Year's End

First year of college is over, and I survived - further more, I enjoyed the experience (most of it, anyway). And I passed all my subjects.

I have found myself this year doing the three things I least wanted to do upon my finishing grade 12 - living in a city, going to university and public speaking. Now I find myself living in Brisbane (part-time, at least) and going to college at St Lucia in order to become a better preacher. Like I tell people, don't say God doesn't have a sense of humour. More surprising than doing these three things is that I actually enjoy what I'm doing.

One of the features of starting with about 30 other people is that one gets to make a few new friends. The opportunity to pick the lecturer's brains over different issues I've struggled with for years has been wonderful, and the chance to dive more deeply into the word than I've had the chance to before has been wonderful.

College has also been very humbling - daily I rediscover my ignorance, and often, especially in Greek and Hebrew, another mountain of knowledge to climb. But at least I'm not alone. And the learning has been good in giving me a bigger framework to put the different books of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, together.

The outlook of my college is also rather different from what I've encountered in the past. Last year during an Old Testament course I was doing I was told that the Documentary Hypothesis was fair dinkum and that the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) was a late cobbling together of various stories (and invented stories) of Israel's past and as such was in no way historically reliable (even on the off chance some of it might be true). I'd come across the Documentary Hypothesis (JEPD) about seven years before (and had ended up discounting it), but there was something disconcerting in the way it was presented at that time - perhaps the overlay of post-modern thought and the declaration by the teacher that doubt was essential, certainty unobtainable, and the Bible unreliable (and indeed, often counter-productive to what we were trying to do in the church). I know, of course, that such people exist in my church, especially among the ordained, in large numbers, but until you actually brush up against them at forums like these you can forget that they exist and that they teach such things for the church's benefit.

Contrast to QTC - I was informed again and again that the Bible is the Word of God, inerrant and reliable, in both Old and New Testaments. The most stunning difference lay in the Pentateuch (my Hebrew/OT lecturer did his PhD under Gordon Wenham, hence part of the reason). One lecture in particular (which actually had no value toward our assessment) saw him go over why the Documentary Hypothesis (Wellhausen) was in conflict with the other tool of the time (the history of religion school of Gunkel) were in fundamental conflict with each other (they cut the Pentateuch up into little bits, but the trouble was they made the cuts in all different places). Starting in the 1970's, the Emperor's clothes started to be seen for what they were, and more and more scholars looked at the unity of the Pentateuch, and its literary style and purpose. It should be noted that although the Documentary Hypothesis has been largely overthrown, its language still has to be retained because it was in fashion for so long, and also that there is no clear replacement for it. For Evangelicals the obvious answer is Mosaic authorship, but there are many models for this, too.

Academic standards are also pretty high. This has been a bit of a shock to the system, not having had homework since 1996 (and at least then it was all in English) but at least I chose to do it this time around. The certificate level stuff I did towards lay preacher accreditation and the hours of listening to lectures/sermons by Don Carson and others on mp3 helped along the way.

Alround Good times. Hope I can keep it up in 2011.