About Books, 1

Hey! Look at me! I got tagged! Ooh, and by someone whose blog is listed in the sidebar at Mike Cope’s, no less.

Actually, this is the second time I’ve been tagged. The first time, tagged by Steve Duer, I was so out of commission, and I didn’t respond for the longest time. Finally, I started putting together my wise and wonderful response. But that was before I had discovered the straight-from-Word-to-Blogger trick. Of course, I was predestined, working on revision #5 I think it was, to completely lose the post. So I did the mature thing: I cried and quit.

This time, I’m going to respond and tag in installments not for fear of loss (although that would be reason enough), but for the same reasons I haven’t posted anything in the last three weeks. My excuses for the downtime are many and myriad. But they’re mainly about the following:

1. Trips to Oklahoma and New Mexico

2. New and returning faculty stuff. (And because of odd circumstances, I’m both new AND returning).

3. The flurry associated with the first two weeks of school.

The above sort of looks like a syllabus, doesn’t it? That’s significant. Oh, which leads me to ask, Where did we get that weird form where nouns that end in “us” go to “i” in the plural? I’m guessing that came from folks who thought that saying syllabuses sounded silly. Anyway, don’t you know ESL students lvoe that sort of exception to English noun endings.

Okay. Now for that first part of the response to the tag:

1. One book that changed your life: Like most readers of books, I want to say, “Which time?” What I mean is, it seems like different books come along at different times in your life and change the way you think and look at things from that time on.

But if I had to pick only one book, I’d have to say, Jesus—God and Man, by Wolfhart Pannenberg. It was assigned to me during my student days at Harding Graduate School in Memphis. At the time Dr. Doug Brown was the Theology Department there and I signed up for his course on “Christian Evidences.” What a mind-expanding drug that was.

Anyway, I picked the topic “Christology,” and was told by Dr. Brown to read and report on what was then Pannenberg’s magnum opus.

What it did for me? It led me to realize that a Christian--even one who was intellectually-engaged—didn’t need to check his or her brain at the door before worshipping the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I can’t begin to express what a joyful relief that was to me. But when people walk up to authors they’ve never met before, and hug them? I know what that’s about.

I suspect that Jesus—God and Man isn’t read as often as it was before the publication of Tom Wright’s newer book, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Trust me, if you manage to wade through either one or both of those books, you’ll be glad you did.