I’m trying to wrap up chapter 8 right now. Here’s what’s in my thesis (more or less…)

an overly long and complicated title: “An analysis and comparison of the exegetical practices of Basil of Caesarea in his Contra Eunomium, and Hilary of Poitiers in his De Trinitate, in relation to their doctrine of the Trinity”.

1. Introduction: Pro-Nicenism in the light of recent scholarship

2. Hilary and Basil in their historical context and recent scholarship

3. Economy and Theology: Partitive Exegesis in Practice

4. John 1: A theology of the eternal Son

5. The ‘made’ Son (1): Approaches to Proverbs 8 among fourth century authors

6. The ‘made’ Son (2): Basil and Hilary on Proverbs 8 and Acts 2

7. Names, Nature, Nativitas: John 5 and 10

8. Causality and Economy: John 14

9. Conclusion: Basil, Hilary, something something pro-nicenism something something.

I was very glad to awake this morning and see that Geoffrey Steadman as returned to his Greek and Latin texts with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary projects with some very fine new additions.

It has reminded me that I do need to return to my inspired-by-the-above Patristic Readers. Really, my work on these ground to a virtual halt due to the twin pressures of a thesis and an infant child.

It also hasn’t helped that I have so far worked on relatively short texts which do not provide enough material for a print volume in themselves.

I do have hopes though! I have already made a decent start on the third Gregory of Nyssa text, and that should not take forever, which could see the three of them put together for a printable volume.

Also, teaching Gregory Nazianzus Oration 29 this week, I normally format my own teaching materials in the same style as the readers. So that would be a headstart there for a next volume. It would be nice to offer all 5 Theological Orations together.

Even after just a day of teaching with some experienced students, I’m reminded how great the gap is for those wanting to transition into Patristic texts. It is not easy, and good help is hard to come by. I myself have had recourse to ask more than a few questions about Gregory’s Greek to an associate.

Anyway, we live in hope, and particularly I hope to put this dissertation to bed in a few months…

One of the interesting things about the intra-Evangelical Complementarian Trinity Debate with a really-long-name, is that people’s positions appear to fall out along some very clear party lines.

The leading American ERAS/ESS/EFS proponents all come from very particular backgrounds. There’s not a lot of surprise in their positions. When you line up other defenders of the same position in the UK, and Australia, it becomes very obvious that there are party lines.

What I think is a most telling fact, even though it’s not a compelling argument in and of itself, is that (so far as I can tell), historical theologians and the like whose field is Patristics, and particularly 4th century Patristics, almost universally reject ERAS as a valid reading of Nicene Orthodoxy. Whether ERAS is right or not, it’s not what historians think pro-Nicene theologians were wanting to say.

That, if anything, ought to give doctrinal theologians a pause. ERAS clearly is novel. It’s a set of categories and an attempt to think about ad intra relationships in a way that our predecessors did not. Even if you think it’s right, you should at least come clean and recognise that it’s new. If you want to argue that it’s ‘in line’ with the tradition, that’s another argument. It’s not the same argument as trying to rustle up some Patristic supports.

Every time someone trots out a quotation in this debate, my critical alarm bells start ringing, “What’s the context of this quotation? What is the overall shape of that author’s theological argument? Is this quotation true to their authorial intention?” Language about Trinity can get really confusing, really fast. And 4th century Greek writers are not easy to translate into clear, comprehensible, nuanced English (pick 2 of 3). It’s easy to find quotations that sound like they support your position, but do they really?

For my part, I think the onus is very much on ERAS proponents to make a case. Classical Trinitarianism doesn’t need to defend itself here – no one on that side of the Nicene fence is trying to say “hey, the Son doesn’t submit to the Father”, but rather, “hey, why are you trying to shoe-horn in authority-submission relations into the ad intra relations of the three hypostaseis? We don’t need that in here thanks very much.” The problems of ERAS remain: how is it not a rejection of a single Will in the Godhead? How does it not violate Divine Simplicity? How is it not over-privileging authority-submission as a paradigm to understand Trinitarian relations?

In terms of the most recent posts, I think Ware did a very admirable job in clarifying his own views. I am sympathetic to his statements that it is ‘hard to see’ the direct Biblical basis for Eternal Generation, but that it still remains a compelling account. It seems to me that Ware is wrong, but has shifted to be less wrong over time.

