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Summarise this!

Saturday, 12 November, 2005

Study, I feel, is not going very well. Yesterday I woke up at 10:30 and spent most of my time wading through Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels articles on form criticism, literary criticism, redaction criticism and tradition criticism. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels is a formidable tome; even though it is packed full of very helpful information, the detail is slightly more in-depth than, say, The Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology. Articles shorter than 8 pages are rare. I wrote a summary on the above types of criticism but it was like pulling teeth. Part of it, I surmise, was my natural negative reaction to some of the ideologies and methodologies: form and tradition criticism utilise the hermeneutic of suspicion (everything is out unless there's a good reason to include it) which is an indication of a very low view of Scripture and the doctrine of inspiration; and literary criticism seems to pull out the worst trends from university English departments to apply them to the Bible (tell me why poststructuralism and deconstruction have any relevance to Biblical studies!)

I need to get faster at writing these summary papers; I have three exams next week and so far I'm just stuck in the depths of New Testament 1. My waking hours have shifted to the 2 am-midday block which may not be entirely healthy but I was doing that sort of thing back when I was writing my thesis. My brain is more likely to be in study mode at around midnight and unfortunately I couldn't make myself do anything in the afternoon, no matter how hard I tried. And then I got depressed in the evening to the point where it was almost overwhelming and so crashed in front of the TV and watched The Simpsons, Legally Blonde 2 in fast forward and the end of Maid in Manhattan (which, quite frankly, didn't make me want to see the beginning of it).

I couldn't sleep so I took myself off to the spare room where my reading wouldn't upset my sleeping husband. I read through the whole of Romans and appreciated it a lot more though I don't think I'm at the point where I can write about it. I also spent most of the small hours of the morning reading parts of the New Bible Commentary, 21st Century Edition which is an enormously helpful concise book and just the thing I probably should have bought at the beginning of the year or earlier. (We didn't because we already had the old New Bible Commentary but really the 21st Century Edition is better.) I slept a bit but kept waking up at every train, plane and screech of tyres. (Maybe I should shift my waking hours to the accord with the transportation timetable.)

On a positive note, yesterday Ben went in to college to have lunch and buy PTC notes for Church History 1. (I can't help him out with that subject because I don't do it but I did pull a bunch of things off the internet for him—a timeline, someone's lecture notes from a previous year, past exam papers from which I came up with a list of topics.) “Can you check the mailbox?” I asked. He brought me back my History of Christian Mission essay and I was gratified to see that I had gotten a very decent mark. Mike Raiter's a fussy marker—pointed out that my quote about Calvin's attitude towards the Turks was too long for a 2,000-word essay. Nevertheless, he did say,

This is an excellent piece of work. One of its great strengths is your frequent recourse to the primary documents. Very well written. Your comments on Calvin's attitudes towards the Turks provides an important balance to your argument. We must be careful not to overtstate the case for the mission-mindedness of the Reformers.

Yay me!

(Got to study, got to study, got to study ...)

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