Work, brain, work!
Saturday, 09 April, 2005
Term 1 at Moore College is finally at a close and I am exhausted. Yesterday was a half-day of prayer which Moore holds regularly (though I'm not sure if it's once a semester or once a term). Ben and I were a bit late due to 8 am traffic and our frustrating inability to find an all-day parking spot in the usual places. Everyone met together in DBK to hear two short talks from Paul Barnett, sing some songs and then pray together as a big group. There was one point where Michael Jensen asked us for prayer points to do with the college and other things and I put up my hand and asked that we pray for people who struggle with singleness. I also wanted them to pray for couples who have infertility however I wondered if people would think I am infertile if I requested that.
We broke for morning tea and then went to our chaplaincy groups to pray for the various mission teams going out to different places around Australia (and one to Bangkok) in the first week of May. Philip Kern, our chaplain, got us to pray by going around the circle and then in pairs. We spent a significant portion of time praying for our mission to Campsie (where we will be working, among other things, with a Mandarin-speaking congregation [and only one of us speaks sort of half-decent Mandarin]). About halfway through we took a break because we'd been sitting down for too long. Hans, upon learning that Philip had never ever played Fruit Salad, exercised his youth group leadership skills by mobilising the entire chaplaincy group to play in the Room C foyer. I'm sure Philip was quite bemused by the whole thing.
We returned to praying again for the rest of the mission teams and then it was time for individual prayer. However, Philip mentioned that he was involved in marking the first year primary document assignment (he was one of two markers). So of course all the first years in the chaplaincy group hung around to talk to him about it. I won't tell you what I got for it but I will tell you that I was pretty satisfied with the result—I thought it was fair (even though the marker disagreed with my assertion, taken from Meier, that Josephus saw John the Baptist as being a harmless philosopher). I stuck around to listen to Philip because it was just really cool to hear him talk about stuff—about paring down language (getting rid of all unnecessary adjectives because, as someone said, they are the weakest part of language ... Philip saying all this made me think of Virginia Woolf's writing style which I have long admired), about good essayists who have their own voice (like George Orwell and John Updike) and about N.T. Wright whom, Philip views, is extremely dangerous because the way he writes is so persuasive however he makes assertions which contradict the Bible and will not accept criticism on his work because, as Wright says, “I haven't written about that yet.”
Ben and I lunched with some of first year, chatted with some other students and then hit the library to work on our respective essays (he's doing the one about the female characters in Mark; I'm doing the one about Jesus' self-understanding in Mark). It seemed like everyone was in the library, frantically researching and photocopying for this essay. It made me glad that I had started looking at secondary sources earlier so I could quietly slip out of the frenzy. I reviewed my notes, half-hearted looked a book by François Dreyfus, realised that I didn't really need to read it because I already thought that Jesus claims to be God in Mark and I knew why I thought that, went downstairs because the air conditioning was driving me crazy, and sat at the big mahogany table in the serial room listening to Ben, Pete and Stew try to work on their essays.
The library was closing at 5 and we left to meet Richard who was up for the day doing AFES things. Tim and Katrina let us use their lounge room and we sat around talking about how things were going before Rich prayed for us and had to leave. Then Ben and I battled rush hour traffic north to have dinner with friends that we hadn't seen since they got married about a year ago. I was still coughing and so the wife gave me some Lemsip cough medicine that she had bought for herself, saying, “You should have this. As soon as I bought it, I stopped coughing. So maybe if you have it, you'll stop coughing too!” It must have worked; I haven't coughed at all today.
But that's probably because I slept for most of today and ate lunch at 3 pm while watching a taped Law and Order: SVU. I'm trying to do some work on my essay but my brain refuses to engage. I think I've just about read enough stuff anyway and I know roughly my plan of attack. Originally I was going to structure the whole thing around titles but to do so would embroil myself in half a dozen separate debates to do with “Son of God”, “Son of Man”, “Suffering Servant”, “ Messiah” and, worst of all, the “Messianic Secret” motif (and I really don't have time to read Wrede's ground-breaking work on the subject). I talked with a guy in third or fourth year (I can never remember what year people are in) who used to go to one of my old churches and he advised not following the title line. I suggested that I structure it around what Jesus said, what Jesus did, what other people said about him, etc. and he said that might be a good way to go so I'm going to pursue that line. I think I could easily fall into the trap of just not looking at the Bible in answering this question, when really the most important thing is to look at the Bible. So I will.
That said, there's one more book I want to finish reading before writing which is called, The Christology of Mark's Gospel (Jack Dean Kingsbury). I am very pleased that his first chapter deals with the messianic secret, Wrede and all the scholars since then (well, up to 1983, anyway) because it means I can use him as a footnote. I think I am getting way too bogged down in the details though; I should just speed-read him and not worry so much about stuff like corrective christology (the idea that Mark used the title “Son of Man” in his gospel to correct/modify “Son of God”) and other things which are only indirectly related to the question.
However, after talking to Hans who was talking to Gibbo (our Greek lecturer), I've realised that I'm going to have say something early on in my essay about how I'm reading Mark—ie. that Mark was Peter's “interpreter”; that he wrote down Peter's witness faithfully; that he recorded the actions and events surrounding Jesus faithfully; that the words which Mark reports are Jesus' words are actually Jesus' words, and not words that Mark has put into Jesus' mouth. Pete was amazed that we still have to make such assertions, being Moore College students, but I understand that it's right to position yourself and state your assumptions up front. In the world of scholarly theological research, not everyone is an evangelical Christian and, indeed, not everyone understands the term “evangelical” in the same way.
In a way, I find this frustrating because I want to assert that there is one truth and one way of reading the Bible. But I can also see that I am a product of my milieu—that most of the Bible teaching that I have ever been fed has come from Sydney evangelicals—and that Sydney evangelicalism, and its particular emphasis on the death, resurrection and atoning work of Jesus, has grown out of particular reactions to the secular thinking of the day (John Woodhouse was talking about this the other week). I never thought of Sydney evangelicalism as being reactionary but then it does make sense. It explains a lot about our attitudes to Pentecostalism, for example, but that's a whole other can of worms.
Anyway, today is the day of rest and I have just picked up a stack of food from my mum who was holding a function at her place this afternoon and who cannot possibly eat it all. So perhaps I should ditch the book and go spend the evening watching some lovely movie or other ...
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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