mind. He was a lifelong learner, and he was just always interested, especially in Bible study. So, the Lord called him to pastor for a season. He was a gifted man in those ways. Even though he didn't have a formal education, he was always learning. I mean, even when I was in college and grad school and teaching, he would call me up with some Bible questions, wondering what a certain historical context was or the meaning of a word. And they always encouraged us to be faithful in school, to work hard, to give our best effort, not to cause any trouble.
When we moved to Florida, I was really good at math, and I thought I would follow my brother's footsteps and be an engineer as well. And so that's where I was headed. I was thriving algebra two, trigonometry, et cetera. And it was around my junior year in high school, summer after my junior year, that the church we were going to took some young people to a Christian camp. First time I was really, really challenged to consider pursuing full time vocational ministry. In my heart, it just seemed like the overwhelming call of God on my life. And so, after that year, I felt God's call to change career paths and pursue ministry in some capacity. I didn't know what that would involve, but some kind of full time vocational, whether it's pastoring or Bible teaching or something like that. I grew up in the public school system up until 11th grade, and then my senior year, I went to a small Christian school. It went from, I think we had like 500 seniors in the public school to four in the Christian school. And so, the academic rigor was not there that academic senior year. But there was a lot of value in just appreciating what Christian schools have, the Christian worldview and being encouraged in your faith. So, the Lord really used that year, even though academically, it was probably not the most profitable, spiritually and socially, it was really good for me. It provided a lot of preaching opportunities. We did a short-term mission trip that kind of fueled that fire for vocational, full time vocational ministry. And that also connected me with Bob Jones University. The pastor of the church attached to the school was a Bob Jones grad, and so he brought me here to visit.
When I came, that's when I knew this was the place. It had a good international flavor. It was a nondenominational place. And I grew up nondenominationally. I mean, I grew up in different denominations, but that was never a thing. So that's kind of my background. I come from extreme poverty, but interestingly, it's like when we consider poverty, somebody always has it worse. So even though I grew up pretty poor by American standards, when I would go into Mexico, there was even more poverty there. And I've seen completely illiterate, uneducated lives, like what that looks like culture, and then kind of every level of, here's what a high school degree looks like. I was the first one from my family to graduate from college. Even though my other siblings were going to college, I just went full time. They were doing Vo-tech and working, so I just plugged right through. I came here and I put myself through school working. And so, I came here as a Bible major, and I was an ancient languages minor. So that math, joy and success that I had kind of converted into language, love of language, ancient languages. I took Latin in High School and I really enjoyed it. And so, when I got into the Greek here in Undergrad, it was fun for me. Greek was not Greek to me. It was enjoyable.
[11:17] Mike Gray: Don't always hear that.
[11:20] Sam Saldivar: So, I enjoyed the torture. And I also took Hebrew my senior year. So, there was this unknown, unspoken ancient languages minor that was available, and I took that track. And it was about my sophomore year that the Lord used a couple of guest speakers in some of my Bible classes to really challenge me to consider pursuing a PhD. The thinking of those speakers went something along the lines of, okay, if you go to a medical doctor, you consider his education. He has to go to school at least twelve years and then do some practice. You wouldn't want to go to somebody who didn't do his homework, who didn't know his anatomy, who didn't know what he was talking about— was just winging it. You want to go to somebody who's highly qualified and has a good reputation. And so, the illustration that was given was, okay, if we expect that much of a medical doctor, what about spiritual doctors, people who deal with God's word and people's lives? Shouldn't they prepare themselves as much, if not more so? That really hit home to me.
And another challenge was just the illustration of the kinds of tools that would be available to you depending on your career, your education choices. So, it's like, okay, if you're a farmer, it's nice to have a shovel. You can do a lot with a shovel. But what if you could have a lawnmower or something, something mechanical that could assist you in your work? And that was kind of compared to like a master's degree. So, the undergrad was a shovel, the master's was the lawnmower. And then PhD is like having a tractor, a big tractor, as far as how much work you're able to do, how many tools are at your disposal. So those illustrations really hit home with me. And when you consider the examples of Moses and Isaiah and Paul and even Jesus himself who the way God worked in their lives is they didn't start as novices right into ministry. They had years and years of training and preparation before they got into ministry.
