This expresses well why I have become disenchanted with theological academia. The pursuit and infatuation with that which is novel describes most of the academy. You must make a new contribution or apply some new method to the text.
Put simply, novelty is the seed bed of error.
One night, the theologian Thomas C. Oden dreamed that he was walking through a cemetery in New Haven. There he came upon a tombstone, his own. The epitaph read:
“He made no new contribution to theology.”
This made Oden very happy, as it should make us if those words were on our tombstones. For we are not called to make new contributions to theology, but to faithfully hand down the truth once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).
Let us repeat, let us continue to teach what Jesus taught from the Father, what the apostles learned from our Lord, and what has been proclaimed throughout the history of the Church.
There is a temptation we all face, to say something novel, something no one has ever taught before. But we must resist this. Our calling is not innovation, but faithfulness.
Today in Bible in One Year, we read 1 Timothy 6, where Paul warns Timothy:
“If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.” (1 Tim. 6:3–4)
God, protect us from teaching or holding to a “different doctrine.”
Rather, let us humbly take up the words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching of the apostles, the teaching that accords with godliness, and pass on these life-giving and saving words, that many may hear and believe.