Tag Archive - Fuller

Conference Week: Day 1

November 16, 2011 in SBL with 2 Comments

It’s conference week. Day 1.

I’m at Fuller Sacramento today. N. T. Wright is getting ready to take the stage to talk about Paul for the 21st century.

The follow up panel discussion will be moderated by Kathryn Greene-McCreight. I’ll be on the panel with Peter Rodgers, Libby Vincent, and Chap Clark.

Stay tuned for a full debrief. This is your warning: blogging for the next week will be heavily tainted by biblical studies, and the Society of Biblical Literature conference in particular. Stay tuned…

UPDATE

This afternoon, N. T. Wright addressed the significance of Paul for the 21st century church. He began by a sort of brainstorming of various issues that confront us in the 21st century: wealth and poverty, e-generation and its impact on relationships; the standoff between secularism and fundamentalism.

With the table set, Wright addressed three issues where Paul speaks and transforms our understanding: God (monotheism); People of God (election); and Hope (eschatology: one glorious future awaiting the world).

Each of these, Wright argues, is reworked around Jesus and the Spirit in Paul.

God is the God and father of Jesus Christ; Jesus is Lord, the Spirit works the works of God.

The people of God are those who are the one, holy people of God–the body of Christ.

And as for eschatology: there is a hope present among us because new creation has begun with the resurrection of Jesus.

There was lots of great stuff here; nothing new for those who know Wright’s work, but great reminders about who God is for us in Christ, and who, then, we are supposed to be.

The one question I raised, and perhaps slight concern I had, was that Wright talked a lot about hope and resurrection with little mention of the cross as the road to our promised future, the source of obedience that secures our resurrection hope.

All told, it was a great afternoon, with almost 500 in attendance. Tonight’s gathering on Jesus is a few hundred stronger and getting started now.

Great stuff going on at Fuller, Sacramento!

Fuller Faculty on Women in Ministry

September 22, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Fuller with 7 Comments

Fuller’s faculty have a series of videos in which they discuss various dynamics of women in ministry. Enjoy.

Marianne Meye Thompson on Women in Ministry:

Women in Ministry from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Marianne Meye Thompson approaches the question from the standpoint of creation:

Women in Ministry: The Basis in Creation from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Joel Green approaches the question from the perspective of the Gospels:

Women in Ministry: The Basis in Jesus’ Ministry from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Erin Default-Hunter talks about a personal journey on the issue of women in ministry:

Women in Ministry: A Personal Journey from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Mouw on Fuller

September 21, 2011 in Fuller with 4 Comments

Rich Mouw gave a great welcome address to Fuller’s incoming students. It outlines well where Fuller came from, what “evangelical” might mean as a label for non-fundamentalist, even non-conservative Christians.

New Students Convocation: President’s Message from Fuller Theological Seminary on Vimeo.

Open Letter to New Testament Students

September 13, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 54 Comments

Dear NT Intro students,

Our quarter will be kicking off in a couple of weeks. I love the process of digging into the New Testament texts with students–you bring a passionate commitment to living out the Jesus story that is too often missing in the halls of the academy. You remind me why we study the Bible in the first place.

But there’s something you should know. Bible classes are often the hardest classes for seminary students. And I don’t mean that they’re the hardest academically. I mean that they’re often the hardest on students’ faith.

You’re coming to study a book that you love. You’re coming to delve into a book whose various verses and chapters have spoken directly to your heart–and transformed you. You’re coming to build on what you know and to enrich what you’ve already discovered.

But if I am doing my job, you are probably going to undergo a slow process of discovering that what you thought was a book is, in fact, a bunch of books; you’re going to find out that what you know is often incorrect; and what has spoken to you has been edifying, but that text may not ever be able to speak with that same voice again.

Bible professors are not the only ones whose classes hope to leave you with transformed knowledge. But rarely do you have as much invested in the assumptions that the professor is trying to deconstruct.

People lose their faith in Biblical studies courses, and grad school in particular, because they discover the pervasive extent to which the NT was written by humans and speaks differently from what they anticipated.

