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Saturdays at Seven Conversation Series

“Laziness Does Not Please the Almighty” ft. Westmont College’s Sandra L. Richter I Saturdays at Seven – Season Three, Episode Thirty-One

By April 18, 2026No Comments

Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify

In the thirty-first episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Sandra L. Richter, the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. Richter begins by sharing how the details through which Old Testament (and New Testament) scholars are called to sort can be of benefit to their fellow scholars as well as to the Church. While those details rarely make it to parishioners, Richter claims scholars can develop the skillset that allows them to share those details without compromising their complexity. Such efforts demand discipline, creativity, and an eagerness to interact with a variety of audiences but such efforts, Richter believes, are well worth it. Richter then goes on to explain how she came to develop such an understanding of the academic vocation—one that came as much as the result of planning as a willingness to embrace opportunities as they surfaced. Such opportunities, for example, led her and her family to live in the Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest, and out on the West Coast. Over the course of those years, she developed habits that allowed her to write monographs and group Bible studies as well as mentor scholars and parishioners. Richter then closes by discussing the virtues Old Testament scholars need to cultivate in order to make such efforts as well as the vices they need to be ready to confront.

Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Our guest is Sandra L. Richter, the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. Thank you for joining us.

Sandra L. Richter: Oh, it’s great to be here. Todd, thank you so much for the invitation.

Todd Ream: So I’ve got to start with a confession here. I spent three years studying Hebrew, if I combine those years as a graduate and undergraduate student, but where that effort came to an end, however, was when I could not properly place vocal and silent shewas.

So I got to open by asking, do Old Testament scholars really need to know the difference between the two because they’re merely vertical dots?

Sandra L. Richter: Uh, yeah, they are kind of important. Um, now see, if I had been your Hebrew teacher, I have all sorts of tricks of the trade to help you with the vocal versus silent shewas. Um, hopefully we get to the place where we can read without pointing at all the vocalization we’re going to have to, if we’re going to do northwest submit inscriptions and all that falderal.

But for our students yeah, you do kind of have to know the difference. I’m so sorry. But it gives you such, such profound appreciation for Jesus talking about jots and tittles, doesn’t it?

Todd Ream: It does indeed and I appreciate the estimation you have of my ability in the proper classroom with the proper instruction.

Sandra L. Richter: Oh, we could have taken care of that.

I’ve got a little crew that’s suffering through right now and none of them thought they would survive the process and they’re all doing great. And three of my upperclassmen who were supposed to move into second semester this term instead did our Global Ministries trip with my New Testament colleague, Holly Beers, and one of their outings this week was to head down to Egypt and climb Mount Sinai. And so they sent me a video of the three of them standing on the top of Mount Sinai, reciting the Shema, which I made them memorize in Hebrew. That was part of their final exam. And they were so proud of themselves that they could stand on Sinai and confess the faith. And it was quite a moment.

I would have gotten you there, I promise.

Todd Ream: There we go. That’s wonderful. Yeah, well, and at my advancing age, getting up Mount Sinai, this also becomes another challenge that I’d have to, you know, work through. But that’s a different level of preparation or form of preparation I’ve got to, I’ve got to contend with at some point.

Sandra L. Richter: Yep, I’m with you.

Todd Ream: These forms of study then, in what ways does it help you to, when preparing to write to teach, but also to preach too and, and share with parishioners and congregations?

Sandra L. Richter: I do a lot of both of those things. I just got back from the Mid-Texas Global Methodist Church annual conference and, and did a bunch of that stuff. You know, my students ask me that all the time at this point, because I’m primarily an undergraduate teacher right now. And what I wind up saying to them is that if I didn’t know Hebrew, I would feel like I was flying blind. I, I really would. I think I would feel like a pilot who wasn’t instrument rated. Because when I read the text, I can in, in, in any form of English translation, okay, maybe not a paraphrase as much, I can see the Hebrew working behind the translation committee and I can anticipate the conjunctions.

And when I may or may not agree with the translation committee the depth of the vocabulary, which of course, any translation committee has got to make a choice, you know, you’ve got six options sitting on the table. And I can tell you from experience, because I’m on the NIV committee, that you’re going to have 15 people sitting around that table arguing like their lives were at stake for which preposition we’re going to use and then they, they have to choose, you know? And knowing the language behind it helps me to see the options.

