Len,

Reading these words made me smile at a subtle irony.

In speaking of Wayne McCown, you have also described something of yourself.

You taught us that the early church did not choose between Peter and Paul. It made room for both—the fisherman and the scholar, the witness and the interpreter, the one who touched the wounds and the one who furnished language for what the wounds meant. Yet some rare souls seem to carry traces of both.

The longer I have known you, the more I have come to see that you belong to neither camp exclusively.

For while your scholarship is vast, it has never felt detached from life. Your learning has always borne the scent of Galilean waters. You have never been merely Paul. There is Peter in you as well—a witness beneath the scholar, a disciple beneath the professor, a man who speaks not only from books but from having walked with Christ.

Perhaps that is why so many have been drawn to your work. We encounter not simply a brilliant mind, but a whole life.  Your language speaks of the academy, but it has never become your credential. Like the apostles you so often describe, your deepest authority derives from elsewhere.

You have shown generations of readers, students, pastors, and pilgrims that scholarship can kneel and that knowing the text does not withhold the ability to stand astonished before its Author. Few are granted the gift of a teacher. Fewer encounter a mentor. Rarer still is the person who, like the ox at Oxford, can discern the shallow crossing—guiding scholars toward the shoreline and fishermen toward the library, until both find themselves standing in deeper waters.

Thank you for being, for so many of us, both Peter and Paul.