Year 4 at IWU (2000-2001)

0. 1997, Year of the Hire
1. 1997-1998 First Year Schenck
2. 1998-1999 Married Schenck
3. 1999-2000 Go New Testament

1. The fall of 2000 was the Gore-Bush election. I wasn't really happy with either alternative. Voting was at Center School. Somehow I ended up in line with John Drury and Mandy Hontz, who were now dating in their senior year. I couldn't decide who to vote for even into the booth. I thought maybe I would vote for my wife Angie, but she wasn't on the ballot.

Finally I said to myself, "Ah, what harm can a president do?" And I let my childhood defaults take over.

In those days the Division seniors always did a prank during finals week. (with Bonita looking the other way) In Bud's last year as Chair, they put sod in his office (with a layer to protect the carpet). Another year they put their faces in place of the faces in the hall of fame in the hallway. There's a picture of this somewhere but I haven't found it yet. John Drury's year they camped out overnight in the conference room, remaking it into a dorm room. I remember now that the conference room then was immediately to the left when you came in the suite (a detail to fix on my office drawing--I believe a renovation later moved it to a room outside the north entrance to the suite by Russ and my offices).

2. In 2001 McConn chapel was finally torn down. And in 2001 the Williams Prayer Chapel was built. Wilbur Williams took a dollar salary a year and donated the rest toward the building of this chapel (where, incidentally, he and Ardelia will be buried). In those days, Wilbur owned a large number of the houses around IWU and so was blessed to be able to give significantly to IWU and to students. More on his trips to the Holy Land in a later post.

They didn't want the chapel built too big so that it didn't become a place for weddings and such but so that it would remain a place for prayer. Ardelia would retire from the art department in 2002. I found a liturgy for morning prayer that I led in September 2001, I presume in the new prayer chapel.

My friend Neil Evans from England would laugh at the thought that I might have been a regular at morning prayer in Durham. But I had gained a little knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican liturgy while I was there. I suspect that that service in 2001 made me somewhat of a go-to person for such liturgies in the early part of that decade. David Riggs would far surpass it with Coram Deo, but I believe I gave him starting materials for the liturgy. I ran the first Ash Wednesday service in the Williams chapel, although Constance Cherry and Emily Vermilya would far surpass it. And when College Wesleyan decided it wanted to have a "cathedral" venue in 2002, after Bud declined, I ran it for over ten years.

2001 was also the year that they significantly expanded the student center. Those were years that Brendan Bowen and Todd Voss were major players on campus, Brendan with buildings and Todd with student life. We used to gripe about Voss keeping the students too busy with co-curricular activities when they were here to get an education. In retrospect, I think they came as much or more for the campus life as for the classes, although relationships with faculty are the most important for student success, it would seem.

IMO, Voss was part of the secret sauce of those years. He's doing a spectacular job now as president of Southern Wesleyan, where he has finally been able to (almost) build his dream dorm. I say almost because he always dreamed of faculty living in dorms with students.

3. We had two new faculty come on board officially in 2000. Steve Horst had been adjuncting philosophy and counseling for some time. A Houghton grad, we finally had someone full time who actually knew philosophy! His wife Cherie adjuncted some too in those days.

David Smith also came to teach New Testament. I had been in some classes with Dave at Asbury (Dr. Wang's Romans, Dr. Lyon's Textual Criticism), but of course married and single students at Asbury didn't necessarily interact much. I ran into him again in 1996 in Durham as he was considering doing his doctoral work there. I believe I suggested his name to the Division.

4. I continued teaching my normal fare of large philosophy and New Testament survey classes. I taught Honors College sections in both the fall and spring. That fall was David Riggs' first semester at IWU also as the Director of the Honors College.

I see that Lisa Toland was in the fall section of Honors New Testament, and Alicia (Rasley) Myers was in the spring. Lisa would go on to teach in the Honors College, and Alicia is now quite a prominent New Testament scholar. Russ Gunsalus likes to point out that she was a youth ministries major.

I taught at Notre Dame again in the spring--another chance to get season tickets for football! It was about a two hour trip each way and I had it timed well. I could teach a 7:50 class, scramble to South Bend to teach, then get back in time for a class in the evening. Of course I felt like I was going to fall over during class up there.

5. I see I presented a paper on sola fide at the second Fall Religion Colloquium. Before long we would come to have them in both fall and spring.

I have long believed that the Wesleyan tradition stands somewhat apart from the high Protestant tradition of Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition. This is because Methodism arose from the Anglican tradition, not from European Protestantism. So just as the Anglican tradition has sometimes considered itself a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism, so I have considered Wesleyanism.

