BT 205 Hebrew Poetry and Wisdom

What is this course about?
The beauty and utter necessity of wisdom and poetry have been lost in our culture. There are probably countless reasons for this, but perhaps one of the greatest is our lazy, technical, and disinterested approach to reading. In other words, we read from a distance, rather than from within, impersonally rather than personally, fast rather than slow, and in search of facts rather than life, meaning, and understanding. Our generation does not know how to get lost in a story, to walk in its world and find our life, vision and values transformed. Too many warranties, manuals, news stories, and e-mails. This tendency to depersonalize the text in search of mere information or shallow personal interest dangerously eclipses Bible reading as an encounter with the personal God who reveals himself there.

This is important because the writings of wisdom and poetry are, more than anything else, testimonies of people’s encounters with God. In the ancient world, wisdom and poetry provided the means to join together two critical aspects of human existence: life before God and life in the world. Is not all of what we know about human life located at this intersection between our life-world and our God? The joy, struggles, mystery, and beauty of living at this intersection energizes and provides the framework for the ancient world of wisdom and poetry as it should for ours. It is at this intersection that we meet these ancient writers and walk and breathe in their world. Without a desire to share their encounter with the same God in our own world, we will fail to honor these texts and tap into their powerful messages. In sum, wisdom and poetry reach deep into the creative and imaginative depths of human nature to express new and powerful images and transform our lives.
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