What it is I'm privileged to do this fall
Starting Monday, I will have about 160 students spread across four classes, most of them freshmen. As I have been preparing for and praying about the beginning of the semester, and the formal beginning to my own career as a professor and teacher, it occurred to me what it is I am privileged to do this fall.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
For 120 of those students, I will be teaching them the Gospels, especially the Gospel of Mark. Many of them know a thing or two about Jesus, and some of them know quite a bit. But some of them don't know a thing. And none of them has read the Gospels the way I will teach them to read them. They haven't heard about the Synoptics. They haven't heard about Logos Christology. They haven't thought about Mark 8, the "hinge" on which the whole book rests, when Jesus twice heals the blind man, and then twice heals his followers (present and future) in the person of Peter, rebuking him then teaching about the passion of the Messiah, about his death and resurrection. They haven't grappled with the living, convicting force of the Sermon on the Mount on their lives (and mine). They haven't considered the Jewish context of the church's origins, of Jesus's life and work, of all of Scripture and the faith itself. They haven't contemplated the salvific significance of the resurrection. They haven't—as in two of the classes we will do—read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, or for the most part even heard of him. They haven't analogized the Gospel portraits of the living Jesus to artistic interpretations of him, interpretations that make the familiar strange, that distort and confront, that take an angle, that imagine the Jew of Nazareth in other times, places, cultures, peoples.
They haven't done any of it. And I get to be their teacher, the one invested with the great responsibility of introducing them to so many wonderful, challenging, genuinely life-changing ideas—and not just ideas but events, persons, arguments, proposals, practices, ways of reading and thinking, ways of living and acting, ways of praying and worshiping God.
I get to introduce them to a whole world, the world of theology: of faith, and church tradition, and Holy Scripture, and the rest.
What a thing.
