The Three Most Dangerous Words: "I Think That…"

Two years in, you are good at this.

That sentence is the danger, and it is worth saying plainly because nobody warns lay teachers about it. The hazards of the first month are obvious — you might be unprepared, you might be nervous, you might get something wrong. The hazards of the third year are not obvious at all, and they are worse, because by then you have a room full of people who trust you and a growing supply of things you find interesting.

Nobody drifts on purpose. It happens by small, reasonable steps. A teacher who has read more than his class begins to enjoy the reading. What he has read starts appearing in the hour. Then the thing he has been thinking about all week starts appearing, whether or not the passage raised it. And somewhere along the way the class stops being about the text and starts being about the teacher’s current interests, delivered by a man who is, by now, genuinely good at delivering them.

The word that marks the drift is small: I think.

It is not a bad phrase. Used honestly it is one of the most useful things a teacher can say. Used carelessly it is the sound of a man handing the class his opinion with the text’s authority still attached. This chapter is about telling those two apart, and about three specific ways a good teacher goes wrong in his third year.

The steward, again

Go back to what chapter three established, because every hazard in this chapter is a version of forgetting it: you are a steward, not an owner.

Not of the text — that is obvious once said. But also not of the class. The hour does not belong to you. Its contents were not left to your discretion because you happened to be standing there. You have been handed something that belongs to the congregation and finally to God, and the question asked of a steward is not whether he found the work interesting. It is whether he was faithful.

Every failure below is a steward quietly beginning to behave like an owner.

Hazard one: the hobbyhorse

Everyone has one. That is not a character flaw; it is what happens when a person reads seriously. Some question got hold of you — the end times, textual criticism, church music, a controversy in another denomination, a book you have not stopped thinking about — and it is now the lens you reach for.

The problem is not the interest. The problem is that a hobbyhorse does not announce itself. It disguises itself as relevance. Every text seems to raise it, because you are the one reading every text.

Three tests, and they are all measurable rather than introspective.

Count. Look back at the last eight sessions. How many of them arrived at your topic? If the answer is more than two, the text is not raising it. You are.

Ask who leaves satisfied. After a session that touched the hobbyhorse, was the class fed — or were you? A teacher usually knows the answer and usually declines to ask the question.

Watch for the pivot. The hobbyhorse announces itself grammatically. Which reminds me. This is actually related to. You know what nobody talks about. When one of those leaves your mouth, you have just changed the subject, and the class does not know it because you said it in the same voice you use for the passage.

The cure is not to become uninterested. It is to move the interest somewhere it belongs — a conversation after class, an evening study announced as what it is, an article. What you may not do is spend the congregation’s hour on your own reading list while calling it James.

Hazard two: novelty

The second hazard flatters harder than the first.

Sooner or later you will see something in a text that you have never heard anyone say. It will be exciting. It will feel like the reason you have been studying — the moment the work paid off and you found something.

Take the excitement seriously as a warning sign.

Not because new observations are impossible; a careful reader really does notice things. But run the arithmetic. This passage has been read by the church for two thousand years, in a hundred languages, by people who gave their lives to it. If your reading is genuinely new, the overwhelming likelihood is not that everyone missed it. It is that you have missed something.

And notice what an untested novelty does in a classroom. The class cannot check you. They will receive it as the teaching of the church, because it came from the front of the room, and it will still be in their heads in ten years when nobody remembers where they got it.

Paul warns Timothy about people who want to be teachers of the law without understanding what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions, and tells him to charge certain people not to teach anything different or to occupy themselves with speculations that promote controversies rather than God’s work. He tells him elsewhere to warn against quarreling about words, which does no good and only ruins those who listen. Ruins those who listen is the phrase to keep. The damage of a novel teaching is not to the teacher’s reputation. It is downstream.

So when you find something new, do the thing that costs a week: take it to the pastor before you take it to the class. If it is right, it will still be right on Sunday. If it is wrong, you have found out privately, which is a mercy.

A useful rule of thumb: if your discovery makes the passage smaller — one more thing the text turns out not to mean, one more group it turns out not to include — treat it with extra suspicion. Errors are usually tidier than the truth.

Hazard three: certainty about what has not been settled

The third hazard is the subtlest, and it is the one this chapter’s title is really about.

There are four different things a teacher can say, and they carry four different weights:

• The text says — and you can read it aloud.
• The text implies — your inference. Might be right. Yours.
• The Confessions say — the church’s public confession, and you can point to the article.
• I think — clearly labeled, sparingly used.

Chapter three named these. Here is what goes wrong with them in practice: they all come out in the same tone of voice.

