Chronic Murmuring

Christmas and thoughts on Wright

We had a nice Christmas. Paige, Miles and I spent Christmas at my in-laws in Nashville. We attended Covenant Presbyterian Church on Christmas Eve for their equivalent of midnight mass. Taking the Lord's Supper is a strange event. The next day, after taking communion on Christmas even, Paige and I both noted how differently we felt. Not that I want to continue to look to my feelings and emotions as barometers of my spirituality, but I do notice that the frequency with which I take communion usually affects me at a spiritual level, even if only making me more aware of things like my insensitivity to Jesus or apathy towards God. Sometimes, it seems as though those are more valuable than love towards him, though - at least in terms of our spiritual progress. The preacher that night noted that our ability to love God was almost one-to-one the equivalent of our own sense of our sin. He who has been forgiven much loves much, in other words. When we see and understand our own sinfulness towards God, then Jesus's sacrifice and atonement and life on our behalf becomes more serious, more dramatic. We cannot help but then love God more.

As a side note, I think that this is the one and only reason why I am sometimes troubled by N.T. Wright....

...He complains that we have justification is overlaid with too much of Luther's theology - at least according to a conversation he had with my assistant pastor a month ago. Yet, in my own experience, it is precisely that Lutheran theology that can drives the believer's sanctification. More specifically, it is a kind of law/gospel dichotomy coupled with a constant focus on grace that seems to me, in my life, to have had the greatest effect on my "religious affections." Yet, I still like Wright, and specifically I find his historical method extremely valuable. I cannot imagine reading the gospel narratives apart in any other way aside from continually noting the messianic expetations of that period, the idea that Israel was in exile at the time (or believed to be), the political climate in Israel due to Rome's occupation, and the implication that all of those have for our understanding of the church and the kingdom. Yet, I still feel like he overstates some things when he talks about justification. He even said so much on one tape series. At a Regent College conference several years ago, he answered a critic in the crowd by noting that at times, he was prone to overstate his case because of the fact that he believed his general insight into the gospel times was so true and so neglected by scholars and churchmen. That Wright's paradigm tends to "crowd out" other insights, or even very specific doctrinal forumations, is I think both the strength, but also the weakness. But, I take it that this is part of the process of developing theology. Sometimes, the strength of a position is mainly in its ability to get everyone to begin asking new questions. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful described the purpose of his ideas on art in this way:

"I am satisfied I have done but little by these observations considered in themselves; and I never should have taken the pains to digest them, much less should I have ever ventured to publish them, if I was not convinced that nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to duffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth.... I only desire one favour; that no part of this discourse may be judged of by itself and independently of the rest; for I am sensible I have not disposed my materials to abide the test of a captious controversy, but of a sober and even forgiving examination; that they are not armed at all points for battle; but dressed to visit those who are willing to give a peaceful entrance to truth."

The second part of Burke's statement is probably the biggest complaint that "Wright fans" have about Wright's critics. That is, that there has been very little interaction with Wright's thought. I am not in a position to judge whether that is true, but the claim that critics have been sloppy and even dishonest in their representation of Wright seems to be a recurring theme. So much so that I'm inclined to believe it.

Nicholas Wolterstorff once said that there appeared to be three responses to Dooyewerd: to be his disciple, to dismiss him or superficially read him, or to critically interact with him. Critically interacting with him required the most of the person, ironically, even moreso than being his disciple. The first and second alternatives are possibly the most attractive. Either we make the man our idol and messiah, and follow him wherever we go, or we take a few things out of context, safely insulate ourselves from his argument, and possibly throw a few transparent hand grenades at his arguments and be on our way. This is the more general approach to "new paradigms" in general. Paradigms are, by nature, holistic and usually inflexible. They also cause some cognitive dissonance on the listener's behalf. The scholar's task is to strike a third road - one that, I think, is the most charitable of the three (charity in its biblical sense). It requires listening and correcting. It requires getting our hands dirty, too, which I think most of us simply don't want if for no other reason than that our lives are already so hectic as it is. How many of us can really afford to allocate the time needed to reading Wright's three tomes on biblical theology? I can't, and I have an interest in doing so, so how much more can I expect a committed disciple of Jack Miller, who is a fulltime pastor with a full plate, to do so? The strength of the PCA is that it has been successful in striking a balance between numerous extremes - between theology and practice, between confession and change, between growth and stagnation. Yet, in the end, it is American in its Reformed confessions. It depends on the works of men like Jonathan Edwards, J. Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til, RC Sproul, Jack Miller. It's access to John Calvin is through its Dutch/American lineage, and while that is by nature very diverse, it also is somewhat narrow as well. When Wright accuses churches of being overly committed to a Lutheran understanding of justification, there are bound to be substantial stumbling blocks. Personally, I think that is even understandable, given our committment to Lutheran soteriology.

