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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.
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Saturday, January 18, 2020
Going to England 6
previous post
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23. While Dunn was in Wilmore, Joe Dongell must have sat by him at a meal. Joe has a dry sense of humor, occasionally with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. So Joe apparently asked Jimmy if there was anything he had ever written that he regretted, maybe something relating to Romans 7.
Although Dunn was one of the leaders of the New Perspective on Paul, his interpretation of Romans 7 is distinctly old school. The vast majority of experts on Romans have come to see Romans 7 as Paul presenting the hypothetical struggle of someone who wants to keep the Jewish Law but cannot because they do not have the Holy Spirit to empower them to do so. This understanding was first championed by Kümmel but was emphatically put forward by Krister Stendahl in 1963.
For me, Krister Stendahl's article, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," is an incredibly helpful starting place to understand Paul. I'm not sure when I first fully digested this piece, but for me it is the starting place for getting a "new perspective" on Paul if you have only known the superficial interpretation left over from the Protestant Reformation. What is more, Stendahl's understanding of Paul fits very well with a Wesleyan perspective.
I will soon have occasion to talk about the "new perspective on Paul," but I don't believe I have commented yet on my sense of the Wesleyan tradition as a kind of via media between high Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Of course the Anglican tradition claimed this first. By high Protestant, I refer to Lutherans and the Reformed tradition. By contrast, the Wesleyan tradition came through the Anglicans.
The result is that works play a more significant role in the Wesleyan tradition than in Lutheranism and the Reformed. For this reason we are sometimes accused of being semi-Pelagians. The new perspective has of course indicated that we are closer to Paul than the high Protestants. We are more balanced in our hermeneutic, if you go with Wesley's quadrilateral. On several issues recent developments in scholarship have turned our direction, including Barclay's recent work on grace.
But Dunn's Romans commentary still has the older sense that Romans 7 as Paul's continued struggle and defeat in the face of the power of Sin. This is of course still the popular interpretation although abandoned by most scholars. Joe's joke was ribbing Jimmy on this fact. Jimmy's response was, "No, I feel very comfortable with my interpretation of Romans 7." :-)
24. The way the University of Durham in England worked was you applied as a Master of Letters (M.Litt.) student. Then if you made sufficient progress in your first year, you were retroactively considered a Ph.D. student finishing your first year. The PhD in England lasted three years.
My sense is that England expected a person to get all the basic and essential competencies in your master's work. That left you ready to write your dissertation in your doctoral program. It seems almost the opposite in the States, where the first two years of your doctorate are typically spent taking courses and working on your competency exams.
I was fine with my languages. I knew Greek and Hebrew. I had taken courses in German and French for reading. I knew Latin.
I've always felt like I cheated when it came to the Old Testament. Over the years I've tried to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of Old Testament scholarship, but I was never required to pass comps in Old Testament theology. There are areas of New Testament interpretation and theology that I have filled in as well over the years.
Given the structure of the program, my application required a possible dissertation proposal. Here I would probably have preferred to do something in Paul or the historical Jesus. But the best hand I had to play was Hebrews. So I submitted a proposal on Hebrews in line with the research and writing I had already done.
25. My proposal (and paper) tried to integrate what you might call the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Hebrews' worldview. By horizontal I refer to the eschatological and apocalyptic. By vertical I refer to the cosmological and, perhaps, the Platonic. Dr. Bauer had introduced me to a classic chapter by C. K. Barrett in a Festschrift for C. H. Dodd in 1956, "The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews." [1] It was an early suggestion about such an integration.
I might add that I was privileged to meet "Kingsley" Barrett in Durham. I told him that his chapter had been very formative in my approach to Hebrews. His response is helpful for budding scholars. "Thank you. I'm not sure if I would still agree with it today." It reminds me of a series that used to be part of SBL some years ago called, "How I Changed My Mind." Famous biblical scholars gave papers on issues for which they were once known but about which they had changed their positions.
This is of course interesting to keep in mind when you read something by a scholar. As a student starting out, it's easy to assume that the views of scholars are static. You might attack them in a paper not realizing that they have moved on a topic. For example, I was a little surprised to see that a recent publication had me dating Hebrews to the 90s. I remembered that I had tentatively suggested that date in 2003. But I have long since re-dated it to the early 70s.
Barrett was a Methodist preacher, as was Dunn. There were small Methodist congregations out in the countryside of Durham county. I preached in one once, as I recall. It was interesting that, at least in some circumstances, there were some questions about Barrett. What someone told me was that he seemed one way from the pulpit and another way in his publications.
I'll confess that I find that rumor both a little puzzling and yet understandable. I have never thought of Barrett as being far out there as a scholar. If anything, he seemed to be a faith-filled interpreter to me. Yet I am well aware of the gap between the understanding of a typical congregation and the discussions of the academy, so I can see how such a disconnect could be perceived.
I also heard that there were tensions between Barrett and Charles Cranfield when they were both in the theology department at Durham. The tension came, if I remember correctly, because Barrett took the Lightfoot professorship. I met Cranfield once or twice while I was there as well. Someone, I can't remember who, went with me to visit him in his home. He seemed to me one of the nicest of men. He was unfortunately very hunched over with a curved spine. It looked quite uncomfortable to me.
Cranfield was also the author of a famed Romans commentary in the ICC series. Unfortunately, he completed it at just about the same time as the new perspective on Paul was rising. In that sense, his commentary was virtually out of date from the day of its publication.
26. Dunn accepted my proposal. I was sure to mention that the ideas of his Baptism in the Holy Spirit had been very significant in my own pilgrimage. He was incredibly helpful. He lined me up to teach Greek. He helped me get approved for an "Overseas Research Award" that would allow me to pay in country tuition rather than the tuition of a foreigner.
I didn't realize until my third year that this award was a Trojan Horse. With the award, I paid in country tuition, which sounds nice. The thing is, if I hadn't received the award, my Greek teaching would have covered my tuition entirely. I only recently finished paying off the student loans I took out for England... and I wouldn't have had any if I had realized this little secret.
Most importantly, Jimmy arranged for me to interview to be a "residential tutor" at St. John's College. As great as studying at Durham was, my time at St. John's College was equally or more meaningful to me. I'll say more about the role soon enough. Some time in the spring of 93 I flew to England for the first time to interview for the position, which would largely cover my room and board.
I remember seeing the townhouses of England as my plane descended into Manchester. It turned out it was an odd place to fly into but on the map it looked closer to Durham to me. But the speed train from London to Durham was much simpler. And the view from the train in Manchester was pretty industrial and unattractive. That was my only time in Manchester.
The interview went well. I think I mainly met with Margaret Masson, who was the Senior Tutor at that time. She is now the Principal of St. Chad's next door on the Bailey. David Day was then Principal. I really liked him, very sharp. No one was around. It must have been between the second and third terms.
I remember David Day being very cautious about asking me on matters of faith. He was almost apologetic for asking. This is a difference with American contexts. There they didn't try to proselytize and they tried to be respectful of other perspectives and religions. Still, it was important for him that I have a genuine and orthodox Christian faith.
I think it was a fairly quick turn around. I must have surely checked in at Abbey House to see Dunn, but I don't remember. Of course the cathedral is right there near John's and Abbey House too. Surely I went in. I was in awe of the majesty of the place. John's had a characteristic smell. It smelled old.
The steps leading into John's at that time had seen so many feet that they had bowed--concrete steps that had worn down under the slow passage of student feet over a couple hundred years. They "fixed" them during my time there. I didn't like it but they thought it was a risk management issue.
27. I believe I stayed that night, a Friday night, at the Foreign Missions Club in northern London in Islington. Interestingly, that's where the London Honors students from Houghton spend their spring semester. They just left this week. It's called something different now. To get there I went through Kings Cross, later immortalized by Harry Potter.
I spent Saturday walking across London. I started at the Tower in the east and walked to St. Paul's to Trafalgar Square and out to Buckingham Palace. My feet were pretty tired by the end of the day. At some point, near the British Museum, I looked up and saw that I was on Aldersgate Street, where an easily missed plaque commemorated Wesley's heart warming experience. I hear there is a more prominent sign today.
I was supposed to fly out of Gatwick the next morning. I was pretty proud of myself that I had figured out how the Tube worked. I got up on Sunday morning I thought in plenty of time to get to the airport. I didn't ask for any help. On some Tube map I had seen an arrow pointing south of Waterloo station toward Gatwick.
So I got up on a quiet Sunday morning and took the Tube down from Waterloo toward Wimbledon. When it stopped at the end of the line, I was puzzled. Where was Gatwick? A polite steward explained that you had to catch the above ground Gatwick Express train out of Victoria Station to get to Gatwick.
Horrible mistake! I had to ride all the way back to Waterloo, transfer, and catch the above ground train. I thought for sure Gatwick was in London! Wasn't it a London airport?!!
When I finally arrived at the gate, it was less than a half hour to take off and they weren't letting anyone on. Thankfully, my Dad had given me a credit card, and I was able to stay in a B and B in town. That night I tried steak and kidney pie for the first and last time.
28. I found myself needing to get out of my apartment in Wilmore without enought stuff to fit into three of my vehicles. My clever idea, perhaps not so clever, was to drive to my parents' cottage at Frankfort to store the stuff there. That was a terrible night. It is God's grace that I didn't fall asleep at the wheel.
I made two trips to Frankfort from Wilmore that night. Then I think I headed to Florida.
[1] Scott Mackie has recently published a number of classic Hebrews articles, including some of mine, in an expensive volume The Letter to the Hebrews: Critical Readings.
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23. While Dunn was in Wilmore, Joe Dongell must have sat by him at a meal. Joe has a dry sense of humor, occasionally with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. So Joe apparently asked Jimmy if there was anything he had ever written that he regretted, maybe something relating to Romans 7.
Although Dunn was one of the leaders of the New Perspective on Paul, his interpretation of Romans 7 is distinctly old school. The vast majority of experts on Romans have come to see Romans 7 as Paul presenting the hypothetical struggle of someone who wants to keep the Jewish Law but cannot because they do not have the Holy Spirit to empower them to do so. This understanding was first championed by Kümmel but was emphatically put forward by Krister Stendahl in 1963.
For me, Krister Stendahl's article, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," is an incredibly helpful starting place to understand Paul. I'm not sure when I first fully digested this piece, but for me it is the starting place for getting a "new perspective" on Paul if you have only known the superficial interpretation left over from the Protestant Reformation. What is more, Stendahl's understanding of Paul fits very well with a Wesleyan perspective.
I will soon have occasion to talk about the "new perspective on Paul," but I don't believe I have commented yet on my sense of the Wesleyan tradition as a kind of via media between high Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Of course the Anglican tradition claimed this first. By high Protestant, I refer to Lutherans and the Reformed tradition. By contrast, the Wesleyan tradition came through the Anglicans.
The result is that works play a more significant role in the Wesleyan tradition than in Lutheranism and the Reformed. For this reason we are sometimes accused of being semi-Pelagians. The new perspective has of course indicated that we are closer to Paul than the high Protestants. We are more balanced in our hermeneutic, if you go with Wesley's quadrilateral. On several issues recent developments in scholarship have turned our direction, including Barclay's recent work on grace.
But Dunn's Romans commentary still has the older sense that Romans 7 as Paul's continued struggle and defeat in the face of the power of Sin. This is of course still the popular interpretation although abandoned by most scholars. Joe's joke was ribbing Jimmy on this fact. Jimmy's response was, "No, I feel very comfortable with my interpretation of Romans 7." :-)
24. The way the University of Durham in England worked was you applied as a Master of Letters (M.Litt.) student. Then if you made sufficient progress in your first year, you were retroactively considered a Ph.D. student finishing your first year. The PhD in England lasted three years.
My sense is that England expected a person to get all the basic and essential competencies in your master's work. That left you ready to write your dissertation in your doctoral program. It seems almost the opposite in the States, where the first two years of your doctorate are typically spent taking courses and working on your competency exams.
I was fine with my languages. I knew Greek and Hebrew. I had taken courses in German and French for reading. I knew Latin.
I've always felt like I cheated when it came to the Old Testament. Over the years I've tried to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of Old Testament scholarship, but I was never required to pass comps in Old Testament theology. There are areas of New Testament interpretation and theology that I have filled in as well over the years.
Given the structure of the program, my application required a possible dissertation proposal. Here I would probably have preferred to do something in Paul or the historical Jesus. But the best hand I had to play was Hebrews. So I submitted a proposal on Hebrews in line with the research and writing I had already done.
25. My proposal (and paper) tried to integrate what you might call the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Hebrews' worldview. By horizontal I refer to the eschatological and apocalyptic. By vertical I refer to the cosmological and, perhaps, the Platonic. Dr. Bauer had introduced me to a classic chapter by C. K. Barrett in a Festschrift for C. H. Dodd in 1956, "The Eschatology of the Epistle to the Hebrews." [1] It was an early suggestion about such an integration.
I might add that I was privileged to meet "Kingsley" Barrett in Durham. I told him that his chapter had been very formative in my approach to Hebrews. His response is helpful for budding scholars. "Thank you. I'm not sure if I would still agree with it today." It reminds me of a series that used to be part of SBL some years ago called, "How I Changed My Mind." Famous biblical scholars gave papers on issues for which they were once known but about which they had changed their positions.
This is of course interesting to keep in mind when you read something by a scholar. As a student starting out, it's easy to assume that the views of scholars are static. You might attack them in a paper not realizing that they have moved on a topic. For example, I was a little surprised to see that a recent publication had me dating Hebrews to the 90s. I remembered that I had tentatively suggested that date in 2003. But I have long since re-dated it to the early 70s.
Barrett was a Methodist preacher, as was Dunn. There were small Methodist congregations out in the countryside of Durham county. I preached in one once, as I recall. It was interesting that, at least in some circumstances, there were some questions about Barrett. What someone told me was that he seemed one way from the pulpit and another way in his publications.
I'll confess that I find that rumor both a little puzzling and yet understandable. I have never thought of Barrett as being far out there as a scholar. If anything, he seemed to be a faith-filled interpreter to me. Yet I am well aware of the gap between the understanding of a typical congregation and the discussions of the academy, so I can see how such a disconnect could be perceived.
I also heard that there were tensions between Barrett and Charles Cranfield when they were both in the theology department at Durham. The tension came, if I remember correctly, because Barrett took the Lightfoot professorship. I met Cranfield once or twice while I was there as well. Someone, I can't remember who, went with me to visit him in his home. He seemed to me one of the nicest of men. He was unfortunately very hunched over with a curved spine. It looked quite uncomfortable to me.
