Serving as a Christian university professor is not the most celebrated job in America. It is not an ignoble profession, but few of us would describe ourselves as overpaid. Most of us are exempt from federal minimum wage and overtime laws.[1] One would think the years of education required to serve as a professor would result in more job security. Many university faculty have found it necessary to organize into collective bargaining units to protect themselves from unfair treatment.
In stark contrast, Scripture associates those who perform as we do with both high regard and heavy responsibility. Over the following two posts, we will explore some comparisons between the work of professors and that of both the Old Testament prophets and priests. The jobs are not identical, but the similarities will invite us into a deeper understanding of God’s call on us and allow us to see our vocation more through His eyes than those of the world around us.
The job description of the Old Testament prophets included a variety of tasks. God sometimes called upon them to identify and consecrate His chosen kings (1 Samuel 16:1). He might send them to warn the people of Israel (Judges 6:7-10), and sometimes of other nations (Jonah 3:2), of His impending judgment. Occasionally, He would require them to mete out judgment on His behalf (Exodus 32:27). At its core, however, the job of the prophet was to be a steward of truth. When God’s people were living in a way that was contrary to His commandments, the prophets would be dispatched to remind them, “Thus saith the Lord.”
When King Ahab and his wife Jezebel maintained that the people of the Northern Ten Tribes could retain their identity as the Nation of Israel but also worship the Baals, God sent Elijah to tell them, “That’s not true.” Elijah advised the people that they would have to choose between living as God’s people and worshipping the gods of the land. Then, in one of the Bible’s more dramatic scenes, Elijah demonstrates God’s superior power by successfully calling on Him to send fire from Heaven (1 Kings 18:38). When the Babylonians were threatening the Southern Kingdom, and the self-appointed prophets of Jerusalem told the people that God would save them, God sent Jeremiah to tell them, “That’s not true.” He advised them that God would deliver them into captivity and that they needed to prepare for exile (Jeremiah 21:7).
In an important way, professors are also stewards of truth. Faculty do not dream up the content of our programs from imagination; we carefully construct it over years of development within our academic communities. Pick up (or download) any college textbook, and you will not see a random collection of theories and propositions. Within our various disciplines, the content of courses commonly taught across institutions of higher education has been researched, proposed, revised, and crafted into an acceptable canon of learning for that particular course. Our process of slowly evolving program content can sometimes stifle innovation, but it is all hopefully done to preserve the integrity of the discipline and to convey truth, as best we can collectively understand it, to our students. Delivering our classes is also part of our stewardship of the truth. Every time we correct an exam or a mispronounced technical term, we are telling our students, “That’s not true,” and refining their understanding of the material we teach.
College professors, however, are not just called to deliver the truth. Like the Old Testament prophets, we are called to demonstrate and argue for the truth. We have to convince our students, and sometimes the rest of the world, of their error. We have to identify where they are off the mark through various forms of assessment, and then reteach or reconstruct our pedagogy so that they know, understand, and conform to the truth. Our job is not finished until the understanding of our students has changed.
When I (Larry) teach my Principles of Finance students how to calculate the yield on a Treasury Bond, I don’t just deliver a lecture. If a student prices an 8% bond at 11%, I cannot allow him to be satisfied with his own private reality. I am obliged to tell him, “That’s not true.” I will work with that student until he can routinely price that bond accurately without my assistance. I will also require all my students to demonstrate an understanding that this same bond must trade at 8% and that anyone selling it for more is being exploitative and anyone buying it for more is being exploited. Like the prophets of old, I don’t just want them to know the truth in a propositional sense, I want them to walk in that truth, and my work is not complete until they do.
Professors are also charged with discovering new truths. Truth in the academy tends to advance at a glacial pace as long-term research studies lead to publications which are then, hopefully, argued, replicated, and refined over years of hard thinking, careful experimentation, and disciplined writing. Ideally, we then teach, publish, publicize, and otherwise distribute that new truth until it becomes integrated into our discipline.
