Here's the previous breadcrumb.
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1. My second year at Asbury was my first full foray into Hebrew. I had dabbled a little into the letters and some vocbulary when I did my honors project at Central, but CWC had not offered Hebrew. Frankly, I think it was good for me to get my Greek a little more solidified before tackling another language -- although Greek and Hebrew are quite different. It was for this reason that I decided not to take Aramaic my first year as a Teaching Fellow. I didn't want to scramble my Hebrew.
That was Lawson Stone's first year at Asbury, fresh from Yale and a dissertation on Judges. The previous year, Eugene Carpenter had taught Hebrew inductively using Genesis 1. I bought his cassette tapes and had started memorizing his pronunciation.
I didn't feel too bad to miss Carpenter. Lawson was superb as a teacher. I would run into Carpenter again my first year teaching at IWU in 1997-98. He tried to recruit me to come teach at Bethel in Mishawaka. Perhaps I will tell that tale if I keep writing these memories. Unfortunately, he would drown while fishing on a lake in 2012. It always seemed strange to me but none of my business.
2. Lawson was enthusiastic his first year teaching, clearly a genius. I seem to recall he was enamored with Barth that year or two. He was full of ideas. In the spring he talked several of us to do a special Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew class. His goal was to integrate the inductive Bible study method with an original language exegesis course. Very exciting to be a part of that. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too.
We used Seow as a textbook, but he would try LaSor thereafter. LaSor taught Hebrew by starting with Esther 1:1 and proceding through the whole book. When I taught Hebrew as a Teaching Fellow, I used LaSor and loved it. That experience teaching Hebrew from the biblical text itself had a huge impact on me, an impact that has led me to teach biblical language inductively several times.
As someone who was just being exposed to more advanced biblical studies, I found Lawson eye-opening and open-minded. He seemed open to critical theories, although I always wondered if he lived under some peer-pressure from having Dennis Kinlaw and John Oswalt in the neighborhood. I was frankly surprised to find out how traditional Lawson had become in the 2000s, but perhaps I was the one who moved.
3. I also had Minor Prophets English Bible with David Thompson that spring. Thompson's style was quite different from David Bauer's. Bauer was authoritative and at least felt exhaustive. Thompson was tentative and modeled epistemic humility. One lesson I've learned in the "real world" is that confidence is extremly important if one wants to advance in this world. If there is one humble soul that is tentative and another confident soul that is typically wrong, the second often wins.
It was good to continue exercising these English Bible/Inductive Bible Study skills. I wouldn't have a good bird's eye sense of this method until I taught it online for Asbury a few years later. At the time, it was like a game. You learn how to play the game and don't necessarily ask why the game has the rules it has. I seem to recall that Ruth Ann Reese was a little puzzled by the method when she came to Asbury. She already had a PhD in hand, but what the heck was "particularization with recurrence of filial language"?
4. I would do an independent study with David Bauer that summer on Acts. I hadn't been able to take the class. It was a defining experience, I suspect. I had taken Acts with Ken Foutz at CWC, so I had made a pass at the material already. And Acts had featured significantly in my honors project on sanctification. Now I applied the English Bible study method to the book.
That was also when I reversed my understanding of the Spirit-fillings in Acts. With my honor's project, I had still taken the position that the Spirit-fillings in Acts were events of entire sanctification. But now that I was reading the text inductively and trying to go with the most likely interpretation given the evidence, it just didn't seem to be the case.
If we bracket tradition and listen to the text, nothing about Acts suggests that these baptisms in the Spirit were moments when the heart was cleansed of inbred sin. They seem to be gateway experiences. Chris Fisher, Ed Ross, and I edited a student newspaper called the Short Circuit my last year. I wrote up a piece on this topic. I think it grieved some of my family.
This experience with Bauer in Acts was probably far more future-shaping that I could imagine. It gave Dr. Bauer a chance to see my growing interpretive skills -- something that probably helped me become a Teaching Fellow. It also exposed me to Jimmy Dunn's Baptism in the Spirit, as well as Bob Lyon's classic Wesleyan article on the same subject. That would shape where I did my doctoral work.
5. I took three other courses that spring of 1989. One was Patristics with David Bundy. I was not drawn to the fathers the way Chris Bounds was, whom I think was also in that class. In fact, I quickly came to believe that the fathers were largely incompetent if you judge them by the standards of inductive Bible study. They were "credulous," "pre-modern" interpreters who saw their own theology in the text rather than hearing the text on its own terms.
When I went to Indiana Wesleyan University, I was pushed to develope a "second naivete" about them and the development of doctrine. The end was to have my cake and eat it too. I could read the Bible in context following the rules of inductive Bible study and yet affirm the theology they saw in the text as a fuller sense that was directed by the Holy Spirit in the development of doctrine. Postmodernism and the polyvalence of texts was helpful here.
6. A second was David Seamands' "Servant as Pastoral Care Giver." Here I was exposed to his books Healing for Damaged Emotions and The Healing of Memories. Although I made fun of the concept of "damaged emotions," I found his basic concept helpful. Like the movie Inside Out (and the approach Scott Makin takes in the Campus psychology course), our memories can be "damaged" in ways that inhibit us from thriving and functioning fully in life. You need to deal with those memories to fully move forward (a bit of Freud peeking through as well).
I believe I've already talked about his concept of "damaged love receptors" (also very cheesy). I came to wonder if my God "antennae" were damaged. Was God beaming his love to me but I couldn't receive the transmissions because my antennae were damaged? In the next few years, a sense of God's absence would plague me.
I believe it was also around this time that I was exposed to the God-concept video, one of which is God as sheriff -- "every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you." Another was the absent God, the give you what you want God, and perhaps the party God. Then the right one was the father of the Prodigal.
7. Finally, I took apologetics with Jerry Walls, my second class with him. My biggest takeaway from that experience was James Sire's The Universe Next Door. It was my first real exposure to the notion of a worldview. This book has continued to influence me over the years.
That's a lot. I came across in some bookstore a book that tried to condense an MDIV into one book. Obviously it only aimed to hit the highlights. I would love to write something like that too. On the bucket list.
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