Notes Along the Way -- Asbury Year 1.5

I've been trying to capture the highlights of my earthly pilgrimage here. I've written a number of posts on my first year at Asbury. The previous bread crumb was here. Here's a last post on Year 1.
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1. For the most part, my first year of seminary was quite stimulating. I've mentioned my first encounter with David Bauer's (FM) English Bible and Bob Lyon for textual criticism. [1]

I had a class with Bob Muholland in J-term on Roman Hellenism and tried a final paper on Stoicism. Man, if Google or ChatGPT had been around, I'd have learned so much more. It would have helped me input so much more.

You see, I have a hard time inputing raw details into my brain. I have to have a file to put them in. I have to be able to connect individual facts to some scaffolding I have. And I really didn't have much scaffolding, it seemed to me. I could have pestered the bejeebers out of ChatGPT if it had been around. 

In those days, I felt like an engine revving full speed in neutral -- wanting to crank out thoughts but not connected to all the needed information inputs to come up with significant results.

To this day, I look at F. H. Sandbach's little book on The Stoics and think, "What a mountain of little disconnected details!" I'm looking forward to reading Timothy Brookins' recent Greek and Roman Philosophy. I've always envied the scholars who can input so much with so much greater ease than I can. The tools have helped even the playing field. :-)

2. I had Cathy Stonehouse (FM) for "Pastor as Teacher" and Don Boyd for "Pastor as Liturgist." I was increasingly doing better at paying attention in class. If I slept my way through Central, I at least was awake at Asbury. All I remember from Stonehouse's class is that people have different learning styles (Kolb). I'm not sure she figured out mine.

In general, the fact that people are different was certainly one of the top takeaways of my first year. Part of orientation was taking the Myers-Briggs test. It seemed to explain so much about my strengths and weaknesses. In college, I had discovered the old Sanguine-Choleric-Melancholy-Phlegmatic schema by way of Tim LaHaye, of all people. It was helpful too, but Myers-Briggs was more professional. [2]

When we designed the curriculum for Wesley Seminary, we made sure they didn't have a "one-size-fits-all" sense of Christian spirituality. Keith Drury had them read Sacred Pathways in the second spiritual formation course.

3. Don Boyd was a curious fellow to me. His worship class generally aimed at United Methodists and I was a fish out of water. He had us grade each other's worship portfolio and of course mine was grossly inadequate from a UM perspective. This low church holiness fellow had never heard terms like Eucharist or the Great Thanksgiving. I had serious questions about corporate confession. 

To be honest, I still grimace a little in corporate confession. It seems so pessimistic. Isn't it possible that everyone in a congregation might not have intentionally sinned during the week? "Ah, Ken, but there is such a thing as unintentional wrongdoing. And there is always more good we could have good." What does the confession say? "We have done that which we ought not to have done, and we have left undone what we ought to have done."

To be frank, while I definitely think God is concerned with any unintentional wrongs we might cause others, I don't think God is particularly worried about the fact that we are not infinitely perfect. I say the confession. I still don't like it. It has all sorts of potential neurosis written all over it.

And to think Boyd was a Wesleyan! In fact, he was the DS of the Alleghany district when they pulled out of the Wesleyan Methodist church. It amazed me to think that this once ultra-conservative guy was now going hyper-liturgical with the United Methodists -- at least he seemed hyper-liturgical from my inexperienced perspective.

4. I suppose he had all but left the Wesleyan Church by then. He had once attended Stonewall Wesleyan before the pastor drove him away. Maybe in fact he had already transfered his credentials to the UM church. At least he did eventually.

Asbury was an interesting place for Wesleyans. If most UM students were there because it was conservative and orthodox, the Wesleyans there in general were on a broadening path. I've often said that, while the UM and Wesleyan students typically had the same beliefs, they were headed in different directions. They had different flavors. 

The Wesleyan students were broadening. Some of the UM students were contracting. This is one reason why I'm not sure if the Global Methodist Church and the Wesleyans would turn out to be a good match. The jury is still out, in my opinion. 

Our theology is roughly the same. But a group coming off of a split has a certain flavor, and we won't know where it stabilizes for a bit. Indeed, there are some "taking bets" on whether the GMC will continue to support women in ministry over the long haul. It is headed in the opposite direction culturally.

Some Wesleyan students went to Asbury and found themselves leaving the Wesleyan Church. Some of this was a sense of how little they had known about God and Christian faith before they came. 

Some became fascinated with liturgy -- something they were not likely to encounter in a Wesleyan church. Boyd himself seemed an example of this. Indeed, preaching from a sermon manuscript would have had a generally negative reaction in most Wesleyan churches.  

I often chuckle to myself at College Wesleyan Church at how unWesleyan it generally is in flavor. Houghton Wesleyan Church was also quite unusual, pipe organ and all. I personally am glad that they are within the liturgical bounds of the church, even if on the edges.

For some Asbury students, it was down the Canterbury trail, go ye. That is to say, some even became Episcopalian. I know one UM student who became Roman Catholic.

For students like me, it was a realization of how little I had really known about the Bible before I went to Asbury -- frankly, how little your typical Wesleyan understands about the Bible. Whole new vistas were about to unfold for me. To be honest, God kept me in the Wesleyan Church... but it might not have been so.

5. We are not just talking about a quantum leap in understanding here. We are talking about a cultural shift. I have a hypothesis. Most Wesleyan churches are, for lack of a better word, small and blue collar-ish. Asbury had a white collar gravitational pull. When it spit out students the other side, they didn't always fit the Wesleyan Church anymore.

[In much of what follows, I am giving my impressions of stories I've heard. Actual participants in events may have a different perspective.]

