Learning From Your Peers

28 May 2025   John 16:12-15

“I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.’”  John 16:12​

There is a time for the learning that comes from masters. But it is not always as early or as often as the masters think. In the economy of salvation, learners also strengthen each other to carry the freight of inspiration.

C.S. Lewis (Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 1-2) recalls from his youth times when he was reluctant to take his questions to a master because the master was very likely to explain what you understood already, add a great deal more information that you did not ask for and did not care about, and never really got around to explaining the matter that brought you to the master in the first place. Every teacher knows the expression that settles on students’ faces when they appear to be listening politely but behind the politeness are thinking of the fellow student they are going to ask the same question next. Sometimes students learn more from each other than from masters who have passed by the concerns of students so long ago that they have forgotten what it is like to be a new learner.

Students learning from and striving with each other can be just as valuable as the tutoring of experts. It is how we got some of the greatest artistic and intellectual breakthroughs in history. The Renaissance, for instance, was not just the result of students sitting patiently at the feet of master artists, but much more of students talking to and striving with each other, observing, talking about and perfecting their techniques until one day a superstar pops out – a Michelangelo, or Leonardo, or Rembrandt. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions points out that every scientific breakthrough in history has happened the same way. Even when everyone knows there is a problem with a particular theory, scientists won’t abandon it until there is a new theory to climb into. And that new theory never appears unless scientists talk to each other a lot.

That is why it is important not just to listen to the thoughts of great scholars on the Bible, but just as much to think and talk about the Bible with peers, discussing and striving with each other until some fresh insight pops out.

That is how we are strengthened to think better, pray deeper, and carry more insight to the non-believing world.

More information is available to us today than at any other time in history. Ordinary people now can, in seconds, have at their fingertips information that it used to take years to acquire and store. Merely having access to information, however, is not the same as understanding it, connecting it to other bits of information again and again until an actual insight emerges. Learning how to assemble information into insight is a skill that happens in conjunction with others who add their approaches to the same data, and previously undiscovered data, and in conversation or debate new vistas emerge that were simply unattainable apart from personal contact and discussion. That is just one reason why the Church is so indispensable in the husbandry of wisdom. There was no Renaissance without a community of artists testing their ideas and techniques on each other. There are no scientific revolutions without scientists testing out new ideas on each other. Likewise, there is no revival in the Church without disciples strengthening each other by sharing the Spirit’s words and works in them.

There is certainly a place for the contributions of Masters to guide and correct conversations and protect learners from veering into error and apostasy, to inspire harder work, better conversation, and deeper prayer. It is just as vital for the lay faithful to talk and study together. That is also a way that the Spirit strengthens us to bear the burdens of the not-yet-believing world.