I have less sympathy for Grudem’s position, because quite frankly Grudem continues to demonstrate to me in his writing and thoughts that he is far from competent in this area: his systematic doctrine textbook is notorious for prooftexting. Appendix 6 in it shows me he doesn’t understand μονογενής in the Fathers, even if he is technically right about John 1. His reasons for rejecting impassibility show me that he has not understood the classical formulation of that doctrine. His prooftexting of historical support for ERAS continues to call into question his ability to read historical texts accurately. And his frank admission that he doesn’t understand Eternal Generation but thinks it would be better replaced by ERAS just seems to confirm this trajectory – Grudem doesn’t understand Nicene Orthodoxy.

I think we’ll see this topic simmer down in the next few weeks. My post chronicling blog-posts on the subject has hit 72 different posts, and that is not even all of them! But it seems this civil war is going to cool down for awhile. I suspect Grudem will formulate something more specific and ‘weighty’ at his ETS presentation, and I think his opponents are going to rip it to pieces, but this isn’t going away. Neither, sadly, are some of the hysterics.

I became intrigued by this modal construction recently, after I berated some undergraduates in my comments on their essay that what they really meant was ‘X cannot be overstated’. However, greater reflection leads to me to believe that, while they were probably wrong, the structure is ambiguous.

It turns on the meaning of ‘cannot’, and whether you take it to mean “must not be allowed to be the case” or “is an impossibility that will never occur”. If the former, then “X cannot be understated” means something like “I can’t and won’t allow it to be stated as of less importance than it actually is.” If the latter, then “X cannot be understated” means something more like, “It is impossible to state the importance of X any lower than it actually is” (hidden premise: the importance of X is incredibly low).

The problem with the latter option, is that it is exactly the opposite of what the speaker presumably intends, especially if they meant the former. They might have chosen to construct the opposite statement, “X cannot be overstated”, but it too suffers from the same ambiguity.

I’m still not convinced that “X cannot be understated” means “X is highly important” so much as it means “X is so unimportant that it is not possible to understate it”, but I’m prepared to start giving students the benefit of the doubt, or at least start pointing our the ambiguity of the construction.

(I’d never planned to get into this, but here are a few thoughts on the current debates, from mostly a historical perspective. I may (or may not) wade into the theological argument more seriously later.)

1. It’s much more difficult to accurately portray the 4th century controversies than you’d like. That’s why it’s a whole field of studies in and of itself. What escapes a lot of people is that Nicaea in 325 solved very little. It did deal with Arius. However, it never fixed ‘Nicene orthodoxy’, nor finalised the debates that followed in its aftermath. homoousion did not become an important term until the late 350s. Athanasius isn’t as important as 1st year students think. ‘Lines’ between ‘parties’ are much, much blurrier than textbooks make them out to be. The Creed of Constantinople 381 is so different to Nicaea 325 that JND Kelly doesn’t think you can even call it a revision. For all this, I do think something called ‘Nicene Orthodoxy’ on the Trinity comes to exist. However, its emergence is late, its synthetic, its primarily Cappadocian, and it still contains theological variety within itself.

2. Whether it’s proper to speak of order within the Trinity or not, it’s not proper to tie this to gender debates or ecclesiology (in this case, what women may or may not do in churches). In fact, it’s probably heretical to make those moves. I can see why these moves have come about on both egalitarian and complementarian sides, but they are bad moves to make.

For example, some egalitarians have a theology that tightly links function to being. Woman are the same being as Men, and therefore you can’t exclude them from certain functions, without suggesting difference at the level of being. Therefore, they can’t conceive that in the Godhead there is any difference of function without difference of being. In that view, for the Son to submit to the Father would be Arianism – because it would imply the Son’s inferiority to the Father. That’s why some egalitarians are so committed to proving Eternal Functional Subordination wrong.

It goes the other way too. Ware, Grudem, et alii, are so committed to seeing functional differentiation between men and women, that they want to see it in the Trinity in order to ground their gender arguments.

