Another full day. 7 papers today and a chapel service and then Choral Vespers (which was actually Evening Prayer like we've been doing for evening prayer offices). I won't give descriptions of all the papers for today, but just give some highlights. I appreciate all you checking in a seeing what's going on. Being here makes me long to be back in Victor. But, alas, a vacation stands in my way, which I am also looking forward to.
Today marked the end of the Exegetical Symposium and the beginning of the Confessions Symposium (hence the name symposia, which is plural for symposium.) Anyhow, we began today with some very interesting papers, one on the 'supposed' problem with the river of blood (the 1st plague of Egypt) found in Ex 7. Apparently some scholars don't think that 'blood' really meant 'blood', but either some sort of algae or a mineral deposit. Since when does God not mean what He says in His Word!? And that was the conclusion of the paper: that we must take God at His Word, when He reveals things to us in Scripture, He really does mean it! And the final Exegetical paper (exegesis literally means 'to guide out'; in theology it means getting the meaning of the text from the text itself as opposed to eisegesis, which means that someone is getting a meaning of the text by putting his/her own thoughts into the text; exegesis is good, eisegesis is bad.) the paper was about the King James Version. We got a brief history of the King James Version and how it has affected other English translations of the Bible. Our ESV, for example, is a descendant of the KJV.
After the Exegetical papers, we were given 5 Confessional papers today dealing with CFW Walther (our synod's first president) and his relationship with theologians and other Lutherans of his day. There are a lot of misconceptions about Walther, and some of the these misconceptions are being challenged. I'll just mention one now and you can ask me about more later, if you care. Perhaps the most significant misconception is that Walther was the 'father of confessional lutheranism' after the time of the reformation. Walther was NOT, it was actually Martin Chemnitz (the second Martin). This is not to discount the priceless contributions he made to lutheranism in America, it's just that, technically speaking, he didn't take the lead role.
Another paper that very much interested me was one given by one of my favorite professors, Dr Naomichi Masaki (yes, he's Japanese...and proud of it...and hard to understand at times). He gave a paper on a little known Lutheran Father named Theodor Kliefoth. In his time (1800s in Germany) Kliefoth was very well respected by all confessional lutherans, including Walther. But he's not very well known to us primarily because most of his writings are still in German. So I need to learn German to start translating.
The papers were great, the conversation was fabulous, but the most important highlight of the day was...I got to play soccer with some the guys on the old seminary team. Good fun, great exercise. I'm outa here.
God's Peace.
+Pastor Huelsman
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