A Harvard Lesson in Humility

If you’ve not heard of William Stuntz before, I encourage you to get to know him. Stuntz, 52, is an accomplished, highly regarded professor at Harvard Law School. He is also a Christian (he attends Park Street Church) who speaks very honestly and winsomely about his Christian faith.

And one other thing about Stuntz: he is dying from cancer.

His reflections on death are poignant, thoughtful, and hope-filled (here’s one interview at Patheos; here’s an abbreviated version at WSJ; and here’s his testimony given at Park Street).

There’s a lot that can be said about Stuntz, but I was struck by “one of his famous phrases” as reported in a recent article about him. The phrase is this: “I hadn’t though of that.” One of Stuntz’s former students reflects on the power of these simple words: “Think of how much he accomplishes with that one phrase in the classroom…Somehow, his students managed to come out of of every conversation with him feeling like we were tenured Harvard professors, or could be, someday.”

I can’t recall when I’ve come across a more practical and challenging account of humility. Here’s a celebrated Harvard professor unafraid to admit to his young, inexperienced, less knowledgeable students that they could think of ideas he hadn’t thought of before. Count me convicted. How easily I can allow my congregation or my elders or my pastoral interns or my wife or my kids to keep on assuming that my knowledge of the Bible, of theology, of the Christian life in general is beyond tracing out.

Of course, they don’t really assume that. But any pastor or leader knows what I’m talking about. When you have a position of prestige or gifts of intellect, people make a habit of defaulting to your area of learning. And how comfortable we are to play the expert.

But if we’re honest (and why wouldn’t we be except for pride?), we don’t know it all. We aren’t models of everything. Even our youngest pupils will see things we haven’t seen before. So why not admit it?

What beautiful humility to utter that simple phrase: “I hadn’t thought of that.” It encourages others, may even inspire others, while also demonstrating a proper sense of our own finitude.

I’m grateful for William Stuntz, for his Christian faith, his vocation, and today, for his example of humility. I have much to learn and am glad to learn from others farther ahead in the race. I want to say “I hadn’t thought of that” more often, because, well, there are billions of things I’ve never thought of before. No sense in hiding the obvious. There’s only one Know-It-All in the universe, and he will not share his glory with another.

Kevin DeYoung
thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/