Hebrew Scripture Theology

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

-Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1732

Just a little post-script to yesterday’s all-too-brief discussion.

Week 9! Already! And with it, we come to the one of the key themes which distinguishes Jewish and Christian understandings of the Hebrew Bible.

I hope the slightly tweaked structure to class time made an improvement on Monday.

With a title like that, I'm tempted to continue with ... “brace yourself!”

Just a reminder -- Monday, 10th of March is rapidly approaching! I have heard from a few of you, checking out potential essay titles/topics. If you would like to make sure you're heading in an appropriate direction with your topic, do feel free to email me your thoughts/idea and I can give you a quick bit of feedback.

Based on the chats I've had so far, the main thing to flag up is that the essay must treat some aspect of the connection between “theology” and “exegesis”. I'm not so concerned about the “balance” between these two as in seeing you working at this interface at some level.

So, no “purely” exegetical papers without showing the import for theological reflection; no “purely” theological treatises without an anchor in some text(s) from the HB/OT!

DjR

On WebCT you will find (for both DV0160 and P02215 versions of the course) a folder linked for Week 6. The only item in the folder is an MP3 of a sermon you might find valuable to hear in preparation for our Week 6 question, “What does it mean to be human?” More information on it is available on WebCT.

Although the phrase “dialectical unity” came to run like a scarlet thread through our discussion (thanks to Robbie and Samuel Terrien!), the conversation was more multi-faceted than that observation might suggest.

Last week we saw that some of the traditional divine attributes were distinguished on the basis of whether they belonged to reason, or to the realm of the person of faith. In many ways, the theology of “divine presence” belongs decidedly in the latter category.

As promised, Kate Baxter’s seminar presentation is now available as a PDF from the HST webpage on WebCT.

Reflecting on Monday’s class, it seemed to me that the two presentations were complementary.