Jugglers are very skilled at their craft and can keep many of us mesmerized by how repetition and rhythm combine to achieve something extraordinary.
I must confess that I am not a good juggler.
Keeping in motion the balls of ‘husband’, ‘father’, ‘student’, ‘ordinand’, ‘writer’, and ‘friend’ have all been a bit much for me lately and as a result I haven’t been giving those of you who read my words any updates in a while. My sincere apologies!
I want to do a general “life updates” post at some point talking about the wife and kids, playing snow football here on campus, and other events, but in my goal of trying to keep this easy to update I will contain this post to an introduction of the classes I’m currently taking. Let’s do that now.
SVOTS Spring 2021 Classes
NT102 - Introduction to the New Testament (Dr. John Barnet). Dr. Barnet is a disciple of Fr. Paul Tarazi but also incorporates other points of view on the creation and reception of the NT writings. There is a focus on the Pauline Corpus, but my favorite part of the class so far is going through several papers on different interpretive and heuristic lenses through which we can achieve exegesis and not eisegesis. So far, my favorite papers read in the class have been Fr. Georges Florovsky’s “The Lost Scriptural Mind”, Fr. John Breck’s “Orthodox Principles of Biblical Interpretation” (St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 40:1-2 (1996) 77-93), and David Steinmetz’s “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis”(Trinity Journal, 24 no 1 Spr 2003, p 77-103) which introduces the medieval concept of the fourfold sense of Scripture (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical). Barnet teaches that "the heuristic key for understanding scripture is the Gospel of the Crucified Messiah” which is a line that comes from Fr. John Behr, I think.
LS210 - Intermediate Liturgical Skills (Dr. Harrison Russin, Dr. Vitaly Permiakov). We’re working on memorizing the Obikhod sticharon tones and troparia tones as well as going through the structure of Matins and how to use the typikon, octoechos, menaion, etc. to construct the texts each of the services. Later today, I will have to put together all the variable texts for Saturday evening’s All-Night Vigil and submit it as an assignment. The first year of LS classes is mostly about music and the structure of services and the second year is more about preparing to serve as clergy. This artificial distinction is designed so that M.A. and M.Div students share the first year on chanting, singing, and liturgical and the M.Div students carry on in year two for the “nuts of bolts” of how to serve as a deacon or priest liturgically.
PA204 - Introduction to Patristics (Fr. Bogdan Bucur). Given Fr. Bogdan’s background under Abp. Alexander Golitzen, this class is a wealth of Second Temple apocalyptic writings and a scattering of Gnostic, Middle-Platonic, and Neo-Platonic literature to show the milieu out of which the fathers emerged. For example, two weeks ago when discussing Irenaeus, we first read the gnostic text ‘The Secret Book of John’, then read the sections of ‘Against Heresies’ that refuted it, and then all of ‘On the Apostlic Preaching’. I love this approach to the fathers! Now we’re in the midst of reading Origen and Tertullian before moving on to 1st Nicea.
PA342 - The Recurrent Monarchian Challenge in Early Christianity (Fr. Bogdan Bucur) this upper level Patristics class focuses on Marcianism, Monarchianism, and other heresies that came about as the early church developed from a binitarian sect of Second Temple Judaism to the Trinitarian Incarnational Church of the Conciliar age. This too has a lot of apocalytpic second temple texts like ‘The Apocalypse of Abraham’, ‘The Ascension of Isaiah’ and we’re now reading a lot of Philo, bits and pieces of Plato (esp. Timaeus), and modern scholars like Behr, Daniel Boyarin, and Andrei Orlov. There are only three of us in this class—a brilliant man in his late 20s with a Master’s of Arts in Religion from Yale who taught theology at a private school for a few years and is a big devotee of Plotinus, a guy my age who just got out of the Air Force and isn’t intellectual but has one the biggest hearts and desire to serve Christ that I’ve ever seen, and myself. It’s a fascinating class not only from the subject material, but also for the 1-on-1 time with Fr. Bogdan and being in the middle between these two exemplars of different types of men who come to seminary.
I hope this post finds all of you well! Feel free to comment if you have any questions or would like to see me write about something in particular.