Anyhow, my Christmas holidays were nice. I got The Fugees' Greatest Hits which I asked for. We also got a new receiver from my in-laws. It's the mack-daddy attachment to our fairly lame stereo. It's almost too good, in fact. It's like putting a V-8 engine into 1986 Chevy Cavalier. Sure, it's nice, but it's kind of weird too to have that much power in such a crappy, ugly car. Still, it's a good base from which to build in the future. We need to get a new CD player in the future because right now, we use our DVD player to play our CDs. We're debating (read: I'm pleading with Paige to do this, and get much resistance) joining BMG records, too, to build up our paltry CD collection, which has not grown in over four years, except to include some stuff by the Wiggles.

Miles had an incredible time at his grandparents house as well. He didn't get a whole lot of presents from Santa Claus, since we're so broke, but you should've seen his face when he saw that fireman hat and when he opened a present from his aunt continaining eight Hot-wheel cars. He played cars the entire day of Christmas, crashing them, then having one of the cars apologize for hitting the other car. He also worships the ground his big cousin, Cameron, walks on. Cameron's ten, and Miles is two, yet they play incredibly well together. All in all, I had a wonderful time, and so did my family.

Now I'm back in Athens. Paige and Miles are returning on Wednesday. I came back early to start studying for my gigantic macroeconomics prelim which is on January 6th. This is the second hurdle I need to pass (the first being this past summer's micro prelim, which I passed thankfully). They say that the test is easy, but I still worry that I've waited too long to start preparing. After classes ended last Tuesday, I took off a week for Christmas vacation. Now, I'm freaked out a little that the test is only 10 days away. I've got a lot of work before me.

I did hear word, though, that I got the highest grade in the class on my labor economics final. It was a great boost to my ego. The professor told me I showed remarkable improvement over the semester. It solidified my committment to labor economics as a field. I will not get to take the other part of the sequence, though, until the spring of 2005. I hope that in the meantime I can make considerable progress on this study of the relationship between secular labor markets and clergy labor markets. The more I read of clergy compensation, the more I think that there is a story to tell about the effects of rising income inequality and the returns to skill over the past thirty years has had on unique features in the market for Protestant clergy. The data is the thing that, as usual, has me a bit stressed out. Data collection differs denomination to denomination. It's also better among the more centralized denominations, such as Episcopals and Presbyterians, and less so among the more congregational denominations, such as Baptists. There are national surveys, such as the Current Population Survey conducted by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I think they systematically under-represent clergy wages since they do not include information on housing allowances. According to one study by the LCMS, housing allowances account for as much as 25% of compensation for as many as 40% of clergy, and as much as 40% for the other 60%. Housing allowances will more than likely differ depending on the size of the congregation, being paltry or non-existent in the smaller churches and larger for the larger ones, as well as differ depending on region (urban vs. rural). A lot of this is going to take some time for me to sort through, given my relative weakness in econometrics. This is leading me to believe that this study of clergy labor markets could possibly be one of the three essays I eventually do for my dissertation. But, it's still premature to say. I am taking an independant readings this semester with my old econometrics professor to help further this research on clergy. By the end, he wants me to have a written "prospectus" and dissertation plan. He is no a labor economist, though; rather, he is trained in econometrics and public finance. But he is an especially gifted empiricst by most accounts, and so I hope that he can help me in the right direction. The main story that I'm trying to test is whether or not changes in the relative wages of clergy could be driving some of these observed features in the market for clergy, such as the simultaneous glut and shortage of clergy in most denominations. There exist in most denominations high vacancy rates among small churches (ie, vacancy rate meaning churches without a pastor; small meaning churches with less than 100 members), but at the same time, churches record usually more ordained ministers on the books than there exists churches. Some of this is probably a function of the difficult of matching labor supply to labor demand, though. Many churches have more than one clergy on staff, especially as one moves up to the larger churches. Secondly, denominations have difficulty cataloging precisely how large their labor supply is, since not all ordained ministers are necessarily "in the counted labor force" so to speak. I'm sure everyone reading this knows of individuals who are ordained ministers, or who at least have comleted the Masters of Divinity track, but who are not in the labor force for their denomination.

