Seminary Musings

This post has been percolating for a good few weeks now (reason number one I haven’t updated in eons), but I think I’ve finally figured out not only what to say, but how to say it.

When you enter an institution as one of two incoming female students, you get asked about that. A lot. Enough to be exasperating, really. And, rather unfairly, the question stops being asked long before you figure out what the answer to it is (or, at least, what a better answer than, “Oh, it’s fine, really,” is).

You see, one of the privileges of being one of a handful female seminarians on a campus dominated by male students training for pastoral ministry is actually quite simple, and, in fact, it’s not even limited to the female seminarians, but to any of the seminarians not training for pastoral ministry (please don’t shoot me for using the same phrase twice in one sentence): it’s getting to see the training process first-hand. It’s in getting to see what happens in the process of training for the ministry.

I mean, we freely admit that the eccentricity does not stop at the faculty level (and, for the record, I’ll take an eccentric prof over a “normal” one any day — if, in fact, there is such a thing; eight years of post-secondary education have taught me academia goes hand in hand with eccentricity). Personally, I think the students here are a pretty neat group, but that does not mean we’re free of varying degrees of general odd-ness by any stretch of the imagination! (And the most stressful times in the semester have a way of bringing that out even more.)

But, see, then there are the other moments. The ones in which the guys go into full-on pastoral mode? Those moments are really cool. Those’re the moments in which you can see that the guy you just/recently/not-all-that-long-ago had the most random and absurd discussion with, is, Lord willing, really part of the next generation of pastors.

And then there are still other moments. Those are the ones in which you hear an admonition in class from a professor about things that are necessary to think through for pastoral ministry, warnings about the ease with which people can slip into false teachings, and so forth. Those’re the moments where the importance of keeping not only your pastors in your prayers, but also your fellow seminarians. Those’re the moments in which you get a glimpse of the great responsibility being faced — that, despite what people might think, being a shepherd doesn’t mean lying around in a meadow all day while the sheep in your care are just grazing on their own, that there are times when the occasional wolf, isn’t just occasional. Those’re the moments in which James 3:1 really rings in your ears.

At the end of the day, that’s my favourite thing about seminary. It’s hearing the sermons and seeing the preacher he’ll become just as much as you hear the one who is. It’s seeing the seriousness with which training for ministry is done. It’s getting to pray for part of the next generation of pastors.

Home

I think California’s Gold Country was the first part of the state I fell in love with. It was at some point where I was old enough to appreciate Placerville and its surroundings. The next part was the Wine Country. There’s something about vineyards nestled into the countryside that just makes me smile.

When you drive past the same surroundings day in and day out, you don’t realise your attachment. Oh, to be sure, there are days when the sun hits just right, and it’s a beautifully clear day (a rarity in California’s valley in summer and fall), and then you’re sitting at just the right spot in your car to get a wonderful view of the snow-topped mountains. Or there’ll be a day that’s gloriously cloudy, with the most beautiful dark sky you’ve ever seen, and then the sun peeks through the clouds just enough to make the light just so, and the greenery in the fields surrounding you is highlighted in a way that makes you catch your breath at the sight of it. Those were the days when the commute from Woodland to Davis and back again were totally worth it.

But, for the most part, when you grow up in area like this, where the beauty is subtle, you tend not to realise how attached you are until you leave it. When you do leave, and you go to an area where the sight of cities that have grown together is a normal thing, and there aren’t quite so many holes between cities on the freeways, and even when there are holes, they aren’t very attractive holes… That’s the moment you start wishing to see a field of pretty much anything that’s actually been cultivated.

As it is, all summer long I’ve been amazed at how many trees Woodland has, at how beautiful the rice paddies really are; I haven’t grown tired of looking out the window when driving to Davis — I’m too busy trying desperately to memorise the view so that there’s something to remember when I’m once again stuck in the urban sprawl of SoCal.

This is my California. Farmland is aplenty, there are distinct seasons, and it’s amazing.