I took that view and I said, okay, I need to get a PhD in something in Biblical studies. And as I considered my Bible, about 77% of it is Old Testament, and most of it is foreign to people. And so, I'm like, we're missing something here. We need to study our Old Testament. People don't understand what it's about, and it's most of our Bible. And I've never really heard a lot of good teaching from the Old Testament personally, so my own understanding was lacking. And so, I decided my sophomore year here, Bob Jones, to pursue a PhD in Old Testament interpretation.
[14:11] Mike Gray: So, you could have gone down the scholarship road, but you decided to move—simultaneous, because you can't divorce scholarship from pedagogy—but into a classroom environment that presents another set of challenges that aren't necessarily completely the same as those who completely devote themselves to research and scholarship. So, what motivated the desire to get in the classroom?
[14:38] Sam Saldivar: I didn't initially plan to get in the classroom. I initially planned to go to the mission field. My first thought was, I'm going to start a church somewhere in a Spanish speaking country, but I want to have kind of like a Pauline influence. I want to not just start a church, but put overseers over the first church I start, and then go start another church, put overseers there, and then move on, do a Pauline kind of approach to missions. And then as I thought about it, I said, probably I should have a central place of training for pastors, like something like a seminary. And right around that time period, I had some friends of mine who were already involved in a Christian college working on developing a seminary in a Spanish speaking country, and they asked me to come and be their Old Testament guy. And I initially had agreed to do that.
By the time I got done with my work, several of those guys were not there. And the influence on that ministry from unfortunately, as you grow up, you kind of realize that politics can affect a lot of places, spills over. That was not going to be the best environment for me. But thankfully, I was about one year away from finishing my doctoral work. A position opened up here at the school where I could start teaching full-time in the Bible department. And I kind of took it initially, not planning long-term, but thinking, I'm going to be here, so might as well, while I'm working on this, start my career and see how this goes. And so that first year was very rigorous and it was challenging in many ways. I had first year teaching, I had eight different classes and six different preps, so it was quite a start and trying to finish up my dissertation that first year. But I really enjoyed it. And there were also opportunities that I took to go to the mission field and help pastors with teaching block courses. So, as I thought about it, it seemed like, I'm going to keep doing this, I'm enjoying it. And this is not in the language or the place that I thought it would be, but I'm going to give it a shot. I'm enjoying it and I want to be for my students what a couple of my favorite Bible professors were for me, where they really emphasized the Scripture primarily as the sole authority for faith and practice.
I was very humbled to realize that I ended up taking the same classes that my heroes taught. Now I was teaching those classes and I'm like, whoa, I'm not worthy to be in this place.
[17:37] Mike Gray: How do you think the experience of taking Bible in an academic course should differ from personal Bible study or a group of people in the church getting together for group Bible study or even listening to sermons? There's something different about the classroom. Is that right?
[17:57] Sam Saldivar: When we go to Sunday school and when we sit under preaching, I think, rightly, we have a very submissive mindset, and it can almost become a passive one. We're supposed to listen and absorb and just allow God's word to change us. A lot of times that comes, we receive it, but we don't really challenge anything. That's said, we don't really oftentimes go deeper with what's presented to us. At least that's the way I grew up. The pastor is the authority. He is God's man. He preaches the word—a lot of times with great volume and intensity. He knows the way and I just say, yes, Lord, unquestioning. And I follow everything that's said to me.
So that's one danger of not studying the Bible for myself in an academic way. I think another challenge is we tend to divide the Bible into something that's purely spiritual. It kind of makes the Bible be almost like a book of spells or a book of magic where it's inherently powerful. Any little part of it is powerful. So, if you could just take a line from it and just speak it, something magical is going to happen in your life or in somebody else's life. So, we tend to that's kind of the dangers, I guess, of growing up in just listening to it and not having academic rigor.
