Malcolm Gladwell once wrote a brilliant book simply titled Blink.
In it he presents an imaginary puzzle and leaves you the reader to figure it out. Here's the story:
A man and his son are in a serious automobile accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the boy and gasps, "This is my son!"
"Who," asks Gladwell, "is the doctor?"
You read that story and you realize it's a puzzle, an enigma. It's not like a math or logic problem that can be solved with paper and pencil. Gladwell goes on, "The only way you can get to the answer is if it comes to you suddenly, in the blink of an eye" (hence the title, Blink). "You need to make a leap," he says, "beyond the automatic assumption that doctors are always men."
The answer to the puzzle is now clear. The doctor is the boy's mother.
As I reach the end of my career, I am concerned by the way many topics in biblical studies are assumed rather than proved. And not only by your average church member. Scholars can be guilty of the same thing. You'll hear things like, "Paul could not have possibly been the author of Hebrews," or "Matthew's Gospel could never have been the church's first record of the life and ministry of Jesus." But I'm done with assumptions -- with what I've begun to call scholarly group think. Did you know that the majority view has often turned out to be falsifiable? Yet I have had scholars say to my face, "Today no respectable New Testament scholar holds to the Pauline authorship of Hebrews." Remember, I'm the guy who wrote a book called The Authorship of Hebrews: The Case for Paul. I've also written a book defending Matthean priority -- the historical view of the church through the ages until the advent of modern higher criticism.
Every one of us makes assumptions to one degree or another. It's human nature to do so. I make assumptions all the time. But if I'm given clearly new information that challenges my assumptions, I just roll and adapt to it. The other day I decided to go to a particular restaurant to eat. My assumption was that the restaurant was open on that date and time I was going. But when I got there the restaurant was closed. Now what was I going to do? Had I decided to check their website first, I could have avoided the problem.
My point is that assumptions can be wrong, in some cases even dangerous. Perhaps we need to keep a couple of things in mind:
- You can't avoid making assumptions in every decision and activity.
- You need to pay attention to your assumptions in every decision and activity.
- You should always acknowledge the possibility that your assumptions are wrong.
- If possible, you should always have a backup plan in case you are wrong.
One thing I've never understood is why my profs in seminary never once asked me to challenge their assumptions about things like the authorship of Hebrews or the synoptic problem. It's like they were asking me not to think and to just blindly accept things the way the beehive wanted me to perceive them. It's basic human nature to make assumptions, especially based on first impressions. This doesn't mean, however, that those first impressions are correct. How many times have I made assumptions based on too little information or bad information!
The good news is that if we make any of these wrong assumptions we can steer the ship in a different direction. But this will happen -- as we saw in the story about the emergency room doctor -- only if we check and spot our mistaken assumptions and then take different actions.