Assignment 1 of 3

Course 1, Assignment 1 of 3

The Gloss You Carried

What You Are About To Do

This is the first of three assignments in Course 1. You are about to read the course textbook, The Gloss, pick one of three worked scenarios presented later in this sheet, and perform on the page the reading move the book has been teaching you. You will produce a written paper of approximately eight hundred to one thousand words and a recorded video of ten minutes, plus or minus two. Your instructor will then send you three challenge questions, which you will answer in a second recorded video.

The reading is substantial but it is not long. The book is one hundred eighty-five pages and it was written to be read, not survived. The scenarios below are worked out in enough detail that a careful reader can follow what is happening and then perform the move themselves on the same passage. Plan to spend several sittings on the textbook before you turn to this sheet, and several more sittings on your own writing once you have picked the scenario you want to work with.

Your Reading

Read the entire book, The Gloss, before you begin work on this assignment. Every chapter. Do not skip the ones that look like they are about something you already know.

The book is eleven chapters walking through one sustained move: before you can see the text of Scripture, you have to learn to see what has been covering it up. Chapters 1 and 2 name the problem and why it has persisted for so long. Chapter 3 names the reading method you are going to learn to use. Chapter 4 explains why translation loses things that matter. Chapters 5 and 6 take the method and aim it at scholarly arguments outside of Scripture, so that you can see the method work on material that is not Bible. Chapters 7 through 11 apply the method to a series of controversies that most thoughtful Christians have carried discomfort about for years, often without ever being given the tools to resolve the discomfort.

You are not being asked to agree with everything the book says. You are being asked to have read it carefully enough that you can work with the move it is teaching. The move is what you will demonstrate in this assignment. The specific arguments in chapters 7 through 11 are illustrations of the move, not substitutes for having practiced it yourself.

When you have finished the book, return to this sheet and read the three scenarios below. Pick one. Then write your paper.

What This Assignment Is For

You have just read a book whose whole argument is that there is a text underneath two thousand years of packaging, and almost no one reads it. The believer does not read it because they have been told what it means. The skeptic does not read it because they have been told it does not mean anything. The book's move is to show you how to set aside both packagings and read what the text actually says.

Your job in this assignment is not to evaluate whether the book is right. Your job is to perform the reading move the book has been teaching, on a worked example, so that the move enters you rather than staying on the page. A student who has read the book and says “that was interesting” has not done the course. A student who has read the book and then performs, on their own, what the book was showing them how to do, has done the course.

The reading move is called the Adler close-read, and you saw it named and explained in Chapter 3. It asks you, when you come to a passage of Scripture, to read what the passage actually says, with the sentences that sit next to it, without importing meanings you were previously taught to import. When you do that, a consistent thing happens. Passages you had been told meant one thing reveal that they mean something else, something the text itself was saying all along, and usually something more interesting than the gloss.

The three scenarios below are three well-known passages where this happens. Each scenario shows you the move on that passage so you can see how it works. Pick one. Then write your paper on the same passage, in your own voice.

The Three Scenarios

Scenario 1: Jeremiah 29:11 — “For I Know the Plans I Have for You”

The gloss as you have carried it

You have seen this verse on coffee mugs, on graduation cards, on the wall of a Christian bookstore, on a friend's Instagram, on the back of a youth-group T-shirt. “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Most believers have encountered this verse as a personal promise from God to them, specifically, about their own life. God has a plan for you. The plan is good. You are going to have a future. The verse is comfort for a moment when you are unsure about where your life is going, and the comfort is that there is Someone in charge and He has arranged things for your benefit.

This is one of the most beloved verses in modern American Christianity. It is also almost universally read detached from the two sentences that sit on either side of it.

The passage in its original setting

Read Jeremiah 29 from verse 1 through verse 14. The whole chapter is a letter. The letter has a sender, a recipient, a date, and a subject.

The sender is Jeremiah the prophet. He is writing from Jerusalem. The recipient is the community of Jews who have been forcibly deported from Jerusalem to Babylon. They are not home. They are not coming home soon. The date is approximately 597 BC. The Babylonian captivity is underway.

The subject of the letter is how the exiles should live in Babylon. Jeremiah tells them, in earlier verses, to build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, seek the welfare of the city they have been carried to. Settle in. Because, and this is the verse immediately before the famous one, “when seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.”

Seventy years. Most of the people reading that letter would be dead before the promise was fulfilled. The letter is explicitly addressed to a community that will not personally see the deliverance the letter is promising. Their grandchildren might. They themselves will live and die in captivity.