Cranfield was also the author of a famed Romans commentary in the ICC series. Unfortunately, he completed it at just about the same time as the new perspective on Paul was rising. In that sense, his commentary was virtually out of date from the day of its publication.
26. Dunn accepted my proposal. I was sure to mention that the ideas of his Baptism in the Holy Spirit had been very significant in my own pilgrimage. He was incredibly helpful. He lined me up to teach Greek. He helped me get approved for an "Overseas Research Award" that would allow me to pay in country tuition rather than the tuition of a foreigner.
I didn't realize until my third year that this award was a Trojan Horse. With the award, I paid in country tuition, which sounds nice. The thing is, if I hadn't received the award, my Greek teaching would have covered my tuition entirely. I only recently finished paying off the student loans I took out for England... and I wouldn't have had any if I had realized this little secret.
Most importantly, Jimmy arranged for me to interview to be a "residential tutor" at St. John's College. As great as studying at Durham was, my time at St. John's College was equally or more meaningful to me. I'll say more about the role soon enough. Some time in the spring of 93 I flew to England for the first time to interview for the position, which would largely cover my room and board.
I remember seeing the townhouses of England as my plane descended into Manchester. It turned out it was an odd place to fly into but on the map it looked closer to Durham to me. But the speed train from London to Durham was much simpler. And the view from the train in Manchester was pretty industrial and unattractive. That was my only time in Manchester.
The interview went well. I think I mainly met with Margaret Masson, who was the Senior Tutor at that time. She is now the Principal of St. Chad's next door on the Bailey. David Day was then Principal. I really liked him, very sharp. No one was around. It must have been between the second and third terms.
I remember David Day being very cautious about asking me on matters of faith. He was almost apologetic for asking. This is a difference with American contexts. There they didn't try to proselytize and they tried to be respectful of other perspectives and religions. Still, it was important for him that I have a genuine and orthodox Christian faith.
I think it was a fairly quick turn around. I must have surely checked in at Abbey House to see Dunn, but I don't remember. Of course the cathedral is right there near John's and Abbey House too. Surely I went in. I was in awe of the majesty of the place. John's had a characteristic smell. It smelled old.
The steps leading into John's at that time had seen so many feet that they had bowed--concrete steps that had worn down under the slow passage of student feet over a couple hundred years. They "fixed" them during my time there. I didn't like it but they thought it was a risk management issue.
27. I believe I stayed that night, a Friday night, at the Foreign Missions Club in northern London in Islington. Interestingly, that's where the London Honors students from Houghton spend their spring semester. They just left this week. It's called something different now. To get there I went through Kings Cross, later immortalized by Harry Potter.
I spent Saturday walking across London. I started at the Tower in the east and walked to St. Paul's to Trafalgar Square and out to Buckingham Palace. My feet were pretty tired by the end of the day. At some point, near the British Museum, I looked up and saw that I was on Aldersgate Street, where an easily missed plaque commemorated Wesley's heart warming experience. I hear there is a more prominent sign today.
I was supposed to fly out of Gatwick the next morning. I was pretty proud of myself that I had figured out how the Tube worked. I got up on Sunday morning I thought in plenty of time to get to the airport. I didn't ask for any help. On some Tube map I had seen an arrow pointing south of Waterloo station toward Gatwick.
So I got up on a quiet Sunday morning and took the Tube down from Waterloo toward Wimbledon. When it stopped at the end of the line, I was puzzled. Where was Gatwick? A polite steward explained that you had to catch the above ground Gatwick Express train out of Victoria Station to get to Gatwick.
Horrible mistake! I had to ride all the way back to Waterloo, transfer, and catch the above ground train. I thought for sure Gatwick was in London! Wasn't it a London airport?!!
When I finally arrived at the gate, it was less than a half hour to take off and they weren't letting anyone on. Thankfully, my Dad had given me a credit card, and I was able to stay in a B and B in town. That night I tried steak and kidney pie for the first and last time.
28. I found myself needing to get out of my apartment in Wilmore without enought stuff to fit into three of my vehicles. My clever idea, perhaps not so clever, was to drive to my parents' cottage at Frankfort to store the stuff there. That was a terrible night. It is God's grace that I didn't fall asleep at the wheel.
I made two trips to Frankfort from Wilmore that night. Then I think I headed to Florida.
[1] Scott Mackie has recently published a number of classic Hebrews articles, including some of mine, in an expensive volume The Letter to the Hebrews: Critical Readings.
Friday, January 17, 2020
Choosing a Doctoral Program 5
previous post
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18. Once I became a Teaching Fellow, the plan was to go on and do doctoral work in New Testament. The Joe Dongell track of course was a thought--Union in Virginia. That's also where David Bauer had gone. Paul "Bud" Achtemeier taught there. Could I perhaps study Paul with him?
The thing was that he was apparently nearing retirement. The worst nightmare stories of doctoral students come when you switch advisers. It had happened to Ron Crown at Oxford when George Caird died suddenly.
By the way, I had a lot of respect for G. B. Caird in that period of my life. Bauer had first exposed me to him with his article, "The Exegetical Method of the Epistle to the Hebrews." This short piece highlighted the way the argument of Hebrews could be seen as structuring around certain key scriptures. [1]
My second exposure to him was a book that Bill Patrick used in intermediate Greek, called The Language and Imagery of the Bible. It was one of those books that was like genius. As I read I kept thinking, "Of course." "Of course!" "Of course!"
I remember Steve Lennox saying he was with him until the later chapters. This is where he talks about phrases like "the sun was darkened" being similar to our "earth shattering events." Caird suggests that Acts sees the Day of Pentecost as the fulfillment of Joel on this score.
A key light that Caird turned more fully on was an understanding of the difference between what is literal and what is figurative. There is a tendency in certain circles to fight over whether the Bible is "literally" true. However, these discussions often do not really understand what the word literal means in this context. If something is taken "literally," then the words are taken in their normal sense. [2]
Dunn used to tell a story of a student that vehemently argued with him over whether the expression, "the trees will clap their hand" was literal (Isa 55:12). Clearly it was not meant so but the student insisted it must be because everything in the Bible (for him) was literal. The student later lost his faith, clearly being set up by his background to believe completely indefensible things. If trees literally clap hands, then they must at some time sprout hands like ours and make sounds putting them together.
A paper about which I am very proud, the first paper I gave after we started the Hebrews Group at SBL, is "An Archaeology of Hebrews Tabernacle Imagery." It looks at the sacrificial metaphors of Hebrews in layers. This, to me, is a key to understanding Hebrews and it makes moot a host of studies trying to pin Hebrews down to one sacrificial perspective.
Some of Paul Ricoeur's thought on metaphor has been helpful to me here. It seems like there is a vast swath of earlier thought that is sheer rubbish on this subject, going back to Aristotle. Metaphors are typically more powerful than literal language, not mere flourishes of language.
The older Reformers spoke of the "plain sense" of Scripture and distinguished it from the literal sense. Sometimes the plain sense of Scripture is literal and sometimes it is figurative.
So it's no surprise that Tom Wright studied under Caird, given his penchant to take things like this figuratively. I was struck with Wright's suggestion that Mark 13:26 is about the Son going on the clouds rather than coming. I don't agree, but it's genius. And it's exactly what I would expect of a Caird pupil.
Two other students of Caird were Lincoln Hurst and Marcus Borg. I read Hurst the first semester of my doctoral program. I also read some Borg in my doctoral work in preparation to teach some Christology. I found him interesting but unattractive in his thought.
19. Another possibility was to apply to Notre Dame. Harry Attridge was still there at the time, and he had recently written one of the best commentaries on Hebrews for the Hermeneia series. I'm embarrassed to say that I got a little confused over New Testament study there being under Theology. Of course it was the same at Durham.
In any case, Attridge left for Yale soon enough anyway. Interestingly, Greg Sterling followed the same pathway about 15 years later.
I did apply at Duke, thinking I might study with Richard Hays. Of course Hays wasn't working on Hebrews at that time. I'm not sure if Duke even took three doctoral students at the time. They did not accept me. Durham, England was a much better result for me than Durham, North Carolina, although I continue to like Duke Divinity School and Duke's basketball team. :-)
20. I should perhaps back up a little and talk about Hebrews and James D. G. Dunn. I've already mentioned a little of my Hebrews path. It starts with my interest in holiness as a Wesleyan and thinking of Hebrews as the Leviticus of the New Testament. Then it moves to my independent study with Bauer and the paper I presented both at Asbury and at the regional SBL in Atlanta. It was known for being difficult Greek and difficult to understand, and I considered it a challenge.
I mentioned how I had been attracted to the work of James Dunn--the way he thought and approached questions. He seemed to me a real truth seeker. Come to find out, his background was not entirely dissimilar to mine. He was raised in conservative, Scottish Presbyterianism. He had a somewhat mathematical background in economics and statistics. He used to say he was Presbyterian north of the border and Methodist south of it.
He was a popular person to study with if you were an open-minded conservative or an evangelical on the edge. Scot McKnight was one of his early pupils when Dunn was still at Nottingham. Graham Twelftree as well. Both are now renowned scholars with a strong faith. [3]
Asbury conveniently had him come to campus to speak the year of my searching. I met him there. He was the head of the theology department, the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity. Another way that he was like me is that he understood that universities survive if they have students. He took a number of students, some part time, some full time.
21. When he was on the Asbury campus, I seem to remember that he was questioned about one of his more idiosyncratic positions in the question and answer session in Estes chapel. Although I suspect the focus was his new book, The Partings of the Ways, he argues in his book, Christology in the Making, that the Philippian hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 is not about the pre-existence of Christ. He argues that it is a Last Adam argument. Here's a paraphrase of his interpretation
Few have followed Dunn in this interpretation, and I don't agree with his interpretation of this passage. However, when I read Christology in the Making, he did convince me that many passages in Paul that are glibly taken of Christ's pre-existence may not actually be saying that.
For example, take 1 Corinthians 15:49: "Just as we have born the image of the earthly man [Adam], so we will bear the image of the man from heaven [Christ]." It is tempting to read this verse in relation to Christ's pre-existence, but what is this chapter about? The chapter is about our resurrection body. The man from heaven is the resurrection man. We are not going to be like Christ in his pre-existence. We are going to be like Christ in his resurrection.
I find this convincing. It is another example of how we read later theology into earlier texts. Take Ezekiel 37, about dry bones coming to life. If we listen carefully to this text, it is not about the individual Israelites who died. It's about the resurrection of Israel as a whole. It is not about the end times. It is about the return of Israel from captivity and its reconstitution as a people.
Dunn helped me overcome my later theological glasses to see biblical texts in context as they were originally meant. Not perfectly of course because no one can completely overcome their biases and unreflectivity. I will confess that I encounter many a New Testament scholar today that I do not think has learned to listen to biblical texts on their own terms. I have a hunch that the rise of theological interpretation has given a green light to a fundamental inadequacy in the scholarly community.
If I might toot my own horn, my article in the Journal of Biblical Literature titled, "A Celebration of the Enthroned Son" does with Hebrews 1 what Dunn did with some of these other passages. I have taken positions about which I have significant doubts, but I am quite proud of most of this article.
When I read, for example, Richard Bauckham's interpretation of Hebrews 1, as well as some other friends of mine I won't name, I frankly think they have not been able to overcome their theological glasses to hear this chapter for what it seems to say. Hebrews 1:5 is not about the eternally begotten Son. I believe that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father," but this is just not what Hebrews was saying. Hebrews 1 is primarily, perhaps completely a celebration of the resurrected and exalted Son.
22. Dunn and his generation saw the development of early Christology as following a pattern something like this:
Of the first point, Dunn easily convinced me. Romans 10:9, Philippians 2:11, and other passages clearly locate Jesus as Lord at the point of his resurrection. Acts 13:33 locates Jesus as Son of God to his exaltation. Acts 2:36 locates Jesus as Lord and Christ to his resurrection.
It is at least a legitimate observation that John 1:14 is unique among the Gospels in its sense of incarnation. Matthew and Luke teach the virgin conception, but they do not mention that Jesus existed before then. Mark doesn't mention the virgin birth.
Simon Gathercole, a student of Dunn after me, has tried to argue that the Synoptics do teach Jesus' pre-existence, but I find most of his arguments strained. The Transfiguration might indicate his pre-existence. Mark 12:35-37 might imply Jesus' pre-existence, but it seems clear to me that the Synoptics say almost nothing about it.
Silence doesn't mean they didn't believe it. Absence of presence is not presence of absence. I hope it's obvious that I believe in the pre-existence of Christ. But, once again, Dunn helped me to see how many assumptions I brought to the biblical texts that the biblical texts do not clearly say.
[1] Asbury had this "elenchus" in the library basement that had article file cards in relation to various verses. It was a spectacular research tool in the day before the internet, Google, and electronic databases. The old time scholars almost had to keep all this information in their heads. Many of them could! Tenley Horner once challenged me to find a book in my library. I succeeded immediately.
Craig Keener is of course bizarre in this regard. From what I hear he has a complex and extensive filing system in his basement with notecards from things he's read and studied. I also here he is practically nocturnal.
[2] I am fully aware of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, another book that Bill Patrick first clued me in on. They argue that language has its roots in metaphor and thus that even things we now think of as literal were once figurative. A scholar once tried to put me in my place by pointing this out when I already knew it. I used to be intimidated by senior scholars, but I've gotten over it.
[3] "Doctor father," the person you got your PhD with. Dunn is my Doctor Father, C. F. D. "Charlie" Moule was his, and C. H. Dodd his.
_______________________
18. Once I became a Teaching Fellow, the plan was to go on and do doctoral work in New Testament. The Joe Dongell track of course was a thought--Union in Virginia. That's also where David Bauer had gone. Paul "Bud" Achtemeier taught there. Could I perhaps study Paul with him?
The thing was that he was apparently nearing retirement. The worst nightmare stories of doctoral students come when you switch advisers. It had happened to Ron Crown at Oxford when George Caird died suddenly.
By the way, I had a lot of respect for G. B. Caird in that period of my life. Bauer had first exposed me to him with his article, "The Exegetical Method of the Epistle to the Hebrews." This short piece highlighted the way the argument of Hebrews could be seen as structuring around certain key scriptures. [1]
My second exposure to him was a book that Bill Patrick used in intermediate Greek, called The Language and Imagery of the Bible. It was one of those books that was like genius. As I read I kept thinking, "Of course." "Of course!" "Of course!"
I remember Steve Lennox saying he was with him until the later chapters. This is where he talks about phrases like "the sun was darkened" being similar to our "earth shattering events." Caird suggests that Acts sees the Day of Pentecost as the fulfillment of Joel on this score.
