Notes Along the Way 3.2 -- The Scholarly Atmosphere

Continued from the previous post
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10. I haven't said much lately about the New Testament Seminar. I mentioned that we went through
Florentino Garcia Martinez edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls the second year. Those were great learning experiences. It wasn't as intense as comp exams, but it helped us cover the bases.

While I was in Germany, they went through New Testament apocrypha. I tried to keep at least an eye on them while I was away, documents like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Protoevangelium of James.

It was always a delight when Dunn was working on a commentary. He worked on two during my time there, one on 1 Corinthians and one on Colossians. Such valuable sessions. I would go on to write a commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians for the Wesleyans, and that semester was so helpful to that end. 

For Colossians, I came to see the Colossian philosophy as a form of mystical Judaism rather than syncretistic Judaism. We explored 4QMMT. So helpful. Dunn's commentary on Colossians remains the best, in my opinion.

I prize a comment Stephen Barton once made to me. He said that I usually prefaced any comment or question I was about to make with something like "I probably don't know what I'm talking about" but then I would go on to say something valuable. I felt so out of my depth in that group. Stuckenbruck, Moberly.

There were also some funny moments. One Canadian presenter paraphraseed 1 Corinthians 11:13 as Paul saying that they needed to have conflicts so they could determine who was "top dog." Dunn got a big kick out of that. I'm not sure he could make heads or tails out of the comment.

11. By far the academic highlight of my time there was the Durham-Tubingen Colloquium on Paul and the Law. You can read the papers here. It was a festival of famous names. 

I met Martin Hengel. I was sitting at the end of a table during a meal when he came up passionately and interrupted whatever conversation was going on. "Luke could not have just used Matthew without a Q," he said. "It is inconceivable that he would smash the Sermon on the Mount and partition it throughout his Gospel."

Made sense to me. I think Friedrich Avemarie was at the table. A short conversation and I realized I had completely misinterpreted Otfried Hofius' approach to Hebrews in relation to Gnosticism. So much for my German.

I met Tom Wright. He had to leave a little early and I had the privilege of walking him to the train station. Richard Hays was there. Hermann Lichtenberger. Bruce Longenecker came back. I heard a rumor that the Germans only agreed to come if E. P. Sanders was not invited. He had apparently quite extensively smeered Joachim Jeremias character somewhere, questioning whether he could have accidentally gotten the rabbinic sources so wrong.

I may have misremembered that piece, so I welcome correction.

Dunn had hoped that the conference might result in some sort of consensus, but that was wishful thinking on his part. Those were the first decades of the "new perspective on Paul," and it was never likely that they would come to agreement. As I recall, Hans Hubner represented the old perspective. I think Cranfield came to one session.

All very helpful. For over a decade I would be the principal teacher of Paul's letters at IWU, and these experiences provided an incredibly strong foundation on which to build.

12. The spring and summer of 1996 were focused on finishing my dissertation. I had a stack of commentaries and monographs about a yard high by my computer. I would scour them as I made interpretive decisions.

Although I have developed firm positions on the meaning of Hebrews now, in those days I often didn't know what I thought on particular questions. I have described my process as one of deciding what I think about x. Then if I think something about x, it has implications for y. And as time went by, I weaved a tapestry that is my interpretation of Hebrews.

I had a 5 mile route mapped out that I ran to think (and also to train). I believe I would go down the Bailey across Prebends bridge and then take a left to South Rd. Then I would run up to where it met Darlington Road and out to Neville's Cross. From there it was back down to Crossgate and across Framwellgate Bridge. Mind you, it's been 30 years.

In the end, I was pretty happy with the results. I would later revise and get it published with Cambridge.

Loren Stuckenbruck was my internal examiner and Frances Young my external. After the first few minutes of my viva, I thought I was in trouble. "I'm going to have to do massive rewrites," I thought to myself.

Then Young let up. They said that they were actually very positive about the dissertation. There were also some side comments about Dunn not being particularly sophisticated at recent developments in hermeneutics. He was a classic historical-critical scholar, and my method section was dabbling in matters of poststructuralism and narrative criticism. 

Well, I passed with only some minor revisions. It was still more involved to get a dissertation printed back then. But my copies were submitted at Old Elvet, and I would graduate in December.

Notes Along the Way -- Durham 2.3 New Faces in Durham

Continued from the last post
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12. I don't remember much specifically about the fall of 1994 (Michelmas term). Perhaps that was the term we went through Martinez's newly published The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated. I failed to mention that the third term of each year (Easter term), we graduate students presented papers, if I remember correctly. During that third term, students didn't take courses but studied to take their end of the year exams, which meant everything for advancement (see Harry Potter).

I taught beginning Greek again for the Department of Theology that fall. My German friend Christoph Lorenz had returned to Tübingen, and a new German exchange student had arrived, Alex Jensen. He was quite unlike any German I had met so far. He was from Hamburg, and far from the stereotypical German, he was quite the jolly old soul.

He was also studying at Tübingen. He liked to poke fun at the Schwäbishe accent: "I muss schaffe gange." Believe it or not, his very first higher ed degree was a PhD from Durham. The German theology undergraduate degree took 7 years. With at least 3 years under his belt, he was able to come to Durham on exchange. He would then transfer as an MTh student and upgrade to a PhD under Stephen Barton. And that was his first degree.

His English was not perfect. He would say, "Hmmm" as if to assent, but I think it meant, "I didn't get a word of that." Of course, it was amazingly better than my German. Alex knew how to bluff his way through this world. I suspected that invention could come from a desire not to exert more effort than necessary, and he was clever.

We would have many good conversations over the next two years. I remember him trying to explain Luther on free will. I didn't get it. In retrospect, I don't think I got it because Luther basically doesn't believe in free will (De servo arbitrio). That was a surprise. 

I think Alex was trying to explain compatibilism to me. I would sum it up as, "You're not really free, but you think you are." To me, it's a farce, which I suspect is why Alex couldn't explain Luther to me to my satisfaction. The language barrier may also have been a factor.

He would become a residential tutor, and we often spent our allowance for students together on end of the term gatherings. When I told him I didn't like drinking, he would say one must do it as a matter of duty: Pflicherfühlung.

13. Sandy Wedderburn had returned to Germany, so my second year saw a newcomer to the teaching faculty of Durham: Loren Stuckenbruck. He had studied with Johann Christiaan Beker at Princeton.

Stuckenbruck is clearly a genius. A nearly photographic memory for intellectual things. His interview was very memorable. The other finalist was Dale Allison. I enjoyed Allison's presentation in the spring of 1994. Bob Hayward was quite unfairly critical of it, I thought.

Nevertheless, Loren was a fantastic hire. One of the best academic mentors out there. Very attentive to material you gave him to read. A great cheerleader. He would be the external examiner for my dissertation. I was delighted to see him and Lois in Rome this month for the Enoch Seminar.

That fall semester, Loren and some other students met in Dr. Hayward's office to look at some early rabbinic texts. I was not good enough at Hebrew to make much sense of them (targums, I think). They were unpointed too. I remember Loren lighting up when we came across a reference to the watchers. The core book of 1 Enoch is the Book of the Watchers. 

(I have to think it is no coincidence that Marvel comics has a group called "the Watchers." These comic book writers are scary people indeed. Former philosophy majors and such)

14. Bruce Longenecker had also moved on from Cranmer Hall. So the spring of 1994 also saw interviews for his position. By the way, have I mentioned that he had a computer program that helped him write music? I tell you, these top level academics are scary smart beyond what most people can imagine. Sometimes I think people have to put them down because of how intimidating they can be. No one puts Bruce down, of course. He's such a kind soul.

Have I mentioned a couple John's meetings some of us did? We read through the Apostolic Fathers, as I recall. On another occasion, I presented a paper arguing that evangelicals should be focused on the good news since that's the root word. Root fallacy, of course. I had not yet taken Wittgenstein fully to heart.

I remember one fellow who interviewed talked about how only one of the "7 last words" of Jesus was probably historical ("My God, my God..."). Principal David Day was not impressed. Made some snide remark and that was that.

In the end, they hired Mark Bonnington, who was there for the remainder of my time.

15. I think I was in Romeo and Juliet that fall as Mercutio. I had been in Much Ado about Nothing the previous year. Still sang in the choir. The rowing crew was mostly gone now -- Juan, Christoph, Helen. Still cantored for the Tuesday worship service. Still attended the Claypath United Reformed church. Preached there once or twice during my time in Durham.

