This is the first of two posts today. This one will be a “catchup” on my life recently, for those of you who for some reason care about such things.

First off, I got an “A” in first semester Greek. I think I will always look back on August of ‘04 as being a significant time in my life, though not because of the “A.” The past month was a time of really having to live in God’s sustaining grace as Karyn was away in Maine and I was faced with the first intense academic class of my adult life. Hardly real suffering, I know….but a sweet confirmation to me that God is with me at such times. And while trying hard not to become overconfident, the accomplishment of finishing that class successfully is undeniably affirming that I can actually do this seminary thing!

I can’t possibly express adequately how wonderful it is to have Karyn back. This month apart certainly confirmed to me, as if I had any doubts, that we have been made one piece by God. Just waking up and seeing her there lying next to me is like Christmas and birthday presents every morning.

Thursday was our first official day of classes at Westminster. We had two abbreviated classes as the main event of the day was the opening convocation. At the convocation, the seminary president, Dr. Samuel T. Logan, projected the front page of the New York Times from the day of the seminary’s first opening convocation seventy-five years ago. It was interesting to see how there were many troubles and fears in the world then that are similar to todays. We were also reminded that within about a month of the beggining of WTS, America’s worst ever financial crisis began. Looking back, and seeing how faithful today’s administration and faculty are to the founding mission of the institution, was an encouraging reminder of God’s faithfulness.

One of the things that Karyn and I both noticed during the ceremony was how powerful the singing was. This is a student body who gives sings great hymns like “Praise to the Lord” and “Be Thou My Vision” with the gusto they deserve.

As I said earlier, we had that day only two of the six classes we’ll be taking this fall, but we were excited by the introductions to both of them. Dr. Edgar, the professor for Introduction to Apologetics, has a fascinating background, including living much of his life in France and having been converted in a conversation with Francis Schaeffer, one of my heros! He told us that Westminster is one of the few (perhaps only) seminaries that has an apologetics department. This is largely due to the insights of one of the founding professors, Cornelius Van Til.

Van Til rejected traditional (”evidentiary”–think Josh McDowell) apologetics, largely because of his Calvinistic view that man’s reasoning abilities are just as fallen as the rest of his being. He stated that a true apologetic must begin by presupposing the existence of the Triune God who reveals himself in the Bible as the only possible basis for a rational universe and therefore rational thought. Furthermore, he called for a transcendental apologetic, in which the goal is not to win a debate with the unbeliever, but rather enter into the unbeliever’s own world and help him/her to see that the presuppositionas of his/her world view do not fit the world that actually is. Much of this meshes with the way that Karyn and I have thought about evangelism, so we are excited to see what this course leads to.

The other class we began on Thursday was Introduction to the New Testament. Dr. Taylor began the class with an amusing but effective demonstration. He asked us to pretend that we were a conference of archaeologists, lingquists, and other scholars meeting several centuries in the future to discuss our findings on the lost American civilization, completely destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. He projected on a screen a small fragment of a document recently uncovered in the ruins. In actuallity, it was a few lines from a newspaper account of a baseball game, but it was fun to hear how far afield our speculations as to its meaning could go if we pretended that we had no knowledge of baseball or the culture from which it arose, and only a limited understanding of the language itself. His point was obvious: our understanding of the historical, cultural, and religious background of the New Testament is critical to our ability to rightly interpret it. That will be the focus of this course–along with questions of inspiration and transmission–rather than a general survey of the contents.

On Fridays, we will normally have our mentored small groups for Hebrew class, but since there has been no Hebrew yet, that was cancelled. So our real regular schedule starts this coming Monday.

In the meantime, Karyn and I managed to keep very busy…how unusual is that? We were up in north Jersey this past Monday through Wednesday, and again on Friday, cleaning out the apartment of Karyn’s aunt who recently passed away. This was probably some of the hardest (and grossest!) physical labor Karyn and I have ever done. Her aunt lived as a recluse for the last number of years of her life, never letting anyone into her apartment except in extreme emergency. When we first opened the door, the smell literally knocked me backwards. Apparently, she had become a shopaholic, running up all her credit cards to their max by purchasing clothing which she never wore, but simply threw into huge piles all over the apartment. To make matters worse, she had a cat that urinated into much of the clothing. And then there were the roaches. She hadn’t cleaned in who knows how long, and the kitchen and bathroom were literally, at places, inches thick in roach poop and roach carcasses. Our task over those four days was to get the apartment in enough of a presentable condition that an estate sale can take place there. Somehow, we accomplished that goal.

The upside of all that work was the treasure trove of family memories Karyn uncovered. We found tons of photos and documents detailing her fascinating lineage on her father’s side, some of which we knew only from rumors previously. I’ve said many times that I “married up,” but now I can say that with documentary evidence! We confirmed that Karyn is indeed descended from the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, as well as a French explorer who became one of the founders of St. Louis. Our new discovery is that she can trace her lineage to the royal families of France going back almost to Roman times! And here she is married to the descendant of a German tradesman who was expelled from the colony of New Amsterdam for “blasphemy and railing against the magistrate.”

Well, other than all that, guess we’re not doing much We’re actually looking forward to settling into the routine of classes and studying!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 11th, 2004 at 11:38 am and is filed under It`s All About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.