Journal Entry 6
February 21, 2008
I am wrestling my way through the second term paper of the Christian Tradition class. I have vowed I will be finishing the paper before the eve of the date due. To that end I diligently plodded my way through loads of resources, spending hours in the Menno Simons historical library being rather bored. And then I read a little speech by a retired Mennonite professor that introduced me to Desiderius Erasmus.
Suddenly, a spark! The very next day I changed part of my paper topic to write on Erasmus, a pre-Modern post-modern, lover of the Church, and devout believer in Church unity. He always hoped that the Catholic Church would swing open its doors to include the Reformers after it thought hard enough. For him the Church was big enough for all Christ-believers. As someone said of him, he thought schism was a worse sin than heresy. (I really do know the source of that statement, and I faithfully promise to credit its source in a proper footnote in the paper.)
The ugly part of my religious heritage is a long past full of painful and angry church splits. My research is a reaction to that, as well as a quest to find if others believed as I do – that division has no place in a Christian Church. I hear Erasmus calling all Christians to “chill,” not to cool our zeal for the Gospel, but to strengthen zeal by working together, even with Christians with whom we can’t find agreement, with Christ at the center. Where might the Church be if we paid attention to his old (new) message?
Besides working through a paper, I am tightening my grasp on Greek. In Greek Readings we are translating the Gospel of John story of the blind man healed in the Siloam Pool. I find it’s easy to lose track of time while translating. Before I know it an entire hour whizzes by and I’ve succeeded in translating perhaps as far as 2 verses! (Or maybe three short ones.) I look ahead to the end of the semester and see I need to be slightly more proficient than that, and I have faith I will be there. In some cases my own personal Siloam Pool would be nice. I’ll just wash this blinding mud from my eyes and I’ll see my way clearly – through Greek class, through decisions, through term papers, and through Seminary!
