Back into the Dorm

My dream was quite vivid last night--I dreamed that Mary and I moved into the dorm room in which I was a resident assistant my last two years of college. I was trying to get people to borrow the stupid safety video individually instead of watching it in a meeting, and I caught some guys coming in after having way too much tequila. May God help me if I ever want to move into a dorm again.

David Tracy's book has one of the most sensible paragraphs on the diversity in the New Testament that I've read in some time. I'll produce it at length here:

Both these major genres--apocalyptic and the doctrines of early Catholicism--may best serve their roles in a contemporary interpretation of the actual diversity of the New Testament not as the truth but as the truth of important correctives. Apocalyptic serves constantly as the corrective of any slackening of eschatological intensity for real history, for the novum and the future, any relaxing of the power of the negative and the not-yet in all other genres. Early Catholicisim serves as the coorective of any temptation fo shirk the ordinary, including the ordinary and necessary human need to find some clarity and explicitness for certain central shared beliefs as doctrines to allow for the human need to find order in thought and some structure in community. (Tracy 268)

The paragraph goes on to line out the tensions that each genre maintains, holding each forth as a necessary check on our tendencies to lose the ordinariness or the newness of the gospel proclamation. This is what good systematic theology should look like.