The past couple of years, I’ve taken to celebrating Christmas with a bit of Athanasius, but I’ve done that twice in a row now, so here’s a bit of Anselm instead, taken from chapter three of book one of Cur Deus Homo.

Boso. Infidels ridiculing our simplicity charge upon us that we do injustice and dishonor to God when we affirm that he descended into the womb of a virgin, that he was born of woman, that he grew on the nourishment of milk and the food of men; and, passing over many other things which seem incompatible with Deity, that he endured fatigue, hunger, thirst, stripes and crucifixion among thieves.

Anselm.. We do no injustice or dishonor to God, but give him thanks with all the heart, praising and proclaiming the ineffable height of his compassion. For the more astonishing a thing it is and beyond expectation, that he has restored us from so great and deserved ills in which we were, to so great and unmerited blessings which we had forfeited; by so much the more has he shown his more exceeding love and tenderness towards us. For did they but carefully consider bow fitly in this way human redemption is secured, they would not ridicule our simplicity, but would rather join with us in praising the wise beneficence of God. For, as death came upon the human race by the disobedience of man, it was fitting that by man’s obedience life should be restored. And, as sin, the cause of our condemnation, had its origin from a woman, so ought the author of our righteousness and salvation to be born of a woman. And so also was it proper that the devil, who, being man’s tempter, had conquered him in eating of the tree, should be vanquished by man in the suffering of the tree which man bore. Many other things also, if we carefully examine them, give a certain indescribable beauty to our redemption as thus procured.

Merry Christmas!

I’ve decided I need to start keeping a record of memorable seminary, or seminary-related, moments… They’re just too good to not record. (In no particular order:)

1) The fientive squirrel. Fientive squirrels only run up certain branches on the tree of Hebrew binyanim. Ironically, while I remember the fientive squirrel really well (we’re still making jokes about it), I can’t remember which branches he runs up!

2) One of the ending bits from Dr. Horton’s lectures on covenant theology in Christian Mind last fall: “Theology exists so that believers may faithfully invoke God as He has revealed Himself in Christ and redemptive history, so that He may be invoked in trouble and praised in deliverance.”

3) The outside of Hebrew III was generally full of memorable moments as the class collectively tried to figure out how to wrap our minds around the mysteries of Hebrew syntax. There was also that time four of us studied together for our mid-term (on OT textual criticism), which included a section on the Hebrew names and order of the Old Testament books. This prompted a highly entertaining study session in the library’s atrium. I don’t remember everything that went on in exact detail, but I do remember that never have I laughed so hard in a study group.

4) At the end of last Fall term:

After I handed in my papers, I went to the bookstore hoping to finish copying some notes before I had an appointment with one of my professors, but I found it full of students and our Dean of Women Students, to whom I went over to talk. I was explaining that I find papers more stressful than exams because I’m the one in control of the paper, whereas there’s only so much you can do about an exam. She said that she’s the opposite: she prefers exams over papers for the exact same reason. This prompted the following exchange:

Me: Well, I just have a high view of Providence.
DWS: *laughs* Well, I just always had a high view of prayer, as in, “Please, Lord, help me know how to answer this question!”

5) A few weeks ago, five of us (four students + one wife) went to In’N'Out together. Because few such conversations can go on for long in most settings without touching on various aspects of Two Kingdom theology, we did eventually turn our attention to our indirect founder, J. Gresham Machen, who was declared to be “so totally punk rock.”

6) Christian Mind again:

Dr. Horton: *frowns at the clock* What time do we get out? 12:40?
*Class agrees*
Dr. Horton: I was born without the category of time. It just doesn’t work.
Student: Were you also born without the category of break?

7) Sitting outside while waiting for Hebrew to start only to see Dr. Horton pass by several times because he forgot the exams for his Doctrine of God class and then again because he forgot the course evaluations. One of the students asked him if he was out for his morning run, and he laughingly replied in the affirmative.

8) Three of us were standing in the hallway of Faculty Row needing to talk to Dr. Horton about our papers. Dr. Baugh walked by and made an inquiry. After the exchange, one of the students asked him about his fountain pens. Dr. Baugh replied, “18 years in post-secondary education and I’m known for fountain pens“.

9) Dr. Godfrey’s defence of Psalm-singing in Modern Church.

10) Dr. Estelle: “I’ve got you on belay.”

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.

