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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued...

Dongell on Love, Purity, and Power

1. I had the chance to have lunch with Joe Dongell a couple weeks ago in Atlanta. He's a Wesleyan professor at Asbury Seminary and one of the smartest people I know. We have a lot in common, including similar backgrounds and similar educational pathways. I always know I'm going to be laughing when I'm having a meal with Joe, his brother Pete, and other friends from the Asbury era of my life.

Recently, Joe read through all of Wesley's works multiple times. I believe he will put out a book with his reflections, but he has spoken several times on his conclusions in various circles. I wanted to explore and expand on one train of thought emerged from that study.

2. It is well known by now that Wesley did not talk about entire sanctification in terms of the book of Acts. His preferred phrase was "perfect love" and he much preferred the books of John and the Sermon on the Mount in his preaching. It was John Fletcher who equated this experience with Acts, which gave the experience a much clearer experiential template.

There is some evidence that Wesley didn't have a problem with this approach, but you practically have to be a Wesley scholar to argue for it. It just wasn't a primary way he thought about entire sanctification.

3. One train of thought Joe has explored is that the shift from preaching on being perfected in love to preaching on Acts entailed some shifts in the way the American holiness movement thought about entire sanctification. In particular, Joe believes it shifted the focus from love to a focus on purity and power. I'll let the church historians hash out the details, but I want to dance a little with Joe's thoughts here.

One thing I think is clear is that the shift to Acts eventually shifted the American holiness movement away (not completely, but in focus) from the substance of the doctrine (love) to the experience of the doctrine. For example, Joe would argue that Wesley did not really specify any timetable for having this experience. In the late 1800s, the holiness movement would shift toward having a second experience ASAP after conversion.

Joe is suggesting that when Fletcher preached sanctification by way of Acts, he presupposed the substance of Wesley's teaching on love. But once the focus was on Acts, Joe argues, it became possible to preach sanctification without the substance of Wesley's teaching.

This shift inevitably made a lot of room for a certain shallowness to the experience, what Keith Drury once called, "two-tripism." At the beginning of the twentieth century, people were asking questions like, "Did you jump when you were sanctified?" "Did you shout?" In a slightly different context, "Did you speak in tongues?"

4. At some point, another shift happened. Sanctification shifted from a positive dynamic--love toward others--to a negative move. Holiness somewhere shifted to being against things. This was a twisting of the heart of the doctrine. Holiness was now about what you didn't do, about stopping certain behaviors, and holiness preaching was often dominated by preaching against relatively external things like what you wear or where you go. The holiness movement became heavily infected with legalism and Pharisaism.

(Soon forgotten was the social activism of the mid 1800s, when Wesleyans were activists against slavery and for women's right's.)

Not everyone, to be sure, not every sermon. There was still preaching about being saved from anger or self-destructive behaviors. I especially prize the preaching I heard on selflessness and self-denial, of doing everything for the glory of God. It was only the content toward which that teaching was directed that I question.

Could it be that the prevailing sense of holiness in the mid-twentieth century became a negative movement, and often about relatively superficial things? Holiness preachers were conceived along the lines of the prophets of the OT, but they missed a key dynamic. The OT prophets preached more for people than against sin. The prophets railed for social justice and against idolatry. They didn't primarily preach against breaking the Law.

5. It's no wonder that the Boomers of the Wesleyan Church largely rejected holiness in the late twentieth century. They saw neither purity nor power in the movement. They shifted their focus to the church growth movement.

Even moreso, those groups that continued to focus on this shell of a doctrine understandably confused a certain kind of cultural conservatism with holiness. A place like Bob Jones or Liberty University felt more holiness to them than a place like IWU, which actually promotes Wesley's actual values and the values of the nineteenth century church. Holiness became cultural and political conservatism, not perfect love.

Indeed, it was fascinating recently to hear the question of when Wesleyans shifted from a holiness emphasis to an emphasis on love, as if holiness was ever for Wesley anything but perfect love!

In short, we lost our way.