Assignment 2 of 3

Course 3, Assignment 2 of 3

Telling Your Friend What Was Already Done

What You Are About To Do

This is the middle assignment in Course 3. You have already done one thing. In the first assignment you picked one of three worked scenarios, performed the restoration move on a piece of inherited Christian language about salvation, and wrote about what became visible when the agency moved from the believer to God and the deed already filed came into view. You did that as a student working through an analytical exercise. The instructor read what you wrote. The instructor asked you challenge questions. You responded.

In this assignment the register changes. You are no longer writing to demonstrate that you performed a move. You are writing as someone who has learned something and is telling another person what you have learned. The other person is not your instructor. The other person is a friend who heard you have been studying at Saint Luke's and asked you what the course is about.

You have fifteen minutes of your friend's attention. You are going to use them.

If you completed Course 1 and Course 2, you have done a version of this assignment twice before. Course 1 Assignment 2 asked you to explain the close-read in friend-register. Course 2 Assignment 2 asked you to explain the sorting move in friend-register. Course 3 Assignment 2 asks you to explain the restoration move in friend-register. The form is the same. The substance is different. You can draw on what you learned about voice in the prior two assignments, and this sheet will not repeat everything those sheets already taught you. If you skipped or have forgotten the earlier versions, read the guidance below carefully. The voice is harder than it looks, and the substance this course is asking you to carry into friend-register is heavier than what the earlier courses asked.

What You Are Becoming

A believer who can talk about Christianity without arguing about Christianity. A believer who can name what the New Testament actually says about salvation, in plain language a friend can follow, without making the friend feel preached at, lectured at, or sold something.

Modern Christianity has many people who can recite the gospel. Fewer who can describe it. Almost none who can describe it in a way that makes the gospel clearer rather than more confusing to whoever is listening, especially when the friend has already been exposed to the popular American version and has formed an opinion of it. The last category is what this diploma is forming you for. You are not being trained into apologetics. You are not being trained into evangelism. Those are their own roles and they have their own formation. You are being formed into something simpler and older: a Christian who knows what the deed actually says, can describe what is on it in plain words, and can do this for a person who was not raised to ask the question.

This is what you are about to practice. The conversation with the friend is the form. The substance is what the book has taught you about the deed, the legal vocabulary, the agency that runs from God to the believer and not the other way around. The test is whether you can put the substance into the form without breaking either one.

You will not feel ready. The voice you are refining here is a voice you will use for the rest of your Christian life, and sharpen further in the Master of Christian Catechesis if you continue. What matters at this stage is that you do it with awareness of what you are doing.

What Friend-Register Is

The voice you are about to write in is not a stylistic choice. It is not about making your writing warmer or simpler or more casual. It is about who you are oriented toward while you are writing.

An academic paper is oriented toward showing the reader you understand the material. A sermon is oriented toward moving the hearer toward a decision. A catechism is oriented toward forming the catechumen in doctrine. An argument with a skeptic is oriented toward defending a position. A conversation with a friend is none of these things. A conversation with a friend is oriented toward the other person's curiosity. They asked you something. You are answering them. They are allowed to interrupt. They are allowed to not be impressed. They are allowed to disagree. The success of the conversation is not measured by what you said. It is measured by whether they wanted to keep talking.

This means several things in practice.

It means you use the words you would actually use in a conversation. If a word would not leave your mouth when you were talking to your friend on a bench outside a coffee shop, it should not leave your pen here. The book uses words like cheirographon and huiothesia and methistemi. Some of these will land naturally in a friend conversation if you explain them as you go. Most will not, and you will need to translate. Cheirographon in friend voice is "an IOU, a handwritten debt note." Huiothesia in friend voice is "the Roman legal procedure for adopting an adult son into your family with full legal standing." Methistemi in friend voice is "the word the Greeks used when a government moved a population from one territory to another." If you keep a Greek word, give your friend the word by explaining what it carries. Do not drop Greek into a friend conversation as proof that you have done the reading. Drop it only when the word is doing work no English equivalent can do.

It means you tell them something that interested you, and you tell them why it interested you. Not because interest is the highest virtue, but because the friend asked what you are studying, and the honest answer is the part of the course that actually got your attention, not the table of contents.

It means you stop when they would stop you. If you can feel, while you are writing, that your friend would at this point raise an eyebrow and say wait, what does that mean, answer them right there. Do not keep going and hope they figure it out.

It means you do not try to win them. The friend is not an opponent. The friend is not a prospect. The friend is a person who asked a question and wants to know what you have been doing. If at any point your writing starts to sound like you are arguing with them, back up. The arguing voice is not friend-register. It is debate-register, and it will land differently than you think it will.

The goal is not to make your friend agree with everything you say. The goal is to make your friend understand what you have been doing, in a way that leaves them more curious than they were before.