I suspect I had written a draft of the methodology part of my dissertation by this point. I was going to use Richard Hays' structuralist approach to Galatians but apply it to the narrative substructure of Hebrews. I would focus on the settings of that narrative world: space and time. I was probably reading books like Susanne Lehne's The New Covenant in Hebrews and Mary D'Angelo's Sacred Space.

My memory is that I really buckled down in writing my third year. I gave Dunn at least one paper or two a term to read those first two.

16. I think I've already mentioned that I managed to meet Kingsley Barrett at some point. I remember the first time I spotted Charles Cranfield walking across town. He was incredibly hunched over. Very unfortunate for him. Still, he lived to be 100, dying in 2015. 

Perhaps I've mentioned that he wrote his ICC Romans commentary just before the new perspective on Paul exploded. He was like the last of the old generation. I would meet him formally either at a John's dinner or, more likely, during the Paul and the Law conference.

Notes Along the Way: Durham 2.2 -- The Summer of Schindler's List

Continued from the previous post
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6. The summer of 1994 featured two movies that related to the problem of evil and suffering. I'm sure you know the drill. If God is all powerful, then he is able to stop evil and suffering. If God is all good, you'd think he'd want to stop evil and suffering. Then why does evil and suffering continue to exist?

This question had really begun to trouble me in my final years in Wilmore. It's not that I faced either great suffering or evil. I never have thus far. My mother and father both lived long lives and both passed as peacefully as I would want to. Have I had struggles and disappointments? Of course, but none beyond what is fairly normal for a mortal on this earth.

I have mentioned my struggle with the seeming silence of God. I've mentioned my decade of torture from about the age of 10 to the age of 20. I cried out to God repeatedly for a sense of peace and forgiveness, but most of the time did not sense any clear answer.

In my last couple years in Wilmore, my study of Scripture kept revealing how little my church circles really understood about the Bible. If you have been reading this series, you'll have a sense of that journey. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that I began to long for some sort of direct sign from God of his presence.

7. My final year in Kentucky, I was the facilitator for a small Sunday school class at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington, where I attended. The two daughters of Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical/Hebrews fame were in the small group. Because I had the subject on my mind, we read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts. 

To be honest, it just didn't satisfy. Frankly, I have never heard an explanation that entirely satisfies. The two main explanations are the free will theodicy (God gives us freedom, which means some are going to freely do the wrong thing) and the soul making theodicy (suffering gives us the opportunity to grow). They both are helpful but still not entirely satisfying.

Over the years, I've engaged a few books on this topic (even took a shot at writing one). At IWU, our Monday reading group read Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd. Steve Horst really likes this book. Its biggest move is to give substantial blame to Satan. In Boyd's view, Satan provides a bigger context for the evil and suffering of the world than just the two main explanations.

I actually found The Shack to be somewhat helpful. However, I've never been able to bring myself to be a universalist. I would say it is the free will theodicy on steroids.

This past year, a reading group I'm in with the Horsts and the Varadmans read Tim Keller's, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. Again, I didn't find any silver bullets in the book. There was a line that I resonated strongly with. He suggests that all the different explanations taken together help quite a bit, but there is no one explanation that seems to fully satisfy nor do they all add up to a comprehensive explanation.

That final year in Kentucky, I would shout out to God (silently) during prayer. During the pastoral prayers at Stonewall, I was silently screaming to God, begging for some sort of word that was definitively him. I even asked him to punish me somehow just so I would know he was there. I bought Hans Kung's huge book Does God Exist? As usual of course, it didn't hold my attention.

8. So the summer of 1994 seemed like a gut punch. First, there was Schindler's List. As Keller has pointed out, the real challenge is not your run of the mill suffering. Yes, that absolutely can keep us from becoming morally flabby--no pain no gain. It builds character. It shapes our moral muscles

But the Holocaust was "over the top" evil. It is "gratuitous suffering" that is the challenge. Six million Jews--how much character does that build? Yes, Hitler was defeated. But how many times in history were the Hitlers not defeated? How many times--so many times, maybe most of the time--did the "Hitler" in question win?

If that wasn't enough, Shadowlands came out later in the summer. This is the story of C. S. Lewis' struggle with the cancer and death of his wife. That story in itself wasn't so difficult to handle. It was that story as a follow up to Schindler's List that was forceful. It was a one-two punch.

Lewis looks foolish in the movie when he presents the problem of pain. The movie means to portray him that way. I love the look of complete puzzlement on one lady after he talks about suffering as God's chisel whose blows hurt so bad but make a fine sculpture out of us.

In the movie, Lewis is on a journey to knowledge. At the end of the movie, he still has faith, but he is much wiser than when he gave his lectures. He's sure God has his reasons, but he's still the vivisectionist. He shouts at a priest giving him the kinds of responses he himself has given in the past. The son, meanwhile, decides not to believe in God.

"Pain is the megaphone God uses to rouse a deaf world." I'm not sure I like that. Lewis, who accepted evolution most of the time and didn't necessarily see Adam as a literal human, mostly relied on the soul making argument to answer the problem of evil. Like most explanations, it helps a little but still leaves one wanting more.

9. I remember having some friends over to dinner in my flat that summer. One of the friends was an atheist, a PhD student in philosophy. "You know the best answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God just doesn't exist to stop it." I told him I understood all his arguments. 

"Then why do you still believe," he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "I just do."

10. To me, most of the core questions about God have fairly easy, rational answers. The cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument--these make a lot of rational sense to me. The resurrection of Christ can be argued for on the basis of historical evidence.

To me, the problem of evil and suffering require more faith. God gave us a choice, so some are going to make the wrong choice. Makes sense. Makes a whole lot more sense than hyper-Calvinism, which makes God responsible for every last evil thing that has ever happened in the world.

Suffering gives us an opportunity to grow and express moral character. Yes, makes sense.

But there is a point where the suffering and evil are so great, that these explanations do not seem satisfying. That's when I have to press the mystery button. We have to believe God is in control. We have to believe that God loves us and is good. As the priest in Shadowlands says, "We see so little here."

We don't see the whole picture. That's the best we can do to fill in the gap between the explanations that make sense and what is left to mystery.

11. After decades of reflection on the question, two insights seem likely to me, although I welcome the Lord or someone else to show me otherwise. One is that death and suffering in themselves don't have any moral significance. Death is not bad. Suffering is not bad. Pain is not bad. The agents that cause them are what can make those events evil.

One of the biggest realizations I've had in the last five years is that not only in Genesis but likely in Paul as well, death was part of God's creation. It wasn't meant to be the end game, but it was the beginning. Eternal life was always a modification, an addition, to our natural state. The tree of life adds eternal life. 

Death was not the intention for humanity, but it was our created state. That suggests that death is not bad in itself.

A second insight is that, while we can see God at work everywhere if we orient ourselves that way, it is highly unusual to receive direct and unambiguous words from him. Again, it is not that we cannot see and hear him continuously. It is that all of these moments could be taken differently. They are a matter of interpretation most of the time. 

If you believe that God is speaking, you will hear him. But rarely will you have a speaking that is direct in an indisputable way. Faith is always involved in hearing God.

I can see God constantly at work in my life. Am I absolutely certain in each case that it is God? No. And that's ok. I'm thankful all the same.

NAW Durham 4 -- Teaching Christology in Cranmer

Continued from last week
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I remembered that the first year of my doctoral program I also waded through L.K.K. Dey's Intermediate Patterns of Perfection in Philo and Hebrews (1975). I didn't feel like I learned much of anything about Hebrews, but it was a baptism by fire into Philo. 

25. I've mentioned that Cranmer Hall in the 1990s was an Anglican training school in partnership with the Wesley Study Centre. I'm having trouble ironing out all the details. John Pritchard had just come as the Warden of Cranmer Hall, and a man by the name of Philip was over the Wesley Study Centre.

On faculty was Bruce Longenecker in New Testament, Robert Fyall for Old. I attended his United Reformed Church while I lived in Durham, and he performed a ceremony for Angie and me in 1998 there. The church was evangelical in the British sense.

Michael Vasey taught liturgy. He published a book called Strangers and Friends during my time there. I believe Robert Song came during my second year as an ethics professor. In 1999 he would join the main Department of Theology. A woman named Liz taught theology. I haven't been able to pull up her last name yet.

