New Students, Fall 2004

Falling in Love with Scripture:
Chris Bishop

Chris Bishop, raised a cradle Episcopalian in a clergy family, had actually fallen away from the church for a time before "before stumbling into a church in Manhattan one Easter Sunday morning, and God opened his hand and took me in." In the earliest weeks of his seminary education at LTSP he speaks movingly of his welcome and dialogue with Lutheran students at the school. "They eat and talk like I do and believe a whole bunch of things that I do," he says. "Now I understand why our two churches, despite their institutional and doctrinal differences, have decided to enter into meaningful communion together." He notes that in those early weeks "I have fallen in love …with scripture during my Old Testament class. I am in love with the story of God, who after wiping out his entire creation determines to love them in all their stupidity anyway - the birth of grace. It's the same grace that lifted me out of a hole I had dug thinking I was mining gold, but which almost buried me alive." He's enjoyed immensely the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Robert B. Robinson, the Anna Burkhalter Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew. "The surprising deepening of faith, and a renewed recognition of faith's need for loving action, and all in six weeks. What could be better than that?"