Over many centuries, the light of revelation—God's message of hope, salvation, and love—has warmed and illumined the hearts of those who study the Bible. Countless individuals have been healed, have been inspired, and have felt that God's presence has been revealed to them.
At the threshold of the twenty-first century, Biblical scholarship has, like many other academic disciplines, been revolutionized by social and technological change. It is asking new questions, for example in the area of feminist theology; and it is able to uncover and manipulate data in ways that were virtually inconceivable before the development of the computer. As an academic discipline, however, its main concern has not greatly changed over the centuries. Academic Biblical study remains for some scholars an effort to understand God's word and creation largely through the human intellect. For that reason, such Biblical scholarship has a limited usefulness to persons of whatever religious persuasion whose primary concern in reading the Bible is growth in spiritual understanding and regeneration. It can be useful up to a point, just as many other human disciplines are, in drawing lines of thought and making significant distinctions.
But strong spiritual growth cannot be achieved by the human intellect alone. Nor can the human intellect with its harvest of academic treatises on the Bible properly be regarded as the corroborator of revelation. The truth of the matter is quite the other way around. It is revelation and demonstration that authenticate scholarship, illumine it, redeem it from becoming an arid, intellectual exercise, and indicate when it is headed in a fruitful direction.
