Lessons from the pursuit of PhD - Part 2

Just as the graduation ceremony died down, and my wife and son were finished with taking pictures, questions began to flood my mind.  Was it worth the struggles and suffering I put my family through all these years?  Did this degree really change me in anyway?  Would I be different with or without it?  What have I really learned from this?  So on and so forth.

     
      As we drove home, I had begun to show the sign of absent mindedness to my family; I had to find the answer soon in order to join my family to enjoy the evening with.  As we reached home, I had concluded that the suffering I put my family through was more than this degree deserved.  The struggles my son went from changing schools and familiar surroundings, the sleepless nights and worrisome days I put my wife through would never be compensated by me having this degree.  The separations were so costly; the lost family time, the lost vacations together, and the lost opportunity to deepen intimacy between father and son, husband and wife would never return.  My wife was the one who made the greatest sacrifice to educate her husband from the scratch.  Yet, they were absolutely selfless in their suffering and were equally happy and proud to see me finish the line. 

      As for me, it did bring very many changes and has taught me lessons that I wish I learnt them when I was still young, but grateful to the Lord for teaching me eventually.  Lessons such as the 1) Theological clarity, 2) Academic affection, and 3) Character refinement stand out the most.  I attempted to express theological clarity in my earlier post.  

To see the post, click  Theological Clarity  

Today I want to focus on Academic affection.

2) Academic Affection: I was brought up by my maternal grandparents who were devout Hindus.  In the days gone bye when schools were few and far apart in far west Nepal, Brahman families always taught their male offspring to read and write at home.  By the time my grandparents put me in a school (an hour and half away on foot; even today my hometown is untouched by modernization), I had already fallen in love with one of the sacred Hindu scriptures, Devi Bhagwata-Purana (an epic in praise of the power of the creator in the form of a female deity).  After spending a few month in grade one, I was placed in grade three. 

      But this promising start was cut short when I discovered that I had my parents, a brother and many sisters.  My biological parents decided to bring me home, but when I got there, everything felt so strange and alienated and by the time I finished 5^th grade of my schooling, my academic life had come to an end; home was no longer a home to me, it was a prison from which I wanted to escape.  I had developed a serious case of depression and the attachment disorder resulted into a borderline personality disorder (it took me years of study to find out what had happened to me).

      Because I was deeply influenced by Bhagwata-Purana, I always looked beyond the natural world to find explanation for my life; hoping that someday this creator who made me would solve the puzzle of my life.  With that hope, I kept attending the school, but my mind was no longer there and in 9^th grade, I decided to give up on life and gods as well.  Communist revolution that was brewing underground in those days in Nepal appealed to my taste.  And, it was at this time that I read a small booklet titled “A Friend of All”; a collection of stories from the gospel of Luke.  This booklet became the first source of information about the man called Jesus Christ who finally solved the puzzle of my life.  With the spark of the gospel in my heart, I came to stay in my eldest sister’s home who happened to be a secret Christian up until that time.  From there I was able to pass the national board exam that opened the door for the university for me.  But study was not in my mind.  By the time the result for the national board had come out, I had dedicated my life to become a follower of Jesus Christ for the rest of my life.  All I wanted was to read the Bible and be an evangelist.  I became a part of the church that met in my sister’s house.  Having heard of one of their members going to the US for Bible Study (though he abandoned the Seminary and went into other field of study in the US), I approached to the leader (my brother-in-law was the leader) and said “if there is any place in India where I could study the Bible, I would like to go”.  He looked at me with a contemptible look in his face and said “What is the use for a person like you in studying the Bible?  People who study the Bible are good for nothing and they become the most dangerous people for the church.”  That was a very discouraging response from a person who had supported one of his friends to go to the US for the same purpose.   Seeing my determination, he gave me a name of a school in Dehra-Dun, India; Presbyterian Theological Seminary.  He promised to get me there and I waited for the news of my admission into the world of theological studies.  Unfortunately, he didn’t think I was made for education and recommended another of his friends (who is also a good friend of mine now) to go there and told me to get a life by getting some job; I got the job as an elementary school teacher only to be fired after about a year for preaching the gospel to the students and teachers.  The only regret for missing out on PTS was that had I been sent there, I could have met my wife a few years earlier than I eventually did! 

      It so happened that in that town there were two groups of Christians; Pentecostal and Anti-Pentecostal.  I was with the Anti-Pentecostals, and we all were warned not to meet the Pentecostals.  But my curiosity finally led me to the Pentecostals and their powerful worship and Christian boldness immediately captured my imagination on my first visit; they had a visiting preacher from Sri Lanka who preached on the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  He was the first person that I had heard preach about the baptism in the Holy Spirit.  This first encounter with the Pentecostals ignited in me a hunger for the power of the Holy Spirit and in less than six days of meeting with them, in that Friday night at 10:30PM in my single room, the Spirit of God invaded my hungry soul; Jesus filled me with the Holy Spirit in a dramatic way and my life took a different mode of existence since that night.  I did not care if I was not trained theologically.  That night, the call of the Lord to preach the gospel was made crystal clear.  All my psychological disorders disappeared and for the first time I was unafraid, unashamed and determined to live for the glory of God. 

