Even though I’ve had my mind on other things recently, just so some of you out there don’t get worried, I wanted to put a little theology on my blog. I want to get to writing a lot more about stuff we talk about in classes, etc., but I just haven’t found my “rhythm” here at seminary yet. But, no worries, I still go to classes, write papers, read books (….kind of) and engage with the material from the courses. Here is a quick post on some stuff from classes…
Old Testament:We’re still working through a lot of the documentary hypothesis stuff, it seems to be at the center of all our discussions. That’s okay, but I wish we’d take a look at other methods other than a historical critical method, but we are at Princeton. I had to write a paper looking at the two accounts of the crossing of the Red/(Reed) Sea in Exodus. While doing a little research for the paper, I came across Brueggemann’s commentary on Exodus, where he pretty much dismisses source criticism and favors other models of criticism – I wish we’d get into that. We’ll see…
Hebrew: Hebrew is still Hebrew. We had our first exam last week, and I did surprisingly well on it, but I’m lost again. It is fun to be able to at least verbally read through a passage pretty much. We are still learning vocab pretty slowly, so I have no idea what most words mean, but slowly, we’re getting there.
Dionysian Forgery: This is a class I have a hard time enjoying fully. It’s pretty interesting stuff, but I’m still not 100% into it. But, I just need to be into it enough to write a 20-pg paper for it. Dionysius is just a really interesting character. He’s mentioned in Acts 17 as someone Paul converted, yet it’s been shown to be almost for certain that these documents actually come from 500 or so AD. Yet Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius) writes as though he was a contemporary of Paul and that he was around at the time of Jesus. Pretty interesting that he was able to fool people for so long. Lots of interesting themes in his writings, including Platonic/neo-Platonic thought, apophatic theology, and other themes that I really don’t understand. I’m meeting with Dr. Rorem (who wrote the commentary on Dionysian literature) next week to discuss the fact that I just don’t get some of this stuff.
Paradigms/Progress in Theology: The whole premise of the course is looking at varying and different theologies and philosophies of theology comparatively. So we’re reading some interesting books and having interesting classroom discussions on the authority of Scripture (i.e. what role does it really play in our faith, in our theology, in our life?) and we got into a bit of process theology last week. Although it was quickly dismissed by many in my precept (our small groups).
Communicating the Gospel to Youth: This class is pretty great. A very good youth ministry class taught by Langford, who is a Ph.D student – a quality guy. He’s definitely a tough-grader, as I have to rewrite my “What is the gospel” paper; I think I went off and did too much apophatic theology (what the gospel is not…). Some very good stuff in the course.
Speech: Brower, who teaches my section of Speech, has been doing it for close to 50 years. He’s amazing. A very personable guy, incredibly gifted at the art of speaking and communication. We’ve been reciting poetry and speaking in front of the class. It’s pretty fun, just a 1 credit course.