Verse 11 is spoken in that context. The “plans to prosper you and not to harm you” is what God is saying to a people He has just told will spend seventy years in a foreign land. The “hope and a future” is the future of the nation, not the future of the individual reader at a bad moment in their own life. The promise is real. The promise is corporate. The promise is on a timescale that will cost the original recipients their own lifetimes.

The gloss reading named honestly

The modern devotional reading takes Jeremiah 29:11 and extracts it from Jeremiah 29:10 and Jeremiah 29:14. The extraction is neat. It leaves behind the seventy years. It leaves behind the exile. It leaves behind the fact that the promise is corporate. What remains is a single sentence that sounds, stripped of its context, like a personal promise to whoever happens to read it.

The devotional reading is not exactly wrong. God does have plans. He is not capricious. He does not delight in harming His people. All of this is true and all of it can be defended from elsewhere in Scripture. But the verse that defends those things is not Jeremiah 29:11 in the sense the devotional reading uses it. Jeremiah 29:11, read honestly, is a word spoken to a community in crisis, promising restoration at a timescale that exceeded the lifespan of most of its hearers, in a form most of them would never personally see.

The close-read performed

The Adler method asks you to do four things when you read a text. First, read what the text actually says. Second, ask what the text is about. Third, ask whether the text is true. Fourth, ask what follows from it if it is.

For Jeremiah 29:11, the first step does most of the work. Read what the text actually says — not the verse alone, but the verse with its neighbors. The sender is Jeremiah. The recipient is the exiled community. The subject is how to live in exile for seventy years. The promise is national restoration on a timescale that will outlast most of the hearers.

The gloss does not survive the first step. The verse means what it means in the context the text itself supplies, and that context is not “your personal life is about to improve.”

What becomes visible

When the gloss comes off, several things become visible.

The first is that God speaks in terms longer than the individual life. The promise to the exiles is real, and it is also a promise their grandchildren will receive. This is not a flaw in the promise. It is a feature of how God works with His people, which is across generations. Any Christianity that cannot sit with a seventy-year timescale is running on verses extracted from texts that knew better.

The second is that the comfort the text actually offers is a stronger comfort than the gloss's. The gloss's comfort is: your life will get better soon. This is often not true, and when it fails, the gloss fails with it. The text's comfort is: the God who is in charge does not abandon His people even when the circumstances He has allowed will last longer than you will. That comfort survives the circumstances. The gloss's comfort does not.

The third is the shape of the reading move you just performed. You did not need Hebrew. You did not need a commentary. You did not need an advanced theological education. You needed to read the verse with the verses that sit next to it. The gloss's whole survival depended on you not doing that. The moment you did it, the gloss collapsed. That is how this move works.

Scenario 2: Genesis 1:1–2 — The Gap the Text Puts There

The gloss as you have carried it

You have been in one of two rooms. In the first room, someone told you the universe is six thousand years old because the Bible says so. In the second room, someone told you the universe is 13.8 billion years old because science says so, and that therefore the Bible is wrong. Neither room let you ask the question the text itself was waiting for you to ask.

The question is: what does the Bible actually say?

The passage in its original setting

Read Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Just those two sentences. Slowly.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

Notice what the first sentence does and does not say. It says God created the heavens and the earth. It does not say when. It does not give a date. It does not give a duration. It does not give an age.

Notice what the second sentence adds. The earth is now in a state. The state is formless, void, dark, watered. This is not the state of a freshly-created planet. A freshly-created planet, one would expect, arrives with some form. The state described here is the state of an earth to which something has happened.

Between the first sentence and the second sentence, the text puts something. Or rather, the text has a hole where something is missing. The hole is the only place in the first creation account where time has elapsed invisibly. Everything from verse 3 forward is narrated day by day. Verse 1 to verse 2 is not.

The gloss readings named honestly

The young-earth gloss reads verses 1 and 2 as describing a single continuous moment. God created, and the earth was immediately in its formless pre-formation state. The six days of creation begin in verse 3 and proceed immediately. Total elapsed time from the beginning to the first day: effectively zero. Total age of the universe: approximately six thousand years, derived by adding genealogies from Adam forward.

The atheist-skeptic gloss reads the young-earth gloss as what the Bible claims, and then disproves the Bible by proving the universe is 13.8 billion years old. If the Bible says six thousand and science says 13.8 billion, the Bible loses. The skeptic has “won.”

