Mr. Locke’s Classroom

I started reading Augustine’s Confessions today, in conjunction with a chapter “about” him (and his theological positions) in my Church History textbook.  I find myself growing more and more perplexed, being pulled in two separate directions.

On one hand, when I read what others have admiringly written about him, and when I read summaries and explanations of his doctrine and highly influential contributions to western theology, I dislike him intensely and am resentful at the direction in which he led the church.

And yet, when I read him in his own words, I can’t help but recognize a kindred spirit.  I’m struck by his painstaking authenticity, his earnest search for understanding and relevance, and at his keen insight into humanity, psychology, education, and culture.  To be sure, I see early traces of doctrines he developed in later writings (original sin, depravity, salvation by grace alone, etc.) and I still disagree with him.  It makes me wonder how much my affinity toward Augustine has to do with his personability as a writer, and some shared circumstances — in addition to being a seeker-of-truth, he was a teacher, a rhetorician, student of literature, and devoted father to his son.

I’m also amazed by the intensity of Augustine’s need to write — his corpus is immense — and while Confessions is probably not the very first piece of world literature with an autobiographical bent, it is universally recognized as the father of that literary genre.  That means he was willing to experiment in new styles of writing.  It’s written in the first person, ostensibly directed to God, but he readily acknowledges that much of what he says is for the benefit of “my readers.”  Mind that he wrote this while still relatively unknown, and in his early 30’s.  Delusions of grandeur, self-confidence, or just a desire to share?  In addition to a stack of books, he also wrote instructional “how to” manuals, soapbox sermons, and back-and-forth conversational letters to both contemporaries and heretics alike.

Any of that sound familiar?  Augustine fits the profile of a typical blogger.  I think he would have loved the interactivity of blogs, too, although he probably would have been a frequent violator of the “comments should be shorter than the original post” rule of blog etiquette.

I don’t know if I’ll ever quite come to terms with Augustine.  In fact, the more I’ve been studying the “heresies” of the early church, the more I come to identify theologically with Pelagianism — the exact heresy Augustine spent the last years of his life combating.  Still, he’s no longer a voice I can just ignore or dismiss out of hand.  In addition to inspiring me to write this post today, Augustine’s Confessions was the inspiration behind the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a profound influence on my own thinking and educational/social philosophy.  Somehow, I don’t think Rousseau could have agreed with Augustinian doctrine that much either.  But perhaps, like me, he was enthralled by the writer and the writings, if not by his conclusions.  Come to think of it, Rousseau would have made an excellent blogger, too…

No classes this week — it’s a tradition called “Reading Week” here at Princeton Theological Seminary.  I think at my undergraduate college, we called it “fall break,” but the implication here seems to be, “No break for you! [insert whip crack here] Time to catch up on all the reading!” Hmmm…guess I could also look at it as mercy and grace, on the flip side.

I feel guilty admitting this, but even while I’m only taking ten credit hours this semester (eight in the “long term” and two in the “Jan term”) I’m still way behind in my reading.  I could blame the whole “having a family thing” or having been “out of college for ten years,” or even “blogging when I should be reading” but none of that changes the fact that I’m behind.  So, time to lay excuses aside and buckle down with some books this week.  Here’s what I’m reading:

