Theologians Dont Know Nothing About My Soul

Monday night Sea Bass and I went down to Mob town to see WILCO! We first heard about them in Blue Like Jazz...and let me say...TY very much Donald Miller for introducing us to them. One of my favorite Wilco songs is Theologians. Most of us at Beeson Divinity School are aspiring young theologians, to use a term I first heard eight years ago in Kosciusko Mississippi and only this year did I realize that the beloved Helmut Thielicke was the one who wrote the book Coker and I got that term from. It used to be said that the main function of the preacher was the cure of souls. Are we still in that business? Do we know anything about souls - let alone the cure of souls? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what the Lord has prepared for those who love him.” So, obviously nobody knows anything about what God is going to do in the lives of people, so no one knows anything about the cure of souls. Wow. That sure sounds hopeless. But, look at verse 12. But. Now this is a really big but. I love that word, especially when Paul uses it. Almost every time Paul puts his big but in the middle of a sentence things turn out good. I mean, it looks like it is going to be bad, really bad, and then Paul sticks his big but in there and says, “God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.” This word search can mean to search out or to investigate. When used in the sense of animals it means to sniff out. This is probably why many have called the Spirit the hound of heaven. The hound of heaven is sniffing out your soul but the question still remains. Do we theologians know anything about people’s souls? In Revelation 2:23 in the NIV Jesus says, “I am he who searches hearts and minds.” That word the NIV translates to “minds” (and know that I'm an NIV kind of guy…so I'm not bashing on them) is only found once in the NT. In the LXX (The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) it is found several times, most commonly translated as “kidneys” (Ex. 29:13; cf. 29:22; Lv. 3:4, 10, 15; 4:9, Dt. 32:14). It is translated metaphorically in PS 138:13 as “inmost being”. This is not the brain that the Lord is searching but something much deeper. One writer said that the kidneys are where we filter things out and this filtering system is the part of us that the Spirit looks deeply into because it determines what stays and what leaves our bodies. We have the Spirit of Jesus living inside us, the same spirit that Paul had but what are we doing here to grow in that? Because as I see it, any class here that has the word Spirit in it is pushed to the realm (the ever shrinking and hard to get into realm) of “electives.” Electives? If the class has the word grammar, syntax, translation, exegesis, history, or theology in it, it gets pushed to the front and center and made a “requirement” and a “prerequisite.” I don’t think I want to be known mainly as a theologian because as Wilco says, “theologians don’t know nothing about my soul!” I want to be known as a curer of souls! What do you want to be known as?