Well, we started moving into our house on the 11th, and I started here at the church on the 16th, and now enough stuff is out of boxes and put away that it’s possible to get around; I still have a lot of books to get organized on my office shelves, but it’s beginning to look like someone actually works here. I keep getting sidetracked, though. This morning I pulled some of Stan Grenz‘ books out of a pile and put them in their place, and then I just sat down and looked at them for a while, and remembered. I can still feel the shock I felt in March 2005 when I was surfing the Web and tripped over the fact that he had died the day before, of a dissecting brain aneurysm. I can’t claim any sort of special relationship with him or his family; he was one of my favorite professors at Regent/Carey, and I met his wife Edna on a couple of occasions around the school, but if he’d been asked to make a list of his favorite students, I have no reason to think I’d have been on it. He was just good to all of us, that’s all, and I learned a tremendous amount from him, and enjoyed him greatly as a professor; you never quite knew what was going to happen when you walked into his classroom. He might be sitting there with his guitar, or the TV might be set up for Star Trek (he was a big Trekkie) or X-Files, or it might be a theological evaluation of a Gloria Estefan song. I won’t say anything was possible, but he was never completely predictable, either.
And while I don’t want to get into the arguments back and forth over the emerging church (at least, not today, anyway), I do want to say this. Dr. Grenz’ name is conjured a lot these days in those arguments, and he’s criticized pretty harshly by those fighting the emerging church; and I don’t recognize the straw man they’re holding up. The Stan Grenz they attack and vilify just doesn’t sound all that much like the one under whom I studied. It’s too bad; I learned a great deal from him, and I think those who consider him their opponent probably could too.