(HT: I was inspired by Tim Challies’ post today, which I completely understood.)

Morning Musings

Shortly, I will be leaving for my antepenultimate Hebrew class (thank you, Professor Allan for teaching our Latin class to think of antepenultimate events!). As an H.T. student, I only need to go through Hebrew III, so this really is my antepenultimate Hebrew class. It’s really weird to think that just a few months ago I was counting down the months until now just because I just wanted to be done with Hebrew, while now it’s not so much wanting to be done with Hebrew (which has gotten fun) as it is wanting to be done with school and go home.

Weirder still is the realisation that I’m nearly done with my first year here at Westminster. I continue to marvel at the way that I’m here despite always saying I’d never do grad school in SoCal (and I remembered that every time it showed even the slightest hint of getting into the upper-60s this past winter).

At our monthly church lunch this past Sunday, we were discussing with a new student the realisation that learning things here is a lot more subtle than it was as an undergrad. Take Christian Mind as an example. If you come in with no prior philosophical training, a lot of it is completely foreign and weird and takes time to sink in. And, at the time, it doesn’t really feel like you’ve learned all that much. But then second semester rolls around and you realise that you can recognise modernism and why it’s wrong because of those lectures on covenant epistemology. You realise that that whole archetypal/ectypal distinction actually matters and that you do use it outside of class (I mean, it’s not that you don’t know it’s important in CM, but you do so in a more abstract way). You realise that you’ve suddenly got a whole new set of categories with which you’re working and you didn’t even realise that you picked them up.

I was reading E. Y. Mullins’ Baptist Beliefs and realised that his basic underlying assumption was one of autonomy. I had to pause then as I realised that I had actually learned something in Christian Mind. Prior to that, I would have thought that something seemed off about what Mullins was saying, but I wouldn’t've known why it was coming across as a bit on the wonky side.

Finally, too, the missing pieces of the medieval church are in place. My undergrad courses concentrated pretty much solely on the political and cultural developments of the period, and so we learned about the intertwining of church and state, but the hows of religious thought were left out. In other words, this medievalist-in-training loved every one of her history courses because a) I was doing history again, yay!, and b) pre-industrial Europe was my primary emphasis and it just plain feels good to be back in pre-industrial Europe getting the remaining pieces of the picture.

And now here we are. Including today, I have three class days left. My last paper for the term is due a week from tomorrow. Then it’s three reading days and a week and a-half of finals before I’m done, and that will be that for the first year, and after a break our collective attention will turn to the fall and a new class schedule! (And I did, in the end, since it was necessary and all that, figure out how to fill in my missing units:

HT516 Theology of Sacraments (Fesko)
NT401 Greek II (Baugh)
CH701 Modern Age (Godfrey)
OT630 Intro to Aramaic and the Book of Daniel (Estelle)

Plus one directed research, translating Latin, which will be fun, because I miss doing Latin, even if I think it’s just this side of crazy to do three languages next term…

The Place In Between

The concept of living in between worlds takes on new meaning when you’re a student far from home. I suddenly discovered last semester that when I’m in Escondido, I talk about going home, and when I’m in Woodland, I do the same about returning to Escondido. At the same time, however, there are moments when neither feel like home. This is true for Woodland because I spend less time there in a year than I do in Escondido, and so it’s begun to feel more like a visit when I do go home. It’s true for Escondido because my family isn’t here, because I have a very strong dislike for the climate, and because it feels like an entirely different state (SoCal in no way resembles the California that I know and love, except, that is, for being hot in summer and the wildfires). There is, after all, a reason that I always said I would never, ever, ever go to grad school in Southern California… And yet, here I am, in a place that becomes a sort of home by sheer virtue of time spent in it and the fact that I have a church here that I love.

