Assignment 2 of 3

Course 4, Assignment 2 of 3

Telling Your Friend What the Committees Did Not Do

What You Are About To Do

This is the middle assignment in Course 4. You have already done one thing. In the first assignment you picked one of three worked scenarios, performed the separation move on a popular skeptical claim about how the Bible came to be, and wrote about what became visible when authorial work was disaggregated from custodial work and the diagnostic marks of committee authoring were applied to a specific historical claim. 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 Courses 1, 2, and 3, you have done a version of this assignment three times 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. Course 3 Assignment 2 asked you to explain the restoration of agency. Course 4 Assignment 2 asks you to explain the separation of authorial work from custodial work in friend-register. The form is the same. The substance is different. You can draw on what you learned about voice in the prior three 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 unusually likely to come up in real friend conversations.

What You Are Becoming

A believer who can talk about how the Bible came to be without sounding like an apologist, an apologist's opponent, or a college history teacher trying to impress the room.

This is harder than it sounds because the topic of how the Bible was put together is one of the most common entry points to a real conversation about Christianity for an outsider. People who would never ask you anything about the gospel will sometimes ask you about Constantine, or Nicaea, or which books got left out, or whether translations have garbled the text. They will ask because the topic feels safe to them. It is historical, not personal. They can ask without committing to anything. It also feels safe because they assume, often correctly, that the Christian on the other side of the conversation will not actually know much about the history. They are not setting a trap. They are exercising a curiosity that has been fed for years by movies, novels, podcasts, and casual conversations, and they are testing the topic on someone who, in their experience, is unlikely to be able to answer.

What this course gives you is the ability to actually answer. Not in a defensive way. Not in a debate-club way. In the way a person who has read some careful history can describe to a friend what actually happened, in plain language, with specific names and dates, and with respect for the friend's intelligence and time.

That 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 canon, the creeds, the translations, the preservation of the text, and the diagnostic marks that distinguish authoring from custodial work. 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. Most believers go their whole life without ever being asked these questions in a way they can answer. You are training into something rare.

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. Words like homoousios and Masoretic and cheirographon may have shown up in your reading, and may even, in small doses, land in a friend conversation if you explain them in passing. But most technical vocabulary needs translating. Masoretic in friend voice is "the Jewish scribes who copied the Hebrew Bible across the medieval period and were almost obsessively careful about it." Homoousios is "a Greek word meaning of the same substance, which the bishops at Nicaea picked because it was specific enough to exclude the teaching they were trying to exclude." Septuagint is "the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament that the early Church mostly used." If you keep a technical term, give your friend the term by explaining what it carries. Do not drop it as proof that you have done the reading. Drop it only when the term is doing work no plain 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, who's that, answer them right there. Do not keep going and hope they figure it out from context.

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, especially on this topic.

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

The first failure mode is turning your paper into a Da Vinci Code rebuttal. The temptation is real. Brown's novel is a vivid target. The popular skeptical version of Bible history that floats around in the culture is wrong in specific ways that you can now name. It will be tempting, when you sit down to explain what you learned to your friend, to start by knocking down the version you assume your friend has absorbed. You know how everyone thinks Constantine made the Bible at Nicaea? Let me tell you why that's wrong.

This will not land. Your friend, even if they have absorbed pieces of the popular version, did not bring up The Da Vinci Code. They asked what you are studying. If you open by attacking a position they did not state, you have positioned yourself, in the first thirty seconds, as the kind of person who is looking for an argument. They will pull back. Even if they were curious before, they will be defensive now. The conversation will become about whether you are right rather than about what you have been learning. You will have changed the register from friend to debate, and the debate version of this conversation almost never goes well, regardless of how much you know.

The antidote is to lead with what you found, not with what you are correcting. I have been reading about how the Bible was actually put together. The way the committees worked is more interesting than I thought. Then describe it. If your friend has absorbed the popular skeptical version, they will ask you, somewhere in the conversation, about Constantine or Nicaea or the lost gospels. When they do, you can address it. By then you have established yourself as someone who is reporting what they learned, not as someone who is fishing for a fight, and the response will land better.