These are both wrong ways to argue. Wherever you are on the gender and ecclesiology issues, just stop dragging the Trinity into it because you are making a mess of your Trinitarian theology and it’s not helping your anthropology nor your ecclesiology.
3. Reading 4th century theology accurately is really hard work. And systemic theologians and protestant reformation historians often do it less-than-well. Not always, but more than I’d like to see. It’s not that I think non-specialists in this field should just go home, but a recognition that they’re playing an away game would be helpful. The problem, as I see it, is a tendency to read 4th century debates in alien terms of their own frameworks, which gets in the way of reading these theologies on their own terms and in their own contexts.

5. Configuring the debates as primarily ‘Orthodoxy’ vs. ‘Arianism’ misses a huge component: Marcellus of Ancyra. While Marcellus was an early ally of Athanasius, his theology came to be seen as modalist, and the consensus of Eastern bishops was always against him. This tarred Nicaea with guilt by association, and Athanasius as well (though he was opposed for political reasons as well). The final consensus emerged as much from a continuing regard to exclude modalist and Marcellan theology, as it did from ‘defeating Arianism’; for almost all parties, Arianism was dead in 325, Marcellus was the problem moving forward.

The whole ‘Arian’, ‘Semi-Arian’, ‘Neo-Arian’ set of terms is now virtually dead in Patristics. Because after Arius and possibly Asterius, it’s just inaccurate to call other theologians Arian. This is a legacy of over-realising Athanasius’ importance, because it’s he who both constructs ‘Arians’ as the enemy, polemically, as well as champions Nicaea and homoousios from the late 350s onwards.

6. Nicaea wasn’t envisioned as offering a solution. Indeed, beyond being a council that deal with Arius and his heresy in particular, its participants did not give it the kind of status common today. As Sieben argues, the view of the Council itself develops over time, becoming only latter a confession of faith of enduring value, and eventually seen as embodying revealed truth that is essential to the church’s faith-confession. What’s most intriguing about Nicaea is its absence from the debates for at least 25 years following. It’s prominence in introductory church history courses, textbooks, and popular Christian historical imagination is in large part due to Athanasius later writings and his construction of ‘Arianism’ as a threat and ‘Nicaea’ as the solution.

7. With Ayres, I recognise that the range of options is more than just ‘eternal functional order in the Godhead’ vs. not. The danger, as I see it, of EFS/ERS is that it appears to create problems with divine simplicity and the will of God. The danger without it, is that it may be impossible to say anything about intra-hypostatic relations at all.

(nota bene: I was updating this post about daily with any new contributions I came across. I am no longer doing so, as the debate has largely moved on. [It’s certainly not over, people are indeed still writing and blogging about it. I would say the initial storm of discussion has subsided though, and I am no longer actively monitoring it]

The posts below are in roughly chronological order. New additions welcome!)

Blog posts galore have flown back and forth this week over whether certain persons in contemporary reformed Calvinist circles are pushing their Trinitarian barrels in a non-orthodox direction because of gender debates between Complementarian and Egalitarian positions. Here’s a collation of posts so far:

Liam Goligher kicked things off with two fiery posts:

1. Is it okay to teach a Complementarianism based on Eternal Subordination?

2. Reinventing God

They were particularly fiery posts in that they didn’t stop short of saying that using Eternal Subordination to prop up complementarianism was a departure from Nicene Trinitarian theology and thus tantamount to a heretical view of the Trinity.

Carl Trueman then followed up from Goligher’s post:

3. Fahrenheit 381

Michael Bird weighed in:

4. The Coming War: Nicene Complementarians vs Homoian Complementarians

Mark Thompson gives us:

5. ERS: Is there order in the Trinity?

and promises a second post.

