Primary Authors & Sources
THEO-201 builds its reading list from required primary and classical sources in poetic writings exegesis and ethical reflections. The authors below are read as teachers across the centuries, not as entries in a bibliography. Robert Alexander Watson contributes The Book of Job, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg contributes Commentary on the Psalms, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
Taken together, these readings form a coherent conversation across centuries — students encounter real arguments, not flattened summaries. Johann Peter Lange contributes Proverbs, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study. Ralph Wardlaw contributes Lectures on the Book of Ecclesiastes, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study. Alexander Moody Stuart contributes The Song of Songs, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
What You Will Study
Students exegete Poetic and Wisdom Writings including Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs with attention to Hebrew poetry, wisdom genre, lament, praise, and erotic metaphor as theological communication. The course employs Hebrew skills and Reformed hermeneutics distinguishing didactic wisdom from Christological psalmody and typological reading governed by New Testament warrant. Readings include psalter selections organized by genre alongside wisdom literature addressing suffering, virtue, vanity, and marital love. Students analyze how Jesus and apostles used Psalms and Proverbs in their own teaching and fulfillment preaching. Weekly exegesis treats psalms for worship planning and wisdom texts for counseling application in pastoral ministry contexts.
Course Objectives
Objectives include identifying Hebrew parallelisms and wisdom forms, exegeting representative psalms and wisdom passages with literary and theological sensitivity, explaining Reformed use of Psalms in public worship including imprecatory texts, and applying wisdom literature to counseling and discipleship without proverbial legalism. Students will preach Christ from Psalms following apostolic example. The course cultivates appreciation for emotional honesty and intellectual humility in biblical faith. Students will compare Job's theodicy with New Testament revelation of suffering's meaning in Christ. Assessments include exegesis papers, psalm-prayer compositions, and worship service plans incorporating assigned psalter texts.
Ministry & Life Application
Poetic and wisdom exegesis equips pastors to lead worship and counsel souls with Scripture's own language for grief, joy, doubt, and desire. House churches in the Florida Keys can recover psalm singing and wisdom catechesis often neglected in contemporary evangelicalism. Pastoral ministry gains resources for visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, and instructing youth in practical godliness from Proverbs. This course enriches spiritual formation and preaching with biblical affections anchored in inspired poetry. Congregations pray and live more biblically when leaders teach them to inhabit the Psalms and wisdom books as Christian Scripture.