A key light that Caird turned more fully on was an understanding of the difference between what is literal and what is figurative. There is a tendency in certain circles to fight over whether the Bible is "literally" true. However, these discussions often do not really understand what the word literal means in this context. If something is taken "literally," then the words are taken in their normal sense. [2]
Dunn used to tell a story of a student that vehemently argued with him over whether the expression, "the trees will clap their hand" was literal (Isa 55:12). Clearly it was not meant so but the student insisted it must be because everything in the Bible (for him) was literal. The student later lost his faith, clearly being set up by his background to believe completely indefensible things. If trees literally clap hands, then they must at some time sprout hands like ours and make sounds putting them together.
A paper about which I am very proud, the first paper I gave after we started the Hebrews Group at SBL, is "An Archaeology of Hebrews Tabernacle Imagery." It looks at the sacrificial metaphors of Hebrews in layers. This, to me, is a key to understanding Hebrews and it makes moot a host of studies trying to pin Hebrews down to one sacrificial perspective.
Some of Paul Ricoeur's thought on metaphor has been helpful to me here. It seems like there is a vast swath of earlier thought that is sheer rubbish on this subject, going back to Aristotle. Metaphors are typically more powerful than literal language, not mere flourishes of language.
The older Reformers spoke of the "plain sense" of Scripture and distinguished it from the literal sense. Sometimes the plain sense of Scripture is literal and sometimes it is figurative.
So it's no surprise that Tom Wright studied under Caird, given his penchant to take things like this figuratively. I was struck with Wright's suggestion that Mark 13:26 is about the Son going on the clouds rather than coming. I don't agree, but it's genius. And it's exactly what I would expect of a Caird pupil.
Two other students of Caird were Lincoln Hurst and Marcus Borg. I read Hurst the first semester of my doctoral program. I also read some Borg in my doctoral work in preparation to teach some Christology. I found him interesting but unattractive in his thought.
19. Another possibility was to apply to Notre Dame. Harry Attridge was still there at the time, and he had recently written one of the best commentaries on Hebrews for the Hermeneia series. I'm embarrassed to say that I got a little confused over New Testament study there being under Theology. Of course it was the same at Durham.
In any case, Attridge left for Yale soon enough anyway. Interestingly, Greg Sterling followed the same pathway about 15 years later.
I did apply at Duke, thinking I might study with Richard Hays. Of course Hays wasn't working on Hebrews at that time. I'm not sure if Duke even took three doctoral students at the time. They did not accept me. Durham, England was a much better result for me than Durham, North Carolina, although I continue to like Duke Divinity School and Duke's basketball team. :-)
20. I should perhaps back up a little and talk about Hebrews and James D. G. Dunn. I've already mentioned a little of my Hebrews path. It starts with my interest in holiness as a Wesleyan and thinking of Hebrews as the Leviticus of the New Testament. Then it moves to my independent study with Bauer and the paper I presented both at Asbury and at the regional SBL in Atlanta. It was known for being difficult Greek and difficult to understand, and I considered it a challenge.
I mentioned how I had been attracted to the work of James Dunn--the way he thought and approached questions. He seemed to me a real truth seeker. Come to find out, his background was not entirely dissimilar to mine. He was raised in conservative, Scottish Presbyterianism. He had a somewhat mathematical background in economics and statistics. He used to say he was Presbyterian north of the border and Methodist south of it.
He was a popular person to study with if you were an open-minded conservative or an evangelical on the edge. Scot McKnight was one of his early pupils when Dunn was still at Nottingham. Graham Twelftree as well. Both are now renowned scholars with a strong faith. [3]
Asbury conveniently had him come to campus to speak the year of my searching. I met him there. He was the head of the theology department, the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity. Another way that he was like me is that he understood that universities survive if they have students. He took a number of students, some part time, some full time.
21. When he was on the Asbury campus, I seem to remember that he was questioned about one of his more idiosyncratic positions in the question and answer session in Estes chapel. Although I suspect the focus was his new book, The Partings of the Ways, he argues in his book, Christology in the Making, that the Philippian hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 is not about the pre-existence of Christ. He argues that it is a Last Adam argument. Here's a paraphrase of his interpretation
- Although he was in the image of God, like Adam,
- Jesus did not try to grasp after equality with God, unlike Adam.
- But he emptied himself...
Few have followed Dunn in this interpretation, and I don't agree with his interpretation of this passage. However, when I read Christology in the Making, he did convince me that many passages in Paul that are glibly taken of Christ's pre-existence may not actually be saying that.
For example, take 1 Corinthians 15:49: "Just as we have born the image of the earthly man [Adam], so we will bear the image of the man from heaven [Christ]." It is tempting to read this verse in relation to Christ's pre-existence, but what is this chapter about? The chapter is about our resurrection body. The man from heaven is the resurrection man. We are not going to be like Christ in his pre-existence. We are going to be like Christ in his resurrection.
I find this convincing. It is another example of how we read later theology into earlier texts. Take Ezekiel 37, about dry bones coming to life. If we listen carefully to this text, it is not about the individual Israelites who died. It's about the resurrection of Israel as a whole. It is not about the end times. It is about the return of Israel from captivity and its reconstitution as a people.
Dunn helped me overcome my later theological glasses to see biblical texts in context as they were originally meant. Not perfectly of course because no one can completely overcome their biases and unreflectivity. I will confess that I encounter many a New Testament scholar today that I do not think has learned to listen to biblical texts on their own terms. I have a hunch that the rise of theological interpretation has given a green light to a fundamental inadequacy in the scholarly community.
If I might toot my own horn, my article in the Journal of Biblical Literature titled, "A Celebration of the Enthroned Son" does with Hebrews 1 what Dunn did with some of these other passages. I have taken positions about which I have significant doubts, but I am quite proud of most of this article.
When I read, for example, Richard Bauckham's interpretation of Hebrews 1, as well as some other friends of mine I won't name, I frankly think they have not been able to overcome their theological glasses to hear this chapter for what it seems to say. Hebrews 1:5 is not about the eternally begotten Son. I believe that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father," but this is just not what Hebrews was saying. Hebrews 1 is primarily, perhaps completely a celebration of the resurrected and exalted Son.
22. Dunn and his generation saw the development of early Christology as following a pattern something like this:
- The earliest Christian faith focused on the resurrected Jesus. To say Jesus is Lord was to confess that God had raised him from the dead and enthroned him as Lord, Christ, and Son of God.
- I don't remember if Dunn thought this, but some would then argue that Mark located Jesus as becoming Messiah at his baptism, a kind of adoption of him by God at that point.
- Then perhaps Matthew and Luke saw Jesus becoming Son of God at his virginal conception.
- Finally, John saw Jesus as the pre-existent, incarnated Logos.
Of the first point, Dunn easily convinced me. Romans 10:9, Philippians 2:11, and other passages clearly locate Jesus as Lord at the point of his resurrection. Acts 13:33 locates Jesus as Son of God to his exaltation. Acts 2:36 locates Jesus as Lord and Christ to his resurrection.
It is at least a legitimate observation that John 1:14 is unique among the Gospels in its sense of incarnation. Matthew and Luke teach the virgin conception, but they do not mention that Jesus existed before then. Mark doesn't mention the virgin birth.
Simon Gathercole, a student of Dunn after me, has tried to argue that the Synoptics do teach Jesus' pre-existence, but I find most of his arguments strained. The Transfiguration might indicate his pre-existence. Mark 12:35-37 might imply Jesus' pre-existence, but it seems clear to me that the Synoptics say almost nothing about it.
Silence doesn't mean they didn't believe it. Absence of presence is not presence of absence. I hope it's obvious that I believe in the pre-existence of Christ. But, once again, Dunn helped me to see how many assumptions I brought to the biblical texts that the biblical texts do not clearly say.
[1] Asbury had this "elenchus" in the library basement that had article file cards in relation to various verses. It was a spectacular research tool in the day before the internet, Google, and electronic databases. The old time scholars almost had to keep all this information in their heads. Many of them could! Tenley Horner once challenged me to find a book in my library. I succeeded immediately.
Craig Keener is of course bizarre in this regard. From what I hear he has a complex and extensive filing system in his basement with notecards from things he's read and studied. I also here he is practically nocturnal.
[2] I am fully aware of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, another book that Bill Patrick first clued me in on. They argue that language has its roots in metaphor and thus that even things we now think of as literal were once figurative. A scholar once tried to put me in my place by pointing this out when I already knew it. I used to be intimidated by senior scholars, but I've gotten over it.
[3] "Doctor father," the person you got your PhD with. Dunn is my Doctor Father, C. F. D. "Charlie" Moule was his, and C. H. Dodd his.
The Present Silence of God 4
previous post
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12. I finished as Teaching Fellow at Asbury in the spring of 92. Then I went full time to finish up my classics degree at the University of Kentucky in 1992-93.
I was in the student center at the University of Kentucky when the first Iraq War launched. That was scary. I was 25. As I stood there, I realized I just barely was still draft age.
It was really the first "war" since Vietnam. I remember still having the hangover of Vietnam. This is hard to believe now looking back but because the last war effort had more or less failed, I had not grown up with the military confidence that we have now. It is hard to recreate what it felt like then for me but it is basically this:
For second year Latin we used Ball's Reading Classical Latin. The readings were from easier Latin authors like Livy and Ovid, maybe a little Catullus and Cicero. I did not take courses in most of these authors so that was a good opportunity to fill in gaps. Jerald Walz has kept in touch with me a little over the years from those days.
14. I might say that as a white male student in Wilmore, I did not think of the place as having any prejudice or darkness in relation to race. In America, such forces have seemed somewhat dormant to me until the last four years or so. But I may just not have noticed because I'm white. I know a black IWU student who went to Asbury and experienced the environment in a much different way than I did. I have had a black colleague who experienced the town on a visit differently than I did.
This is part of what is meant by white privilege. It is an ease of living in certain environments that a white male like myself doesn't see. It's a friction I don't experience that others do. I was disappointed once upon a time to hear that Henry Clay Morrison, founder of the seminary, was not without issues when it came to race. Of course the few Asbury professors I have heard on such topics did not approve of those elements in Wilmore's history. Thankfully both IWU and Central have at least a little different history on that score, having black students from their early days. [1]
Some time after I graduated from the seminary and before recent UM dynamics, I came to think that the Wesleyan and Methodist students at Asbury in general had a different flavor. We might believe exactly the same things, but the flavor was different. Wesleyans who went to Asbury, it seems to me, were largely in a process of broadening their view of the world. Their eyes were being opened to see more.
By contrast, Methodists who went to Asbury tended to be resisting cultural trends and moving in the opposite direction. They often went there looking for an island of resistance in the middle of a liberal church. They were fighting against liberalism. So although Wesleyans and Methodists at Asbury more or less had the same theology and ethics, they were moving in different directions. They were on different vectors.
15. I dated a student from Asbury College for a few months while I was teaching fellow. She had taken voice lessons so I took some voice lessons, the only voice lessons I ever had. I will leave out a brief encounter we had involving a train. It wasn't at High Bridge but not too far down the tracks from the police station. [2]
I also taught a couple times for Midway College while I was a teaching fellow. Bob Miller had used Felix Sung, maybe, to adjunct some for them. Miller was a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar. I was always curious why such a liberal guy would have someone from Asbury teach for them. Probably a combination of necessity, not thinking it mattered too much with this student group, and perhaps respect for scholars at Asbury like Bauer.
Bill Patrick still teases me about us going over to Louisville to meet and hear Martin Hengel. When I introduced myself and he heard my name, he asked if I was German. I said yes because I thought he meant in heritage. Aber er bedeutete ob ich Deutscher wäre.
I remember teaching a class at Midway largely made up of adult nursing students. I had one of those moments where you realize you are unreflective about something. So I was making an argument for the virgin birth to them. My argument went like this. Paul believed in the virgin birth and he was close enough to Jesus historically to know. Now what's the problem with this argument?
The problem is that Paul never mentions the virgin birth one way or the other in any of his writings. Galatians 4:4 doesn't say one way or the other. He is completely silent on the issue. This was an example of me viewing the Bible as one book rather than sixty-six (or more) separate books. Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth, but they obviously were not in the same books as Paul's writings.
Of course I believe in the virgin birth. That's not the point. The point is my increasing reflectivity in those years. It was troubling to see on one matter after another how unreflective I had been. The virgin birth is mentioned in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, but not really anywhere else. Perhaps the early Christians talked about it all the time, but it does not play a significant role in the theology of the New Testament texts because it just isn't mentioned. [3]
I wholeheartedly agree with those who point out the importance of instilling faith in our children. Beliefs and relationships that are in the gut of your youth are hard to shake. It is much harder to instill faith in a person on the basis of rational argument, once the mind is fully formed. Arguments tend to lay on top of a more gut-based foundation, not the other way around as in the "Platonic fallacy" I have mentioned (see Jonathan Haidt).
My main plea is that we form the faith of our children in foundations that are really solid. Once a person has detached from their childhood gut, they are susceptible to all kinds of influences. Those of us who are still in the worldview of our childhood often can't see why others do not attach to our way of seeing the world. It seems so compelling to us. We do not realize that the motivations for belief usually go much deeper than whatever reasons we might present.
16. I was fascinated in Larry Wood's contemporary theology class to learn that Wolfhart Pannenberg was a mostly orthodox theologian who nevertheless did not believe in the virgin birth. Pannenberg focused on the resurrection in his theology. At that time, it seemed quite the norm to see the resurrection as the focal point of Christology. That is not so much the case now. Right now, the Trinity and thus the pre-existent tri-unity seems to be the center. More on this to come.
I do not agree with Pannenberg on the virgin birth, but it was a little jolting to reflect on this subject in those days. It seems to me that almost all the arguments about why the virgin birth is essential do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Jesus is not half God and half human. He is fully human and fully God.
Therefore, whatever Jesus' divinity is, it is not his humanity. Jesus had an X and a Y chromosome. Because Jesus was born of a virgin, God must have created the Y chromosome. But Jesus could have become fully human with no human parents, and Jesus could have been fully divine with two human parents. His divinity is not contingent in any way on the nature of his human parentage, at least not as far as I can see.
Nor does it make sense to say that Jesus had to be born of a virgin so that he could be without sin. Perhaps some Christians in the early centuries like Augustine thought this because they thought of sex as dirty, but this is bad theology. Sin is not on the Y chromosome. If it were, then women would be without sin, being XX.
