Notes Along the Way -- TF 2 -- The First Iraq War

Continuing from last post
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1. On January 17, 1991, the US launched an attack against Iraq from Kuwait, the beginnings of the first Iraq War. I was standing in the University of Kentucky student center when it launched, suddenly realizing that, at 25, I was still an age that had once been drafted.

I remember some trepidation about a war with Iraq. I don't know how widespread my feelings were, but I felt like we had been under a hangover from the Vietnam War up to that point. Could we win a war? It sure hadn't seemed that we had won Vietnam. It had seemed that, in the end, we had cut our losses and hightailed it out of there. 

In that sense, the first Iraq War restored our confidence. At least it restored my confidence. We got our mojo back. 

Bush senior wisely didn't go into Baghdad, unlike his son. In hindsight, that seemed prescient, although he was sharply criticized for it. The next time, when Dick Cheney had the chance, he and the neo-cons talked Bush junior into it, resulting in the second longest American conflict. P. S. He started the longest one so far too, in Afghanistan.

2. I was at the University of Kentucky (UK) because I was starting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature, that is, classical Greek and Latin. I was following in the footsteps of Joe Dongell, who had done the same thing when he was a Greek Teaching Fellow. They foolishly gave me the same scholarship they had given him, not knowing how much smarter he is than me.

It was my second semester teaching beginning Greek, and the courses I was teaching that spring were the same ones I taught in the fall. In short, I was already getting bored.

I only took one class, Greek Poetry. It certainly wasn't the ideal class to begin with. Poetry in any language tends to break the most rules and be the least explicit. It doesn't use the full grammar of prose.

And it was painful. This was a master's degree. We had a lot of lines to do for each class. I was just solidifying my Koine Greek. I had no idea that ινα could be used with the indicative. I had no idea that ου could be used with a participle. There was no Google yet, and there certainly wasn't any AI yet.

I would teach Greek in the morning at Asbury, then drive 30 minutes to Lexington to an Arby's not far from the UK campus. I would spend the next two or three hours trying to create an interlinear from a blown up version of whatever text from Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides. I had an English translation to try to retrofit the Greek text if I was totally lost.

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

I almost never had the translations entirely done, which was embarrassing. I would try to predict where we would be in the text by the time they got to me and, if I hadn't gotten that far, I scrambled to have something to say.

3. However, Dr. Hubert Martin was the best professor to have for such an incompetent fool as me. Soft spoken, infinitely merciful. He must surely have known how much I was struggling.

The other students had done classics in their undergraduate work. I had not looked at Latin since high school. I had taken 2.5 years of it with Mrs. Mrozek -- and high school Latin is a lot different from master's degree Latin. In the summer of 1991, I crammed Wheelock's 40 chapters down my throat. Thankfully, I had started Latin when my brain was like a sponge, so it came pretty easily.

One of the students had done his undergraduate work at Berea College. I don't remember his name but, man, he was sharp. There was another woman fresh out of undergraduate classics too. I felt SO stupid around them.

4. I believe we read Oedipus at Colonus for this stint. I had known the Oedipus trilogy since high school. But it has been interesting to think about it from a theological angle. The ancient world was fatalistic, as the story of the Three Fates shows. But they didn't see "free will" and fate as contradictory. Rather, as we humans went about making free choices, we ultimately end up where it was said we would end up. (reminds me a little of Molinism)

You probably know the story. Oedipus' father gets a prophecy that his son will kill him. He has Oedipus exposed -- put outside for animals and the elements to kill him. But, of course, a shepherd rescues him. He ends up raised thinking his father is the king of Corinth.

He then gets the same prophecy. He doesn't want to kill his father, so he heads north. And who should he meet on the way but, unbeknownst to him, his father. In the first recorded incident of road rage, he kills him. He goes north to Thebes where he brings about the Sphinx's end and, as a reward, gets to marry the queen of the city -- who interestingly is his mother.