(For a brief moment while I was at the seminary, I even explored a publishing sub-group of Pickwick with a few scholars. Its name was to be Via Media and, in my mind, its agenda would have been to promote this sort of approach on a scholarly level. However, one tension was that my compatriots were largely post-liberal with a post-modern flavor, while my vision was for a post-conservative movement with a more critical realist flavor.)

Accordingly, most of the solas, in my opinion, do not apply in a pure form to the Wesleyan tradition. Prima scriptura ("Scripture first") is more Wesleyan than sola scriptura because of the quadrilateral. In my colloquium paper that fall, I presented the fact that works have always been important for the Wesleyan tradition in a way that has made the high Protestants nervous or outraged. Yet the new perspective on Paul has affirmed our understanding of the Bible. Recent work on grace has also made it clear that grace was not unconditional in a Mediterranean context (cf. John Barclay). David Riggs and Chris Bounds worked with students exploring such contours of grace in the early church.

I had the idea of an online journal that would preserve the papers from these colloquia, Quadrilateral. We actually took out some space on the indwes server and I did publish the first edition from the papers that fall. Unfortunately, as with so many of my ideas, it did not endure.

When the student center expansion was finished, we would shift to having these in one of the banquet rooms. Students would get their trays in the cafeteria and then come over to eat while professors presented their papers. It was quite a positive part of the life of the Religion and Philosophy Division in those days.

6. This would be my last year as Director of the Graduate Ministry program. David Wright would take over as Graduate Director the following year and put it online. This move saved the program.

I did some online work for the program that year, however. I wrote an online course for the program in the fall of 2000, one of the first. It was a course on Biblical Hermeneutics (MIN-511). One of the pieces I wrote for that course was "From Pre-Modern to Post-Modern Interpretation of the Bible." I was also supposed to write a New Testament Theology class online as well, although I have no memory of it. :-)

I revised the Research Methodology course. This was another case of me doing something that was really out of my field of expertise. I could do biblical research, but I knew precious little about quantitative and qualitative research of a more substantial, statistical nature.

I also ended up teaching the Capstone Project course a number of times. I had students like Jay Height and Matt Trexler. A funny memory is that Matt forgot to give his MA project a title. We always read the titles of their projects at the consecration service. So I made up one for him that he heard for the first time as he was coming to the platform. I made it particularly complicated. :-)

7. Jerry Pattengale has always been heavily involved with scholarship at IWU. I believe it was he who started the Honors College in 98. He would eventually become the major liaison between the Green Foundation and IWU. He is currently the only University Professor at IWU, appointed in 2014. This category, I think, is brilliant and full of untapped potential.

I've always said that Jerry was the best agent you didn't have to pay for. He always promotes everyone, and he has connections in the publishing and scholarly world on the highest levels. A brief word to him once and I was on Wikipedia. :-)

In those days he put me in charge of Visiting Scholars. He frankly did most of the relational work, and Aleta Tippey ran all the logistics. All I really did was pick up a few people from the airport.

8. I had my second scholarly article published that year in the Journal of Biblical Literature ("A Celebration of the Enthroned Son"). I gave two papers at SBL in Nashville. One was an extension of my work on the afterlife for the Q section. In those days, I would often submit two proposals in hope of one of them getting on the schedule. This year both hit.

Up until this year at IWU, faculty have been allotted $800 of faculty development money to go to conferences and such each year. But if you were presenting, you could get an additional $750. So I was always highly motivated to present, not only for the advancement of myself as a scholar, but so all my expenses would be covered. :-)

The other paper would prove to be more significant. Ronald Williamson's benchmark work on Hebrews and Philo came out in 1970. I had the idea of getting a paper into the Philo section under the idea of a thirty year evaluation of his work. The piece would be published the next year in the Studia Philonica Annual. It would get me into a niche at the intersection of Hebrews and Philo, a niche that got me onto the SBL docket even this fall, 2019.

9. The summer of 2001 my family took a landmark trip to St. Andrews for a conference on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I presented on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the afterlife.

The whole family would go, including Sophie, who had been born in September 2000. Both sets of parents went too. It was a comedy of errors as we went from London to St. Andrews, then to Paris afterward. The amount of luggage was immense. Tom and Sophie broke out with a mild case of chicken pox the day we came home. Sorry for anyone who broke out a week later after arriving back in the US.

I was quite dejected in those days for not having a breakthrough moment as a scholar. When I was in my doctoral program, I dreamed of being at a research university as a scholar like those I had encountered in England and Germany. Wouldn't it be great to teach at a place like Durham or Cambridge or the University of Chicago, I thought?

At that second St. Andrews conference I connected again with Carey Newman, who was at Westminster John Knox at that time. He took a chance on me and got me a contract with WJK to write, Understanding the Book of Hebrews, which became a reality two years later. It is probably the most important book of my scholarly career, because it established me as an authority on Hebrews.