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12. I finished as Teaching Fellow at Asbury in the spring of 92. Then I went full time to finish up my classics degree at the University of Kentucky in 1992-93.
I was in the student center at the University of Kentucky when the first Iraq War launched. That was scary. I was 25. As I stood there, I realized I just barely was still draft age.
It was really the first "war" since Vietnam. I remember still having the hangover of Vietnam. This is hard to believe now looking back but because the last war effort had more or less failed, I had not grown up with the military confidence that we have now. It is hard to recreate what it felt like then for me but it is basically this:
- There was an underlying and lingering doubt I had about foreign war. The last two conflicts--Korea and Vietnam, had ended in mire and a sense of defeat.
- On the other hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, and Perestroika in Russia had created some sense of optimism about a future world that was filled with democracy. As a side note, the Trump presidency has shaken my confidence in societal progress to the core.
- The rapidity of the first Iraq War restored in me a sense of America's military dominance in the world. I grew up with that sense from my parents about WW1 and WW2, that America had saved the day in Europe for both. I know it was much more uncertain at the actual time of those wars. Looking back, I admire Bush 1's decision not to go into Baghdad in 91.
For second year Latin we used Ball's Reading Classical Latin. The readings were from easier Latin authors like Livy and Ovid, maybe a little Catullus and Cicero. I did not take courses in most of these authors so that was a good opportunity to fill in gaps. Jerald Walz has kept in touch with me a little over the years from those days.
14. I might say that as a white male student in Wilmore, I did not think of the place as having any prejudice or darkness in relation to race. In America, such forces have seemed somewhat dormant to me until the last four years or so. But I may just not have noticed because I'm white. I know a black IWU student who went to Asbury and experienced the environment in a much different way than I did. I have had a black colleague who experienced the town on a visit differently than I did.
This is part of what is meant by white privilege. It is an ease of living in certain environments that a white male like myself doesn't see. It's a friction I don't experience that others do. I was disappointed once upon a time to hear that Henry Clay Morrison, founder of the seminary, was not without issues when it came to race. Of course the few Asbury professors I have heard on such topics did not approve of those elements in Wilmore's history. Thankfully both IWU and Central have at least a little different history on that score, having black students from their early days. [1]
Some time after I graduated from the seminary and before recent UM dynamics, I came to think that the Wesleyan and Methodist students at Asbury in general had a different flavor. We might believe exactly the same things, but the flavor was different. Wesleyans who went to Asbury, it seems to me, were largely in a process of broadening their view of the world. Their eyes were being opened to see more.
By contrast, Methodists who went to Asbury tended to be resisting cultural trends and moving in the opposite direction. They often went there looking for an island of resistance in the middle of a liberal church. They were fighting against liberalism. So although Wesleyans and Methodists at Asbury more or less had the same theology and ethics, they were moving in different directions. They were on different vectors.
15. I dated a student from Asbury College for a few months while I was teaching fellow. She had taken voice lessons so I took some voice lessons, the only voice lessons I ever had. I will leave out a brief encounter we had involving a train. It wasn't at High Bridge but not too far down the tracks from the police station. [2]
I also taught a couple times for Midway College while I was a teaching fellow. Bob Miller had used Felix Sung, maybe, to adjunct some for them. Miller was a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar. I was always curious why such a liberal guy would have someone from Asbury teach for them. Probably a combination of necessity, not thinking it mattered too much with this student group, and perhaps respect for scholars at Asbury like Bauer.
Bill Patrick still teases me about us going over to Louisville to meet and hear Martin Hengel. When I introduced myself and he heard my name, he asked if I was German. I said yes because I thought he meant in heritage. Aber er bedeutete ob ich Deutscher wäre.
I remember teaching a class at Midway largely made up of adult nursing students. I had one of those moments where you realize you are unreflective about something. So I was making an argument for the virgin birth to them. My argument went like this. Paul believed in the virgin birth and he was close enough to Jesus historically to know. Now what's the problem with this argument?
The problem is that Paul never mentions the virgin birth one way or the other in any of his writings. Galatians 4:4 doesn't say one way or the other. He is completely silent on the issue. This was an example of me viewing the Bible as one book rather than sixty-six (or more) separate books. Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth, but they obviously were not in the same books as Paul's writings.