But it’s also much like cross-cultural experience that if you’re interacting someone from another culture, if you’ve actually lived in their space for a period of time, if you actually know their idiom and their experiences, what their architecture looks like, what their economy looks like, the vocabulary they choose just makes so much more sense. So for me, yes, not only Hebrew and Greek, but the Northwest Semitic and Akkadian, all of that cultural and linguistic knowledge just deepens the text to me on a, not just periodically, but on a daily basis.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Part of the process that proves formative for Old Testament scholars, as well as New Testament scholars is cultivating an expertise in relation to a particular text or commonly grouped sets of text. For you, for example, a text that appears to be formative for you is the book of Deuteronomy as exemplified by your monograph Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology.

Would you start by sharing why Deuteronomy captures your interest?

Sandra L. Richter: Yeah, and I actually, when I got your list of questions, Todd, I, I pulled the text off my shelf, so there you go. Um, because it’s a German publication, it’s not pretty, you know, “Just, just the facts, ma’am.” I think that’s what the German publishers should have as their subtitle. So yeah, that business of becoming fluent in a particular corpus and sometimes I forget how profound an impact that has on my own scholarship until I drop into somebody else’s corpus.

So for example, I was doing some work on Ezra, Nehemiah last week. And I realized, yeah, I can read the Hebrew, yes, I can, I can read commentaries, but I, I feel like I’m about three inches in. Whereas when I read Deuteronomy or the Deuteronomistic history, I feel like there’s a mile of cultural, economic, legal, geographic settlement information behind every phrase that I read. And it’s that moment when I’m in someone else’s corpus. And again, I feel like I’m flying blind, that I realize what a gift it’s been able to spend so much time in Deuteronomy in the Deuteronomistic history.

So I think you had asked me why it captures my interest and like so many things in scholarship my path into Deuteronomy was almost serendipitous. I was in the 200 seminar at Harvard University and all the Harvard grads out there are going, oh, the 200 seminar. Uh, we, we, we affectionately called it Harvard’s hazing ritual, and I was assigned a topic and we were doing divine presence and the topic I was assigned was divine presence in Deuteronomy, and I wrote my paper.

And in writing my paper, of course you’re casting about for every resource you can find because you know your professors are going to expect you to have located every resource available. And I stumbled into an unpublished classic S. Dean McBride’s Deuteronomic Name Theology. It was still in the bowels of the Harvard archive. And that was when I first became informed on the name theology. And so that first paper snowballed into a second and a third and a fourth, and finally into my prospectus. And, you know, that’s how I landed in Deuteronomy. 

But now, I would say it captures my attention for a thousand reasons. Uh, likely the most powerful is that Deuteronomy is the constitution and bylaws of ancient Mosaic Israel. And if you’re going to understand Israel, you have to understand Deuteronomy, and it’s not an easy book, not by any stretch, any more than reading the United States Constitution and bylaws is easy. And so I’ve come to the place where I speak of the book, and when my commentary finally comes out, this will be in the introduction that Deuteronomy is a law code tucked inside a narrative, staged as a speech, and formatted as covenant.

And unless you can engage the book in every aspect of those genres, law code, narrative, speech, and covenant, you are not going to understand the book. And then when you think about the narrative and you realize that Moses is giving this last will and testament—what I fondly speak of as his last boyfriend speech and we can flesh that out in a moment—that he’s going to finish this all-day sermon, this last communique with these people that he has been pastoring through thick and thin for 40 years. Then he’s going to climb a mountain and die. Uh, talk about rhetorical impact. It’s an amazing book.

And it also embodies the early settlement of Israel. Uh, I have a sequence of articles on the economics of Deuteronomy and the entire economic system of the book shouts Iron I transition into actually Late Bronze into Iron IA, and that’s so exciting and so interesting to see this economic system play out in their law code. So all of those reasons, I have sold my soul to Deuteronomy.

Todd Ream: Oh, thank you. Now you’ve spent a considerable amount of time, as you’ve mentioned here, preparing materials that the audience is primarily fellow scholars, that they can then utilize in terms of building blocks for their own work. But you’ve also made the transition over time to preparing resources for parishioners. For example, you’ve developed study guides along with companion streaming videos for a host of Old Testament figures and Old Testament books, including Deborah, Ruth, Jonah, Psalms, and Isaiah.