I was privileged to be in England when the Anglican Church first ordained women (1994). I don't think Liz was in the first group, but I suspect she was ordained in York in May of that year. I seem to remember us sending her off as she got on the bus to leave. I jokingly made some stupid remark about not being sure that ordination was actually in the New Testament. She said, "Maybe, but I don't want to think about it since I've waited so long for this to happen."

I feel confident that the elements of the previous paragraph are true. I'm just not entirely sure about the combination. The first woman to be a bishop in the Church of England (Libby Lane) graduated from Cranmer the spring before I arrived. [1]

26. It seems to me that, in the fall of 1993, Cranmer was lacking someone to teach theology. So it became a team effort. I was privileged to be asked to cover Christology. There is something implicit about the thinking of the leaders to ask a Biblehead to teach the theology of Christ. It seems to assume that theology is more or less what the Bible says--or should be--which is far from how theology is often approached.

I was mindful of this distinction, although I also indulged myself. I believe there is a gap between the Bible and Chalcedon. My recent reading of Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkens has overwhelmingly confirmed that, unless one has a very strong sense of Providence, the path from the Bible to Nicaea and Chalcedon will seem little more than petty humans fighting each other--often literally.

I believe I gave three lectures. The first was on the quest for the historical Jesus. The second dealt with Pauline and early New Testament Christology. I believe the third focused more on John. Philip and Fiona Richardson were students then. We have kept in contact over the years. They have faithfully served as OMS missionaries over the years.

27. I spent a fair amount of time researching for this teaching. Apart from the New Testament Survey teaching I did for Midway College, it was really my first time teaching Bible. And I was privileged to do it on a high level. Don't get me wrong. I loved teaching Bible at IWU. But this was more like teaching for Notre Dame. 

I used N. T. Wright's sense of the "third quest" for the historical Jesus to frame that lecture. The first quest ended with Albert Schweitzer. Many of the portraits of Jesus in the 1800s were some mixture of antisupernaturalist and romantic. David Strauss threw down the gauntlet of myth. Source criticism whittled Jesus down to Mark and then Wrede took that away. 

Meanwhile, Schweitzer dubbed Jesus an apocalyptic stranger, a foreigner to what we want in a Jesus. Then comes Barth and Bultmann. Stop the quest! It's the Christ of faith that is important, not the Jesus of history. The quest seems to stop for a few decades.

Then comes the New Quest, launched by Ernst Kasemann. Maybe we can know a few things about the historical Jesus. Maybe he is relevant. The criteria come into play: dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence. Edward Schillebeeckx writes a 700 page book on Jesus with only a handful of certain sayings from Jesus. The Jesus Seminar perhaps culminates this era with its red letter Bible -- sayings of Jesus in red that came from him, pink if quite possibly, gray if probably not, and black if certainly not.

28. N. T. Wright spoke the third quest into existence. The "Jesus the Jew" quest. He pinned its beginnings to Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew, The Aims of Jesus by Ben Meyer, Jesus and the Constraints of History by A. E. Harvey, and E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism.

What Wright said distinguished it was the attempt to show the continuity between Judaism-Jesus-and Christianity rather than the dissimilarity. Going for dissimilarity gives you a small subset of what Jesus likely said and did. Wright aimed to find "double similarity."

I was quite enamored with Wright in those days. I couldn't wait for his Jesus and the Victory of God to come out. By the time it finally came out in 1996 I had moved on. But I did find the notion of the contraints of history and E. P. Sanders' approach to Jesus quite helpful. I met Wright in Durham at a conference in 1995. More on that later.

Over the years, I have given a paper for the Historical Jesus (1999) and Q Sections (2000) at SBL. Both had to do with Jewish afterlife traditions. Tom Wright came up after the historical Jesus paper and asked me for a copy. I like to think that it helped inspire some of his thoughts for the early sections of Jesus and the Resurrection of the Son of God. I never finished the work that all that afterlife research was headed toward. More on that later.

There have been some notable points over the years. John Meier's Marginal Jesus series was spectacular, I thought. Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus was a fine volume in its approach that asked more about the kinds of things Jesus certainly said and did rather than specific things. Dunn's Jesus Remembered I also found quite helpful, building off of some of the insights of Kenneth Bailey on oral tradition. 

I managed to drive over to United Theological Seminary when Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne blew up the quest. The conference volume was published as Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (2012). Now there's a volume out called The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus also edited by Chris Keith with James Crossley joining in.

29. I'm sure that my next two lectures in Cranmer were thoroughly influenced by Dunn's Christology in the Making. The standard model for approaching New Testament Christology in those days focused on Christological titles. I spent a fair amount of time researching the title Son of Man. Maurice Casey's book From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God had come out in 1992.

There is currently a Waterstone's on Saddler Street that was a prize during my time in Durham. I believe it was a Dillon's back then, but it had a superb used theological section. I bought many biblical studies classics there during my time at Durham.

It's hard to remember where I took my thoughts on the Son of Man. Casey had written a book on the title in 1979. Barnabas Lindars came out with one in 1985. I have Douglas Hare's 1990 volume in my library to this day, but I don't remember being particularly impressed with it. Nor was I impressed with Casey's "I'm just a guy" conclusion.

Somewhere, I synthesized three main uses in the Gospels: 1) self-referential, 2) in relation to Jesus' sufering, and 3) in relation to a Daniel 7 apocalyptic figure. The fact that only Jesus uses the title in the Gospels seems to be strong evidence that he did in fact use the title.

So I played a little hooky from my own dissertation in order to fill in gaps in my knowledge of New Testament Christology. It probably wasn't entirely as much learning as a US doctoral seminar would have given me, but I enjoyed it very much.

[1] I should note that there is some resemblance of Bishop Libby Lane to the Liz of my memory, and Bishop Lane's first name is Elizabeth. But the only way that could have worked was if she commuted back from Blackburn to teach, which seems very unlikely.

Notes Along the Way Durham 2 -- Settling into St. Johns

continued from here
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8. St. John's was a delightful place, the kind of place where you want to stay forever. There were three of us Residential Tutors. Neil Evans, who was the Welsh chaplain I mentioned earlier, and Helen Fox of the Isle of Wight, who had just finished her undergraduate work. Her flat was up the Bailey a smidge.

The John's property was really a delightful Frankenstein. There was the principal property. Then there was this random slice of flats a little further down. You had to go out on the Bailey and up to get to them.

Helen only stayed a year, maybe because she was working on a one year master's. Then I believe Neil moved into her flat for the next two years. More on Helen later. She was the one who really set me on to Wittgenstein.

9. These were residences first built in the early 1700s in the Baroque style. The University of Durham itself wasn't founded until 1832 -- a bit of a late comer when you think that Cambridge goes back to the 1200s and Oxford even to the 1000s. Still, Durham is the third oldest university in England. Then again, when you consider that St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Dublin were all founded in the 1400s and 1500s, Durham was quite a bit down the line.

As a sidenote, I didn't really go in understanding all the distinctions of territory. England is the heart of Great Britain, but Great Britain also includes Scotland and Wales -- both of which were forced to join the merry band somewhat against their wills. And you have to add in Northern Ireland to get the United Kingdom. Ireland proper to the south gained its independence in the 20s. 

These distinctions are bloody obvious to anyone who lives there. But they weren't to me as an American. And I expect James Petticrew to have an Angus for saying England is the heart of Great Britain.

10. Because the innards of John's were repurposed residences, they seemed to be constantly trying to figure out how to maximize the space. There was a lovely set of stairs that ended in a wall. Sometimes it felt a bit like a maze.

We three Residential Tutors were also Fire Marshalls of a sort. If the fire alarm went off, we would spring to action, running to the front office to see where the alarm had gone off. Then we would run to the appropriate location to see if it was a real fire or not.

It almost never was. I can only remember one time in my three years there when it was a real fire. Third year. Someone cooking on the top floor of Cruddas. At least one fire truck always had to come and double check, but if we could ascertain that it wasn't a real fire, we would call and tell them that they didn't have to send multiple trucks.

11. My sense is that most alarms had to do with alcohol. The drinking age is 18 in England, so pretty much all students drank. In fact, John's has a very quaint bar in its basement -- not for the claustrophobic. You went down a very narrow set of winding stairs to get down to it. A student was chosen each year to be head barman.

I was impressed with how many things like this were student led. They really entrusted the students with significant leadership. In fact, as students they didn't think of themselves as pre-engineers or pre-geographers. They called themselves what they were going to become. "I'm an engineer."

