Seminary Reflections: Raising the Question

I am happy to say that the first paper of the semester has come and gone, my academic standing none the worse for wear. The only major critique/suggestion I received was that I should “try to resist making as many claims about the meaning of the text at this point. Focus instead on raising questions.”

Looking back, I can see that I didn’t follow directions as well as I could have. The assignment was never intended to be a thesis-driven argumentative essay but rather an exploration of potential avenues for exegesis in a particular passage. This one’s on me; I was never great at following directions.

That being said, there’s something about this that just cuts deeply against the grain, isn’t there? Try to resist making claims. Focus instead on raising questions.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I was taught to write papers. Five-paragraph essay: make a claim, three points to support it, and summarize. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them. Write a thesis statement. Underline it. Make a claim.

Ask questions? You’ve got to be kidding me. A generation of junior high and high school english teachers – at least all the ones I had – are recoiling in disgust, red pens at the ready.

But I also have to admit that there’s something deeply Presbyterian – or, at least, deeply Seminary-an – about raising questions. Seminary, we are told, is a place and time in which we are encouraged to question, to ask ourselves and God about our faith and about our vocation. It’s written into the language of our ordination process: I, like a number of my classmates, am an Inquirer for PCUSA ordination. We’re asking questions.

A friend recently told me that he was entering the PCUSA ordination process himself. He told the pastor at the church under whose care he will be that he was “going to take this ‘Inquirer’ thing seriously.” I told him that I thought that was the whole point. The PCUSA ordination process is a fairly open invitation. We want people to enter, to inquire, to ask questions of themselves and the denomination, to have questions asked of them. Getting in, as they say, is the easy part.

My wife is an Episcopal priest. In their ordination process, the discernment and evaluation of the candidate is done largely prior to seminary enrollment. The result is that the M.Div. population itself is almost entirely vocationally homogenous: her peers were almost 100% Episcopal clergy-to-be.

Here at Princeton, on the other hand, we’re all over the place. The student population is 50% PCUSA, and a good number of those are ordination-track. But we also have quite a few students eyeing Ph.D. work, and a number of others just here to ask questions. And every day those numbers change: ordination-track Presbyterians start to look at doctorates instead. Students from nondenominational backgrounds hitch their wagons to PCUSA, and vice-versa. We’re in a constantly encouraged state of flux.

As for me, I came into school already in the ordination process, fairly sure of what I wanted, and nothing yet has happened to make me seriously doubt that calling. But, of course, it’s early. There’s much water left to go under this particular bridge. And maybe one of these days I’ll learn to read the directions.

Seminary Reflections: An Uncommon Language

The conventional wisdom around Princeton Seminary campus — and most seminaries, I’d readily assume — is that you’re either a Greek person or a Hebrew person. The logic, as I understand it, is that the two languages, both needed for ordination, require such different kinds of mental exercise that most students will find themselves drawn much more strongly to one than the other.

The implication is presumably that your experience of learning Biblical language is, among other things, a particularly dorky kind of personality test. Just tack it on to that profile I sent to Presbytery, thanks.

For me, there is no doubt that the two were drastically different experiences. I took Greek over the summer, my first coursework here at PTS. For eight weeks I labored: four hours a day of class, untold more sitting at my desk, translating inane sentences about slaves who threw rocks at boats and children who eat bread in the desert. In Greek, my challenge was always about grammatical systems. It was a language I learned in Excel: each week brought new charts and graphs, each night new opportunities to join my wife on the couch while endlessly reproducing paradigm upon paradigm.

I will not soon forget the first moments, maybe two weeks in to that course, when we were first invited to open our Greek New Testaments and to read (with struggle, perspiration, and no small amount of coaching). It was as if, after years of riding in the back seat, somebody had just handed me the keys. The text opened before me to the horizon, even though I could rarely get out of first gear.

Hebrew never offered me anything like daylight or open road. I took the first half during the fall semester, and the second half during PTS’ relatively-new intensive January term. As it began, so too did the full bore of my first full semester, with multiple other classes and commitments, Field Ed and CPE applications and interviews, and a whole host of new friendships and networks to discover. Hebrew got my attention, but it had to be shared, doled out in bite-sized chunks.

