I attended a small liberal arts college in southwestern Ohio. It was affiliated with a conservative Baptist denomination (it is now affiliated with the most conservative wing of the Southern Baptist Convention). I first decided to attend this school because they had offered me a very generous financial aid package that included several scholarships and grants. I had decided to attend for the first year. If I didn’t like it, I would transfer to Penn State. On the first day of classes I wandered into my freshman writing class. It was held late in the afternoon in a wing of the library building whose windows looked out over a grassy area. As I entered the classroom I noticed a man sitting in the back of the room staring out the window with his eyes on the clear blue sky. I took a seat slightly to the other side of the room from the man staring out the window. Within a minute or two the remainder of the other students had entered the room.
At the instant the class was to begin, the man in the back of the room tilted his head slightly back and said – “Who is God?” All of us stared at the man…and then each other. Wasn’t this an English class…a writing class? We squirmed in our seats…what was this guy trying to do here? A few people cleared their throats and offered stock, church-type, abstract answers – “God is the creator of everything….God is our father…God is the almighty one”…and on and on. Then the man, whom we now assumed was the professor, spun around in his seat and said, “But where in the bible does God describe himself?” (Yes, – this was a conservative evangelical college in September, 1980…so the masculine pronoun had to be used to refer to God). Again, we students stared at one another. No one had an answer. Then the professor asked, “Well, when does God refer to himself? Doesn’t he describe himself there?” In chorus many of us chimed in about God talking to Moses at the burning bush. “How does he refer to himself – exactly?” asked the professor. We quoted the King James Version of that interaction between God and Moses, “I AM hath sent me…”
The professor began to smile slightly, “Does that make any sense?” he asked. “I am – present tense. Hath sent – past tense.” Then he went into a longer soliloquy about God and time (something about which this eighteen year-old boy had never thought). The teacher finished with a broad smile on his face, and looking directly at us delivered this stark statement – “God is not subject to the rules of grammar; however, you are. And we will be concentrating on those rules quite a lot in this class.” That professor’s name was Ron Grosh. Because of him I decided to pursue a double major that included English. He agreed to become my academic advisor, and would eventually become a dear friend.
Todd Rivetti 