A note on drinking. I of course had grown up with a sense that you might become an alcoholic if you had one drink. Certainly, there was plenty of drunkenness among the student body, as is the case among American colleges. I used to marvel at a rugby lad named Hamish who had juvenile diabetes. Yet he would take a shot of insulin and then go on a pub crawl in which he would down a "yard" in one.

But the staff at John's modeled responsible drinking. Every Sunday involved a high meal, a little like you see in the Harry Potter movies. The leaders would sit at the "high table" -- with everyone in a simple black academic gown -- and the students filling the rest of the room. 

The leaders were part of what was called the "Senior Common Room" (SCR). It referred both literally to a room upstairs and figuratively to those who made it up. We would meet before these special meals and those who wished would have a class of sherry. Then after the meal there would be glasses of port available.

Yet I never saw any of those leaders drunk. It really made some of the rhetoric I grew up with seem rather foolish. This august group was far from some collection of out of control Bacchanalian figures, spilling all their secrets and giving into their hidden desires. Nothing of the sort!

It would seem to me that it would be more mature for us to teach young people to drink responsibly than to set up an all-or-nothing proposition where many would fail and then be out of control.

12. The entrance to John's, as I mentioned, had been constructed in the early 1700s and had been Baroque. A few anecdotes. Principal David Day enjoyed telling of how he had recently visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Apparently, on the tour, the guide had boasted that the stairs there dated from the 1700s. His remark? "The stairs outside my office are older."

This expanding sense of time was a key feature of my travels. In America, I had been impressed with something from the 1800s being old. The 1700s seemed a very long time ago. I didn't know any buildings in Florida or Indiana that went back to the 1700s.

Now in England, we had Durham Cathedral that dated to the 1000s and 1100s. Absolutely blowing my mind, Hadrian's Wall was about an hour away from me, and it dated to 122 and Roman times. (They said you could tell a road that was built on a Roman road by its straightness for miles and miles.) 

Then you go to Jerusalem and Greece and you're looking at things that are 2000 to 3000 years old -- maybe older. I've never been to Egypt or Iraq, but the scale just gets higher and higher.

I also remember Principal Day saying how overwhelmed they were by choices on their trip to America. In England you ask for an English breakfast and it's going to be much the same anywhere. But in America you have to decide how you want your eggs cooked and whether you want bacon or sausage. My daughters have to text me their Starbucks orders because of how complicated (and counter-intuitive) some of them are.

A fun memory is the brief moment when Principal Day had the opening hall repainted in its original Baroque colors (puke green). It was so awful that he immediately had it repainted back. At least that's how I remember it.

I've already mentioned the chapel -- St. Mary the Less. There was also a magnificent library. These were small buildings with lots of character. St. Mary the Less dated to the 1100s.

13. The oldest colleges of Durham were on the peninsula where the castle and cathedral were. The Bishop of Durham had previously been a Prince Bishop -- half bishop, half soldier, cathedral on one side, castle on the other. That all ended during the time of Van Mildert in the early 1800s, whose support helped to found the university. University or "Castle College" is the most posh of the colleges -- students live in the castle and graduation ceremonies happen there. 

A fun anecdote about the Castle kitchen. When it was constructed around 1499, word has it that Prince Bishop Richard Fox got tired of having to bless all the food coming out of the kitchen. So he put a sign over the pass through with the words "est deo gratia" ("thanks are to God"). That way, the food was automatically blessed when it arrived to those serving it.

The Palace Green is the area between the Cathedral and Castle. The Department of Theology is right there on the Green as well. Dunn's office was the first on the right as you went in the door. It was like a library in itself. 

[I'll put a placeholder here for the second floor window.]

The Cathedral itself was quite inspiring. I much preferred it to the ostentatious Westminster Cathedral in London with all its gold. Durham Cathedral lost most of its gold in the 1500s during the time when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. It was quite disheartening to see the ruins of former monasteries or abbeys out in the countryside. And you could see stones from them in nearby houses

As you went down the Bailey, you saw Hatfield College, Chad's, John's, and St. Cuthbert's. At the end of the Bailey, the bridge that crosses the river is called Prebends. It has a famous quote by Sir Walter Scott engraved on it: "Grey towers of Durham, yet well I love thy mixed and massive pyles, half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scots, and long to roam your venerable isles with memories stored of tales long since forgot." C. S. Lewis is said to have taken the idea of the lamp in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from here.

I guess Oliver Cromwell kept some 3000 Scottish soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar in the cathedral in 1650. The idiot Puritan had closed all the cathedrals and so used the empty building to keep those who survived the march down to Durham. Hundreds would die in there. They would burn anything wooden they could find for heat. 

The Chapel of Nine Altars commemorates them today. They were buried nearby, as was discovered during work on the Palace Green Library in 2013. Then they were reburied at a cemetery nearby.

16. The first trips to Durham involved lugging my books in huge boxes -- the biggest allowance possible. I had two huge suitcases and two huge boxes each trip. It was a lot. The first trip it was my desktop and books, books, books. 

I think I may have tried Heathrow once but quickly Gatwick became the way. Gatwick Express to Victoria. Victoria to Kings Cross on the Tube. Then a three hour train ride to Durham.

By the time the train was past York, I would be fighting sleep with all my might. I wasn't able to sleep on the plane. I was inevitably sucked into one or two movies. Darlington. Stay awake Ken. You have to stay awake. Durham. Then a taxi to John's.

I always would say, "Never call a nerd a weakling. We have to have muscles to carry all those books!"

17. I was on the bottom level of Cruddas. Cruddas was a four story building of student housing on the back of the John's property, situated on the incline leading down toward the river. Indeed, it was very easy to slip down to the river from where I was.

I think I mentioned that I did a little rowing that first year. Christoph Lorentz was a German exchange student that year, very tall. Juan was from Spain. Jonathan was English. Helen Fox served as the cox. We weren't very good (they called us the "crowd pleasers"), but we had a lot of fun.

Just about as soon as I was in my flat. Rachel Leonard and David Fox appeared at my door. Rachel's room was right next to mine. David was the Junior Common Room (JCR) president. Both of them sharp as a whip. Brilliant. Rachel was Psychology. David was Literature. I always felt like my brain was moving in slow motion when I was around them.

I came to consider them some of my closest friends. I still have a gord somewhere that David and I used to hide back and forth for some reason. I have failed to send it back to him now for about 25 years.

Although I was exhausted, they insisted I walk with them and some others to a pub that evening. I couldn't tell you where it was. I had my first Ribena, a non-alcoholic blackcurrent drink.

My impression of the night was that I was in a foreign country. I knew all the English words they were saying. I just didn't know what they meant.

Notes Along the Way Durham 1 -- Spying Out England

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1. In the spring of 1993, I took a trip to Durham, England to spy out the land and interview with St. John's College. I think by then Dunn had more or less sealed the deal. As long as I wasn't a serial killer or someone outside British Christian allowances (which were quite broad frankly), I would be a Residential Tutor there.

This was my first trip outside the United States on my own. I had been to the Philippines with my parents to visit my sister in 1976 or 77, who was a missionary at that time. I had been on a missions trip to Bolivia in 1988 with a singing team from Asbury. But this was me by my lonesome.

My high school humanities teacher, Mr. Stock, had told us in the twelfth grade that some of us would later travel to Europe and remember that class. We would remember flying butresses, the art, the architecture, the history. At that time, I had no imagination that I might ever visit Europe. Now, it's hard to imagine what I was thinking then.

Living in England and Germany for some three years would broaden my perspective. Perhaps I will mention when I talk about Africa my thoughts on how visiting another country doesn't necessarily broaden a person. Two people visit a foreign country. One person sees him or herself more clearly than they had before. The other is more entrenched in their biases than before, inoculated against a broader view of the world. [1]

My mind was blown once again. Over and over again, it seemed, the boxes my view of the world was in exploded. When I would return, so much of American thinking -- particularly those of my own circles -- seemed so small. Just as I was glad I was raised in a more diverse south Florida rather than Indiana, I was glad to live overseas long enough to see so many things about America in perspective.

I took it as a compliment those years in England when I was repeatedly told that I didn't seem like the stereotype they had of Americans -- loud and relatively closeminded, while thinking I knew everything about everything.

2. On that first visit, I met with the Principal of St. Johns -- David Day at that time. I remember him being a little delicate on the faith question, which I found amusing. In my world, faith boundaries were everything -- far more important than scholarship, to be frank. Yet St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college (British style) with an Anglican/Methodist theological college associated with it at that time (Cranmer Hall). The Christian faith boundaries were fairly broad, but they existed.

