Luke Timothy Johnson on Not Wasting Time

"My first and most persistent goal in life was to become a saint .... In my own stumbling and clumsy fashion, I find that I truly do seek the face of God. Scholarship, like all other human endeavors, has always seemed to me secondary to the serious business of becoming a certain kind of person; scholarship is a game that can be played, and must be played, seriously and intently, with the scholar never forgetting that it is only a game, whose stakes are not ultimate." 

"Sowing seeds by scattering them in every direction means much waste, and yes, the sower seldom actually sees whether any of the sown seed yields a crop. But I would not trade the hours I spent in preparing and presenting all this array of words for any other task I might have been assigned. As I gladly learned, so gladly did I teach."

"As for properly scholarly writing and publication, I am acutely aware how few minds I have changed or improved. I know, in fact, that some of my views are regarded by many other scholars as wrongheaded or eccentric. But I am also aware that I never stinted in the effort to make a difference in how important issues are understood. I know that I have employed the gifts God has given me—a modest intelligence, a wealth of energy, a passion for truth and beauty—as fully as time and circumstances have allowed. I have never wasted time, and I have never allowed circumstances to be an excuse for less than full effort. I have pursued truth as I have seen it. With that realization, I must be content." 

- Luke Timothy Johnson, The Mind in Another Place: My Life as a Scholar (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 31, 267.

Luke Timothy Johnson has been a formative influence and sparing partner in my thinking about Luke-Acts for years, I'm a sucker for academic biographies anyhow, so no surprise that I find Johnson's memoir stimulating in all sorts of ways. Challenging too. Highly recommended for anyone interested in biblical scholarship (or biblical scholars) even if you disagree, as I do, with Johnson on various points.