"Infallible revelation?" and "Aagh! No time!"

I had Greek today. (Tuesday.) The four of us, (three students and one teacher) paused in our struggle to chat. Professor Hegedus asked us how we were finding the work load. We all groaned. He then observed that Divinity professors tend to be overbooked workaholics, and wondered what sort of example they were setting for us in regard to balance and self-care. He said that pastors have a hard time with burn-out, and mused about if the seminary was reinforcing behaviours that lead to burn-out instead of helping us learn how to balance demands and say "no."
He is a very gentle man. He was being humorous and slightly wry, not critical.
He was funny and ironic, and supportive without actually giving us blatant permission to let some of the assigned reading slide....
I'm already having to do that.
I hope I'm not heading for a spectacular crash and burn.

Now it is 11:15 pm the following night. I have spent the day attending to basic needs and family care, and doing very little homework. YIKES.

However, I'm VERY excited about some of the stuff I'm reading for school, especially in my George Dole lectures.
I also love the stuff near the end of a book called "What They Don't Tell You - A Survivor's guide to Biblical Studies," which professor Hegedus assigned. There is a section that says, "Living Tradition is Changing Tradition" and another called "When it comes to asking questions, God is a 'big boy,' God can handle it." It has quotes like: "A man I knew believed he needed to accept so-called 'creation biology' because the Bible gave him an anchor in life. . . . To people like this man, there are just two opposite ways and only these two ways to understand revelation: (1) there is an absolutely infallible---yet humanly accessible---special source of knowledge in religion, or (2) there is no source whatsoever of knowledge deserving any trust or confidence. This view is strange to me because we do not require this kind of absolute knowledge in any other area of life. For example, scientists do not claim any result of science as absolutely certain as it stands, yet our engineers apply many scientific results with confidence. . . . The choice is not between absolutely certain and reliable revelation on the one hand and no revelation on the other. There can be many degrees in between." (excerpts from pp 145-147)

Taking any revelation at face value---as the complete and bald truth without any broader meaning---is an enormous mistake. And while applying our fallible human understanding makes people nervous, for we are by definition going to make mistakes, NOT applying our understanding is abdicating our spiritual responsibility. It is the equivalent of burying our "talents" in the sand.

Putting away soap box and heading to bed.