Everyone in this story thinks they are acting freely. Yet when the story is done, they have all fulfilled their fates.

I've wondered if something along these lines is a better explanation of the tensions in the New Testament rather than Augustine or Wesley's more philosophical approaches. In any case, it speaks to the cultural framework in which Paul and others lived.

I would end up taking Greek Poetry again in year 3 because there wasn't another option. It was at least a little better the second time -- with different readings of course. I always felt like, when I got to the end of these degrees, I was about where I would liked to have been when I started.

We read Prometheus Bound. I wasn't very acquainted with the story before. Prometheus is punished for helping humanity by giving them fire. It's a reminder that the biblical creation story is unusual when God actually likes us. We are much more of a thorn in the side of other creation stories.

Martin had us read J.B. by Archibald MacLeish alongside PB. It is a play on Job. It has Job say that famous line, "If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God." I would wrestle quite a bit with the problem of evil over the next couple years. It wasn't Dr. Martin's fault.

5. The second Greek class I took was Thucydides (with Robert Rabel). That was an eye-opener with regard to the standards of ancient history writing. He apologizes for not being more entertaining. Many historians of the day were more prone to make things up for the delight of their readers, apparently.

But the most striking passage is where he indicates he made up some of the speeches in his history. If he didn't have access to witnesses or wasn't present himself, he invented what he thought they probably said. This potentially has implications for the speeches of Acts and the Gospels. Thucydides was not being pernicious at all. He was genuinely trying to present the flavor of the events. 

To me, it showed that the parameters of ancient history writing were just different than they are for us.

I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin in the program too. Plutarch was a moralist. He is potential background for what biography was like at the time of Christ. My main take away was that he was far more interested in what lessons or morals we might take from the figures he told about than portraying them with great historical accuracy.

What was important was that the story about the person present a truth rather than you track down and be absolutely sure it happened.

I always laugh when I think that, while Herodotus is often called the "father of history," Plutarch called him the "father of lies." This was actually because Plutarch could not be objective about history. The Greeks always had to be superior to any other people. Meanwhile, part of what earned Herodotus that title was the fact that he could critique his own people. 

In the end, Plutarch was a tribal thinker and nowhere close to an objective one.

Fatalism, Herodotus, and Thucydides would show up in my philosophy classes at IWU, because the first two are mentioned in Sophie's World.`

To be continued...

6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom. (philosophy)

Last night the next group of philosophers in training started social and political philosophy. We primarily went through Niebuhr's five ways Christians have engaged culture. But since I am going beyond my classes in this blog series, I thought I would start with some fundamentals.
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1. One of the basic principles of theology--the study of God--is that any earthly, visible church is not the same as the invisible, spiritual church. Your local church may be great. The denomination to which you belong may be great. But it is not the same as the one, true, invisible church. This is one of the most basic things you learn in Christian theology.

Protestants especially believe this. But it is true even for Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church openly admits that not all of its popes have been godly. The church has had periods of great corruption. No earthly church is ever the same as the true church. 

Even when you dig into the earliest councils of the church, you will find huge instances of all-too-human politics and ungodliness. The church erased a council in 449 that would have likely changed what we believe about Christ for all time. At that council, a bishop was beaten to death and those present were forced to sign a blank document that was filled in later. 

Afterwards, the emperor's horse tripped and killed him. Because that emperor died, there came a different emperor who backed a different position--the one we believe today about Christ being one person with two natures. They had another council two years later (Chalcedon) and erased the first one. Chalcedon established what almost all Christians believe today about Christ being fully human and fully divine.

The one, true church is invisible. No earthly, visible church is equivalent to it.

2. If this is true of the church, it is absolutely true of any earthly, visible state or country. Think about it, is the state more likely to be holy than the church? It's really an absurd thought. If the visible church is never the same as the true church then the state absolutely is never the same as the kingdom of God.