Would you describe the discernment process that led you to not only be of service to scholars but then to broaden that and also include parishioners?

Sandra L. Richter: Todd, I think you would agree with me that one of the great griefs of biblical scholarship is that it so often doesn’t reach the Church, that we do all of this backbreaking minutia-focused work, and it’s, it’s never communicated to the people sitting in the pews who are dying to know it. So I think one of my gifts and one of my niches of service is the capacity to take that technical material and to communicate it to the Church. And for myself, I think largely that comes from the fact that I started in ministry, and my first love was, actually, my first love was the unchurched and then the churched, and then I moved into the academy. So this has always been a part of who I am.

And in that who I am God opened up some opportunities. When I began, it actually was even before that, before I took my first post at Asbury Theological Seminary, I had been teaching what is essentially the Epic of Eden to youth groups and young adult groups and um, and adult study groups for quite a while. And I had practiced it a bajillion times and it was being distilled down into what I saw as a primary need for the Church, which was, how can I put your Bible together for you? How can I transform the Old Testament from a jumbled up pile of names and places and dates and transform it into, not only a story, but the great story so that you could see that Eden and the New Jerusalem go together? That Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus all go together.

I joke with my students at this point telling them, you would never dream of picking up Harry Potter in book four. You’d never do it. And yet, you pick up the Bible in book four every day. And you shouldn’t be surprised that you’re still trying to figure out if Sirius Black is a good guy or a bad guy, or why in the world Harry Potter’s got this big lightning bolt across his forehand, you know? Let me introduce you to your people. So that’s emerged out of my teaching, both of laity and of seminarians because honestly, a seminarian is just an undergrad with a calling. That’s all they are. And I realized how critically important this was.

So that grew into weekend seminars and it would take eight hours to get all the way from Eden to the New Jerusalem. So I would start on a Friday night. I would teach all day Saturday, and we’d usually have a last hurrah, you know, like a group adult Bible study on Sunday morning. Well, I also had a day job and I was trying to get my dissertation published and I was having my babies, and there was not enough room in my world to do these weekend seminars, teach my classes, raise my kids, and get my stuff published. So I’m a high capacity kind of girl, but my capacity was totally maxed out.

And so at that point, I was good friends with a man named JD Walt, who was the dean of the chapel at Asbury theological and is now the chief officer of Seed Bed Publishers, and Tiffany and the kids, we were all really good friends. And at 1:00 AM in his kitchen, at one point he said, Sandra, why don’t we film it? And I was like, film it? Who wants to listen to an Old Testament scholar on video? He’s like, oh no, no, a lot of people want it. And I was like, you’re crazy. And he said, you know, give it a shot.

So in many ways, Seedbed launched with the Epic of Eden, and we did that one weekend seminar. It took us a long time. We didn’t know what we were doing. We’re filming at midnight over in Asbury College’s studio. We’re dragging seminarians over from the dining hall to sit in the audience until one in the morning. Oh my gosh, what an experiment. And then they dropped it, right? They published it. And it caught fire, and people desperately wanted a 12-week opportunity to educate their churches. And how does the Bible go together and how does Eden and the New Jerusalem go together? And why should I care about David? Um, why is it important to me that I understand Abraham’s inheritance? And you, of course, know the answer to all of those questions. But the average person in the pew didn’t know the answer to any of them. So that was the beginning.

And then it was like, well, what about Isaiah, really hard book, 66 chapters, nobody can get their brain around it. Let me do the same thing. Let me put Isaiah together for the average person. And, and so it just kept growing and growing and somewhere along the way, we realized we had a very real and very necessary task. And the last one we published was Deborah and that is now coming out under the shared imprimatur of Harper Collins and Seedbed. And we just refilmed the original Epic and when I get off this podcast, I’m going to go do the final proofs on the study guide, and that’ll drop in a couple of months.

And I guess one last word of testimony, as I said, I just got back from this ministerial conference. There were 700 ministry leaders at this gathering and every time I finished speaking or answering questions, a line would form 20-30 yards deep of ministry person after ministry person, waiting a ridiculous amount of time to just come up, shake my hand, tears in their eyes, telling me how much this material has equipped them to disciple their people. And I’m overwhelmed at that reality. I’m overwhelmed at that reality.

