Chapter 1: Teacher

Jennifer Saunders knew all about Prof. Blake’s reputation. The first class he’d taught a couple of years earlier had taken care of that. He was demanding about studying and stingy with grades. Still, she either took this course from him in the fall quarter of 1980, or left Garrett Theological Seminary without ever having a course in Paul’s epistles. She felt lucky that she had reached her second year without having had him before.

What people hadn’t mentioned was his voice. It wasn’t really a preacher’s voice; he obviously made no effort for sweetness in tone. On the other hand, it was a pleasant voice. And he carried the classroom without the slightest hint of strain. Jen had the sudden desire to hear him sing. She hadn’t much time to think about that, however. She filled pages of her notebook, first day of class or not.

“Romans,” he said, “may be the first Epistle in the Bible. There are several reasons for considering it the culmination of Paul’s theology, however. We are going to study it last. We are starting on Corinthians. I want you to read both letters before the start of next class. You’re expected to have an English translation of the entire Bible, or -- at least -- the entire New Testament, with you in class. We may have to look another report up. By ‘translation,’ I don’t mean ‘paraphrase.’ The Living Bible and Phillips are right out. This class is studying as much as possible what was written. I’d prefer something later than 1950. The King James translators did great work, but the language has evolved since then.”

Having already earned his reputation for being demanding, he paused to pass out his syllabus of the course. Then he started on his contextual lecture. “In reading Paul, we always have to remember that we are reading other people’s mail...”

He didn’t let up in later classes. The second week, he suddenly was wearing glasses, but nothing else changed. He didn’t suffer fools gladly, and the joke was that if you dropped a pencil while taking notes, you would miss two questions on the next test. Jen began to see a pattern in his thought, though. “That’s what you think he meant,” he told Pete. “What did Paul say?”

“He said that every bit of scripture was inspired by God,” his latest victim replied.

“Let’s look at that. Read me verses fifteen and sixteen.”

“‘And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.’” Pete was obviously ignoring the professor’s strictures on the King James translation.

But Blake was hunting bigger game. “Now there are two things here. Notice that Timothy knew the scriptures from childhood. What scriptures? The Septuagint. That’s what Jews outside Palestine read. Our Old Testament and our Apocrypha. The second thing is that scripture is inspired by God. Paul doesn’t say that it is dictated by God, and Paul damn-well knew about dictation, he did it himself. Now you may think that he really meant that the Old Testament and the New Testament were dictated by God. But that isn’t what he said.

“And there is something paradoxical in claiming that Paul is telling us that the Epistle to Timothy was dictated by God, but Paul used the wrong term by mistake.”

Not that Blake was any easier on the liberals than he was on the fundamentalists. One day, he came into class with a stack of papers. The class worried. A pop quiz was one thing, but these looked like two-hour finals.

“You might have heard,” Blake began, “the story about the man whom the police arrested for bank robbery. ‘You might as well confess,’ the cops said. ‘We have an eyewitness who can identify you positively.’ “What does he know,’ said the man. ‘I was wearing a mask.’

“Well, back in the nineteenth century, there was a serious theological movement called ‘The Historical Jesus.’ Writers could tell you what Jesus really taught, as opposed to what the first-century Gospel writers thought he had taught. Since the nineteenth century was the acme of science and human understanding, they could strip away the encrustations and reveal the real teachings.

“Then a theologian named Oll-bare Shvite-sair wrote a book analyzing their teachings. You’ve heard of him as a medical missionary, but he was a concert-level organist and a major theologian as well.” At this point, Jen started to suspect that he was talking about Albert Schweitzer, but he was talking too fast for her to go back to correct her notes. “What he did was to compare what the historical-Jesus writers had said about questions on their own with what they said Jesus had taught. Guess what? In every case, although what Smith attributed to Jesus might be different from what Jones attributed to Jesus, it was identical to what Smith taught on his own. They hadn’t stripped away the encrustations added by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; they had stripped away the teachings that offended them. They’d added a few encrustations of their own, as well.