It's important to point out that this is a major blind spot for some Christians at times. We have recognized the dangers of civil religion for as long as people have confused patriotism for worship. Various forms of religious nationalism can't tell the difference between fervor for a particular vision of a country and the worship of God. 

And those infected can't see it. In fact, they are more zealous for the state than they ever were for God. At its worse, they are ready to kill those who do not bend to their vision of the state. They become hard hearted, and anyone whose loyalty to their vision is in question becomes the worst of evil.

In our times, Nazi Germany is of course the classic example, where loyalty to Hitler's Germany became indistinguishable from state Christianity. When German Christians in the 1930s tried to merge Christianity with nationalism, the true church responded with something called the Barmen Declaration. 

This statement pointed out that "Jesus Christ [that is, not Hitler or Germany] is the one Word of God whom we must hear and obey in life and in death." When the state insisted that it was God's kingdom on earth, they rejected "the false doctrine that the church could recognize other powers as God’s revelation."

Whenever our love of nation takes on a fervor that should only be reserved for God, we have begun to lose sight of the real God and our vision for the state has become an idol. The state has become a god for us.

The kingdom of this world is never the same as the kingdom of our God.

3. There may be times when an earthly state aligns more or less with the kingdom than at other times, but we should always be clear. No earthly kingdom is ever identical to the kingdom of God.

It is essential that we never confuse or blur the two.

A theocracy is allegedly a state ruled by God. But apart from the days of Moses, there has never been one and will never be one till Christ actually returns. The book of the Judges, when Israel was allegedly a theocracy, was one of the most godless periods of Israel's history, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

In so-called theocracies, there is always a group of priests or a Pope or an Ayatollah interpreting what God says. Theocracies are thus really monarchies (rule by one) or something called an oligarchy (rule by a few) in disguise. 

Sure, someone might say they are only letting the Bible rule--but it is always their interpretation of the Bible. In Calvin's Geneva, the rule of the Bible was the rule of John Calvin's interpretation of the Bible. And in Puritan England and Puritan New England when they were in charge, it was their interpretation of the Bible that ruled. If you were a Mary Dyer or Roger Williams, you were either ousted or put to death.

No earthly state--even if it claims to be a theocracy--can be equivalent to the kingdom of God because humans are involved. A human has to tell the people what God says. A human has to implement what they think God says. A human has to interpret the Bible. 

And people are sinful. "There is none righteous, no not one" (Rom. 3:10). The Founding Fathers of the United States thoroughly took that into account. They put extensive "checks and balances" into the Constitution so that the evil, sinful nature of one person or group was counteracted by other individuals and groups in the government.

This is part of why Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament strongly distinguished between the church and the state. Jesus told his questioners to "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). And Paul told the Philippians--living in a Roman colony--that they were citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). 

The implication was that their political identity did not lie with Rome but with God in heaven. Hebrews and 1 Peter imply the same when they call citizens exiles and aliens (Heb. 11:13; 1 Pet. 1:17).

The Founding Fathers were thus wise to dictate that "Congress shall establish no religion." Thomas Jefferson called this a "wall of separation" between the state and religion. It was all too clear to the Founding Fathers that, if there were a state religion, it would end up oppressing the people like the Puritans had in New England or like the kings, queens, and Puritans of England had in the 1500s and 1600s.

3. Lord Acton put the principle wisely: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." [1] For this reason, it is best for the church to always be distinct from the state and for there to be more than one church at that. There is surely a correlation between the amount of power someone has and the danger of corruption and corrupt impact. 

It is not an absolute correlation, but it is a general one.

And since wealth brings power, the same correlation is in play there. The more wealthy a person is, the more powerful a person is. And the more powerful a person is, the greater the potential for corruption and corrupt impact. 1 Timothy 6:10 was not lying when it said that "the love of money is a root of all evils."

At times, Western culture has at least given some appearances of resisting these trends. But the more you dig into history, the more you realize that corruption has never been far away from any period of rulers. We celebrate the apparent exceptions. Yet even here the public doesn't always know what has happened behind the scenes.