• St. Augustine’s Confessions – The week after Reading Week, I have a paper due in my Early & Medieval Christian History class analyzing his contribution to medieval thought.  Personally, I’m more interested in his contribution (with this particular book) to the Confessional Autobiographical genre of literature, of which this is apparently the “first” (at least in the western canon).  Oh, and that’s him up there in the picture, “reading” too.
• On Christian Teaching — This one’s also by Augustine, but for my Christian Education & Formation Class.  Apparently the good Saint dabbled in a little bit of everything, including my favorite field.  So far, I’ve appreciated some of what he’s said (he’s an early proponent of age-appropriate pedagogy), but he often frustrates me with his highly dualistic Neo-Platonism (an overrated philosophy, IMHO).
• The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, Walter Brueggemann — Also for my Ed & Formation class.  The jury’s still out on this one, but so far (I’m on chapter one) he has an interesting premise:  That in teaching Old Testament, we should study not just the scriptures themselves, but also the methods by which they were taught as they evolved over centuries in ancient Israel.
• Reclaiming Our Roots:  An Inclusive Introduction to Church History, Mark Ellingsen.  Another for my church history class, this one is exactly what the title indicates — a reconsideration of the contributions of women, Africans, Asians, and other “non-Western” voices to the development of the early and medieval church.
• Documents of the Christian Church, selected and edited by Henry Bettenson.  If you think the presidential debates were contentious, try reading some of the early “church fathers” and “heretics” in their own words, debating through council after council.  I tend to side more with the heretics, but no big surprise there.  It is interesting figuring out “which” heresies I identify with more.  I’m definitely not Gnostic, but I could get right on board with the Ebionites and the Sabellianists.
• On the Incarnation of the Word, St. Athanasius of Alexandria.  This one is for my Patristic Greek Readings class.  We’re reading it in the original Greek, and translating as we go.  I’d comment on the theology, but right now I’m doing pretty good just to eek out a basic meaning, sentence by painstaking sentence.
• Constructing Local Theologies, Robert J. Schreiter.  Another for my Ed & Formation class — this guy reminds me a lot of Paulo Freire, and incorporates a lot of sociology, cultural anthropology, progressive education, and liberation theology into his writing.  It’s perhaps the first approach to theology and education that I’ve been able to get really excited about.
• Brew Like a Monk, Stan Hieronymus.  Ok, ok, so this one’s not “officially” for a class, but I do find significant overlap with my church history class.  Anyhow, it focuses on the Belgian Trappist Monasteries — their history, evolution, philosophy, and brewing practices.  It may not be for a grade, but it also might be one of the most relevant ones to my future pursuits, so I’m keeping it on the list this week.

Anyhow, think that’s enough to keep me busy?  I’ve also got a field trip on Wednesday to The Cloisters art museum in NYC, and a choir concert Friday evening.  Ok — enough blog-crastination.  I’m off to read…

First of all, I’m not asking you to do my homework for me–just to add some “real world” perspective to it. One of the criticisms of seminary is that much of what we learn is in theoretical isolation, and often not practical or relevant to actual practice. And yes, I asked my professor’s permission before doing this.

In my Christian Education and Formation class, a big part of our grade this semester is responding to case studies of potential “church situations.” I’ve already written my initial response to this case study (and you can read it here) but I’m more interested in hearing how you would respond to this situation — especially those of you who are pastors, educators, or have ever served in a church leadership capacity.

You have recently been called as pastor of a local church in Atlanta. The search committee was articularly interested in your interest in Christian education and formation as they think that you will help bring young families into the church. This urban, struggling church has approximately 200 members on the rolls and averages 75 members in worship on most Sundays. The average age of the congregation is 62.5 years of age. Though there are a handful of families with school-aged children, several of them leave and join churches with large youth programs as soon as their kids enter middle school. At the previous meeting of the congregation’s governing board, you promised to lead a discussion at the beginning of the next meeting about envisioning new directions for the church’s programs for children and youth. After you provide a dazzling ten minute Augustinian mini-lecture on the central importance of love in the church’s ministry of education and formation, several people raise their hands to express concerns or disagreement. Here are a few of the more forceful comments:

“That all sounds, nice, pastor; but it is too abstract. We have kids all around us who live in broken homes and are tempted by drugs, sex, and crime. We need a plan that deals with the hard realities that the kids in this city are facing every day.”

“My neighbors up the street go to Grace Church. They have a huge youth group. Every other weekend they go on a ski trip or a trip to the beach. My daughter has been begging me to let her join that youth group because it is so much more fun than ours. What are you going to do to make this church fun for the kids?”

“Atlanta has become such a diverse place culturally and religiously. We have so many languages and ethnicities here now and more are moving in all the time. The city now has as many Muslims, Buddhists, Bahai, and Wiccans as Lutherans or Jews. My family is religiously mixed and I know we aren’t alone in that. It would be irresponsible for us to ignore this reality. We have to prepare the children of this church to function as good neighbors in this increasingly diverse religious situation in which we live.”

