Teaching Fellow 1

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1. I was 23 when I began as a two-year Teaching Fellow at Asbury. These were truly some of the best years of my life. I was not only working, but I was doing something I dearly loved--teaching Greek and Hebrew. I had close friends who pretty much thought the same way I did about God and the world. I got along very well with students and got to hang out with some really smart professors. I even dated for several months.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy teaching the Bible, especially Paul's earlier letters. But the Bible can be controversial. People often shape their faith around a certain unreflective understanding of the Bible they learn as a child. And while they think they want to go deeper with the Bible, I don't think it's always true. What a lot of them want is secret knowledge that goes along with what they already think.

In fact, for some people, serious study of the Bible can result in the Bible becoming more distant than before. Joel Green speaks of it becoming a dissected frog. You can label all the parts but it's not jumping anymore. This was especially true in the purely "modernist" phase of biblical studies, where only the original meaning was of interest. One of the strengths of "post" modernism is the possibility of a second naivete that can accept both ancient and living meanings to an autonomous text.

I say this to explain why I enjoy teaching biblical languages so much. No one in my Greek classes ever argues over the forms of the third declension. There is no stress worrying over whether someone will tell their pastor that you said the perfect tense is completed action. And you can make all sorts of random puns of no significance whatsoever.

Teaching over the years has always involved varying degrees of ice below the surface of what I teach. There has often been a depth that just wasn't helpful to bring up. There are books I haven't written. Perhaps they would have been pointless.

One of the reasons I always enjoyed going to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting was to be able to talk to people who understood. When I first showed up there from IWU, Keith Reeves from Azusa expressed great surprise that a professor from IWU would be there. That would dramatically change over the years.

More than once I have thought how nice it would be to teach something uncontroversial like math or physics. I bet I would have been a great calculus teacher. And no controversy!

2. I was so excited the night before my first Greek class. I had a hard time sleeping. I even thought about having everyone get in boxes on the lawn representing noun endings. I used to have "subjunctive day" where students would arrive to a note on the board that said, "We might be in room x." I was silly. It was great fun.

A fellow before me, Rory Skelly, had put a number of Greek paradigms to music. Although I always footnote him, I have often gotten credit for these ditties. They are quite helpful. The only one I added was an adjective ending song.

The teaching fellow I replaced was Felix Sung. His parting words to me were, "And remember, people are stupid." At the time I thought it was a little harsh. I will say that not everyone has the aptitude for biblical languages. At least a couple of ministers later confessed to passing the Greek competency exam by improper means.

The senior teaching fellow was Bill Patrick, one of my best friends. Bill is brilliant. He is hilarious. Every once and a while we will still have a text exchange with short snippets of shared experiences, Deep Thoughts, and Saturday Night Live.

Bill was never good at playing games in the academy. He could have done a dissertation in his sleep. Indeed, I would have been glad simply to write up conversations with him. He has enough in his head. But at some point it all seemed foolish to him. I personally would say that some games are worth playing.

If he ever wrote a novel, I picture it being a bit like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. That is, I see him writing one book in a lifetime that becomes a classic (realizing that there is now a second). Bill did start a novel once. But then he read Of Human Bondage and decided that the novel had already been written. I read the novel in England, perhaps the first I read outside of school. [2]

Students seemed to enjoy me for Greek, but they learned more with him. Bill has to be one of the only Teaching Fellows to go four years. He robbed me of ever being the senior teaching fellow. :-)

3. I roomed with Brian Matherlee in the same apartment after Don Crowson got married. Brian was extroverted with not a hint of nerd. Imagine my surprise when the two prettiest new students were in our apartment. Hilariously, when he was showing them our apartment he pointed out my room and said, "And that's Ken's room."

"Who?" they said.

"Ken, he's right there." And indeed, there I was, standing right behind them, completely unnoticed. :-)

One of them was Greta (Lemons) Lebo, who would become part of my circle of closest friends for those years. Brian, Greta, Laura Lambert, Quin Monahan, Tracie Jordan, Greg Shannon, Jenny Stewart, and more. We had a booth at Applebees. I actually started to sketch a painting of five us in the booth. Finally got rid of it in the recent move, unfinished.

I forgot to mention that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. John Hull and Scott Gunn decided to go see Berlin on the fly. They invited me but I just didn't have the money. I was finally able to see it five years later.

4. I was ordained in 1991 at the age of 24. The rule was that you needed two years of ministry service after bacheloreate education, one after an MDIV. I don't think they counted my teaching, although I was under appointment by the Florida district. I think they cobbled together the bits and pieces of church ministry I had done here and there. I think I forgot to mention some summer ministry I did with Trinity Wesleyan in Central.

I asked for an NASB for my ordination Bible. We had used the RSV at Asbury. The EB professors liked it because it didn't have headings that would bias your outlining when you were doing a survey. But I knew it was viewed as a somewhat liberal translation, so I asked for an NASB. I didn't want another KJV and at the time I couldn't stand the NIV.

O.D. Emery was the presiding general superintendent, a long time friend of my family. Also signing my Bible was J.D. Abbott, after whose son I was named. Virgil Mitchell also signed. I had served as student body chaplain at Central my senior year under him.

Then there was the DBMS (now DBMD): Raymond Kensell (DS), Dennis Waymire (Asst DS), Richard Cowley, M. Lee Schenck (my dad), Walter McKee, and Mac McCombs (sec).

5. I taught Greek in a three hour + three hour format, a whole year, using Machen. I taught a six hour block, a one semester crash course. I also taught intermediate Greek, using Brooks and Winbery's Syntax of New Testament Greek (again following precedent). Metzger's Lexical Aids also featured. [1]

Patrick Eby had me as a torturer in those days, along with others like Jim McNeely. They not only had to parse Greek words but give the semantic nuances of the cases and tenses. I think we even did a little sentence diagramming.

[1] It occurs to me that the way I was able to get through Hebrews in Greek was Sakae Kubo's, A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.

[2] Between my doctorate and starting teaching, I read Crime and Punishment and Things Fall Apart.