“Now, today, there are still people doing nineteenth-century theology. But they’ve decided to wear masks. The group calling itself ‘The Jesus Seminar’ are voting on what Gospel teachings they want to call into question. You won’t get Smith’s votes to compare with Smith’s positions. You’ll only get the majority opinion. But I figure that I know what the majority of these theologians teach. I figure that most of you have some idea, too. So, I’ve taken a few passages from each of the four Gospels. I want each of you to vote on them. Not on whether Jesus actually said them; on whether the Jesus Seminar people will vote them in or out.”

What he passed out was two pages stapled together. He might think it was only “a few passages,” but each Gospel filled one side of a page. And they were citations only; “Jn 1: 42 IN OUT; Jn 1: 47-51 IN OUT,” was the top line on the back page.

“What does this have to do with the Pauline Epistles?” Craig asked later in the cafeteria.

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “I hope he has tenure.” Blake never hid his opinions, but passing out sheets with his name on it, headed with the question: “Based on your knowledge of the general trend of liberal theology, will The Jesus Seminar vote these passages in or out? Circle one,” looked like spitting in the faces of most of the faculty.

“I hope he doesn’t have tenure. I hope they sack him. What do you girls see in him anyway? What does he have that -- for instance -- I don’t?”

Well, for one thing, he had a Ph. D. But that wasn’t quite what Craig was asking.

“Testosterone, Craig, testosterone,” Barbara said. She was an older woman who’d been secretary to the president of an insurance company until he retired, her husband moved to Chicago, and her youngest child went off to college. She was unfailingly nice and would read to you from the meticulous notes she kept in steno pads. Somehow, though, she and Craig had struck sparks from the first day.

“So much for being a happily-married woman,” said Sally. She was one of the “girls” who definitely was not attracted to Prof. Blake.

“This,” Barbara held up her left hand to display the wedding band, “goes on my hand, not on my eyeball, to quote Henry.” Henry was her husband. “But at my age, I dream more about introducing Blake to my daughter than of seducing him myself.”

“Poor girl,” Sally said. “Testosterone, maybe. But married to that man? That isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare.” Jen wasn’t sure. In high school she would have said so; in seminary she kept her own counsel.

One place she didn’t keep her own counsel was appearance. She consulted Barbara on her wardrobe. She was a grad student and dressed like a grad student. But she was becoming conscious that she would have to dress like a preacher fairly soon. And she hadn’t many memories of woman preachers. Barbara dressed more formally than anyone else in Jen’s classes, more formally than the few women faculty members.

“Well, I’m not trying to set any styles,” Barbara said, “or even keep up with any styles. Most of what I wear is old, what I wore to the office a few years ago.” Jen suspected that Barbara had spent more on clothes in the last year than Jen had. “I’ll tell you what I’d tell my daughter.”

“Please do.”

“The first thing you have going for you is that your parishioners won’t have any more experience with women pastors than you have. They won’t compare you with their ten last. Still, jeans and a sweatshirt won’t do.” Which was what Jen was wearing during the conversation. “Work days, sure, but you want to look like somebody to fill a pulpit, not somebody to empty the wastebaskets. And you want to avoid garish colors and anything frilly. You’ll be a young woman and the ordained spiritual leader of the church. You should make it easy for them to see you as the spiritual leader, harder to see you as a young woman. Not that I’d advise anything unisex.”

“Unisex sounds radical.”

“And you don’t want to look radical. Preach a radical vision, if that’s what you think they need to hear, but dress conservatively. One thing I’d suggest -- cut your hair.” Jen followed that advice.

Blake collected the papers on what he called “The Schweitzer Game.” He even handed out a report on the average class guess on what the Jesus-Seminar answers would be. He didn’t seem to grade them, though.

Student church was something the administration thought it had to provide; it wasn’t something the students thought they had to attend. Third-year students who hadn’t got a chaplaincy internship -- even many who had lucked out that way -- had somewhere else they had to be on Sunday morning. The minority of the first two years who were serious about church mostly attended a real church with a real congregation. The majority, conscious that this might be their last opportunity to sleep in on Sunday morning for the next forty years, took that opportunity. When a student preached, he dragooned his friends into attending; when a faculty member preached, his favorite students usually showed up.

