STEPHEN: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the unique blessing it is, not just to go deep in God’s Word on your own, but as one man among a group of men progressing through the course of study at Bethlehem as part of a cohort, a band of brothers doing it together as you sharpen each other. What was your experience of that? 

ALBERTO: The best learning is done in community. No doubt about that. And the way others shape you and you shape others is invaluable. During seminary David and I were roommates, and I have memories of time that we studied together, that we prayed together, that we cooked together, and we discussed things together. I have memories with Ben, another brother, and I have memories of Simon and as I shared before, Simon was crucial. The Lord used Simon to bring me up and to just wake me up to the fact that God was blessing me through the difficult study of Hebrew. Some of the best things have come out of rubbing shoulders with my brothers, not only in the learning, but what we are after the learning. It’s not just accumulating knowledge, it’s becoming somebody. That’s what we are after. We want to become better than what we are. We want to leave a certain education, a certain school, a certain degree not just with a paper in our hands, not just with more information and a list of books that we have recorded on a spreadsheet of how many pages we read, or an amount of authors that we remember, we want to be different people. And that happens when you pursue this kind of education with this kind of people. 

DAVID: Do you remember the 6:30 a.m. breakfast that we’d have while working through Hebrew flashcards together? That is something that you can’t do online: eight guys coming together, having breakfast and going through dozens of Hebrew flashcards. I think one thing I’d add is that when I came into seminary, to put it just plainly, I thought I was smarter than I am. And one of the ways I found out that I’m not as smart as I am was that I had other guys around me who, when they heard me articulate and talk about things there would be puzzled looks,  questions, or pushback, which was so valuable. It’s not something I came in expecting, but it wouldn’t have happened in the same way if I would have just been in an online chat room with other students. 

MATT: I also benefited from the camaraderie and the love and the friendship, but I want to hone in on the reality of academic rigor with a band of brothers. I think that being in a small cohort of men who love the Lord is so helpful in that you get to sharpen each other, you get to debate each other, and you get to do that in and outside the classroom in a way that you just can’t do it if you’re in a very large class or you’re doing it online. And not only with that, but after that first year or so you know these brothers personally. You understand their theology, their grammar, their Christian tradition, so you are no longer going over the fundamentals in debating these things like you would be if you were in random classes with random people. You can go deeper so much faster because you have a theological and personal understanding of someone. That, for me, was so helpful. I learned so much from my professors, and I probably learned just as much by interacting with brothers who are much smarter and clearer than I am. And that was invaluable. 

STEPHEN: I’ll add another angle on this. Learning in community at Bethlehem is invaluable for how well it prepares us for pastoral ministry on a team of elders. As group of men, all of us are pastors now and I assume we all are on some kind of team with a plurality of elders. I’m just trying to imagine myself, in seminary, preparing for ministry, online or in isolation, in a context that did not allow me to grow to appreciate these other men’s strengths and mine in relation to them. This education has been such a blessing as it has set me up to be on a team of men and to learn to appreciate their strengths. When it comes to shepherding a flock together, there are weaknesses that I bring to the table, and strengths that they bring to make up for those weaknesses that I wouldn’t have known without this education. 

ALBERTO: If I may add one last thing, the words of the Psalmist say how good it is for brothers to dwell in unity. And I think there’s something special about it. It pleases the Lord when some of his sons come together to learn and discuss holy things in unity. It is a pleasing aroma.

DAVID:  It’s like oil on the beard.

ALBERTO: Amen.

ALBERTO: So, brothers, we have discussed how we have come to Bethlehem, and what kind of students we were before coming to seminary and how seminary has shaped us to be a certain kind of student. How would you say then that time at Bethlehem has prepared you to become a life long learner and student of the Word of God? 