A difference that happens when you study the Bible academically is that you are giving weight to the nature of the Bible. The Bible is literature. The Bible was written as literature. It's not written as a book of spells. It's not written as a textbook. It's not written as a book of theology. It is written as a story. And stories are complicated. So, when you come into an academic setting, what you're trying to figure out is the Bible is a work of literature that I need to dig deep into. I need to study, like, who are these people? Where are these places? When did this happen? As you start studying the Bible, there's so much, so many fields of learning that it introduces you to as it tells the story. And if you're a curious mind in an academic setting, then you have all these questions that you want answered and you're not satisfied with, okay, I'm going to believe something just because the pastor said it, or just because my parents taught it, or just because that's what was said. In Sunday school, you say, okay, that's great that that was said, but I need to have a reason. I need to have personal understanding behind these things that have been taught to me.
So, you're going deeper. You're looking at a lot of the background, your study. You have to study language if you're really going to understand. So, most of us grew up in whatever native tongue we grew up with. We grew up reading that language and that translation. But the Bible wasn't written in English or Spanish. They were written in Hebrew, classical Hebrew, and Aramaic and Greek. And so, what you discover as you start studying the Bible from an academic approach is that there's a lot more here. It's easy enough for a child to understand, but it's deep enough for the brightest minds to spend an entire lifetime and still not quite have most of it figured out. I mean, you got some of it figured out a little bit, but there's a lot there.
[21:50] Mike Gray: So it sounds like you are not content with what we sometimes call the model of teaching as telling and learning as remembering. At least that's where you are now. Have you always been there?
[22:03] Sam Saldivar: I grew up my first opportunity for Bible teaching was in high school, and I taught eight-year-old boys. And not too academically, not highly academic, but what I realized early on is when you're teaching, there's something transformative that happens to you as a teacher, or it should, especially if you're teaching God's Word. I'm teaching eight-year-old boys certain lessons from the Bible, and what's really going on is God is working on me and he's showing me what I need to change. So, I think that in any honest presenter of God's Word, and I think God's Word tells us this, if we start teaching His Word, we're going to be held to a higher standard because we're telling people what to do, but we're supposed to be doing that.
And I think that's kind of at the core of genuine learning in every field, that it's one thing to repeat something that was given to you and it's quite another thing to understand it. We've all probably had “teachers”, teaching us things, but we could tell that they did not really understand what they were saying, and it actually made it more confusing for us to try. But they were into the I'm just going to tell you all this information. This is what in some cases, I've had teachers read the textbook to me because that's the model that they have in their thinking that, okay, here are this set of facts, and I'm just going to repeat them to you. What's wrong with you? Why don't you get it? I gave you all the information. Just remember it and you'll understand.
[23:47] Mike Gray: Manuscripting a lecture.
[23:49] Sam Saldivar: Yes, just reading their notes to you. And that's frustrating. So, when I first started teaching, I had all this incredible lot of facts about the Old Testament. One of the requirements for our studies was to memorize the chapter content, basically almost every chapter of the Old Testament. So, I spent several months, 16 hours a day, just memorizing data. And when I started teaching, I found a lot of that data fascinating. And I started unloading on my students, and that wasn't working very well. There was a glazed look on their faces. And I had done ministry with children and young people where basically the best times with them, the best times were when they were engaged, when you had their attention and their excitement. And when you're teaching that way, you really don't have any behavioral issues because you've captured their minds and hearts and they're engaged. And I wanted to bring that into the classroom. So, after halfway through that first semester of teaching, I realized I had to change a lot of things in my approach. I can't just get up there and read through my lecture notes and put up the PowerPoints and have them memorize all these facts and repeat them on the test. That was not really reaching their lives or changing their minds.
[25:15] Mike Gray: For some of our listeners who are believers, the idea of hiding God's word in our hearts, that we might not sin against God is like, okay, so that's Bible memory. Is that the way you view hiding God's Word in your heart?