N. T. Wright suggests that the virgin birth was a gift. Not entirely sure what he meant. To me, it is an origin befitting the divine Son of God, a sign. [4] Not necessary for any substantial reason but fitting the divine King of Kings.
17. I did not feel God's presence much those days, although I begged him for it. Often during church I would even beg him to chastise me in his anger just so I might know he was there. Often during the prayer times at Stonewall I would plead for God to make himself known to me.
I led a college Sunday School class my last year there (Gary Cockerill's daughters were in it). We read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? Not that I was suffering. Not at all. I have a theory that people who observe others suffering worry about the problem of suffering more than the people who actually undergo the suffering. And I didn't even know someone who was suffering.
I also bought Hans Kung's Does God Exist? I didn't find it particularly helpful. To be honest, most of it was over my head.
On a side note, Thomas Oden came to an Asbury College chapel while I was teaching fellow. I went to hear him. I didn't know anything about him except that he was famous. He gave his testimony but I didn't understand it. That was depressing. Part of the problem is the fact that my mind wandered, as it typically did during any sustained speech at that time. By the time I would snap back to the speaker, I had lost track of their train of thought.
Back to God. At one point I had a bright idea. When I pray, why don't I talk as if I'm actually talking to somebody? That seems like an obvious suggestion, but at some point I came to the conclusion that my prayers had often been monologues. It seemed sometimes like I prayed as if I was talking to myself rather than to someone who is actually out there.
Have you ever heard prayers where it sure seems like they're talking to the other people in the room rather than to God? How many pastors provide information or a sermon in their prayers that, frankly, God already knows? It's like they are really lecturing to the congregation. "Lord, you know that ...." or "Lord, we know that..." I suspect there are some other unreflective monologuers out there.
These days, I do not presume that I will have a vivid experience of God every day or even every month. There are moments when I feel blessed or when I feel peace. I thank God for those. But I go along my way, believing that God is with me, whether I have feelings or not. God is right there with me to talk to. Whether he talks back to me or not doesn't matter. It is of course a blessing when he does.
[1] Although one of the last lynchings in America took place in Marion, Indiana. I hope there were no people associated with Marion College in the infamous photo.
[2] It seems to me that I ran to High Bridge and back once. Quite a run. I never went on that notorious bridge.
[3] This point is hard to grasp if one is still reading the Bible unreflectively, because in that pre-modern state, one has difficulty telling the difference between what you believe about and hear in the text and what the text actually says.
[4] I have already mentioned that Isaiah 7:14 seems to have had both a "near" meaning in its own time as well as the "far" meaning that Matthew saw fulfilled in it.
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12. I finished as Teaching Fellow at Asbury in the spring of 92. Then I went full time to finish up my classics degree at the University of Kentucky in 1992-93.
I was in the student center at the University of Kentucky when the first Iraq War launched. That was scary. I was 25. As I stood there, I realized I just barely was still draft age.
It was really the first "war" since Vietnam. I remember still having the hangover of Vietnam. This is hard to believe now looking back but because the last war effort had more or less failed, I had not grown up with the military confidence that we have now. It is hard to recreate what it felt like then for me but it is basically this:
- There was an underlying and lingering doubt I had about foreign war. The last two conflicts--Korea and Vietnam, had ended in mire and a sense of defeat.
- On the other hand, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, and Perestroika in Russia had created some sense of optimism about a future world that was filled with democracy. As a side note, the Trump presidency has shaken my confidence in societal progress to the core.
- The rapidity of the first Iraq War restored in me a sense of America's military dominance in the world. I grew up with that sense from my parents about WW1 and WW2, that America had saved the day in Europe for both. I know it was much more uncertain at the actual time of those wars. Looking back, I admire Bush 1's decision not to go into Baghdad in 91.
For second year Latin we used Ball's Reading Classical Latin. The readings were from easier Latin authors like Livy and Ovid, maybe a little Catullus and Cicero. I did not take courses in most of these authors so that was a good opportunity to fill in gaps. Jerald Walz has kept in touch with me a little over the years from those days.
14. I might say that as a white male student in Wilmore, I did not think of the place as having any prejudice or darkness in relation to race. In America, such forces have seemed somewhat dormant to me until the last four years or so. But I may just not have noticed because I'm white. I know a black IWU student who went to Asbury and experienced the environment in a much different way than I did. I have had a black colleague who experienced the town on a visit differently than I did.
This is part of what is meant by white privilege. It is an ease of living in certain environments that a white male like myself doesn't see. It's a friction I don't experience that others do. I was disappointed once upon a time to hear that Henry Clay Morrison, founder of the seminary, was not without issues when it came to race. Of course the few Asbury professors I have heard on such topics did not approve of those elements in Wilmore's history. Thankfully both IWU and Central have at least a little different history on that score, having black students from their early days. [1]
Some time after I graduated from the seminary and before recent UM dynamics, I came to think that the Wesleyan and Methodist students at Asbury in general had a different flavor. We might believe exactly the same things, but the flavor was different. Wesleyans who went to Asbury, it seems to me, were largely in a process of broadening their view of the world. Their eyes were being opened to see more.
By contrast, Methodists who went to Asbury tended to be resisting cultural trends and moving in the opposite direction. They often went there looking for an island of resistance in the middle of a liberal church. They were fighting against liberalism. So although Wesleyans and Methodists at Asbury more or less had the same theology and ethics, they were moving in different directions. They were on different vectors.
15. I dated a student from Asbury College for a few months while I was teaching fellow. She had taken voice lessons so I took some voice lessons, the only voice lessons I ever had. I will leave out a brief encounter we had involving a train. It wasn't at High Bridge but not too far down the tracks from the police station. [2]
I also taught a couple times for Midway College while I was a teaching fellow. Bob Miller had used Felix Sung, maybe, to adjunct some for them. Miller was a member of the notorious Jesus Seminar. I was always curious why such a liberal guy would have someone from Asbury teach for them. Probably a combination of necessity, not thinking it mattered too much with this student group, and perhaps respect for scholars at Asbury like Bauer.
Bill Patrick still teases me about us going over to Louisville to meet and hear Martin Hengel. When I introduced myself and he heard my name, he asked if I was German. I said yes because I thought he meant in heritage. Aber er bedeutete ob ich Deutscher wäre.
I remember teaching a class at Midway largely made up of adult nursing students. I had one of those moments where you realize you are unreflective about something. So I was making an argument for the virgin birth to them. My argument went like this. Paul believed in the virgin birth and he was close enough to Jesus historically to know. Now what's the problem with this argument?
The problem is that Paul never mentions the virgin birth one way or the other in any of his writings. Galatians 4:4 doesn't say one way or the other. He is completely silent on the issue. This was an example of me viewing the Bible as one book rather than sixty-six (or more) separate books. Matthew and Luke mention the virgin birth, but they obviously were not in the same books as Paul's writings.
Of course I believe in the virgin birth. That's not the point. The point is my increasing reflectivity in those years. It was troubling to see on one matter after another how unreflective I had been. The virgin birth is mentioned in Matthew 1 and Luke 1, but not really anywhere else. Perhaps the early Christians talked about it all the time, but it does not play a significant role in the theology of the New Testament texts because it just isn't mentioned. [3]
I wholeheartedly agree with those who point out the importance of instilling faith in our children. Beliefs and relationships that are in the gut of your youth are hard to shake. It is much harder to instill faith in a person on the basis of rational argument, once the mind is fully formed. Arguments tend to lay on top of a more gut-based foundation, not the other way around as in the "Platonic fallacy" I have mentioned (see Jonathan Haidt).
My main plea is that we form the faith of our children in foundations that are really solid. Once a person has detached from their childhood gut, they are susceptible to all kinds of influences. Those of us who are still in the worldview of our childhood often can't see why others do not attach to our way of seeing the world. It seems so compelling to us. We do not realize that the motivations for belief usually go much deeper than whatever reasons we might present.
16. I was fascinated in Larry Wood's contemporary theology class to learn that Wolfhart Pannenberg was a mostly orthodox theologian who nevertheless did not believe in the virgin birth. Pannenberg focused on the resurrection in his theology. At that time, it seemed quite the norm to see the resurrection as the focal point of Christology. That is not so much the case now. Right now, the Trinity and thus the pre-existent tri-unity seems to be the center. More on this to come.
I do not agree with Pannenberg on the virgin birth, but it was a little jolting to reflect on this subject in those days. It seems to me that almost all the arguments about why the virgin birth is essential do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Jesus is not half God and half human. He is fully human and fully God.
Therefore, whatever Jesus' divinity is, it is not his humanity. Jesus had an X and a Y chromosome. Because Jesus was born of a virgin, God must have created the Y chromosome. But Jesus could have become fully human with no human parents, and Jesus could have been fully divine with two human parents. His divinity is not contingent in any way on the nature of his human parentage, at least not as far as I can see.
Nor does it make sense to say that Jesus had to be born of a virgin so that he could be without sin. Perhaps some Christians in the early centuries like Augustine thought this because they thought of sex as dirty, but this is bad theology. Sin is not on the Y chromosome. If it were, then women would be without sin, being XX.
N. T. Wright suggests that the virgin birth was a gift. Not entirely sure what he meant. To me, it is an origin befitting the divine Son of God, a sign. [4] Not necessary for any substantial reason but fitting the divine King of Kings.
17. I did not feel God's presence much those days, although I begged him for it. Often during church I would even beg him to chastise me in his anger just so I might know he was there. Often during the prayer times at Stonewall I would plead for God to make himself known to me.
I led a college Sunday School class my last year there (Gary Cockerill's daughters were in it). We read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? Not that I was suffering. Not at all. I have a theory that people who observe others suffering worry about the problem of suffering more than the people who actually undergo the suffering. And I didn't even know someone who was suffering.
I also bought Hans Kung's Does God Exist? I didn't find it particularly helpful. To be honest, most of it was over my head.
On a side note, Thomas Oden came to an Asbury College chapel while I was teaching fellow. I went to hear him. I didn't know anything about him except that he was famous. He gave his testimony but I didn't understand it. That was depressing. Part of the problem is the fact that my mind wandered, as it typically did during any sustained speech at that time. By the time I would snap back to the speaker, I had lost track of their train of thought.
Back to God. At one point I had a bright idea. When I pray, why don't I talk as if I'm actually talking to somebody? That seems like an obvious suggestion, but at some point I came to the conclusion that my prayers had often been monologues. It seemed sometimes like I prayed as if I was talking to myself rather than to someone who is actually out there.
Have you ever heard prayers where it sure seems like they're talking to the other people in the room rather than to God? How many pastors provide information or a sermon in their prayers that, frankly, God already knows? It's like they are really lecturing to the congregation. "Lord, you know that ...." or "Lord, we know that..." I suspect there are some other unreflective monologuers out there.
These days, I do not presume that I will have a vivid experience of God every day or even every month. There are moments when I feel blessed or when I feel peace. I thank God for those. But I go along my way, believing that God is with me, whether I have feelings or not. God is right there with me to talk to. Whether he talks back to me or not doesn't matter. It is of course a blessing when he does.
[1] Although one of the last lynchings in America took place in Marion, Indiana. I hope there were no people associated with Marion College in the infamous photo.
[2] It seems to me that I ran to High Bridge and back once. Quite a run. I never went on that notorious bridge.
[3] This point is hard to grasp if one is still reading the Bible unreflectively, because in that pre-modern state, one has difficulty telling the difference between what you believe about and hear in the text and what the text actually says.
[4] I have already mentioned that Isaiah 7:14 seems to have had both a "near" meaning in its own time as well as the "far" meaning that Matthew saw fulfilled in it.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
University of Kentucky 3
previous post
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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.
____________
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.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
Teaching Fellow - Hebrew 2
previous post
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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.
____________
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.
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
Teaching Fellow 1
previous post
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1. I was 23 when I began as a two-year Teaching Fellow at Asbury. These were truly some of the best years of my life. I was not only working, but I was doing something I dearly loved--teaching Greek and Hebrew. I had close friends who pretty much thought the same way I did about God and the world. I got along very well with students and got to hang out with some really smart professors. I even dated for several months.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy teaching the Bible, especially Paul's earlier letters. But the Bible can be controversial. People often shape their faith around a certain unreflective understanding of the Bible they learn as a child. And while they think they want to go deeper with the Bible, I don't think it's always true. What a lot of them want is secret knowledge that goes along with what they already think.
In fact, for some people, serious study of the Bible can result in the Bible becoming more distant than before. Joel Green speaks of it becoming a dissected frog. You can label all the parts but it's not jumping anymore. This was especially true in the purely "modernist" phase of biblical studies, where only the original meaning was of interest. One of the strengths of "post" modernism is the possibility of a second naivete that can accept both ancient and living meanings to an autonomous text.
I say this to explain why I enjoy teaching biblical languages so much. No one in my Greek classes ever argues over the forms of the third declension. There is no stress worrying over whether someone will tell their pastor that you said the perfect tense is completed action. And you can make all sorts of random puns of no significance whatsoever.
Teaching over the years has always involved varying degrees of ice below the surface of what I teach. There has often been a depth that just wasn't helpful to bring up. There are books I haven't written. Perhaps they would have been pointless.
One of the reasons I always enjoyed going to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting was to be able to talk to people who understood. When I first showed up there from IWU, Keith Reeves from Azusa expressed great surprise that a professor from IWU would be there. That would dramatically change over the years.
More than once I have thought how nice it would be to teach something uncontroversial like math or physics. I bet I would have been a great calculus teacher. And no controversy!
2. I was so excited the night before my first Greek class. I had a hard time sleeping. I even thought about having everyone get in boxes on the lawn representing noun endings. I used to have "subjunctive day" where students would arrive to a note on the board that said, "We might be in room x." I was silly. It was great fun.
A fellow before me, Rory Skelly, had put a number of Greek paradigms to music. Although I always footnote him, I have often gotten credit for these ditties. They are quite helpful. The only one I added was an adjective ending song.
The teaching fellow I replaced was Felix Sung. His parting words to me were, "And remember, people are stupid." At the time I thought it was a little harsh. I will say that not everyone has the aptitude for biblical languages. At least a couple of ministers later confessed to passing the Greek competency exam by improper means.
The senior teaching fellow was Bill Patrick, one of my best friends. Bill is brilliant. He is hilarious. Every once and a while we will still have a text exchange with short snippets of shared experiences, Deep Thoughts, and Saturday Night Live.
Bill was never good at playing games in the academy. He could have done a dissertation in his sleep. Indeed, I would have been glad simply to write up conversations with him. He has enough in his head. But at some point it all seemed foolish to him. I personally would say that some games are worth playing.