Michael Bird gives a second post outlining some of his own thoughts on the issue:

6. More on the Calvinist Complementarian Divide on the Trinity

Wayne Grudem gives a defence of his position:

7. Whose Position on the Trinity is really new?

As does Bruce Ware:

8. God the Son–at once eternally God with His Father, and eternally Son of the Father

Denny Burk gives a few follow-up comments to Ware and Grudem:

9. A brief response to Trueman and Goligher

And Trueman offers some brief rejoinders to Ware and Grudem:

10. A rejoinder to Wayne Grudem

11. A surrejoinder to Bruce Ware

Mike Ovey’s comments in support of Eternal Subordination:

12. Should I resign? On the eternal subordination of the Son (original post here, reblogged at Credo)

See also posts by

13. Scot McKnight: Is it New? Yes. It is Orthodox? No.

14. Darren Sumner: Some Observations on the Eternal Functional Subordination Debate

15. Mark Jones: God’s Will and Eternal Submission

Michel Barnes, a renowned Patristics scholar, added some comments apparently on facebook, reproduced by Michael Bird (with permission):

16. Comments from Michel R. Barnes.

There is also a bit of a response from Patristics scholar Lewis Ayres, on the same facebook post. Here’s the repost on Bird’s blog:

17. Lewis Ayres’ comment. (Original facebook comments from Barnes and Ayres)

There’s also a summary post by Andrew Wilson

18. Submission in the Trinity: A quick guide to the debate

My friend Ryan Clevenger has a great post on Gregory Nazianzen’s view of the subject:

19. Gregory of Nazianzus on the Submission of the Son.

Luke Stamps has a tidy contribution that brings in Calvin and Gregory of Nazianzus together:

20. The Trinity debate and the history of interpretation

Fred Sanders offers his own related contribution here:

21. 18 Theses on the Father and the Son

Mike Ovey responds with quite a bit of sass to Michael Bird’s take on his position:

22. Can Michael Bird read my mind? Alas it seems not.

Owen Stracham, a self described advocate of “Eternal Relations and Authority Submission” defends his position here:

23. The Glorious Godhead and Oroto-Arian Bulls

A second post from Mark Jones:

24. Eternal Subordination of Wills? Nein! Part Two

A third post from Mark Jones, really getting stuck into Strachan:

25. Biblicism, Socinianism, and “Arid” Scholarhip

TGC Australia have decided to write a whole series addressing it, by Andrew Moody and Mark Baddeley

26. The Ordered Godhead: (1) Commending Nicaea – Moody.

Luke Stamps also shares some thoughts on the divine will:

27. Further reflections on the unity of the divine will.

There’s a post from Derek Rishmawy,

28. On Trinitarian controversy: why it’s not always terrible and how to go about it.

Andrew Perriman:

29. The subordination of the Son, and why it has nothing to do with gender. (and a whole bunch of related posts there)

D. Glenn Butner, Jr.:

30. Eternal Submission and the Story of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.

And a recent round-up post by Alastair Roberts:

31. The Eternal Subordination of the Son Controversy: The Debate so Far.

Darren Sumner again, with:

32. What is the Immanent Trinity? A Clarification for the Eternal Subordination Debate

Matt Emerson, with:

33. What makes a Doctrine “Biblical”? On method.

Matthew Barrent, with:

34. Better late than never: The Covenant of Redemption and the Trinity Debates.

Michael Bird points out the line-up for a section at ETS this year:

35. The 2016 Evangelicals and Gender Study group session on the Trinity.

And lately the ‘civil war’ has even made it to Christianity Today: Caleb Lindgren writes

36. Gender and the Trinity: From Proxy War to Civil War

A guest post by Scott Harrower on Michael Bird’s Blog:

37. Why Trinitarian Debates Really Do Matter!

Another good descriptive post, by Mike Riccardi:

38. Making sense of the Trinity (EFS) debate.

Andrew Moody’s second post over at TGC Australia:

39. The Ordered Godhead: (2) The Beauty of Ordered Willing

And finally a response from Goligher to Ovey:

40. Dr. Liam Goligher responds to Dr. Mike Ovey

Grudem combed through some evangelical scholars to prove the lineage of his view:

41. Another Thirteen Evangelical Theologians Who Affirm the Eternal Submission of the Son to the Father

Then Owen Strachan wrote what I would call a snarky “see told you we were right” post following on:

42. Wayne Grudem Critiques Liam Goligher’s Historical Theology

There’s also a helpful post here from Alistair Roberts giving some reading for those playing at home:

43. The Eternal Subordination of the Son Controversy: Survey of Some Relevant Material

Goligher also as a response to Ware and Grudem, here:

44. A Letter to Professors Ware and Grudem

Keith Johnson has a post over at TGC:

45. Is the Eternal Generation of the Son a Biblical Idea:

Mark Jones offers a response to Wayne Grudem’s list of evangelicals in support of his position:

46. Wayne Grudem’s Historical Theology Analzyed

Carl Trueman gives what he promises to be his last response to Grudem (for now?):

47. Once more unto the breach…and then no more: A final reply to Dr. Grudem

Over at Cripplegate, there’s a whole bunch of useful posts. This most recent one is quite helpful and promising:

48. The Complementarian Trinity Debate: A summary of its beginnings, by Wyatt Graham.

Wyatt Graham continues with

49.  The Complementarian Trinity Debate: A chronological Summar Part II.

Christopher Cleveland has an interesting post, outlining a case for a long-term background in evangelical scholarship, here:

50. Why the Trinitiarian Controversy was Inevitable

Scot McKnight hosts a post from Jamin Hübner at CBE, with plenty of ‘quotation marks’ to undermine Complementarianism and EFS:

51. Subordinationism: Some Major Questions/

Carl Trueman continues, tangentially:

52. The Ecumenical Consequences of the Peace

Malcolm and Karen Yarnell start in with a baptist perspective:

53. Trinity and authority, part 1 of 5.

A mini-essay from Matthew Crawford:

54. Clarifying Nicene Trinitarianism with Cyril of Alexandria

Carrying on from Andrew Moody, Mark Baddeley at TGC Australia writes:

55. The Ordered Godhead: (3) Speaking of God…

Luke Stamps tries to take stock of things:

56. The Trinity Debate: Where do we stand?

Wend Alsup (and Hannah Handerson) at theologyforwomen.org write:

57. The Eternal Subordination of the Son (and Women)

While Coutney Reissig at Christianity Today writes:

58. Why Complementarian men need Complementarian women

Al Mohler offers his thoughts with:

59. Heresy and Humility – Lessons from a Current Controversy

To which Carl Trueman offers his response here:

60. A Reply to Dr. Mohler on Nicene Trinitarianism

Mark Woods gives a piece for Christianity Today:

61. Complementarianism and the Trinity: Is Wayne Grudem a dangerous heretic?

Matt Emerson gives us two fine pieces:

62. A Summarized Biblical Case for Eternal Generation

63. An Attempt to Arbitrate the Trinity Debate

Lewis Ayres contributes another guest post on Mike Bird’s blog:

64. On the meaning of Nicene Orthodoxy

Kyle Claunch, doctoral candidate under Bruce Ware, responds to use of their work in critiquing ERAS, with:

65. Some Clarifications from @kdclaunch on Bruce Ware and the Trinity Debate

Some new contributions…

Mark Baddeley continues at TGC Australia:

66. The Ordered Godhead: (4) Athanasius and Nicea

Meanwwhile Mark Jones offers up a reading list!

67. A (Somewhat Annotated) Bibliography on the Trinity.

Clarification from Bruce Ware over his views:

68. Knowing the Self-Revealed God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

Here’s Nick Norelli offering us:

69. Some Scattered Thoughts on the EFS/ERAS Debate

Mike Bird has three questions in response to Bruce Ware’s post (68):

70. Bruce Ware’s Clarification on EFS/ERAS and Nicene Orthodoxy

Mark Jones, after some heated twitteractions, responds with an article engaging Ware’s latest post:

71. Guest Post from Mark Jones (includes some free commentary on ‘tone’ and ‘fallout’ by Trueman.

Mark Baddeley wraps up the series at TGC Australia

72. The Ordered Godhead: (5) Final Reflections

Todd Pruit just fired a salvo, with a post quoting extensively from Ware and showing some real problems in his book ‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance’:

73. Let’s all be Nicene

Bruce Ware gives another guest post defending his position and trying to contextualise statements in the aforementioned book:

74. An Open Letter to Liam Goligher, Carl Trueman, and Todd Pruitt, on Trinitarian Equality and Distinctions

Matt Emerson and Luke Stamps offer a nuanced response to Ware’s latest two posts:

75. Responding to Bruce Ware with Charitable Criticism

A response letter from Goligher, Trueman, and Pruitt

76. The Looking Glass War: Responding to Bruce Ware

An engagement with Ware’s recent post from Geoff Holsclaw:

77. Holsclaw responds to Ware (a little cluttered since it quotes Ware’s post in full and responds point by point.)

A response from Steven Wedgeworth offers a critique of Ware’s position:

78. Bruce Ware’s “Essential Properties of Personhood”: Social Trinitarianism and Pro-Nicene Logic

I was disappointed not to go to the North American Patristics Society’ conference for 2016, but I do not regret my decision not to go this year. Here’s what not-going did for me:

1. I saved about $2000-3000 dollars and 4 days worth of air travel.
2. I spent some quality time with my 11 week-old daughter.
3. I visited my 90-year-old grandmother.
4. I made some good progress in my rapidly overgrown and overgrowing treatment of 4th century exegesis of Proverbs 8.
5. I gave a presentation about my time teaching in Mongolia.
6. I followed as much of the conference as I could via twitter.
7. I finally had a gym bro compliment me on my strong deadlifts.
8. I saved myself the abomination of drinking the american excuse for coffee.
9. I heard a local paper comparing the Johannine Epistles and with Philodemus and Plutarch.
10. I got to experience the very belated arrival of ‘autumn’ in Sydney.

No, but semi-seriously, I wish I could have been there, but I’m glad I decided not to go this year.

When I teach students who have (some) Greek (these are usually biblical studies/theology students), my go-to method is to use a text-based approach and in particular I tend to get them straight into John’s Gospel in the Vulgate.

Some classicists seem a little down on reading the Vulgate. They seem to think we should just stick to the classical canon and that ‘nothing good came from later Latin’. What nonsense. I love some good Cicero too, but let’s not get caught up on Latinitas.

Teaching this student population from the Vulgate has three powerful advantages.

1. It leverages off their knowledge of Greek. Not that they need to know the Greek underlying the Vulgate necessarily, nor even by particularly familiar with John in the Greek. But having done Greek gives me something easy to which I can relate Latin syntax and vocabulary. Telling a student that ut here is mostly correspondent to ἵνα is a short-cut to comprehension. Similarly, it helps explain some Vulgate oddities, like quia being used for ὅτι when really it shouldn’t.
2. It leverages off their knowledge of both English and the English Bible. When students clue in to the passage they’re reading, it gives them a context to ‘cheat’ – to render the text comprehensible because they know what it ‘ought’ to say. This isn’t cheating, it’s using what you know to understand a text. Similarly, Latin’s influence on English is more profound than Greek’s, and the number of cognates and derivatives also helps a great deal.
3. It gives students a sense of achievement early on. Even filling in meanings and structures for students, they get a sense that ‘hey, reading Latin isn’t so hard! I can understand this.’ That’s a powerful motivator to keep going instead of 16 weeks of grammar all so we can know about poets and sailors giving roses to girls

I wouldn’t teach all students this way. If I had them in person I’d be inclined to a more communicative oral method. If they didn’t have a biblical studies, Koine Greek background, it wouldn’t work as well. But for this population of students, the Vulgate is a great entry point. And you don’t need to stick to something easy like John forever. Reading Old Testament, and deuterocanonical or apocryphal texts, makes for some fun forays into some more difficult terrain.

It’s been a few months since I wrote one of these posts. Honestly, I have little to report – all my side projects have slowed to almost nothing at present. Most of my time is currently devoted to thesis-writing, the small amount of tutoring I do, and looking after the baby.

I do have a beta-version of a reader’s edition of the Acts of Thecla. It’s mainly vocabulary without many grammatical comments. I might post that up soon.

I’ve had the experience of alternately learning and teaching languages online for about 5, hedging on 6, years now. I’ve learnt, and taught, 1-to-1, 1-to-many, though never many-to-1 (I’m not sure that’s a model that helps anybody!). I’ve worked in classes in 5 different languages. All of this, I think, gives me a little bit of insight into some of the ups and downs of online teaching of languages. Here are some of my reflections.

• Video is not essential, but it’s very helpful

I say this because actually looking at someone and engaging with them is tremendously helpful. We’re engaged in communication here, and putting faces to voices is part of what elevates this from talking on the phone. I do have students and teachers who leave video off, often for reasons of increasing internet reliability and speed, and that is fair enough. But to the extent that it is possible, having video on and having that the main thing on screen is the optimal set-up.