The Old Testament prophets did similar work. The truth of God is eternal, but His prophets were often called upon to apply God’s Torah to novel conditions so that the people of God would know how to live in their new circumstances. In 1 Maccabees 4, Judas and his followers reclaimed Jerusalem from the Greeks but found the altar in the Temple had been desecrated by pagan sacrifices. This was new. None of the Old Testament law or sayings of the prophets had taught them how to deal with such an event. So, they disassembled the altar, gathered up all its component stones, and stored them in a designated location, “until a prophet should come to tell them what to do with them” (1 Maccabees 4:46 NRSV).
When the last Old Testament prophet, John the Baptist, convinced his contemporaries that they had to repent and follow Yahweh in a new way, preparing for the imminent coming of the Messiah, some of his converts encountered a novel problem. They were working for the occupying power, either as tax collectors or as soldiers, and they didn’t know how to live a devoted Jewish life under those circumstances. John the Baptizer had to deliver new instructions, derived from the eternal truth of God, to address their neoteric condition (Luke 3:12-14).
The similarity between our work and that of the Old Testament prophets has a number of implications for us. As stewards of truth, we have a crucial reason to take our role seriously. Woe to the professor who fails to remain current in his discipline and delivers outdated content, no longer accepted as true. The Old Testament rule was that prophets who did not speak the truth, measured by fidelity to the commandments of God, were to be put to death (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). More important than our own fates, in the New Testament, Christ identifies Himself with truth (John 14:6). In a mystical way, when we mishandle the truth, we mishandle the person of Christ.
Another implication of our role as modern stewards of truth is that, like the prophets, we must be forever learning. The Old Testament prophets always had to be open to new revelations from God, new messages they had to deliver. As we saw in the cases of the Maccabees and John the Baptist, they also had to be forever growing in how to apply the truth they had received to new circumstances so that God’s people could continue to walk in the Way even as they encountered new issues. Eternal truth shares God’s immutability, but if our understanding and application of it do not grow over time, we have abandoned the mission of the prophet.
This post is not a treatise on alethiology, and people can differ over distinctions between God’s eternal truth and some of the things we teach. The Bible, however, does not offer a different standard of responsibility for truthfulness according to the subject matter under discussion. We are always called to fidelity to the truth. It does, however, make a distinction between different kinds of speakers purporting to deliver the truth, in recognition that some roles render listeners more vulnerable than others. For our purposes, teachers are in that class of speakers who carry heavy responsibility for all that we say and do (James 3:1).
One thing the Old Testament prophets could not rely on was popularity. The very fact that the prophets were deployed meant that truth was in short supply, and truth can pack a powerful punch. Speaking truth to power can put one at risk. Both organizations and individuals can become invested in an untruthful worldview, and prophetic disruption can cost those organizations and individuals both politically and economically. Prophets were also powerful voices. As spokespeople for God and His truth, they could have a major impact on the popular zeitgeist.
The one thing no prophet or professor can do is to sacrifice the integrity of what we know to be true. Like Galileo, when confronted for his acceptance of the Copernican theory of the solar system, we are called to remain true to what the Lord has revealed to us, regardless of whether the pressure to deviate comes from the left or the right.[2] When those trials arise, let’s take a look back at Hebrews 11 and number ourselves among the faithful prophets who endured whatever was meted out to them in order to remain faithful to the Truth.
[1] U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, “Fact Sheet #17S: Higher Education Institutions and Overtime Pay Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).” Revised August 2024, https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17s-overtime-educational-institutions.
[2] Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti, Containing an Account of the Lives and Works of the Most Valuable Authors of Italy. With a Preface, Exhibiting the Changes of the Tuscan Language, from the Barbarous Ages to the Present Time (Printed for A. Millar, 1757), 52, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-italian-library-con_baretti-giuseppe-marco-_1757,