If he ever wrote a novel, I picture it being a bit like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. That is, I see him writing one book in a lifetime that becomes a classic (realizing that there is now a second). Bill did start a novel once. But then he read Of Human Bondage and decided that the novel had already been written. I read the novel in England, perhaps the first I read outside of school. [2]
Students seemed to enjoy me for Greek, but they learned more with him. Bill has to be one of the only Teaching Fellows to go four years. He robbed me of ever being the senior teaching fellow. :-)
3. I roomed with Brian Matherlee in the same apartment after Don Crowson got married. Brian was extroverted with not a hint of nerd. Imagine my surprise when the two prettiest new students were in our apartment. Hilariously, when he was showing them our apartment he pointed out my room and said, "And that's Ken's room."
"Who?" they said.
"Ken, he's right there." And indeed, there I was, standing right behind them, completely unnoticed. :-)
One of them was Greta (Lemons) Lebo, who would become part of my circle of closest friends for those years. Brian, Greta, Laura Lambert, Quin Monahan, Tracie Jordan, Greg Shannon, Jenny Stewart, and more. We had a booth at Applebees. I actually started to sketch a painting of five us in the booth. Finally got rid of it in the recent move, unfinished.
I forgot to mention that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. John Hull and Scott Gunn decided to go see Berlin on the fly. They invited me but I just didn't have the money. I was finally able to see it five years later.
4. I was ordained in 1991 at the age of 24. The rule was that you needed two years of ministry service after bacheloreate education, one after an MDIV. I don't think they counted my teaching, although I was under appointment by the Florida district. I think they cobbled together the bits and pieces of church ministry I had done here and there. I think I forgot to mention some summer ministry I did with Trinity Wesleyan in Central.
I asked for an NASB for my ordination Bible. We had used the RSV at Asbury. The EB professors liked it because it didn't have headings that would bias your outlining when you were doing a survey. But I knew it was viewed as a somewhat liberal translation, so I asked for an NASB. I didn't want another KJV and at the time I couldn't stand the NIV.
O.D. Emery was the presiding general superintendent, a long time friend of my family. Also signing my Bible was J.D. Abbott, after whose son I was named. Virgil Mitchell also signed. I had served as student body chaplain at Central my senior year under him.
Then there was the DBMS (now DBMD): Raymond Kensell (DS), Dennis Waymire (Asst DS), Richard Cowley, M. Lee Schenck (my dad), Walter McKee, and Mac McCombs (sec).
5. I taught Greek in a three hour + three hour format, a whole year, using Machen. I taught a six hour block, a one semester crash course. I also taught intermediate Greek, using Brooks and Winbery's Syntax of New Testament Greek (again following precedent). Metzger's Lexical Aids also featured. [1]
Patrick Eby had me as a torturer in those days, along with others like Jim McNeely. They not only had to parse Greek words but give the semantic nuances of the cases and tenses. I think we even did a little sentence diagramming.
[1] It occurs to me that the way I was able to get through Hebrews in Greek was Sakae Kubo's, A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.
[2] Between my doctorate and starting teaching, I read Crime and Punishment and Things Fall Apart.
_______________
1. I was 23 when I began as a two-year Teaching Fellow at Asbury. These were truly some of the best years of my life. I was not only working, but I was doing something I dearly loved--teaching Greek and Hebrew. I had close friends who pretty much thought the same way I did about God and the world. I got along very well with students and got to hang out with some really smart professors. I even dated for several months.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy teaching the Bible, especially Paul's earlier letters. But the Bible can be controversial. People often shape their faith around a certain unreflective understanding of the Bible they learn as a child. And while they think they want to go deeper with the Bible, I don't think it's always true. What a lot of them want is secret knowledge that goes along with what they already think.
In fact, for some people, serious study of the Bible can result in the Bible becoming more distant than before. Joel Green speaks of it becoming a dissected frog. You can label all the parts but it's not jumping anymore. This was especially true in the purely "modernist" phase of biblical studies, where only the original meaning was of interest. One of the strengths of "post" modernism is the possibility of a second naivete that can accept both ancient and living meanings to an autonomous text.
I say this to explain why I enjoy teaching biblical languages so much. No one in my Greek classes ever argues over the forms of the third declension. There is no stress worrying over whether someone will tell their pastor that you said the perfect tense is completed action. And you can make all sorts of random puns of no significance whatsoever.
Teaching over the years has always involved varying degrees of ice below the surface of what I teach. There has often been a depth that just wasn't helpful to bring up. There are books I haven't written. Perhaps they would have been pointless.
One of the reasons I always enjoyed going to the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting was to be able to talk to people who understood. When I first showed up there from IWU, Keith Reeves from Azusa expressed great surprise that a professor from IWU would be there. That would dramatically change over the years.
More than once I have thought how nice it would be to teach something uncontroversial like math or physics. I bet I would have been a great calculus teacher. And no controversy!
2. I was so excited the night before my first Greek class. I had a hard time sleeping. I even thought about having everyone get in boxes on the lawn representing noun endings. I used to have "subjunctive day" where students would arrive to a note on the board that said, "We might be in room x." I was silly. It was great fun.
A fellow before me, Rory Skelly, had put a number of Greek paradigms to music. Although I always footnote him, I have often gotten credit for these ditties. They are quite helpful. The only one I added was an adjective ending song.
The teaching fellow I replaced was Felix Sung. His parting words to me were, "And remember, people are stupid." At the time I thought it was a little harsh. I will say that not everyone has the aptitude for biblical languages. At least a couple of ministers later confessed to passing the Greek competency exam by improper means.
The senior teaching fellow was Bill Patrick, one of my best friends. Bill is brilliant. He is hilarious. Every once and a while we will still have a text exchange with short snippets of shared experiences, Deep Thoughts, and Saturday Night Live.
Bill was never good at playing games in the academy. He could have done a dissertation in his sleep. Indeed, I would have been glad simply to write up conversations with him. He has enough in his head. But at some point it all seemed foolish to him. I personally would say that some games are worth playing.
If he ever wrote a novel, I picture it being a bit like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. That is, I see him writing one book in a lifetime that becomes a classic (realizing that there is now a second). Bill did start a novel once. But then he read Of Human Bondage and decided that the novel had already been written. I read the novel in England, perhaps the first I read outside of school. [2]
Students seemed to enjoy me for Greek, but they learned more with him. Bill has to be one of the only Teaching Fellows to go four years. He robbed me of ever being the senior teaching fellow. :-)
3. I roomed with Brian Matherlee in the same apartment after Don Crowson got married. Brian was extroverted with not a hint of nerd. Imagine my surprise when the two prettiest new students were in our apartment. Hilariously, when he was showing them our apartment he pointed out my room and said, "And that's Ken's room."
"Who?" they said.
"Ken, he's right there." And indeed, there I was, standing right behind them, completely unnoticed. :-)
One of them was Greta (Lemons) Lebo, who would become part of my circle of closest friends for those years. Brian, Greta, Laura Lambert, Quin Monahan, Tracie Jordan, Greg Shannon, Jenny Stewart, and more. We had a booth at Applebees. I actually started to sketch a painting of five us in the booth. Finally got rid of it in the recent move, unfinished.
I forgot to mention that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. John Hull and Scott Gunn decided to go see Berlin on the fly. They invited me but I just didn't have the money. I was finally able to see it five years later.
4. I was ordained in 1991 at the age of 24. The rule was that you needed two years of ministry service after bacheloreate education, one after an MDIV. I don't think they counted my teaching, although I was under appointment by the Florida district. I think they cobbled together the bits and pieces of church ministry I had done here and there. I think I forgot to mention some summer ministry I did with Trinity Wesleyan in Central.
I asked for an NASB for my ordination Bible. We had used the RSV at Asbury. The EB professors liked it because it didn't have headings that would bias your outlining when you were doing a survey. But I knew it was viewed as a somewhat liberal translation, so I asked for an NASB. I didn't want another KJV and at the time I couldn't stand the NIV.
O.D. Emery was the presiding general superintendent, a long time friend of my family. Also signing my Bible was J.D. Abbott, after whose son I was named. Virgil Mitchell also signed. I had served as student body chaplain at Central my senior year under him.
Then there was the DBMS (now DBMD): Raymond Kensell (DS), Dennis Waymire (Asst DS), Richard Cowley, M. Lee Schenck (my dad), Walter McKee, and Mac McCombs (sec).
5. I taught Greek in a three hour + three hour format, a whole year, using Machen. I taught a six hour block, a one semester crash course. I also taught intermediate Greek, using Brooks and Winbery's Syntax of New Testament Greek (again following precedent). Metzger's Lexical Aids also featured. [1]
Patrick Eby had me as a torturer in those days, along with others like Jim McNeely. They not only had to parse Greek words but give the semantic nuances of the cases and tenses. I think we even did a little sentence diagramming.
[1] It occurs to me that the way I was able to get through Hebrews in Greek was Sakae Kubo's, A Reader's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament.
[2] Between my doctorate and starting teaching, I read Crime and Punishment and Things Fall Apart.
Seminary -- Teaching Fellow 8
previous post
__________
48. When I felt a call to ministry in college, I fully anticipated I would pastor. When I graduated from Central, I did not feel mature enough yet to fly solo, so I went to Asbury. As I was at Asbury, I was increasingly drawn to biblical studies and teaching.
It's a pattern I've seen in students often. A certain personality is drawn to the life of the mind. I have mixed feelings about it. For one, there is hardly any space for professors of biblical studies these days. In the seventies, sometimes they would pay for your schooling. When I came on the market in 1996 there was almost nothing. It seems much, much worse today.
I thanked the Lord often at Indiana Wesleyan that I had a teaching job. I remember an older student who asked me about doctoral work in an area of ministry. He was clearly annoyed that I discouraged him. But today he sits with a doctorate and no permanent teaching job. When I saw Dr. Muholland in 1996, he annoyingly remarked somewhat glibly that it was a buyer's market for professors.
By the way, I did have Muholland for a J-term in a course on Greco-Roman Literature. I focused on the Stoics. I wasn't able to have him for his forte--Revelation. He had the novel hypothesis of reading Revelation as if it reflected an actual ecstatic experience of someone. :-)
So many students think they want to teach. Most do not realize who they are up against. There are some incredibly bright people out there. I cringe a little to see that I did the same. But some are actually destined for this life. There are still a handful who should go into the academy.
District ministerial boards were not always understanding. "Weren't you called to ministry? Why are you diverting from ministry to teaching?" Of course the church has a long tradition of ministerial teachers. There is a clear category in the Discipline for it. But, again, I feel this charge.
I have preached extensively in my life. I have visited the sick and counseled the distressed. I have led worship. I have engaged in evangelism and taught small groups. I have been on church boards and led in several contexts. I have youth pastored and supply pastored. It is not as full of ministerial experience as I prefer when hiring a ministerial professor, but it is experience. I hope it might be said of me on the positive side, "Some people have twenty years of experience. Some people have experienced the same year twenty times."
49. As my time as an Asbury student began to draw to a close, I came to a fork in the road. A kind of fleece came into play. Every year, Asbury hired a graduate to teach Greek and Hebrew for two years as a Teaching Fellow. I applied.
The fleece was this. If I was given the opportunity to be a Teaching Fellow, I would go on to do doctoral work in New Testament and follow the path toward becoming a professor. If I did not get the position, I would take a church in Florida and proceed into pastoral ministry. Perhaps the door would open at some later time to go on for further study.
I was chosen as Teaching Fellow, and the rest is history. I think I was chosen not only because I had done good work in biblical studies but because they thought I might be a good teacher. I think they thought I might relate well to students.
This has been a key to me in hiring. The academy sometimes can focus on a certain kind of intellectual who is destined to publish a lot and be a name. But can they teach? Can they relate to students? Will they enrich the relational dynamics of the team? Would you all like to go out to lunch with them or will everyone steer clear of them?
Knowledge is wonderful. I love it. I love brilliant people. The students love it when a professor is brilliant... if he or she can equip them for life. And there are few things worse than a brilliant person who is self-centered and demeaning to others. There is a place in the academy for the genius who is moving the front edge of knowledge but doesn't interact much with students. But they are largely the stuff of research institutions. These days most institutions can't afford to have too many of them around.
__________
48. When I felt a call to ministry in college, I fully anticipated I would pastor. When I graduated from Central, I did not feel mature enough yet to fly solo, so I went to Asbury. As I was at Asbury, I was increasingly drawn to biblical studies and teaching.
It's a pattern I've seen in students often. A certain personality is drawn to the life of the mind. I have mixed feelings about it. For one, there is hardly any space for professors of biblical studies these days. In the seventies, sometimes they would pay for your schooling. When I came on the market in 1996 there was almost nothing. It seems much, much worse today.
I thanked the Lord often at Indiana Wesleyan that I had a teaching job. I remember an older student who asked me about doctoral work in an area of ministry. He was clearly annoyed that I discouraged him. But today he sits with a doctorate and no permanent teaching job. When I saw Dr. Muholland in 1996, he annoyingly remarked somewhat glibly that it was a buyer's market for professors.
By the way, I did have Muholland for a J-term in a course on Greco-Roman Literature. I focused on the Stoics. I wasn't able to have him for his forte--Revelation. He had the novel hypothesis of reading Revelation as if it reflected an actual ecstatic experience of someone. :-)
So many students think they want to teach. Most do not realize who they are up against. There are some incredibly bright people out there. I cringe a little to see that I did the same. But some are actually destined for this life. There are still a handful who should go into the academy.
District ministerial boards were not always understanding. "Weren't you called to ministry? Why are you diverting from ministry to teaching?" Of course the church has a long tradition of ministerial teachers. There is a clear category in the Discipline for it. But, again, I feel this charge.
I have preached extensively in my life. I have visited the sick and counseled the distressed. I have led worship. I have engaged in evangelism and taught small groups. I have been on church boards and led in several contexts. I have youth pastored and supply pastored. It is not as full of ministerial experience as I prefer when hiring a ministerial professor, but it is experience. I hope it might be said of me on the positive side, "Some people have twenty years of experience. Some people have experienced the same year twenty times."
49. As my time as an Asbury student began to draw to a close, I came to a fork in the road. A kind of fleece came into play. Every year, Asbury hired a graduate to teach Greek and Hebrew for two years as a Teaching Fellow. I applied.
The fleece was this. If I was given the opportunity to be a Teaching Fellow, I would go on to do doctoral work in New Testament and follow the path toward becoming a professor. If I did not get the position, I would take a church in Florida and proceed into pastoral ministry. Perhaps the door would open at some later time to go on for further study.