There are the little things I miss about my little corner of NorCal — driving by the vineyards surrounding the Satiety winery, the quirkiness of Davis, complaining about what I’m quite certain is a level of corruption in our county supervisors and city council as they do their best to drive downtown into the ground even as they build new shopping centres in the floodplains outside of town, living in a city that is less than half the size of Escondido, for that matter, living in a city laid out like a grid and not like a circle, redwoods, ag country, my cats, and people who realise that those coloured lines in the street are for more than making suggestions on where to drive…

Of course, when I’m at home, while I don’t in any way miss Escondido itself, I do miss people and places like the seminary library.

But all that to say that it really does drive home the fact that we as Christians are a pilgrim people and that this world as it is is not our true home. Instead, we look forward to the consummation of redemption, the resurrection, and the ushering in of the eternal state in the new heavens and earth. Our relationship to this world is not that of gnosticism; this present age is evil, but creation is not. We need not seek the redemption of culture, nor do we need to seek to “help” the ushering in of God’s kingdom. Instead, we live as good citizens wherever we may be, living out whatever our vocational callings might be while remembering the living hope that we have in Christ Jesus.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (I Peter 1:3-8)

“How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write”

From the WSJ — “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write” (HT: Tim Challies)

Back in Jr. High or so, I read a Star Trek: Voyager novel about the backstories of the lives of the main characters before they got stuck in the Delta Quadrant. One of them, I can’t remember now which, at one point ended up in a real bookstore, which is, of course, a rarity by that point since books are read on data PADDs rather than on print. I was horrified. Since then, the thought that hard-copy books might actually become obsolete has remained in the back of my mind as something to be dreaded.

Dad and I have frequently had this argument over the last few years — he thinks the State would save a lot of money by scanning all of its books and replacing its libraries with servers full of PDFs. Given that when I was an undergrad I easily spent 75% of my time on campus in the library (and, thus, most of my day was spent in the library), cue the horror.

After reading the above article, the dread hasn’t lessened. If anything, it’s increased in the face of one author’s vision of what a world dominated by e-books could be like. Musings on iPod-style theology that have come to prominence at various times over the years have nothing on this.

Consider this: Great Britain manages to support several major bookstore chains in addition to the plethora of independent stores scattered all over. The U.S. can barely cope with two (Borders is not doing well at all.). Now maybe Amazon is more prominent here than there, but Amazon.co.uk is far from a small thing. But clearly, we’re not exactly a nation of readers, and I don’t see that improving with the rise of e-books — if anything, we’ll be worse off.

No doubt, scanned PDFs are very useful. By now, I have several zipped archives of various collections of Reformation-era books. But at the same time, I still remember the fun I used to have wandering around Shields Library, combing through the shelves and stumbling on old books. I hate it when libraries give you print-outs of your due-date instead of stamping them — had UCD done that, I wouldn’t've known that the last time a particular book was borrowed was before I was born.

Hard copy books are wonderful things. I love the smell of libraries, and I have yet to find an end to the sheer fun of wandering through the stacks. I relish the start of research papers for just that very reason. One can also interact with the text in a way one can’t with a PDF. Yes, I know, both Preview and Adobe Reader allow for highlighting and notes, but it’s really not the same thing at all. In an article on reading I read, I think from Dr. Mohler, he said to own your books — write in them! Ask questions of the text. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen the same way on a computer screen. While research will no doubt be simplified in ways that the author of the WSJ article imagines, I can’t help but think that something will yet be lost in the process.

Perhaps there’s something about the way one thinks of these things — I know I’ve reached a point where my typed class notes are definitely of better quality than my handwritten ones. This is especially so if you’re nearing the end of the class period and the professor suddenly realises how much he still has to cover and so he starts talking faster than you can process to write properly. Typed bullet points work really well at that point — provided one can type fast enough. (Or they would’ve if I’d used my computer in Christian Mind, as it is, those notes are a bit of a mess.) But while I can do that with my notes no problem, reading is still in a category unto itself.

All that and the opening of the World Digital Library is still exciting — including 27 works from 8000 B.C. to 499 A.D!