[25:37] Sam Saldivar: I do think it is essential to put God's word in your mind and in your heart. I think the way we do that is very important. In other words, the Pharisees were probably the Bible experts as far if there were a Bible trivia challenge, the Pharisees would nail it. They knew all the minutiae that was their life, but they weren't doing what God was calling his people to do as far as hiding, treasuring His Word in their hearts. So, I think what God intends for us to do is to move beyond just mere recollection of His Word to a treasuring.
There are some people who really struggle with memory, but what I found is those people that struggle with memory tend to learn something better, deeper and longer because it's such a struggle, whereas people who have a good memory, they could just immediately remember it, but it doesn't affect them. It doesn't change the way they think or who they are. I've found people who struggle with memory, they need a why more than people who don't. And so, I think what God wants us to do when He's calling us to treasure His Word, to hide it in our hearts, is to go through that process of struggle. And what that's doing is it's shaping our thinking. It's changing our heart. It's pointing out where we need to change. It's highlighting how great He is, who He is.
Okay, I remember for the test, and I'm done with it, kind of memorization. It's a I remember it and I kind of understand it, but I need to go back to it and review and put it in there again. And that process, it's not the actual remembering of facts that's doing anything for me. It's how it's changing me as a person. And so meaningful, maybe meaningful memorization, transformative memorization. But the mind has to be engaged and the heart is engaged, and it ends up changing you. When you do it the right way, you don't come out of Pharisee. You come out more humble rather than know it all. Yeah.
[28:08] Mike Gray: In education, we often talk about, “so what's the learning outcome?” What am I trying to accomplish with the teaching that I'm doing? And that passage says I hide God's word in my heart that I might not sin against God, which indicates not just recalling some truth, but there's the wrestling in my soul at the moment that I want to sin because I'm still a sinner, even if I'm God's child. And there's something going on in my heart that's the product of that wrestling that says, how could I do that? Because— and then I'm rehearsing truth that has transformed my thinking. So, yeah, it would be simplistic to say that just drilling down with Bible verses that you've memorized will result in that learning outcome.
You mentioned a little while ago that Scripture is a narrative, and I think a lot of people miss that too. Pastors that I know maybe a decade ago went to Germany and so they kind of went on a tour of churches. The way they were presenting the Bible was the Bible is a narrative from a garden to a city. And this is like totally out of the realm of any kind of preaching or experience. Did you make this up? It was illuminating to think of the Bible as a connected story rather than a whole bunch of different books written in different styles and different periods of time by different individuals, almost like it's an anthology of some sort. Actually there's some strong connection between the books that I might use to actually master Bible. So how do you use the reality that the human brain is actually wired for narrative, which I'm sure is the reason why the Bible is written in narrative, because we're the audience that it was written to speak to. So how can you use the reality that the Bible is wired for narrative, for stories, to produce deep and lasting theological knowledge and students as life changing, as transformation?
[30:28] Sam Saldivar: It's interesting that when God gave us His Word, He doesn't give us a book of laws. He doesn't give us a theological textbook, scientific textbook. The majority of the Scriptures is made up of stories and poems. We, as humans are wired to want to hear stories. Children love stories read to them, love stories told to them. Even made-up stories. Make up a story. I want to be entertained. That's who we are. When we sit down at lunch with friends, unless it's a technical discussion of our profession, we normally relate stories to each other. How's your day? Well, here I go. I'm going to tell you a story, and if I just relate facts to you, you're not interested. There's an immediate shut off, and we just start communicating facts to each other that have no story attached to them.
One of the blessings to me of Scripture, and this kind of became a strong emphasis when I was going through my doctoral work, is engaging in a literary analysis of Scripture to give the Bible the respect it deserves by treating it as what it is. It's a story. I think sometimes we're concerned about when you say the Bible is a book of stories, that can sound bad because we assume that because it's a story, it's not true. But it's a book of historical narratives. It's a book of true stories, stories that actually happened. They're communicated to us in a way that we can relate; in a way that's not going to answer all our questions. And that kind of invites us to study further. Like, why did he say that? Why did he not say that? Why is this detail, mentioned in this story? Why is it said here? Why are certain things left unanswered?
