update and false teachers

I hate house-hunting. Even with loans it may be tight.

Easter is coming up. That means I get a four-day weekend.

I have been rather unproductive. I have huge research papers coming up, and I haven’t started on any of them. One in Gospel of Mark, two in Romans, one in Geology. All of them are due the same week, it seems. Honestly, I have no motivation. Senioritis. I’ve been here four years and I’m ready to get my degree. Move on to bigger and better things. But I’ll be here till December, because I have six more credits to achieve. In order to stay under insurance, I have to take 12 credits; so I’ll be taking two classes I don’t need. Sad day.

I am really bored. I want to do something tonight. I may be going to Highlands with Mandy, but that’s up in there. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll probably just go somewhere for a bite to eat and some contemplation. I have really been chewing through St. Paul’s Epistle to Titus lately. There’s some really good stuff in there.

The identity of the false teachers in Titus is interesting:

The false teachers were more developed in their teaching than those false teachers who plagued the early days of Paul’s ministry. They were a new threat to the gospel in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. They originated as Judaizers, preaching adherence to “works of the law” in addition to having faith in Christ, and they embraced an ascetic ritualism with a zeal for visions of angels, and they had proto-Gnostic tendencies in promoting an experience of (a distorted) divine wisdom and knowledge, as well as depreciating matter, physical resurrection, and redemption. They denied Christ’s resurrection as well as his physical incarnation and death. While they had abandoned their teaching on the need for circumcision among Christians, they now forbade marriage, promoted certain food laws, and claimed to impart a special kind of divine knowledge, whose source was, in actuality, demonic. Their vaunted asceticism produced an arrogance prime for sexual recklessness. One of their heavy interests was in genealogies, the precise meaning of which we cannot ascertain from the text.