Wodehouse was a genius. This is from Right Ho, Jeeves and is just a sample of the superb writing. Augustus “Gussie” Fink-Nottle is a rather reclusive schoolmate of the protagonist and “the Bassett” is not a hound but Madiline Bassett, the girl engaged to Gussie. Here’s how Wodehouse describes the arrangement:

Nobody could love a freak like Gussie except a similar freak like the Bassett. The shot wasn’t on the board. A splendid chap, of course, in many ways — courteous, amiable, and just the fellow to tell you what to do till the doctor came, if you had a sick newt on your hands — but quite obviously not of Mendelssohn’s March timbre. I have no doubt that you could have flung bricks by the hour in England’s most densely-populated districts without endangering the safety of a single girl capable of becoming Mrs Augustus Fink-Nottle without anaesthetic.

Later on in the same chapter here is an exchange between Bertie, the protagonist, and his cousin who has gotten engaged to Gussie in order to spite her real fiance:

I curled the lip about half an inch. ‘Being a female, you wouldn’t. You gentler sexers are like that. You pull off the rawest stuff without a pang. You pride yourselves on it. Look at Jael, the wife of Heber.’
‘Where did you ever hear of Jael, the wife of Heber?’
‘Possibly you are not aware that I once won a Scripture-knowledge prize at school?’
‘Oh, yes. I remember Augustus mentioning it in his speech.’
‘Quite,’ I said hurriedly. I had no wish to be reminded of Augustus’s speech. ‘Well, as I say, look at Jael, the wife of Heber. Dug spikes into the guest’s coconut while he was asleep, and then went swanking about the place like a Girl Guide. No wonder they say “Oh, woman, woman!”‘
‘Who?’
‘The chaps who do. Coo, what a sex! But you aren’t proposing to keep this up, of course?’

Credenda/Agenda did an entire issue on Wodehouse. Check it out if you want to know more.

Eat, drink and be merry for in the fall we do Greek Review! I’m just not getting it. I can recite the facts and the endings and spew paradigm after paradigm but it all seems to be unconnected facts floating around my mind. Two days later I can’t tell you what a subjunctive is or does without looking it up. Nothing stays. Liquid verbs? What was that? Oh, there I found it in Chapter 20 which is now only a dim memory. Translations? Well, recognize the words and then remeber the verse from the English bible and make a guess. But parse the words? Not without the book.

It hit me today (since this is the last week of class) that I will be doing exegesis in the fall. That scared the daylights out of me. If I don’t have the basic idea of what’s going on now, what will happen to me in the fall? Throw that drowning man another cinder block!

The reassuring thing is that Einstein failed math in high school and my Calculus professor in college failed Intro to Calc three times before he was able to go on and get a PhD in it. I could never understand why someone didn’t just get math. You do this to the numbers and you get that! What could be simpler? How can you not get that? Well, now I’m going to have a whole bunch more sympathy on people who struggle with math in the future. I’m not getting the basic facts of language even though they should be obvious.

This is actually a great place to start seminary from; weakness. I’m at the end of myself and there is nothing left. Were I not a Christian and were I not sure that God had called me to this, I would be awash in despare. Instead I find that I am without my own resources and can only lean upon God. If He’s called me to this, then He’ll provide when I have nothing else and I will only be able to praise Him for it.

A coffee shop. Trendy enough. And who’s here? There is an artist, I think he’s going to school. He sits hovering over his papers paying attention each detail in his drawing, one pencil clamped between his teeth the other being guided across the paper. Earphones dangle but don’t interfere. When he looks up at people walking past his table I see in his eye an artist’s power of observation. They’re friendly eyes but penetrating, it seems to me that he is seeing more than a face when he looks up. He is observing a face in a way only an artist can.

The table between he and I contains a screenwriter and his laptop and his cellphone. Nice enough guy and ready to talk about his project. I think he said Matt Damon or someone like that is going to be in it. Though the laptop is opened the only thing I’ve ever seen happen there is him showing the unfinished trailer on it. On occasion he seems to be reviewing the script. Once he explained the plot to someone. Something about a discredited FBI or CIA agent and terrorists on their way to Washington DC and no one believes him. Cookie cutter. Still, he doesn’t seem to be making this up, I just can’t fathom why he’s in Chicago and not L.A. He told someone once but I didn’t pay attention. He spends a lot of time on his cellphone. If this is all a farce, the cellphone is a fantastic cover. He could sit in his coffee shop talking into a dead phone about all kinds of wonderful movie deals and plans. If he’s legit then I’m sitting a few feet away from some hot deal making. Either way, the man is involved in fiction, and from the sounds of it it is cheap fiction real or imagined.