As I started teaching and trying to figure out a way to get my students engaged a little bit more, that's something that I really wanted to challenge them with. That in the same way that I would never pick up a book or even a show or a movie and randomly pick a page. Here's a 500-page book. Let me randomly flip through it. Where does my finger land? Page 325, the second paragraph. I'm going to read two lines, close the book. I'll come back tomorrow and do that again randomly. That's not the way we read books. We start at the beginning, go to the middle, and then go to the end. Neither would we take a movie and just randomly say, I'm going to go to minute 76 and 15 seconds and watch a two-minute section of the movie. Stop it. Let's do this again tomorrow. There's no context to what's happening. And so that's the way the Bible is given to us, is given to us as a whole story that has a beginning. As a matter of fact, when the Bible starts in the beginning, when you say in the beginning, you're assuming that there's going to be an end, that's a powerful way in which you can take all of this data that the Bible does contain. I mean, it's full of information, but that overarching story gives it all meaning.
So, what's the Bible all about? Well, I like your summary of what the scripture is. Another one is this idea of the creation, the fall and then redemption. God creates a perfect, beautiful world. He has his vice-regent in place, and then there's this fall. And so, the rest of the Bible story is about God redeeming this fallen creation with revelation. We have a garden in the beginning with gold and a river, and there's a lot of fine gold in that first garden. But when we get to the end, we have this other garden like place with streets of gold and another river there. There's a tree of life at the beginning and at the end. And so, there's this nice story. And at the center of the story is Jesus. He is the one who can take a fallen world and restore it. And all of the stories of Scripture point to Him. All of the stories of Scripture are related in some way. It could be either like kind of a prefiguring of things that Jesus is going to do. It could be kind of God preparing the way for Him to come historically or through a lineage, but it's all in some way related to Him. Jesus is the center of the story. He's the key that unlocks the mystery to what the Bible means. All things are of Him and through Him and for Him, to Him be the glory.
So, kind of having not only just the Bible is a story, but the Bible's all about God. The Bible's not all about me. So, when I go to read the Bible, it's not what can I get for myself kind of mindset. It's what does God say about Himself? And it's in the act of engaging the Scripture and focusing on God that I'm transformed. I mean, there's just something that changes. And I think that's another reason that God gave us stories, because these stories just change us. I think we've probably all been moved to tears by stories we've seen or read or even a testimony of something that God did in somebody's life because we can relate to things. We see ourselves in these characters. We see our flaws; we see God's grace. And so, there's just something beautiful and transformative about stories. And that's how God has made us.
[36:39] Mike Gray: You've hinted at something that I think maybe would be helpful if we made it more explicit. You talked about the need to wrestle personally with Scripture. I think a lot of people avoid the wrestling process by looking at authoritative sources, commentaries, whatever. A student might say, “why should I wrestle?” There are experts who have already wrestled, and I can just consult the products of their wrestling and be good. Other people might even say, I'm not sure that wrestling is a good idea because the Bible just needs to be respected. When I start questioning the Bible, I'm probably in dangerous territory. So, I've asked you a bunch of questions kind of simultaneously, but I think they all are kind of interwoven. What's your reaction to that?
[37:41] Sam Saldivar: I think, unfortunately, a lot of times students come to Bible classes, they assume and sometimes explicitly will tell me, we already know all the answers. I grew up in Sunday school. My dad's a pastor. He said, this is the answer. Or we had this expert come in and speak on his subject. And that's the answer. A big question I asked him is, well, what is your authority on why, as a believer, do you believe what you believe? Do you believe it because your dad said so? Because your pastor taught it? Because you read it in some book somewhere? Or do you believe it because that's what the Bible actually says? So, my challenge to students is, don't assume that because you've heard something your whole life. (This goes back to what I said earlier about you grow up and as a believer, when you finally submit yourself to the Lord, you submit to your authorities. It can be done almost in an unquestioning. Everything they told me must be Bible and can't be questioned. Otherwise, in some way, I must be rebelling against God's authority.) That's not the way Jesus ministered.
