Thursday, July 14, 2005
Christopher’s Manchester Weblog - Summer 2005 - Wednesday June 22 - Day 2 - Professors and Birds
Another update, this time from day 2 in Manchester
Wednesday marked my first full day in Manchester, which meant the joys of being awoken at 4am by the birds that don’t seem to realize that sunrise and time to wake-up are NOT the same thing. As short as the days are in the winter here, the summer days more than make-up for it.
I don’t know if you knew this, but the idea for daylight savings time came from an Englishman. Back in 1907 this man was up at dawn, overseeing deliveries, and realized that here was all this wonderful sunshine (as rare an English commodity as good teeth), and everyone was in bed instead of out enjoying it. So he proposed and parliament passed a change to the time, moving wakeup “time” back an hour. What it means in Manchester is that finally gets dark after midnight, which means that it doesn’t get dark here at all each day (does that make any sense?). Personally, in Colorado Springs I love daylight savings time…in Manchester I could only love it if given a slingshot to convince the birds to leave my window til a godly hour comes!
Actually, it is very weird to walk the city at night (as I do on my late night constitutionals) and see people out eating and drinking and talking, in outdoor cafes, at 10:30! The Brits really do love both their sunshine and their chance to celebrate. I do wonder though it all this late night activity explains why everything in the city seems to run a bit sloooowwww here in the summer.
So, I met with Dr. Noble, my erstwhile professor and mentor for my doctorate. He is currently reading for the first time the entire Pannenberg Systematics, so he was full of questions for me. I had mailed him the first four chapters a week ago Monday, which meant that they arrived here Tuesday about an hour after my lengthy trip from the airport ended. Got to love the postal system that says, “International Express - 2 to 4 days.”
He had read through the first quarter of my thesis by the time we met on Wednesday. He accomplished that though by completely forgetting we were supposed to meet at 3pm and showing up at 4pm. No comment.
What did he say? Well, you will never get an Scot to say he likes something, so I knew better than to hear anything of that sort. What I did hear is that:
1) I have too few quotes. This of course comes about because in January he told me, “Don’t put in a lot of quote, as they will think you are just cataloging what the author said.” Fortunately, I have all the quotes I referred to, so now I just need to go back, add them in and tighten up what I did say. No problem L
2) I don’t demonstrate I have a knowledge of German. Of course everything Pannenberg wrote has been translated, but I need to put all the quote in German, or at least all the references need to come from the German editions. This is going to be a lot of fun, especially since the German editions of Pannenberg’s work are not cheap, even in Euros.
3) I don’t cite enough secondary sources. This surprised him most of all. That is when I told him that while lots of people have written about Pannenberg’s Trinity concept, a few on his theological anthropology, and a few on his idea of faith, no one has written on his idea of sanctification. I mean, he’s a Lutheran theologian – do you think of German theologians when I say sanctification? (Feel free to insert your own joke here). So, I am going back through the 800+ articles and books written on Pannenberg in the past fifty years making sure this is the case – including the French and Italian literature. So now I live in fear that someone Italian Lutheran wrote a dissertation on Pannenberg’s doctrine of relational sanctification as penance for something.
4) He’s a bit concerned about the length. I only have 10,000 words left to play with and I have two chapters that I can write and all those quotes to put back in. We shall see on that one….
So, that summed up my time with Dr. Noble. I was somewhere between crestfallen and content. I knew I had more work to do. I just never figured it would be plowing through Pannenberg’s German and French and Italian journals. Many of you wanted to know what I was going to be doing for 4 weeks over here….now you know.
Hoping and praying your Wednesday went better than mine, even if you have morning songbirds.
Christopher
