Δοχα: Remembering the Professor Who Taught Me So Much In So Little Time

My alma mater’s president shared this update on Facebook this evening:

Good evening, Friends.

Moments ago we received word here in my office of the home-going of former VFCC President (1985-1996), Wesley Smith. His son, Wes, just called to let us know that his passing was quite sudden. Let’s join in prayer support for the entire family that God’s great grace and peace will be ministered to the entire Smith family at this challenging time.

My wife saw it first and told me about it. I am taken aback, not entirely from the surprise of Smith’s sudden passing, but from the amount of sadness I feel about it.  This wasn’t a man I was incredibly close to, or whose classes I eagerly signed up for every semester (I only ever took three classes with him). Several of my friends spent far more time with him than I, yet I find, in spite of these limited experiences, that I was deeply impacted by the time I spent with him, inside and outside of the classroom. Therefore, being a broken millenial (as my wife says), I feel the need to reflect on my time with this man and, of course, post about it on the internet.

I first took classes with Smith when I started Greek my sophomore year.  He had been hired in place of the last professor, and I had no idea what I was getting into.  Indeed, I did learn a good bit of Greek (when I paid attention), but I also had the wonderful privilege of listening to a man rich with wisdom, wit, and deep passion for teaching, storytelling, and for his faith.   Just about every five minutes of class he would remember some story from General Council, or from a church he pastored.  My favorite was the one where a woman came up to him and informed him that God had told her that he was to be married to a young woman who attended the church.  Too bad for her (and for God); he was already married!

The other class I took with Wesley Smith was on the Early Church, something I was gaining interest in with every new book or article I read on the subject.  In addition to more great stories, I learned about the tumultuous times the church was born into and suffered through, be it from outside influences or interior arguments (According to Smith, you could hardly sneeze in the early church without being called a heretic; our reading proved him right).  I learned about Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Ignatius of Antioch, and so many other amazing men (and women) who were instrumental in the foundation and building of the church.

Smith pushed us to think outside of our little A/G bubbles, even taking us to a Maundy Thursday service at Westminster Presbyterian Church, an experience I will never, ever forget.  The solemnity, the quiet reflection, the removal of the candle from the sanctuary as the bells tolled above us. The experience was nothing short of transcendental for me.

Beyond these short periods of time, I never got to know Smith much further. I would pass him on campus; he would smile, and I would return the favor.  The last thing that struck me about him, however, the one thing that will always stick out about him to me, was that he read four books a day.  Every single day.  Four books.  It became clear to me, when I learned this, where he obtained and added to his wealth of knowledge, and how he kept his mind sharp, even in his advanced years. This, accompanied by his cheerful repose, his deep passion, and love for God inspires me even now.

The world today has lost a profound and wonderful man, who worked to usher in the Kingdom of God with each minute of his day. His friends, his family, his students, all who knew him will (I hope) carry on the torch that he carried for so long. Today he entered Paradise, and I look forward to the day where Heaven and Earth are joined once more, where we can rejoice with the Lord together.  May his legacy continue until that day, and may I carry his torch.

The Incredible, Annoyingly Wide Spectrum of Inspiration

Inspiration means a lot of things to a lot of different people.  No Christian is going to disagree with you that the Bible is inspired, or that it is the word of God.  For the most part (probably with a few exceptions), this is a pretty settled argument.  Where the argument comes into play is when we try to determine just HOW inspired the Bible is, and the spectrum is pretty wide, though people do seem to tend toward the extremes, with very little folks falling in the middle. Things get even weirder when we begin to introduce words like infallible, meaning incapable of error (and even THAT word has its own variations in degree).  Here’s some examples:

1) The Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman Geisler, though for whatever reason lacking a specific article on inerrancy itself, works hard through logical argument and evidence from Scripture to demonstrate Scripture’s inerrancy.  The argument is summed up in this logical form:

God cannot err.

The Bible is the Word of God.

Therefore, the Bible cannot err.

When considering matters of science and history (as distinct from matters of faith, morals and theology), Geisler makes the claim that, because matters of science and history are inextricably interwoven with matters of faith, the Bible must be right in terms of history and science as well. 

2) A term that has been used interchangeably (and it is up for debate whether it is correct to do so) is infallibility. An infallibilist is someone who argues that the Bible is entirely incapable of error. Though for a long time I was under the impression that infallibility was more of a matter of faith and morals (as in the Bible is incapable of error on its theology and morals), it apparently has the capacity to extend far beyond that.  The Chicago Statement of Faith affirms infallibility with this definition.

