📚 Another Excerpt From My Book
"That Hermeneutics Class"
Friends,
The book is almost done. It’s now officially as long as my doctoral dissertation and I’m reading through it a few more times to hunt down spelling and grammar mistakes.
Anyways, I just read this short section and wanted to share it with you.
Much love,
Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE
“College was a time of Biblical exploration, for sure, but it was also a time that cement was poured into my understanding of what the Bible was, how it worked, and what it was to be used for: it was the very words of God, it was as plain as day, and it was to be used for teaching, defending, uplifting, and rebuking people who didn’t abide by it.
And then I went to seminary.
And in seminary a lot of notable things happened, but for this part of my story I need to tell you about that hermeneutics class with that professor who posed all sorts of questions that I had no answers for. [1]
Hermeneutics is a fancy word they use in seminary to talk about the interpretation of some sort of literary text, mainly the Bible. And in this class I remember the professor telling us that the Bible wasn’t what many of us thought it was and although I don’t remember the specifics of the class material (it was about 15 years ago), I remember leaving that class every afternoon feeling extremely disillusioned.
I said very little during class time and (instead) did a lot of listening as the professor would pose questions that students would engage with and often argue with. In fact, I remember on one occasion he posed a question to the class (I believe it was about the historical accuracy of “the virgin birth”, if I remember correctly) and 2 students got into such an argument that one of them got up and stormed out of the room.
I remember feeling very nervous and very scared.
Why?
Because the Bible was the one thing in my world that felt 1000% certain to me – impenetrable, really … and it felt like this class was tugging …
Tugging.
Tugging.
AND.
Tugging.
… so much so that my certainty was beginning to unravel.
It was almost as if whatever foundation I had concerning the Bible that had been neatly built and cemented into place throughout high school and college … it felt like this class and this professor were holy jackhammers sent from God to crack the foundation so that something else that had always been bubbling beneath the surface could find its way through the cracks and begin to grow.
Indeed - although it felt scary and although I felt nervous, something about it seemed good and of God.
In all honesty, though, I continued through seminary with the same mindset regarding the Bible that I had when I entered seminary, but after that class the thing that was different was that in the back of my mind I had this lingering thought that perhaps the Bible is something more than “the Word of God” and perhaps my desire to defend it and dissect it and know it frontwards and backwards and left and right was an attempt to tame an untamable book that is meant to be filled with Mystery as opposed to certainty.
… Perhaps.”
[1] I spoke with that professor (Dr. Stephen Bailey) in episode 148 of the “What If Project” podcast - https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-366hv-101a095
Looking forward to this!