Static vs Dynamic

     The church fathers have commented that someone is either increasing or diminishing, in regards to their faith.  That someone is never static, or at a plateau.  Our lives as believers ought to be dynamic, we should always be growing: in our love for God, in our love for others, in our understanding of who God is and our relationship with Him.  We should be growing in our understanding of others and our relationships with them.  This is not to reduce our faith to merely an academic exercise.  I am talking about love for God and love for man.
     But there certainly is an academic side to all of this.  When you love someone else and spend time with them, you automatically come to know them better, and this includes all kinds of details, some important and others trivial.  The wonderful thing about God is that no detail about Him is ever trivial.  We ought to be striving to know him better, including in an academic sense.  Knowing the text of Scripture and knowing church history are two ways that we come to know God by seeing how He has interacted with and treated His people through time.
     One more very important point.  Learn to read Scripture and history by imitating the saints.  We can fabricate all kinds of novel and interesting ways of reading, but that is really not helpful.  Learning to read and understand in the right way makes all the difference in the world.