      Finally, the pastor of the Pentecostal church suggested me that I go to a Bible College in South India (the visiting preacher mentioned above happened to be one of the professors of that school).  The admission was secured for me but the Anti-Pentecostal group blocked me from going there and another person was sent in my place.  Twice I was left out and others took my place; I began to wonder whether I was really not made for education (both of the brothers who took my place are still in the ministry!).  It took me another year of waiting to be in that Bible College. 

      This was a Pentecostal school where you were given a heavy dosage of spirituality but with a bare minimum of theology in the proper sense of the discipline.  Critical thinking was discouraged and contrary view points were avoided from the classroom to the dining room.  Any student that disagreed with the official Pentecostal position would be expelled from the school; a close friend of mine lost his three years of Study when his Bachelor of Divinity thesis was rejected because he questioned certain Pentecostal positions. 

      I graduated with a strong sense of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in my life, but from an academic point of view it was a different story; even C.S. Lewis was not Christian enough for us to read.  Karl Barth was a great danger for the Bible and I didn’t even hear the names of the likes of Schleiermacher, Schweitzer and Bultmann.  From the historical perspective, we did hear the names like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others, but only John Wesley came just a bit closer in gaining respect for a Pentecostal like me.  I was naive enough to believe that the academic pursuit can and will quench the Spirit in my life.  Subconsciously, I had to guard my spiritual experiences of the Holy Spirit by limiting myself to the non-academic reading of the Bible. 

      In God’s divine providence, I had to teach in a non-Pentecostal Bible School in Kathmandu.  I felt it was my duty to know what the other side believes and thus began to read the non-Pentecostal writings.  The first of such works was “Charismatic Chaos” by John MacArthur.  This book did not destroy my convictions the way I was told in the college about the Anti-Pentecostal writings; in fact, this book opened my mind as how the non-Pentecostals have misunderstood the Pentecostals.  The next book that really challenged my Pentecostal perspective was “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” by James Dunn (in four year college, this book wasn't even mentioned).  Though I disagreed with Dunn, but he helped me to clarify my personal convictions about the baptism in the Holy Spirit biblically. 

      A desire to study in a non-Pentecostal school led me to South Korea.  It was liberating to know that even if I disagree with the school/professors but have sound academic arguments, I would be accepted and respected.  It was in this school that I fell in love with the thinkers and the theologians of Romantic Era.  I even indulged into Philosophy and Psychology in my personal readings; helping myself in understanding who I was and why I was the way I was. 

      Finally, for my doctoral study, I chose another Pentecostal School and to my surprise, the Pentecostalism of my formative years had gone through a tremendous transformation from being an illiterate ghetto to an open ended and unguarded theism where the danger of total collapse is a real possibility.  As I began my doctoral studies, it downed on me that the very foundational doctrine of the baptism in the Holy Spirit has now become an academic Achill’s heel for any aspiring Pentecostal scholar.  While there is hardly any agreement among the divergent Pentecostal groups about the basic elements of the baptism in the Holy Spirit, some Pentecostal scholars have now relegated the experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit to the non-essential or if not to the irrelevant teachings about Christian life.  My goal as a student was to provide a biblical defense of how I had experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit in that Friday night alone in my room some 30+ years ago.

      The process of writing a doctoral dissertation was very painful, tiresome and discouraging.  My supervisor kept hammering on me for the clarity of my thought and as time progressed, my love for learning spilled over many other areas of life.  Books began to be precious to me and most of my wife’s earnings were spent on them (she was the one working to support me and my son).  Contrary to some of my Pentecostal friends’ fear of studying the opposite views, I have discovered that it is in knowing the opposite views that we strengthen our own views.  There are great many scholars who do not have a clue about what it is to be actually baptized in the Holy Spirit as an experiential reality, and equally there are many Spirit baptized Christians/ministers who do not have a clue about what the others are saying in this regard.  If the scholars could experience the actual baptism in the Holy Spirit as reported in the New Testament, their theology and scholarship would influence the academic world in a powerful way.  In the same way, if the Spirit filled Christians/ministers would be open to listen to others; they would discover an amazing world of aesthetic beauty in the area of art and literature.   Academic with affection touches the head and the heart but without the affection, academic is dry and arid; an academician without the affections of the heart is tasteless and a romantic without the dogmatic knowledge becomes a kite without a string attached to it. Click here for related piece I wrote.

      From these years, I have now learnt to question my own assumptions and to my horror, there were too many assumptions that had to be shaken and shake they did.  Today, beside the Evangelical scholarship in which I wish to find my abode, I confess my respect for individuals like Victor Hugo, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Barth, Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Solzhenitsyn and many others; not just for their genius but for their love of learning and respect for their creator.  I have admiration even for the foes of Christian faith such as men like late Christopher Hitchens whose wit and dark sense of humor were captivating to hear and read; people like him helped me to see the blind spots of religion.  Yet, had I not been through the process of academic refinement, I would still be in the prison of my self-righteous Evangelical ghetto, thinking that these men don’t deserve my attention because they did not believe the way I believed.