These are not absolutes. They are tendencies and warnings with serious implications about how society would ideally be structured. The main take aways are 1) keep power from being concentrated in the hands of the few and 2) keep religion separate from the state with the state as a neutral zone. 

Of course, at any given time, most of us don't have a choice about these things. We are born in a particular place and time, and the state is a given.

[1] In an 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated? 

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 The State is Never the Kingdom (this post)
6.2 How to Structure Government 
6.3 Kingdom Values for Society
6.4 Christ and Culture
6.5 The Social Contract (equal rights and utilitarianism)
6.6 Adam Smith vs Karl Marx

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism  

1 -- Unlikely Friends (a seminary novel)

Thinking about a strange novel idea. Went to Fazolis. Here's what came out...
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We met in the summer, three unlikely friends brought together by a common enemy—Greek.

Julie was a Methodist, sort of. Two weeks before starting seminary she wasn’t even a believer. She had gone a few times to a United Methodist church when she was a kid. But it all seemed so boring to her, even useless.

She had gone into social work because she wanted to help people. About three years in, she was pretty discouraged. She wanted to help people so badly. But it was such an uphill battle.

The last straw was when one of her clients took her own life. She had worked so hard with her—well beyond the norm. But you can’t watch everyone 24/7. A person’s going to do what a person’s going to do.

It was then she saw a billboard. Sometimes you wonder if those signs do any good. I think, as often as not, they tick people off. But that day Julie heard a message: "Have you tried God?"

She went to that Methodist church for the first time in twenty years. She wasn’t even able to talk to the pastor, but an older lady in the back struck up a random conversation with her.

“You seem like you’re looking for something,” she said.

“God, I guess,” Julie said with a chuckle.

“Well, you’d think you’d come to the right place.”

Before she knew what was happening, Julie was having a home cooked meal with an 87 year old widow. She shared her story. The woman listened.

“I think God might be calling you into ministry,” the older woman finally said.

“What?” Julie blurted out. She later expressed to me repeatedly her shock at such a question.

Our friend Bobby not only thought such things were ridiculous but exclaimed at one point, “Were you even baptized at the time?” he asked.

“No,” she said with a grin. “I’m still not.”

Being friends with Julie would be hard for Bobby even beyond the challenges of seminary itself.

By the end of that lunch, Julie took comfort in the thought of starting seminary to find out what God had to say—if he even existed.

The timing was right. Intensive Greek was just about to begin in July. Bobby and I were headed in the same direction, although by different paths.

Bobby was a Southern Baptist. He hated the thought of going to a “liberal Methodist seminary,” but he had a good job working third shift at a mail facility and he didn't want to move. He thought he could work all night, take classes in the morning, and sleep a little in the afternoon and early evening. 

He had looked at other choices, including online. None of them clicked with him. He felt like his foundation was strong enough to survive liberal Methodist professors. Maybe he could even convert a few.

Ultimately, he wanted to preach, but he wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Baptist churches don’t always have a good structure for a person to get a church. He had tried to connect with various small churches in rural North Carolina, but he hadn’t been successful. He thought maybe if he had a degree in Bible it might help.

To be frank, his presence at Coke Seminary was an oddity. I’m sure he wouldn’t have come if some bizarre donor hadn’t set up a special scholarship just for Baptists. They hardly ever had anyone to give it to. 

One day, he finally walked into the admissions office and jokingly asked, "You don't happen to have any scholarships for Baptists."

The lady looked at him funny and said, "Funny you should ask..."

Me? I was a charismatic. Assemblies of God. It was a strange place for me too because I had a sneaking suspicion that nobody there exercised any spiritual gifts. (I was wrong, by the way.)

I was between things. My girlfriend had dumped me for a random woman we met at Myrtle Beach—that was tough. I decided I should get my life in order. One thing led to another and, before you know it, I found myself learning the Greek alphabet in a two-month summer intensive.

It wasn't how I had seen my summer going.

