Pursuing Answers to Many Questions: Dr. Aubrey Buster ’09, M.A. ’11
Words: Juliana Bacote ’24
Dr. Aubrey Buster ’09, M.A. ’11
When Dr. Aubrey Buster ’09, M.A. ’11, was in high school, she wanted to be a singer. She never thought she’d end up teaching the Old Testament.
On the way to audition for another college’s conservatory, Buster stopped by Wheaton to audition at the Conservatory because her dad told her it was located “on the way there.” She later learned this was not true. But she agreed to audition at Wheaton. During her visit, she attended a chapel service presented by HNGR students, which convinced her she wanted to go to Wheaton. “I was so moved by the purpose, the eloquence, and the vision of the students.”
When she got into her top-choice conservatory and Wheaton’s conservatory, she chose Wheaton.
Buster’s plans shifted again once she was on campus. In the midst of studying voice with elective studies in English literature, she faced “an existential crisis.” “I asked myself why what I was doing in music mattered,” Buster said. “I remember wondering, ‘Why does music matter when people are starving in the world? Shouldn’t everyone just be doing ministry all the time?’”
To solve her inner turmoil once and for all, she did what many college students would do: she wrote a thesis.
While working on this thesis, which focused on theology and art, Buster stumbled into the world of biblical interpretation, sparking a new interest for her. “Looking back, my thesis was probably mostly nonsense, but what I got from working on it was this love of putting together different pieces,” she said. “A little bit of Hebrew that I taught myself from an eBay grammar, some theology of art, something I learned in music history class. I think it was the experience of putting those things together and the thrill of finding a source that gets at that question you have in your bones that caused me to say, ‘I want to do this. I want to write and figure out questions without bounds.”
After Buster completed her Bachelor of Music, she began the Master’s in Biblical Exegesis at Wheaton and loved it so much that she proceeded to pursue a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Emory University. Not long after graduating, Buster found herself returning to Wheaton, where she knew she would have the opportunity to facilitate the kinds of conversations that led her to want to study the Bible in the first place. “The people who come to Wheaton love studying many things about the world,” she said, “Wheaton creates spaces for students and faculty to study these things from a position of faith and then bring our questions to the study of the biblical text.”
The texts Buster has the most questions about have become the areas she has studied the most, as she aims to uncover some answers. “I think one of the reasons I ended up in Old Testament specifically is due to the number of questions I had,” she said. “And because the Old Testament can seem so foreign and distant to us, I found that each new point of access I got and each question I answered was so rich for helping me understand the person of God and the nature of the text. So, I found it really rewarding.”
For a similar reason, Buster finds teaching the Old Testament rewarding. “I find that it’s the part of the Bible students have the least familiarity with,” she said. “So, I get to see those light bulb moments that kind of change everything on a regular basis.”
The same motivation that brought her to teach at Wheaton still keeps her motivated in her work eight years later. “I still have questions,” Buster said. “And I think the answers matter.”
