So many things I just don't get about this place.
It's not the subject matter, I can follow it OK, but the way they organize the process has been confusing me.
Greek is the only thing that makes sense. The class meets Mon, Wed, Fri in the morning. There is a homework assignment every night. There is a quiz every other class. In the 10-week term there is a midterm at the end of the 6th week and a comprehensive final during finals week. There are lots of points available for knowing lots of different words and concepts.
Spiritual Formation clearly makes no sense, but it's a pass/fail class and attendance is really all that matters.
Gospels and History are just silly. There are a couple papers that are written to promote discussions and show that you scanned one reading. There is a TON of reading. Then there are tiny little objective tests. Not once a week, not once a month, but only once or twice per term. Anything in the hundreds of pages of complicated readings is fair game for these short little exams. Could be scripture recognition, could be matching, could be multiple choice, could be true/false, could be short answer, could even be knowing one of dozens of specific dates. I estimate there would be between 2000 and 5000 questions that could be covered in one of these objective tests and over the whole course, there will only be 25-100 that actually appear on a test. That's not simply unfair, it's unreasonable. This kind of structure shows not only a misunderstanding of statistics but an outright disrespect toward it. If that much material is going to be covered, there should be a reasonable chance that a concept that an individual understands particularly well be included. On the history exam my studying emphasized the ancient text readings that seemed most likely to be covered by more difficult short answer questions and because of that I did poorly on the matching section. That's not 5 points of my grade. It's 5% of my final grade. I studied for hours, I'm certain I would have gotten a 95% of a longer test, but this 25 question nonsense didn't happen to hit on the concepts I was most familiar with. Very aggravating.
That diatribe was something of a personal vent, but I'm going to let it stand as part of the blog about seminary because I'm afraid this style of inappropriate testing will become a theme.
That same day in history (sounds like a birthday card) we looked at a ninth century document called The Heliand. It's a harmonization of the four gospels into a Germanic folk story used to evangelize the Saxons. In it Christ is portrayed as a warrior-king, chieftain of mankind, (Rome is "Fort Rome" and the crucifix is the "gallows tree," they call it Galileeland, disciples are "warrior-companions"…). After about 5 people spoke up and said how cool they thought this was and how they were going to preach from it and teach Sunday school, I raised my hand to say that I wasn't comfortable with the portrayal of Christ as the warrior because it made it more difficult to then truly convince the populace that Christ is something unique and sacred. Now the people of the class didn't much care for my position (I'd also made a comment based off an aside that Old English first appeared in the 9th century saying that Bede translated parts of the Bible into that language and he died in 735 (this a fact I learned in the course of studying for the unreasonable test, which unless he wasn’t paying attention, the professor didn’t know either) and was rebuffed by some including the professor who said he wrote in Latin) and they attacked my point saying that it wasn't inappropriate for Christ to be a warrior because of terms like "Lord of Hosts" (hosts being armies) and told me I was not taking into account the context of the Saxons as a warlike people. Those kinds of comments are insulting to me; when I hear them I think the person saying them must just love their own voice. What I said was that the blending of the gospel message into culture and context had the negative effect of making it into something less than sacred. My point was it's not terrible to have scripture and a Gospel that sounds different to us. It's positive on many many levels and perhaps if the Saxons were approached with a non-harmonized edition of all four gospels and allowed to read and interpret them for their culture they would open their eyes and become less warlike.
We're studying the Jesus Seminar and other Quests to understand the historical Jesus in the Gospel's class and to me the point about the Heliand speaks directly to what many of these scholars have done with their interpretations of scripture. They made mistakes (in a much different way by starting from crazy assumptions and building upon hypotheses that were nothing near factual or even largely agreed upon) and what they end up with is a Jesus that looks like one of them. The phenomenon is described as looking down the well of history and finding Christ, never knowing that you're studying your own reflection. In the course of attempting to find out how to best imitate Christ they begin to make Christ imitate them. How is that not what was done for the Saxons? How can everything be said be so positive. The discussion sections almost never turn out to be critical of anything unless it's obvious that the thing is presented to us as flawed. The same is true in Spiritual Formation: everyone has a positive spin on everything they say. There is dishonesty in that and an obvious unwillingness to confront a thing that may not fully be seen until it is examined from the contraposition. It's uncomfortable the way my comments are declared mistaken when really I'm only seeking a different perspective.
