Month: November 2005

Our daughter is home from college, a son is coming over with his wife soon, Old Christian Radio is streaming through the computer, and Wonder Wife is producing various dishes in the kitchen that fill the house with appetizing aromas. Yes, it’s Thanksgiving morning at the Barleys’ again.

It won’t always be this way. Already we have one son who didn’t come home for the holiday, so the process of disintegration has taken its toll. Eventually the kids will be all over the world and “the old days” will be a memory. But that’s how it needs to be. God didn’t call us to huddle together like a pile of baby turtles in the pet shop aquarium; he called us to go into all the world and preach the gospel. There’ll be time enough for togetherness once we cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.

Gratitude is a proof of God’s existence. Today is cloudless in Memphis and the temperature is about 60 degrees. Whom does an atheist thank when he perceives natural beauty, and perceives within himself that he has received far better than he deserves? There must be someone to thank, or else gratitude is a perverse condition of the mind. But we know when we experience it that gratitutde is right, not wrong. Therefore, we know that there is a God who grants us the good things we enjoy in this world.

That is an informal logical argument, but I doubt that I have any readers who have studied formal logic enough to be offended by my lack of rigor. I think I developed this argument on my own, but I found out later that G. K. Chesterton articulated it a hundred years ago, and I may have seen it in his writings, or even somewhere else, and simply forgot it. But I know that in my heart I feel profoundly grateful to God nearly every hour of every day. I even believe that I feel more gratitude than the average Christian does, just from casual conversations on the topic.

The Lord said that he who has been forgiven the most will love God the most. We who are saved have all been forgiven more than we can measure, but some of us don’t think about it enough.

Adrian Rogers died in the hospital this morning, succumbing to the combined attacks of double pneumonia, colon cancer, and chemotherapy.

I had heard a little of Dr. Rogers (yes, he had an earned doctorate) before I came to Memphis. I knew that he was a president of the Southern Baptist Convention and a key figure in that denomination’s controversy over whether Christianity or liberalism was to be taught in the seminaries.

When I entered seminary here, I heard him speak a number of times on campus. I came to believe, as I still do, that he was the finest preacher in the the English speaking world. Of course, since I haven’t heard all of the preachers, my opinion is a bit hasty. But I’ve heard quite a few great ones, with large followings, but I’ve never heard one who could match Adrian’s mastery of homiletics.

He was an unrelenting foe of Calvinism, which is the idea that Jesus died only to save a chosen few out of humanity. Adrian believed that he died for the whole world and that every soul was a real candidate for salvation. I heard him preach once “You can say what you will about election, but it’s a wonderful thing to see how many more get ‘elected’ in a red-hot revival meeting.” Only God knows how many thousands came to the Savior through his ministry.

I met him one day. His church numbered nearly 30,000 members, so I guess I had an opportunity that many of his own members never had. It was Thanksgiving morning, 1996. As befalls great and small alike at one time or another, it was a holiday and he had a house full of visiting relatives and no toilets. The sewer at his house on Grove Park Road had stopped up. Whom do you call at such a time? The mayor? The president? The pope? No, you call Kevan. It was quite difficult, but I got him flushing after a couple of hours with the assistance of my fine trainee at the time, Andrew Brawley.

We didn’t find ourselves dealing with a pompous, arrogant boss who considered the grubby plumbers to be a lower form of life. He was gracious and kind, and he gave us each a generous tip for being available on a holiday. Practically all great men whom I’ve met are like that.

I feel dwarfed when I think about Dr. Rogers, not worthy even to clean his sewer. But Adrian would be the first to confess the words of St. Paul. “I am what I am by the grace of God.”

Blogging, along with the rest of life, has been on hold recently as I feverishly work on a paper I have to deliver in Philadelphia this Friday. The Evangelical Theological Society, of which I am a card-carrying member, has its annual meeting in Valley Forge this year and I have to fly out of Memphis early Wednesday. Even at that, I’ll be late since the conference begins Wednesday morning.

I’ve been turning down plumbing calls for several days. I’ve been totally absent from the Internet forums for several weeks. Except for a couple of plumbing jobs today and seeing a guitar student tonight, I’ve been at this computer since 6:00 AM.

This is the price of scholarship. First you have to torture yourself by listening to papers until you become a Ph.D., then you have to write papers and read them out loud to people who have never done you any harm. They have to listen because it’s a part of being a scholar, and you have to listen while they read theirs.

If you don’t crawl around on the rim of this can with the other little caterpillars, you are scholar non grata and The System will make you clean sewers for a living instead of teaching college.

Writing scholarly papers is hard for me because my brain has turned to sewage over the past ten years. I received the Ph.D. degree (they paroled me for good behavior) in December of 1995. Since then I have taught college as an adjunct for a few years, learned to play the dulcimer and banjo a little, and successfully started a business and plumbed a restaurant and a few houses. My idea of reading a hard book is trying to decipher the Shelby County plumbing code.

Alas, I will take my stand this Friday in front of real scholars and follow the maxim that has served me so well for so long: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull manure.” I hate doing anything poorly; but I don’t have the choice of not doing it at all if I ever want to break into academe, so I keep trying. Maybe next year’s paper will be better.