Are you wanting to deepen your approach to preaching or teaching the Psalms in your ministry? Or maybe you rare preach on the psalms at all because you don’t feel equipped enough? Perhaps you are leading a community through some particularly difficult time – how might the psalms be a resource in your pastoral care and preaching? This unit will support your practice of ministry by deepening your understanding of the biblical text and their pastoral, visionary power.
The ancient prayers and hymns found in the Psalter have been, to a large extent, domesticated. The psalms are about thanksgiving joy, faith and God, but, especially with regard to the laments, they are also about protest, revenge, anger and a cry for justice – emanating from experiences of violence, suffering, injustice and abandonment. How can we use the Psalter to bring home the necessity and urgency of justice? How can we employ the Psalms to respond to the socioeconomic, political and ecological impulses all around us? How can we transcribe the real problems of the ‘I’ in crisis into social, material, mental or physical categories – dealing with the ultimate conditions of human existence in our day and age?
This unit will introduce the Book of Psalms, and study the formation and development of the Psalter. It will give attention to the various forms of the Psalms, their setting and their functions within the historical experience of Israel. But it will focus largely on the language, interpretation and theology of select psalms to identify their liberating potential and significance for individuals, the church and the communities in which we find ourselves.
Course code: BA3020P / BA9020P; Online – BA3029P, BA9029P
Lecturer: Monica Melanchthon
For UCA ministers Continuing Education Grants are available to assist with costs: https://ctm.uca.edu.au/resources/funding-scholarships/. If several colleagues are interested in enrolling together, support will be given if they wish to meet in an ongoing way after the unit in a Peer Learning Group to consider how learnings from the unit impact theological reflection and ministry practice in their contexts.
Please contact the Continuing Education Coordinator for further information: fran.barber@victas.uca.org.au
To enrol, please contact the Pilgrim Theological College registrar, Erlinda Loverseed: registrar@pilgrim.edu.au, or ph 9340 8892