Infallible signifies the quality of neither misleading
nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical
terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe, and
reliable rule and guide in all matters.

3)  Peter Enns still sticks to the inspiration of God’s word and to utilizing the term inerrancy to describe Scripture, but .  For Enns,The Bible is not “an abstract, otherworldly book, dropped out of heaven. It was connected to and therefore spoke to those ancient cultures….precisely because Christianity is a historical religion, God’s word reflects the various historical moments in which Scripture was written.”  For Enns, his book Inspiration and Incarnation ” ‘denies’ an inerrancy that says, for example, historical background information should play a marginal role, if any role, in coming to grips with what Scripture is; or that says that theological tension and diversity are unbecoming a text authored by God; or that the NT authors would never have used the OT in such oddly Jewish ways, since God is the author.”  Enns tries to understand Scripture in a dual relational way that molds the human and divine voices together, showing that, as God speaks to mankind, God must adjust Godself to speak to mankind.

4) Eric Seibert runs things similarly to Enns, using what he calls a “Christocentric hermeneutic” to interpret Scripture.  Enns and Seibert are colleagues; Enns even recently featured him in a few guests posts on his blog at Patheos. While I’ve  only just dived into Seibert’s book, I did have the opportunity to interview him for a paper I was doing while at VFCC.  Seibert’s hermeneutic pushes for Christians to understand everything in light of Jesus’ teachings and actions.   This leads to a reframing of many other portions of Scripture, particularly the OT, where Seibert feels there’s a conflict between the portrayed God of the OT and the God portrayed in Jesus.  While Seibert still adheres to what he calls a “general inspiration,” he doesn’t feel at home using the term inerrancy really.

Those are just a few snippets of how diverse the understanding of biblical inspiration is amongst Christians, and I’ve hardly covered half of it. This is just the tip of the iceberg that I’ve scratched with my pinky when coming to this debate.   However, once my brain is a little less tired of this subject, I’ll happily return to it.  Have a good one, folks!

Review: The College Student’s Introduction to Christology by William P. Loewe

I ought to know this stuff inside and out, truth be told.  I mean, I went to college to study this stuff! I have a big shiny degree that I paid over $80,000 dollars for that says in fancy letters “Theological Studies.” I should know a thing or two about Christology.

Alas, I do not, or did not, in this case. Make no mistake; VFCC tried to teach me this business, but, at the time, Facebook was more interesting. I regret this decision today, as I now find myself learning and re-learning everything I didn’t pay attention to or retain during my college years.  It’s not that I learned nothing; it’s just that I missed a great deal.

This is where The College Student’s Introduction to Christology comes in. I remember learning a few things about Christology, but not much. My theology classes were devoted more to things like the early church fathers, Aquinas’ Summa, Augustine’s Confessions, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, all of which were excellent in and of themselves.  However, theological topics tended to be summarized and taught in one class, rather than focused on over a period of time (such is the nature of overview courses), so I don’t recall much regarding this subject, other than perhaps a few things regarding what the Nicene Creed says about Jesus

TCSITC, however, has a different focus than I would have expected.  This is one of the books I violated my “no buying books” rule for, and I did so because, knowing that I wanted to read more regarding historical Jesus, I thought a primer would be quite useful. Written by a Catholic scholar, I expected a very Nicene Creed dedicated text with some talk about the historicity of Jesus being who the church says He is. What I got, however, was a very historical-critical text, which treats Jesus with what is known as a low, ascending approach (meaning they start with the person and work their way up to His divinity), giving as much credit to the first and second quests for the historical Jesus as possible, then tackling the case of Jesus’ resurrection, followed then by its meaning.

The book is no more than 214 pages in length, and I feel like I finally understand what people are talking about when it comes to quests for the historical Jesus, and what Jesus means for our world today. Loewe spells it out pretty simply, but doesn’t treat you like you’re some five-year-old asking really weird questions.  In many ways, he’s simply summarizing what modern scholarship has shaped Christology into, while still adding just a hint of his own flavor to it. It makes me happy as well that he doesn’t just treat the historical-critical method (if you want to know more, follow the link) as some modernist heresy, but as a useful tool that tells us much more about what Jesus might have actually said and done.

In the end, I definitely recommend this book, whether you’re interested in theology or not.  It makes sense of what comes across as a lot of academic gibberish, and is accessible to anyone who simply wants to know more.   It’s already taught me a lot!