I was chosen as Teaching Fellow, and the rest is history. I think I was chosen not only because I had done good work in biblical studies but because they thought I might be a good teacher. I think they thought I might relate well to students.
This has been a key to me in hiring. The academy sometimes can focus on a certain kind of intellectual who is destined to publish a lot and be a name. But can they teach? Can they relate to students? Will they enrich the relational dynamics of the team? Would you all like to go out to lunch with them or will everyone steer clear of them?
Knowledge is wonderful. I love it. I love brilliant people. The students love it when a professor is brilliant... if he or she can equip them for life. And there are few things worse than a brilliant person who is self-centered and demeaning to others. There is a place in the academy for the genius who is moving the front edge of knowledge but doesn't interact much with students. But they are largely the stuff of research institutions. These days most institutions can't afford to have too many of them around.
Monday, January 13, 2020
Seminary -- Singing and More 7
previous post
___________
41. I would petition to get out of two of the "Pastor as" courses. One, I think, was "Pastor as Evangelist." I had taken an evangelism course at Central. The other was "Pastor as Liberator." This was, for lack of a better description, a social justice course. It would no doubt have been very good for me, but I wanted to take more Bible, and Asbury granted my petition.
Incidentally, coming from where I came, I thought of the Liberator course as somewhat liberal. We grumbled about having to take such courses. Now I view this as a major blind spot in my background. Indeed, it would seem a trick of the Devil to get God's people to mock something that was central to Jesus' earthly mission. It would seem to me at the present moment that a good deal of the church finds itself fighting God while thinking itself fighting for righteousness.
Because I already had taken theology at Central, I was able to do some slightly more advanced work at Asbury. I took a patristics course with David Bundy. I was especially happy to do an independent study with him on Aquinas. A friend named Mark Mealey also studied with him at the same time. I can't remember if he did Aquinas and then later did a study with him on George Lindbeck, the father of post-liberal theology.
It was the first time I had really used my Latin since high school. I found Aquinas' thought very stimulating, particular his distinction between being (esse) and essence (essentia). I wondered if it was only in this universe that God's being was simple, that it reduced to a point in this universe while we cannot say what it is outside this universe.
As a side note, Russ Gunsalus remembers running into me in the basement of the library looking at copies of ancient manuscripts. I guess it looked impressive, but I knew the truth. Just because I was interested in unusual things didn't mean I was really competent at them. It has always been sobering to realize that, say in the Philo group at SBL, the things that count me as brilliant in some circles are basics assumed of everyone before even getting started in others.
Bundy is of course another genius. He was head librarian at Asbury, another Free Methodist (at the time). I secretly wondered if he was too liberal to be an official professor. :-)
He was brilliant, even if he had a little trouble getting to the finish line sometimes. Rumor had it that he learned Dutch one weekend in Amsterdam. Of course I know about rumors like that because some have circulated about me. Russ Gunsalus and I had him come do an assessment of our library when Wesley Seminary was founded. I saw him a couple years ago at SBL Denver. Abson Joseph and I had breakfast with him.
42. I had at least two courses with Jerry Walls. Since I had philosophy at Central, I was able to substitute some more advanced classes for that requirement. I did philosophy of theism and apologetics. We read Swinburne for the first, as well as some from Jerry's doctor father, Tom Morris.
An argument from Swinburne that has stayed with me is that the argument from design is not just about the question of evolution, for example. It is the fact that there are laws of nature at all. Even the theory of evolution proceeds according to rules that reflect an order to creation. Of course now I would consider the fine-tuning argument to be a consummate example of order in nature. Similarly, I would put miracles as a kind of argument from design.
In my final paper, I brainstormed something that sounds a bit heretical, namely, that the Trinity reflected a kind of metaphysical modalism. God the Father referred especially to God outside of the universe. The Spirit referred especially to God inside of the universe. Christ, the Logos, was the metaphysical bridge between inside and out, the connection between God within and without.
I might add that this class was my first exposure to analytical philosophy. I am not really too fond of it although I do use simple syllogisms in my thinking. I wonder if some analytical philosophers use their syllogisms to circumvent common sense. I used to beat myself up for being stupid in reading Plantinga and such, but I wonder if some of those were examples of the arguments not working.
The apologetics class introduced me to James Sire's, The Universe Next Door. Now there's a book that had a major impact on me. His sense of the disintegration of theism over the last five centuries has remained my go-to typology when I teach philosophy, although I've made it my own.
Walls was a huge IU and Bobby Knight fan. Somehow one Christmas I got recruited to sing with him and I think Todd Thompson a song he had written to the tune of Silent Night. Must have been a talent contest or something. "Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight. He's not tall but he is bright. Round Indiana he's our man. For each game he has a plan. Thinking and D are his keys. Thinking and D are his keys."
A couple of IWU students invited Jerry to come to speak about apologetics a couple years ago. There was a Scott Burson connection too because they had co-written some stuff. His most recent work of interest is an edited text Two Dozen or So Arguments for God, which draws on the work of Alvin Plantinga.
43. I think that about exhausts the courses I took at Asbury. I did take one on theological German with Steven O'Malley. We used Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge. When Dave Ward needed to pass a German competency test for Princeton, we worked through it together.
I had taken an interest in German the summer before I went to seminary. I checked out records from the Broward County library and listened to them. Of course in those days I thought Schenck was a German name. It turned out to be Dutch. However, I can still claim a German heritage through my Dad's mother.
I did an independent study on Hebrews with Bauer. My initial interest in Hebrews was from the fact that it had been called the Leviticus of the New Testament. Leviticus had a lot to do with holiness, so I had associated Hebrews with holiness too.
I believe I tried to read through all of Hebrews in Greek for that course. Hard to believe I would have been able to do it then, but I think I basically did. 1 John was the first book I read all the way through in Greek. Then the second was Galatians. I suppose Hebrews was the third.
Dr. Bauer invited me to present a scholarly paper on Hebrews. I presented it, I think, my senior year. It was titled, "Hebrews and the Rest of God." Many who heard it misinterpreted it. By "rest" I meant the resting of God in Hebrews 4. I think Grant Graff took it to mean "here's some of God but where's the rest?"
It was pretty boring. My friends came and endured it. I think Vicky Gibson may have even come from across the street at the college. It's also possible it was my first year as teaching fellow.
I would later drive to Atlanta and present it at a regional SBL, my first SBL paper. I didn't know anyone in the room. It was a small room. I was sure to fill out the time so there was no time for questions. I got up, read it, sat down. It was over and forgotten very quickly. I threw in some German and French to sound sophisticated... and no doubt butchered it. Quite anticlimactic after a lot of work.
44. I've neglected to say much about my non-classroom life during my student years at Asbury. Stewart Fowler was my first roomate, a very nice Free Methodist from Oregon. We would go to Florida on Spring Break with him, Len Philips, and another gentleman whose name I forget. I later heard a rumor that we had been soul winning in Fort Lauderdale and that I had said great words, but I don't remember that part. We may have witnessed to one person on the beach :-)
My next roomate was Don Crowson. We would move into an apartment down near the train tracks my final year. Don is a great guy and perhaps a tad strong willed. So it was a delight to see him begin to date Mary Uible, who might also have had a tad bit of a strong will. A particularly fond memory (please forgive me) was a stand-off in front of her house in Ohio, with them in a standstill over who would drive back to Wilmore. Her parents finally just went back in the house. I won't say who won or how much conversation there was on the trip back.
I was in an accountability group for a while. I believe Jim Maness, Ross Taylor, and another gentleman were in it. I could be misremembering. I don't think Jim Dunn was in it, but I associate him with Jim Maness in those days.
45. I went on a mission trip to Bolivia with Bill Gould. We sang. Scotty/Rachel Gulledge and Mike/Cathy Rash, friends from Central, were also on the trip. That was my second trip out of the country after the Philippines--three continents down. I tried to learn Spanish from a book driving home my whole way back in May before the trip (I would look and then memorize, look and then memorize).
There had been an older gentleman from Colombia who had attended my church growing up, Carlos Gonzalez. He tried to teach me Spanish, but it didn't work because I couldn't see the words written down. My father couldn't even get "buenos dias" to save his life. He tried and failed every Sunday. [1] I had grown up with Spanish all around me, but had never learned it.
The trip was very enjoyable, except for one night on a cold bus up country. I remember Mike getting paranoid when everyone laughed after what he said was translated. He hadn't said anything funny, at least not in Southern. He said he had really enjoyed the "cheese biscuits" that morning. I guess it was a peculiar thing to try to translate.
There was another time I was trying my best to listen to an older man speak to me in Spanish. The national superintendent, noticing, said to the man, "El no habla Español." What a downer.
Another funny moment when was when someone asked what my name was. "Ken," was the response, which sounds very similar to "Quien," which means "who?" So the guy thought the conversation was, "What is his name?" "Who?" So he repeated the question. "What is his name?" "His name is who."
What? Who is Ken? Yes, Ken is who.
Somewhere in there was interaction with Albin Whitworth, a great organist at Asbury. I did a lot of singing in those years. In fact, I sang in virtually every church I was ever a part of until I came to College Wesleyan in Marion. I forgot to mention that I sang in the college choir at Central. I sang regularly at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington during the six years I was there. Those where the days of accompaniment tapes.
The best chapel of every year, as far as I was concerned, was just before Christmas when chapel was Handel's Messiah. There would be scores at the door and we would sit in four sections near the front--sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses. There would be soloists. It was wonderful. I sang bass.
I was in a quartet with Brian Matherlee (lead), Todd Thompson (alto), Ray Jones (tenor), and me as bass. We did a fair amount of singing. Todd had an interesting story that I hope he doesn't mind me sharing a little of. He was the son of a district superintendent from North Carolina. Not exactly knowing what to do with his life, he followed the path he knew best--he studied for ministry.
But after four years at Central and four years at Asbury, he found himself not sure about his vocation. I remember him struggling to find direction, reading What Color is Your Parachute? He would finally go on to study philosophy in England at Sheffield and, I believe, is teaching even now in North Carolina.
Brian and I would become roomates after Don and Mary got married, living in the same apartment in "downtown" Wilmore. We continued to sing. He learned to play the guitar. One piece we did was "More Than Words," by Extreme. We sang it at a wedding reception. The quartet also did "In the Good Old Summertime" and "Mr. Sandman."
46. I worked in the cafeteria during my three years as a student. The first year, Ed Ross and I washed dishes. The last two years I was cashier. I enjoyed it. It was a way of being social without having to go out of my way. They came to me. There weren't a lot of single girls on campus, but I saw them every day in the line. :-)
Since I get bored easily, I quickly started drawing the menu board instead of just putting the list up. The menu items might be on a plane or the menu items might be the ingredients on a cereal box. At Christmas I decided to give menu board calendars for the next year. I did drafts of all my boards on napkins, so I was able to pick what I thought were the top twelve funniest. I found the napkins as I was preparing to move to New York.
I did some improv too, following the Who's Line Is It Anyway? approach. Those were fun. I don't know that I had ever really considered myself funny, but it seems like I was getting there.
Their names escape me at the moment, but there was a Wesleyan couple from California who had been in the acting world prior to coming to Asbury. The wife had actually done an improv class with Robin Williams before he did Mork and Mindy. They decided to put on a version of Godspell. It was a lot of fun and Todd Thompson was in it too. He and I did "All for the Best" in a duet. [2]
47. I attended Stonewall Wesleyan my whole time at Asbury. This was a matter of duty. It was how I had been programmed. You're a Wesleyan. You go to a Wesleyan Church. When you visit a town on a Sunday, you find the local Wesleyan Church to attend.
When I started, almost none of the seminary professors or students attended Stonewall. I mentioned earlier the pastor who had foolishly driven the seminary professors away. It was a little bit of a drive. No offence but the services weren't particularly exciting.
The pastor was Larry Freels. Kerry Kind also attended in those days and would often lead the song service. It seemed like Freels did everything he knew to do to try to grow the church. I remember us trying neighborhood visitation once. It just kind of continued on without much growth.
We did some social action. I remember us standing on the side of the road with abortion signs once. What was funny is that I had broken the middle finger on my right hand playing softball--a fly ball that hit my finger just wrong. So it was in a splint. They gave us the finger, and because of my split, I was giving them the finger right back. :-)
I've come to think that there are three basic kinds of small to medium size pastors. First, there is the preacher. People come to hear them preach. Then there is the pastor. The preaching might be average, but this pastor really cares for the congregation. Then there is the administrator. These days, this person might think about becoming an executive pastor in a larger church with a staff.
Although I didn't take Pastor as Evangelist, but I seem to remember hearing a new concept from other students that seemed very important to me. A church needs to be structured differently as it grows. For example, if the pastor tries to do everything himself, the church will never be able to grow beyond 150-200. This resonated with me in relation to the pastors of my youth.
[1] His French from the war was horrible too. We need "boo-coo" tires for beaucoup. I'm still not sure if "sinny-finny en" was "ce n'est fi rein."
[2] That reminds me that I sang "Old Man River" in a musical at Central.
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41. I would petition to get out of two of the "Pastor as" courses. One, I think, was "Pastor as Evangelist." I had taken an evangelism course at Central. The other was "Pastor as Liberator." This was, for lack of a better description, a social justice course. It would no doubt have been very good for me, but I wanted to take more Bible, and Asbury granted my petition.
Incidentally, coming from where I came, I thought of the Liberator course as somewhat liberal. We grumbled about having to take such courses. Now I view this as a major blind spot in my background. Indeed, it would seem a trick of the Devil to get God's people to mock something that was central to Jesus' earthly mission. It would seem to me at the present moment that a good deal of the church finds itself fighting God while thinking itself fighting for righteousness.
Because I already had taken theology at Central, I was able to do some slightly more advanced work at Asbury. I took a patristics course with David Bundy. I was especially happy to do an independent study with him on Aquinas. A friend named Mark Mealey also studied with him at the same time. I can't remember if he did Aquinas and then later did a study with him on George Lindbeck, the father of post-liberal theology.
It was the first time I had really used my Latin since high school. I found Aquinas' thought very stimulating, particular his distinction between being (esse) and essence (essentia). I wondered if it was only in this universe that God's being was simple, that it reduced to a point in this universe while we cannot say what it is outside this universe.
As a side note, Russ Gunsalus remembers running into me in the basement of the library looking at copies of ancient manuscripts. I guess it looked impressive, but I knew the truth. Just because I was interested in unusual things didn't mean I was really competent at them. It has always been sobering to realize that, say in the Philo group at SBL, the things that count me as brilliant in some circles are basics assumed of everyone before even getting started in others.
