Finals are finished, semester's over!  Assuming I pass everything (no reason I shouldn't baring some unknown heresy) I'll be a third of the way through my program, which means at this rate I'll be here another 2 years. Hopefully making some progress with online classes through my summers will drop that to a year and a half. Not too shabby!

The first week of my second semester ends with that overwhelming feeling you get when you receive all your syllabi at once and realize how much you actually have to do. I have four classes this semester which all seem pretty cool. I have Hebrews-Revelation with a professor who talks faster than John Moschitta. I have Genesis-Joshua with my professor from Archaeology last semester which I really enjoyed. Then I have an Applied Apologetics course which is somewhat of an extension of the Apologetics course I took over our winter term. And lastly I have a class called Advanced Biblical Exegesis which is basically a fancy way of saying how the Bible works together as a whole. Overall it should be good material and the papers I have to write seem interesting enough. In Gen-Josh I have to compare and contrast the blessings Jacob gave to his 12 sons with the blessings Moses gave to the 12 tribes of Israel before they entered the promised land. In Applied Apologetics I'll write a critical book review of a book written by someone with an anti-Christian worldview. And I haven't picked my Heb-Rev topic yet, but since I get to choose I'll make sure it's interesting. Then come May 18th and I'll be over a third of the way through my program!

Only 3 more finals till Christmas break...and boy am I ready to be done. I finished all my semester work before Thanksgiving so I've had nothing but studying for these finals for the past week and a half. One was a take home, open book essay which rang in at about 8 pages long. I'll take Gospels and Systematic Theology tomorrow which will give me all weekend to study up for Into to Theological Studies which is three 1,000 word essays, ugh. But then I'm off for a whole month during which I'll get a major head start on next semesters reading. Ah the joys of seminary life...

Do you suppose the law of increase ("To everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away.") contradicts the law of reversal ("the last will be first, and the first last.")? Why or why not?

Did you ever wonder why Amos 1:6-8 mentions four cities of the Philistine Pentapolis (Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Ekron) but not the fifth, the large and important city of Gath? Ok, it probably never crossed your mind, you just read right over it, even if you were reading Amos, which you probably weren't in the first place. Well, I'm going to tell you anyway! If you flip a few pages over to Amos 6:2, you see the prophet use Gath as an example of what's going to happen to Jerusalem and Samaria because they're such idolaters. Back in 2 Kings 12:17, we read that Hazael, king of Aram (modern Syria), went up and destroyed Gath. Archaeologists have discovered a massive, man-made seige trench around the remains of Gath and a destruction layer in the city that dates to that same time period. Also N. Israel/Syrian style pottery was found at the bottom of the trench. Seems like good evidence that Hazael built this trench when he beseiged and destroyed Gath. He planned to go and do the same to Jerusalem, but king Joash paid him off out of the temple treasury. When Amos was preaching against the sins of Israel and Judah, the destruction of a big city like Gath would have been a vivid example of God's wrath poured out against those who reject him. I love how archaeology makes seemingly insignificant passages like this one come alive!

Tuesdays are by far my longest day. I have three hours of Gospels in the morning with an hour break in the middle for chapel. Reformed chapels are interesting, very liturgical with a hymn, a responsive reading from the Psalms, a 'Pastoral Prayer', then one of the professors preaches. Nothing groundbreaking, but not bad. Then I spend the afternoon doing homework. Today was gorgeous autumn weather so I took some books out to the park. I tried a new park today and about 3:30 a ton of people came for a jr high cross country meet, so much for my peace and quiet. Then it's back to school in the evening for my three hour Systematic Theology class. Fortunately they invented laptops. If I was gonna try to keep up taking notes for these lectures with a pen and notebook, I'd be toast. But this is great! I can set up my laptop. They give us Word docs of all the notes ahead of time. It's a beautiful thing. How did I ever survive college without this stuff? Anyway, glad my longest day is over. The rest of the week is a breeze from here.

The advantage for you, my reader, of following along while I'm in seminary is that you get to experience much of my learning without having to read all the books or write all the papers. This morning was my first Gospels class, where the professor brought out some excellent points about understanding the original meaning of a text. Now I'm sure you're no stranger to the idea of seeking out what the author (say Luke) was trying to communicate to the original readers (Theophilus). But in the case of the gospels, you're involved with narrative stories. Therefore you have two original meanings. First, you have the original meaning to those who were historically involved in the story. But then you also have the meaning to the original readers. For example, in Luke 9:23, Jesus tells the disciples, "If anyone would come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me." At this point in history Jesus had not died yet (obviously) so to his disciples the cross would be considered a criminal's torturous death. However, by the time Luke had written this passage, the original readers (and all those after them) already knew of Jesus' death on the cross, so his reference to 'taking up our cross' would have been a glaring reference to the cross of Christ and added a whole new level of meaning. So the original meaning is two-fold, first to the historical audience, and second to the reading audience, but both are still the original meaning. So in our interpretation of narrative in the Bible, it can help add to our understanding of the text if we take into account what the original readers knew, but the historical audience didn't. Pretty basic, but pretty cool.

That's basically just a long title for Intro to Reformed Theology. In class today we just went over the course requirements and definted theology and different ways to go about studying it. This seems like it will be one of those foundational, but not so meaty courses. I have to choose one of the five Solas or one of the five points of Calvinism to write a paper on. Of all my courses this is the least intimidating, which is good considering it's most people's first seminary course ever.

I spent this morning at New Student Orientation meeting all the other seminary newbies, professors, staff members, and other random people who's names I've already forgotten. Amidst all the info they dumped on us, I was most keenly atuned to the libarian who reminded us that these aren't undergraduate courses. I shouldn't be doing the minimum about of research that my paper requires. I'm excited...and terrified by this prospect. That's part of why I came back to school, to be challenged to think deeply about questions and issues. But I rest in the confidence that whatever they'll ask us to do, they'll also prepare us to do.