There was an infamous incident before I came to Asbury where a foolish Wesleyan pastor, as I heard it, more or less told the Asbury students attending Stonewall not to go to Asbury. And he did this with several tithe-giving Wesleyan professors in the congregation.

By the time I got there, those professors had (unsurprisingly) largely left. I think the pastor had preached from Acts 17 and 1 Corinthians 2. "Look," he said. "Paul tried to preach all intellectual at Athens and it was a failure. So when he got to Corinth, he determined to only preach Christ crucified." 

The moral of this story? Shoot your brain and be stupid like me. Then you'll be a real Christian.

Of course, nowhere does the text say this. Acts doesn't say it. 1 Corinthians doesn't say it. I do think Paul was pushing back on those who thought Apollos was more educated and sophisticated than him. But Apollos was a true Christian and may even have written the book of Hebrews.

It's an oh-so-familiar American script that views education with suspicion. [3] It's good old American anti-intellectualism. Scholars are often wrong about stuff. As one of them, I'm allowed to say I often find us annoying. But experts are usually wrong four or five steps ahead of where a person who knows nothing about a subject is wrong. Not always, but more often than not if they're actually a scholar.

I knew this same pastor in another context (he's passed). I think he truly meant well. But although he could quote the Bible left and right, I don't think he had a very deep understanding of it. He came from the same background that I did. So it's no wonder that he found the Asbury professors threatening.

6. I want to mention three more classes I had my first year at Asbury. One was "Study of Selective Passages" with Ron Crown (FM). It was basically Greek exegesis. You had to have passed the Greek exam to take it -- and you had to take it.

Asbury had two exegetical tracks that ran alongside each other. Frankly, it was a little weird, and I think Joel Green tried to integrate them when he was there. But you see, these were political artifacts. As hard to change as the color of the carpet in the sanctuary.

When the Jeff Greenway presidential crisis happened there in the mid-2000s, my big mouth got me involved (in fact, I might have gone to teach there if that crisis hadn't happened). But two things stood out to me. First, the key players were geniuses. And second, they were crazy good at political maneuvering. It was an encounter with next-level power dynamics for me.

So, it's going to be hard to change such things until some people retire or pass. You had the English Bible exegetical path. And you had the Greek/Hebrew exegesis exegetical path. Both were in the curriculum, each with distinct personalities. Both taught similar skills but with different origin stories involving key personalities.

7. Finally, a bit of philosophy. I was quite keen to take Jerry Walls' philosophy of theism class. I wish ChatGPT had been around to explain some of the arguments to me. We read Richard Swinburne and a compilation of essays. I made a pitch for the Trinity as a metaphysical modalism in a paper printed with my new dot matrix printer. 

I'm pretty sure it was a light heresy. In those days, Wesleyans didn't talk or worry as much about the Trinity as we do now. We prayed "in Jesus' name," like the book of Acts. To pray "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" still feels a little Catholic to me (following Matthew 28).

[You should keep in mind that I led a Book-of-Common-Prayer-based liturgical service for College Wesleyan Church for several years, starting in the old church and continuing in the new building until venues were deemed incorrect theology.]

I'll share my "metaphysical modalism" heresy from that paper. The thesis was that the Trinity was a by-product of the one God spanning different metaphysical spaces. God the Father refers primarily to God in his transcendence, beyond the creation. God the Holy Spirit refers primarily to God in his immanence, within the creation. God the Son is the Logos who stands not only at the intersection of the two realities but centered in the incarnate person of Jesus.

I don't need Chris Bounds to tell me that's almost certainly heresy. But the Trinity is a difficult concept.

8. Finally, I did an independent study on Aquinas with David Bundy (FM), who was the librarian at the time. Even the librarians at Asbury were geniuses.

[One way to have a killer school is to have a killer faculty each with different superpowers.]

I knew a little Latin from high school, so that was a chance to brush up. I focused on his De Ente et Essentia, "On Being and Existence." My proposal on simplicity was that it was what happens when God is viewed from the standpoint of this universe -- he reduces to a point. What he is outside this universe is something beyond our comprehension or reference point.

No one is interested, but I had the musings of a not-too-informed teenage brain going on here. I was fascinated with the concept of ex nihilo creation. A diagram in Henry Morris' Scientific Creationism -- joined with a beginner's sense of Einstein's relativity -- had sparked the thought that God not only created the stuff in space but the emptiness of space itself. I'm sure I wasn't the first person to think this. It likely was thought 60 years earlier by individuals like Georges Lemaître.

I was fascinated by Aquinas' sense of God as other -- soon the early Barth would stimulate similar thoughts. I was fascinated by the idea of only knowing God qua God by analogy. I was fascinated by the notion of a via negativa and apophatic theology -- that we really only know what God is not in his essence rather than what he is. 

If you have endured this far into the post, you deserve a prize of some sort. But all I have to give is the end of the post. Here you go.

[1] FM above means "Free Methodist." The president at that time, David McKenna, was Free Methodist, and obviously many of the faculty were too. These individuals no doubt left me with the impression that the Free Methodist Church, in general, is a more educated church than the Wesleyans.

I don't know if that's true, but I would say that the FM church at that time had far more scholars. When I first went to SBL in the late 90s, Keith Reeves was surprised to find a Wesleyan from IWU at the scholarly convention. He was at Azusa, and let's just say that, at that time, there weren't that many Wesleyans doing biblical scholarship.

[2] A girl I was dating in college didn't like the test. Similarly, I had a friend in seminary that hated Myers-Briggs. I think it's because they were both -NTPs.

[3] See Mark Noll's, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.