Notes Along the Way TF5 -- Teaching at Asbury College

continued from last week
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1. Back in the day, Mike Harstad was a legend at Asbury College. (I don't know the details of his departure so I'll leave it at that.) He was known for teaching Greek the old school way -- by which I mean the way my mother learned it at Frankfort Bible College in the early 1940s. You learned Attic Greek first. Then you downshifted into Koine Greek, the "merchant Greek" of the New Testament.

Brian Small learned Greek from him that way and, as I recall, first introduced me to Smyth's classical Greek grammar. In my seminary years, Greek resources featured high on my list of birthday and Christmas requests. My parents obliged and I filled in some details. I believe Joseph Beth was helpful.

Dr. Harstad thought that Philo was the author of Hebrews, or at least could have been.

Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker, Liddle Scott, Moulton and Geden, Blass-Debrunner. My parents gave me Kittle's 10 volume Theological Dictionary one Christmas. Of course, it turned out to be riddled with language fallacies, not to mention the fact that it was put together by Nazi Bible scholars. Oh well.

In the 1992-1993 academic year, Harstad was on a sabbatical. The whole year. And, since I was now finishing up my MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky (UK), I seemed like a good pick to do some of the fill in while he was gone. 

So I taught second year Latin at Asbury College that year, one class each semester. He used Robert Ball's Reading Classical Latin text, which used simple texts from Julius Caesar, Ovid, Cicero, and the like. It was nice. If only I could have started out with those beginning texts instead of being thrown into poetry again at UK.

I can't say that I remember any students except for Jerald Walz, who has occasionally stayed in touch.

2. We used to joke that a great gulf separated Asbury College from the Seminary, as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Seminary men were known to go over to hang out at the Grill in hopes of finding girls who might date them. It was a little embarrassing, and I joined the ranks of the embarrassing for a short time.

Some of my college friends were RD's at Kresge. We would go over to visit them. That's when I first met Cindy Gunsalus and then Vicki Gibson, who was a close friend in those years. My roomate at the time was Brian Matherlee, now well known Wesleyan pastor in North Carolina. He introduced me to the Braves and the Tarheels. 

He was much more of an extrovert than me and quite cool for a seminary guy. A brief story will capture our respective personalities. Two of the most popular female seminary students came to our apartment to visit him. I was there -- or at least I thought I was. As he showed them around the apartment, he pointed to my room and mentioned that it was Ken's room. Mind you, I was standing right there behind them.

"Who?" they asked.

"Ken," he said. And then as the look of perplexity continued on their faces, he added, "He's standing right behind you."

Ah, such is life.

3. I was a Greek and Hebrew Teaching Fellow at Asbury Seminary from the fall of 1990 to the spring of 1992, going to UK part time. Then from 1992-1993, I went full time to UK and finished my degree.

This involved of course going headlong into Latin. I've mentioned that I took 2.5 years of it in high school. Then I spent the summer of 1991 going through Wheelock.

The first class I finally took was, by some freak act, another poetry class: Juvenal, Martial, and Statius. It wasn't too bad. Juvenal was a satirist. So we read the famous quote that all the people want are bread and circuses. Martial, as I recall, was ronchy. So for a brief moment I knew some Latin bad words and sex terms. I had Dr. Jane Phillips for that class. She was quite reasonable. I had her for Cicero as well.

She was Roman Catholic, and I think may have been a nun at one time. Not entirely sure. I remember her being perplexed that I didn't know the term "fracture" for when the priest breaks the wafer when consecrating the elements. She was trying to prompt my memory for the fourth principal part of frango -- "fractus."

I had two semesters of Latin Composition with her my final year. I can't say that I learned as much as I would have liked, but that has always been my story.

4. I took Virgil's Aeneid with Lewis Swift. He was Dean of Undergraduate Studies and for some reason I was surprised that he actually would teach a class. He passed away a few years ago. I remember a brief exchange we had at a social for the master's students in classics. It was at Robert Rabel's house, as I remember. I dutifully abstained from the wine that was on offer. He had a very nice wine stock, as I recall.

Somehow, we had a brief chat about the imprecatory psalms. Dr. Swift said something like, "I was never quite able to figure out what to do with the imprecatory psalms. You know, praying down God's wrath on your enemies." He had actually studied for ministry as a Roman Catholic at one point, I believe.