Cranmer Hall was a unique partnership between the Anglican Church and the British Methodist church. It was an honor 20 years later when Jimmy Dunn included me on an email including several important Methodist influencers like Richard Hays, urging us to use whatever influence we might have to stop the British Methodists from stopping the use of Cranmer Hall to train Methodist ministers. Unfortunately, the Wesley Study Centre there was closed in 2014.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the partnership between the Anglicans and the Methodists had only begun about five years earlier in 1988. I would get to teach a little at Cranmer my second year in England after Bruce Longenecker left, as I recall.

I also met with Margaret Masson, who had only been Senior Tutor for a year at that time. She would go on to work as Senior Tutor at St. Chad's in 2004 and then become Principal of St. Chad's in 2016. Chad's was the only other college at Durham that had its own theological training school. More on the structure of Durham in a moment.

I found all the staff at John's and Cranmer superb. The word that comes to mind is respect. They modeled a respect for everyone, a posture of listening. 

It was fertile soil for young people to grow in. Other than this boundary of mutual respect, the young plants weren't constrained in how they might grow. I knew both fervently Christian students alongside fervent atheists there. All of them spreading their wings.

3. The difference in what an evangelical college in Durham was and what an evangelical college was in America was striking. In America, Christian colleges were generally bounded sets, characterized especially by their boundaries. At Durham, St. John's was a centered set. The leadership was meant to be Christian. Every opportunity was given for worship. But it was an influence rather than a coercive model.

Neil Evans was the Chaplain, then an Anglican minister (he would later convert to Catholicism). He would become my best friend at Durham. His was the first face I met on my visit. Every morning and evening he held prayer in the small medieval chapel across the Bailey.

Later, when College Wesleyan asked me to facilitate a "Cathedral Service" venue, it was my brief encounter with the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) here that would serve me well. I wish I could say I was disiplined in my attendance. I had not yet had the pets and children that forced me to become a morning person yet. In those days, I would generally roll out for morning tea around 10am.

On Tuesday nights, there was a worship service with the Eucharist every week. I became a regular cantor for the service, singing the appropriate bits of the communion service. Hopefully I'll remember in a later post to talk about the singing and acting I did at John's.

But these Christian elements were meant to attract students to faith and deepen those who already had it. You were not forced to be a Christian to attend, nor were you forced to adopt a Christian ethic -- outside of the baseline of mutual respect and all that it entails.

4. The structure of an old school British university is quite different from that of an American one. In the US, if a university has colleges, they are purely by discipline: "College of Arts and Sciences." In the old days, places like Oxford and Cambridge were made up of somewhat independent colleges each with its own faculty.

At the University of Durham, there are now centralized departments like the Department of Theology. John's and Chad's are the only ones that still have their own faculties but only for ministry. Students in John's get their classes from the university at large now. In fact, the more advanced ministry students even in John's took classes with the Department of Theology.

5. I suppose I'll talk about my travel to and from England later. As I recall, I flew in on this occasion to Manchester, thinking it was closer on the map. I often did this sort of thing -- overconfident that I could figure things out without asking. Then finding out I didn't know what I was doing.

Yes, Manchester was closer on the map. But it wasn't faster by train. To get from Manchester to Durham you stopped at every little place in between. And Manchester was not a particularly attractive place from the train view. I would never fly in there again. Meanwhile, there's a three hour train from Kings Cross to Durham that only makes about five stops.

I was to fly out of Gatwick. Seems rather a rather strange route now. I suppose we must have booked it through a travel agent. I think my dad had given me traveler's checks to cash if necessary.

I spent the night in Islington at a Salvation Army place that the Wesleyan Church often used for missionary transit. I believe the London Honors students from Houghton still stay there when they are in England in the spring, although I don't think it's Salvation Army any more. Angie and I would stay there after we were married too.

On Saturday, I walked London from the Tower to Buckingham Palace. I had some guide to England that I had bought at some bookstore. By chance I happened upon Aldersgate Street on my way past St. Paul's. I felt my heart strangely warmed.

I believe I briefly hit the British Museum. In typical Ken fashion, I was wearing the dress shoes I had brought for my interview. They were ruined by the end of the day.

6. In the morning, Sunday, I was quite convinced I had figured out the Tube. Once again, not asking directions, I made my way to Kings Cross and studied the Underground map. Which line did I take to get to Gatwick? I had not seen it on the map in my guidebook.

Finally, I found an arrow at the bottom of the map with an arrow pointing toward Gatwick. Ah ha, I said to myself, I take the Victoria line to the end.

Nope.

I got to the last stop on the line, disembarked somewhat puzzled, asked the man at the booth how to get to Gatwick. Then he looked at me somewhat puzzled and said, "You need to take an above ground train, the Gatwick Express. It leaves from Victoria station."

That made me a little nervous, but I wasn't too worried yet. I was a strange mixture of overactive looking and leaping without looking. I don't know how these fit together. As my friend Micah once said, "Ken, sometimes you look. Sometimes you leap. But you never do them at the same time."

I took the tube back to Victoria, found the Gatwick Express. But by the time I got to the gate at the airport, they had just closed it. There was my plane, right there. It was still a half hour before departure. But rules were rules. I missed the flight.

7. I called Dad, as I usually did in such circumstances. I can't remember if he had given me an emergency credit card. Seems unlikely. But I was able to use whatever emergency means he gave me to stay at a Bed & Breakfast. Being the sort of person that wanted to try the culture where I was, I had steak and kidney pie that night for the first and last time. 

Yuck.

I might add that those were still the days before things were open on a Sunday in England. It must have been food served at the Bed and Breakfast. I think I was the only one there.

[1] A family friend and her husband did a bus tour through England while I was in Durham. I met them at the chippy near the bus park when their bus stopped at Durham. He had no interest in seeing another castle or cathedral, but he did complain that they didn't have any ketchup for his "fries."

"It's all true," I said to myself. Americans are imbeciles.

When my sister was a missionary, some visited her. As I recall, the expectations of the visitors were unreasonable for Manila. They had no sense that the appropriate move was to eat the normal food and sleep under the normal conditions of the country. Don't bother visiting the mission field otherwise. 

I heard the same complaint from nationals in Sierra Leone when I was there. The missionary doctors, one person said, lived with their higher standard of living separate from the people they worked with and ministered too. I'm sure that wasn't universally true, but I can believe it was true too often.

England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).

England -- First Term Studies 4

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42. For whatever reason, Jimmy suggested I start by reading Ernst Käsemann's The Wandering People of God. It is a classic in Hebrews studies. Its underlying problem is that Käsemann read Hebrews in terms of Gnosticism. Many scholars of his day saw Gnosticism as part of the context of early Christianity.

Bultmann and others had reverse engineered a hypothetical Gnosticism at the time of Paul out of later sources and their imagination. They created the "Gnostic Redeemer Myth," a hypothetical backdrop to Christian thinking where a spirit being partakes of evil material but is freed upon death and leads others out of the prison house of the body to salvation. The problem is that it doesn't exist. It is a pastiche of bits from here and there. Philo is skewed as a source, for example.

The real Gnosticism didn't rise until the late first century. These days it is only invoked when discussing the background of the letters and Gospel of John. It is gone from discussions of Colossians and Hebrews.

43. I read Lincoln Hurst's, The Epistle to the Hebrews: Its Background of Thought. He went through all the backgrounds that had been suggested for Hebrews up to that point. My main take away had to do with Hebrews 8:5, that the earthly tabernacle was a "copy and shadow" of the heavenly one. Hurst showed that "copy" was not a typical translation of hypodeigma and thus that, while the verse had a Platonic feel, it was not straightforwardly Platonic.

Indeed, from Hurst and James Thompson I learned about Middle Platonism. A few years later I would read Thomas Tobin's The Creation of Man, which helped me more than any other source in understanding how Stoicism and Platonism mixed together at Alexandria in the century before Christ to form Middle Platonism between Plato and Neoplatonism.

So I read James Thompson's The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy. I thought he went a little too far with a Platonic background, but I found him a kindred spirit. At some point I plowed through L.K.K. Day's The Intermediary World and Patterns of Perfection in Hebrews and Philo. I felt like a learned quite a bit about Philo but very little about Hebrews.