No one on Slashdot has declared this to be satire, but I really just can’t accept that the article linked to in the above link (yay, meta?) isn’t satire! (Mostly I linked to the /. page rather than the article proper because the comments are encouraging. It’s always nice to see computer geeks standing up for books.)

From the article:

“When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster of Cushing and chief promoter of the bookless campus. “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’ [the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel in which books are banned]. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

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.)

Today I took my second exam (of four). I had been anticipating it being the worst of the three remaining, and I am hoping that tomorrow morning I will not have my judgement shown to have been in error. Tomorrow I do have two exams, though, and so I went hunting in The Valley of Vision for something appropriate. It’s been a very long week (though, at the same time, it was painfully short!), and the end of exam period is always a lot more exhausting than the beginning. This is the one I found (Grace in Trials, 171):

Father of Mercies, Hear me for Jesus’ sake. I am sinful even in my closest walk with thee; it is of thy mercy I died not long ago; Thy grace has given me in the cross by which thou hast reconciled thyself to me and me to thee, drawing me by thy great love, reckoning me as innocent in Christ though guilty in myself.

Giver of all graces, I look to thee for strength to maintain them in me, for it is hard to practise what I believe. Strengthen me against temptations. My heart is an unexhausted fountain of sin, a river of corruption since childhood days, flowing on in every pattern of behaviour; Thou hast disarmed me of the means in which I trusted, and I have no strength but in thee.

Thou alone canst hold back my evil ways, but without thy grace to sustain me I fall. Satan’s darts quickly inflame me, and the shield that should quench them easily drops from my hand: Empower me against his wiles and assaults. Keep me sensible of my weakness, and of my dependence upon thy strength. Let every trial teach me more of thy peace, more of thy love.

Thy Holy Spirit is given to increase thy graces, and I cannot preserve or improve them unless he works continually in me. May he confirm my trust in thy promised help, and let me walk humbly in dependence upon thee, for Jesus’ sake.

Not to compare my professors’ exams to Satan’s darts, but it’s not as though the editors of this excellent collection found a prayer from a Puritan who himself was in the midst of exam week!

Exams began this morning. My first one is tomorrow afternoon (Hebrew), and then the rest are all squished together over Monday (Baptist History) and Tuesday (MedRef and Greek). On the one hand, they will all be over quickly; on the other hand, they’re really squishy…

According to Estep, the second group of Anabaptists may be grouped as Biblicists in the sense that they held that the Word is over the Spirit, making them less subjective than their Inspirationist brethren. They placed the New Testament over the Old Testament. The New Testament was, for them, the final court of appeal, while the Old Testament was the prelude.

There are five basic Biblicist Anabaptist Groups:

1) The Swiss Brethren. These were originally students of Zwingli, but they became more radical than he was. They included Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock. Upon becoming convinced of the importance of believer’s only baptism, Grebel first baptised Blaurock who, in turn, baptised Grebel and the other. All three men were killed within a short time of becoming Anabaptists, and so they were never able to develop their theology.

2) Southern German Anabaptists. Notable individuals in this group are Balthasar Hubmaier and Michael Sattler. Like the Swiss Brethren, they, too, were killed shortly after becoming Anabaptists. Sattler is interesting, however, in that he spent time in Strasbourg where Bucer and Capito were. The three of them had discussions on Christian theology, and after Sattler was arrested, both Bucer and Capito wrote a letter to the magistrate testifying to Sattler’s Christian character. Sattler was also instrumental in the writing of the Schleitheim Confession.

3) Dutch and North German Mennonites. The leaders of the previous two groups were well-educated, but Menno Simons was not. At his ordination as a priest, he knew very little of the Bible and even had doubts about transubstantion. As a priest, he studied the Scriptures and his views began to change, but he did not yet consider himself to be a Christian (he described his life as empty and frivolous). In 1535 he witnessed the execution of 300 Anabaptists, which had a profound affect on him, and he became an Anabaptist. While Simons did have the time to develop his theology a bit, his lack of education is evident in it. He did hold to an unorthodox Christology (he held the celestial flesh view).

4) Hutterites. Jacob Hutter was an Austrian (from Tyrol). He developed a doctrine of communal living. The Hutterites were also known for their missionaries, 80% of which were martyred.

5) Pennsylvania Dutch/Amish. They also stand in the Biblicist tradition.

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…

I found this interesting: CT is asking if Christians overemphasise cultural renewal in light of Tim Challies’ criticisms of Tchividjian’s new book, Unfashionable.