(Note: no more reviews or posts this week.  Taking a break until New Years Eve).

Why I Read: Philosophy

(This is the last single genre post of the “Why I Read” series.  I haven’t hit every genre in existence, but this is only because I haven’t dedicated enough time to other areas to really speak on.  I may return to this series in the future if I develop a healthier interest in other areas of reading.)

I took my first philosophy course my second semester at VFCC.  I was not only a freshman, but the stereotypical freshman who asked tons of questions and expressed his poorly formed opinions to the chagrin of the upperclassmen sitting around me. I had done more than a little prerequisite reading in philosophy, so the class only lent to my curiosity when it came to such discourse, thus provoking new thoughts that clearly required expression.

I think most people take philosophy in college for two reasons:

1. They need to fill an elective.
2. They want to look smart.

Obviously, these aren’t good ideas; there’s better classes with which to fill electives (Bowling and Walking for the win!), and a good philosophy professor will make you realize just how little you really know, rather than make you look smart.  As Socrates said, “The first step to knowing everything is admitting you know nothing.”

All the same, there’s some good reasons to read up on philosophy:

1. Learn about how others think.  Like religious studies, philosophy looks very much at how people view the world and react thereto. Whether you look at the empiricist philosophers who think truth is derived from the senses, the rationalists, who derive truth from reason, or pragmatists, who derive truth from the end result, you begin to see that there’s a lot of ways to look at life much different from your own.
2. You learn about yourself and where your thought derives from.  Christians, for example, when reading Plato or Aristotle, will find many parallels between their theology and what these two men taught.  Two great theologians, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, derived much of their proofs for God’s existence and understanding of His character from Platonic and Aristotelian ideas.
3. Help to revive a dying tradition. Many people today blow philosophy off as either too confusing or out of touch with reality (Stephen Hawking once said that philosophy was dead because it paid no attention to scientific discovery). While the ivory towers of academia have done their job to isolate philosophic discourse from the rest of the world, there’s also disinterest on the world’s end, and that’s where we can change what’s being said or written about philosophy. Worldview is what influences philosophers to say, “This is true,” because it acts as their proof.  If we take interest in philosophy, philosophers will notice, and no longer will it seem so out of reach.

Here’s some good starting points for reading philosophy

1. The Universe Next Door by James W. Sire.  It’s from a Christian perspective, but it details philosophical worldviews pretty objectively, albeit with a slant toward Christian theism as the ideal worldview.  This was my first exposure to philosophy, and put me ahead of the game for theological study.
   
   
2. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Kaufmann. Excellent translator with a pretty clear explanation of things within existentialist philosophy.
3. The Great Conversation by Norman Malchert.  This was my philosophy textbook in college, but Malchert does a good job breaking things down pretty easily.
4. The philosophers themselves. Modern translations serve to better make them understandable, but some introductions by the authors can affect your ability to determine for yourself what you actually think they’re saying and whether or not you agree.

If you’re still not convinced that philosophy is for you, check out Philosophy Bro. He makes different philosophical discussions and ideas easier to understand.  Some adult language.

Why I Read: The Mystics

My second semester at VFCC, there was a series of chapels which dealt with the section of Christian theology known as apologetics.  I attended this elective series pretty faithfully, and enjoyed every single one of them.  One in particular, however, really altered my thinking and, subsequently, my reading.

A young man by the name of Trevor Gordon Hall taught us that day about Christian mysticism, something of which I, in all my nineteen years of being an Assemblies of God congregant, had never heard and was immediately suspicious.  Whenever I heard the term mysticism, the individual using it often meant “new-age.” However, I learned that day that a mystic is any person attempting to encounter God.  Starting with that definition, I didn’t just become a mystic that day, but I had been one for some time.

From there, Trevor spoke of the great mystics such as Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa of Avila, and Thomas Merton.  He talked about different practices, such as contemplation and lectio divina.  I felt swept up in a world where people had not only encountered God, but also sought to continue that encounter every day of their lives.  Their finite attempts to comprehend and articulate their experiences always fell short of the mark, but it left me with near certainty that they had experienced something far beyond what little I knew of God.

Why you should check out some mystics (and some mystics you should check out):

1) Your walk with God, though far more than just an individual one, is very much an interior walk. Christianity is very much a communal religion (hence the communion of saints), but we all have our own faith to work out.  Reading the mystics will help you find a deeper exploration of God.

