Here it is, Skaftna’s Doom.

And here it is listed on SF Signal!

I am doing pretty interesting work. I study, I read, I pray, I prepare to teach three times on Sunday, also teach other times. I have a full schedule just studying, thinking, reading and writing. I can work from home, begin at the hour of the morning I please and take as long a hiatus as I please as long as I make sure I’m getting a conscientious number of hours in. In Colombia the work week is 48 hours long.

And I have to keep track of the time, to look at the clock and measure it accurately rather than work a long time and say that its enough. I have a clear conscience on that. I can say that I use my time well. And I have to do that because I’m doing what I don’t want to be doing, and every time I come back form a vacation it is harder.

It isn’t the activities I’m doing. And now that my salary is adjusted my life is comfortable, and my position is probably enviable. But this responsibility of pastoring is not one I desire, and so the thing becomes more and more difficult. Perhaps like a gradual hardening of the arteries of the soul. If it goes on, it is going to become dreadful.

Only God places pastors, for which I am very grateful. Only God gives them the desire and the supernatural graces to carry on the work.

Here is what’s lamentable: that people want to make pastors out of the people they’d like to see doing it on the preposterous notion that there aren’t enough, as if God didn’t give enough. As if the work of God depended on people being willing enough. So they try to use browbeating and guilt. Which is not how God does it, is it? There is something to be said for his placing there a desire.

Not that I think it has to start out with a desire. But for anything you’re going to do long-term, there has to be a certain joy and willingness on your part if it is going to be done well. And that is a truth hard to argue with; one of those things that rings true down in the deep heart’s core. Because nobody who of good-will desires for another the pastorate, desires for that other a mediocre pastorate.

That was an enjoyable trip, the North Market. And there the food is satisfying because of the method they employ. You look at it when you order, not a picture. It makes a difference. I, of course, went with the non-arts & crafts Chicago style brat and some chili.

Sensible fat chap prepared for me my food, answered my questions, got me out of the way. Not a big one on getting food from yon Cassius types, you know? The lean and hungry look makes one uneasy when it comes to cooks.

Big place, informal, warm. You get your stuff and get along upstairs and find your own location and go to work. From up above you can look down on things. I watched a guy cutting up lamb or goat. Most persevering, and bloodless too.

The downside was the coffee shop. They were cheerful enough with the service, just mindbogglingly slow. I believe the native taking money had a religious tattoo of some vaguely Christian sect. I also believe everybody working there could have used a triple espresso.

Well, don’t go there for the coffee. Go there for the cheese, the bread, the sausages, and if it is your taste, the arts & crafts stuff from other lands. The Vietnamese seemed very popular with many. And yet I think the place with wood-smoked meats variety was the most popular of all.

Four liters of Dr. Pepper down.

Already blew the budget on books.

Got jeans.

Got new laptop.

Met with a person who takes pictures of dead frogs (interesting) of a Saturday morning. Bright the morning, clear the skies, snow glittering down from the wind rushing in the branches. Ended among the old books heaped and stacked.

Sat through a long, disjointed monologue where the preacher had the effrontery to say he’s neither a Calvinist nor an Arminian. Hard to believe such people are real, but I haven’t been in a fundamentalist church for years, thank God. What dishonesty in the same building where I was first taught theology! Do their peers compell them to say such things? Is there a crowd of them for whom saying that is fitting in? Surely the second coming is at hand.

If you say what this chap did, one of two things, it seems to me, is true of you: 1, you are ignorant of theology; or 2, you are being dishonest. Is this what comes of Calvinism being popular? If you want to be cool, you pretend you’re not really Arminian, however limited the options? The unspoken assumption seems to be they return to the simplicity of Scripture refusing all the accretions superadded by the Reformation and other such theologically fanatical knuckleheads.

Otherwise enjoying the winter. Had a bath!

Morning and the world is white. The abbreviated daylight throws us off, but we needed the rest.

Snow is falling, english muffins, sausage and that peculiarly bad coffee that so many Americans spend their mornings over. It is as if Colombia never existed.

* * *
Was in Manhattan yesterday: nice place. The subway with its neglect–a piece of New York being forgotten, coffee and the Empire State where I was out of place not having a blue light on my face since I only bent over my coffee, people bustling about a city in English.