44. I went home for Christmas. I remember going for a walk trying to decide whether to move forward with Hebrews or perhaps to switch to something else. I have always liked Paul more than Hebrews, but so did everyone else. There was plenty being done on Paul. Dissertations have to come to some new conclusion, use some new method, or look at some new evidence. [1]

The subject of the historical Jesus was intriguing but potentially perilous. I did not necessarily expect to get a job in Wesleyan circles, but clearly a topic in such an area would require explanation and possibly raise eyebrows. It had only been a year or two previous that Houghton College had expelled another pupil of Dunn for writing a book that assumed Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles. Some have suggested it was not entirely for his position but also for his attitude.

As a side note, when I was finishing up, Dunn told me he would write a reference for anywhere but Houghton. He wasn't really serious. No doubt the fact that I had studied with Dunn was in the back of Bud Bence's mind when he hired me at IWU. Bud had been Dean at Houghton during the crisis I mentioned above.

One possible idea I had in the area of Jesus studies was to argue that Jesus did indeed keep his messianic identity somewhat hushed because the expectations for a Messiah were different from his own mission. I wasn't too surprised to find that Dunn had already published something along these lines.

By the way, one of the big insights for me in those days was a realization that Jews did not think of the Messiah as God come down as earth. Indeed, not even all Jews were expecting or wanting a Messiah. Those that were generally expected God to anoint a human figure to rise and overthrow Roman rule. The 1987 Princeton Symposium on this topic seems a benchmark here: The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity.

45. With regard to Hebrews, my exposure to literary approaches was percolating. I read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism and the Gospels. Bill Patrick and I had gone to hear him give a funny SBL session where he read Mark from a deconstructive point of view. His book gave me a certain typology for categorizing literary approaches.

Between Richard Hays and N. T. Wright, I became aware of structuralism as a way of analyzing stories. At some point I plowed through Wright's The New Testament and the People of God. He uses the "actantial" model of structuralism to analyze stories of salvation. By the way, at the time I found Wright's work incredibly stimulating. There was a time in the late 90s when I couldn't wait for his Paul book in this series to come out. By the time it did 15 years later, I had largely lost interest. :-)

One feature I loved in this first volume to the series was the way that he processed worldview in terms of story, symbols, rituals, and answers to basic questions. He also gave me one of my first exposures to critical realism. He gave me my first nuanced sense of who the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were. It was a major point in the development of my thinking.

Richard Hays had also used the structuralist model in his own dissertation, published as The Faith of Jesus Christ. By the way, by God's grace I just happened to go to the famous 1988 debate between Dunn and Hays on the expression "the faith of Jesus Christ." It would take me years to get a sense of what I think on this issue, well into my time teaching at IWU. I would eventually conclude that Paul argues "from Hays to Dunn."

Hays' work on Galatians looked for the narrative substructure of Galatians. My idea was to look to the narrative substructure of Hebrews. I later set this out in my book, Understanding the Book of Hebrews. If a story has the elements of events, characters, and settings, I eventually decided in my dissertation for focus on the settings in the narrative substructure of Hebrews.

I should mention here that my friend James Quirk was also studying structuralism as an archaeology major. He introduced me to Claude Levy-Strauss. I did not understand it all and of course it was too tangential to spend much time on him. Let's just say I was impressed at how much more advanced the students at Durham were than any of the undergraduate students I had encountered before.

[1] I've always joked that the implication was that all dissertations are wrong. I've also joked that the only thing scholars agree on is that all dissertations but theirs are wrong. Indeed, the unique claims of dissertations are often based on creative thoughts formed before a thinker reaches maturity in their thoughts. I have always viewed Tom Wright's thoughts on Jesus as the embodiment of Israel in this light, as we as his sense that return from exile is a major key to New Testament thought.

I am being a little hyperbolic here. I do think there are some exceptional dissertations out there. There are, I think, some immature elements to my own dissertation (e.g., the annihilation of the creation). But in my defense, it was more of a new method of looking at Hebrews than completely novel claims.

England -- NT Background and Theology 3

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38. I forget the name of the man associated with Cranmer and Johns (Rob?) who suggested to me that the "Maccabean martyrs" of 2 and 4 Maccabees might have provided a theological lens through which the earliest Christians might have in part processed Jesus' death. The man was working on his PhD in theology, if I remember correctly.

So I found myself reading a little into the Apocrypha in my first year at Durham. 2 Maccabees 7 does seem to view the deaths of seven brothers as in some way bringing the wrath of God to an end toward Israel in the 164BC. 4 Maccabees is even more explicit about their deaths being a ransom and expiation (17:21-22). The word hilasterion in 4 Maccabees 17:22 is used in Romans 3:25, making this an important background text for Paul.

I had not read much in Jewish background literature up to that point. If I were in the States, perhaps I would have had occasion to take a comp exam on them. At IWU I was privileged to teach a course in intertestamental literature. I often told the students in that class that while the Old Testament provided the fundamental elements of the background story of the New Testament, the intertestamental period provided the lens through which people at the time of Christ processed and organized the Old Testament content. Since the significance of data gives it its meaning, there is a sense in which the intertestamental period is virtually as determinative background to Christianity as the Old Testament itself.

Although I had taken a course on patristics with Bundy at Asbury, it was in my first year at Durham that I sat down and plowed through the Apostolic Fathers. In the second term (Christmas term), the graduate research seminar read through much of the New Testament Apocrypha, using Schneemelcher. These are writings in no one's Bible but include writings like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Protoevangelium of James, and the Gnostic writings.

This was the time when John Dominic Crossan was at his height. He was putting forth ideas that seem quite unlikely to me, such as that Jesus was a Cynic and that the Gospel of Peter preserved the earliest form of the passion narrative. It seems like the public was in conspiracy mood, as they always are. Another example when I get to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

39. I might back up a little and speculate why Jimmy took me on as a doctoral student in the first place. Partings of the Ways came out in 1991. In it, he suggests that Hebrews had come under the influence of Platonic idealism. He thus saw in Hebrews a combination of a vertical interest in the heavenly with the eschatological. In other words, my proposed topic fit with a position he had just taken.

The book itself is a great example of Jimmy's ability to see the next step in the flow of scholarship. The train of thought had begun with the "new perspective" on Paul, a term that originated with Tom Wright but that became the coin of the realm because of Dunn's ability to identify and magnify the trends of the day. The new perspective showed, more than anything else, that Paul remained much more in continuity with Judaism than older scholars had supposed.

The next step was thus the third quest for the historical Jesus. It looked at Jesus through this same lens, believing that Jesus was a Jew and that Jesus remained in full continuity with Judaism. He did not start a new religion. In the first century, Christianity was nothing other than a form of Judaism that saw itself as the true heir of its promises.

Here we arrive at the question Dunn asked in Partings. When did in fact Christianity become a distinct religion from Judaism? His answer is that it was in the early second century, after all or almost all of the New Testament books were written.

40. I haven't mentioned one of the first books by Dunn that I read before I went to England. This was Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. I have to say that this 1977 book really helped me see the New Testament in three dimensions rather than in the flat, unreflective way I saw it before. Let me try to express what that looked like:

• He begins with brief glimpses at the fundamental message of Jesus, Acts, Paul, and John. Previously, I would have read these voices in light of each other rather than as individual, potentially distinct voices.
• He moves on to early titles for Jesus--Son of Man, Messiah, Son of God, Lord--a practice that pre-dates Dunn among other attempts to describe New Testament Christology.
• He deals with some of the practices of the early church, something I think was noteworthy. What was ministry like in the early church? What was worship like in the early church? How did the "sacraments" function?
• In the second half of the book, he tries to identify distinct groups in the early church--Jewish Christianity, Hellenistic Christianity, Apocalyptic Christianity, and Catholic Christianity. 

In his work, he built on the past but brought his usual tendencies toward objectivity. Seeing the New Testament through these lenses was like staring at one of those pictures that is three-dimensional if you look at it a certain way.

41. I'm trying to remember the sequence of Greek. It sure seems like I taught Greek Bible in the fall. A man named William Morrice taught introductory Greek using a book he wrote, Durham New Testament Greek Course. He had been teaching Greek for the University, but was gradually moving toward retirement. I especially remember him for having the idiosyncratic view that Tatian's Diatesseron was "through four," which requires five pillars. He thus added the Gospel of Thomas to the Four Gospels as a source for Tatian.

This seems quite quirky to me. Yet the seriousness with which his presentation to the Easter seminar was given (as I recall) was indicative of the nature of study in England. The most idiosyncratic of theories were taken seriously. They were critiqued, to be sure, but they were given a good ear.