2) It’s part of your heritage as a Christian. Whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, all of us have a connection to these men and women who sought to encounter God as part of our faith.  Looking at them and asking, “How did you come to know God?” will yield some very surprising and beautiful answers.

3) Change the way you go about your day.  Many of the practices outlined by the mystics require not only a hunger for the living God, but also time commitment and focus.  Setting aside time for meditation, or praying an Orthodox rope, requires discipline.

So go check out the mystics! Here’s some books I found useful:

1. The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism by Bernard McGinn.
2. New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton (heck, ANY of his books would be great!)
3. The Interior Life by St. Theresa of Avila
4. Christian Meditation by James Farley
5. Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius of Loyola

Why I Read Theology

When I was in my freshman year at VFCC, I shared an apartment with six other young men, two of whom were upperclassmen. One of them, whose name was Matt, turned out to be one of the most influential individuals in my life to date, and he was only in it for a semester, really (though we did, and still do, hang out once in awhile).  Anyway, Matt and I were shooting the breeze one day about predestination (yes, people do that at Christian colleges), and he asked me what my major was.  At the time, it was youth ministry, and upon hearing that, Matt told me, “Dude, you need to be studying theology.”  Not long after that day, I changed my major, and in doing so found what I believe to be my calling (ironically, I volunteer as a youth leader at Middletown Church of God now).

For the next seven semesters, I always had some theology book in my bag, whether for a class or for my own reading.  I still can’t get enough of theology, and being out of school made me hunger all the more for it, which led to me exploring all manner of disciplines under the theological umbrella, from the liberals to the conservatives (theologians tend to move on the liberal-conservative spectrum and get annoyed when you fall somewhere in the middle or off center), and my exploration is just beginning. (Wolfhart Pannenberg is on my Christmas list). Theology has brought me to new understandings of what it means to be a Christian and who/what God actually is.

Aside from the above nerd-out, here’s the reasons I read theology.

1) It’s pretty much required. Deep, deep exploration of one’s faith, the men and women who started it, and the men and women who carried on from their is something I think every Christian NEEDS to do as they grow and mature, and I don’t mean picking up a Christian inspirational book every couple months just to make yourself feel better. Many Christians never make it much beyond books like Wild at Heart, Battlefield of the Mind, or I Kissed Dating Goodbye, if they’re younger.  While it helped me majorly to go to a Christian college, innumerable writings, videos, podcasts, and audio clips exist out there that do more than just make Christians feel good about being Christian, but that challenge them and help them mature by giving them solid food to consume, rather than just baby food.  Some men and women claim to have only read the Bible, and I’d like to think that that’s fine, but there’s a lot of folks who read the same Bible I do who came/come to vastly different conclusions every day, some that can be pretty destructive.  You don’t have to go read Barth’s Church Dogmatics right away or anything, but pursuing a faith that goes beyond your emotions is a must.

2) Every theologian views Scripture through a lens carved by environment and study. For some, this is a bad thing, and often becomes the scapegoat for disunity and argument in the church, but I’ve come to see it as a good thing within reason.  A good friend of mine is of the Reformed tradition in a big way, and I can tell you right now we don’t see eye to eye on many things, but the fact that we call on the same God each day unites us, and I’m proud to say we each were a part of each others weddings (he was one of my groomsman; I DJed his). The fact that we don’t meet up on some of the particulars doesn’t matter; he’s still my brother in Christ.  We’re just looking at the same Source of light from different angles.  Do I think every theologian is looking at the same Source of light as I am? Well, not always. I tend to disagree sharply with some of the liberal theologians, or the members of the Jesus Seminar, but would I still honor them for their work? Absolutely.  They didn’t come to their conclusions in a vacuum, and neither did I.  Respect and honor amongst theologians is one of the things that makes theology great.  It’s when it’s not there that we have problems.

3) On the bitter side of this relationship, I made my bed with theology and have to lie in it.  Don’t get me wrong, I love this stuff, but sometimes, I think to myself, “What is WRONG with me? Why on earth did I pick this as a career path?”  The answer: I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.  Seriously, there’s just so much wonderfulness about plumbing the depths of Scripture, the Early Church, and the traditions birthed from it that I couldn’t imagine a better place for me to explore and homebrew my faith.  I am a theology nerd to the core.

So next time you’re at Barnes and Noble, check out the theology section (skip over Joel Osteen’s books) and see if you can’t find a Bonhoeffer, an NT Wright, a Schweitzer or even St. Augustine.  It’s good for you.  Might be a little painful, but you’ll love it.  I promise.