The apartment is quiet right now. Clint went out for a walk and I'm about to start my Hebrew assignment on pual, hiphil and hithpael verb stems. We had a lovely dinner tonight, slow cooker beef stew (mmm...) with biscuits and salad. The table is cleared now and my red and pink and orange and yellow birthday roses back in their place on it. I'm sipping some cold jasmine tea with milk as I work.
I've had a bit of a slow start to the semester and somehow managed to get pretty far behind in my reading. Maybe it's the subject matter. One of our New Testament texts is NT Wright's The New Testament and the People of God and the first 100 pages or so where Wright explains his methodology have reminded me a lot of Cedarville and the biblical education I absorbed there. Unfortunately, although I really did appreciate my Cedarville education overall, I was frustrated in some of the Bible classes. Something seemed to be missing. I'm really glad that Regent is filling in some of those gaps but it has been a bit hard for me to process. I had no idea how dissatisfied I was with the premillenial dispensationalist framework, or how my frustration had stalled my spiritual life.
We've also been studying the Reformation in my Christian Thought and Culture class and its hard for me not to project onto it all my baggage and see it as the beginning of all divisive, individualist denominationalism. But I'm humbled too, because it's not so easy to see the way forward for the church today sometimes either. We too are limited by our historical moment, our cultural and political ideological environment.
I come to these questions as a lay person, but one who cares deeply about how we do church. And I've felt hurt by the church before, which makes me a little skittish about a lot of things. And yet God works with us still right where we're at--me in the labyrinth of my emotions and memories, the church in her wanderings.
Time to get to that Hebrew. ;)
