“Looking in retrospect on my years at Bible college, I see that, despite all the devotional intimacies, Jesus grew remote from me there. He became an object of scrutiny.”
From: The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey 📚
This is, I think, one of the great struggles for not only people at Bible college or seminary, but also much of Protestant evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is buried in information. Jesus, for many, has become “an object of scrutiny.”
When we lose the relational connection to the divine we have lost the very core of what it is to follow Christ. To be learner of Christ is to grow in Christ’s character and competency. These can’t be learned when Christ is nothing more than an “object of scrutiny.”