Weekly Email: August 26, 2024
First, congratulations to Brian Clifton on winning the book bundle giveaway mentioned in last week’s email! Keep an eye out for more giveaways in future emails.
Student Tip
As we enter the fourth week of your Fall 1 term, you might be facing a paper or major project on the horizon. I wanted to share a quick story about a student in Dr. Vickers’ summer Hermeneutics course who recently reached out, feeling overwhelmed by the demands of life and school. He was juggling multiple responsibilities:
As an associate pastor, his hospital visits had increased, taking up more of his time.
He’s a father of three, with two kids heavily involved in summer sports.
He leads a men’s discipleship group on Saturday mornings.
He had an upcoming family getaway that needed his full presence.
School felt like a looming burden, constantly overshadowed by other priorities.
This situation might sound familiar. While your challenges and the details may differ, balancing schoolwork with life’s demands is a common struggle.
To keep this email concise, I’ve written a blog post detailing some suggestions I gave him which helped him succeed in the rest of his class. The end result? He earned a solid B+ and, more importantly, gained control over his schedule, avoided the overwhelm that was weighing him down, and maintained the right focus on his family and ministry.
You can check out all the details here.
If you need help structuring your time, I’m here to assist, or I can connect you with one of our Academic Coaches. Sometimes, talking it through can make all the difference.
Program News
As we approach the Fall 2 semester (begins October 7!) I want to highlight one elective course that will only be offered once this year:
History and Methods of Apologetics with Dr. Timothy Paul Jones. If you’ve never taken a class with Dr. Jones you’re in for a real treat. He has a passion for equipping Christians with doing apologetics well in both the classroom and in the church. He recently gave a lecture to the faculty here titled, ‘Brothers and Sisters, We are All Apologists Now.’ I was challenged and encouraged listening to this message. If you have some time, definitely give it a listen. He also has a newsletter called The Apologetics Newsletter which is also worth a read (link).
I asked Dr. Jones how this course can equip our students that are currently involved in ministry and here is what he said:
One key takeaway from this course is the opportunity to engage deeply with primary sources from past defenders of the Christian faith, like Augustine and Calvin. Students will learn invaluable lessons on how to share and defend the faith in their own ministry contexts, drawing wisdom from these influential pastors.
I’ve posted a couple lectures + the syllabus and schedule on our Global Campus Hub, check it out.
Faculty Devotional
This week’s faculty devotional is from Dr. Michael Haykin. He likely needs no introduction, as he is one of the leading evangelical church historians—an absolutely brilliant teacher and storyteller, passionate about bringing history to life in practical ways for his students (check out his blog). Some of my favorite classes here at Southern have been with Dr. Haykin, particularly his doctoral seminar on Augustine. But here’s something you might not know: he loves the color purple. So, when I asked him to share a devotional, I wasn’t surprised that he chose to speak on, yes, the color purple.
In 1856, English Chemistry student William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) was looking for a cure for malaria–he stumbled upon a way to make a synthetic purple dye from coal tar. In so doing, he literally changed history, for his discovery led to advances in medicine, photography, perfumery, food production, and revolutionized the fashion industry.
Making ancient Tyrian purple
Purple has long been valued as a colour, because, for many years, obtaining it entailed a monumental difficulty. According to the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79ad, the best purple dye in the ancient near east was manufactured at the Phoenician city of Tyre (for the association of Tyre with purple dye, see 2 Chronicles 2:7).The raw material out of which this dye was manufactured was obtained from the glandular secretion–or tears, as the Christian commentator Isidore of Seville poetically put it–of a carnivorous sea snail, which contemporary science knows as the Murex bandaris. Somewhere around 12,000 of these snails had to be harvested from the sea to produce merely 0.05 of an ounce of dye. A foul stench emanated from the Phoenician factories manufacturing the dye; understandably they were situated on the outskirts of the city. Tyrian purple, as it was known, was literally worth more than its weight in gold and purple-dyed fabrics commanded exorbitant prices. As Pliny noted of ancient fashion, “it adds radiance to every garment,” and this led to what he called a “frantic passion for purple” among the upper and middle classes of his world. The Old Testament world of the Ancient Near East had been similarly shaped by this passion for purple, where it was associated with royalty and prestige and power (see, for example, Proverbs 31:22; Song of Solomon 3:9–10, 7:5; Daniel 5:7; Esther 8:15).
The Christian seller of purple
So, what does this ancient purple dye have to do with the Gospel? Well, in Luke’s Book of Acts we read that when the apostle Paul came to the city of Philippi in 49ad, he met a woman named Lydia, who was originally from the city of Thyatira in the Roman province of Asia (modern-day Turkey). Ethnically she was Greek, but she had come to believe that the Jewish Old Testament contained the truth about God and the world, and thus she regularly met with a number of sincere Jewish women to pray and worship (Acts 16:14–15).
We are also told by Luke that she was “a dealer in purple” (verse 14), which meant that she either sold the dye, or, more likely, sold purple-dyed clothing. Either way, she would have been a woman of wealth and substance. Her regeneration by the Holy Spirit–“the Lord opened her heart” (verse 14)–led to her baptism and to her encouraging Paul to use her home as a base of mission in the city of Philippi.
If one reads through the Book of Acts it is apparent that when Paul went with the Gospel to a new city, a key part of his mission strategy was to find a place where the churches that were founded through the preaching of the Gospel could meet for distinctively Christian worship and fellowship. So it was that in Philippi, the Lord used the wealth that Lydia had obtained by the selling of purple clothing to rich and elite women–women who had a “frantic passion for purple”–to serve Paul’s preaching and teaching about the Lord Christ.
The God who so made the Murex bandaris that its glands contained the base for purple appears to have had a greater purpose in mind than the making of a snail, glorious though that was!
You can find an archive of each week’s email here.