And what Hebrew gave back was, for several months, overwhelming and bewildering. Gone were the connections to any languages I knew, gone were the vocabulary cognates, gone were letters that looked or sounded like anything I’d ever seen. In its place was something so foreign to me that I responded with fear and hostility. I wanted no part of it. Each grammatical rule felt both arbitrary and as if the exceptions outnumbered the norms. I tried to wrap my head around vowel reduction and syllabification still without being able to name and pronounce half of the alphabet. Everything was up to my neck.

But at some point – and I’m still not sure when this was – I started to get it. Not in one moment, not with a lightbulb sketched inside thought bubbles pouring out of the cartoon version of my head. But nonetheless, I started to feel my way through. I survived the semester and came back in January for the intensive term, and all of a sudden I found that I had grown a new tool for Hebrew: instinct. It wasn’t exactly a text laid bare before me, but I could feel my way around. It wasn’t a knowledge I could ever write in a spreadsheet. At best, it was a dim flashlight on a foggy night. Maybe that makes it even more valuable.

I started by echoing the adage that, around these parts, most people are either one or the other, personalities who are suited better to Greek or to Hebrew. Doubtless I experience the two languages in very different ways. But as I take on the task of reflecting on my time at Seminary, both personally and now as the inheritor of this column, I see all around me both of those languages of learning.

To be sure, there are days of revelation, days where seminary seems to be filling in those gaps I knew I had, giving me a glimpse at the whole landscape before me, handing me the keys. There is something undeniably joyous about this, about feeling like I have come to a place that has known me already, and that with just a few chats & graphs we will be on our way. To be secure in the knowledge that I have come to the right place is a wonderful and gracious thing, and I thank God for it.

But just as often are the days where I am just feeling my way through the fog, where this campus, this vocation, this intentional life, feels so deeply unfamiliar that nothing in my past and nothing in my brain can help me along. As familiar as the language of PTS can be on some days, on others it can be equally disorienting, confusing, and wholly foreign, and I know I am expected to form phrases and sentences even as I still can’t remember all the letters. But I also know that I am developing instinct. I know that I can learn to feel in the dark, and I think that such knowledge is just as wonderful and gracious a gift.

That ended up longer than I expected.

If you’ve made it this far, know this: I’m thrilled to be joining up with Presbyterian Bloggers, and thrilled to be reflecting on my time at PTS over the next few years. Hopefully I’ll be able to find new metaphors each month that I can overflog as I have overflogged a few today. If you’ve got any ones you’d like to suggest, don’t hesitate to write!

Read and Learn: Now on Wednesdays!

Happy Wednesday! The weekly posts for "Read and Learn" which used to be on Thursdays will now be on Wednesdays. In addition, along with Quotidian Grace and JusticeSeeker, there will be a third writer: and that's where I come in. My name is Sara Green and I blog over at The Pinkhammer Blog. I am a seminary student at Princeton Theological Seminary and have just started the Spring semester of my first year here. While I am not yet sure what God is calling me to do after seminary, I am (mostly) enjoying the process of trying to figure that out both here at seminary and as an Inquirer in the ordination process. And I say "mostly" because, well...God has a funny way of keeping things interesting along the way that can be rather frustrating. But I am sure I am not telling you anything you haven't already been through yourself. Though I am exploring campus/college ministry and teaching, I am also very excited about pastoral ministry.

My classes this semester are a New Testament Survey class, a history class that focuses on church and state dynamics from the medieval to reformation time periods, and a practical theology class that focuses on Carl Rogers understanding of pastoral care. Oh! And a worship class on the Psalms which I am taking for my own spiritual development though I can tell it will help immensely with planning and leading worship in the future. I am sure some of my posts will reflect things that come up along the way, but if anyone has a particular interest related to these items, please feel free to leave a comment here and I can blog about it either in the "Read and Learn" posts or over at my blog. I also enjoy peppermint mochas and love photography. : )