Jesus Wars 1 -- When God Made a Horse Trip

For years, some of us at IWU met -- especially from the Department of Religion -- to discuss various books at Monday lunch. Keith Drury, Steve Horst, Dave Vardaman, Steve Lennox, and others. Some will remember the annotated Catholic catechism we produced.

The Horsts, Vardamans, and soon Gunsaluses still meet to read through books together. I am particularly interested in the current one, Jesus Wars, by Philip Jenkins. It is about the time around the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

You may know Jenkins from The Next Christendom, which we required in the original curriculum at Wesley Seminary for the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class. He also wrote a book called Lost History of Christianity. 

All these books play on a common sense that, while we like to think of "Western," Protestant-Catholic orthodoxy as providential and inevitable by God's will, there have always been other forms of Christianity. In the year 1000, the center of Christianity might have more been in the area of Iraq than Rome.

Next Christendom pointed out that Christianity in the Global South is overtaking us. There will likely be moments in the future where our sense of orthodoxy feels threatened as a result. The Lost History reminded us of the once vibrant forms of Christian faith that faded over time with movements like the rise of Islam and the Mongols.

2. Jesus Wars looks at a crucial moment in the history of Christianity, one that most of us don't know too much about -- the Chalcedonian moment in 451. This is the council that said Jesus was one person with two natures -- fully human and fully God.

We like to think of Nicaea in 325 as the pivot. Some popular belief here is just wrong. Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire. He did not eliminate Roman religion. He did not set the canon or persecute the Gnostics.

For some Christians, Constantine is the boogie man who messed everything up. True, he did get the Roman state involved in Christianity, but it was far less intrusive at that time than it would become.

This is all more than 100 years before Jenkins book, but Nicene Christianity was not the clear winner after Nicaea. In the mid-300s, there may have been more Arians in the church than Trinitarians. Arius taught that Jesus was the firstborn of all creation -- meaning that God created Christ first as the most exalted being of the universe. He just wasn't "of one substance" with God for Arius.

3. Tonight we discussed the Introduction and first chapter, "The Heart of the Matter." It's a potentially sobering read for the "orthodox," those of us in the West who are in the Western-Catholic-Protestant tradition. However, fear not. There are options. :-)

Did God cause (or allow) the horse of Theodosius II to trip in 450? If he hadn't, the center of Christianity might be in the Middle East and Islam a marginal religion. Meanwhile, Europe might be Arian, Celtic, or some Game of Thrones like religion. (I'm throwing that in there, not Jenkins.)

In 449, there was a council that we don't talk about. It was in Ephesus. History calls it the "Gangster Synod." Monk militias forced the representatives there to sign a blank piece of paper and filled it out with "monophysite" doctrine. They actually beat the opposing patriarch of Constantinople (Flavian) so badly that he died a few days later.

The emperor Theodosius II was also Monophysite. If he hadn't died in a freak horse accident, Monophysitism would likely have become the official doctrine of the empire.

4. Who were the Monophysites? They believed that Christ only had one nature. Typically, they erred more on the side of Christ's divinity and minimized his humanity (For example, Apollinaris believed Jesus had a human body but a divine soul). As usual, there was more nuance than each side wanted to admit. In fact, there are some parables here of the way we stereotype "the other side" today. Are all liberals communists? No. Are all conservatives fascists? No.

Some Monophysites might be better characterized as "Miaphysites." They saw Christ's one nature as a mixture of human and divine, a fusion of the two. Meanwhile, historians and theologians still debate whether Nestorius was really a heretic. He is usually taken to have virtually seen Christ as being two people and going too far in dividing Christ's two natures.

Probably, Nestorius was. He did not seem to be comfortable calling Jesus God when he was an infant. He did not want to say that Mary was the mother of God, theotokos.

