Lubeck remembers Goodrick

I am taking a course from Dr. Ray Lubeck who revised Dr. Edward Goodrick’s (of “Is my Bible the Inspired Word of God?”. This book is the required text for our course and the introduction houses a special rememberence by Dr. Lubeck.

That first semester at Multnomah school of the Bible, precisely because of those two classes [with Edward Goodrick], completely deflated any of my sophomoric attitudes. After all, I had been a Sunday school hotshot, a VBS Bible verse memorizing champion, a high school youth group and summer camp leader, and i had read my Bible daily for several years. of course when I arrived at Bible school, my teachers would ooh and aah upon seeing such experience and education packaged into one precocious young man on their doorstep.

Reality check: within on a few weeks under Ed Goodrick, any residual self-assurance I had left was withering daily under his flare at my uncritical, rote repetition of the interpretations and theology I had absorbed in my twenty years of growing up in the church. Whenever he buttonholed me to defend or substantiate the doctrine that I could so easily parrot (I didn’t really own it), I was left speechless, mouth agape.

This was one of the greatest lessons Ed Goodrick left with me: under his care I was transported from what Howard Hendricks would describe as “unconscious incompetence” to “conscious incompetence”. That is, when i came, I didn’t know all that I didn’t know. After completing all my studies at Multnomah, I had moved to the next step: now I knew what I didn’t know. Instead of being ignorantly clueless, i was now more wisely and humbly clueless–a far more teachable state. And no teacher had a greater role in that humbling, sometimes humiliating process than Ed Goodrick.

This was an especially interesting reflection for me to read in light of a similar discussion I’ve been having with my worldview students. It also made me ponder the mysterious chemistry that can develop between a teacher and student that can result in such a dramatic life change. That X factor is both inexplicable and invaluable.