TEN YEARS GONE: Uneducated (Revised)

What Can We Learn From This Person?

First Published Saturday, April 2, 2016 - Revised Monday, August 10, 2026

When the rulers and elders and scribes saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men....

— Acts 4

There is something wonderfully disruptive about this description of Peter and John.

They were uneducated and ordinary men.

That doesn't mean they were unintelligent. Peter had made his living as a fisherman, which required skills, judgment, physical endurance, knowledge of weather and water, the ability to maintain equipment, and enough business sense to earn a living. He simply had not received the kind of formal education that would have impressed the religious establishment.

And yet there he stood, speaking boldly enough that the educated men in the room had to pay attention.

We still struggle with this.

Somewhere along the way, our culture began treating education and intelligence as though they were almost interchangeable. We ask where someone went to school, what degree hangs on the wall, or what letters appear after a name, and without quite realizing it, we begin assigning intellectual rank.

I have never been comfortable with that.

As a young adult, I remember theological discussions in which disagreement with a pastor or minister could suddenly be stopped by some version of, “Well, he studied the Greek.”

Okay.

Then tell me what the Greek says.

Explain it to me. Show me why it matters. Make the argument strong enough that an ordinary person can understand it. Don't use your education as a credential that ends the discussion.

Otherwise, why even have had a Reformation? Why not leave the Bible in Latin and let the educated people tell everybody else what it says?

None of this means education is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Scholarship is a tremendous gift. I am grateful for historians who know things I don't know, physicians who spent years learning medicine, scientists who understand their disciplines, and biblical scholars who can open doors into ancient languages and cultures that I could never open by myself.

Expertise deserves respect.

But respect is not the same thing as surrender.

The educated person can be wrong. The uneducated person can possess extraordinary wisdom. Someone who never attended college may understand farming, machinery, children, grief, money, human nature, Scripture, music, business, or a hundred other things better than someone with several advanced degrees.

Life educates people too.

I went to college largely because I needed professional credentials for the work I wanted to do. I'm glad I went. My education opened doors and gave me tools that have served me throughout my life.

But it did not make me better or necessarily smarter than the person who didn't go.

Perhaps Acts gives us a healthier way to respond when we encounter someone whose education looks different from ours. Instead of asking what degree the person has, perhaps we should begin with a much more interesting question:

“What can I learn from this person?”

Peter and John didn't have the credentials the establishment expected.

They had something to say.

So the educated men listened.