I responded that I had always taken them somewhat metaphorically. Praying for God to end evil and various vices rather than people. He seemed intrigued.

He was a great teacher of the Aeneid and, although I continued my multi-hour pre-class Arby's ritual, I regularly found myself trying to guess when I would be asked to read to make sure I had something to say once we got there. A trick I tried with varying success was to volunteer early and then have pockets of text translated so I could volunteer throughout the class and just maybe give the appearance of having it all done. 

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I missed the Battleship.

5. There were classes I wanted to take but it just didn't work out. I missed Plato. That hurt. I went the first day but conceded I just didn't have the time. I did catch Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics with Robert Rabel (Books I and X, I believe). I missed Homer, which sucked. I mentioned that I had a year of Sanskrit with Greg Stump.

I had to pass a reading French competency. This was while I was still a teaching fellow. The problem is that the class I signed up for was at 8am. And at that time I certainly was not a morning person. That didn't happen until I was married. I couldn't get myself up. And it's not like there was an attendance requirement. Everything stood or fell on whether you passed the competency exam at the end.

I went the first day. I went a random day in the middle. I went to the class before the exam, I believe. And I studied reading French on my own.

I got an A in the class.

[insert material on E. R. Dodds and the competency exam]

Notes Along the Way -- TF3 -- Postmodernism

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury and student in classics at the University of Kentucky. Last post here.
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1. In the years when I was a Teaching Fellow, I was learning more and more about literary criticism and, of course, postmodernism was in the mix. My original source of exposure here was Dr. Bauer at Asbury.

Dr. Bauer was a leader in narrative criticism, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which I've mentioned before. As it was practiced in the United States, narrative criticism examined the stories of the Bible as stories. His Dokter Vater Jack Kingsbury and others like Mark Allen Powell bracketed the historical questions. You didn't ask whether or not these events happened. You assumed each Gospel was a self-contained story world. It was a very convenient hermeneutic for evangelicals to work on their PhDs because they didn't have to address those critical issues.

Alan Culpepper has a complex but helpful diagram in his book, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel which captures the main dynamics. And of course, Mark Allen Powell wrote a helpful little book called What Is Narrative Criticism? The three main elements of a story are the events, characters, and settings. There is the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader. There is narrative time and story time. I would use some of these categories in my PhD dissertation, as I've said.

When I got to Durham, I felt like they weren't quite as sophisticated at these hermeneutical approaches as Bauer and others were. They were still quite historically oriented, and those who were dabbling with narrative criticism had not fully disconnected their study of narratives from the study of history. 

Of course, as Joe Dongell once mentioned to me, the very use of language assumes a historical baseline. I would understand this better my first year at Durham when I was exposed to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the idea of narrative criticism was to examine the text in isolation from historical questions and historical background.

2. As I've said before, in those days I felt like I was slowly moving through the historical progression of biblical criticisms. In the early 90s, I would catch up. Textual criticism asked whether the King James tradition was more or less original. Historical criticism searched for the history. Source criticism looked for written sources. Form criticism looked at oral traditions. Redaction criticism asked how the authors edited their sources. Composition criticism asked how the writings were composed. Narrative criticism analyzed the stories as stories.

Now, in the early 90s, I had caught up with reader-response criticism, the next step after narrative criticism. The first two thirds of the twentieth century had focused on the world behind the text, the historical. The 80s had tried to focus on the world within the text. Now, with the 90s, there was a turn to the reader, the world in front of the text.

Reader-response criticism had at least three varieties. First, there were those who viewed it with a historical lens -- what was the impact of the text on the original audience. David Smith, doing his dissertation at Durham in the late 90s, hypothesized how the passion narrative of Mark was written in a way to have an impact on the original audience. If the author ended the book at Mark 16:8, what kind of an effect would this have on the audience?

A second variety relates to the impact of the biblical texts on various groups of modern readers. How do women experience the letters of Paul (feminist readings)? How might an African-American woman experience the text (womanist readings). There were black readings and Latinx readings. There is ideological criticism, such as liberation theology readings.

