My Spring Semester Academic Learning Curve

So, back by popular demand...is a blogpost. I gotta get back to doing the things I love--and this is one of them. Despite the fact that this semester has been all over the place when it comes to my health and ability to get to class, I've found that I've actually learned a lot! This list is not hierarchical, but simply stream of consciousness:

1) Read the Gospels in Synoptic Parallels. It is pretty fascinating when you read the Gospels through the lens of what the author chose to include in their telling of God's amazing story! If you are super-analytical like me, you will LOVe dissecting all of the facets of what each Gospel includes and what it doesn't.

2) Read the Old Testament. Read the New Testament. Read them through the eyes of a Jew. Read them through the eyes of a Gentile. Read them through the knowledge of Christ as Messiah. If you wanna go deep, don't just rely on yourself to come up with some miraculous interpretation, but use the concordance notes in your Bible. Chances are that if you read the echoes deeply, you'll have an interpretation that is much more orthodox and mindblowing! Think of the example of the significance of the tearing of the curtain when Jesus died. You only get the deep significance of that when you realize what the curtain was there for in traditional Jewish life. There are many more crazy occurances like this if you read deeply and interpret intertexually.

3) It is ok for those of us who follow Jesus as Lord to study the Historical Jesus. We don't have to leave that to Bart Ehrman. In the words of the guy who redeemed the study for Christ followers said post-WWII that if we aren't focusing on who Jesus was and who He said that He was, then we create our own Jesus (and he was refering to folks like Hitler). Let's not make our own Jesus--lets find and be found by the REAL one.

4) The Prophets ROCK!!!! They are bedrock foundations for the New Testament (and for understanding the life of Israel). If the Church truly wants to be the Church, we gotta read these scary passages and IN THEIR CORRECT CONTEXTS!!! Read around Jeremiah 29:11 and you might pee in your pants!

5) This is an overall lesson from reading the OT with Ellen Davis: a blessing from the Bible is usually blessing and curse wrapped together. Be carefuly when opening these lovely presents!!!

6) The Protestant Reformation can make Protestant Christians nasty people. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and all of the other Reformers were pretty amazing (and you should read what they actually wrote instead of interpretting them through the denominations and doctrines that are named after them). However, be mindful that as someone said "the Protestant Reformation was an argument or a reaction." They weren't necessarily trying to turn over the whole he church. The interpretations of the Reformation have dramatically influenced how we treat others, how we think about God, etc. Remember this before you start to think that the Church started with Luther. Read Christians who existed before and outside of the Protestant Reformation. It might help critique our myopia.

7) Women were actually part of the Protestant Reformation and some of them were quite amazing! I think Katherine Von Bora is my favorite!

8) The Wisdom Literature is kind of layered: There is Proverbial Wisdom that upholds the status quo (though I'm told it is still not all bad...I'm still working on that one). Then there is Ecclessiastes/Qohelet who is your typical Ashevillian who tells you what is important (eat, drink be merry and throw in some spirituality b/c all else is vanity). Then there is Job who had crappy friends who tried to tell him proverbial, prosperity wisdom when God was trying to teach him about life with God. It is ok if your life follows this path. According to my super fab teachers: Beware! Job is always around the corner. Once God gets a hold on you, you may not get to go back to the simplicity of proverb world.

9) If you have never hung out with 600 page commentaries, you should!

10) Take Greek and Hebrew. I haven't taken them yet, but you realize how important they are when the scholars who are looking at the text are trying to figure out the significant meaning of prepositions: "Faith IN Christ" and "Faith OF Christ" are two highly differnet things. This would scare the crap out of Rev. Birdsong.

11) According to Ellen Davis, if you read something in the Bible that does not fit the commandments Jesus spoke about (love of God and love of neighbor) then you may need to move from a literal to a metaphorical interpretation.

12) This is my own interpretation of sorts but, when dealing with God, you must read with a lens toward justice and mercy, death and resurrection. As my dear friend Abraham Heschel suggests, read books like Amos and Hosea together as duel understandings of who God is. Read Jonah and Nahum together too.