On Study

The Word of God is not fixed.

My table is a mess. Here is today’s Franciscan Nugget.

"And this is eternal life: that they may know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (John 17:3) True knowledge is knowledge of God. Tertiaries therefore give priority to devotional study of scripture as one of the chief means of attaining that knowledge of God which leads to eternal life.

I like to read. I like ideas. I found God, in part, in the college classroom. Dr. Frank Eakin was perhaps the most formative voice in that work. You can read about his academic career here. He was my teacher as well as my academic advisor during undergrad. I loved his classes. His seminar on Amos was what convinced me to pursue post-graduate work. Scripture is, as I would learn, potentially a gift to every culture in which it is read. It is read in, through, by, for, and occasionally against the cultures who encounter it. Why? Because the Word of God is not fixed. It is alive. Frank used to make the more fundamentalist students very uncomfortable. You cannot take it literally. Ever. To do so is an insult to both the texts within the canon and to those who preserved it for the rest of us.