In my comments to spiritual formation section when asked to speak to the progress of the class to date (on October 13) I mentioned Celtic "thin places" from one of Mark's Sunday School curricula and said I felt PTS to date had been a very dense place where the rigor of academic pursuit can make it very difficult to look toward the heavens and feel near to something supernatural. I was told to find a “thin place” in my heart because I was blocking God out. That’s so far off base it’s almost absurd. Sure its very positive, it means I can get a thin place wherever I want but that means any place is a thin place, which defeats the purpose. I was making the comment to explore the difference that it would have if PTS felt to me like a high mountain top over a lush green valley in a place where hearing the voice of the creator is effortless, versus what it really is, an urban cacophony (from Greek, “evil noise” – my education’s worth every penny) with so many different pressures and deadlines that a person’s schedule is what defines him or her. But no one hears that, to many I’m saying, “I just feel stressed, and I wonder if God is even here.” Why is this? I know I’m not merely negative, yet it seems like I am the only one who is at all unfavorable to consensus opinions (on minor issues).
Could say more about SF. She did say that she credits the Spirit for growth because it’s painful. She also defined ‘apophatic’ theology as ‘starting from nothing.’ What apophatic really is can be a bit mysterious, in fact it would be outside the spirit of the term to tell you what it is. Look it up. And my favorite from this lecture is her comment about the third (of six) level of faith. It’s called faith by assent and is often characterized by “a reliance on the authority of the Bible.” It’s funny because previous to saying that she told us how sad it is that 70% of faithful people including many pastors are stuck at level three. The implication being that a stronger faith will make you doubt the authority of scripture.
One final note, I’ve got my courses for term three selected. Starting in December you can look forward to reading more posts about Church History, more about Greek, other stuff from the New Testament, and for my very first ever elective: Ethics. Specifically Ethics and Technology, focusing on issues of privacy and how modern technology affects the congregation. I’m pretty excited about that class. And it’s at night, another first.
Thanks for checking in.
<><
It's not the subject matter, I can follow it OK, but the way they organize the process has been confusing me.
Greek is the only thing that makes sense. The class meets Mon, Wed, Fri in the morning. There is a homework assignment every night. There is a quiz every other class. In the 10-week term there is a midterm at the end of the 6th week and a comprehensive final during finals week. There are lots of points available for knowing lots of different words and concepts.
Spiritual Formation clearly makes no sense, but it's a pass/fail class and attendance is really all that matters.
Gospels and History are just silly. There are a couple papers that are written to promote discussions and show that you scanned one reading. There is a TON of reading. Then there are tiny little objective tests. Not once a week, not once a month, but only once or twice per term. Anything in the hundreds of pages of complicated readings is fair game for these short little exams. Could be scripture recognition, could be matching, could be multiple choice, could be true/false, could be short answer, could even be knowing one of dozens of specific dates. I estimate there would be between 2000 and 5000 questions that could be covered in one of these objective tests and over the whole course, there will only be 25-100 that actually appear on a test. That's not simply unfair, it's unreasonable. This kind of structure shows not only a misunderstanding of statistics but an outright disrespect toward it. If that much material is going to be covered, there should be a reasonable chance that a concept that an individual understands particularly well be included. On the history exam my studying emphasized the ancient text readings that seemed most likely to be covered by more difficult short answer questions and because of that I did poorly on the matching section. That's not 5 points of my grade. It's 5% of my final grade. I studied for hours, I'm certain I would have gotten a 95% of a longer test, but this 25 question nonsense didn't happen to hit on the concepts I was most familiar with. Very aggravating.
That diatribe was something of a personal vent, but I'm going to let it stand as part of the blog about seminary because I'm afraid this style of inappropriate testing will become a theme.