• It’s easy for any party to be distracted

Which is related to number two. It’s very easy, sitting in front of a computer, to be ‘distractable’. To drift off to other things. On the part of the teacher this is very unprofessional, and on the part of a student it’s to your own disadvantage. I suggest shutting down every other program you can. Don’t leave things minimised or running in the background.

It can be useful to have other files open, so there is an argument for some minimal use of other windows/tabs. If so, it’s not a bad idea to be up-front about this – because if you can tell that the other person appears to be ‘doing’ something rather than interacting with you directly, this is very off-putting. For my part, I sometimes have the text under discussion up, and sometimes I’ll have a dictionary program or webpage open for checking things on the fly.

• Not all teachers are created equal

I’ve had great teachers and I’ve had bad ones. The worst had no video, appeared distracted, and I am pretty sure counted some lessons that were cancelled as part of our ‘block’. I didn’t continue with him. Great teachers are knowledge, friendly, engaged, and are making a good go at the online platform work.

I don’t think I’m a great online language teacher. I don’t think I’m terrible, but it’s not my preferred medium, as I explain below.

• Timezones!

Assuming that participants are at least in northern and southern hemispheres (typically my experience), the time difference can alter by up to 2 hours (as one timezone starts Daylight Savings/Summer Time, and the other timezone ends it). Here are my tips for dealing with this: (1) plan in advance. Don’t leave it up to the other person to work out these details, make sure you’re on top of them yourself (whether you’re instructor or student). (2) Calendar programs can help – I use google calendar, and it has a feature to set the time-zone of an event. So I’ll often put in tutoring sessions based on the other person’s timezone. Then, when timezones shift, it automatically appears shifted in my calendar and I can either adjust when it is for me or for them, with discussion. (3) http://www.timeanddate.com/ is a great website that let’s you save your own personal clocks, and it has a feature called “International Meeting Planner” that helps you line up times across zones. This is my go-to tool for keeping track of multiple timezones and meetings.

• It’s not ideal, but it can work.

Why online language learning at all? Often there’s not a better option. My Gaelic improved immensely from online classes, because I gained a speaking context for a language I’d predominantly learnt with books. I have one Mongolian student who just doesn’t have many other options for learning Mongolian. The internet makes possible language learning that otherwise could not take place, and it enables communication and a verbal exchange that might otherwise not exist. That’s why it can work.

But it’s not my ideal. Personally I’d rather teach languages in small groups of 4-6, in person. All the TPR, TRPS, CI, WAYK type stuff that I love is quite difficult to do online. Without shared space, shared context, and physical embodiment, many of the things that make the first levels of language instruction concrete and comprehensible, I find, are forced to recede and a more ‘grammatical’ approach takes over. For some of my students, that’s fine – I’m tutoring them alongside or in conjunction with a grammar approach and so I’m not trying to fight that. I wish I could solve all the problems of online language instruction, but I suspect that for me to do so would require more in-person teaching experience first, to bring to the online platform.

I’d love to hear some other thoughts, experiences, questions.

Not really a state of the projects, since most of my projects have been sidelined recently…

My wife and I just had a baby girl, Sorcha (here if you want some pronunciation help), who turned up a few weeks early. Wonderful times but it did throw a spanner in my scheduling. So I’ve been off for 2 weeks, and have been investing my time in first-language acquisition by doing my best to talk to her in Gaelic.

Alas, now I am back at the office, and back to work on the thesis. I finished up a draft of chapter 3 a few weeks prior, which focuses on partitive exegesis in Basil and Hilary. Everyone talks about partitive exegesis, but no one actually talks about it, they just mention it in  passing and assume that ‘all the cool (pro-Nicene) kids are doing it these days’. So I’m currently working on a journal article that surveys partitive exegesis across pro-Nicene authors. This is my big plan to change the 0 pertinent journal publications to the magical 1 figure on my underserved resume.

I’ve almost finished drafting chapter 4 as well. Chapter 4 examines the exegesis of the Johannine prologue in Hilary and Basil. I’m hopeful that I can finish a draft of that just after Easter, and that this will put me close to 50% drafted. Given that I still plan to submit in August if humanly possible, it’s a busy time ahead.