Because for academics, the stuff I’m presenting, it’s real, like that is my commitment. I’m not dumbing down anything. What I’m doing is I’m taking the cookies that are way up on the top shelf, and I’m moving them to the bottom shelf. So yes, you will do maps, you will do timelines. You are going to learn characters, and you’re going to be introduced to some Hebrew. But I’m going to do my darnedest to make it completely accessible to every person sitting in the pew.

Probably the last point on that, one of my pet peeves is that in the Church, we teach Christianity 101 and over and over again. We have lawyers and medical doctors and engineers and NASA scientists sitting in our congregations. And we don’t allow them to go deep on learning the world of the Bible, learning the theology that they’ve committed their lives to. So, you know, let’s get serious about discipling the Church. So that’s my ambition in those studies.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to go back and ask you now a little bit back in time, a little further, ask you about your own calling to the Old Testament. You earned an undergraduate degree from what is now the University of Valley Forge, a master’s from Gordon Conwell Seminary, and as you’ve mentioned through your experience in this particular seminar, that was Harvard’s Hazing, the 200 seminar, Harvard’s hazing experience a doctorate in Hebrew Bible from Harvard University.

At what point in time did you discern that the Old Testament and serving as an Old Testament scholar was going to be your calling? And were there any experiences, mentors and or other authors maybe who helped with this discernment process and aided in it?

Sandra L. Richter: Yeah, and I’d like to encourage your audience with the fact that it was always an evolving calling. I became a Christian in my late teens. I didn’t know anything about any of this, and I read The Cross and the Switchblade. I was a Catholic kid, raised in a Jewish audience, a Jewish neighborhood. I did not know the Protestant world existed. I truly did not, and I read The Cross and the Switchblade. I was just overwhelmed at what these lay people were doing for the cause of Christ. And I was like 17 and I went to one of the leaders in my little house church.

Um, my conversion came at the tail end of the Jesus Movement. Uh, I just, I just watched the movie, The Jesus Revolution. I was like, oh my goodness, that’s my story. Um, but I was in the Washington, DC area. So again, the tail end. So I went to one of the leaders in my little house church, and I told her, I’ve read this book, I can’t sleep at night, and I need to find these people. I need to help them. She said, oh, what you’re experiencing is a calling to ministry. And I said, oh, okay, what’s that? And she said, well, it means you need to go to a Bible college.

And I live in the DC area, Potomac, Maryland, if that means anything to your audience. I’ve never heard of a Bible college. And so again, I said, okay, great, what’s that? And I wound up at Valley Forge largely by mistake. I was there for a good two weeks before I realized that everyone at this college belonged to this little denomination I’d never heard of. I started training. I had great classes, great teachers. I spent every summer working in the Philadelphia Teen Challenge Center, so formative I worked in the induction center, which means we’re getting the girls straight off the streets and this little clean girl from the suburbs, I was an athlete. I’d never been drunk, I’d never been high. I’d never even smoked a cigarette, was sitting up all night with young women who were going cold Turkey off of Demerol, praying young prostitutes out of their background. It was very formative.

That launched me into ministry. I was with a denomination that was not wild about women in leadership and I had a very real calling and I was smart, which was equally scary. Um, so I wound up kicked out on my keister. I was, at the time, I was at Gordon-Conwell, just picking up classes to expand my capacity. I was in youth ministry and I’m traveling back and forth to Gordon-Conwell picking up classes. No intention of getting a degree. I’m serving the church. And that evolved into a master’s in Old Testament because that’s where the gaps were.

To answer part of your question, I’d gone back to seminary to fill in the gaps, and that’s where all the gaps were. So it was while I was at Gordon-Conwell that I realized that my calling was shifting. And so as I’m saying, an evolving calling, talked to my professors about how, how do I move from ministry into the academy? And they all said, you have to get a PhD. And I said, I, I don’t want a PhD, you know. Jesus could come back three weeks from now, and what am I going to do spending 10 years of my life and a hundred thousand dollars getting a PhD?

