You can learn anything on YouTube. Need to pickle onions? Youtube has a tutorial. Can’t change the battery on the keyless fob of your Honda Civic? Some helpful soul has made a video for just your make and model. What’s more, it’s free, as long as you ignore the vast amount of personal information they are siphoning off you. 

With this kind of access to information, why spend money on college? In a famous scene from Good Will Hunting, the main character tells a Harvard student he could have got the same education with “$1.50 in late charges from the public library.” Now with YouTube, you don’t even have to worry about the late charges. 

Even when it comes to theological education, there is a ton of free online content. But before you decide to become a YouTube autodidact, here are 5 points you might want to consider: 

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

 In order to look up something, you have to have a hunch about the information you are missing. In the New Testament, the meaning of many passages becomes transparent with some background history of the Intertestamental Period, a period of roughly 400 years between 400 BCE - 25 CE. But if you don’t know that the intertestamental period is important for biblical studies, it might never cross your mind to study it. This is where a professor can help expose you to ideas that you won’t find on your own. 

You Need Skills Not Just Information

No program can teach you everything that you need to know about the Bible. The Bible is vast. What a good Bible program should do is equip you with a basic framework and set of skills to begin your life-long pursuit of knowing God and his word. Teachers are professionals, not because they have all the information, but because they know what information to reveal and what information to make you find on your own. In other words, they structure classes in a way that not only develops your knowledge but also develops your skills. Skill development doesn’t come through a lecture; It happens in the type of homework that is assigned to you and the graduated challenges of a curriculum. And that’s not even the half of it when you broaden your view and look at all the non-intellectual skills you need to be an effective person, such as communication, meeting deadlines, etc. 

Algorithms want to please you, but learning only happens when you’re challenged.

Cognitive psychologists have long understood that we have certain biases built into our way of thinking. The most prominent of these biases is the so-called confirmation bias. This means that we gravitate toward informational sources that confirm our ideas rather than challenge them. This, in turn, is a byproduct of our general biological tendency to avoid discomfort, which includes the mental discomfort of being wrong. YouTube of course knows this. That is why they have developed sophisticated ways of offering you video after video that confirms what you already think. They want to make you happy, but in so doing, they are also making you dumb. There is a reason that wisdom books like Proverbs spends a good deal of time telling young people to accept discipline and rebuke. It’s an unpleasant but necessary ingredient to education. It’s not likely that you will challenge yourself. Godly teachers, on the other hand, will tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. 

Spirituality isn’t having the right information.

Information and knowledge are great, but they aren’t everything. Not by a long shot. We tend to think of education as gluing bits of knowledge together into a more or less coherent structure, but this isn’t how it works. It’s more of a circuit of actions. You start with knowledge; then you try to put that knowledge into practice; then it doesn’t work perfectly; then you reflect on your failure; and then you become aware of a need for further development. If you are to grow as a person, you need both knowledge and a venue for putting that knowledge into practice. This circuit cannot be completed alone. Ephesians 4 says that we grow into the knowledge of Christ together. We need people around us who can challenge and hold us accountable so that we continue putting our knowledge into practice, falling short, finding mercy and grace, and continuing to grow and learn together. 

The internet is filled with bizarre nonsense.

Finally, it must be said: YouTube, like all the internet, is a crazy grabbag of mostly nonsense. I could say that finding quality theological knowledge on YouTube is like finding a needle in a haystack, but that would be too generous. The needle-in-a-haystack analogy highlights the vast amount of time needed to find the sought-after item.  And indeed, you will waste a load of time sifting through low-quality hogwash. But what the analogy doesn’t highlight is the danger in all that other stuff you have to look through (hay is far too harmless on this score). Maybe a better analogy is that it’s like finding a bar of silver in a pile of razor wire. Or it’s like finding a volvariella volvacea in a field of amanita phalloides. Okay, maybe that last mushroom-themed analogy didn’t land, but the point should be obvious: It’s not just that you’ll spend a lot of time finding something good, it’s that there is a lot out there that seems good, but is actually quite dangerous. So yes, YouTube is technically free, but it will end up costing you more than you think. 

I don’t mean to be too hard on Youtube. It can be entertaining and informative. You can learn all kinds of things like how to cook bundt cakes or how to say “I need friends” in Klingon. When it comes to your theological education, however, the education that will form your deepest values and shape the direction of your life, I would caution you from educating yourself, especially on a platform where you will also learn what celebrities are lizard-people or how to become an overnight billionaire using “this one simple trick.” Getting educated for free does sound alluring, but like that one simple trick, it’s too good to be true.