I would read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels my first semester of my doctoral program. I found it very helpful to sort out these different approaches hermeneutically. I think I mentioned before the SBL presentation I managed to hear from him in 1991. You can find it in the helpful hermeneutical volume, Mark and Method.

Perhaps the most extreme form of reader-response criticism is the one that basically says you can read any meanng you want into the text (see Stanley Fish). As I began to embark on my doctoral studies, I would become acquainted with Paul Ricoeur and the notion of the autonomous text and the polyvalance of texts. Although I don't think the number is infinite, the same text can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Once a text is uttered, Ricoeur observed, it becomes autonomous. The author can no longer control what it comes to mean.

If you've had me for certain classes or read much of my hermeutical stuff, you will begin to hear where my understanding began to sharpen. There are virtually as many potential meanings to a text as there are readers. The text is often a mirror in which we see ourselves. 

3. In those days, I was gaining a good perspective on the way I grew up reading the Bible. We wanted God to "quicken" the text and speak directly to us. God might tell you to move to Florida or go to a specific mission field when a few words in a verse jumped out at you. I grew up with almost no sense of how to read the Bible in context. The meaning of the Bible was to some extent untethered from its historical moorings. We read the text in reader-response mode, shaped by the tradition we came from. 

In terms of ideological criticism, we made "holiness readings" of the text.

Those of a more charismatic nature regularly read the text this way. I've come to believe that if God didn't speak to people in this way, we would all be lost. Although pastors and people in the pew think they know what the Bible means, the fail rate is actually quite immense in terms of the details. I suspect that Sunday morning sermons across the globe are filled with some spectacularly creative interpretive moments.

Perhaps most scholars who come out of these backgrounds, like Gordon Fee, end up rejecting these sorts of reader-response readings. "The text can't come to mean something that it never meant," he wrote. He's right of course in terms of the original meaning, but can't God speak to people through the text however he wants to?

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern interpretation. I can overlay the people I was reading in the early 90s with it. Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative was quite challenging but the first few pages gave me a powerful sense of what I later called "unreflective" readings of texts. Two decades later, when our IWU Religion Monday reading group read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, an even deeper sense of the shift from pre- to modern was to be found.

Putting it all together, we start off as unreflective, "pre-modern" readers. We don't see ourselves as readers of the text. The meaning of the text seems obvious to us without us realizing that we are bringing our own "dictionaries" to it. 

Pre-modern or precritical interpreters don't read the text in context, but they don't know they aren't. They have a "what you see is what you get" approach. They think they are seeing meaning in the world that they are actually reading into it. Paul Ricoeur called these kinds of readings a "first naivete."

I recently encountered some Bible readers of this sort in discussions of biblical prophecy. It's quite clear that they have no idea how to read verses in context. They see the meanings someone has told them. 

When I taught inductive Bible study, it was very hard to get students to read certain Old Testament texts in context. It was quite discouraging actually. You might give them a text that the New Testament reads in relation to Jesus. But they couldn't detach themselves from that meaning to hear the verses in the flow of whatever Old Testament book it was in.

Meanwhile, my holiness forebears and modern charismatics are very open to these on-the-spot "zappings" of the Spirit too.

All of these readings are exercises in reader response, and there are potentially as many meanings as there are interpreters.

4. This, of course, is why the notion of sola scriptura itself was pre-modern because it assumed the meaning of the text is intrinsic and self-evident in the text. The Reformers were more or less premodern and non-contextual. They increasingly knew literary context. Melancthon understood literary context, but he didn't understand the depth of historical context. Wesley largely did not know how to read the Bible in context. And so when he said he was a man of one book, the book he had in mind was the Bible filtered through his reader-responses.

Now to be sure, his reader-response interpretations had a massive archaeology. As an Anglican, he had massive amounts of church tradition rattling around in that head of his. Somewhere in the back of his head were vast numbers of historical texts and of course the biblical text. He knew those texts as Tradition had brought them to him.

And here, let me tip my hat to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer suggested that we do not actually read the text as it was originally, but we read it as it comes to us through layers and layers of tradition. I would say this is absolutely true for the pre-modern, unreflective reader. They have no idea of the glasses they are wearing when they read the text. So it was with Wesley.

