Good question.  As some of you (my Facebook contacts, certainly) know, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation yesterday afternoon, bringing a LONG grad student career to an end.  (To be fair, I have been employed as Assistant Professor of English for the last two and a half years of that, and in the 2004-2005 school year, I was not a grad student.)  But when I got to thinking about it last night, I realized that, when I started seminary (my first graduate school experience), the world was a different place.  So if you don’t mind a bit of self-indulgence (if you do, stop reading now), this is what I remember about the beginning of my grad school career:

• Nobody I knew had a DVD player
• Very few people I knew had mobile phones
• Nobody had ever heard of an iPod
• .mp3 was a format used by the dreaded Napster, and one could only listen to those .mp3 files on the computer or by burning them to a CD
• “text” was usually a noun and sometimes an adjective but never a verb
• Bill Clinton was the president of the USA
• Evan Bayh was a United States Senator from Indiana, and I hoped that he would run for president some day
• I had never heard of George W. Bush or Barack Obama (these are likely my own fault)
• The Indianapolis Colts were on a decade-long streak (with the exception of a couple happy Jim Harbaugh seasons) of pathetic football and had just finished Peyton Manning’s rookie season 3 and 13
• The New England Patriots were a second-rate AFC East team with Drew Bledsoe as their quarterback
• The Chicago Cubs had just made the playoffs for the third time in my lifetime and were finishing the subsequent season at the bottom of their division (okay, that hasn’t changed much)
• The big story in baseball was still the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire home run race (nobody was all that concerned about steroids yet)
• The Indiana Pacers were one of the powerhouse teams in the NBA (they’re not doing badly this season, actually)
• “WWJD” had just barely jumped the shark
• I was one of the few people I knew who actually wrote things for the Internet (those sites, mercifully, have disappeared into the ether)
• Google was one of the new search-engines on the scene
• “Alternative” rock had just recently given way to a crop of “boy bands” and to Ricky Martin on the radio
• The general consensus was that movies were smarter, on the whole, than TV series
• People were still holding out hope that the second and third Star Wars prequels wouldn’t be as wretched as the first
• People were convinced that the second and third Matrix movies would solidify that franchise as the new American mythos
• Cable TV news was in a perpetual state of panic about white boys with guns in high schools, not about foreign nationals with box cuttters
• MTV was still a significant cultural force
• Apple was still that company that made candy-colored computers for teachers
• The college freshmen whom I’m teaching right now were in first grade
• The easily panicked thought all the computers were going to shut down at midnight on New Year’s Eve, but nobody predicted the technical glitches that would change the course of U.S. history on November 7 of the following year
• I had high hopes of becoming a Ph.D some day–in Biblical studies
• I thought I had seen the last of the English department

Alright, folks.  I’m kinda defending my doctoral dissertation tomorrow, so there might be a lectionary post later this week, or the next one might go live next Monday.  Either way, I’ve got to get back to studying!  See you later!

Epilepsy Awareness at Thanksgiving

Chris Maxwell, Emmanuel College’s campus minister, has asked me to pass this link along to our readers.  Chris has been a good friend to me in my five semesters at EC, and his story of returning to active, involved ministry after the onset of his own epilepsy has given me and many others inspiration to strive forward in the service of the LORD.  If you comment, feel free to cross-post there and here–I’d like to see what you all have to say, and I imagine Chris would as well.

There won’t likely be a Lectionary post tomorrow, as I’m reading a paper and participating in a roundtable on Writing Across the Curriculum at the annuel SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) meeting tomorrow.

In the meantime, I want to observe one more time (though mine is a voice that Americans don’t want to hear) that, as the Tea Party rants and the Occupy movement raves, the U.S. government, sponsored by corporate campaign donations, has once again decreed that the earth should become dark one hour earlier than the normal course of the earth’s solar revolution would have it.

OCCUPY DAYLIGHT SAVING!!!

I have to offer a mea culpa this week–I’m preaching in Emmanuel College’s convocation service on Tuesday (tomorrow), and the time that normally I’d devote to writing a lectionary post I’ve decided to spend on revising that homily.  Check back next Monday for the return of the lectionary reflection!

Happy Birthday to CHP guest host and little brother Ryan Gilmour today!  He’s reached the age that Thomas Aquinas regarded as perfect.  

Due to VBS ramping up at Athens Christian Church this week and Nathan Gilmour’s traveling north (where Internet time is even more limited than it tends to be at home), lectionary posts will resume (hopefully) in the last week of June.  Thanks again to all of our great Christian Humanist readers, and keep your iTunes subscription open–a special summer episode of the podcast will be coming your way soon!

