Hi Doctor Enns. As a former student of yours, I’m fascinated with your work and can’t wait to read your latest due shortly. However, I’m wondering why we’re not literally digging deeper. Prior to attending Westminster, I took various Archaeology, Anthropology, and Sociology classes undergrad. And just like the interpretation of various hebrew words, did students interpret artifacts, features, and bones. I do think a time comes in the life of a Christian where he or she ponders the concept of social location in an existential wilderness. I think we need to examine various cultural and contextual apparatuses from the vantage point of Paul (who felt like he was regarded the scum of the earth at times) Jesus, who had no place to lay his head, and the exiled John. I’d like to see conversations like, why is the blue whale at the Museum of Natural History modeled in the flesh, so to speak, whereas many whales have the skeletal similarities of Dinosaurs. How about North American Paleo Indians, purportedly hunting 8500 yrs ago? Why is the half life of C14…5000 yrs? Then there’s “Justification,” held to like a form of belief or “ism” when really Paul may have been using this term practically in a negative sense, since we are all legal creatures, largely involved in the act of self justification. It certainly is a call for evaluation, yet our current culture makes this evaluation positively for a goal of success over against the concept of delay of self gratification in order to avert cycles that make one unproductive. And the first one with a popular roadmap on the mechanics of success, whether evangelical or atheistic gets the prize. Such is not the call of Job in his distress, who felt like a sea monster. I think I’m going to write a book to cycle through the scholasticism taken for granted, community by community. Please guide me to any literature that doesn’t combine science with social justice. I don’t think there is any.
Affectionately, Brad Winslow