* * *
Got cash from an ATM in Manhattan and the receipt told me I had 2 million left in my account. Then you know what incredibly happened? I threw the receipt away.

* * *
Enjoyed the bust of Beethoven in Central Park. And everything.

* * *
Next stage of my life: figure out how to live in NYC.

Today I told the congregation that after prayer, counsel and reflection, it does not seem to the deacons, to my spiritual authority (the pastor overseeing things) or to me that it is God’s will for me to be a pastor in our congregation here.

Great relief on my part. Interesting how it all went.

Let me here set forth some early thoughts–a hypothesis which needs to be substantiated, but a guide for my research.

The wisdom of Proverbs is not always taken with the subtlety of Solomon, and some measure of that subtlety is required. I myself have been exposed to people who do not take Proverbs in the way it is intended. These people take the statements of Proverbs as absolute guarantees even when the book itself is set against this. I have also found, especially among reformed believers, the silly idea that there are no limits to the wisdom of a believer. We have, after all, the mind of Christ–they’ll say. If you talk to some of them about the possibility of Romney’s candidacy, they are worried that he’s a Mormon for this very reason: they’d rather have a Christian, as if a Christian knew more about being a president. I chalk it up to all this silly talk of worldview–the concept has its uses, but it is used to explain too much, like the Enlightenment.

So there is needed a hermeneutical guide to Proverbs, a post-exilic reminder of what perhaps we can call the darker side of the Solomonic teaching and a further guide to wisdom. This is Ecclesiastes and it emphasizes, not the uselessness of proverbs, but the limitations of the wise, of temporal beings, of what we can know (perhaps I ought to say a limit to the benefits of wisdom too). Take, for instance, Ecclesiastes 2:14

The wise man’s eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness:

So far, so clear; nothing could be more proverbial. But that’s not where the verse ends, nor the thought, which is most Ecclesiastical:

and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them all.

There is the adding of nuance, the placing of the thing in a broader context, the addition of another consideration. The wise have an advantage, but lets further consider the fact of mortality, says the preacher. He returns to the limits of man.

Having assimilated this truth in Ecclesiastes, we then have Job. I am making no statement on the time of the writing of Job. Perhaps that plays into it, but I don’t really see that it has to, though it is one of the things I need to look into. I’m just placing the lesson of Job in a sequence with these other books of wisdom literature.

What does Job add? What Job’s friends knew was the proverbial wisdom hardened into retribution theology. Job has the advantage over them of the perspective of Ecclesiastes. Job knows he is not suffering for any wrong he has done. Job’s mistake is not to acknowledge the mystery of God. He goes where Qohelet only suggested and did not so boldly approach; Job charges God with injustice, capriciousness–in other words–forgetting God’s goodness. If Ecclesiastes is about the limits of man’s wisdom, then Job is about the fundamental incomprehensibleness of God, and the question that separates believer from unbeliever: is an infinite and therefore incomprehensible God still infinitely good?

Now back to the research to see how that will modify my hypothesis.

I went to the internet roach motel to see the take-down on Straub’s recent casual article and noticed that William Frederick Danker has quit living.

For those of you who don’t know, the burgundy covers of the Bauer, Danker, Arndt & Gingrich Greek-English Lexicon contain extraordinary pages. To use another lexicon after using BDAG is to return to live in a world with a dimension missing. The man devoted himself to a task not many will recognize or appreciate, but which was truly great and noble. The 3rd edition, his edition, is monumental.

I do not believe the Spanish language has a dictionary of living Spanish that compares with what BDAG does for Koine Greek (the 22nd Edition of the Royal Academy’s dictionary has not even gotten past tautological definitions where the verb is used to gloss the noun and, yes, vice-versa). For all I know–and I have HAL in Logos–there is nothing like BDAG even for Hebrew. How can that be? No Danker of Hebrew-English.

I use BDAG to study, but I also use BDAG in my elementary Greek class all the time. It is worth all $165, of satisfactory weight and binding, and defines like nobody’s business.

The expressions of Arminius himself are so guarded that Moses Stuart (Bib. Repos., 1831) found it possible to construct and argument to prove that Arminius was not an Arminian.

-Strong