I am sorry that there will be no Bible post this week.  This weekend I preached at Athens Christian Church’s Sunday morning service, and rather than write my weekly Bible post (which I normally do on Sunday morning while the kids are asleep), I gave my sermon one more, much-needed revision.  The congregation at Athens Christian thanks you–they didn’t have to suffer through the Friday version of the homily.

Tune in next Monday, though–the Bible posts will keep rolling in!

In our last podcast, we lingered a bit on the aesthetic quality of the King James Version’s archaic language. There was one point I forgot to mention, though: namely, the way I read the word “thou.”

No one will be surprised to learn that my point in the podcast about the “KJV as the voice of God” is as much a personal confession as it an academic observation. I grew up in a fairly traditional Southern Baptist church, as I’ve mentioned before, and the KJV was the translation I heard from the pulpit and in Sunday School. Thus, when my conscience spoke, it was with God’s “King James voice”: “Thou shalt not!” What’s more, the language of the KJV was also the voice of the Church to God: I can still echo the cadences of a certain elderly deacon who began  his prayers, “We thank Thee, O Lord,” and ended them, “For in Jesus’ Name we do pray, amen!” All the “thees” and “thous” were archaic and so felt very formal, and that made sense to me, because God is God, and I am human. Using “thees” and “thous” helped preserve that sense of ontological difference in my childish mind, reminding me that God is holy and that my proper response to that holiness is reverence.

But then, much later, I learned that I was wrong about “thou.” In fact, “thou” was not more formal than “you”: it was the singular second person pronoun of which “you” was the plural second person pronoun, like the Southern “y’all.” This grammatical difference led to a difference of social usage, in which “you” was the formal form of address and “thou” the informal, intimate form. I imagine this is probably not news to most our readers/listeners. (In fact, I think Michial Farmer mentioned this in one of our music episodes.) Still, it was a revelation to me, particularly in how I read the Psalms: “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee”  (Psalm 73:25).

I should make one thing clear, however: the later significance of “thou” didn’t replace the earlier significance of “thou” — it supplemented it. God did not cease to be God. He did not cease to be king in order to become my best pal. Instead, my experience of “thou” is of being uplifted or drawn into a realm too high for me. Perhaps the best way to express what I mean is to borrow the words of Julian of Norwich, from her Revelation of Divine Love (hint: “worship” means “honor,” and “homely” means “friendly” or “familiar”:

It is the most worship that a solemn King or a great Lord may do a poor servant if he will be homely with him, and specially if he sheweth it himself, of a full true meaning, and with a glad cheer, both privately and in company. Then thinketh this poor creature thus: And what might this noble Lord do of more worship and joy to me than to shew me that am so simple this marvellous homeliness? Soothly it is more joy and pleasance to me than [if] he gave me great gifts and were himself strange in manner. This bodily example was shewed so highly that man’s heart might be ravished and almost forgetting itself for joy of the great homeliness. Thus it fareth with our Lord Jesus and with us. For verily it is the most joy that may be, as to my sight, that He that is highest and mightiest, noblest and worthiest, is lowest and meekest, homeliest and most courteous: and truly and verily this marvellous joy shall be shewn us all when we see Him. (II.VII)

Do not mistake me: I know this isn’t serious exegesis, but instead a meditation on a personal aesthetic experience. In fact, it is an aesthetic experience based on a modified misconception. Still, God used this aesthetic experience to teach me something that is true about Himself and my relationship to Him. This is a point we did not address in talking about the KJV, but one that still should be considered. God’s Word is not so impotent that only the most accurate translations based on the most reliable manuscripts can possibly communicate His message to us. Such translations are priceless gifts of God’s grace to His people, and Bible translators should strive for them. But still God is gracious and His Spirit, ever creative, can enliven even clumsy or mistaken translations to disclose Himself. Our Shepherd seeks His sheep, and He can make Himself heard. If I may borrow Julian’s phrase, this is one of the manifestations of God’s “marvellous homeliness”: that He will speak to us even in and through our weakness. And so God speaks through the Septuagint, for all its emasculated metaphors; and through the Vulgate, though it says Moses had horns; and through the KJV, though we need a dictionary. As the seminary student labors over a knotty passage of Greek or Hebrew, God speaks, even in the tension that lies between discarded possible translations. Even in the fragments of half-remembered phrases from Sunday School long ago, caught up by a penitent conscience and stitched into a patchwork Gospel, God speaks. His Word will not return to Him void.