As an aside, a Facebook friend of mine, Gregory Blevins, who is Syrian Orthodox, has sometimes described my view of Jesus' knowledge while on earth as semi-Nestorian. But I have never claimed that Jesus had two minds. I have only suggested that Jesus' human mind on earth did not fully access his full divine capacities. Like the Antiochenes of the past, I lean this way because of my historical reading of the Gospels.

5. Perhaps the most striking claim of this first chapter is how violent these disagreements were. These were far from mere ideological debates. Jenkins himself likens it much more to the Gangs of New York. People were murdered and persecuted for being on the wrong side of this debate. The common person basically went along with whatever their ruler at that time demanded that they believe.

The Athanasian Creed, which actually dates to a century or more later, says that anyone who does not believe what it says can't go to heaven. It ends with a series of anathemas against those who disagree. I'm thankful that John Wesley removed the anathemas when he included this creed in his Articles of Religion.

Jenkins notes that these violent gang wars are a good argument for the separation of church and state. It is really in this phase that the Roman Empire got involved. Indeed, empresses played a major role. For example, Justinian's wife Theodora pushed the monophysite position.

Jenkins sees such tribal behavior as typical of these honor-shame cultures. It reminds me of some of the extremely hardened attitudes of Christians today who virtually excommunicate each other over matters of doctrine. What is sometimes called "Christian nationalism" is basically a contemporary form of these attitudes.

This brings me to a second observation. God is far more interested in the state of our hearts than our creedal confession. We are saved by faith, not by creedal affirmation. How many of these partisans were truly Christian at all? Were the real Christians the unnamed "little people" tossed about by those with power? How hard it is for the powerful to be true Christ-followers! Is it like a camel going through a needle's eye?

I suspect Arius will be in heaven. But there are probably many on all sides who won't be.

6. Jenkins believes that these bloody conflicts severely weakened the church around the Mediterranean. Along with Edward Gibbon, Jenkins sees this as a factor in the fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians. Even more, he sees this as a reason why the church of the East fell to the Muslims. He also notes that the monophysites fared much better under the Muslims than they did under the empire, as did the Coptics in Egypt.

What might have happened if the monophysites had won? Perhaps, Jenkins muses, Christianity would have been strongest in Syria, Egypt, and the Middle East.

Notes Along the Way 4.2 -- Teaching Greek

Continued from last week
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1. I was very excited to start teaching Greek. I felt a little guilty to be teaching, because I felt like I still had a lot to learn. I sometimes say things like, "Do I know Greek? Well, I haven't even taught it yet."

There were two of us. The senior Teaching Fellow was Bill Patrick. He was quite intelligent, far more intelligent than I am. He was the only Teaching Fellow I know who taught for four years. Cheated me out of ever being the senior Teaching Fellow. :-)

Bill always seemed to know what the latest scholarship was. I envy people like that. How do they always seem to know the latest book or article? Certainly Google and social media have helped tremendously. Now we have bloggers like Nijay Gupta or Mike Bird who let us know the latest and greatest.

Back then, Bill always knew. That was also a great thing about the annual Society of Biblical Literature convention. Milling about the book hall quickly let you know what the latest "it" books were. My book purchase each conference was proportional to the amount of money in my account.

Bill went on to teach for a while at the Asbury Orlando Campus, which unfortunately was sold recently. Bill never wanted to do a PhD even though he could have done it in his sleep. I even offered to take dictation. At some point, he came to see academia as a game. He enjoyed pouring into students lives. He didn't want to play the game.

There is of course a certain reality to power. I always enjoyed a line in Bobby Clinton's The Making of a Leader. Somewhere in there he mentions an aha moment he had when he realized that the one with the most power typically wins against you whether you're right or wrong. Few of us can get through life without playing the games thrust upon us.

Duh!

2. Bill was probably my closest friend during those years. We had a lot of fun going to Ramses in Lexington. Joseph-Beth Booksellers was a never-ending favorite. I don't know if he introduced me to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy, but they certainly featured heavily in all conversation. He still jokes about one time I remarked in inferiority after reading one of them, "He's a master."