Bundy is of course another genius. He was head librarian at Asbury, another Free Methodist (at the time). I secretly wondered if he was too liberal to be an official professor. :-)
He was brilliant, even if he had a little trouble getting to the finish line sometimes. Rumor had it that he learned Dutch one weekend in Amsterdam. Of course I know about rumors like that because some have circulated about me. Russ Gunsalus and I had him come do an assessment of our library when Wesley Seminary was founded. I saw him a couple years ago at SBL Denver. Abson Joseph and I had breakfast with him.
42. I had at least two courses with Jerry Walls. Since I had philosophy at Central, I was able to substitute some more advanced classes for that requirement. I did philosophy of theism and apologetics. We read Swinburne for the first, as well as some from Jerry's doctor father, Tom Morris.
An argument from Swinburne that has stayed with me is that the argument from design is not just about the question of evolution, for example. It is the fact that there are laws of nature at all. Even the theory of evolution proceeds according to rules that reflect an order to creation. Of course now I would consider the fine-tuning argument to be a consummate example of order in nature. Similarly, I would put miracles as a kind of argument from design.
In my final paper, I brainstormed something that sounds a bit heretical, namely, that the Trinity reflected a kind of metaphysical modalism. God the Father referred especially to God outside of the universe. The Spirit referred especially to God inside of the universe. Christ, the Logos, was the metaphysical bridge between inside and out, the connection between God within and without.
I might add that this class was my first exposure to analytical philosophy. I am not really too fond of it although I do use simple syllogisms in my thinking. I wonder if some analytical philosophers use their syllogisms to circumvent common sense. I used to beat myself up for being stupid in reading Plantinga and such, but I wonder if some of those were examples of the arguments not working.
The apologetics class introduced me to James Sire's, The Universe Next Door. Now there's a book that had a major impact on me. His sense of the disintegration of theism over the last five centuries has remained my go-to typology when I teach philosophy, although I've made it my own.
Walls was a huge IU and Bobby Knight fan. Somehow one Christmas I got recruited to sing with him and I think Todd Thompson a song he had written to the tune of Silent Night. Must have been a talent contest or something. "Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight. He's not tall but he is bright. Round Indiana he's our man. For each game he has a plan. Thinking and D are his keys. Thinking and D are his keys."
A couple of IWU students invited Jerry to come to speak about apologetics a couple years ago. There was a Scott Burson connection too because they had co-written some stuff. His most recent work of interest is an edited text Two Dozen or So Arguments for God, which draws on the work of Alvin Plantinga.
43. I think that about exhausts the courses I took at Asbury. I did take one on theological German with Steven O'Malley. We used Jannach's German for Reading Knowledge. When Dave Ward needed to pass a German competency test for Princeton, we worked through it together.
I had taken an interest in German the summer before I went to seminary. I checked out records from the Broward County library and listened to them. Of course in those days I thought Schenck was a German name. It turned out to be Dutch. However, I can still claim a German heritage through my Dad's mother.
I did an independent study on Hebrews with Bauer. My initial interest in Hebrews was from the fact that it had been called the Leviticus of the New Testament. Leviticus had a lot to do with holiness, so I had associated Hebrews with holiness too.
I believe I tried to read through all of Hebrews in Greek for that course. Hard to believe I would have been able to do it then, but I think I basically did. 1 John was the first book I read all the way through in Greek. Then the second was Galatians. I suppose Hebrews was the third.
Dr. Bauer invited me to present a scholarly paper on Hebrews. I presented it, I think, my senior year. It was titled, "Hebrews and the Rest of God." Many who heard it misinterpreted it. By "rest" I meant the resting of God in Hebrews 4. I think Grant Graff took it to mean "here's some of God but where's the rest?"
It was pretty boring. My friends came and endured it. I think Vicky Gibson may have even come from across the street at the college. It's also possible it was my first year as teaching fellow.
I would later drive to Atlanta and present it at a regional SBL, my first SBL paper. I didn't know anyone in the room. It was a small room. I was sure to fill out the time so there was no time for questions. I got up, read it, sat down. It was over and forgotten very quickly. I threw in some German and French to sound sophisticated... and no doubt butchered it. Quite anticlimactic after a lot of work.
44. I've neglected to say much about my non-classroom life during my student years at Asbury. Stewart Fowler was my first roomate, a very nice Free Methodist from Oregon. We would go to Florida on Spring Break with him, Len Philips, and another gentleman whose name I forget. I later heard a rumor that we had been soul winning in Fort Lauderdale and that I had said great words, but I don't remember that part. We may have witnessed to one person on the beach :-)
My next roomate was Don Crowson. We would move into an apartment down near the train tracks my final year. Don is a great guy and perhaps a tad strong willed. So it was a delight to see him begin to date Mary Uible, who might also have had a tad bit of a strong will. A particularly fond memory (please forgive me) was a stand-off in front of her house in Ohio, with them in a standstill over who would drive back to Wilmore. Her parents finally just went back in the house. I won't say who won or how much conversation there was on the trip back.
I was in an accountability group for a while. I believe Jim Maness, Ross Taylor, and another gentleman were in it. I could be misremembering. I don't think Jim Dunn was in it, but I associate him with Jim Maness in those days.
45. I went on a mission trip to Bolivia with Bill Gould. We sang. Scotty/Rachel Gulledge and Mike/Cathy Rash, friends from Central, were also on the trip. That was my second trip out of the country after the Philippines--three continents down. I tried to learn Spanish from a book driving home my whole way back in May before the trip (I would look and then memorize, look and then memorize).
There had been an older gentleman from Colombia who had attended my church growing up, Carlos Gonzalez. He tried to teach me Spanish, but it didn't work because I couldn't see the words written down. My father couldn't even get "buenos dias" to save his life. He tried and failed every Sunday. [1] I had grown up with Spanish all around me, but had never learned it.
The trip was very enjoyable, except for one night on a cold bus up country. I remember Mike getting paranoid when everyone laughed after what he said was translated. He hadn't said anything funny, at least not in Southern. He said he had really enjoyed the "cheese biscuits" that morning. I guess it was a peculiar thing to try to translate.
There was another time I was trying my best to listen to an older man speak to me in Spanish. The national superintendent, noticing, said to the man, "El no habla Español." What a downer.
Another funny moment when was when someone asked what my name was. "Ken," was the response, which sounds very similar to "Quien," which means "who?" So the guy thought the conversation was, "What is his name?" "Who?" So he repeated the question. "What is his name?" "His name is who."
What? Who is Ken? Yes, Ken is who.
Somewhere in there was interaction with Albin Whitworth, a great organist at Asbury. I did a lot of singing in those years. In fact, I sang in virtually every church I was ever a part of until I came to College Wesleyan in Marion. I forgot to mention that I sang in the college choir at Central. I sang regularly at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington during the six years I was there. Those where the days of accompaniment tapes.
The best chapel of every year, as far as I was concerned, was just before Christmas when chapel was Handel's Messiah. There would be scores at the door and we would sit in four sections near the front--sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses. There would be soloists. It was wonderful. I sang bass.
I was in a quartet with Brian Matherlee (lead), Todd Thompson (alto), Ray Jones (tenor), and me as bass. We did a fair amount of singing. Todd had an interesting story that I hope he doesn't mind me sharing a little of. He was the son of a district superintendent from North Carolina. Not exactly knowing what to do with his life, he followed the path he knew best--he studied for ministry.
But after four years at Central and four years at Asbury, he found himself not sure about his vocation. I remember him struggling to find direction, reading What Color is Your Parachute? He would finally go on to study philosophy in England at Sheffield and, I believe, is teaching even now in North Carolina.
Brian and I would become roomates after Don and Mary got married, living in the same apartment in "downtown" Wilmore. We continued to sing. He learned to play the guitar. One piece we did was "More Than Words," by Extreme. We sang it at a wedding reception. The quartet also did "In the Good Old Summertime" and "Mr. Sandman."
46. I worked in the cafeteria during my three years as a student. The first year, Ed Ross and I washed dishes. The last two years I was cashier. I enjoyed it. It was a way of being social without having to go out of my way. They came to me. There weren't a lot of single girls on campus, but I saw them every day in the line. :-)
Since I get bored easily, I quickly started drawing the menu board instead of just putting the list up. The menu items might be on a plane or the menu items might be the ingredients on a cereal box. At Christmas I decided to give menu board calendars for the next year. I did drafts of all my boards on napkins, so I was able to pick what I thought were the top twelve funniest. I found the napkins as I was preparing to move to New York.
I did some improv too, following the Who's Line Is It Anyway? approach. Those were fun. I don't know that I had ever really considered myself funny, but it seems like I was getting there.
Their names escape me at the moment, but there was a Wesleyan couple from California who had been in the acting world prior to coming to Asbury. The wife had actually done an improv class with Robin Williams before he did Mork and Mindy. They decided to put on a version of Godspell. It was a lot of fun and Todd Thompson was in it too. He and I did "All for the Best" in a duet. [2]
47. I attended Stonewall Wesleyan my whole time at Asbury. This was a matter of duty. It was how I had been programmed. You're a Wesleyan. You go to a Wesleyan Church. When you visit a town on a Sunday, you find the local Wesleyan Church to attend.
When I started, almost none of the seminary professors or students attended Stonewall. I mentioned earlier the pastor who had foolishly driven the seminary professors away. It was a little bit of a drive. No offence but the services weren't particularly exciting.
The pastor was Larry Freels. Kerry Kind also attended in those days and would often lead the song service. It seemed like Freels did everything he knew to do to try to grow the church. I remember us trying neighborhood visitation once. It just kind of continued on without much growth.
We did some social action. I remember us standing on the side of the road with abortion signs once. What was funny is that I had broken the middle finger on my right hand playing softball--a fly ball that hit my finger just wrong. So it was in a splint. They gave us the finger, and because of my split, I was giving them the finger right back. :-)
I've come to think that there are three basic kinds of small to medium size pastors. First, there is the preacher. People come to hear them preach. Then there is the pastor. The preaching might be average, but this pastor really cares for the congregation. Then there is the administrator. These days, this person might think about becoming an executive pastor in a larger church with a staff.
Although I didn't take Pastor as Evangelist, but I seem to remember hearing a new concept from other students that seemed very important to me. A church needs to be structured differently as it grows. For example, if the pastor tries to do everything himself, the church will never be able to grow beyond 150-200. This resonated with me in relation to the pastors of my youth.
[1] His French from the war was horrible too. We need "boo-coo" tires for beaucoup. I'm still not sure if "sinny-finny en" was "ce n'est fi rein."
[2] That reminds me that I sang "Old Man River" in a musical at Central.
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Seminary - Practical Ministry 6
previous post
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35. I studied Hebrew with Lawson Stone my second year at Asbury. [1] He had arrived the same year I came as a student. I very much enjoyed him as a professor. He was fresh out of Yale, vibrant, and clearly a genius.
In those days he seemed excited about new ideas, very open-minded. I've already mentioned that he did a special seminar on Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too. He wanted to use the tools of EB in Hebrew.
I've always wondered if it was hard to teach in the shadow of your mentor, in this case Dennis Kinlaw. Kinlaw was a colossus of a man, a spiritual giant. He was also an Old Testament scholar. Steve Deneff often mentions him from the pulpit of College Wesleyan as someone who had a big spiritual impact on him as well.
Asbury College was blessed to have a great revival among its students in 1970. It was a normal chapel, but people started going to the altar. And they kept going. And they kept praying. And they stayed and they stayed. And people drove in from all over to join. It lasted for almost 8 days without interruption.
In a way, Asbury College, now University, lived under the shadow of that event for years. Other campuses did too. Even last year at IWU there was a chapel that a professor hoped would spark a spiritual revival. He got permission from the president for students to be excused if they stayed after it was over. I think many did stay for the better part of the day.
So you are always looking for it to happen again. Is this chapel going to start another revival? Wait, two students are staying after chapel to pray. Is this going to be the start of a new revival? I wonder if it is hard to move forward when you are always hoping to revisit the past.
I'm pretty sure that Lawson was open to some critical ideas in 1988 that Kinlaw would not have been. Kinlaw may have been a spiritual giant, but in my mind he was not as great of an Old Testament scholar. My first year as teaching fellow (summer 1990 I think) he did the faculty retreat for the seminary, and I distinctly remember him imploring the faculty to be careful with his baby. In my mind the baby was perhaps the best it had ever been.
These sorts of dynamics are very typical as an old guard passes things on to the new guard. I remember a large church pastor in Florida once reading a quote about how bad the youth of the day had become (Larry Freeman). [2] The quote was about how the younger generation was going to pot and how the world was getting worse and worse. Then he came to the punchline--the quote was from Plato in the 300s BC. Freeman's point--not always true because sometimes the world is spiraling into the abyss--is that the older generation often thinks the younger generation is going to pot.
We used Seow for Hebrew. When I was a teaching fellow, Stone also taught Akkadian and Aramaic. I took the Akkadian class, in part to help Lawson get the numbers. I went to the first day of Aramaic, but I felt like my Hebrew wasn't quite good enough for me not to get really confused. It remains a regret, although a good decision probably at the time.
36. I did take some practical courses at Asbury. Obviously the biblical courses are the ones that most resonated and stayed with me. They were the ones that got at the heart of my search to know the truth and what God required of me.
When I was called to ministry in college, my attention was initially more drawn to theology. My honors project engaged the Bible for sure but it was focused on theological questions. When I started out, I assumed I knew what the Bible taught. The undiscovered country was theology.
In seminary, the world of the Bible opened up to me. With shifts in my understanding, I had to go to ground zero in the Bible. In my circles, the Bible is the foundation. So while my interests at Central had heavily been theological, at Asbury they were now primarily biblical.
One piece of the puzzle was that I didn't want someone to be able to throw me into a faith crisis. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know all the counter-arguments too. I wanted to face the beast of doubt and be prepared for anything someone might throw at me.
37. I took "Pastor as Leader." Aside from the professor introducing us to Ong, the main thing I remember is that he was big on "systems theory." I'm still not entirely sure what the big deal about systems theory is other than it views the church like a machine with inputs and outputs. No offence to the professor, but I'm pretty sure that the leadership courses that Keith Drury taught at IWU and that Bob Whitesel taught at Wesley Seminary were probably more helpful in general for doing the work of the ministry.
I won't give the name of my "Pastor as Teacher" professor. It is a deep irony to me that most of the Christian education teachers I have known throughout the years have been pretty boring. Keith Drury is one exception. I did learn some helpful things in the class though. I was reminded of the moral development theory of Kohlberg. I had learned it first with Hal Robbins at Central. I learned about the Kolb learning cycle. Knowing that people do not all learn the same way is a key insight if you are going to be a good teacher.