Jesus invited the questioning of the Bible, questioning of the text. What is it actually saying? If we just say the experts have figured it all out or I shouldn't question the text, then we're not really going through the struggle that God wants us to have, and we're giving authority to other humans. The experts have figured it out. That kind of approach assumes the experts are the ultimate authority. If they didn't say it, then it must not be true. And so, I'm trying to get my students to go back to the Scriptures. I'm a big fan of Sola Scriptura. We get in trouble when we leave it up to the experts as far as never thinking through how they got to their conclusions or assuming that every single thing they say is going to be precise.
[40:02] Mike Gray: That's why the Reformation was necessary.
[40:05] Sam Saldivar: Yes. And so, God has given us His word. He's made it simple enough for us to understand. He's given us the Holy Spirit, who is going to teach us and is going to help us in that process of wrestling. And Jesus himself. He asked Nicodemus, he said, you're a teacher of the Old Testament, you're a teacher of the Bible, and you don't understand that a man must be born again. Basically. Jesus expected Nicodemus and other Bible teachers to be asking questions of the text and not just to take a superficial —the authorities have stated. And he's also doing the same kind of thing when he says, you've heard it said by the experts. But I say to you, and what he's doing there is he's not changing the Old Testament. He's challenging some of the ways it's been interpreted as if the Old Testament doesn't contain anything relating to the heart. I mean, the Book of Deuteronomy is full of exhortations regarding the heart. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind. It was there all along. The gospel was there all along the Old Testament.
When we challenge our students to wrestle with the text, it's not in a “I don't believe the Bible kind of way.” It's the Bible has to be my sole authority for what I believe and what I practice. And if I do something or believe something just because the experts said it or my pastor said it or my parents said it, that's not sufficient. It's a bad answer. It hasn't done anything to my heart. At some point in our lives, we're going to get to a point where we're teaching God's word to somebody else and our students are going to ask us questions, and it's not going to fly to say, here you are, a 50-year-old Bible teacher. 50-year-old Bible teacher, “Why do you believe this?” “Because my dad said so.” That doesn't quite fly. That's not a sufficient reason.
So, you need to wrestle through personally with the text, and that's going to change you, and it's going to give you a better understanding of what's there and it's transformative. So, I'm challenging my students to come to their own conclusions, to believe what they believe from the Scriptures because they've personally wrestled with those things.
I was a little disturbed this past semester when one of my students, one of the questions on one of the assessments was, what new idea or give something new that you've learned about the Holy Spirit after studying through the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in doctrines class. He said, “I've learned nothing new.” And then I had another student who said he had taken the class doctrines twice, and this was his third time through. He's a pastor’s kid, and he already knows everything. He told me at the end of semester when he had failed yet again and is looking for a few points to get by. Obviously, there hasn't been true learning that has happened in those cases.
Why do we believe what we believe? Well, it's all in the Scripture, and we personally need to wrestle with it. And that actually is a more respectful treatment than just to say we're not going to worry about what it says. The experts have it all figured out and I’m just going to go with what they said.
[43:34] Mike Gray: Transformational learning is what I'm all about on this podcast. And what you're indicating is that it's not different in principle when we approach scripture. Because what we're talking about is the title of the podcast: Deep and Durable learning. It's lasting learning. It's learning that changes your perspective. And in this case, there's an eternal consequential dimension to that transformation. I mean, God's made our minds to function in a certain way and ownership of knowledge is necessary to get to understanding and ultimately to wisdom that makes the right decisions amid the complexities of life. It’s been very helpful, Sam. I appreciate the time that you've given us and I appreciate your approach to teaching in the classroom. May you prosper and teach for many more years!
[44:41] Sam Saldivar: Thank you.