After providing sufficient time for everyone to share their views on the proper aims of education and formation for that congregation, the attention turns back to you. Everyone wants to know what you will say and how you propose to move forward.

My “developed response” is due this Friday, and then a final response by the end of the semester.  If I use any part of your responses, I’ll make sure to ask your permission and attribute your words to you in the paper.  I’m pretty excited about the idea of citing “actual pastoral practitioners” alongside of professional authors and academic theologians.  It’s Open-Source, of course…

I’m not a big fan of anonymity on the internet. Real conversations are best when they happen between real people. It’s too easy to be a jerk when you don’t have to stand by and own your words.

On the other hand, I’m also not a big fan of censorship. It’s too heavy-handed and too easy to abuse when you have the ability to make someone’s words just disappear.

So, I came up with a blog comments policy that might be, if not a *good* solution, at least an amusing one:

1. If you post comments to my blog, please make sure to include your real name and your email address. The only one who will ever see your email address is me, and I promise not to disclose it or use it for anything except to contact you, if needed.
2. If you don’t follow the above, the first time I’ll probably just nicely ask you to do so, and direct you to this policy.
3. Failing that, I will take any future comments you make anonymously, and run them through the Pirate Speak text translator, and edit them to appear that way on the blog. Hence, your comments will still stand, and be mostly intelligible, but they’ll probably also sound pretty ridiculous.
4. If you just *have* to post anonymously, you could save me the trouble by running them through the translator yourself before posting : )

There is one possible exception to this: I have a Presbyterian minister-friend who sometimes posts anonymously to various blogs she frequents, because she’s afraid that if her church ever came across her comments, they’d use them against her. While this is certainly a sad statement of affairs for the church, I can understand her need for protection. If that’s your case, I still want to know who you are before engaging in conversation with you, so if you have a similar reason for posting anonymously, just shoot a quick email to mstrlocke at gmail dot com and I won’t pirate-speak your comment.

Carry on then. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum.

I have a paper due in my Education and Formation class this Friday — as described in the syllabus, it’s a five page “reflective essay about key elements, components, people, events that have contributed most to [my] education and formation as a Christian.”

This is tricky on a couple of levels.  First, I don’t like to distinguish between “Christian” education and education of any other sort.  If I consider myself to be a Christian, then all my educational experiences are part of my education as a Christian, and hence “Christian Education” (for me, at least).  Second, and even more problematic, I consider *all* experiences to be part of my education, whether intentionally so or not.  Life is an educational process.  I’d go so far as to say that in most lives, the vast majority of education happens outside the classroom, unscripted.  Even for scholars.  I’m heavily influenced by Rousseau on this one.

Back to the paper:  It’s my first grad-school paper, so I’m probably stressing over it unduly.  Unlike most papers I’ll do in the next few years, this one doesn’t seem to require any research, citations, comparative analysis (at least none outside my own brain).  It’s “reflective” in nature — as a blogger, I should be pretty good at that, right?

Still, it’s my first grad-school paper.  I have to perform.  When I finished summer Greek with a 98% average, other seminary students told me not to get used to it, that my grades would surely drop in the school year.  That annoyed me, and made me want to prove them wrong.  Here’s my first chance.  Of course, I’m also supposed to “not care about my grades” because I’m here for the education, not the grades.  Welcome to my hypocrisy.  

Really, since it’s due in less than 48 hours, what I *really* should be doing is writing the paper now, not “writing about writing” the paper.  But such is the meta-cognition of the self-obsessed blogger… Oh, and in that vein, I’m a “wikifier,” too — so I’m writing it on my wiki for the world to see (and potentially contribute, although that raises some interesting and dangerous academic questions).  Anyhow, here’s the first paragraph.  I did the English Major thing and decided to start with a metaphor.  Let me know what you think.  Suggestions for direction are welcome, too…

There was never any question if, whether, or which of the evening leftovers would go into the stew pot. In my six-person family of origin, everything that wasn’t eaten for dinner got absorbed into the big stewpot in the freezer, waiting to be thawed, reheated, and reclaimed at the end of the week. The only real question was how this particular addition would affect the taste and character of the stew when the pot was full. Thinking of this dubious family tradition provides an apt enough metaphor for my education as a Christian through the years — mixed up and messy, formed in community, experimental, more concerned with input than outcome, while still intensely practical and sustainable at the end of the day (or week, rather).

