The two sections went in totally different directions today. The first one basically followed the outline I came up with in the previous post, though of course I didn’t get very far (I think I got through the second point, the idea of kerygma). It was something of a zoo, since a number of prospective students were on campus and at least seven or eight of them decided to sit in on my class. But I continued to hammer home the point about the non-naturalness of assuming that “belief” is always central to any understanding of religion, and that Christianity is more or less unique on this. I kept asking them why they thought it would be so important whether one believes, for example, that the Holy Spirit is homoousios or homoiousios with the Father, or why it would be justifiable to anathematize someone for technical deviations from the Chalcedonian synthesis (“two natures in one person, without mixture or confusion”). They wriggled around it, some of them, for quite a while, but ultimately I think they were able to appreciate the genuine strangeness of this element of the Christian tradition. Two of my better students, Kl. and Ca., plus another serious and engaged young man who has worked with me in the past, E., and a couple of promising newcomers, are all in this course.

In the afternoon section, I had asked students to come with questions they’d had about the textbook material, and they did. The questions were on the following topics, more or less:

1. the idea of “grace”
2. the notion of a Christian “myth,” i.e. the story of Jesus, a term the textbook uses frequently and which is troubling to some students;
3. the concept of “justification by faith”; and
4. (this one is kind of random) the significance of Kierkegaard. I didn’t even remember that the textbook mentioned the great Dane.

Probably 90% of the class period ended up being spent on the first point. Err, wait, actually we never got to points two through four. I spent pretty much the entire class pushing them to look at a single paragraph in the textbook (page fifty-nine, if I remember right) that gives a quick account of Augustine’s conversion experience. He was “seduced in the bedroom of his soul.” The students were grappling with the notion of agency or helplessness, and I tried to guide them towards a more intuitive grasp of the existential position of the Christian subject according to Augustine’s view: powerless, driven by desires he or she cannot control, continually beset by both passion and wonderment… I guess I didn’t get quite so carried away.

In neither class did I give them an assignment to think about for Monday. That’s when we start Traveling Mercies.