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It must be one of the world’s all-time great conversation stoppers: ‘Hi, I’m Bill and I’m a theology professor.’ It often provokes one of several responses: (1) yawns and distracted looks, (2) apparent panic that one doesn’t remember more from one’s 4th grade Sunday School class, or (3) ‘Then can you explain to me how a loving God could allow something like the Haiti earthquake to happen…?’ Actually, most people are really nice about it. But I can tell that most of those same nice people can’t figure out what I actually do. So I thought it might be helpful to take you through a day in the life of ‘American-guy-teaching-at-
I usually get up about 5:20 AM and go for a run before sunrise. It’s dark at first on the country lanes where I run, so I mainly try to avoid potholes and mud puddles. I’m usually also playing a little game, keeping a running total (so to speak) of the numbers of people, bicycles and vehicles I pass or meet. On weekends I have to include the number of horses, as a lot of the white Kenyans near our campus own horse farms. I also like to greet people in their own language – Kiswahili, Masai, Kikuyu, English—anything to distract me from the fact my 50-year-old body isn’t particularly happy to up, out and sweating at this hour. However, no run on Mondays like today because I have a four-hour class that starts at 8:00. But I wake up at 5:20 anyway, which is a good thing because I have to turn the hot water heater on so that in an hour I can have one of the most refreshing of God’s good gifts—a hot shower.
By the time I finish my coffee and Bible reading, the birds are singing and our guard dogs are hungry, and I need to cook their food. It’s a Kenya thing, processed dog food that needs to be cooked, I don’t know why. This of course reminds me of this past Saturday when one of the dogs brought their contribution to the cookout we were having on our patio with friends—a very dead bush rat, about 3 ft or a metre long from nose to tail (not overlarge by bush rat standards). Some of our guests had never seen a bush rat before, so we all had to go over and look. Meanwhile Stephanie went inside and found in one of her many cookbooks a recipe which began like this: Put the bush rat over the fire to burn off the hair… Sensing things were getting a bit out of hand, I decided to make the bush rat disappear over our wall.
The dogs get fed, I get presentable, and I collect my books and laptop for the 15 minute walk from our tumbledown cottage at the far end of campus to my office. I get to my office a bit after 7, only to discover that the internet is still down. This was also the case last Thursday and Friday. (At least we’ve had electricity at our house more or less consistently recently, and at least we have an uninterrupted water supply—though each glass of water is like a trip to the dentist in terms of the elevated fluoride content, so we have to use a special bone-char filter to get the toxic levels of fluoride out. Don’t bother asking me how it works. I’m a theologian and personally I think it’s magic.) So rather than read BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the NY Times, check email and do facebook online, I spend my time profitably preparing for my class. This involves printing out about seven pages of lecture notes, checking a couple of Bible references, and double-checking that what I’m about to say about a particular theologian’s views is accurate. Today I’m supposed to lead my Systematic Theology class through a discussion of the various theories of the atonement (what Jesus accomplished when he died on the cross).
As I’m gathering my notes and books together, I’m interrupted by the Registrar who has brought me the final class list. Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST), where we teach, is in the middle of a severe financial crisis, which means that the finance department has been forced to get its house in order, which means that students are being asked to pay their fees on time. Fair enough. But many of our students have been caught out, because many of the organizations that provide scholarships have been forced to cut back this year, leaving a significant number of our students without enough money to cover the $1000 per term tuition bill. The Registrar has just given me the official class list with the instructions that no other students are to be allowed in my Systematic Theology class until they get clearance from Finance. I’m dismayed because last term I had 34 students, but according to this list I now only have 14. And this is happening across the board with all my colleagues. I do realize that we can’t offer something like this for nothing, but I am very sad for those men and women who now must leave school and go back home to uncertain futures. And I’m sad for my African colleagues—half of our faculty—who are not receiving their salaries regularly. So I start class by praying for all of the people here who are caught up in this financial trauma.
I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow of four hours of raucous theology lecture and debate, but I will mention just one of the points that I was trying to get across. I’ve become increasingly aware that much of the theology that I’m supposed to be teaching contains Western answers to Western problems that are not really relevant to the realities faced by my students. This is particularly true when it comes to understanding what the Bible teaches about salvation. In Western Evangelical circles, salvation is too often truncated into ‘making a decision for Christ’ and then I am ‘saved’. But this misses the point of what the NT actually says. So one thing I’m trying to help my students understand today is that, biblically speaking, justification is not salvation. What many people have in mind when they say ‘I’ve been saved,’ is that at some point in the past they heard a gospel presentation and responded by asking God to forgive their sins and asking Jesus to be their Lord. As a result, one has presumably been ‘saved’ and will now avoid hell and will go instead to heaven to be with Christ forever when one dies. Pardon me for getting slightly technical for a moment. ‘Justification’ is the law-court term theologians use to describe what Christ has accomplished on the cross for those who put their trust in him. This means that Jesus, though innocent, dies for my sin, while I, though guilty, am considered by God as though I were his innocent/in-the-right son. So far so good. But while the notion that I’m saved because I’ve trusted in Jesus’ finished work on the cross may make for short and snappy gospel presentations, it’s not all the New Testament actually teaches. Jesus’ finished work on the cross changes our legal status from condemned sinner to pardoned sinner, it is true. But our legal problems before the Holy God are not our only problems. We also have rather serious relationship problems, both with God and with our neighbors, which in our justified state we can now begin to reconfigure in a transformational way. And then there is our even more serious death problem, which Jesus’ resurrection confronts head on and resolves. Justification is important, but as the doorway one must pass through to enter into what salvation is. Justification is not itself salvation. In the same way, a couple saying their wedding vows is not marriage. It is the beginning of the relationship that is itself marriage. A change in our legal status does not make salvation—the subsequent transforming relationship does. This is important for my African students to grasp, because when the current, Western televangelist-inspired gospel-lite that’s preached and believed by so many here is revealed as misleading, the actual New Testament gospel can address much more effectively the real world of broken relationships, injustice, sickness and death as Africans experience it.