This can all sound terribly bleak. But I want you to enter the class with your eyes open.

And more than that, I am going to make you a promise.

Here is what I promise to do for you: I promise to leave you with a Jesus who is worth following, a Christian vocation that’s worth risking your life on, and a Bible that will guide you toward both.

In other words, I promise that I will not leave you empty-handed; I promise that my goal is to strengthen you as a faithful follower of Christ. I have not come to steal, kill, and destroy, but to help you better see the One who is the way of life, and how scripture is a witness to him.

So for my part, I promise to leave you with a faith worth believing.

For your part, I ask that you come to learn. Here, more than anywhere else, if you have come to have your prior understandings validated through high academic marks, you are likely to experience frustration. Hold loosely to what you’ve brought through the door, and learn what is coming from your reading, from our discussions, and from the lectures.

Learn what is really on offer, resist jumping to conclusions, press to find out how it all holds together. I promise that I am striving to be a faithful teacher, I need you to enter in with the goal of being a faithful learner.

At the end of the quarter, we will likely disagree about a few things. Or maybe we’ll disagree about almost everything. That’s fine. I won’t down-grade you for that. But I need to know that you’ve learned. And, I hope that in the process you have seen more clearly a Jesus who is worth following. I believe with all my heart that this is what I’m helping you discover.

So if you feel like things are falling apart or spinning out of control, let’s talk. That’s not the direction this should go, but it’s always part of the danger of discovering that the Bible isn’t what we thought it was–or that Jesus isn’t who we thought he was. But the fresh acts of faith that such discoveries engender can themselves be the stuff of newness of life.

I look forward to learning with you in the weeks ahead.

Peace,
jrdk

I Stream, You Stream…

August 2, 2011 in Fuller with 0 Comments

…we all stream on UStream!

UPDATE: Here’s a recording of the video:

But this afternoon, it’s me. I’ll be on Fuller Seminary’s UStream.tv channel this afternoon, broadcasting live at 2:00 p.m. PDT.

I’ll kick things off with a few thoughts, and then it’s open floor for questions from the audience.

You can find out more by going here.

Or, you can just pop over to the UStream page from 2:00-3:00 PDT.

See you there!

Common English Bible at Fuller

April 27, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Fuller with 35 Comments

During both Advent and Lent I participated in blog tours that were designed, in part, to get word out about the Common English Bible.

Recently, Fuller Seminary’s Bible division voted to place the CEB alongside the NRSV as the translations that may be used by students in our courses. Though not the minutes from the meeting, the press release gets it about right:

“Fuller’s mission is to prepare men and women for the manifold ministries of Christ and his church. We work out this calling with an eye toward both academic excellence and service to the church. The Biblical Division’s decision to approve the Common English Bible for classroom use reflects these commitments,” says J. R. Daniel Kirk, assistant professor of New Testament at Fuller. “We’ve approved the Common English Bible because it’s an academically excellent translation, because it communicates the underlying Greek and Hebrew texts in a clear and accessible fashion, and because it reflects the reality that the communities for which the Bible was written consist of both women and men.”

You can read more here.

As readers of my blog will know, it is an important part of my own theological and ecclessial agenda to have us think and act in all ways as though women and men are equal members of the body with equal access to all gifts and graces. CEB handles gender-inclusive language well, without sacrificing style. Especially in the wake of the death of the TNIV, the advent of the CEB at this point is a tremendous gift to the church, being both more up-to-date and often more accessible than the NRSV.

The whole Bible will be available in August. The New Testament is available now in various formats, and online. You can download Genesis for free right now as well.

Check it out.

Telling the Stories

March 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Culture, Media with 7 Comments

If you want to be an effective communicator of the Christian message, remember that ours is first and foremost a story. Become a great story teller, and don’t think that when you’re “presenting the gospel” you are supposed to shift in to didactic theology mode, and you’ll be well on your way.