And then there’s me. A middle-aged seminary student struggling to keep up with Greek and leaving a family at home with not much money and not a whole lot to do. No cable and nothing on TV. I leave them with the car when I can but my wife doesn’t know her way around very well yet and doesn’t have anywhere to go if she did. Not that my life is much better. School six days a week and then about four or five hours of study afterwards, more for harder chapters. Caffeine is a way of life really. Not complaining, this is the life God has called me to and we (my family and I) know that it is only for a certain amount of time. Then the hard work starts.

Although I liked him, I was never a really big Andy Kaufman fan. I remember when he hosted Fridays. I wasn’t sure if it was for real or staged but that was Kaufman’s style. Leave the audience guessing.

I’m not a very good Baptist, I don’t suppose I ever was (especially since I’ve never belonged to a Baptist church, just a baptistic one.) One of the baptistic distinctives is the autonomy (under Christ) of the local church. I’m beginning to question that. In the Bible we don’t see Timothy starting his own church in Ephesis nor do we see the Ephesian church calling Timothy. We see Paul sending Timothy to them and giving him instructions. Ditto with Titus.

I believe the baptistic way of looking at this is to say that Paul was an Apostle and he had the authority to do that, we no longer have Apostles so that layer of church authority is gone. That strikes me as a convenient argument but not a compelling one. In the local church Paul told Timothy to appoint elders, not have the congregation elect them. The only time we see the congregation being involved in selecting leaders is in Acts 6 where the congregation selects deacons. But what the Apostles said was not to just go ahead and pick some leaders, but that they were to name men “whom we may put in charge of this task.”

This is the kind of stuff that bothers me. What kind of church am I going to pastor? I’m a Covenant Theologian who rejects infant baptism and a baptistic believer who believes a presbytery is a biblical idea! Man, I just wish I could follow party lines, life would be much easier. Baptists won’t take me and Presbyterians won’t either. Hey, I know, I’ll start my own denomination. Yea. That’s the ticket.

A friend pointed this out. I find it fascinating. It comes from page 119ff of the book “Baptisms in the Early Church” by Stander and Louw (both are paedobaptists):

In the first four centuries of Christianity, the literature on baptism clearly shows how, in the majority of instances, it was persons of responsible age (generally adults and grown children) who were recipients of baptism. …The patristic literature of the first four centuries clearly shows how infant baptism developed. Probably the first instances known, occurred in the latter part of the third century, most likely in North Africa, but during the fourth century infant baptism became more and more accepted and though believer’s baptism of people of responsible age still continued in many areas, the development of the Church (after Church and State became reconciled) into a more unified body, controlled by the see of Rome, provided a theological base for infant baptism to be accepted…Finally, it needs to be remarked that the contention often found in modern literature, viz. that adult baptism in the early Church entailed a missionary situation, cannot be substantiated by the relevant patristic literature, since the transition from adult baptism to infant baptism occurred at a time when Christianity was already a widespread phenomenon in the ancient Church. Therefore, it is also unsound to scrutinize the New Testament writings for allusions to infant baptism, since the latter involved a historical development. Moreover, no distinction was ever made between persons coming from a heathen or Christian family. In fact, the reason for the transition to infant baptism was one of theological perspective and had nothing to do with a missionary situation.

Baptize those babies if you want, but don’t tell me that is has always been the practice of the Church. This bit of historic information stands much of Protestant paedobaptistic apologetics on its head.

Sun has once again clarified Sun adds to confusion over StarOffice for OS X their position on StarOffice for Mac OS X. The original report was correct, “There is a port of OpenOffice in development that is coming along quite well, but there is no development of a StarOffice port at this time.” There, see how simple it is? OpenOffice yes, StarOffice no. But they would like to do one and want Apple to help but there is nothing happening right now. “Besides”, a spokesman said, “we were on holiday when it didn’t happen anyway.” Apple couldn’t be reached for comment because the company was standing in the parking lot smoking at the time.

We had a unit quiz Saturday covering verbs. After the test I chatted with many classmates and they’re all feeling like I do. As we went through each type of verb they all made sense. I could identify and translate each one. When we lumped them all together and did a test on the whole thing, someone put all those distinctions in a blender and hit ‘frapee’. They blurred into one.

Still, our teacher said in class “You aren’t going to learn a language in six weeks, that just isn’t possible. But you will get introduced to it and pick up some tools to help understand it.” That was a comfort. A chapter a day is too much. No one could be expected to get it all in that time period at that speed. Besides, I learn by doing typically so just let me translate so text and I’m happy.