Tales from the Archive: William Berrett on Scholarship in 1958

William E. “Ed” Berrett (1902-1993)  figures prominently in 20th century LDS education history. He taught seminary, wrote manuals for the Church and served on the General Sunday school board, briefly became assistant US attorney in Alaska before opening his own practice in Salt Lake, and then returned to Church service. He became a BYU Religion professor, served as vice-president of BYU and CES, and eventually head of Seminaries, Institutes, and Church colleges (excluding BYU.)

On July 11, 1958, President Berrett gave an address to Seminary and Institute faculty at BYU, titled “Scholarship.” It’s quite surprising, in some ways. Below, some excerpts.

Ed Berret, from the BYU website.

This Church started in an area that called for an educated people. The very circumstances of its founding required men to be learned…. Almost in the beginning, the Lord commanded the members of the Church to study and learn, and in enumerating the subjects which they should study he named almost the entire curriculum of a university, secular and religious…. When you set about a program so large as [converting the world], you are requiring your people to become learned. In the first place you can’t speak to the peoples of the earth unless you know languages…. What an assignment that is to us as a people!— to learn the history, the language, the culture, the customs, of every people upon the face of this whole earth until we can come to know and understand and teach them. As a Church we have scarcely begun to acquire the scholarship that is necessary for the consummation of this task….

One thing of course you must know if you are going to teach the Gospel and that is the gospel itself, which is no simple assignment…. In addition, we should know about governments…. It was quite an experience had by some of our missionaries back in 1851-2 when they suddenly decided to go into all the nations of the earth and they went to some of them so unprepared that the effort ended in arrest and deportation. That need not have occurred to a people prepared. When in the early days of this Church people full of missionary enthusiasm went into the mission filed, they found how ill-prepared they were to teach. In 1832 the prophet called them all home and set up the School of the prophets in order to prepare missionaries to go out again into the field. It is interesting to review the subjects that were taught in that School. It looks like a list from a liberal arts college. One subject he thought the Bible scholar should know was Hebrew…. what an example he was setting in scholarship! He thought his people were smarter than they were. He thought they could learn Hebrew in seven weeks of night School at the same time they were taking up a half a dozen other subjects…

The thing I am getting at is this: This Church began with a program that required learned men. The program is the same today. The Prophet Joseph had had little opportunity to go to school himself, but he realized the scholarship which this people must possess if thy were to carry out their God-given task…. The only oft-repeated commandment of the Lord in the Doctrine and Covenants is the commandment to study and learn, and that is repeated… in more than 50 places!

There is more than one source of knowledge…. The prophet made one great truth pretty clear to us: “There is no revelation without a student.”¹I haven’t heard that one before, and he provides no citation.— unless you are a seeker after truth, you will never have a revelation, nor will the President of the Church or anyone else….

I want to point out that learned men have done much for this Church…. Men like James E. Talmage and BH Roberts have had a lasting effect on our people. Almost all of the interpretations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that have deeply affected us have come from learned men, scholars, who sought the truth with all their hearts, and with faith prayed to God for understanding. That will always be true. We need scholars to constantly study and interpret to the masses of the Church the meaning of the words we read. It is difficult to read the ancient scriptures….

[Nephi] remarks how difficult it is to understand [Isaiah.] We are not removed merely 250 years from Isaiah, but nearly 3000 years, living in a culture foreign to his, and we try to read and understand. We wonder that we sometimes come up with differences of understanding. We need men who know the Hebrew people, understand the Hebrew language and Hebrew backgrounds who can help us understand that which the ancient prophets wrote.

It is pitiful how few people we have in the Church who know Greek and Aramaic, when we should be the leaders among men in interpreting the ancient Greek and Aramaic documents…. we ought to have hundreds of them….

What do you know about the backgrounds of the New Testament? How much do we know about the Greek philosophies of that day and the contact of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with those philosophies; the repercussions and compromises, if you will? I just need to formulate a few such questions to realize how ignorant I am…. We are just beginning to find out we need scholarship, men who know the Gospel because they have lived it and breathed it from their early years, and who know the languages because they have studied it from the foundation up…. we are woefully lacking in that kind of scholarship….

I don’t know any area that is taboo for the researcher, I merely say there are a few areas in which it is useless [he singles out trying to prove the existence of God.] I don’t think that anyone expects us here at Brigham Young University to deconstruct the doctrine of the Church in regard to our relationship to Deity, or to reconstruct the organization of the Church, or the powers and duties of the Priesthood. Those are fixed by the word of the Lord to us in the only way they could be fixed. I hope none of you feel that it cramps your style that you are not at liberty to throw the revelations aside and start afresh….

May you get some desires in your heart to known well the area you teach, so that you may speak with wisdom, that you may guide students aright, so that you may be of service to the Lord. I hope you realize that… you have tremendous liberty of research, tremendous right to read any book that was ever printed, to search in every subject ever taught, having only the desire to know the truth.”

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you can see how Berrett’s words here resonate with me. I’ve argued pretty heavily for learning to read scripture in context and paying attention to languages— through easily accessible resources like Study Bibles— as well as discipleship and commitment to the Gospel. See my posts tagged “scripture study,” for example.

I think shallow engagement with scripture leaves us with shallow understandings and expectations, and less capable of handling complexity. If our spiritual and intellectual diet consists of pre-digested pablum and theological Twinkies, we’re likely to choke when steak appears on our plate. We need to engage scripture in order to allow it to change our thought process, challenge our culturally-inherited assumptions, complicate our simplicities. This is not to say that scripture is a purely-divine handbook of timeless and eternally perfect doctrine, ethics, and guidance (as blog readers also know); but we ignore it at our own risk.

PS- to avoid the inevitable pushback, neither am I saying the average member of the Church needs to study Greek nor that Come Follow Me discussions should be academic seminars about Assyrian pottery typology. But we need to spend more time in scripture than merely reading a verse, and spending the next 45 minutes rehashing comfortable cultural “truths” we could have rehashed without pretending like we were actually talking about scripture.

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