TheBanyanTree: Final exams (Warning! Christian stuff included)

[JMoney]

This year I had only one unit left to pass to get my Master of Info Tech
degree.  Thinking that I've generalised enough in my life I decided to take
the advanced Java unit but had to wait till second semester to do it.

It's been disappointing.  For one thing, our lecturer got appointed dean of
school and seems to have been so busy doing dean of school work that he ran
out of time to look after his students.  He missed four lectures out of 13
and was ill prepared for several of the others.  The unit web page was
frequently not up to date.  We had only one lecture on Beans and no prac.
We never touched servlets.  Instead of using Java classes to provide data
structures we had to code our own, as though we were doing a Data Structures
and Algorithms unit but without the theory.  The exam is next Tuesday
morning and for the reasons stated and others I'm finding it difficult to
care.  I just want to get it over and done with.

I also did two units by distance through a Bible college down in Victoria -
Old Testament A and Theology A.  Now they were good.

Since Dad died my mother has been attending church and Bible study
regularly.  I remember her telling me about her feelings regarding the story
in Judges where the Levite gave his concubine (instead of himself) to the
Benjaminites and they gang raped her so viciously that she died.  Then the
Levite cut her body into twelve pieces and sent the pieces off to all the
tribes to call them to civil war against Benjamin.

My mother just hated that story.  She couldn't understand what it was about
or why such a terrible story should be in the Bible.  At the time I couldn't
understand it either but I didn't let that bother me too much.  I just put
the problem in the (large) mental basket where I keep mysteries that are
beyond my present understanding.  But now that I've done OT A I can see what
that story is all about and what the lesson of it is.

Judges is so interesting because it starts off with saying repeatedly that
the people did evil in the sight of the Lord, moves to the stories of the
various Judges - culminating in the story of Samson who had his eyes gouged
out and brought a building down on his own and others' heads - and then
finishes with saying repeatedly that the people did what was right in their
own eyes.  And that's where the story of the Levite and his concubine fits
in.

You have leaders (like Joshua) who do mostly right things but some wrong
things, but they're strong leaders so the followers imagine that everything
the leader does must be OK.  And so it goes until subsequent leaders are
doing mostly wrong things, or all wrong things, and by that time no one can
see what is wrong with what they do so they join their leaders in the
wrongness.  Welcome to our world.

I remember watching the world's first satellite broadcast on TV.  There were
the Beatles singing, "All you need is love".  So simple it sounds.  Just
love one another and everything will be fine.  But they couldn't even love
each other and so they busted up.

That's the hard thing - loving the person who shares your bed, or the person
who is your child, or the one you work with, or the one who lives next door.
It's easy to love people in the abstract - people who you'll never meet and
who will never ask you for a bed for the night, or for money, your time, or
a glass of water.  G.K. Chesterton wrote on that subject much better than I
can.

Theology A was more difficult because we were introduced to some ways of
thinking that only make sense when you look at theology with eyes that are
blinded by the new moral fundamentalism.  We spent more time on kenotic
process theology than on black, feminist or liberation theology and what an
eye opener it was!

Kenosis means something like, "to empty".  Its adherents take Philippians
2:7 (which they translate as saying that Jesus "emptied" himself - and thus
became less than fully divine, which would completely wreck atonement
theology - whereas others say it means that he "made himself nothing" as we,
being creatures, are nothing) and say that God "emptied" himself at
creation.  That is, they say that God made himself less than omnipotent,
omniscient and omnipresent.  They say that God did that in order to allow
his creation (including us) the freedom it needed to evolve in its own way
and (as far as human beings are concerned) to love him even though, if he
had retained his omnipotence, he could have required our love.  Freedom to
choose!  How high-minded and good and moral that sounds.  How excellent this
god must be who voluntarily withheld his power so that we could have freedom
to evolve in our own way and to love him without being forced to do so.

But I don't see that love that is forced can be defined as love.  How can
you love someone on demand?  It doesn't happen.  You love someone because
they're loveable not because they're standing over you with a big stick
saying, "I can force you to act as though you love me".  So God's
omnipotence etc has nothing to do with whether we love him or not.  If he's
lovely in our eyes we will love him.  And as for evolution, well, that's
just materialist theology and bad science and I don't believe it.

Now all I have to do is wait until I get over my heart-felt desire never to
have to do another exam in my life.  Then I'll be able to feel good about
enrolling in OT B and Theology B.  They'll probably be just as stimulating
and informative as the A's were.  I'd really recommend formal theological
training to anyone who's interested in that sort of thing.  It's been a
great blessing to me even after more than twenty years of informal Bible
study.

Janice