Russ--Thank you for posting your story.  Perhaps it will encourage others to do so, as well.  One goal of LBS is to create a community of people who love the Lord, who love studying his Word, and who love sharing fellowship with each other.  We're like-minded folks on an extraordinary journey.  We certainly don't have all the answers, (and we often don't even know the right  questions!), but as we strive to understand the Word of God we're making progress.

I'm honored that we are making the journey together.  And if you do get to San Diego, we will most certainly share a nice dinner and a very nice bottle of wine!

I signed up very soon after the site went live, and yet until now I haven't said much anything about myself. I'm writing to hopefully become a bit more immersed in the community here. Living in NJ I doubt I'll have the opportunity to spend much more than an occasional weekend with Dr. Bill or the "live" Logos classes. From what I hear online, though, I feel as though i would fit right into these communities. I would love to share dinner and a couple glasses of wine Dr. Creasy and some students! I would have a blast! Maybe someday...

Meanwhile I'm happily married to a wonderful woman in NJ. We have three wonderful boys who keep us entertained, busy, and exhausted. As of March 2010 our boys are two, four, and six. Very fun ages! My wife still has the urge for another child now and then. I keep telling her next time I turn 20 we can try. At 38 (I prefer twenty-eighteen instead of thirty-eight) I just don't have the energy to do the newborn thing again. If all goes well I'll already be working until I'm 438 years old to pay for college (and milk) for these three.

I teach-full time at Somerset Christian College in NJ and part-time at Nyack College in NY. My absolute favorite course to teach is Old Testament Survey. The more I teach, the more i learn, and the more I learn about the Hebrew Bible, the more convinced I become that we can't fully understand the gospel without understanding the Hebrew Bible.

I come from a very conservative/fundamentalist evangelical background. At some point in my journey, though, I discovered that I can read the Bible and understand it rather than merely be spoon-fed by pastors. Once I started reading and studying the Bible, my faith came alive. I also started questioning the teaching of my fundamentalist roots. Just one easy example: I was taught that because I'm a Christian I should not dance or drink. But when I read the Bible, I began to wonder why I'm not allowed to dance when the Psalms seems so packed with passages about dancing. I wondered why it's a sin to enjoy a glass of wine when the Bible encourages it now and then? And the more I read, the more I questioned what I had been taught for the first decade of so of my journey as a Christian.

Over time I discovered that quite a bit of what I had been taught was from somewhere in II Noah chapter 3. Today I still consider myself fairly conservative theologically, but many fundamentalists would consider me a liberal heretic. And theologically liberal Christians would consider me ultra-conservative. And those who are in-between often don't know what to label me. And quite honestly I kind of enjoy it here. ;) I suppose I'm both. Or neither. I think I've reached a place where I take the Bible very seriously but I also enjoy thinking, learning, failing, and growing. At this point Christianity seems a lot bigger than having the correct doctrine. And hopefully in another decade I'll have learned enough to realize how far off-base I am now.

These days I teach the Bible any chance I get. I also teach courses about the shift the Western world is facing from Modern culture to post-Modern culture, ministry in post-Modern culture, creativity, photography, and other odds and ends. I just finished a draft of a book about what Jesus calls abundant life (the working title is "The Art of Shalom") that addresses my deepest passion - seeing the Church come alive. Dr. Bill and a handful of other great teachers have had a tremendous impact on me. (Thank you!)

I hope to get to know many of you here, and hopefully eventually I'll be able to fly out to CA and see some of you in person. And when I take over the world and have enough money, maybe I'll see some of you in Israel as well!

-Russ

After six years in the United States Marine Corps and an undergraduate and Master’s degree in English literature from Arizona State University, I attended UCLA as a doctoral student, 1977-1982.  I wanted to be an English professor, and my field was medieval literature—you know, Chaucer, King Arthur and knights-of-the-round-table stuff.

During my Ph.D. studies I read Northrop Frye’s The Great Code, a brilliant book on the Bible as a work of literature.  In that book, Professor Frye observes that we experience the Bible in western culture, not as a random collection of Jewish and Christian literature—an anthology, if you will—but as a unified literary work that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  He goes on to say that if we want to understand the Bible we must read it from start to finish, Genesis through Revelation, as many times as is necessary to understand the shape of the story. 

That was an epiphany to me, and it started me down a path I had never planned to travel.  I read the Bible over and over, and I also read other works that were cutting-edge literary criticism at the time:  Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative and The Art of Biblical Poetry; Mier Steinberg’s The Poetics of Biblical Narrative;and articles published in an avant-garde literary journal, Semia.  As I was moving into the final stages of my doctoral work, my very good friend and mentor advised me not to become the world’s leading expert in a minor medieval poet:  “Choose a major author or a major work,” he said, “and make that be the focus of your creative energy.”  It was good advice.

So I chose God and the Bible!

Not coincidently, at the same time God unleashed the “hound of heaven.”  I read C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain.  C.S. Lewis spent WWI in the trenches in France, and he was an English literature student at Oxford University; Thomas Merton was an English literature graduate student at Columbia University during the build-up to WWII.  Both had serious questions about God, life and our place in the world, questions they struggled with in their late 20s.  In them I found kindred spirits. 

As I studied the Bible ever more intently I encountered God in a very personal, very intimate way through the risen and glorified Christ.  I shouldn’t have been surprised, for it’s an old story.  But I was surprised, indeed.  And like C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton, I found answers to my questions—and a home—in the family of God.

I’ve taught the Bible to thousands of students for more than 30 years now, as a faculty member at UCLA and through Logos Bible Study.  It’s been a remarkable journey, an extraordinary adventure!  And now, through www.logosbiblestudy.org, a new door has opened, an opportunity to step onto the stage of a global classroom, to strive to live a life “worthy of the calling we have received” and to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

Who would have thought!