But it quickly became apparent that that was the only way to move into the academy, so I applied to the local programs. I applied to Harvard Divinity, Harvard University, and Brandeis, and then I got accepted to Harvard University and to Brandeis. I was stunned. And it was in that education and again, this evolving story that I wound up in the academy. And uh, you can hear from that story why I’m still so passionate about serving the Church with my academic calling, but I’m also very passionate about being as good as I possibly can be as an academic.

We have a responsibility as academics, who are also people of faith, to offer our faith communities excellence. You know, this business of, you know, just pulling stuff off the internet to offer to the Church, and then using our credentials to convince people that we’re right that kind of laziness does not please the Almighty. So I am that person that says if we’re going to serve the Church, we need to be outstanding academics, and we need to be outstanding in our commitments to the Church and bring that material to the people of faith.

Todd Ream: Your efforts to bring that material to the people of faith as a teacher, have, as you’ve echoed before already in our conversation, what led you to teach, you know, for example, at Asbury Theological Seminary, Wesley Biblical Seminary, and Wheaton College, you now serve at Westmont College.

Can you tell me a little bit about the discernment process as a New Englander and someone who spent time in the Northeast, how you wound up in Santa Barbara, but also the, what you found important in terms of your understanding of the academic vocation when it comes to service, teaching and scholarship and intersecting with an undergraduate audience?

Sandra L. Richter: Again, I would speak of evolving callings that I have so many friends who took one job coming out of their PhDs, and they’re still there, you know, at that, that same position. And they’ve served that institution beautifully over the decades. And they’re still there, um communicating that excellence in, in that one community.

Uh, for me, there was always this push and pull of you know, that first move was to Asbury Theological and leaving New England was hard. It’s probably harder for my husband actually, because he is born and bred or “bawn and bred” as he would say. Yeah, he’s a New Englander. But in the interviewing process, each, each opportunity had a lovely story that could go with it. And when I landed at Asbury, it was just an excellent match and they also moved quickly and moved with determination.

I did not leave the last interview without, they offered me the job the last, you know, they didn’t let me go home in doubt and they made it very clear that I was their first choice, really their only choice. And, um what do you want from us? So that be, that was an easy choice. And we went to Asbury. We had a beautiful ministry. Uh, 10 years of teaching some of the finest people I know.

When I go to ministry conferences, I get to see those same students all grown up, pastoring their churches, bishops, missionaries. It’s like Christmas every time, largely due to my husband’s calling, we moved down to Jackson, Mississippi for four years. That was a stretch. Uh, who knew that Scarlett O’Hara was still alive and well and living in Northeast Jackson? Um, she is, by the way, she’s just blonde at this point.

Huge culture shift, got to work with the black church, which is phenomenal build some very strong relationships with the AME, the AME Zion, the Missionary Baptist. The school hit a really rough patch, and we needed to pay our mortgage. um, so again, this evolving calling.

And then Wheaton came calling. And who doesn’t want to work at Wheaton? You know, at least for a while. And so we moved up to Wheaton, Illinois. Uh, that was also a very easy match. Uh, the Midwesterners are delightful. So they have all the courtesy of the Deep South, but they have the drive and the academic ambition of the Northeast. Uh, my kids loved Wheaton. We thought we were there forever.

And then I started getting these phone calls from this search committee in Santa Barbara, California. I could not have found Santa Barbara, California on a map if you had held a gun to my head. I was like, okay between LA and San Francisco, I think the Rocky Mountains is a very serious geographical divide in our country. So the first phone call I was like, they’re offering me an endowed chair. Todd, I’m sure you’re aware that in the evangelical world there are very few women in endowed chairs, and I was, oh, that’s serious business.

And there was a research budget, and they wanted me on the road. Uh, they wanted me having that dual vocation of academic and church woman. But my family was settled, and I’m a mom and my girls were entering sixth grade and high school. I’m not going to uproot them right now. And then they called again, and I was courteous, but no, we’re kind of settled. They kept calling and I kept saying, well, we’re really, you know, thank you so much, but we’re settled. And they kept calling.

So I finally said, okay, I’ll fill out an application. I know who else is in the search pool. They’re going to hire someone else. That’s going to be fine and I’m going to build my network and meet some nice people. Well, then I shortlisted, and they wanted to interview me at SBL and I thought, well, I’m going to SBL anyway. I’ll have lunch with these people. It’ll be lovely.

