Julie’s News from Maryland

Today was the first day of testing. I was really excited when I saw the Scripture question. It was right up my alley and really straightforward. God, money, prosperity, faithfulness - all stuff that I love. I was thrilled about the essay that I wrote, well the three short essays that I wrote - it was a three part question:

Limited Resources: An annotated Bible, such as the New Oxford Annotated Bible or the HarperCollins Study Bible, and a concordance. Read Deuteronomy 28:1-14 and Luke 18:18-25 and address the following in a three-page essay:

A. What is the relationship between prosperity and faithfulness in each passage?

B. Readers use a variety of hermeneutical principles to interpret the Bible. Using these two passages as examples, articulate and explain the principles of interpretation that guide your reading of the Bible, especially when texts may present significantly different theological understandings.

C. You have been asked to preach a sermon using the two passages named above. Summarize the main points you would make in your sermon. Be sure it engages both passages.

The afternoon Ethics question was significantly harder for me. This was it:

Open Resources

Are there any acts that are intrinsically evil?

Answer this question in a three-page essay, building a case for your answer that makes use of resources from the Christian ethical tradition.

I looked at this question and thought about how simple, but how complex that question is. I knew immediately that there really isn’t any right answer to the question, but that the best I’d be able to do was take a position and defend it to the best of my ability. I also knew that the question was going to lend itself to the most common mistake that people make when answering GOE questions: not answering the actual question that was asked. As I started to think about this and research it, I started to slip into the origin of evil (and original sin) and I also started to slip into the problem of evil (how we reconcile the goodness of God with the presence of evil in the world). I had to work really hard to stay away from both of those topics and stick to the question that was asked.

As I was writing this essay, I also tried to keep in mind one of the pieces of advice given to us by a former GOE grader - don’t answer like a lofty theologian or a learned scholar, try to answer the question like a good priest. The grader advised us that the readers want to know what we think and what we believe, and they want us to use a few sources to support our ideas. Keeping this in mind helped me to feel like I didn’t have to write the most academic paper ever written about evil acts, but rather to state my own thoughts and beliefs about it, using the Christian ethical tradition for reference and support.

So, 2 down, 5 more to go. Tomorrow is Christian Theology and Missiology (open resources) in the morning and Contemporary Society (Limited resources: bible and prayer book) in the afternoon.

I really am not all that worried about this test tomorrow. I know that I’m a smart, intelligent, articulate person and that I’ve learned a ton of stuff on this journey. I’m reasonably certain that I will be able to say something thoughtful in a concise and organized way.

However, my body tells me that I’m more worried than I’m allowing myself to believe. Last Friday, I was just hanging out at home and discovered that my knee was really sore. You see, when I’m worried about something, unlike most people who get headaches, I get a knee ache. It went away pretty quickly, but I knew why it was there. Then, over the weekend, my jaw started to get sore. It was hard to open and close my jaw and chewing was a little uncomfortable. As I sit here tonight, both sides of my jaw are really sore. I must be clenching my jaw and not realizing that I’m doing it.

Oh, and I had a dream the other night. I dreamed that the Liturgy question asked “Which prayer in the Book of Common Prayer was originally included in its long form, then reduced to its short form, then restored to its original length?” While my classmates and I had acces to Prayer Books, none of us could find the answer. We kept searching and searching, but it just wasn’t there. Then I woke up.

Clearly, my body is letting me know that there is some stress in there about this test. I suppose this is good - adrenaline and nerves help to keep us at the top of our game in the midst of things like this. 4 days from now it will be all over.