Notice what has happened. The skeptic has adopted the young-earth reading as if it were the only reading. The young-earth reader has adopted a reading that requires them to close the gap between verse 1 and verse 2 without the text asking them to. Both parties are fighting over a claim the text does not make.

The close-read performed

Read verse 1 again. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The verse makes one claim: God created the heavens and the earth. The verse does not tell you when that happened. Any age the physicist wants to attach to “the beginning” fits here. Thirteen billion years. Fifty billion years. A trillion. The text is silent. The silence is not a gap in the text. The silence is the shape of the text.

Read verse 2 again. The earth is formless, void, dark, watered. The Hebrew words tohu va-vohu describe something like chaos, or emptiness, or un-formed-ness. This is not the state of a planet that was just made and is fine. This is the state of something that was, at one point, more ordered than it is now.

Between verse 1 and verse 2, the text puts a state change that it does not narrate. An unspecified duration passes, an unspecified something happens, and the earth arrives in verse 2 in a state that requires explanation the text does not give.

Both glosses close this gap. The young-earth gloss closes it by asserting the gap is zero. The skeptic gloss closes it by asserting the text claims the gap is zero and then attacking the claim. Neither party is reading what is on the page.

What becomes visible

The text is not making the claim either gloss says it is making. The text is compatible with a cosmos as old as honest cosmology says it is. The text is compatible with a duration between the beginning and the formless state that no human knows the length of. The text is not committed to any of this on either side, because the text is not talking about cosmological chronology. It is telling you something else, and you cannot hear the something else while you are arguing about the chronology.

The gloss closed the gap the text put there on purpose. The close-read reopens it.

Scenario 3: Philippians 4:13 — “I Can Do All Things Through Christ”

The gloss as you have carried it

You have seen it on athletes' eye black. You have seen it on gym posters. You have seen it on the wristbands of high school football players. You have heard it quoted before a big test, before a job interview, before a performance the quoter was worried about. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

The gloss reading is: whatever I set out to do, Christ will empower me to succeed at. I have a goal. I have faith. The combination produces achievement. The verse is a promise that I will win.

The passage in its original setting

Read Philippians 4 from verse 10 through verse 13. Paul is writing from prison. He is thanking the Philippians for a gift they sent him. He is explaining something about his own condition in that prison.

“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

The subject of the passage is contentment in any circumstance. Paul has been full. Paul has been hungry. Paul has been rich. Paul has been poor. He has learned, through the strengthening that Christ provides, to be content in whichever state he is currently in. “I can do all things” is the last line of a paragraph about enduring.

The “all things” is not “any goal I set for myself.” The “all things” is any circumstance that happens to me. Being full. Being hungry. Being comfortable. Being in prison. Paul is not saying he can win any contest. He is saying he can endure any condition.

The gloss reading named honestly

The gloss lifts the verse out of its paragraph and drops it into a context of achievement. The gym poster does not include verses 10 through 12. The eye black does not include verses 10 through 12. The isolated verse, removed from the paragraph that was explaining contentment, sounds like a promise of performance. In the paragraph, it is a testimony about endurance.

This is not a subtle distinction. The gloss reading and the text reading point in opposite directions. The gloss promises victory. The text promises peace in defeat. The gloss is about getting what you want. The text is about being okay whether or not you get what you want. These are two different theologies, and the verse, read in its paragraph, supports one and refutes the other.

The close-read performed

Adler asks you to read what the text actually says. The text here is a paragraph, not a sentence. The paragraph is about learning contentment in opposite circumstances. The concluding sentence of the paragraph is the one everyone quotes. The “all things” the concluding sentence names is the contents of the paragraph that precedes it: being full, being hungry, abounding, suffering need.

The gloss extracts the sentence from the paragraph and renames the “all things” to mean “anything I am trying to achieve.” The extraction is the gloss. The text reading follows automatically when you put the sentence back in its paragraph.

What becomes visible

Two things become visible when the gloss comes off.

The first is that Paul is offering a harder and better comfort than the gym poster. The gym poster promises you that God will help you win. The text promises you that God will steady you whether you win or lose. A person who loses while running the gym poster's theology will conclude that either they had insufficient faith or God failed them. A person who loses while running the text's theology will conclude that they have one more form of “all things” to learn contentment in. The text's theology survives loss. The gym poster's does not.

The second is that the reading move is the same as in the other two scenarios. You did not need Greek. You did not need a commentary. You needed to read the sentence with the sentences that sit next to it. The gloss depended on you not doing that. The moment you did it, the gloss dissolved.

