Oh good, becca posted. For a while I was afraid this had turned into a monoblogue. (ha, hahahahahahaha...)

I'm memorizing Ruth for a class.

My favorite class is O.T. History with Ray Lubeck. Man, I'm so glad I have a free hour after that class, because afterward I feel like just thinking about everything. This is a class where I am unashamedly, genuinely amazed and interested in everything that is said. This is a class where, if it continued for an extra hour beyond class, I would stay and listen. This is the only class where my pen is constantly causing smoke on either my notebook or my Bible. If I were ever to use a tape recorder in a class, it would be here. Ray makes the Old Testament come alive. Not only that, but he's constantly emphasizing the importance of viewing the Bible as one story instead of examining each individual book.

I am constantly writing down quotes.

Here's a few from this morning's class (I can't tell if they mean the same thing without the context of the rest of the lecture, but here they are):

-"The Bible is a chicken. It's not merely a box of nuggets." (on the importance of stepping back and seeing the Bible as a whole story.)

-(not an exact quote). We tend to be an instant gratification, quick fix society, and we treat the Bible the same way. So we take a few "significant" verses at a time, read/memorize them for our "spiritual buzz", and we "like" those verses because they "mean so much" to "us". In other words, the Bible is all about making "us" feel warm and happy about God.

-(direct quote) "Our tendency is to read the Bible individualistically - as if it's about 'me' and 'Jesus'." This is because we are not a communal society - we are completely individualistic.

-Every sin has this idea behind it: "I can make myself happier than God is going to make me." There's other stuff too but I don't think it would make sense without the rest. Kind of in the same way that the way we interpret the Bible is often skewed because we only read a book at a time, and it's out of context. He gave this example today - Suppose you read the Chronicles of Narnia a chapter a day, but every day you read a random chapter from a random book. Eventually, you may or may not get through the whole series, but it doesn’t make sense unless you take the series as a whole.

I had written other things and copied other notes, but blogger deleted them. I got an error message when I tried to publish that I’ve never gotten before – “blog not found.” Uh. At least I was able to recover about half the post, which is probably as much theology as you could stand anyway. It’s not really theology though, just notes from a theology course, and really stuff that we should all know anyway.

I can't believe it. It happened again. I typed more stuff and tried to post and I got, "the blog you were looking for was not found. This SUCKS! I might have to do something drastic if blogger continues to have such poor service!