Why I Do What I Do

So it turns out that I have this passion to study the Old Testament. It also turns out that I’m a really huge geek who loves to spend hours studying all the intricacies of the text. I recently finished a paper on biblical Hebrew narrative discourse analysis… sounds boring, right? You would think so but as I said… turns out I’m a huge geek and I love it. So this is great, right? I love to study the Bible… what could possibly be the problem with that?

Here’s the problem. What happens when you get so lost in the details and intricacies of the text that you forget why you were doing this in the first place? Near the beginning of this semester somebody asked me why I’m doing what I’m doing… and my answer was this: “Because I love God and I feel like the Old Testament can teach me so much about who he is.” And that’s true. That’s the original motivation behind this academic pursuit.

In my last class of the semester we were having a discussion about this… about the number of evangelical biblical and theological professors who have lost sight of why they’re doing what they’re doing. And quite frankly it’s a little terrifying. I’m still so young and I have my whole life to get this right… but how many Old Testament professors started out just like me… digging into the biblical text because of a love for God… and then somewhere along the way got distracted by all the other stuff of academia… made a compromise here and there… and then eventually ended up teaching the Bible not out of a love for God but out of a love for what they, themselves had worked so hard to learn and discover.

I love to study the Old Testament. I really do. And I’m going to continue to pursue it. And maybe one day I’ll help students to love the OT the same way that my OT profs inspired me to love it. But I’m not going to lie… it’s a little bit scary.

Anybody have any thoughts?

The Sara Narrative?

This is my very first blog. When I was trying to come up with a title I automatically asked myself what I’m all about these days. Clearly the majority of my thoughts are consumed by my studies… more specifically the Old Testament… even more specifically Old Testament narrative (I could keep getting more and more specific but you would all just get bored). Scholars tend to label the stories of various characters within Old Testament narrative in the most simple way… “the Gideon narrative”, “the Abimelech narrative”, “the Samson narrative”(Clearly I’ve been spending my time in the book of Judges). It’s their story. I’ve been learning that these narratives describe so much more than a series of events or actions of the character. They describe the priorities and motivation of the character. They describe the spiritual life of the character. They describe the heart of the character. So, here it is… The Sara Narrative.