Dr. Howard Hendricks, Sculpture of the Exegete.

I sat in your office with you, laughing and discussing the underrated significance of Charles Dickens to the literary world. We both concurred that a literary education was optimal for a theological one. I listened in awe-struck envy as you talked about your days as a chaplain to the Dallas Cowboys—in the good days of Landry and Staubach—and what a big fan you were even then. I knew, even then during that semester as I sat in your class, that I was witnessing greatness of the “legendary” sort. Of course, you had little tolerance for hero worship: you saw yourself as a disciple charged with making other disciples. And so you did, and I was one of the last to execute your infamous Acts 1:8 observation assignment.

You gave me permission to film you in class once, and that footage I have of your teaching is near to my heart now. Your northeastern accent and gruff voice are distinctive on that film, but nothing says “Hendricks” quite like your sense of humor. The one-liners and jokes in class were always punctuated with your tell-tale wipe-of-the-lip gesture that signified to first-semester students that it was ok to laugh in seminary.

You taught me to read the text for what it ACTUALLY said, not just what I WANTED it to say.  You taught me to observe the text carefully, not sloppily. You taught me to interpret the text correctly—an offensive thought in and of itself to the subjective experientialist, for whom the text says whatever he needs for it to say. In the process of teaching me to read the Bible correctly, you taught me a deep respect for it. I stopped seeing it as a handbook for living and started recognizing it as the living Word of God--a doctrine I had theretofore affirmed but not completely understood. What you taught stood up to scrutiny and question, even from a classical Enlightenment-era man like me.

“Men, it’s good to find a wife,” you’d say to the men in the class. Because you believed that, others did too. Your Bible bore the scars, scribblings and marks of a scholar who had translated and interpreted it so many times he could breathe it in his sleep.  You are an example of the patient, diligent, and careful life of the expositor, but something more, as well.

For yours is an example of beauty. Those weren’t just words you translated and interpreted; they were art. They breathed, and breathe still. They soar and sear, inflate and puncture, penetrate and protect. They are hilarious, powerful, beautiful. They were before you, and they are after you. That you considered them so worthy as to entirely give your life to them is the statue of the true exegete.

It is the model of the man of God, sculpted patiently, painstakingly, beautifully, by The Supreme Artist. You are His Art, finally finished after years of labor, and you exist  so that the next cohort of theologians may observe, interpret and apply…correctly, earnestly, thoroughly—and become, themselves, the sculpture of the exegete for the next generation.

Thanks, Prof.