The second failure mode is collapsing the four kinds of custodial work into one undifferentiated thing. The book is precise about this. There were four distinct kinds of committee work performed on the Bible across Christian history. Recognition, articulation, translation, preservation. Each kind has its own story. Each kind happened in different periods. Each kind was performed by different people for different purposes. A friend who hears you say "well, the committees just kind of organized things" will get bored almost immediately, because you have not given them anything specific to picture.

The antidote is to pick one of the four and tell that one well. You do not need to cover all four in fifteen minutes. The reader who finished Assignment 1 picked one scenario — canon, creeds, or translations — and worked on it. That same scenario probably gives you the most natural starting point for friend-register, because you have already thought through the specific names and dates and have something to say about a specific piece of the history. Pick that piece. Tell it. Mention the others briefly in passing if it is natural to do so. Let your friend ask about the others if they are curious. Do not try to deliver the whole course in one conversation.

A subsidiary failure mode worth flagging: becoming a date-and-name machine. The book has a lot of names and dates. Athanasius's 367 letter. The Council of Hippo in 393. The Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. Tyndale executed in 1536. The Septuagint produced between 250 and 100 BC. Some specifics will land in friend voice. A blizzard of them will not. Pick the two or three that make your point most clearly and let the rest sit in your notes. Your friend is not taking notes for an exam. They are listening to a person who has been reading something that interested them.

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 how the Bible came to be? They have probably encountered the popular skeptical version somewhere, even if they cannot quote it. They have probably heard, somewhere, that there were "books left out of the Bible." They may have seen The Da Vinci Code or one of its many imitators. They may have absorbed the general impression that the Bible is the work of councils and committees and that this fact is somehow damaging to its claims. They probably have not been taught the actual history. They are not ignorant and they are not hostile. They are ordinarily curious, and the topic of how the Bible was actually put together is exactly the kind of thing they are curious about, because the topic feels historical to them rather than personal.

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 that close-read move, and the sorting thing, and then the legal vocabulary stuff? I have been doing something different 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 separation showed you. You may tell them about a chapter of the book that caught your attention. You may tell them about the diagnostic marks of committee authoring as a general analytical tool, with one specific application. Any of these can work. What will not work is a recitation of the four kinds of custodial work, because a recitation 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 categories separated), 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, but didn't they leave some books out — what about the Gospel of Thomas? Doesn't the fact that there are different translations mean we can't really know what it says? If the council didn't invent Christ's divinity, why did they need to meet at all? 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 leading with what I found, or am I leading with what I am correcting? If I am opening by attacking a position my friend has not stated, I have already lost the register. Lead with what I learned.

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

If my friend stops me at any point in this paper and says wait, who is that, can I answer them in the next sentence, or have I dropped a name without context? If I cannot give the context, I should not have dropped the name. If I can give it, I should give it before my friend has to ask.

Am I picking one piece of the four kinds of custodial work and telling that one well, or am I trying to cover everything? Cover one piece well. Mention the others in passing if natural. Let my friend ask about the others if they want.

Am I grounding this in concrete specifics — the specific scenario I worked on, a specific historical figure, a specific event — or have I drifted into abstract talk about the Bible and committees and history? If I have drifted, bring it back down. My friend cannot picture abstractions. They can picture Tyndale being burned at the stake in 1536. They can picture Athanasius writing an Easter letter in 367 listing the books his churches were already reading.

Am I telling my friend what I did, or am I trying to win an argument they have not started? Winning an argument they have not started 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 Committee 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 separation 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 how the Bible came to be 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. Date-and-name overload 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, and not like an apologist working through a script. Your friend would want to keep listening. Your friend would not feel preached at, lectured at, or argued with. 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 fourth time. The first was in Course 1. The second was in Course 2. The third was in Course 3. That practice paid. The voice you have been developing across the prior courses is ready to carry the topic of this course, which is one of the topics most likely to come up in a real friend conversation about Christianity. The history of the canon, the creeds, and the translations is the kind of material that becomes useful in casual settings in a way that the more theological material from the earlier courses does not always become useful in casual settings. People ask about it. You will be asked about it. Now you can answer.

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 and does not sound like you are looking for an argument.

Begin.