DAVID: Two things come to mind. These are things that maybe I’m not very conscious of that I’ve been shaped by, but as time goes on, I realize that I do something differently than I used to, or something is sharper than it used to be. One of the things is being on the anvil again and again of having to write papers and articulate things for knowledgeable wise professors who are going to give you feedback. And some of my papers were just full of markings when I got them back. It looks a little bit scary. But that process, again and again of, here’s a question, here’s a prompt, here’s a ten page paper where you have to talk about some massive topic. It causes you to have to articulate that again and again, and it shapes how you think about speaking in a clear way that people can understand. And so that’s one thing that comes to mind. And then another one is the aspect of going to a passage where you’re looking for what the author intended to communicate. It was maybe vaguely on my mind that this was important before coming to seminary, but it was pressed in again and again while I was in seminary. There are a lot of good directions you might go in a sermon. And to sink into that and then draw whatever implications for the church. But that was just a repeated thing that was sounded throughout seminary and I don’t think I realized, you know, how much it was kind of affecting how I read the Bible until probably afterwards. 

STEPHEN: I would say the week in, week out preaching of the Word. I’m the main preaching pastor at our church. So I am in the text every week, and it is so sweet to start out the week in the original languages. We’re preaching through Genesis right now and I am week in and week out reading God’s Word as he gave it and marinating in it, lingering over it, steeping your soul in it as he gave it, in order to do your best to determine why Moses would structure the book the way he does. Why did he include these details here? Why is this portion an inversion of exactly what happened two chapters ago? Reading in English, I’m so prone, whether by pride or whatever it might be, to fly through the passage. I will come to it with the idea that I’ve been on my Bible reading plan for several years now so I’ve read Genesis a few times and I know what this passage is about. But to week in, week out, start your sermon preparation, slowly and joyfully working your way through the passage as God gave it in the Hebrew or in the Greek is just a sweet way to linger over God’s Word, and it just shapes you. It shapes you in a way that is deeper and more profound, than just kind of flying through it over the surface in English, at least for me.

DAVID: It forces you to slow down. 

MATT: What I love is that if there is a topic that I want to dig deeper into, that at Bethlehem, we have acquired some of the skills as well as the resources to find some of the best work on those topics and to be able to mine them here and there, sometimes going over them quickly, sometimes more deeply. And I have found that very helpful, because now I know where to look for good things, and I know what I don’t know, and where I can find that assistance. In preaching, I love that most weeks, I’ve generally learned how to handle most passages very well. Like you were saying Stephen, I start off with prayer, I work through the passage in English, and then work through the biblical language multiple times, using some of the techniques we used. So this could be different types of discourse analysis, with phrasing, or with arcing, to understand the author’s intent or the proposition they’re making. And I find that it’s when I am eighty to ninety percent done that I typically go to the commentaries, which are helpful, and sometimes they help correct me as I’m still learning. But I love that most of the time I’m able to get a really decent grasp of God’s Word and have a heart to want to communicate that to people. I have learned these skills at Bethlehem, as well as the art and the science of communication that has helped me preach so much better. And it’s a lot better than my eisegesis where I’m bringing stuff to the text. Instead I’m really trying to draw out what is actually there, and it’s been such a blessing. 

STEPHEN: What you said at the beginning reminded me of one of our professors that said that the books that he would have us read are like tools. For pastors, books are our tools. And so like any good carpenter or other tradesman, he knows the tools that he needs to use in order to accomplish the work that he’s been given to accomplish. Well, so with us. To spend five hours just dipping yourself into Charnox’s The Existence and Attributes of God and realize that’s a book that I’m going to come back to the rest of my life; to be amazed at who God is and my utter inability to comprehend him, and to help communicate that better to my people. There are just hundreds of books like that, hundreds of tools that our professors exposed us to in order to set us up for a lifetime of pursuing greater knowledge of, enjoyment of, and obedience to God for the sake of His glory in our churches. 