So I had lunch with these people and then that very familiar nudging of the Holy Spirit. Um, and I’m like, no, we just gutted our house. And so I turned it over to all the accountability partners in my life and we started praying about it. And then I, not only shortlisted, but I got the campus interview. And now I’m not going to make a fool of myself on campus interviews, so, of course, I prepared hard, and they offered me the job before I left campus. And I’m like, oh no.

So it was actually a very difficult decision, and it was very hard because my family was settled and specifically my girls were settled. And we made the move with more than a little bit of fear and trembling and landed in the Gundry Chair. And Bob Gundry is a fabulous human being, and I am so honored to be holding his chair. Uh, Tremper Longman, my predecessor, is also a fabulous human being and I’m very honored to be holding his post. And God knew what he was doing. And here we are in Southern California, trying to do our best for Westmont and for the kingdom.

Todd Ream: In 2020, InterVarsity published your Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why it Matters, which then was another turn in some ways over the course of your career. You drew heavily from your expertise as an Old Testament scholar when preparing a book, but it once again, you know, served a wider audience, served a wider audience in terms of appreciation for the Old Testament, but served a wider audience in terms of the impact that the Old Testament has on our understanding of a critical issue with which we are struggling globally.

Can you tell me a little bit about the discernment process that led you to pursue that book, and then what you hoped audience members would encounter when reading it?

Sandra L. Richter: So I have long been deeply invested in the environmental question and have had, prior to that book, published a number of technical pieces. I had talked Asbury Theological into committing one of their kingdom conferences to the issue. I gave my first presentation from a pulpit at Asbury Theological in 2005. So this is, you know, this is a long history. Asbury is in central Kentucky. This is not a bright shining star in the fight for environmental responsibility.

My community hearing, being able to hear that this issue was not simply an issue of societal ideology, this was biblical issue, when I was able to make that argument to my community in 2005, my community responded in spades. And Asbury Theological created probably the most effective recycling program I have ever seen in any institution in Wilmore, Kentucky. So that led to me talking the Institute of Biblical Research, one of our scholarship academic communities into committing one of their conferences to the environmental question. And I gave a plenary Saturday paper, a technical paper at this point in time, to the issue of environmental scholar environmental theology, which I was followed by no one less than Doug Moo, who jumped in on Romans 8 and the book of Revelation. And that was back in 2008.

And then Rick Hess of Denver Seminary approached me and said, I want to publish that. And so it came out in IBR, and then I landed at Wheaton College and I contacted Kristen Page who was the endowed chair of biology, and I said, girl, you and I need to teach a course on the Bible and biology. And she says, I’m all in. I don’t know if we can talk Wheaton into it and get the funding. We did. We got the grant, we taught the class, and 25 of Wheaton’s finest sat in that classroom and this was the turning point for stewards.

So at this point, I’m publishing technical pieces here, there, and everywhere. And hey, what about biblical theology? What about systematic theology? What about this? But all of those, as we’ve already discussed, are limited to the academic world, right? But you and I both know there is a sleeping giant out there called the evangelical world, who does not realize that this issue is a biblical issue. And everywhere I’ve spoken from Nebraska cattle county to SoCal and you know, the birth of the environmental movement, every one of those communities of faith, when they realize that this is in the Bible, hands go up everywhere. What do we do and how do we do it?

And that response is, oh my gosh, it’s, it’s profound. I’m sitting in the Wheaton classroom, and this was the turning point for Stewards of Eden for me. And Kristen and I did the standard icebreaker. Every professor has done it, and that icebreaker is tell the group your name, your major, and why did you decide to take this class. And you and I both know all we’re doing is hoping for some low-level bonding and buying a little bit of time while people get comfortable. We don’t expect much of anything.

Well, the first student, second student, third student, all the way around the room, every one of them us essentially the same answer to why they decided to take this class. And here’s the answer: I’m a biology major. I’m a theology major. I’m a physics major, but I grew up loving the great outdoors, seeing the majesty of God in the Ozark mountains, the wild ponies of Chincoteague, you know, common dolphin off the Channel Island Sound. I have always loved God’s creation. I’ve always seen God in creation, but I’ve never known that as a Christian, I was allowed to advocate for those loves. And I’m so glad that you’re teaching this class.