In my Church History class, we have recently moved from the early era of the persecuted church into the era of the church-in-bed-with-the-empire.  This also happens to be the era of creeds.  I get the sense that for many, this represents merely a bunch of names, dates, and outcomes to memorize.  Ancient History.  But for me, this chunk of history has been particularly agonizing, highly relevant, and a poignant reminder that in a few short years, I have to stand in front of my presbytery and affirm that I “sincerely receive and adopt” these creeds as “authentic and reliable expositions of what scripture leads us to believe and do.”

First and foremost among these ecumenical shin-digs is the Council of Nicaea (CE 325).  Seems the whole thing started from an argument between a priest, Arius, and a bishop, Alexander.  Among the things that Arius believed:

• “The Word” (aka Jesus, aka the Son, aka logos) wasn’t around from the beginning of time (whatever one construes “time” to be, of course) but was “created” by God (aka Jehovah, aka the Father, Creator, etc.).
• Therefore, God outranks Jesus in the heavenly hierarchy, conveniently preserving the monotheism argument.  But complicating the logical one…
• God and Jesus are made of different stuff.  Similar stuff, unidentifiable stuff, but decidedly different stuff.
• God is constant, but word/son/Jesus is subject to change (including suffering).

Apply the converse to most of these arguments, and you have Alexander’s POV.  Arius gathered a following, wrote some texts and even some hymns (maybe something like “Of the Father’s love begotten / ere the worlds began to be after being baptized in Galilee…”) and then everyone got their panties all in a wad.

I know that I’m supposed to agree with Alexander, and most people I’ve encountered seem to do that pretty readily, sometimes without much thought.  The two main arguments (at least from what I could find online and in talking to other students) go something like this:

• The argument of Alexander was the stronger of the two theologically and logically, and thus prevailed.

From what I can tell, there were intelligent arguments by intelligent men on both sides of the issue, and both firmly supported by different scripture passages.  I guess we could assume that [sarcasm on] Arius was just an idiot who couldn’t read, in which case it *really* baffles me that the best theological minds of the time spent half a century going back and forth before finally resolving the dispute.  Maybe we’re just a lot smarter than they were. [sarcasm off]

• Alexander’s side eventually DID prevail.  This proves God was somehow guiding the process and wouldn’t have allowed the church to wander down a heretical path.

Except that it did.  For at least fifty years after the council of Nicaea, until the next big council in 381, the church and its leaders continued to go back and forth on the issue.  And unless Arius was just some highly original genius, who’s to say that generations of Christians in the 300 years before the Nicene Creed hadn’t come to similar conclusions? (my history text indicates that Arius’ views reflected the historical tradition held by a large number of Eastern Christians).  Does that mean that God allows the church to remain in heresy, but only for 50 years?  Or is it 300?  Or…well, maybe we’re in a heresy phase right now?

I don’t know that I actually agree with Arius.  Or Alexander.  Actually, the voice that most resonates most with me in this debate is that of the Roman Emporor at the time, the famed Constantine.  He wrote a letter to both knuckleheads, saying (among other things):

It was wrong in the first instance to propose such questions as these, or to reply to them when propounded.  For those points of discussion which are enjoined by the authority of no law, but rather suggested by the contentious spirit which is fostered by misused leisure, even though they may be intended merely as an intellectual exercise, ought certainly to be confined to the region of our own thoughts, and not hastily produced in the popular assemblies, nor unadvisedly entrusted to the general ear.  For how very few are there able either accurately to explain subjects so sublime and abstruse in their nature?