I would say Bill was a better teacher than I was. I was a more entertaining teacher. Probably, students enjoyed my Greek classes more than his--especially the average students. But I venture to say that more of his students actually passed the compentency exam than mine did.

I was full of silly gimmics. On "subjunctive day," I would put a note on the board that said we might be in a different room down the hall. I used the songs that Rory Skelly had developed before us. I use them to this day and have developed a few of my own to memorize paradigms. I've heard that some of my students (and their children) have remembered those songs years later, long after they remember what they meant.

The Teaching Fellow I replaced left a note on his desk: "Just remember. People are stupid." I didn't think that was very nice at the time. But you have to remember how smart some of these teachers were. And the average intelligence of most people out there is, well, average. I always felt like I wasn't a bad teacher because I was somewhere between the brilliant and the academic struggler. I thought maybe a biography of me might be titled, "Not Quite a Genius."

I was so excited to teach. The night before I started I had these ideas like drawing a huge paradigm box on the lawn and having students hold signs with the endings on them. Never did that one.

3. Bob Lyon oversaw the Teaching Fellow program. I had never been invited into his Lo Society. I suspect I was too conservative at the time. Then when it started becoming popular, he ended it. That wasn't what it was supposed to be.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed getting to know him some. That was around the time that Fazolis came into the world. He always thought he was funny when he would order a "Freddie" (fettucine alfredo). Bill and I used to beat him to say, "Humor isn't what it used to be." He didn't find our mocking very amusing. 

That was also about the time that Walmart started being open 24/7. That was really weird back then.

I also enjoyed the occasional Chinese with Dr. Bauer. I sometimes joked that I wouldn't have been surprised if he had ordered by saying, "There are three reasons why I would like Cashew Chicken. First..."

Joe Dongell came the year after I graduated, so I never had him. Unintentionally, I had somewhat been following his path. He went to Central; I went to Central. He went to Asbury; I went to Asbury. He became a Teaching Fellow; I became a Teaching Fellow. He did a master's degree at the University of Kentucky... well, I decided to start that degree in the spring of 1991, my second semester as a Teaching Fellow. 

I wouldn't follow him to Union. Who knows, though? If Paul Achtemeier hadn't retired, maybe I would have.

4. One of the books that Bill Patrick used in his Intermediate Greek class was G. B. Caird's The Language and Imagery of the Bible. I didn't use it when I came to teach that class, but I did read it. I found it a breath of fresh air.

It's hard to describe the thrill of reading something that just makes so much sense. It's like finding words to describe reality. Those experiences would slow down over time, but they often happened when I was in my 20s and 30s. I hope to share some of those moments.

The book is about the meaning of words. The later parts of the book were most striking to me. For example, he notes that language like the sun darkening and the moon turning to blood probably wasn't meant to be taken literally. Steve Lennox once told me that he found some of those last chapters a little difficult to swallow, although perhaps not that point. N. T. Wright has hammered this general dynamic home in his writings as well with his sense that "Jesus coming on the clouds" isn't about the second coming. 

I suppose my main take away from those last chapters is that end of history and the world language didn't always mean a literal end of the world. Ezekiel 37 wasn't about a literal resurrection of the dead originally. It was about the revival of Israel collectively as a people. Similarly, I'm not sure that Isaiah 66 was originally about a literal new heaven and earth.

G. B. Caird died in 1984, way before his time. But most of his work that I read made a lot of sense to me (not that I agreed with everything). His method of starting with the clear and moving to the unclear really resonated with me.

Caird had been working on the ICC (International Critical Commentary) on Hebrews when he died. Congratulations to David Moffitt for taking up the torch, although I would have liked to do it. :-) To be frank, I think my approach to Hebrews is more in keeping with the historical flavor of the series than the theological interpreters who reign at present.

Both Tom Wright and Lincoln Hurst studied under Caird at Oxford. Hurst was an early influencer on me with regard to Hebrews as well, particularly his work on Hebrews 1 and his analysis of "copy and shadow" in chapters 8-10. 