And as we went around the room, what I saw was an entire generation who understood that environmental concern was not a Christian issue, and they were peeling off of their faith because they found it illegitimate. And before that class was over, I resolved in my heart, my mind, I’m going to let these 22-year-olds know, that even if their local church might have failed them on this topic, their faith has not. And so Stewards was my effort to get a 100-page easily accessible biblical theology of creation care into the hands of my students and to stick completely with the Bible.

So the beginning of each chapter, the first half is a biblical theology, the second half is a case study. So sustainable land use the Industrial Revolution’s impact on agriculture, the widow in the orphan mountaintop removal, coal mining in Appalachia, and what it has done to the widow and the orphan, care for the wild creature, let’s talk about the black bear in the Mississippi Delta in Mississippi. And the reaction has been amazing.

And I’ll have podcasters on a regular basis they’ll ask me this question, “So, Dr. Richter, what’s your big idea? Everybody’s got to have a big idea.” And I will say to them, “My big idea is to waken a sleeping giant and to fill that giant with a wonderful passion. No group on this planet has done more for the transformation of society toward righteous causes than the Church. If I can awaken the Church on this topic, oh what things we can do.” So that’s where Stewards came from. I still do technical articles on environmental studies on a regular basis, but that’s the mission of that little book.

Todd Ream: Thank you. As our time has unfortunately become short, I want to ask you in terms of one last question here then, making good on that promise to awaken that sleeping giant as you’ve mentioned, whether it is manifested in the students who are sitting in your classroom or the parishioners that are in the Church, what virtues have proven most important for you to cultivate as an Old Testament scholar in order to flourish? And then if any, what vices are most important for individuals seeking to flourish in a comparable vocation do we need to be aware of and potentially confront? 

Sandra L. Richter: Yeah, I was actually asked to give the luncheon presentation to our IBR PhD students this year. So that’s the Institute of Biblical Research. And that was essentially the questions that they asked me. And so the virtues the number one virtue is that being an academic is just as much a calling as being a pastor or a missionary, and I would encourage the young PhDs out there, you need to know that you know that this is your calling. This is a highly competitive field. A real PhD is going to suck the life out of you. If you are not heading into that research degree, that Ivy League degree, knowing exactly who you are in Christ and knowing that this is indeed your calling, either you’re not going to survive this, or your Christian commitment is not going to survive this. Or worse, you know, your marriage is not going to survive this. So that would be the number one thing. Know that this is your calling.

And in knowing that it’s your calling, you better give us your best. I want excellence. I want to see excellence in every footnote. I want to see evangelical scholars that are completely conversant in the historical, traditional scholarship of our field. We don’t get to stay in our bubble, not if we actually intend to impact the academy and to do our best to transform the evangelical world as well. So those would be my virtues.

Um, my vice is, arrogance is not a spiritual gift. Um, getting overly impressed with yourself, your skillset, your intellectual capacity, take a listen to Deuteronomy 6, which basically says, when you are successful in the land, don’t forget where you came from. And then maybe you should take a look at Deuteronomy 7, when you are successful on the land, don’t join the club. It is the Almighty who called you into this space and gave you all of your intellectual capacities and your ability to articulate and be amazing in the classroom. Keep it straight who’s actually the Giver of these gifts and who you actually work for.

Institutions are going to let us all down, every time, every generation. If we can remember Who it is we actually work for the Church will survive and will be strengthened and encouraged by our gifts and our calling. If we can’t keep that straight, we’re going to become a part of the problem. And that’s the last place I’d want to be.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Sandra L. Richter, the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.

Sandra L. Richter: Thank you Todd, so much for the invitation. It’s been an honor.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.

Todd C. Ream

Indiana Wesleyan University
Todd C. Ream is Honors Professor of Humanities and Executive Director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Indiana Wesleyan University, Senior Fellow for Public Engagement for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, Senior Fellow for Programming for the Lumen Research Institute, and Publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review.  He is the author and editor of numerous books including (with Jerry Pattengale) The Anxious Middle: Planning for the Future of the Christian College (Baylor University Press, September 15, 2023).

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