As my first week of classes wraps up, I understand what how rock feels after dynamite has done it's work. My mind is being blown.
I look around at all these other "top-of-the-class" students around me, and I feel a mutual humility, like a group of self-perceived geniuses learning we are actually hamsters. In all our previous efforts, we thought we were drinking the nectar of the gods, when we were lapping at water bottles in wire cages.
So I approach the year with a dogged determination to learn. I intend to discern, and catch my blind spots by running into walls. With that hopeful, humbled approach to being a back-boned interpreter, I share a few quotes from my profs from the first week. Enjoy.
Jon Laansma (Hermeneutics & N.T. Exegesis prof)
"Presuppostions are not a bad thing; we have to have them. We just need to get better ones."
"The goal of this course is not to kill your passion for Scripture and make it a frog for you to dissect on a table. The goal is the wisdom of God and the edification of the church."
"The way of knowing something must conform to the thing itself."
"Despite modernism's assertions, ontology precedes epistemology. We exist (in relationship) and thus we know." (parentheses mine)
Nicholas Perrin (N.T. Theology)
"I value good writing. To say that content is more important than form is bad Christology, I think."
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It has occurred to me that no one else in my program sees him/herself as a "hamster" and that I may be, for the first time, in the middle of a very intelligent pack.
ReplyDeleteI also sense in myself a desire to cast off the intellectual strutting I previously participated in. Answering every question the professor asks was only one way of boasting. I could also phrase an intelligent proposition that I had derived in the form of a question, and then posit it to the teacher as if I were a humble layman seeking truth, when the the marquee I erected above my head is flashing "Look at me. How intelligent am I to have figured this out?"
I want to just sit quietly and listen to smarter guys tell me what's what. Of course I can't do that, I have to interact, to discern, to piece what they're saying into my theological grid. But I finally see the stupidity of trying to prove to an expert how much I (an amateur) know.
P.S. The answer to the only question asked in this comment is "Wildly."