I was very interested in Wright's work in those early days as well. I finally plowed through The New Testament and the People of God while I was in Sierra Leone in the winter of 1997. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I waited anxiously for the second volume but probably had moved beyond him by the time it finally came out.

These were high days for me. I was so happy. And despite what Jim McNeely might say, I had become funny.

Mark's Passion 2: Jesus and the Temple

This is a continuation of last week's beginning.
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5. Then came that final week of Jesus on earth. That was the week that I met Jesus, from his glorious procession into Jerusalem to his crucifixion. I will need more papyrus for that. 

We had heard stories of healings and exorcisms in the north, in Galilee. My family too had gone out to see the Baptizer. We had also been baptized. Could Jesus be the one that John had foretold?

So, we were there when he came into Jerusalem, on a donkey. We knew this was a prophetic act. We shouted, "Hoshi'ah na" from the psalm, "Save us, O Lord." We expected the heavens to open and for angels to descend, decimating the Romans and the leaders of Jerusalem.

That was not the plan. I heard Peter say it repeatedly in his sermons. He was constantly beating himself up for not getting it, for not understanding. He especially was hard on himself for his denials of Jesus.

But it did not happen the way we all expected. We expected vindication when we arrived at the temple. We were confused that nothing happened.

It was then that I met Jesus. In all the confusion, Jesus saw me. "Thank you for marching with us today," he said. The crowd was preoccupied with its questions, but Jesus saw me. What was I? Fifteen?

6. I was not there the next day for the big event. On Sunday, Jesus seemed to just evaporate. Only later did I hear that he had gone back to Bethany. He was staying there with a friend of the movement, Simon the leper. I would get to know all these people later on.

But when Jesus returned on Monday, something about the scene really angered him. I could sense the frustration in my house as well. The leaders of the city were so corrupt. Pilate was so ungodly and yet they collaborated with him without a second thought. My family had money, but they all used their money on themselves. They couldn't care less about the people.

As I look back, I suspect it was just too much, seeing those greedy moneychangers cheating people for an extra shekel--and in the place set aside to worship Adonai. It did not last long, but for a good minute he wreaked havoc there, overturning tables, driving sheep away. The Romans didn't seem to pay much attention, but I'm sure the temple leaders were ticked.

When he came back, he started preaching judgment. He spoke boldly from Isaiah that God's house was supposed to be a house of prayer. Then he shifted to Jeremiah--they had made the temple into a den of thieves. His words from Jeremiah were particularly bold. Like Jeremiah, he warned the Jerusalemites that they should not think that God would spare the city just because it was the place of God's house. 

Peter wondered if God did not come then because Israel was not repentant. After all, wasn't that the message of the Baptist, that Israel needed to repent in preparation for the Lord? We would eventually come to see Jesus death as a kind of ransom for the sins of Israel, like the Maccabees before us but so much more powerful.

7. Jesus would preach the message of Jeremiah more and more as the week went on. He ruffled a lot of feathers. And he did it right there in the temple, not like the Baptizer, who was outside the city by the river Jordan. It made us all nervous. How long would the Jerusalem leaders let such prophecy continue before they did something really bad?

"There was a fig tree that didn't bear fruit," Jesus preached. "Because it had withered, the farmer eventually cut it down and planted a different tree. Let the one with ears to hear, hear."

I heard a prophecy from the Lord a decade later. It circulated widely in the church in the days of Emperor Caligula, not long after he tried to set up an image of himself in the temple precincts. It was a prophecy based in Daniel about a sacrilege that would defile the temple. 

The prophecy spoke of intense persecution for the church, the true Israel. It foretold that we would be beaten in synagogues. We would be betrayed by our families. There would be apocalyptic signs as the creation groaned in longing for its redemption.

Then the temple would be defiled. The prophecy ended with the prediction that this would happen within our generation. And then Jesus would return...