March 20, 2007 – 11:21 am
Greek Language Tools from Lionel Windsor
March 15, 2007 – 11:08 pm
First hour: looking at boundaries in ministry. Here, we considered a helpful Venn diagram: your own boundaries as a carer, the boundaries of your environment, and the boundaries of the person you’re caring for. If more than one of those boundaries are compromised, it’s wise to reconsider your involvement in a particular situation.
To illustrate: the [...]
Greek Chapter six - tenses.
A tough chapter. The verbs suddenly get a lot more complicated.
Apparently it’s unusal to cover this many tenses in the space of three hours, but we now know the perfect, future, imperfect, and aorist tenses.
To prepare for Tuesday’s exam, I’ve started copying all the insights [...]
This week there were three different things in three hours.
First hour, more biblical theology. We’re getting closer and closer to the new Goldsworthy book: I’m looking forward to seeing how biblical theology relates to preaching, and to understanding the bible.
Second hour, a discussion on the ministry call of Isaiah (in Isaiah 6). It kicked [...]
Greek continues: more adjectives and the verb to be
A quick view from the front of the classroom this time. This week we went back over the contents of chapter five - adjectives and the verb to be. We then moved into the more daunting territory of chapter six - [...]
Lunchtime greek
Minor breakthrough this lunchtime with greek, although it’s a little hard to explain. Spent the lunchbreak on some exercises; one was to translate “the one god is in heaven”, which I managed to nut out, without looking up any words.
Not terribly exciting, huh? Well, as it turns out, [...]
February 27, 2007 – 11:20 pm
Ministry formations - before start of class
Sure, there was some interesting content in the biblical theology section of the class: the history of the way that people have understood the bible, and the way it fits together, make for some interesting reading. Having a better understanding of how far we [...]
February 27, 2007 – 10:06 am
Greek chapter 5
Adjectives: so easy it’s barely worth teaching, according to the lecturer. Doesn’t quite match up with my experience, but at least some of the word endings must be starting to stick. It seems I’ll have to spend some more time each day revising.
Indeed, later in the [...]
February 22, 2007 – 8:24 am
The other subject we had this week was ministry formations. There are two parts to it: one on biblical theology - this week, we looked at the history of biblical theology. The second half is more about the individual student; its framing idea is what you do flows out of who you are. This will [...]
February 22, 2007 – 8:22 am
Greek Lecture
This week was the first time that the in-class tests have been collected for feedback from the lecturer. I’m starting to understand how learning the 24 forms of the will be useful, and have new motivation to keep going with the rote learning of vocab and parts of speech.
This [...]
February 17, 2007 – 11:13 pm
Spent an hour or two today revising my Greek vocab lists; wrote out the Greek words, tried to learn the English. Not too hard. Then, reversed it. Still getting caught up on spelling (is that a long e - eta, or a short e - epsilon sound??), so the words that I couldn’t remember or [...]
February 13, 2007 – 12:28 pm
Learning declensions
The lecturer was joking that we should take a photo of the slide - in fact there are many such tables to learn as part of being able to read and write NT greek.
Three hours of Greek, with only a few minutes break in a couple of spots [...]
February 9, 2007 – 10:01 pm
As with the other two days of greek, we started with the lecturer reading a chapter of 2 Peter - it only has three chapters, so we had the whole book read to us (in English) by the end of our intensive "week".
Day three was the first day to begin with a test, to see [...]
February 7, 2007 – 10:07 pm
After a number of hours spent revising verb conjugations and noun declensions (the noun was asked if it would conjugate, but it declined) on my paltry vocab, it seems like most of our initial vocabulary is starting to settle.
I’m getting better at reading and writing greek characters. Today’s real challenge is to notice the word [...]
February 7, 2007 – 11:52 am
Start of greek
The view from my desk…
The first day of Greek (Koine greek) is all about learning the alphabet. Learning how to write the letters is important, and knowing the order of the letters (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, [...]
December 11, 2006 – 1:11 pm
[as] Something that may be useful for some readers who might be writing such papers for College next year: Guidelines for Writing a Research Paper in New Testament Exegesis
November 25, 2006 – 9:09 pm
Two exams down, and I’ve finished college for the year. It’s been a worthwhile experience over all. I don’t think it’s for everyone: the sheer academia of it would be a turn-off to some people: not everyone wants to study at all, let alone study something that has very little chance of increasing your ability [...]
October 28, 2006 (4 weeks ago) – 9:17 am
It’s the read-slabs-of-the-bible part of semester. This week, just to keep up with what was covered in class, I read Ecclesiastes, Job, and Revelation. Yesterday, I read 30 Psalms over the course of two train trips. This week’s Old Testament lecture is on the Psalms, and so that’s the prescribed reading: all 150 Psalms. I [...]
September 14, 2006 – 10:51 am
A few Reading Lists for theological students
September 7, 2006 – 6:08 pm
Generally when reading the bible, you do so in small chunks - maybe a chapter at a time, maybe in even shorter passages. This helps you to focus on the small picture; the details; and see what particular phrases mean. To get a bigger picture, though, it can be helpful to read larger sections. As [...]