As I side note, I remember one presentation by a person from Canada on 1 Corinthians 11:19. It says there need to be factions among them to find out who is worthy. This person suggested that the factions showed who would be "top dog." This was an unfamiliar expression and there was quite a bit of chuckling in the room. Dunn in particular found it very amusing.

In my class we read Mark 1-8 in Greek. It was a great opportunity to add yet another part of the New Testament to my repertoire. I remember a Greek Orthodox priest being in my class in year 2. He was quite annoyed with my pronunciation, as modern Greeks always are.

Michaelmas in England 2

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34. St. John's was laid out in the most interesting of ways. These were Georgian townhouses retrofitted to become a college. The summer before I came they had done some renovation, so returning students found the corridors somewhat altered. My favorite feature of all was the stairway that ended in a wall.

I think it was sometime in my first year that Principal David Day decided to restore the original Baroque colors of the entrance way, which included a long stairway to the first floor (remembering that the ground floor was not the first floor). Let's just say that puke green did not have the desired effect. It was immediately repainted in a more tolerable although less accurate green.

I remember hearing Day comment on a visit he made to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The tour guide apparently commented on how old some stairway was, dating to the mid- to late 1700s. Day commented that the stairway outside his office was older.

The timescale of Europe was something to get used to. I grew up in Florida and was born in Indiana. Although Florida was settled early by the Spanish, Fort Lauderdale was largely developed in the mid-twentieth century. Indiana went back to the early 1800s.

Now I was an hour drive away from Hadrian's Wall, built in AD122. It was hard to fathom. The cathedral was started at the end of the 1000s. Begun in the Norman style, its west end ended in the Gothic period. Suddenly I found Mr. Stock's senior humanities class coming alive, flying buttresses and all. It was just as he had said, that his class made Europe come alive, something I never dreamed might happen at the time.

If you followed the Bailey down past St. Cuthbert's, you came to Prebends Bridge. Here was once a lamppost that allegedly inspired C.S. Lewis. Inscribed there was also a poem by Sir. Walter Scott of Scottish fame: "Grey towers of Durham, yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles. Half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scots, and long to roam these venerable isles with tales long since forgot."

I guess some Scots were imprisoned in the cathedral at some point. I was told they defaced much inside. Unlike Westminster, the inside was plain, the gold removed during the Protestant Reformation. It fit my sensibilities. I liked it much better than the showy cathedrals of London.

35. My typical day was quite leisurely. My sense was that the British day didn't start as early as the American one. At 8am, things still didn't seem to be moving much. There was prayer in St. Mary the Less every morning. I wish I could say I was a regular attender but I slept in most mornings. I didn't have much in the way of video games, but Tetris did sometimes take some of my time.

I had a bathtub with no shower. That was a change. I would usually stroll out in time for the 10am tea that the staff of the college had every weekday morning.

Sundays there was high table, like the table in front in the banquet hall in Harry Potter. Everyone wore their black academic robe, as in Harry Potter. I got a used one from somewhere. One of the new dietary elements was lamb, with the possibility of mint sauce. I never got the hang of it. There were of course plenty of sheep in the surrounding countryside, but lamb was never my preferred cup of tea.

I met with Dunn privately perhaps once a month. I'm sure I was quite boring. At times in fact he looked to be falling asleep while I was talking, but he would have exactly the right thing to say whenever I might pause. His office was a library in itself, with row after row of bookshelves.

A highlight was the Monday graduate research seminar. It was a time to be with other professors and doctoral students. Occasionally there would be visiting professors wandering through. That year, the other two New Testament professors were Sandy Wedderburn and Stephen Barton. Bruce Longenecker was teaching for Cranmer that year and also attended.

Occasionally some Hebrew Bible professors might attend. Walter Moberly was a regular. I don't remember Robert Hayward ever coming. His office was right above the entrance way. I remember seeing him one day from the Palace Green below standing in his large window. He gave a slight wave with his head slightly tilted to one side.

36. The school year was divided into three terms--Michaelmas, Epiphany, and Easter. The student exams were in the third term. It was an interesting setup because they only had classes in the first two terms. The third term was high stakes with only study preparation and exams. Instead of letter grades, the grades were numbers (e.g., "a first").

In the third term, we graduate students gave papers in the research seminar. That was always the least interesting of the year, I hate to say. During the other two terms, we might work through a recent book that had been published or, if Dunn was writing something, we might go through a book of the New Testament. It was conventional for professors, if they were writing a book, to offer a course on that subject. Their lectures might then be chapters from the book they were writing.

My first term, I believe we read through Geza Vermes' The Religion of Jesus the Jew. I believe the semester in fact culminated with him visiting the seminar. In the end I was not particularly impressed.

It was an interesting point in time to be doing doctoral work. The so-called "third quest for the historical Jesus" was in full bloom, and Dunn was in the thick of it. I've already mentioned that the third quest was an abandonment of the overly restrictive criteria of the "new quest" of the sixties. I've also mentioned that Wright's chapter at the end of Stephen Neill's The Interpretation had been my entry into this third quest.

Wright singled out four books as indicative of the beginning of this new phase in historical Jesus study: A. E. Harvey's Jesus and the Constraints of History, E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism, Ben Myers' The Aims of Jesus, and Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew. I would say that two things in particular distinguished this new phase. One is a move beyond looking at just the sayings of Jesus to the events of Jesus' ministry. The second was a fuller appreciation of the Jewishness of Jesus.

37. In those days, I was thirsty for a sure footing. So many arguments I had heard seemed to blow away with a puff of wind. A little like Descartes, I wanted to know what could not reasonably be doubted. I was no longer in an echo chamber. I was in England. There was no Wesleyan Church around the corner. I now had to defend my positions with real arguments.

The resurrection seemed fairly easy to defend historically if one allowed for miracles philosophically. Let me point here to one of Dunn's books, The Evidence for Jesus. It is entirely plausible from the evidence that many people claimed to see Jesus alive after his death. It is entirely plausible that there was no body in the place where they had laid him. Sprinkle the possibility of miracles on top and you have a plausible resurrection.

It seems to me that the incarnation is neither disprovable nor provable on the basis of history. It is purely a matter of faith. It does not stand or fall on the virgin birth for reasons I have already mentioned. I believe it is a coherent concept. I do not believe that Jesus' self-limitation is problematic for it. In short, it is almost entirely a matter of faith, not reason.

Nevertheless, I was thirsty for historical evidence that supported the general contours of Jesus' ministry as it is presented in the Gospels. Sanders provided some of this for me, particularly in his shorter version, The Historical Figure of Jesus. He argues for the historical plausibility of twelve disciples, for example. Later work by John Meier, Dale Allison, Wright, and Dunn has also been helpful to me.

In my mind, even if we were to bracket faith and think purely historically, we would conclude that the Gospels give us the basic, historical story of Jesus. [1] It is not essential to prove all the details are historical. Nevertheless, we would conclude that Jesus followed in the train of John the Baptist and that he called twelve disciples to symbolize the reconstitution of Israel. We would conclude that he was known for casting out demons and healing people. We would conclude that he taught non-violence in the face of the Romans and that religious leaders found him problematic because he didn't follow their rules. We could conclude that he taught God was going to save his people and that he was going to die as part of redemption. We would conclude that he created a disturbance in the temple, that he was crucified as a messianic pretender, and that his followers believed he appeared to them after his death.

I was delighted in the spring of 94 to teach three sessions on Christology in Cranmer. I recently ran into Fiona Richardson at Houghton, who now works with her husband Philip for OMS. She was one of the Cranmerites in those sessions. I did a lecture on the historical Jesus as one session. Another one was on early Christology in Paul and Acts. I believe a final one was on John.

[1] That is to say, the "Jesus of history" coheres with the "Christ of faith."

Arrival in Durham 1

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29. Sometime in early September 1993, I believe, I packed two large boxes along with carry-ons as large as I could pack onto a Virgin Atlantic flight across the Atlantic. I was young and able, almost 27. But some of those transitions were very stressful, leaving me drenched in sweat. Who said nerds don't have muscle? We have to have muscle to carry all those books!

I had my desktop in one box and as many books as possible in the other, with a small dolly. It would take the first year of back and forth to get my biblical studies books all over there. The weight limit at least kept things within reason.

It was Gatwick to Victoria to Kings Cross and then north to Durham. When I would travel for more than one day, I would take out a British Rail or Eurail pass, so many days in a month. The train from Kings Cross to Durham was about a three hour trip that went through York.