Yesterday (well, today if you’re living in the past like the USA) is/was International Mother Language Day, and I thought I’d write some thoughts about it.

My mother tongue is English. I sometimes wish it wasn’t, but it is just an accidence [sic] of history that it is so, and in terms of the geopolitical state of the 21st century, a pretty good advantage to have. English, for various historical reasons, is our world’s dominant language and conveys huge benefits for those who possess it. It also achieved that dominance through a complicated and ethically-fraught history involving a lot of colonialism, subjugation, and linguistic oppression.

Which is why IMLD matters. We still live in a world where linguistic prejudices are very strong, and often only marginally different from racism. We still live in a world where the freedom and the opportunity to speak one’s mother language without discrimination is denied, under-threat, and contested. We continue to live in a world where, for reasons ‘neutral’ but also many reasons that could be changed, minority languages are under threat and disappearing rapidly. The support and use of minority languages is, in my view, an issue of justice and fundamental human rights.

So I commend you to read the Background page on IMLD, and consider what part you might play in the support of linguistic diversity and preservation.

A few days ago this post appeared highlighting a new feature for Logos users, at least those on the subscription Logos Now model (which I am not).

As a big advocate of reader’s editions for students to move into more fluent and extended reading, I was pleased to see this step taken. A reader’s edition, well designed, rapidly aids a reader of an original-language text by providing helps (usually vocabulary glosses) for parts of the text that are odd, unusual, low frequency, etc., that would slow down comprehension to the point where the reader couldn’t understand and thus the benefits of attempting to read fluently are lost because the percentage of ‘unknowns’ becomes too high to process.

The post says, “Ideally, there would be multiple levels of reader’s editions”, tailored to individual learners’ levels. This would indeed be ideal, and digital texts with tagging and a reader’s edition feature would be an ideal solution for this. Printed volumes, or even static digital texts, have to guestimate the level of help a reader will need, and cannot adjust that level with any degree of ease.

Watching the video though, a number of limitations of what Logos is offering become apparent.

1) The texts available are only those for which an Interlinear exists. This is problematic because the number of those texts is really quite limited – Greek NT and LXX, Hebrew OT, and Greek Apostolic Fathers are the main ones; I am not sure if there are other interlinear texts on Logos because frankly I have no use for interlinears and wouldn’t recommend them as a tool for anybody, even in a digital format. This is a fairly considerable restriction of reader’s editions to a small corpus of texts.

Because it’s built on interlinears, it’s less useful. If it were built simply on morphologically tagged texts, that would (a) open up so many more texts that exist within the Logos datasphere, (b) in theory be infinitely expandable by user effort (even crowdsourced effort) to morphologically tag new texts.

2) The display is built upon the interlinear, so unlike the very fine reader’s editions published for the NT and OT, with footnoted vocab helps at the bottom, these digital reader’s editions suffer from the same problem that print interlinears do – they’re interlinears! They stick the gloss directly on a line underneath the main text. This is distracting and unhelpful. I would warrant a guess that anytime you see text in two or more languages, your eyes are usually drawn to the language you read more readily (your native language, if that’s an option) and away from the one you’re learning. I can’t see how this helps a learner to read more fluently and comprehend more directly.

The solution would require running the reading text with some kind of annotation in a side window or footer bar. I don’t know how Logos software is programmed or how their interlinears are encoded, so I don’t know how that would work.

3) The choice of words displayed/not displayed is based either on a pre-existing frequency list for the whole corpus (i.e., all the NT, not just the book you’re reading) or else a pre-existing word list. You can generate word lists, but this is not the fastest process. What is really lacking is a ‘personalised, dynamic word list’, to which you could add and subtract words ‘on the fly’, representing your own personal, internalised lexicon. That is the level of individual tailoring that is needed.

4) Vocab helps, but not grammar helps. In my view, unfamiliar or difficult grammar can also be tackled in a good reader’s edition, which is one more feature lacking here. Much more difficult to implement and to scale to individual readers, but a desideratum nonetheless.

Is it a good idea? Yes. But it will need some development I suspect.

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