Back When I Actually Did Have Hair

Scott Fillmer — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:42:40 +0000

Yes, this is me from back in 1994 with our Basset Hound, Blazer. We just got back from a week of travel from Virginia to North Carolina and all places in between. When we got back we found out that Blazer (who is 16 years old) had about reached his limit with life and after sharing that life with us for the past 16 years he will be very missed in our family. He traveled to every state in the continental U.S. and we have countless memories together. Our house feels empty but right now but God’s plan moves on ahead. More photos are over on Deb’s blog here.

We went up to Virginia to visit the campus of Liberty University where I am currently working on my MDiv (Master of Divinity) at Liberty Theological Seminary. I have the option to take a language track in Greek and Hebrew, which will take about a year or more to finish, but must be completed on campus. So we went up to Lynchburg to see what our living options might be when it comes time to take those classes.

Up to this point every class I have taken has been through their distance learning program and although that is the easiest path to take, it might not be the best path to take. The language track will open up some opportunities for post-graduate work, but more importantly I hope it will benefit whatever ministry I am a part of when I finish my masters.

As a follower of Christ I don’t ever want to get to the point in my walk where I am unwilling to get out of my comfort zone and take bold steps. I have found the older we get, the easier it is to live in a state of routine and forget that we are to live boldly for Christ, and sometimes that means giving up the easy path for a more challenging one. I think sometimes we can stay chained to our safe routines for so long that we don’t even know how to escape if we wanted to, and faith is supposed to be anything but routine.

A lot has changed in my family since 1994 when Deborah took this photo at our house in Homewood, Alabama, Blazer is not with us, neither is my hair, but some how I added a few pounds and our routine will change once again.

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Theology in the Early Church of Saint Augustine

Scott Fillmer — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:59:09 +0000

One of the most common blog posts I have read over the years has been the obligatory apology to the blogging world (or to the blog itself as if it had some human quality to be actually mad at someone) when the writer has for one reason or another neglected the blog. This always seemed odd to me. Who really cares anyway (I highly doubt anyone has been distraught at my infrequent posts as of late), but yet we always seem to feel the need to give an explanation as to where we have been.

That was my way of saying where I have been as of late, and that is reading a monstrous biography on Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown. Some may or may not know I am in seminary work, moving towards an M.Div, and of course this biography was part of that work. This biography was probably one of the longest, most in depth biographies I have ever read. It was not a light read, but it left me with a sense of intrigue for the life of the great theologian of the 4th-5th century.

In a time when the theology of the early church was still being hammered out, it gave me a sense of how little (or perhaps how prized) original thought is to us in the 21st century, and the Internet has proven Ecclesiastes 1:9 is so true. The more information we have at our finger tips, the harder it seems to be able to express an original thought. Within seconds I can pull up Google Books and be able to read the Divjak letters penned by Augustine himself, yet compiling thoughts of my very own that haven’t been already said seems impossible. I have a huge list of reasons for going back to school, not only to follow what I hope to be God’s will for my life, but to be able to dig deep into His world, and learn how to think again. Augustine said that he learned more from writing than he did from reading. Today I fear, with more information available to us than any other time in history, we do little of either.

The amount of information we have at our finger tips has made, at least my knowledge, surface deep on many levels. I have always tried to learn a little about a lot of things, which has taught me that I know a great deal about nothing, which is the difference between reading an article on the Internet and a book the breadth of Brown’s biography. It took me several weeks to get through it, but it was time well spent. The only problem with the book was that it was so well footnoted that it gave me many more books that I would love to read, like Augustine’s classic Confessions or the City of God, if I could only squeeze more time into a day.

Scott Fillmer » mdiv

Back When I Actually Did Have Hair

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Theology in the Early Church of Saint Augustine

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