Kiss me once and kiss me twice, Then kiss me once again....

....it's been a long, long time.

The lyrics to that old Louis Armstrong song were going through my mind as I opened up my great big green blogging machine this afternoon.

There's a rumour going around that a civic election was held a week or two ago and that I was in it. It must be true because my bank account seems awfully empty (here's hoping it was for advertising expenses and not bribes), my daily schedule for November is full of references to various all-candidates meetings and similar events, my wife is asking me how I've been, and I'm supposed to be at the school district office next week for an Inaugural Meeting. Apparently I'm a school trustee.

More to the point, November seems to have been blown on the election. I haven't blogged on my usual neXus-ish fare for, well, forever. Perhaps I should do a real quick summary of what I've done thus far in the hope that I can figure out what to do next.

So let's see. I decided to start exploring some of the ideas associated with emergent thinking without looking to any emergent gurus for help. Now why the heck did I do that? I'm not usually all that ambitious, and I know squat about theology.

Oh yes, it's coming back to me now. I wanted to avoid having my mind "tainted" by any particular school of thought, and see if I could get to the emergent conclusions in the old fashioned way--through what is called, in the vernacular, exegesis.

What is exegesis?, you say. I'm surprised to hear you say it since you probably can't even pronounce it :-). Well, it's literal meaning is 'to interpret'. Here's a typical dictionary definition: "a critical interpretation or explication, especially of biblical and other religious texts." It has to do with examining the meaning of words in their original contexts, considering the history that informs the use of the word, and so on. One attempts to remain objective in determining the intent of the author in choosing that word, and learn from its meaning.

The opposite tendency, and one that is all too common when the reader brings an agenda to a passage, or is unfamiliar with original meanings, is called eisogesis. This is the subjective practice of reading into a word or passage what you would prefer that it meant.

[A brief note to the more linguistically inclined. The 'ex' in exegesis means 'out of' or 'from'. The 'eis' in eisogesis means 'into'. The 'gesis' root has to do with leading or guiding. So one is led out of the text, or one guides into the text.]

In order to avoid being charged by others with being caught up in the sway of some personality whose views I would prefer over those of the Bible (a common enough accusation made by one school of theological thought versus another), I thought that if I could preserve a high view of scripture (inspired by the Holy Spirit, infallible, etc.), and use the usual historical/critical/exegetical approach to interpretation, and arrive at certain conclusions without doing violence to the text, that my arguments would be more convincing than simply laying out a few propositions.

Now, let's see what topics I've considered thus far, and how much trouble that has gotten me into.

Abbotsford, Alabama

One of the most ridiculous controversies in which I ever found myself involved the full-frontal attack on the Abbotsford school district by those who insisted that we were teaching biblical creationism.

We were accused of such by a gentleman from outside our district who, knowing nothing about our practice, blew the whistle on the school trustees for forcing their religion on the district by requiring that creationism and evolution be given equal time in the classroom. While this was a ridiculous accusation, it garnered widespread attention in the media, including all of the national Canadian television networks and CNN.

No matter what I told people about the actual practice, the same tired stereotypes were published again and again. I finally complained to one Canadian Press reporter that I lived in Abbotsford BC, not Abbotsford Alabama.

[For a rather good study of the whole business, see Lois Sweet, God in the Classroom, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997, chap. 11.]

What we actually did, by the way, was allow a student in, say, a grade 12 biology class, to do individual study on the creationism v. evolution debate, with the teacher choosing whether to allow any brief discussion of same in class. This approach was completely in accord with the curriculum guides of the day.

Art Charbonneau, the Minister of Education, who assumed that because I was a professor at Trinity Western University I must also be a fanatic from the religious right, refused to meet with me, substituting his deputy minister instead and threatening to fire all us trustees if we didn't cease and desist from this loathsome practice. But to do that, he had to first re-write the curriculum guides that permitted the practice. Realizing after the fact that this would also affect faith-based high schools, he quietly revised them yet again a short time later. Brilliant chap.

The issue for me was never one of religion. While I'm no scientist, I felt that the evolutionary view was probably a better understanding of the scientific data, as did the majority of the board. What we were united on was that we were representatives of all the citizens of Abbotsford, not just the ones who shared our view (i.e., the evolutionists, who may have been at best a small majority of the city at the time). For me it was an issue of freedom of inquiry for the students, and representing the public interest. Apparently Mr. Charbonneau and the national media weren't interested in this angle, even though I talked about it repeatedly.

The one good thing that came out of it all was that I led the school trustee polls three out of the next four times I ran. All's well that ends well, I suppose.