Translation:  You both have waaaaay too much time on your hands.  You should try farming, or fighting barbarians sometime.  Then see how important your consubstantiation is.  Constantine continues (and I add some emphasis)…

The cause of your difference has not been any of the leading doctrines or precepts of the divine law, nor has any new heresy respecting the worship of God arisen among you.  You are in truth of one and the same judgment: you may therefore well join in communion and fellowship.  For as long as you continue to contend about these small and very insignificant questions, it is not fitting that so large a portion of God’s people should be under the direction of your judgment, since you are thus divided between yourselves…(Eusebius, Life of Constantine, II, 69-71)

But Constantine was just an emperor.  What could he know? He wasn’t even baptized until he was on his deathbed, the heathen.  So, they ignored him of course, not because he didn’t make sense, but (my opinion here) because they each wanted to be RIGHT! And we still do.  Unfortunately for Arius, democracy can be a real bitch, so he got outvoted at the council.  And excommunicated.  And then he was reinstated, and Alexander was excommunicated.  And then Arius was excommunicated again.  You get the idea…

Meanwhile, the church kept having councils, and kept on saying to those with whom they disagreed, “we’re taking our toys and going home.  You can’t play with us anymore.  Nanny, nanny, boo, boo.”  Unity and uniformity gained, diversity and freedom lost.

When I go before my Committee for Preparation for ministry, I wonder if I can take a third option?  Can I say, in reference to the creeds, I don’t care?  Affirm, not affirm, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another.  Let me simply do the things that Jesus did, rather than say the things his followers said, 300 years later.

The illegal immigrant wandering through the desert without water doesn’t really give a rip whether God and Jesus are made out of the same substance.  But Jesus tells me to give him something to drink.  To the teenager whose father died in a car accident, it is utterly insignificant whether Jesus was created by God or always existed.  But Jesus tells me to comfort him. What is ministry?  What is a minister?

Perhaps we have too long supposed that what we believe informs who we are and what we do.  Maybe it’s the other way around.  Maybe what we do informs who we are and what we believe.  Perhaps what ties me to my Presbyterian brothers and sisters is not the historic creeds we all profess nearly as much as it is the shared relationships and shared ministry I have found among them.

I hope they’ll still let me in…

Today was the first day of classes for the fall semester — marking the beginning of my first (junior) year as a seminary student at Princeton Theological Seminary.  Since I last posted about my fall schedule, I’ve made a few changes:  I dropped my Old Testament class (placed out of it, actually, since I had an OT course as an undergraduate at Oral Roberts), and added a one-credit class called Readings in Patristic Greek.  This takes my course load down to a meager 10 credit hours this semester — which is a good thing, because I also got a work-study job with the Seminary’s Institute for Youth Ministry doing web-development type stuff.

Grady has started school, too — he’s attending the Dupree Center (it’s the seminary sponsored pre-school) two half-days a week, and seems to be having a great time with his classmates and his teacher, Mr. Allan.  His birthday was on his second day of school, so he took muffins to class and they had a party.  He also likes looking through the school microsope at their collection of shellacked bugs (so I taught him how to say “entomologist”).

Not to be outdone, Abby is starting, too…starting to crawl.  Everywhere.  She has a funny sort of crawl, too that almost seems like it involves more work than doing it the regular way  (I hope that’s not indicative of future personality type).

And amidst it all, Amy has been the glue that holds all of us together as we walk, run, and crawl in new directions.  She’s also discovered a new love for the ocean and the beach, as somehow we managed to spend three of the past four weekends before classes started at various beaches on the New Jersey shore.

Looking backwards at our departure from Texas, our journey to the East Coast, and the past few months here in New Jersey, I’m glad we decided to come early for Summer Greek.  Today was a day of beginnings for most students in my class, but for me (and for my family, too, I think) it feels comfortable.  Familiar.  I know that we’re still a whole lot closer to the “beginning” than to the middle or end, and there will still be plenty of unfamiliar situations, experiences, and even trials to come, but for now things are good.  I’m confident that these years will be a special time for our family — one that we’ll look back on nostalgically in lifetimes to come.

(to see the rest of the pictures from this set, click here)