That same day in history (sounds like a birthday card) we looked at a ninth century document called The Heliand. It's a harmonization of the four gospels into a Germanic folk story used to evangelize the Saxons. In it Christ is portrayed as a warrior-king, chieftain of mankind, (Rome is "Fort Rome" and the crucifix is the "gallows tree," they call it Galileeland, disciples are "warrior-companions"…). After about 5 people spoke up and said how cool they thought this was and how they were going to preach from it and teach Sunday school, I raised my hand to say that I wasn't comfortable with the portrayal of Christ as the warrior because it made it more difficult to then truly convince the populace that Christ is something unique and sacred. Now the people of the class didn't much care for my position (I'd also made a comment based off an aside that Old English first appeared in the 9th century saying that Bede translated parts of the Bible into that language and he died in 735 (this a fact I learned in the course of studying for the unreasonable test, which unless he wasn’t paying attention, the professor didn’t know either) and was rebuffed by some including the professor who said he wrote in Latin) and they attacked my point saying that it wasn't inappropriate for Christ to be a warrior because of terms like "Lord of Hosts" (hosts being armies) and told me I was not taking into account the context of the Saxons as a warlike people. Those kinds of comments are insulting to me; when I hear them I think the person saying them must just love their own voice. What I said was that the blending of the gospel message into culture and context had the negative effect of making it into something less than sacred. My point was it's not terrible to have scripture and a Gospel that sounds different to us. It's positive on many many levels and perhaps if the Saxons were approached with a non-harmonized edition of all four gospels and allowed to read and interpret them for their culture they would open their eyes and become less warlike.
We're studying the Jesus Seminar and other Quests to understand the historical Jesus in the Gospel's class and to me the point about the Heliand speaks directly to what many of these scholars have done with their interpretations of scripture. They made mistakes (in a much different way by starting from crazy assumptions and building upon hypotheses that were nothing near factual or even largely agreed upon) and what they end up with is a Jesus that looks like one of them. The phenomenon is described as looking down the well of history and finding Christ, never knowing that you're studying your own reflection. In the course of attempting to find out how to best imitate Christ they begin to make Christ imitate them. How is that not what was done for the Saxons? How can everything be said be so positive. The discussion sections almost never turn out to be critical of anything unless it's obvious that the thing is presented to us as flawed. The same is true in Spiritual Formation: everyone has a positive spin on everything they say. There is dishonesty in that and an obvious unwillingness to confront a thing that may not fully be seen until it is examined from the contraposition. It's uncomfortable the way my comments are declared mistaken when really I'm only seeking a different perspective.
In my comments to spiritual formation section when asked to speak to the progress of the class to date (on October 13) I mentioned Celtic "thin places" from one of Mark's Sunday School curricula and said I felt PTS to date had been a very dense place where the rigor of academic pursuit can make it very difficult to look toward the heavens and feel near to something supernatural. I was told to find a “thin place” in my heart because I was blocking God out. That’s so far off base it’s almost absurd. Sure its very positive, it means I can get a thin place wherever I want but that means any place is a thin place, which defeats the purpose. I was making the comment to explore the difference that it would have if PTS felt to me like a high mountain top over a lush green valley in a place where hearing the voice of the creator is effortless, versus what it really is, an urban cacophony (from Greek, “evil noise” – my education’s worth every penny) with so many different pressures and deadlines that a person’s schedule is what defines him or her. But no one hears that, to many I’m saying, “I just feel stressed, and I wonder if God is even here.” Why is this? I know I’m not merely negative, yet it seems like I am the only one who is at all unfavorable to consensus opinions (on minor issues).
Could say more about SF. She did say that she credits the Spirit for growth because it’s painful. She also defined ‘apophatic’ theology as ‘starting from nothing.’ What apophatic really is can be a bit mysterious, in fact it would be outside the spirit of the term to tell you what it is. Look it up. And my favorite from this lecture is her comment about the third (of six) level of faith. It’s called faith by assent and is often characterized by “a reliance on the authority of the Bible.” It’s funny because previous to saying that she told us how sad it is that 70% of faithful people including many pastors are stuck at level three. The implication being that a stronger faith will make you doubt the authority of scripture.
One final note, I’ve got my courses for term three selected. Starting in December you can look forward to reading more posts about Church History, more about Greek, other stuff from the New Testament, and for my very first ever elective: Ethics. Specifically Ethics and Technology, focusing on issues of privacy and how modern technology affects the congregation. I’m pretty excited about that class. And it’s at night, another first.
Thanks for checking in.
<><
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