I had trouble sleeping on the plane overnight so I usually would sleep most of the train ride. I'd arrive sometime around 9 or 10am, I believe. I was always afraid I would sleep past Durham, but I usually awoke at the Darlington stop and managed to stay awake the rest of the way.

Durham has a spectacular train bridge coming into the station. Then it's down the hill and across the Weir (which rhymes with "beer") onto the peninsula where the castle and cathedral are. Then up the "Bailey" past Hatfield and Chads college to St. John's.

The old British universities are not structured like American universities. Over time, they have moved more and more toward centralized instruction, but in the old days each "college" within the university might have its own cross-disciplinary faculty. [1] St. Johns was one of two remaining colleges with some of its own faculty. Cranmer Hall was a theological training school within Johns that was separate from the theology department of the broader university.

It all worked well, although there was perhaps a small sense that the purely Cranmer students weren't quite as advanced as those also doing a Durham theology degree. When I was there, there were both Anglicans and Methodists training in Cranmer. A few years ago the Methodists took that possibility away, to centralize training in the face of declining numbers around Britain.

There were thirteen colleges as part of the University of Durham when I was there. I'm a little surprised to see that they have added three since I left, one of which is named, "John Snow"! I see that what used to be "Grad Soc" (the Graduate Society) has been renamed Ustinov college after Peter Ustinov, who used to be chancellor of the university and who shook my hand at my graduation. He was a famous actor.

It was so much better for me to be part of Johns rather than Grad Soc. I was part of a vibrant Christian community. If Jimmy hadn't gone to bat for me in Johns, my experience would have been so impoverished by comparison.

The university was founded in 1832, rather late in the game of European universities but the third in England, after Oxford and Cambridge. There are others older in Britain in general, such as Edinburgh in Scotland and Trinity College in Dublin. Within Durham, the oldest college is University College, whose students live in the Castle. I believe the university was founded when Bishop van Mildert didn't want to pay tax on the castle. So he donated it to found a university.

The bishops of Durham were once "prince-bishops," both political and spiritual rulers of the region. The funniest thing I remember about the castle is that the bishop got tired of having to bless every meal so he put a prayer over the window through which food came from the kitchen to the dining area. It was thus automatically blessed on its way out.

30. When I arrived, the students were not yet there. I was greeted by Neil Evans, a Welshman who would be my closest friend for the next three years. He was an Anglican priest and a man of noble character all around. He would become chaplain during my tenure there.

I was to be a "residential tutor," what they used to call a "moral tutor." It was a little like being an RA except there were far fewer rules to enforce. To be honest, it was mostly about being available. I used to call myself the "tea and biscuit tutor." If you want serious advice or help, better see Neil.

A second part of my job had to do with being a fire deputy of sorts. If the fire alarm went off, one of the tutors would need to go to the front office and see where the alarm had gone off. Then we ran to the spot to see if it was a real fire. It almost never was. Nevertheless, being a college and having students who sometimes drank too much, the alarm did go off fairly often, especially on a Friday night. If it was a false alarm, we would warn off them sending all the fire trucks. One always had to come to make sure.

There were only two real fires that I remember in my three years. The one was a kitchen on the top floor of Cruddas. They ran a hose from the Bailey back and had it right out. The other was when David Fox set his hair on fire.

In my final year near the end, we were cooking outside behind on the south lawn. The fire wasn't starting very quickly, so David--who was extremely clever--went to get some gasoline to speed things up. I seem to remember David Morton being involved as well. The flame shot up so quickly that his head caught on fire. He had the smarts to put it out with his shirt.

31. Neil and Helen Fox were the other two residential tutors. To get into where Helen was (if I am remembering where she and Neil were respectively), you had to go outside and north to come back inside. It was like 23 House on the Bailey. It was somewhat isolated from the rest of John's. If I remember, Neil moved down there my second year, and I don't think we replaced Helen.

Helen was an interesting person, from the Isle of Wight. I seem to remember her being one of those people who was somewhere around a hundredth in line to the throne. I could be making all that up. I found the bluntness of some of my friends surprising. Perhaps it was because I had lived in the south for the previous nine years. I myself had lived quite a sheltered life. I remember telling Helen once that she had helped me understand the French Revolution. :-)

She was quite a nice person and prompted some interest in Wittgenstein. I had encountered Wittgenstein briefly I think in my Philosophy of Theism class. There was a chapter on "Wittgensteinian Fideism" in the book by Tom Morris. Although Wittgenstein himself did not come up with the idea, people like D. Z. Phillips had championed the notion that language of God was not about a being "out there" but really a certain kind of language game. God was real in the sense that the language of God affected the way people lived in the world. For this group, God existed because language about God caused all sorts of things to happen. The concept of God in language gave rise to certain actions.

That wasn't Helen's interest. She was working on feminist views of God, as I recall. [2] It was however either her or Neil who told me about the "Sea of Faith" movement in England, led by people like Don Cupitt. The phrase comes from a poem by Matthew Arnold called, Dover Beach. In the poem, Arnold mourns the retreat of faith in modern society. Cupitt was a non-realist within the Church of England, He believed in God as an idea, not as a reality out there.

The Anglican Church was fascinating to me. It was held together by its common liturgy, not so much a common belief system. Unreflectively, I would have assumed that it is the belief system of a church that gave it an identity. But on reflection, it was really lifestyle standards that gave the holiness movement of the late twentieth century its identity. And it was more a common liturgy for Anglicans.

So the Anglican church had Anglo-Catholics like Neil and St. Chads. It had "evangelical Anglicans" like St. John's at that time. There were charismatic Anglicans, such as at Holy Trinity Brompton in London. The Toronto Blessing broke out while I was in England. Then there were non-realists like Cupitt. One church, one basic liturgy, lots of variation.

32. St. John's was "evangelical Anglican." That's not evangelical in the current American sense. It was evangelical in the sense of being Scripture focused, believing in justification by faith and the centrality of the cross. At the same time, it was evangelicalism in a different culture.

For example, moderate drinking was the norm. There was sherry served in the Senior Common Room before high table or key events, and there was port afterwards. I never saw any of the staff or administration drunk. I did see students drunk of course, often. The drinking age is 18 in England.

I might say that my England experience exploded to bits all the rhetoric about drinking I had heard in certain American circles. Neil was not one ounce spiritually inferior to any Christian I knew in the States. He drank moderately but I never saw him drunk. I do not have a problem with not drinking. But there is only a cultural argument against moderate drinking. There is no absolute argument and there certainly is no biblical argument for total abstinence. The British church can carry its alcohol.

The buildings were all co-ed. This is another difference with American evangelical colleges. Rachel Leonard, who would also become one of my closest friends, had her single room right next to mine. As I was moving in, she and David Fox appeared in my internal doorway to greet me. They were the president and vice president (I don't remember if those were the precise titles) of the Junior Common Room (JCR) of John's, the student association of the college.

I was in the bottom floor of Cruddas, on the south side corner. My flat stretched from the front to the back with a kitchenette and bath in front, room in back. Behind Cruddas was a path down to the boathouse. I did row for fun, by the way, while I was there.

St. John's expected common moral behavior of its students, but it did not expect specifically Christian behavior. The model was that the staff was Christian. Christian services took place every day in St. Mary the Less in the morning and evening (the chapel across the street). There was a worship service on Tuesday nights (I often cantored for it).

But the students were not required to be Christian. There were no sexual prohibitions other than those of society at large.

33. David and Rachel invited me to the pub that first night. I think I had a Ribena, a non-alcoholic blackcurrent drink. I was surely out of it because of the trip. I think I may have crashed for a few hours.

What I remember most about the night is that I didn't understand anything going on. They were speaking English, but I didn't understand what they were saying. I knew nothing about English Tele. I knew nothing about English "football" (soccer). Like Wittgenstein's lion, they were speaking but I didn't understand them. [2]

Welcome to England!

[1] In the US, there might be several colleges in a university, but they are usually distinguished by discipline ("The College of Medicine") or modality ("The College of Adult and Professional Studies").

[2] We were having a discussion, for some reason, about whether there could be such a thing as a private language. Wittgenstein of course would say no. What I meant, I think, was my own words, not my own meanings, but I could be misremembering. I didn't like to get caught out. I would have to learn about Wittgenstein so as not to be caught ignorant.

[3] "If a lion could speak, would we understand them?" Wittgenstein was pointing out that we might be able to define the words, but if we do not know the "language games" of a lion, we wouldn't get their meaning.