What It Looks Like When I Graduate From Seminary

Friday night Western held the graduation banquet, which was actually a lot of fun and brought to mind a lot of reminders about why we came to seminary in the first place. I'll put a post up later this week about that. Krista, our parents and my sister Dawn all joined us at the banquet and so did a lot of our friends from Western and their families, of course. And why the number 40 in this picture? Why, it's my class rank, of course. Goooooooo, number 40! Oh, fine. It was the number of our table. Goooooo number 40! In other news, the napkins at the restuarant were made to look like human hands. Creepy. Notice also the uncontrollable flame in front of Krista. Because she is HOT!

Here's the family, all celebrating together. No more class for Dad! Yay! The kids did an admirable job sitting through the ceremony. Here's the first picture of me with my Master's Hood. I liked it during the rehearsal when they kept referring to "The Hooding Place." It sounded creepy. It wasn't actually creepy, but that's how it sounded. The hood, unfortunately, was rented and had to be returned.


Baby M: "Dad, I am so glad you spent six years and many thousands of dollars for this great toy for me!  Yaaaaay, Dad!  It's attached to your head!"

Z: "Before I had a baby sister *I* would have been the one to yank those tassles."

Old couple in the background: "When I was younger, people had the proper respect for graduation tassles!  None of this letting babies touch them nonsense!"



Lastly, I told A she could take a picture of herself wearing my cap, but only if the tassle was on the right side of the cap, since she hasn't earned wearing it on the left yet. TAKE THAT you seven year old non-graduate! Don't worry, she is planning to defeat my school-going record. Go for it, kid!

Many thanks to all my family and friends who came to graduation and the party afterward. I love you guys and am thankful for all the hard work, understanding and patience you have given me over the years while I was working on this degree!

Sermon on the Mount class with Bill Mounce this week

I'm taking a class at Western Seminary this week... a three day look at Jesus' sermon on the mount by Bill Mounce. If you're interested in seeing the sort of thing we'll be discussing, my professor has free podcasts of the two year series he preached on the sermon on the mount online. That's right, two years. I know. Read it again. Two years. He will have to talk fast to fit it all into 2.5 days.

I'm looking forward to this class. We're going to take a pretty deep look at this key sermon of Christ. I'll try to give you some worthwhile tidbits from the class later this week. In the meantime, if the internet causes you to sin, cut it off. It's better to enter Heaven without wireless than keep it and go to Hell. Don't say I didn't warn you.

About to Get Owned in my Ecclesiastes class

Today in class I have to present a sermon on Ecclesiastes 10. My classmate in the previous class had three verses to cover and I have twenty. In addition, my commentary says things like, "This is the most difficult section of Hebrew in this book... we are simply uncertain what much of it means."

So I get to go in and do a lesson on it.

I am taking my newfound "Talk Guideline" with me: "Try Not To Say Anything Stupid." I am looking forward to the day when I can do this in every talk. Yeeha.

My talk (and indeed the chapter... at least I hope) hinges around the idea that small things matter. A few flies in the perfume gives the perfume a stench of death instead of a pleasing aroma. During my intro I'm talking about Edward Lorenz, chaos theory and the butterfly effect to show how small things matter. We'll also take a look at the geometry brain teaser below (completely stolen from a post on boingboing a while ago):



You guys are geniuses, I'm sure you can figure this out. It appears that the rearranging of the shapes above has created an alteration in the area they cover. How can this be?

Anyway, I'm off to go share this bad boy. Hopefully my professor doesn't surprise me with some hitherto unrealized curve ball from the Hebrew (or Akkadian or any of the many other languages he speaks).

If you all are interested I'll post the notes somewhere and you can take a look at them.

The Bible As Fiction (?)

I'm currently taking a class on Ecclesiastes at Western. The teachers are my Hebrew teacher and the pastor from my church. The class is split in two... during the first hour my Hebrew professor walks us through the Hebrew exegesis, and in the second hour my pastor talks about how to present these things to your congregation.

One of the interesting things that we talked about this week is that Ecclesiastes may not have been written by Solomon. It seems reasonably clear that there is a "frame narrator" (i.e. someone who wrote the first and last chunks of the book, which refer to the main voice of the book in the third person). There are a wide variety of opinions on this question, and there are respected evangelical voices on both the pro- and anti-Solomon authorship question.

My professor thinks it was probably Solomon, but he said that the Hebrew style and vocabulary is a good argument for it being written later. He thinks that maybe it was edited at a later day to make the language more accessible to a later audience. He admits that this is a dangerous assertion.

What interests me is that *if* Solomon is not the author and some later wisdom author wrote Ecclesiastes, then what we have here is a work of fiction. I don't think this impacts its canonicity or its truth. I believe that some fictional accounts have more truth in them than historical accounts. It is interesting to consider, though. If the genre of fiction is something that God chose to use in the scriptures (and I think there may be other places we could argue that this is the case) then it introduces an interesting point into questions about the role of fiction and story in spiritual instruction. Of course, Jesus told parables which could easily fit the definition of fiction (although some have argued that they were his actual life experiences), but they are short, quick little stories. Ecclesiastes is on another scale entirely.

Tremper Longman III has an interesting discussion of the "genre" of Ecclesiastes in his commentary (required for our class) in which he compares Ecclesiastes with ancient Akkadian "ficitonal autobiographies", meaning biographies in first person written about famous people by someone other than those famous people. It appears to fit pretty well.

So, anyway, I'm mulling all this over today. I know this wasn't a fully detailed explanation of all the reasoning behind why Solomon may not be the author of Ecclesiastes, but what I'm more interested in for now is this question... did God use fiction at all in the scriptures? What do you think?

Church History Puns

I just started a church history class tonight. My professor is young (meaning he is not ancient) and also one of those Ridiculously Intelligent Geniuses Who Cannot Be Touched (meaning he is smarter than me).

I kept noticing throughout his lecture today that there were these little puns thrown in every once in a while. But he never cracked a smile. I laughed once, but no one else did, so I was wondering... is this some sort of test? Is this how he entertains the other 98% of his brain while the 2% is lecturing?

I know, you think they are probably just those accidental puns that happen sometimes. The kind where you say "no pun intended" and everyone laughs and you say, "No, really." But c'mon. You have to see these puns to believe them. Here are my two favorites:

1) Talking about the earliest church that has been found (it's in a cave) he aid, "This was a rocky time for the church."

2) Talking about the similarities between pagan and Christian art in the first couple of centuries after Christ he said, "There are common artisitic practices that I would draw on."

So come on... tell me the truth. Do you think those puns are intentional or accidental?

What I'm Reading

Why am I still up? Because I'm reading for my theology class.

In addition to some systematic theology, I'm spending some time reading Graham Cole's "He Who Gives Life" which is interesting, Dever's "Nine Marks of a Healthy Church" which is (at least) easy to read. The best book we have to read for the class is Timothy Tennent's Theology in the Context of World Christianity, which examines western theological biases and blind spots by exploring systematic theological contributions from eastern and "southern" (Latin America and Africa) theologians. It's ridiculously fascinating and insightful.

I was disturbed to discover upon looking up the link for Tennent's book that he is, apparently, only twelve years old. Behold! Here is his picture:

I would prefer that a man of his insight and accomplishments look like this:

Note to self: Medals are classy. Buy some!