5. Postmodernism is then a step beyond reader-response criticism. Jacques Derrida did not believe the text had any stable meaning. Of course, this seems to deconstruct in that he wrote books. [1] In my opinion, he deliberately wrote ambiguously to try to make his point. But the fact that we all know his point suggests that words can indeed have meaning.

Postmodernism is thus a warning sign rather than a philosophy in itself. It tells us that our confidence in the meaning of our words is almost certainly overconfidence. Some like Stephen Fowl have pointed out that the meaning of many texts, including biblical texts, is frequently underdetermined. That is to say, we may lack sufficient evidence to know for certain what their original meaning actually was.

But in my mind, he has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. He effectively says, because we cannot know for certain the meaning of certain texts, why don't we just assume that they're orthodox. This is a certain brand of what has been called "theological interpretation." 

In the end, interpretation is a never ending struggle. But at any point in time, it does seem likely that we can identify a host of things that the text didn't likely mean -- including a lot of the meanings that people from various church traditions give it today.

6. The hermenutical struggles of those years left me concluding that there is more than one legitimate path to biblical interpretation. First, there is the original meaning, about which we can have varying degrees of certainty. If you want to be an expert on this original meaning, you must know biblical languages. You must know biblical history. You should know the history of interpretation. 

This is something beyond the level of most pastors. They're simply not trained on this level. And many don't have the aptitude.

Then, there is the reader-response understanding of broad orthodoxy. It does not tell you how to interpret every verse, but it gives boundaries to your appropriation of Scripture. The more we dig into the history of orthodoxy, the more nervous we might get about this reading. We almost have to have some sense that God was behind the scenes, directing this process. Even within the Bible itself, an honest contextual understanding inevitably has to believe that God directed the flow of revelation within the pages of Scripture.

I wrote up how this might work in a book I first published in 2006. I had first submitted the text to Westminster John Knox in a competition. Then, I gave it to Abingdon for year, at the end of which they published a curiously similar book with someone else. 

7. In addition to the orginal meaning, there are the many different reader responses to the biblical texts. There are denominational readings. There are our "tribal" readings of various kinds. Finally, there are individual readings when God speaks directly to you.

These years were the crucible in which I was catching up with the postmodern discussions of that moment. I was learning to distinguish between what I thought was valuable and what I thought wasn't. It would eventually allow me to have a second naivete (another Ricoeur phrase). My childhood church involved readings of a first naivete. 

With a second naivete, we can read the texts in the same way we did in our first naivete. The difference is that, now, we are consciously reading the texts out of context. First, we read it out of context without knowing it. But now, we can read it that way quite conscious of what we are doing.

[1] Deconstruction is the term used to refer to his philosophy. It's the idea that meaning unravels in the very act of trying to construct it. He did not claim to try to construct a philosophy--his was an anti-philosophy. But, ironically, his own attempt to deconstruct meaning was a veiled attempt to construct it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued...

University of Kentucky 3

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9. I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin, as I recall. I always felt like I was just about ready to begin each degree as I finished it. When I finished my classics degree, I felt like I was just about ready to get a lot out of it if I were starting.

That first year doing classical Greek I felt like I was scrambling. We were given a certain amount to translate each class. Class time consisted of going around the room and translating. It was very hard for me to get through the amount of translating assigned. I would copy and blow up the pages and try to create a kind of interlinear. Sometimes I would try to work back to the Greek from the English.

One thing is certain. I was so focused on getting through the grammar and syntax that I didn't learn much about Plutarch himself. I had a nice schedule going. I might teach Greek in the morning at Asbury and then drive to an Arby's just off the campus of UK. I'd have my choice of the day with a cherry turnover and try to finish as much of the translation as I could with Cordon Bleu in hand.

I think I took Dr. Martin again for Greek Tragedy (different works) the next year. Other than that I had Thucydides with Robert Rabel the next year. By then I was a little more facile with my Greek and got a little more out of the content. I had wanted to take Plato with him and went to the first day of class. Another regret but I just didn't have the margin to pull it off and had to drop the first week. I missed out on Homer too, much to my disappointment.

There were some great students on this same venture with me. I remember one in particular who had gone to Berea College, a college where students can have free tuition if they work on campus. I wish I remembered their names. They had done classics in their undergraduate programs and seemed so much ahead of me.

