Saturday, August 28, 2010

New semester and me

I feel like I am in the right place. I started my third semester at Carnegie Mellon this week, after an amazing summer back home in Norway. I thought it would be terrible to leave home. But it was not. It actually feels really good to be here in Pittsburgh right now. I have a mission here, and I feel good about working towards my degree here. I also have a deep conviction that going home is not far away. I will go home. Soon. And it will be wonderful. But right now, my world is here, it is beautiful, and I am at peace.

I am taking four classes this semester. That is not an awful lot, and the classes neither have a reputation of being awfully difficult. That said, three of my classes are required for my major, so I am not falling far behind by this. The four classes I am taking are:

15-123 Effective Programming in C and UNIX
18-240 Structure and Design of Digital Systems
21-127 Concepts of Mathematics
79-350 Early Christianity

The three first classes are all having a pretty slow start, and I expect them to speed up in the coming weeks. They are also classes that are not very interesting to discuss unless the audience is educated in software, logic or mathematics. Hence, the class material I will discuss here on the blog is mostly limited to Early Christianity. So let me tell you about that course:

We are about twenty students taking the class. I don’t know the various flavours of belief we represent, but a fair guess is that most of us are Christians in some sense or another. I know a few of them from before, but they are mostly strangers to me.

Professor Miller is an historian, and the course is teaching us how to look at the Bible from an historian’s perspective. Miller does not, however, impose on us that the historical perspective is the only correct way to read the Bible, though he certainly would argue that it is a valid way to read the Bible; Jesus may or may not be the Christ, but regardless of your answer to that he is also an undeniable historical figure, and the Jesus movement was also a very true and historical movement. And it is this historical aspect of Jesus and the early church that is under the scope of this course.

As for Miller’s own belief, it is hard to tell exactly what it is. I certainly do not think he is not holding the Bible as infallible, as opposed to what many evangelicals do. However, he has a great respect for Jesus, so either he considers him the one and only Christ, or he considers Jesus as one of many “Christ’s”, or he may also just consider him as a great human being.

You see, historians do not take for granted that what is recorded in the gospels is always a true record. A historian is considering the views and belief of the writer as well. So whenever Jesus claims that he is the Messiah, a historian can opt to believe that those claims were written into Jesus’ words later. Written, of course, in the belief that he actually did say those words, but as any historian would tell you: Human memory is closer to what the brain can make sense of than what actually happened.

To accept this premise does not, however, imply that you cannot believe the gospels are inspired, and that what they tell is mostly true. For what I know, Miller himself may very well believe the gospels are inspired and true. If so, he is just more aware of his own beliefs than most of us are.

Anyways, I think this will be an interesting semester, and I am looking forward to all of it. Oh, and I am also hired by the University as a course assistant in 15-110, which is an introductory programming course in Python. Funny thing, though, I have never used Python before! When I took that course, it was taught in Java (see one of the assignments here). Wish me luck :-)


More:
Joseph H. Lynch: Early Christianity: A Brief History

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this, and all the best of luck for your semester!

    Perhaps you could have a separate blog for the three first classes, I'm sure that some (at least one) of your readers would be interested in those as well :-)

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  2. Godt å lese det du skriver! Veldig godt:)

    Historikere flest vet vel ikke om den dype respekt og Gudsfrykt - og sannhetsforkjærlighet - den har, som virkelig lever nær Gud. Løgn eller forvridd tale ville være en stor, stor synd, særlig når det er Guds ting man skriver om.

    Og likevel kan jo troverdige vitner huske bittelitt feil her og der. Eller ha misforstått noe, eller blitt feilinformert. Det er jo vitner vi alle er, både vi og bibelforfatterne (med unntak av en del profetiske tekster som er ment å være direkte tale fra Gud).

    Bibelen selv slår jo fast at "løgngriffelen har vært ute" og kludret til noe i Guds ord. Så det er bibelsk å ikke tro hver minste tøddel. Og flott at mange viktige sannheter står skrevet på mange ulike steder og måter.

    Hvis man merker og skjønner eller vet at her har vi med et menneske som virkelig lever nær Gud å gjøre, en med høy integritet og også med slik ballast som jødisk kultur gav (man lyver IKKE, man skjønnmaler IKKE, fantaserer ikke; man snakker sant både om kongen og slaven) - da kan man våge å tro på det vitnet skriver. I all hovedsak.

    Jeg antar/har hørt det er en slik type prøving skriftene i bibelen har vært gjennom, da de blei godkjent til å være med i Bibelen. Men det vil vel du lære mer om.

    Jeg synes Lukas sier det så flott i Luk. 1, 3: "No har eg granska alt vel frå fyrst av, og eg har sett meg føre at eg vil skriva det opp for deg i samanheng...."
    - man merker seriøsiteten og ærligheten,og at han virkelig har gjort så godt og sant som han kunne.

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