I had Don Boyd for "Pastor as Liturgist." Boyd had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in the Allegheny District of Pennsylvania. During the merger of the Wesleyan Methodists with the Pilgrims, they had pulled out and become their own group. Some New York Pilgrims had done the same.
Boyd was DS during all that mess. My sense is that both the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists who didn't go with the merger both thought the other side was too liberal. And also that it was moving toward the one world religion of the end times.
My grandfather Schenck and a couple of my uncles didn't merge either. One uncle told my dad at a campground on the way to Florida that he would pray for my Dad's soul if he went with the merger. We packed up and left the next morning before the other family got up. My dad would be a delegate at the merging conference at Anderson in 1968.
Boyd was teaching mostly United Methodists, and he had clearly come to love liturgy. Our final project was a worship file where other students graded us. I knew precious little about liturgy as someone who had grown up as a holiness Wesleyan. Let's just say I was annoyed to be graded down on my materials because of a United Methodist student's eyes.
I only finally let go of the file box in my move to Houghton. Some will know that I became a go-to person for a while in Marion whenever there was a desire for something a little more on the Book of Common Prayer side. In time, Constance Cherry and David Riggs on campus and Emily Vermilya at College Wesleyan became the masters in residence.
If I continue this series into my IWU days, I'll mention there that I was never a purist. Rather, I believe you can worship God from any number of styles of worship, from Hillsong to the mass. I stand-up for the legitimacy of liturgical worship over and against my background that saw it too "catholic" or full of "vain repetition." But I do not think it is the only way to worship and find the other side legitimate too.
38. I was able to take David Seamands for "Pastor as Care-Giver" before he retired. He was of course renowned. His book Healing of Memories would be deeply meaningful to me. [3] Seamands' lingo was always a little sappy to me, but the substance I found very helpful.
So he speaks of "damaged love receptors." The idea is that God is transmitting his love to you. The problem is that some of us have damaged love receptors. Our antenna are broken. God loves us. God has forgiven us, but we can't feel it.
This idea resonated with me in the extreme. My theology told me that God loved me. My theology told me that I was forgiven. But I couldn't feel anything from God most of the time.
Seamands suggested that we often need help from each other when this is the case. We need others to come alongside us as antenna repair people. This was a puzzling point for me. If I had enough faith, why wouldn't God just repair me himself? As an introvert, I didn't want to go to others for help.
In the end I would simply say, "That's just the way God has set things up." It reminds me of an old song. "God uses people, ordinary people. He uses people who are willing to do what he commands."
In my spiritual journey, there has often been a lag between my head and my feelings. When I talked to Dongell or Huffman or my mother or David Thompson, their advice and thoughts were not immediately satisfying. They had to seep in. They had to work their way into my spiritual gut.
In a way, Seamands' work marked the closing of my ten years of guilt. I was moving into a period of peace, one of the happiest periods of my life.
39. As an aside, I never took Don Joy for a class. His sex class was very popular and of course I was intrigued. But to sign up for it seemed a little desperate. :-)
Joy wrote a book called Bonding. As I recall, in it he argued that man was created androgynous, both male and female. So when God created Eve, he divided man into Adam and Eve, male and female. Marriage, then, was getting the band back together.
I heard that he had run it by the Old Testament faculty at Asbury and they had told him it didn't work exegetically. Interestingly, I was reminded of this theory while going through John Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve. He says something about the definition of "side" in Hebrew that sounded a little like Joy's theory, which I doubt Joy came up with himself.
40. The final practical course I took was "Servant as Proclaimer" with Don Demaray. It was a great class. The way he had it structured was great, and I found his book quite helpful.
We presented the parts of a sermon before presenting a whole sermon. I remember that, when I presented my introduction, I talked about how I had run the Lexington 5K a couple times in the spring without having run at all over the winter. I was able to do that when I was in my early twenties. The point of the introduction was that if you aren't training for your spiritual life, you will choke when the race suddenly comes upon you.
I got good marks on the intro from him. The evaluation side would always first involve positive feedback from him and the class. Then he would say, "And now the other side." I also remember him quite frequently saying at the beginning of class, "Let's pray that this will be the best class ever. Why not?" Of course I would always then think to myself. "They can't all be the best class! There have to be some less exciting ones. Otherwise we all would eventually explode!"
In typical idealistic Ken fashion, in those pre-pragmatist days, I switched my topic for the final sermon. Mistake. I was on a good trajectory. I think I tried to preach on the problem of evil. I agreed to go ahead of when I was originally scheduled, agreeing to switch with someone, and didn't have enough time to perfect it. Argh!
[1] I don't regret it, because I loved Lawson as a professor, but I missed Eugene Carpenter by a a year. He would move to Bethel in Mishawaka. I did have some interaction with him at Bethel. He tragically died on a lake a few years ago.
Carpenter taught Hebrew inductively from Genesis 1. I bought his tapes and listened to them over the summer after my first year at Asbury. Part of my familiarity with Genesis 1 in Hebrew comes from those tapes.
[2] I found him reading the quote annoying at the time, and I post this story knowing one possible response. I'll simply mention the genetic fallacy--whether something is true or not does not depend on its source.
[3] His earlier book, Healing for Damaged Emotions was also meaningful to me, although I thought the title was funny.
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35. I studied Hebrew with Lawson Stone my second year at Asbury. [1] He had arrived the same year I came as a student. I very much enjoyed him as a professor. He was fresh out of Yale, vibrant, and clearly a genius.
In those days he seemed excited about new ideas, very open-minded. I've already mentioned that he did a special seminar on Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too. He wanted to use the tools of EB in Hebrew.
I've always wondered if it was hard to teach in the shadow of your mentor, in this case Dennis Kinlaw. Kinlaw was a colossus of a man, a spiritual giant. He was also an Old Testament scholar. Steve Deneff often mentions him from the pulpit of College Wesleyan as someone who had a big spiritual impact on him as well.
Asbury College was blessed to have a great revival among its students in 1970. It was a normal chapel, but people started going to the altar. And they kept going. And they kept praying. And they stayed and they stayed. And people drove in from all over to join. It lasted for almost 8 days without interruption.
In a way, Asbury College, now University, lived under the shadow of that event for years. Other campuses did too. Even last year at IWU there was a chapel that a professor hoped would spark a spiritual revival. He got permission from the president for students to be excused if they stayed after it was over. I think many did stay for the better part of the day.
So you are always looking for it to happen again. Is this chapel going to start another revival? Wait, two students are staying after chapel to pray. Is this going to be the start of a new revival? I wonder if it is hard to move forward when you are always hoping to revisit the past.
I'm pretty sure that Lawson was open to some critical ideas in 1988 that Kinlaw would not have been. Kinlaw may have been a spiritual giant, but in my mind he was not as great of an Old Testament scholar. My first year as teaching fellow (summer 1990 I think) he did the faculty retreat for the seminary, and I distinctly remember him imploring the faculty to be careful with his baby. In my mind the baby was perhaps the best it had ever been.
These sorts of dynamics are very typical as an old guard passes things on to the new guard. I remember a large church pastor in Florida once reading a quote about how bad the youth of the day had become (Larry Freeman). [2] The quote was about how the younger generation was going to pot and how the world was getting worse and worse. Then he came to the punchline--the quote was from Plato in the 300s BC. Freeman's point--not always true because sometimes the world is spiraling into the abyss--is that the older generation often thinks the younger generation is going to pot.
We used Seow for Hebrew. When I was a teaching fellow, Stone also taught Akkadian and Aramaic. I took the Akkadian class, in part to help Lawson get the numbers. I went to the first day of Aramaic, but I felt like my Hebrew wasn't quite good enough for me not to get really confused. It remains a regret, although a good decision probably at the time.
36. I did take some practical courses at Asbury. Obviously the biblical courses are the ones that most resonated and stayed with me. They were the ones that got at the heart of my search to know the truth and what God required of me.
When I was called to ministry in college, my attention was initially more drawn to theology. My honors project engaged the Bible for sure but it was focused on theological questions. When I started out, I assumed I knew what the Bible taught. The undiscovered country was theology.
In seminary, the world of the Bible opened up to me. With shifts in my understanding, I had to go to ground zero in the Bible. In my circles, the Bible is the foundation. So while my interests at Central had heavily been theological, at Asbury they were now primarily biblical.
One piece of the puzzle was that I didn't want someone to be able to throw me into a faith crisis. I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know all the counter-arguments too. I wanted to face the beast of doubt and be prepared for anything someone might throw at me.
37. I took "Pastor as Leader." Aside from the professor introducing us to Ong, the main thing I remember is that he was big on "systems theory." I'm still not entirely sure what the big deal about systems theory is other than it views the church like a machine with inputs and outputs. No offence to the professor, but I'm pretty sure that the leadership courses that Keith Drury taught at IWU and that Bob Whitesel taught at Wesley Seminary were probably more helpful in general for doing the work of the ministry.
I won't give the name of my "Pastor as Teacher" professor. It is a deep irony to me that most of the Christian education teachers I have known throughout the years have been pretty boring. Keith Drury is one exception. I did learn some helpful things in the class though. I was reminded of the moral development theory of Kohlberg. I had learned it first with Hal Robbins at Central. I learned about the Kolb learning cycle. Knowing that people do not all learn the same way is a key insight if you are going to be a good teacher.
I had Don Boyd for "Pastor as Liturgist." Boyd had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in the Allegheny District of Pennsylvania. During the merger of the Wesleyan Methodists with the Pilgrims, they had pulled out and become their own group. Some New York Pilgrims had done the same.
Boyd was DS during all that mess. My sense is that both the Pilgrims and the Wesleyan Methodists who didn't go with the merger both thought the other side was too liberal. And also that it was moving toward the one world religion of the end times.
My grandfather Schenck and a couple of my uncles didn't merge either. One uncle told my dad at a campground on the way to Florida that he would pray for my Dad's soul if he went with the merger. We packed up and left the next morning before the other family got up. My dad would be a delegate at the merging conference at Anderson in 1968.
Boyd was teaching mostly United Methodists, and he had clearly come to love liturgy. Our final project was a worship file where other students graded us. I knew precious little about liturgy as someone who had grown up as a holiness Wesleyan. Let's just say I was annoyed to be graded down on my materials because of a United Methodist student's eyes.
I only finally let go of the file box in my move to Houghton. Some will know that I became a go-to person for a while in Marion whenever there was a desire for something a little more on the Book of Common Prayer side. In time, Constance Cherry and David Riggs on campus and Emily Vermilya at College Wesleyan became the masters in residence.
If I continue this series into my IWU days, I'll mention there that I was never a purist. Rather, I believe you can worship God from any number of styles of worship, from Hillsong to the mass. I stand-up for the legitimacy of liturgical worship over and against my background that saw it too "catholic" or full of "vain repetition." But I do not think it is the only way to worship and find the other side legitimate too.
38. I was able to take David Seamands for "Pastor as Care-Giver" before he retired. He was of course renowned. His book Healing of Memories would be deeply meaningful to me. [3] Seamands' lingo was always a little sappy to me, but the substance I found very helpful.
So he speaks of "damaged love receptors." The idea is that God is transmitting his love to you. The problem is that some of us have damaged love receptors. Our antenna are broken. God loves us. God has forgiven us, but we can't feel it.
This idea resonated with me in the extreme. My theology told me that God loved me. My theology told me that I was forgiven. But I couldn't feel anything from God most of the time.
Seamands suggested that we often need help from each other when this is the case. We need others to come alongside us as antenna repair people. This was a puzzling point for me. If I had enough faith, why wouldn't God just repair me himself? As an introvert, I didn't want to go to others for help.
In the end I would simply say, "That's just the way God has set things up." It reminds me of an old song. "God uses people, ordinary people. He uses people who are willing to do what he commands."
In my spiritual journey, there has often been a lag between my head and my feelings. When I talked to Dongell or Huffman or my mother or David Thompson, their advice and thoughts were not immediately satisfying. They had to seep in. They had to work their way into my spiritual gut.
In a way, Seamands' work marked the closing of my ten years of guilt. I was moving into a period of peace, one of the happiest periods of my life.
39. As an aside, I never took Don Joy for a class. His sex class was very popular and of course I was intrigued. But to sign up for it seemed a little desperate. :-)
Joy wrote a book called Bonding. As I recall, in it he argued that man was created androgynous, both male and female. So when God created Eve, he divided man into Adam and Eve, male and female. Marriage, then, was getting the band back together.
I heard that he had run it by the Old Testament faculty at Asbury and they had told him it didn't work exegetically. Interestingly, I was reminded of this theory while going through John Walton's The Lost World of Adam and Eve. He says something about the definition of "side" in Hebrew that sounded a little like Joy's theory, which I doubt Joy came up with himself.
40. The final practical course I took was "Servant as Proclaimer" with Don Demaray. It was a great class. The way he had it structured was great, and I found his book quite helpful.
We presented the parts of a sermon before presenting a whole sermon. I remember that, when I presented my introduction, I talked about how I had run the Lexington 5K a couple times in the spring without having run at all over the winter. I was able to do that when I was in my early twenties. The point of the introduction was that if you aren't training for your spiritual life, you will choke when the race suddenly comes upon you.
I got good marks on the intro from him. The evaluation side would always first involve positive feedback from him and the class. Then he would say, "And now the other side." I also remember him quite frequently saying at the beginning of class, "Let's pray that this will be the best class ever. Why not?" Of course I would always then think to myself. "They can't all be the best class! There have to be some less exciting ones. Otherwise we all would eventually explode!"
In typical idealistic Ken fashion, in those pre-pragmatist days, I switched my topic for the final sermon. Mistake. I was on a good trajectory. I think I tried to preach on the problem of evil. I agreed to go ahead of when I was originally scheduled, agreeing to switch with someone, and didn't have enough time to perfect it. Argh!
[1] I don't regret it, because I loved Lawson as a professor, but I missed Eugene Carpenter by a a year. He would move to Bethel in Mishawaka. I did have some interaction with him at Bethel. He tragically died on a lake a few years ago.
Carpenter taught Hebrew inductively from Genesis 1. I bought his tapes and listened to them over the summer after my first year at Asbury. Part of my familiarity with Genesis 1 in Hebrew comes from those tapes.
[2] I found him reading the quote annoying at the time, and I post this story knowing one possible response. I'll simply mention the genetic fallacy--whether something is true or not does not depend on its source.
[3] His earlier book, Healing for Damaged Emotions was also meaningful to me, although I thought the title was funny.
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