A teacher who is confident by temperament — and most good teachers are — delivers his inference with the same steadiness as his citation. The class cannot hear the difference, because there is no difference to hear. They received four kinds of claim as one kind.

So I think has to do real work, and it can do two opposite jobs.

Honest tentativeness: I think this is what Paul is doing here, but I’ll be honest that it’s an inference and other readers land elsewhere. That sentence tells the class exactly how much weight to put on what follows. It is one of the most valuable things you can say.

Disguised authority: I think the problem with the modern church is… — said in the same voice, about something the passage never raised, with the text still sitting open as if it were the source. The words I think are present. They are doing no work at all. They are decoration on an assertion the class will receive as taught.

The test is simple and slightly uncomfortable: when you say I think, are you lowering the weight of the claim, or borrowing weight for it? If it is the second, cut the sentence.

And the same discipline applies to the genuinely contested questions. Some things in Scripture are clear and should be said clearly; manufacturing doubt about them is its own failure. But where honest readers differ, say so — give the strongest form of the other reading rather than a caricature of it, say which you find more persuasive and why, and move on. A teacher who does this buys enormous credit, because his class learns that when he says a thing is settled, it is settled.

Reason, doing its job

One more distinction, because it prevents the overcorrection this chapter could otherwise produce.

Nothing here says stop thinking. Careful reasoning is not the enemy of a faithful class; it is most of the work. A teacher’s mind is a creature God made, damaged like everything else but not discarded, and the tradition that supposedly distrusts reason spent its first century building schools and teaching logic.

The distinction is one of jurisdiction. Reason serves the Word — arranging what Scripture says, comparing passage with passage, noticing when two things have been confused or one thing has been split. That is the office, and it is demanding. What reason may not do is sit over the Word and rule on what Scripture is permitted to have said.

Which gives you the practical form of the wall you will eventually hit. Sooner or later a class will meet two things that are both taught and cannot be fitted together — and someone will ask you to fit them.

Here is the distinction that saves you. A contradiction asserts a thing and its opposite in the same respect at the same time, and it must be rejected, because God does not lie. A mystery is different in kind: it stands above reason, which did not generate it and cannot explain the mechanism, and which therefore has no standing to refuse it.

How do you tell them apart? A contradiction is found by examining the claim. A mystery is found by examining yourself. When we say that can’t be, we almost never mean we have located a formal contradiction. We mean I cannot see how. Those are different sentences.

So when the class presses for the mechanism — how a body can be in bread, how God can choose and also desire all to be saved — the faithful answer is often a refusal, and the refusal is not evasion. It is a servant recognizing the edge of his jurisdiction. Say what is taught, say both halves, and decline to invent the synthesis. Inventing it always costs you one of the halves, and the half that gets quietly dropped is usually the one that was comforting somebody.

The pre-class humility check

Five questions. Two minutes, at the kitchen table, before you walk out the door.

1. Whose hour is this? If the honest answer involves what you want to talk about, fix it now.
2. Is anything in this lesson here because it interested me rather than because the text raised it? Name it. Cut it or move it.
3. Am I about to say anything I have not heard anyone else say? If yes, hold it until you have asked the pastor.
4. Where am I inferring, and have I said so out loud in my notes? Mark it on the page so you say it in the room.
5. What am I planning to be wrong about? Not a trick question. Every lesson has a soft spot. Know where yours is before someone finds it for you.

And run all five on yourself before you ever run them on another teacher. That is not a pious flourish. It is the only way the tool stays sharp, because the errors you cannot see are by definition the ones inside your own house.

Correction is not a loss

End with the habit that makes all the rest survivable.

You will teach something wrong. Not might — will, and probably this year. The question was never whether, but what happens next.

Here is what should happen. The following week, early in the hour, plainly: I told you something last week that wasn’t right. Here’s what’s right, and here’s how I got it wrong. No drama. No groveling. Ninety seconds, and then on to the lesson.

Teachers resist this because it feels like a loss of credibility. It is the exact opposite, and the reason is worth understanding. Your class already assumes teachers protect themselves — they have watched it happen elsewhere. A teacher who visibly does not protect himself has told them something about the whole Christian life that no lesson on repentance can convey, and it makes everything else he says more believable rather than less.

A planned correction is a mark of fidelity. It is what a steward does when he finds he has mishandled what was not his.

So decide now, before it happens, that this is what you will do. The decision made in advance is easy. The decision made at 9:40 on a Sunday morning, in front of nineteen people, with your dignity in the room, is not.

Which brings us to the harder version. Sometimes what arrives is not an error you can correct but a question you cannot answer — or a person whose need has just exceeded the hour entirely.

That is the next chapter.