I should have mentioned that at 10 on Monday mornings all NEGST students take an hour to meet in their departmental advisee groups. I lead the advisee group for the Theological Studies Department. I’ve arranged things so that each week we discuss a topic that my twelve advisees want to talk about. Earlier this term we discussed polygamy, drinking alcoholic beverages, Christians in politics, and today, one of our students led us in a discussion of lying and integrity. After this, I have just enough time to say hi to Stephanie, who has her own advisee group, and to check to see if the internet is up, which it isn’t. So it’s back to class and two more hours of engaging with my Kenyan, Zambian, Cameroonian, Sudanese, Ethiopian, American, Nigerian, Ugandan, Korean, Tanzanian and British post-graduate students.
After class I have a dilemma. I have a stack of administrative things to do, but it’s past lunchtime and I’m really hungry. Admin, or lunch…? I head to the café and order some Kenyan food (githeri—yum!) and a banana, taking my textbook for my Tuesday Contemporary Theology class to read about Hans Kűng. Perfect. Having regained perspective after a good meal I’m ready to tackle my list of administrative ‘to-dos’, more of them than usual because my head-of-department is away on leave this term. That means I’m presently ‘acting HOD’ with all of the responsibility, none of the experience and none of the glory. There is a student application to review. Check. There is a final grade form to fill out from an independent study that I supervised. Check. There are two ‘final-project-in-lieu-of-
By this time, I’ve done about as much damage as I can do, on campus at least. So I head home for a cup of tea and sit on our patio (site of the attempted bush rat BBQ) and this time successfully connect with the internet. I check email, browse facebook to see if our daughters are doing something interesting or posting pictures, and get my fill of the latest global crises and disasters and enough American politics to make me even more glad that I’m here and not there. And I check my blog to see if anyone has been reading it or leaving any comments (which you are welcome to check, too, if you like. Just google ‘onesimus online’ and have at it!).
So that was my work day, for today at least. Stay tuned for next time when Stephanie will continue with her take on our adventures. Till then here’s a quick summary of our current prayer needs:
- Prayer for Stephanie as she teaches her classes on 1 Corinthians and Intermediate Greek, and for Bill as he teaches Systematic Theology and Contemporary Theology, at the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST).
- Prayer for Stephanie’s travel to Zambia, 15-17 March, for a staff meeting of the Accrediting Council for Theological Education in Africa (ACTEA). Stephanie serves as ACTEA accreditation officer.
- Prayer for Linnea (21) and Caroline (19) as they begin to make plans for their summers. Both girls hope to find summer jobs and also travel to Kenya. Linnea would like to do a public health internship in Kenya for part of the summer, and Caroline is hoping to arrange a trip to visit friends back in Ethiopia while she’s on this side of the planet visiting us.
- Prayer that someone would fall in love with Stephanie’s parents’ house in Virginia Beach, VA, and that they would be delighted to pay the price we are asking, so that we can finally buy a house of our own in Charlottesville, VA, where the girls are. And if God has a better idea, pray that we would have the patience to wait on him and his agenda.
Thank you so much for all your prayers, gifts, encouragement, emails and other forms of support. We do feel buoyed up by all the saints who sustain us in this work.
By grace,
Bill
for Stephanie, Linnea and Caroline Black
Along Bill’s running route
The NEGST campus where we live is in Karen, a Nairobi suburb full of leafy lanes and horse estates—considered the historic centre of the ‘white settler’ community in Kenya. (Karen Blixen’s ‘Out of Africa’ house is just nearby.) More and more homes are being built in the community and more affluent black Kenyans are moving in. But there’s plenty of peaceful countryside to enjoy adjacent to campus, with the view of the Ngong Hills in the background.
Local tourists
We’re often so busy with work that we forget we live in the midst of all this African splendour! So we took a day during NEGST’s mid-term break this month to visit a couple of places in our neighborhood we hadn’t been to yet—a rescue center for ophaned elephants, and the crocodile park (with resident giraffes and ostriches).
Kid Pix
And here’s what Linnea (21) and Caroline (19) were up to this month…
Like the rest of the mid-Atlantic, the University of Virginia has had record snowfalls. (That’s Caroline, 2nd from right)
Our Africa children have been learning the joys of downhill sledding. Caroline (at left) seems to have taken to it right away…
…but from what we hear, it took Linnea’s friends a little longer to entice her (far left) out into the cold.
Yet somehow she still managed to make the 1¼-hour drive over the mountain to Virginia Military Insitute for VMI’s mid-winter dance with William.