A lot of these kinds of issues become technical problems that I need to deal with. Other problems deal with differences in data collection between denominations. Getting my head aroud this is one reason why I think that this is probably better suited for my dissertation than simply an article for publication. Secondly, though, it also opens up more possibilities, because the relative wage issue differs depend on things like education and race. So that allows me some testable hypothesis. For instance, I could make predictions about labor supply among black males that would differ from the predictions I would make about white males, since the market wages for black males differ from white males. The same goes for the education of each. Right now, I'm collecting data on seminary enrollments dating back to 1969. I'm thinking that one way to test the responsiveness of clergy labor supply to relative market wages is to look at changes in M.Div. enrollments over time. Anyhow, this is where the study is going. I'm cautiously excited, since this is the first study I've undertaken that actually seems to end with something empirical and testable. It's also a topic upon which I can learn basic skills in empiricism, as well as possibly bring me closer to getting out of here. In the end, the only thing that matters to me is getting out of here. The costs of staying in graduate school each additional year are really high (ie, what I could've earned that year on the market working as a professor or an economist somewhere). Since we are stalling having more children until it's clear there's an end to this program in sight, I'm even more inclined to hurry this along. Watching Miles not have a sibling, and watching Paige work so hard, I've become more motivated to find a research topic than ever.

Lastly, and apologies that I am rambling, it seems that my semester teaching ended rather well. I've received numreous extremely positive reviews in email from students - even from students who did not get the grades that they wanted. One student told me that they appreciated the fact that I cared more about them understanding the material than about simply memorizing data for the tests. I hadn't thought about that until the student said it, but I guess it is true. I would never approach teaching any other way, but I guess it is true that not all teachers really care that a student understands at a deep level what the material is about. But that's how I approach learning, in general. The real satisfaction comes not from gettting good grades, but from understanding an idea not previously understood, and seeing how those ideas connect to other ideas to form the body of knowledge under consideration. I'm eager to read my evaluations. In the end, the grades were distributed precisely as I wanted them, and I had worked as hard as I could've to help students learn the material. I know how I will change the class material this spring, and I feel more confident after having seen the narrative arc of the material. In other words, I see the connections between cost-benefit analysis and supply and demand to, say, the Keynesian models we considered at the end of the class and the model that determines how many workers a firm will hire or how much capital they will invest in, or the determination of loanable funds. There are still some holes in my understanding due to skipping four of the 17 chapters in the textbook, but I will not be using Commanding Heights this semester, and I don't plan on screwing up comparative advantage again, so I think I'll be okay. But I will be using Paul Romer's Aplia software to assign problem sets and experiments in class, and that does have me a little bit nervous. That requires an investment on my part - learning how to integrate the software into the class means me sitting down and rehearsing the problem sets that Aplia has repeatedly to determine which ones I should assign and what material I should cover in class. It also means spending time doing the experiments. All in all, though, I think it'll be good in the longrun, since the material is valuable for the students as an aid in their learning. I also have decided to give them the mandatory attendance policy again. Only five students didn't get the full 5% this semester - and two of those were students who simply quit coming to class (they also were the only two who failed the class). Those students who did come also tended to do better, but of course that doesn't prove that it works. But it did provide incentives to continue to come to class. Coming to class gave the student five full points on their final grade, which for many was the difference between an A and a B, a C and a B, or a D and a C. One student in particular failed to get a B simply because they missed so many classes. Also, in the end, it did not seem to skew my distribution towards over-inflation in the way I feared. So I'm going to keep it. The one thing I'll do differently is print out the attendanc sheets ahead of time - all of them, that is. What I hated doing was each day, printing out those attendance sheets. Since the class was at 9:00, that meant I had to be in my office earlier doing that. Ordinarily, though, I just wanted to make my first stop of the day that class. So what I'll do instead is print out the semester's attendance ahead of time. That will be more time consuming on the front end, but in the end, I think I'll be more grateful I did it.

Posted by scott at December 28, 2003 10:54 AM | TrackBack