Of course I believe in the virgin birth. That's not the point. The point is my increasing reflectivity in those years. It was troubling to see on one matter after another how unreflective I had been. The virgin birth is mentioned in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, but not really anywhere else. Perhaps the early Christians talked about it all the time, but it does not play a significant role in the theology of the New Testament texts because it just isn't mentioned. [3]
I wholeheartedly agree with those who point out the importance of instilling faith in our children. Beliefs and relationships that are in the gut of your youth are hard to shake. It is much harder to instill faith in a person on the basis of rational argument, once the mind is fully formed. Arguments tend to lay on top of a more gut-based foundation, not the other way around as in the "Platonic fallacy" I have mentioned (see Jonathan Haidt).
My main plea is that we form the faith of our children in foundations that are really solid. Once a person has detached from their childhood gut, they are susceptible to all kinds of influences. Those of us who are still in the worldview of our childhood often can't see why others do not attach to our way of seeing the world. It seems so compelling to us. We do not realize that the motivations for belief usually go much deeper than whatever reasons we might present.
16. I was fascinated in Larry Wood's contemporary theology class to learn that Wolfhart Pannenberg was a mostly orthodox theologian who nevertheless did not believe in the virgin birth. Pannenberg focused on the resurrection in his theology. At that time, it seemed quite the norm to see the resurrection as the focal point of Christology. That is not so much the case now. Right now, the Trinity and thus the pre-existent tri-unity seems to be the center. More on this to come.
I do not agree with Pannenberg on the virgin birth, but it was a little jolting to reflect on this subject in those days. It seems to me that almost all the arguments about why the virgin birth is essential do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Jesus is not half God and half human. He is fully human and fully God.
Therefore, whatever Jesus' divinity is, it is not his humanity. Jesus had an X and a Y chromosome. Because Jesus was born of a virgin, God must have created the Y chromosome. But Jesus could have become fully human with no human parents, and Jesus could have been fully divine with two human parents. His divinity is not contingent in any way on the nature of his human parentage, at least not as far as I can see.
Nor does it make sense to say that Jesus had to be born of a virgin so that he could be without sin. Perhaps some Christians in the early centuries like Augustine thought this because they thought of sex as dirty, but this is bad theology. Sin is not on the Y chromosome. If it were, then women would be without sin, being XX.
N. T. Wright suggests that the virgin birth was a gift. Not entirely sure what he meant. To me, it is an origin befitting the divine Son of God, a sign. [4] Not necessary for any substantial reason but fitting the divine King of Kings.
17. I did not feel God's presence much those days, although I begged him for it. Often during church I would even beg him to chastise me in his anger just so I might know he was there. Often during the prayer times at Stonewall I would plead for God to make himself known to me.
I led a college Sunday School class my last year there (Gary Cockerill's daughters were in it). We read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? Not that I was suffering. Not at all. I have a theory that people who observe others suffering worry about the problem of suffering more than the people who actually undergo the suffering. And I didn't even know someone who was suffering.
I also bought Hans Kung's Does God Exist? I didn't find it particularly helpful. To be honest, most of it was over my head.
On a side note, Thomas Oden came to an Asbury College chapel while I was teaching fellow. I went to hear him. I didn't know anything about him except that he was famous. He gave his testimony but I didn't understand it. That was depressing. Part of the problem is the fact that my mind wandered, as it typically did during any sustained speech at that time. By the time I would snap back to the speaker, I had lost track of their train of thought.
Back to God. At one point I had a bright idea. When I pray, why don't I talk as if I'm actually talking to somebody? That seems like an obvious suggestion, but at some point I came to the conclusion that my prayers had often been monologues. It seemed sometimes like I prayed as if I was talking to myself rather than to someone who is actually out there.
Have you ever heard prayers where it sure seems like they're talking to the other people in the room rather than to God? How many pastors provide information or a sermon in their prayers that, frankly, God already knows? It's like they are really lecturing to the congregation. "Lord, you know that ...." or "Lord, we know that..." I suspect there are some other unreflective monologuers out there.
These days, I do not presume that I will have a vivid experience of God every day or even every month. There are moments when I feel blessed or when I feel peace. I thank God for those. But I go along my way, believing that God is with me, whether I have feelings or not. God is right there with me to talk to. Whether he talks back to me or not doesn't matter. It is of course a blessing when he does.
[1] Although one of the last lynchings in America took place in Marion, Indiana. I hope there were no people associated with Marion College in the infamous photo.
[2] It seems to me that I ran to High Bridge and back once. Quite a run. I never went on that notorious bridge.
[3] This point is hard to grasp if one is still reading the Bible unreflectively, because in that pre-modern state, one has difficulty telling the difference between what you believe about and hear in the text and what the text actually says.
[4] I have already mentioned that Isaiah 7:14 seems to have had both a "near" meaning in its own time as well as the "far" meaning that Matthew saw fulfilled in it.
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