A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Damascus - Part Two
A Short Autobiography of Mike Bird
Career in Intelligence Moving Towards College
I’m glad I left 3 RAR when I did, it was time for something different, and the move into military intelligence for the years 1997-99 was good for me. Maybe I would become a secret agent like Jack Ryan of Tom Clancey novels - well, not quite. Given my infantry background, I was sent to 1 Brigade HQ in Townsville, North Queensland. Great to be back in Queensland, but it was hot! The work was great, I loved it, excelled at it, and worked with some great people and for some great people (such as John Blaxland, now Australia’s leading military and security analyst). Finally got my driver’s license too!
I joined Townsville District Baptist Church which had a bunch of young people my own age and a small theological college attached to the church run by a Southern Baptist Pastor named Joey Huggins from Griffin in Georgia. I took classes with Joey on 1 Corinthians and Romans. And I got bit by the Bible college bug. I enjoyed this more than my military intelligence work - which I really enjoyed. I started learning some Greek. And, with the internet now in full bloom, I read everything, I mean everything. Apologetics, theology, Bible, I was into it all! Joey was also from The Founders Fellowship of Reformed Baptists, so I became Reformed Baptist. I had more Calvin than Hobbes. I was truly and righteously reformed. I had so many tulips I could have been a seventeenth-century Dutch theologian. I was so complementarian that John Piper would have called me extreme in my views of male authority. I was the zealous theobro that your Arminian aunt warned you about.
Around the same time, I began thinking about becoming an Army chaplain, even went through the preliminary ordination process with the Queensland Baptist Union. I was thinking about chaplaincy and then maybe one day doing some academic work, perhaps in apologetics, I was a big William Lane Craig fan (still am!).
Around the same time, I met a young seventeen-year-old girl named Naomi Lanyon, who was nannying for an Army family. She was wonderful, sweet, loved Jesus, and not too bad on the eyes either. Shortly after we met she informed me that her boyfriend was now history and she asked if anyone was sitting beside me on the church pew. With a smile I said, “Well, be my guest.” So I invited Naomi to join me on a preaching-date in a town 100 km south of Townsville. Maybe it was the two sermons I delivered, maybe it was the long car drive and running over an echidna, but by days’ end we were a couple.
Naomi was good for me because up until this point I was convinced that women pretty much hated me (which was sad because they smelled nice, had strange curves, and looked soft to touch). My mother hated me (at least periodically in her drunken rage), teenage girls never really warmed to me, and most women I knew only tolerated me to get to one of my friends. So a girl who actually enjoyed spending time with me was a new thing and I thought I could get used to this. No wonder, ten weeks later, we got engaged. I had to marry her because she was thinking about moving to the UK to be a nanny and if she did that she might find out that she could do a lot better than me. So I literally put a ring on it before it (i.e. Naomi) could leave the country.
At this point, I decided I wanted to go to Bible College. So I resigned from the regular Army, moved back to Brisbane, and enrolled at what is now called Malyon College for 1999-2001. The plan was to do a degree, get ordained, return to the Army, and maybe pursue academia later. But after a few semesters I realized that I was more gifted on the academic side than pastoral ministry. Better with words than with people.
Malyon College was great, three solid years of Bible, theology, church history, Greek, and ministry. Several teachers had a big influence on me including Jim Gibson, who showed me that theology was about gospelizing and Jeff Pugh, who showed me the world of the New Testament and ministry studies. It was three of the most wonderful years of my life. At the same time, we attended Grace Bible Church which was a John Macarthur style church with two lead pastors, Dave D’Amour and Craig Lloyd, graduates from The Master’s Seminary. Great guys who supported me, encouraged me, and looked after me. Terrific preachers too. In hindsight, it was very conservative which attracted a few legalistic types, but on the whole, a loving place to grow disciples.
Naomi and I visited America, Canada, and the UK in 2000, catching up with family, and Joey Huggins in his native Georgia. On our trip, in a book shop in Griffin, I came across a certain N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God. I decided I’d read it when I got back to Australia, which I did, and the world was never the same again for me. On p. 14 of JVG Wright pointed out that the way that most people read the Gospels was that as long as Jesus had a sin-less birth and a sin-bearing death, nothing much else really matters. That hit me like a tonne of bricks because for me, Christianity was more Paul-centric than Jesus-centric. Jesus was Paul’s own John the Baptist. Reading JVG plus the lectures from Jeff Pugh at Malyon pushed me away from a systematics approach and more towards reading the New Testament in its social-historical context.
I finished at Malyon with a very healthy GPA. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Mark 9:1 - And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” I argued that the kingdom of God coming with power referred to the crucifixion. Well, anyways, I sent my paper off to Trinity Journal in Nov 2001 and Bob Yarbrough wrote back saying in effect, nobody is gonna be convinced by this, but hey, you argue a fairly good case, so we’ll publish it. It was Yarbrough’s email that made me think that maybe, just maybe, I had the makings of a Christian scholar. So if you don’t like my scholarship, blame Bob Yarbrough, his acceptance of my first ever attempt at a journal article encouraged me to keep going.
Around the same time, I attended some great lectures by D.A. Carson at the Presbyterian College in Sydney that had a big impact on me. Despite my appreciation for Wright on Jesus, I was lukewarm about his Paul approach, at least at first, and Carson’s lectures were a good critique of aspects of the New Perspectives based on the then-forthcoming Justification and Variegated Nomism. But at this point, I have to say, that Wright and Carson were my two biggest theological influences.
By now Naomi and I had had our first child Alexis, a wonderful bundle of delight, blond hair, inquisitiveness, and so much fun. She would soon become INTJ in the Myers-Briggs scheme, much like me! Alexis is something of a mini-Mike in personality.
I began my Honours Degree in 2002 at the University of Queensland in the Religious Studies Department. This was not Bible College, it had more nuts than Brazil and more fruitcakes than a Jewish Christmas party. One of the PhD students in the department wrote a book on - I’m not lying, this is true - Proving Jesus is Gay Using Astrology! I wrote my Honours Thesis on the relationship between Justification and Resurrection in Pauline Theology, which resulted in several journal articles in JETS, Colloquium, and SBET that I would one day revise and publish in The Saving Righteousness of God. But by now, I was getting more into Wright and my YRR theobro sympathies were beginning to wane.
In the next episode, it will be doctoral studies and my first job at Highland Theological College.