Education is easy when it fits the contours of our being. Some are naturally mathematical, some grammatical, others physical, marketable, logical, poetical, ad nauseum. Every person carries in their body and personality skills to benefit their fellow man. A good job should tap those skill, a good education should hone them. Still, an education that simply conforms to the prejudice of one's personality will be hollow or two dimensional. Such an education does not challenge but leads down a path defined by our genes, not our choice. Our lives will be a drip of water always taking the downward path of least resistance never fighting to change course of reach for something higher.

I hate language studies. In elementary school I hated grammar, in middle school I loathed language arts, in high school I languished literature and in college I only failed one course, Greek. So why was I up late last night reading Essential English Grammar and why did I just enroll in two more Greek and Hebrew classes? I need the fight. When education is entertaining I suffer for lack of discipline.

In my life discipline and creativity are at war. No, they are not mortal enemies, but through trickery and crafty deceit I have started a lasting cold war between them. Creativity is my ally against discipline. In high school I had a motto: Do as much work with as little effort as possible. That takes creativity. We had a physics project due one week. We had to transfer water across three types of systems before depositing it in a bucket. My classmates built intricate systems with pullys, sprockets, buckets, cables. I found a way to make it work with a nail, a funnel and a tube. The checkout lady at ACO must have thought I was binging that night. While some students spent weeks, I finished the whole thing in three hours. I lost no water; got a perfect score. Some of my college friends are still paying off student loans. I played with a yo-yo.

I'm not saying I never work hard, I just work hard so I don't always have to, so I don't have to be disciplined. In this unholy allegiance I have forged with creativity sometimes we must use the weapons of the enemy to win the war. And I am happy with the life we have fought for, a life with only intermittent discipline. But sometimes, in the distance, I hear a voice as if a spy has crept into my brain asking, "What if creativity and discipline were allies?" Impossible. The very purpose of creativity is to avoid discipline. But... what if?

Why did I sign up for a 4th semester of post-graduate-level Greek and Hebrew? What if? I will not master these arts without discipline by my side. There is in me nothing that coincides with the study of language. I never used to yell in anger, but I have taken it up this year as a part of my studies. The terms, the vocabulary, the grammar, the tests and the conclusion whenever I translate that the NIV has done a pretty darn good job all tell me you are living backwards, accomplishing little with much work. How can I persist? It is this drug of the unknown that drives me. Everything in me has always told me to turn right. Well, what about left? As soon as I freed myself from the path of least resistance, from my inclination to always turn right, I found that not only could I turn to the left I could also go straight, backwards, up, down or just be still. Before my life was narrowed down to a single direction but I have witnessed a world of possibilities all barely within reach, and only in striving will I experience their benefits. As I pursue the difficult but possible I find that much I held as true about life was the creativity working in me to define a world where my way is always right and best. Once I learned to resist myself I broke free from my presuppositions and saw a new world. Life was once black and white. When I lived in that world I could imaging gray, but only when I reached for the gray did I see color.

So I have learned to love the things I hate. I just took Greek exegesis this summer. I hate exegesis. They taught us to preach exegetically. I hate exegetical preaching.  Nevertheless I poured myself into the study, full of anger and suffering, and I have come out seeing the glory of this skill, a skill I still despise. I hate it because it is hard. It is hard for me. I hate it because I could never preach that way with affect. I hate it because it is not in me to love it. I knew the skills would be difficult for me so I invented reasons why exegesis was useless. But I have seen a glimmer of its value. Will this change my life? No. But I did learn things in a way I never learned before, things I never thought I could grasp. A new door is opening, the door to a harder more arduous life. Dare I peek inside and fight the life of least resistance?

This interested me because today there is only enough room in for one philosophical system. The metaphysic (if I can call it that) of the day is "post modernism" and if you are hip to the jive you will communicate as a post-modern. It's not that your ideas have to adhere to the post-modern mind, they just need to be acceptable to a post-modern reader. If you speak as though you believe in absolutes or in the relevance of faith you will be derided as "oh so last century." The scholar fashion police will be on you before the end of 'bad boys' finishes playing. There is enormous pressure to adhere to the current accepted standards of what constitutes scholarship and evidence. If you prove something the wrong way you will not just be proven wrong, but you will be ousted... kept out of the inner circle of scholarship.

I think this all goes back to the foundations of scholarship, nerddom. All the nerds in middle and high school ever wanted was to fit in and to be frenched by a cheerleader. They were never part of the in-crowd and were perpetually unable to keep up with what was "cool". By the time they figured it out the trend had past and the shirt, pants, hat they bought to help them fit in only served to show how nerdy they were. Their entire scholarly career, up to that point, was defined by social rejection.

Oh how the tables have turned. The world of advanced scholarship is their world and they can now do as they please, or so it seems. My theory is that some how a couple of jocks got into the upper ranks of scholarships and are still playing the same games with the rest of us they played in high school. How did they get to this advanced position, you might ask, as though a bone headed football jock could never become a scholar. Perhaps they were polo jocks. The feminists are the cheerleaders of the intellectual game, no nerd would dare cross them. Either way, the jocks are still in control and all the nerds are just trying to fit in. Nothing has changed, just the social game. Speak against the feminists by suggesting that men and women might be different and your reputation as a scholar will get swirlied by the jocks of the academy. Suggest that evolution doesn't make sense and you won't get invited to that party next week.

Yes, times are changing, but the game remains the same and there is nothing new under the sun. What blows my mind is that the current trends in scholarship are presented as new ideas. It is thought that a certain philosophy becomes fashionable and dominate because it is supported by fact, either in science or in some social study that has been done. This just isn't true. The ideas that we tout as so novel and educated were discussed and dismissed by philosophers thousands of years ago. We do not adhere to a certain way of thought because it is backed up by the facts but because it is in fashion, because the scholar jocks and cheerleaders have told us it is okay to think this way in our advanced age. I am not suggesting that we give up our pursuit of a better system since it has been done before, but we should at least acknowledge that our trends in philosophy are more like trends in music than developments in science. They are based on little more than the current fancy of the public and a few men and women who define what is scholastically cool.