What You Will Produce

The Paper

A written paper of approximately eight hundred to one thousand words, in three parts. Pick one of the three scenarios above. The three parts are the same for whichever scenario you pick.

Part 1: What You Were Told. Write, in concrete terms, what you had been taught about this passage before you encountered the close-read in this assignment. Not what you “believed” in some private sense; what you had been told. The sermons you remember, the Sunday school lessons, the study Bible footnotes, the things people in your church or your family said in passing. If you had never heard the passage discussed at all, say that. If the teaching you received made the passage feel awkward and you were told to move past it, say that. If you had been given a confident answer that you nodded along with but never quite believed, say that. The point is to put your inheritance on the page, in specific terms, so that the next two parts have something concrete to compare against. Honesty is the standard. Roughly one third of the paper.

Part 2: The Reading Performed. Walk through the close-read in your own voice. This is not a paraphrase of the scenario above. You read the scenario. Your instructor read the scenario. Writing it back down is not the assignment. The assignment is to take the reading move — the actual motion of reading the verse with the verses that sit next to it and noticing what becomes visible — and perform it on the page in the voice of someone who has just come to see what they had not seen before. Show the passage. Show the work. Use your own words. Roughly one third of the paper.

Part 3: What the Window Showed. Write what became visible to you when the close-read landed. What in the passage that had felt familiar now feels different. What in your inheritance from Part 1 now reads differently to you. What you think you will carry forward from this scenario into your future reading. This part is personal. It should sound like you, not like the textbook. Roughly one third of the paper.

The Video

A recorded video of ten minutes, plus or minus two. You present the substance of your paper on camera, in your own voice, looking into the camera. You may use brief notes. You may not read from a script.

Ten minutes is enough time to walk through the three parts of your paper aloud. It is not enough time to ramble. Prepare. The video is not a summary of the paper. It is the substance of the paper delivered out loud, in the form it would take if you were telling someone about what you had just figured out. If the video and the paper sound like the same person, the voice is yours. If they sound like different people, the instructor will notice.

Your face must be visible throughout. The recording quality does not need to be professional but must be clear enough that your instructor can see you and hear you. Phone, webcam, tablet, all are acceptable.

The Challenge Response

After your instructor has reviewed your paper and your video, you will receive three challenge questions. The questions will probe your understanding of the close-read you performed, will ask you to extend the reading move to a passage your paper did not address, and may press on a place in your paper or video where your reasoning was unclear. The questions are not adversarial. They are diagnostic.

You respond to all three questions in a second recorded video, between three and six minutes total. Same format as the first: on camera, notes permitted, no script.

How This Will Be Evaluated

This assignment is graded pass / does not yet pass. The evaluation looks at the paper, the video, and the challenge response together, as a single body of work, against five dimensions.

Dimension 1: Evidence you read the book. Specific engagement with the reading method the book teaches in Chapter 3, and with the examples and arguments the book uses elsewhere. Generic references to “the book” without concrete content is the failure mode.

Dimension 2: You performed the close-read, not just described it. You took the scenario you chose and walked through the reading move yourself, in your own words, on the page. Paraphrasing the scenario or summarizing what the book said about reading is not the assignment.

Dimension 3: Honest disclosure of what you were told. Part 1 of your paper put your actual inheritance on the page, in concrete terms. A generic Part 1 that could have been written by anyone is the failure mode. The instructor is looking for a specific person disclosing a specific inheritance.

Dimension 4: The voice is yours. The video verifies this. The writing and the speaking sound like the same person, and that person sounds like they actually own the reasoning they are walking through. Reading continuously from a script on camera is the failure mode. Stumbling occasionally and recovering is fine. The instructor can tell the difference.

Dimension 5: Applied thinking in the challenge response. When the instructor asks you to extend the reading move to a passage your paper did not address, you can do it. A student who installed the move can apply it to new material. A student who only performed it once, for the assignment, cannot.

A student passes when the body of work passes on all five dimensions. A student does not yet pass when one or more dimensions show a deficiency significant enough to indicate that the reading move has not yet entered them. A student who does not yet pass receives written feedback identifying which dimensions need strengthening, and is invited to resubmit. The College's interest is in your formation, not in gatekeeping. There is no limit on the number of resubmissions. A student who arrives at genuine comprehension after three attempts has passed, and the number of attempts is not recorded in the evaluation.

When you are ready, write your paper, record your video, and submit them together. Your challenge questions will follow.