MATT: And so no longer are you using a hammer to try to hammer in a screw. You learned how to use a screwdriver and then an electric screwdriver. But some of these tools, you can use them the wrong way and just have terrible conclusions, which is just not only unfortunate for us, but devastating to the people that we’re trying to help. We know the tools exist, but we’ve never been trained on them. It’s just so helpful and to have that hands on approach. So we’re not merely reading it or learning it, you know, via video, but we’re really getting to be with other brothers, with professors that know these tools in and out, and they can say, like, hey, put your hand here, let me show you how to do it. Don’t cut off your finger. This is how you use it. And we can cut the Word of God straight. 

ALBERTO: I add only two things to that. One is the love of learning. What I came out of Bethlehem was this idea that I wasn’t fully content with what I had gotten. Not because it wasn’t good, but because reality is way bigger than what I could learn and know in four years. And so I want to continue. That’s a great desire in my heart to continue to understand the world that God has made through the Word that he has given. And to pursue both of those in the right order, Word and world. And the second is that I’m not content anymore with English or Italian alone. I opened the Bible and I want to know what he says in the Hebrew, what he says in the Greek, what he says in the Septuagint, what he says in the Latin Vulgate. What is the translation? The history of translation has impacted the way that we understand a word, how to understand the Scripture, the way it was given to the people was given for our benefit and the benefit of our people. So that is two things I would add.

DAVID: So out of that study, we’ve learned better, I trust, to articulate what we’re reading and what we’re understanding. So, how has it been, since then, after this rigorous reading and study, learning how to be able to teach, preach, express what you’ve read?

STEPHEN: One of our professors, Andy Naselli, talked about that what we were doing in seminary was digging deep wells from which we can draw water from the Word, not only for ourselves and our own souls,  but to water the flock that God has entrusted to us. So the mountainous reading that we did in all of our classes, the precise exegetical skills that we learned in Greek and Hebrew and all the rest serves the end of helping us see and savor more of God in his Word, so that we can help our people do that as well. I especially learned that communication is immensely important, one that I think the Bethlehem professors are so helpful in making clear. They want us to be exact and precise with our words as we communicate what we see in God’s words to others, to our people, for his glory.

MATT: You know, I’ve seen some other friends that came from other seminaries, and they focused a lot on their homiletics, their rhetorical skills, and how to craft that beautiful sermon. And I know that sometimes I felt a little frustrated because I’m not as good at that, but what I love is that we had such a deep dive to the reality of the text, and I love that skill of honing our exegesis, reading well, and understanding what we’ve read, and then being able to exult over that to our people. The pastoral instincts and the rhetoric, that can come over time, but the skill of being able to really see the words, the grammar, the propositions as they penetrate reality, and then communicate that to other people with a seriousness has been invaluable, and I wouldn’t trade that for all the homiletical skills in the world.

DAVID: The languages are a huge part of that. When I came to seminary, I was, for some reason, thinking, languages are just a small part of this, and I thought I’d just kind of skip through it. And I got into Dr. Beckman’s Hebrew class and looked at all of this writing that I thought, there’s no way I’m going to ever understand what any of this means. But after semesters of being in those classes, I started to really cherish the time that we had, and now it’s affected the way that I approached the Bible. In preaching, one of my first steps is to print out a little page of if the passage in the Old Testament Hebrew or New Testament Greek, and it adds a layer of confidence in being able to teach and preach what I’m going to focus on, what I’m going to highlight, what I’m going to emphasize to the people in our church. So certainly changed the way that I go about studying the Scriptures and teaching them. 

ALBERTO: Communication is art and skill, and art and science. There are two aspects of that. And the art is difficult to teach, but the science can be taught. And I think what Bethlehem has helped me to do is to hone down some of the ability to communicate better, and to communicate more clearly. Why? Because words matter, and because words shape. They even shape reality, actually. The way we think about things, what we portray before people, the way we speak about the Lord, the way we speak about the Scripture, the way we speak about life and the way we communicate that, that does not just to come across to the mind, but also to the heart. The Word is a double-edged sword, and it pierces through bone and marrow. And the way it does that is through the means that God has chosen, namely his preachers. And so preachers need to be able to speak and think and write. And Bethlehem has helped me do that.