My Classes Here at LThH

I've been putting off this post for a while, but it's about time that I told about my classes this year. Unfortunately, for various reasons, I still haven't been to all of them yet, but I'll tell you about the ones I've attended so far.

So here's a post with a lot of text and almost no pictures. Es tut mir leid...

The class structure here is such that almost all classes are 2 hours per week, and occur in a 2 hour block, once a week. 4 credit classes meet twice a week, as do 3 credit classes, but only for 1 hour on one of the days.

Also, all but two of my classes are "lecture" classes, which means that there's no homework or reading, unless one is particularly interested in that topic. Then, the professor does provide other materials that one could read or look into. The other types of classes are "exercise/practice" and "seminar." In the former, we work through a given text- translation if it's from another language, and deeper understanding if it's in German- and discuss it as a class, with the professor's guidance. The readings are done in-class, and we usually don't read it beforehand. On the other hand, while the seminar classes are similar, there's a lot more reading beforehand. We discuss the readings, usually much longer (~40 pages), and talk with the prof about them. Both also have student presentations throughout, which I may or may not participate in (it's not required for exchange students, but I might try some next semester when my German is better).

So my week begins with Practical Theology in Overview by Prof. Dr. Barnbrock. It's a bit early (7:30am), but is somewhat understandable, with help from my iPad's dictionary. We spent the last two class periods on the history of practical theology, and today we started the overview of some of the different divisions- homiletics, catechetics, and liturgics. Looking at the syllabus, we're going to continue with the divisions before going through various theologians who have been influential in various ways. I can't say I recognize any of them, though. This is a class for those beginning seminary.

I have two classes with Prof. Dr. da Silva: Church History 3 (from the Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia) and History of the SELK. He is probably the easiest to understand, because he's actually from Brazil. Both classes therefore have been easier to follow, not only in language, but also in substance. In Church History 3, we studied the societal and political influences on the start of the Reformation; the times and thoughts were changing and were ripe for Martin Luther and the Reformers. Just last week we discussed Martin Luther's early life, through his posting of the 95 Theses. Tomorrow we discuss the conflict with Rome and the Emperor. In History of the SELK, we've been discussing the Prussian Union, and I think today we'll get to the Saxon emigration. So it'll be interesting to hear about the history of those who stayed in Germany, albeit separated from the State (Lutheran/Reformed) Church. After today, it looks like we'll spend each class studying a different synod which eventually joined the SELK instead of studying history chronologically. Considering the number of independent church bodies and the long process towards a unified church body, this is probably the best way to study the History of the SELK. It certainly doesn't have a clear leader (like Martin Stephan had been) or founder (like C.F.W. Walther) in the LCMS. Nonetheless, it looks to be an informative class.

With the OT professor, Prof. Dr. Behrens, I'm taking Hermeneutik OT/NT. This is the hardest class to understand, because Behrens talks extremely fast, and his German is garbled at times. "At times" here means "all the time." I have a hard time picking out what he's saying, and the only words I pick out are the ones I know. What compounds this is that it's my only seminar class, so I have to read (and try to understand) 40 pages of German before the class, which is never fully completed by class-time. So I'm pretty much lost during those two hours, but hopefully it gets better. I'm not too worried.

I'm taking the Book of Romans with the NT professor (and director of the exchange program), Dr. Salzmann. I'm enjoying this class so far, because we're interacting with the Greek text (which I understand!), as well as the German translation (which is significantly easier to understand than conversational German). Salzmann's pronunciation is fairly clear, and I can follow his reasoning and presentation for the most part. So far we've gotten through Romans 1:17, and we'll continue today for an hour on Romans 1:18 and following. This is my 3 credit class and is a lecture class, so we don't have a lot of discussion over the Greek text with Dr. Salzmann. There's room for questions, but not our own translations. Not that I'm really interested in translating Greek into German.

Finally, I have two classes (Apology of the Augsburg Confession and Dogmatics 1) with Pastor Wenz, who is the pastor of the nearby St. Johannes-Gemeinde in Oberursel. For the first two weeks of classes, he was in America, first in Atlanta, then in St. Louis, for the International Conference on Conference Leadership. Last week, after he came back, we had the first meeting of the Apology of the AC class. It's an "exercise/practice" class, and we go through the Apology in detail, studying primarily the Latin text. It's been good to get back into a bit of Latin.

This past Friday was "Dies Academicus," in which some professors and pastors presented papers on the theme, "Biblical Hermeneutics." It was informative and good, but it also prevented Dogmatics 1 from meeting, so we'll meet for the first time this Friday morning.

More on Dies Academicus and this exciting weekend later. (And hopefully a post about my travels around Frankfurt.)


That's about all. Feel free to ask questions in the comments sections or by email. I like hearing from people.