When David Blake was announced as preacher on one Sunday, Jen got herself to student church. She had been right; Blake’s singing voice was clearly audible over the small congregation; and it was even more pleasant than his speaking voice. He made no effort to sweeten that for the sermon, either. He did, conspicuously, turn down the pulpit microphone.

“I’m going to read a bit more than the Lectionary section,” he said when he got to the Gospel. He read the entire first chapter of Luke. Then he preached on what Jen had always taken as introductory material. “So, what does an inspired writer do?” he asked rhetorically. “Luke went over the whole course of the events -- events as recalled by the witnesses he had -- in detail. Luke didn’t hide in his room and figure out what had happened by what felt right by his lights. At least, if he did, he doesn’t tell us about it. Now, I’m a professor of the New Testament, and you might think I’m promoting my own field; but I think we are called to do the same thing. As professors of theology, as people who will be clergy hired to preach the word, as simple believers, we are called to go over the records we have of the whole course of those events. We are called to read the Gospels and study the Gospels.” He repeated and expatiated on this theme, but it clearly was the central point of his message.

Jen did all right on the tests, but she was starting to dread the end-of-term paper. She started a draft of it well before the class work wound down. She was also careful to keep a low profile in class, though the word was that Blake didn’t grade you down for contradicting him. Some of the other students didn’t take that precaution.

“Well,” Sally said in class, “Paul was a sexist. We shouldn’t try to follow his teachings about women.” They were on Colossians, the last book they’d read before Romans.

Blake had left the third and fourth chapters to be covered in one day, but he wasn’t going to applaud their being ignored. “I think you’re reading him anachronistically. The people who claim that Paul was transcribing what God dictated for the twentieth century are consistent -- I don’t agree with them, but they are consistent. On the other hand, saying that Paul wrote on his own authority, but he was wrong about the position of women in the twentieth century shows a little confusion.

“Now, as I emphasized in our study of Philemon, Paul is always ready to say that believing might add obligations; he never teaches that it removes any. A woman who believes has all the obligations that she would have as an unbeliever, and a first- century Greek woman had the obligation to obey her husband. Were the husband also a believer, that put some obligations on him; it removed none from her.”

“I’m here to clarify what is my theology,” Sally replied. “And I must say that you aren’t helping.”

“Good! Well, really, I should be indifferent rather than favorable. There is no reason that I should care why you are in class, so long as you aren’t here to disrupt it. I’m here to teach what Paul wrote. Barbara might be here to polish her shorthand skills for all I care. If you go out of this class knowing what Paul wrote, I’ve fulfilled my obligation to the seminary.”

“And your obligations to us?” Sally was really reaching.

“None. Oh, I’ve the same obligations that I owe you on the street as a Christian and as a citizen. But my obligation as a teacher is to the seminary. Their obligation to you is to give you the preparation to be a preacher of Christian doctrine, of Methodist doctrine in particular. I must have overlooked the place where they promised to help you work out your private theology. Just to satisfy my curiosity, and not part of the course work, what do you plan to do with that theology when you have determined it?”

“I’m going to be a pastor, of course. How could I do that without working out my own theology?”

“Well, it’s none of my business. As I said, I hired on to teach Christian theology. But I should think you would have a hard time making a living as the founder of The Church of Sally.”

“It’s not The Church of Sally. I’m going to be a Christian pastor. It’s just that I have to decide what my theology is. Then I’ll preach that.”

“I don’t see why you expect some congregation to pay you for that. They are more likely to expect you to preach the theology of the church. Now, look at Jen. Plenty of parishioners would like to look at her. Even if she grew her hair back out, though, I doubt that many people would pay to hear her opinions. They want to hear the Gospel. For that matter, I have a D. Min. just like you’ll have; I studied years after that. You don’t seem terribly anxious to hear my opinions.”