The Particular Trap of This Course

Course 3 has two failure modes that the earlier courses did not have, and you need to watch for both.

The first failure mode is legal-jargon overload. The book taught you Greek words. You learned them. You like them. They feel like they are doing real work, because they are. The temptation, when you sit down to write to a friend, is to take pride in the vocabulary and let the conversation become a tour through the technical terms you can now name. Your friend does not care about the vocabulary. Your friend cares about what the vocabulary is pointing at. The vocabulary is a means. The thing it is pointing at is the deed. The friend wants the deed, in plain words. If your paper sounds like you are showing your friend the cabinet of new words you have learned, you have failed in the same direction the altar-call tradition fails: you have replaced the substance with the form. The antidote is to use a Greek word only when it is doing work no English equivalent can do, and when you do use one, to explain it the way you would explain it to a smart friend who has not read the book and does not need to.

The second failure mode is criticizing your friend's exposure to Christianity. Course 3 is structured around the gap between the popular American salvation language and the New Testament's actual legal vocabulary. There is a temptation, when describing the gap, to slide into criticism of the popular language itself, or of the pastors who preach it, or of the church the friend grew up in if they grew up in one. That voice will land on your friend as complaint, not conversation. It will sound like you are sneering at something they may have honest connections to, or like you are sneering at a version of Christianity they have already dismissed and now hear you confirming was indeed dismissible. Neither lands well.

The book itself does not do this. The book is careful. None of this is said to put the altar call down. People have come to real faith through it. The Spirit uses what is there. You should be careful in the same way. The popular American salvation language is not a fraud. It is a smaller piece of a larger thing, and your job in friend-register is to point at the larger thing without disrespecting the smaller one. The pastor pointing at the cross is right about what he is pointing at. He just does not have forty minutes on a Sunday morning to lay out the Greek. That is what a course is for. Your friend should leave the conversation with more respect for what is actually in the New Testament, not less respect for the people who have been preaching pieces of it.

The Friend You Are Imagining

To write this paper well, you need a specific picture of the person on the other side of it. The same guidance applies as in the earlier courses.

The person is not a fellow believer in formation. If they were a catechumen, you would be writing catechetical voice, and the Master of Christian Catechesis students are the ones who do that.

The person is not a hostile atheist looking to dismantle your faith. If they were hostile, you would be writing apologetics, which is not this assignment.

The person is a friend. Pick a real one, in your head, while you write. A sibling. A roommate. A coworker. A neighbor. Someone who knows you, who respects you enough to ask you a real question, who is not trying to convert you or be converted, and who will actually listen for fifteen minutes if the conversation is worth listening to.

What does this friend know about Christianity already? They know what the culture has given them. They have probably heard of the Bible. They have probably been to a wedding or a funeral in a church. They have heard the phrase ask Jesus into your heart somewhere, and have a vague impression of evangelical conversion as a private emotional event. They have heard the protection-racket critique, even if they did not know it had a name, because the critique is in the cultural water. They are not ignorant and they are not hostile. They are ordinarily curious about what you have been doing with your time, and they asked because they actually wanted to know, and now the answer is your problem.

If you used a specific friend for the prior courses' Assignment 2, you may use the same friend again. They will remember those conversations. You do not need to start over. You can pick up with them. Remember last time we talked about the close-read? And then about that sorting thing? I have been doing something else now. If you are using a different friend, or if the friend you are picturing is generic, give them a face. The conversation is more honest when the person on the other side is specific.

That is your audience.

What You Are Going To Do

Write, in approximately one thousand to twelve hundred words, how you would explain what you have been studying to that friend.

The structure of the paper is yours to find. There is no required three-part division. There is no template. What you include, and in what order, is for you to decide based on what would actually serve the person on the other side of the conversation.

You may draw on anything you have read in the book. You may draw on what you performed in Assignment 1 of this course. You may tell them about the specific scenario you worked on and what the restoration showed you. You may tell them about a chapter of the book that caught your attention. You may tell them about the whole move the book is teaching, at a high level, with one concrete example that shows what the move looks like. Any of these can work. What will not work is a recitation of the seven legal words, because a recitation of the seven legal words is what someone who has read a book says. It is not what someone who has absorbed a book says.

The most honest version of this paper is the version that leans heavily on your Assignment 1 work. You did specific work on a specific scenario. That work has a story. The story has a beginning (what you were told), a middle (what you saw when the agency moved), and an end (what is different for you now). Your friend does not want a summary of the book. Your friend wants to know what you did and what you found. Tell them.

The Paper

Approximately one thousand to twelve hundred words. Structure is yours. Voice is the friend-register described above. Substance draws on the book and on your work in Assignment 1.

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.

