"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.

Why I Walked Away From Seminary, Pt. 2

06/05/2009 05:11 AM Filed in: Personal | Pastoral Stuff

Friday I began a series explaining why I walked away from seminary after 2 years, thousands or dollars spent, and hundreds of hours of study time. Today continues the story by examining a sliver of my time in college. You can read Part 1 at this link.

I arrived at East Texas Baptist University in the fall of 2000. I remember not being entirely sure of how this whole college thing would work out. My parents had both started college, but neither had graduated and they seemed to be perfectly happy and quite intelligent. So I didn’t actually know if I was going to finish because I kind of assumed that at some point I would start traveling and preaching or leading worship; if college got in the way of that, I’d just quit.

Needless to say, entering into college with that kind of attitude doesn’t exactly lend itself toward putting your best foot forward in your studies.

But why did I need to worry about that anyway? After all, I was majoring in religion, a subject I practically already knew frontwards and backwards. Though I never would have said it out loud, I had grown up in church and been to Sunday School more times than I could have possibly kept track of. What on earth could my professors possibly teach me about the Bible that I didn’t already know?

And then I found out that angels may have had sex with humans.

That’s right: Genesis 6 threw me for a huge loop on my very first day of class. My Old Testament professor at ETBU was walking us through the syllabus and going over a rough outline of what we would be studying for the semester when he casually mentioned the passage.

“And in a few weeks we’ll look at the flood narrative,” he said, “which starts in Genesis 6 with the unusual prelude, ‘When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose.’ We’ll be talking about what that means and the fact that many biblical scholars understand it to mean that angels intermarried with human women. If that is understood as true, it would be considered one of the evils that angered God to the point of destroying nearly every living thing on the earth.”

So imagine being little Mr. Know-It-All from Grand Saline, Texas. Mr. Future-Conference-Speaker. Mr. Sunday-School-Is-My-Middle-Name.

Now imagine having angel sex thrown in your face on your first day of college.

To an outsider, it would have seemed small and insignificant. An inconsequential fact mentioned merely in passing. An interesting bit of Bible trivia.

But it rocked me to the core. Because if I didn’t know about that...if something mentioned in the first five minutes of my first class while we were just looking over the syllabus was that alien to me...

...what else did I not know?

*part 3 will be posted on Monday

Tags: seminary, Christianity, Pastor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School