10. Over the summer, I went through Wheelock's Latin. Quite a tall feat I was trying to pull off. Having only had two and a half years of high school Latin, I was going to jump straight into master's level classes. Wheelock is of course great. I used it several times to teach Latin at IWU and will use it again online at Houghton in March.

I think the first Latin course I took was with Jane Phillips. I can't remember if she had once been a nun (my high school physics teacher had been. can't remember if I mentioned her). I really enjoyed her as a professor. I remember once she expected me to know what "fracture" was (she was trying to give me a hint) but I didn't. Fracture is when the priest breaks the big wafer in front of the church when consecrating the elements in the Eucharist. Not my tradition.

I think my first Latin course was "Juvenal, Martial, and Statius." It wasn't too bad because these satirists tended to write in snippets rather than prose. I also had two semesters of Latin prose composition with Dr. Martin, going from English to Latin. That was a bear.

A highlight was taking Virgil with Louis Swift. He was Dean of the Undergraduate School at the time. He was a widely known and respected figure who has now passed. I remember a brief conversation with him at a fellowship where he mentioned he could never quite figure out the imprecatory psalms. I had never really thought much about it. I told him that I tended to take the enemies in those psalms as figurative enemies like my struggle with some vice.

Interesting that I had unthinkingly allegorized those psalms without even knowing it. But that is what unreflectivity does--it is something you don't even know you are doing. I do believe my openness to "more than literal" or figural readings of the biblical texts is rooted in a kind of typological penchant of holiness preaching. My grandfather Shepherd apparently taught a whole class at Frankfort at one time in "types and shadows" between the Old and New Testaments.

11. I'm trying to remember what other courses I took. I took a course with Rabel on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We read book 10. That was very enjoyable. I had always liked Aristotle, although I have moved beyond him in almost every category. He of course is the underpinning of Aquinas.

I took two semesters of Sanskrit as linguistics courses. That was fun. I forget the professor's name but he was very kindhearted. All of my professors at UK were really nice people, and several seemed clearly to be people of faith.

I needed to have French for reading knowledge in preparation for doctoral work, so I took a French for research course. Unfortunately, it was at 8am, and I lived over a half hour away. I was not yet a morning person either. The only thing that mattered grade-wise was the final exam. So I came to the class three times--the first day, the last day, and one random time in the middle. I got an A on the exam.

I took a course on Cicero in which we read De Amicitia and De Senectute. I've tried to add up the philosophy related courses I took here and there in grad school to see if I reached the 18 hours that is standard to teach philosophy. I think I just barely make it. [1]

[1] Philosophy of Theism, Apologetics, Aquinas, Aristotle, Cicero, and then you have to decide about Barth, Plutarch, etc.

Teaching Fellow - Hebrew 2

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6. It was during those two years that I was Ichthusman. Ichthus was a Christian rock festival that Bob Lyon started in the early seventies as a sort of Christian version of Woodstock. Youth groups would come from all over and camp in tents at the Wilmore campground. The latest contemporary Christian bands would come.

For fun, Ichthusman would fight Lust Boy or Sin Man. I think Scott Brown was Sin Man one year and Jeff Finger Lust Boy the next. This is not something anyone would have asked me to do as a shy student but it fit with my new persona as a funny and unorthodox Greek teacher. I bought some old clothes at Goodwill and velcroed them so I could rip them off, leaving me standing in my underlying cape and tights.

At one point I had the idea of parachuting onto the stage. We seriously considered it until we found out that our insurance wouldn't cover such a stunt. I've only parachuted once in my life. It was my first summer in England. Rachel Leonard wanted to do it and I said I'd do it with her.

It looks so simple from the ground, but up in the air I wondered why I would agree to do such a thing. I do heights but will admit to some nervousness when I get up somewhere. It was a static line jump, meaning that a line pulled your shoot for you when you jumped. It was a propeller plane so we had to climb out on the wing and let go backward. Quite a thing.

I made myself do it. The first ten feet of falling were gone in an instant leaving a really nice float the rest of the way down. I waited for Rachel to jump. The engines went off. No Rachel. The engines came back on. It circled around. The engines went off. Finally Rachel. I guess the only reason she let go was because the guy yelled and startled her.

