A Very Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

What a great reason for a celebration: God becomes incarnate - Jesus Christ is born - completely God, and completely human. Amazing. Athanasius, in his writings against Arius, noted that 'what God has not assumed, God has not healed'. We Christians often put all the emphasis on Easter as the culminating point of God's mission on earth. We don't realize that the salvation plan began in earnest on that distant night while shepherds watched their flocks. We should ponder this great mystery, that Incarnation. How wonderful God is, to have humbled Himself, and taking the form and very being of a human. Fully God, and yet, fully human. Not a human body but devine mind - NO. Somehow, fully God and fully human - only such a way as this could Jesus take upon Himself the sinfulness of all humanity, then, now, and future.

Have you thought about this on this great day of celebration?

Amidst all of the celebrating, the eating, the ripping open of presents, I hope you will call upon the Lord, and thank Him for the greatest of all gifts, His Son.

One of our Christmas morning traditions is for the kids to gather in my wife's and my bedroom so that we may read together the Jesus' birth narrative as presented in Luke 2:1-20, and thanking God in prayer for the gift of sending His Son. Then we run downstairs to enjoy the gift giviing and receiving. It was pretty cool - a very good morning.

I hope you, too, have had a good day with your family. May the rest of your Christmas be a blessed reminder of the Father's love for you, in the name of the Son, through the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God's great blessings in Christ to you!

Amen, and amen.

It is finished!

Or at least this stage of things are... Yesterday afternoon, I turned in my the second of my two mini-theses, thus completing the last of my requirements for finishing my Master's in Theological Studies, with a concentration in Contemporary Theology.

I must say, it was all very anticlimactic. Though, as I was finishing the very last piece of editing that second paper, one of classmates came up to where I was working in the library. She asked if I was finished writing, and when I told her I was, she let out with an "aaaahhhhhhh!" that was both shock and joy for me. She then ran and got another classmate of ours who has a camera phone, so that I could get some pictures of that important moment for my personal posterity. It was kind of her, but I still felt kind of empty after a semester of working on these two major papers.

That was Wednesday. Yesterday, I made the final draft copy, punched holes, set in its binder, and left it for Dr. Adelekan on his office door knob. My first paper I was able to turn in the week before. I gave it to Dr. Brash just after his Thursday morning class finished up.

So, both papers are finished. Both are turned in.

It is finished? Only that particular chapter. I still need to find out what my prof.s thought of these two papers. I still need to get my grades, and find out how my overall cum average comes out.

Now the rest of my life begins, starting with diving into filling out my application to Princeton for a Ph.D in Systematic Theology. At the same time, I'll be preparing for my GRE's. And if that's not enough, I have a few Christmas gifts to buy or create for my beautiful and awesome wife. Not to mention prepare my heart in celebrating this great season Advent, and soon Christmas.

I want to put in "writing" my thanks and praise to God Most High, the Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who brought me through five and a half years of studies, and a great deal of transition in those last couple. The LORD was for me all that I needed HIM to be, plus much more than I could have realized or hoped for. Thank you, O LORD!

I also want to "write" my thanks to my wonderful wife who has been very supportive and incredibly flexible in allowing me to work late a few more evenings and Saturdays in the last few weeks than I had needed to through most of the semester. She has been a true help-mate.

I need to thank Dr. Brash and Dr. Adelekan for their insights and assistance for each of my papers. Each offered encouragement and perspectives that helped me write a better paper than I could have managed on my own. They had done a great job in giving me a sense of what writing a dissertation will be like. They have blessed me through out not only this past semester, but for many others as professors in other subjects and classes. Thank you, both. You really gentlemen and scholars!

If you're interested in reading either or both of my mini-theses, please let me know via a reply. MTS Paper 1 is on a theology of Proclamation of Word and Sacrament in Reformed Theology. MTS Paper 2 is a theological ethics paper on the need for the Church to be the Beloved Community in a way that rejects that more base parts of Culture, while loving the people who inhabit it. Each was a great deal of fun to write, and I learned quite a bit in the process of each.

Gloria Dei!

It's been a long, long time

well, lo and behold... it's been almost three months since I last blogged.

Life has been busy. I'm actually about to graduate from Palmer Theological Seminary. But the catch is that I have to turn in two mini-theses in order to do it. That's where most of my mental energy has been going these last few months.

I'm about 99.9% finished my first one, and about 75% finished my second. Once they're both completed and delivered, I may see how I can post them here for the one person who checks in here to read and critique. I've had a good time reading and writing for them, but I'll be darn glad to finish them and be done.

Part of the reason it's taken so long is that I've tried to work in a way that respects my first and second positions in life as husband and father. All that means is that I've been doing most of my research and writing 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, and pretty much trying to be a part of my family in the evenings and on weekends. I've actually done pretty well at it. I have been T.A.ing again for Dr. Brash's Sys. Theo. 1 class (always excellent - he's the man!), and I've had a couple of opportunities to substitute teach for him and Dr. Keener's Biblical Interp class (that, too, was very excellent). All that's to say that the papers have taken longer because of the way I've gone about writing them, but over all it's been worth it.

Well, we've been having the stomach virus going through our home, and so I'm going to head upstairs and see if my wife wants to end the day together, and pray the night goes well. I'm also praying that I don't get it (but that's a different story).

God bless you, reader!

praising God!!!

Okay, I wanted to share with you that I just finished getting my second thesis proposal accepted. This is a great weight off my shoulders, to say the least. God is good. Now I am free to proceed on my research and writing for both mini-theses. These are the last and final parts to my finishing and receiving my Masters of Theological Study in Contemporary Theology. I am very excited. Both of the professors who are my main readers are great and very supportive. The reader for my second thesis, Dr. Adelekan, whom I met with this afternoon, told me he was very excited to see what he would learn from my work. I need someone like who believes in me, or more accurately, believes in what God wants to do through me. In any event, I praise God for this. Now, join me in praying through this semester for the good Lord to provide me with all discipline, insight, knowledge, wisdom, and discernment in getting both of these theses finished, finished well, by early December. Amen!

reading Isaiah

a month or so ago I shared the lament that I was struggling to read Scripture on my own, as part of what is an important ongoing discipline in the Christian faith. I was reading as part of Sunday worship, but beyond that it was definitely challenging to either find the time when I thought about it, or I just didn't think about doing it, getting caught up in life in general.

but praise be to God, as I started reading from the prophet Isaiah over this past week, and have, but for a day, read at least one chapter a day over these last several days. it is refreshing to read consistently - something I know in my mind and know from my studies in school - and yet to do it purely for my self and my own faith is something like a breath of fresh air.

I think Isaiah is one of the most important Old Testament books for Christians to study and be familiar with for two reasons. 1) it is one of the books of the Bible that Jesus quoted most often, not the least of which was during what is referred to as His inaugural sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth, as recorded in Luke 4, for instance. 2) there is some disagreement among OT biblical scholars as to whether Isaiah is the work of one prophet, or three distinct sections, where the chapters 1-35 or so were written by the prophet Isaiah, chapters 36-55 or so and then chapters 56-64 were written by two other groups of prophets writing in the tradition and school of Isaiah. But this last point is merely the opinion of scholars who first off have an anti supernatural bias, i.e., there's no way that one man named Isaiah could possibly have "known" such things, and there's no way God is real, and therefore God could not have communicated any information to Isaiah. Peronally, I find such a bias as nonsense. I believe that one Isaiah very well could have written the entire book, with later generations of that line or school of prophets (post-exilic) editing the book in some minor ways (per its canonization, for instance).

But I'm excited, and I hope you will be inspired to read along, or read another book of the Bible. God's richest blessings in Christ to you!