Telling stories well usually means being able to read and understand stories well. This explains half of my advice to undergrads who would be biblical scholars: Double major in (English) Literature and Classics. Classics so you understand the world and languages of the New Testament, Literature so that you can cultivate the skill of reading and the art of interpretation.

This is also why learning how to watch and interpret and talk about movies can be an important part of engaging the twenty-first century North American world.

Enter Windrider.

Last night Fuller Northern California did a warm-up film watching event, in anticipation of the upcoming Windrider Film Forum in April (April 28-30).

The short films we watched were “The Little Gorilla” and “Kavi.” Both were about children who were faced with opportunities to overcome obstacles that stood in their way: internal and external. Both raised significant issues about family and its ability to help or hinder the realization of a child’s potential. Kavi also opened the audience’s eyes to the horrors of modern slavery.

You can watch Kavi here. Also, check out the website.

But the things that I took away from the film were less about the films themselves than a few conversations that ensued afterward.

One line of conversation that developed was prompted by the messy ending of one of the movies. It’s not all neat and tied together. The deliverer does not deliver a full redemption. In response to this observation by an audience member, Chap Clark spoke for a few minutes about how that is not only what “life” is really like, but that is what the Christian life is like as well. We too often present the gospel, especially at camps and to young people, as though accepting the gospel is the end-point that ties all the loose ends together.

But that’s not reality. And we need to learn to be comfortable with the loose ends and to think about how we tell the story such that it matches up a bit better. How do we tell our story? And do we tell the story as well as these film makers?

Another line of conversation was opened up by someone asking about the spate of spiritually-interested Hollywood films. Ralph Winter spoke about this being a long-running theme in the entertainment industry, but one that’s getting more press right now. He talked about the opportunities that are opened up for us to address spiritual issues by the films and TV shows that serve them up for us.

But what I really wanted to know was not so much how we as Christians can sponge off the great stuff already being done. I wanted to know what he thought we as Christians needed to learn in order to make better movies and write better shows. Why is it that the Coen Brothers make the best Christian movies in Hollywood even though they aren’t Christian?

His response was spot on, in my opinion:

    Christians think the most important thing is content. The entertainment industry only cares about telling a good story.

The way that Winter explains Christianity’s failure in the entertainment industry parallels what I would say is its failure, overall, to understand itself. We have too often forgotten that our faith is a story. It’s not a statement.

We think that to tell about Jesus we have to give an atonement theory. The early Christians thought that to tell about Jesus they had to narrate his death: in Gospels, in a meal, in a baptismal ritual.

As Winter suggested, we should be the greatest story tellers of all. But before that will be true of us, we have to really start believing that the story’s the thing.

Once we do that, not only can we, perhaps, make better films and write better fiction. Perhaps we can even engage good stories, stories without the particular content we would have put in, and see there the stories, or even the Story, we wish to tell.

On Campus (Pasadena)

February 16, 2011 in Culture with 3 Comments


    “Yes, that’s his mouth.” (Mother to her two year old daughter who was playing around the sculpture.)

Winter Courses: Pasadena & Menlo Park

November 6, 2010 in Academia with 0 Comments

For any Fuller students out there, sweating and poring over your winter quarter courses, here’s what I’ve got cooking for the winter.

For those of you at the Mother Ship in Pasadena, I will be teaching NE506, Greek Exegesis of Mark, on Wednesdays.

For those of you in the Bay Area or otherwise in Northern California, I will be teaching NT2, Acts-Revelation, in Menlo Park.

ATS School Size–And Fuller Nor Cal

September 27, 2010 in Academia with 4 Comments

Andy Rowell drew my attention to the latest Association of Theological Schools Annual Data Tables. Some of you couldn’t care less, some of you will kill be because you’ll kill a whole afternoon looking at stats. Apologies!

One thing that struck me as I was looking over the list: In the U.S. and Canada, 62.2% of member schools have a full-time equivalent enrollment of less than 150 students.

At Fuller’s Northern California Campus (Bay Area & Sacramento) where I work, we have an FTE of about 190. Fuller Northern Cal has more students than over 60% of the seminaries in the U.S. and Canada.

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