The video is not a summary of the paper. It is you having the actual conversation, out loud, with the imagined friend, while the camera watches. If the video and the paper sound like the same person, the voice is yours. If they sound like two different people, one of them is written and the other one is you, and the instructor can tell the difference.

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 instructor is no longer playing the role of a teacher checking your work. The instructor is playing the role of your friend. The three questions will be questions the friend might actually ask after hearing your explanation. Follow-ups. Clarifications. Wait, so are you saying my grandmother's prayer at her hospital bed didn't do anything? If the deed was already filed, what is the prayer for at all? Are you saying my whole church has been wrong? These are the kinds of follow-ups a thoughtful friend would actually offer when something in your explanation almost made sense but did not quite land. They will not be hostile. They will be the questions a real friend would have.

You respond on camera, in friend-register, the way you would respond to a real friend asking a real follow-up. Three to six minutes total for all three responses. Same format as the first video: on camera, notes permitted, no script.

Quality Checks While You Write

If you find yourself wanting a starting point because the freedom feels paralyzing, here are some questions to ask yourself while you write. They are not a structure. They are quality checks. Use them while writing the first draft and again while reading what you have written.

Am I writing as if I am talking to my friend, or as if I am writing a paper? If I am writing as if I am writing a paper, the voice is off. Picture the friend. Picture them sitting across from me. Picture them asking what I have been studying. Write the answer to them, not the answer to my instructor.

Am I using Greek words because they are doing work no English word can do, or because they sound impressive? If I cannot, in the next sentence, say what the Greek word is carrying in plain English, I should not have used the Greek word at all.

If my friend stops me at any point in this paper and says wait, what does that mean, can I answer them in the next sentence, or have I used a term I cannot unpack? If I cannot unpack it, I should not use it. If I can unpack it, I should unpack it before my friend has to ask.

Am I grounding this in concrete specifics (the specific scenario I worked on, the specific thing I had been told, the specific thing I came to see) or have I drifted into abstract talk about salvation and the cross and the gospel? If I have drifted, bring it back down. My friend cannot picture abstractions. They can picture the specific thing I grew up being told and the specific thing I came to see instead.

Am I telling my friend what I did, or am I critiquing the church that gave me the inheritance? Critiquing the inheritance, especially the version of it my friend has had cultural exposure to, will make my friend uncomfortable and will not teach them anything. Telling them what I did will.

Am I helping my friend see what I have come to see, or am I demonstrating to my instructor that I have come to see it? The first is the assignment. The second is performance. They sound similar on the page until you read your own writing carefully, and then they sound very different.

Have I left my friend more curious than they were when the conversation started, or have I left them tired? The good version of this paper leaves the friend wanting to know more. The tedious version leaves the friend glad the conversation is over.

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 references to material from The Deal that show you engaged the text rather than skimmed it. Generic references to "the book" or "what I learned" without concrete content is the failure mode.

Dimension 2: You drew on what you performed in Assignment 1 of this course. The restoration you performed on your chosen scenario in the first assignment is part of the substance this paper should use. You are not required to make it the center. You are required to use it. A paper that shows no evidence of having performed Assignment 1 is a paper that skipped a step.

Dimension 3: Honest disclosure of your own formation. A friend-register conversation about Christianity is not a performance of mastery. It is one person who has been doing some reading telling another person what they found. Honesty about where you started, what you thought before, and what changed for you does not have to be in a labeled section, but it does have to be present. A voice that pretends to have always known what it now knows is a voice your friend will not trust.

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. Scripted delivery is the failure mode on camera. Written-paper voice is the failure mode on the page. Greek-word showcase is the failure mode at any register.

Dimension 5: The voice lands. This is the make-or-break dimension and it is what the assignment is ultimately for. The writing sounds like a person explaining something to another person, not like a student stitching together a summary. Your friend would want to keep listening. Your friend would not feel preached at, lectured at, or converted at. They would feel talked with. If the voice does not land, the other four dimensions do not save the paper.

A student passes when the body of work passes on all five dimensions. Dimension 5 carries particular weight, because it is the dimension that names what this assignment is for. 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 the voice after three attempts has passed, and the number of attempts is not recorded in the evaluation.

A Closing Word

You are about to do something for the third time. The first was in Course 1. The second was in Course 2. That practice paid. The voice you began to develop in those courses is ready to carry more weight now, because the substance you are carrying is heavier. A deed is bigger than a frame. A legal restoration is more structural than a sort. The conversation with your friend this time will need to do more work in the same fifteen minutes.

You will not feel ready. That is still the right feeling. The voice will sharpen across the rest of the diploma and beyond. What matters is that you practice it now, with honest substance, on a friend you can actually picture, in a register that does not sound like you are quoting a textbook.

Begin.