7. My second year I got to teach Hebrew. I think most of us would learn best by teaching someone else. I had taken a fair amount of Greek by the time I began teaching, but there were still a lot of rough edges. After teaching Greek for a year, I was pretty good at it.

I was not as strong at Hebrew. I selfishly chose LaSor as a Hebrew textbook. Lawson Stone had sung its praises once upon a time. LaSor introduced Hebrew inductively. A Fuller professor, he started with Esther 1:1 to learn the letters and by the end of the book you knew Hebrew. He paid high attention to the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, with an iconic list of rules in the back (a dagesh forte is omitted if a vocal shewa appears beneath it).

With LaSor, I believe, students learned Hebrew more quickly and more thoroughly than with a classical approach. Moreover, they learned it where they could use it even after one semester. The problem is that your head swims for the first month or so. You are seeing everything in the language from the very beginning.

The hyper-J personality is prone to panic. Frankly, I don't know if I would have enjoyed learning Hebrew that way but it was much more fun to teach. The J wants to learn a small bit, master it, then go on to the next bit. This is really not the way language works. As children, we are thrown into the whole language.

To learn a foreign language, one ultimately needs to go somewhere where that is all that is being spoken around you. This was the rule when I first went to Germany in spring 95. They were not allowed to speak English to me until I had a complete fail.

Teaching Hebrew with LaSor thus requires a bit of pastoral care. I was good at that. You have to assure people that it's going to be ok. You have to get them to trust the method. And, sure enough, it suddenly all begins to click a month or two into the course. Then you're reading real Hebrew. You're seeing the same things over and over again.

I'm proud to say that I taught Brian Russell Hebrew. He has since gone on to be and Old Testament scholar and Dean of the Orlando campus of Asbury. He was of course much more gifted at Hebrew than I was. He would constantly ask questions whose answers I didn't know.

I have always had a penchant for teaching things inductively. This was part of the initial genius of Wesley Seminary--problem based learning that induces principles from realia. There is a certain personality that hates this. It wants to learn systematically in building blocks. Most of academia is this way.

I have to view this approach, however, as somewhat artificial, even if it is helpful for some very intelligent people. It is not the way of the real world. It is a quasi-Platonic approach to life that is not actually the way the world works. I call it the Platonic fallacy. Perhaps I will return to this question.

8. Joe Dongell is a brilliant professor at Asbury. He came I think my last year as a student. He is the son of Herb Dongell, whom I had for Greek at Central. His younger brother Pete is another good friend who came to Asbury a little after me. After Fred Long, Pete also became a Teaching Fellow.

It wasn't really intentional, but my life path mimicked Joe's to some extent. Of course he had surpassed me at every step. He went to Central as I would. Then he went to Asbury as I would. He was a Teaching Fellow as I became.

While he was a Teaching Fellow, he decided to do a MA in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Kentucky. He told me once he wanted to see if he could do well in a secular environment as well as in a Christian one. He received a full scholarship to do his master's there.

It seemed like a good idea to me. I get antsy if I do the same thing over and over again anyway and I need to be learning something new all the time. So I applied for the same scholarship he had received and was accepted to work on an MA in classics at UK.

I jumped into Greek Tragedy, perhaps as early as the spring of my first year teaching. That was an eye opener. For one thing, it's poetry. The normal rules of language are typically bent in poetry. I had learned a little about meter back in high school, but now I was analyzing iambic pentameter in Greek. Hubert Martin was the professor, the nicest of people. He helped me limp through the course.

I would soon learn that some of the rules I thought were universal were not. I probably was a more effective teacher for not knowing the nuances. I learned that ἵνα didn't always take a subjunctive and that οὐ could actually be used with participles. I got a glimpse of the disdain some classicists have for "that merchant Greek" of the New Testament (none of my professors at UK said that).

Before the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the Greek of the New Testament was a bit of an enigma. Some suggested it might be "Holy Ghost" Greek. But when this cache of ordinary documents were discovered in Egypt in the late 1800s, it was realized that the New Testament is actually written in "street Greek," ordinary, common, "Koine" Greek.

This fact throws a bit of a wrench into the argument that we should read the Bible in the King James because of its lofty language. Apparently God didn't think so.