Intro Lecture Excerpt-Old Testament Course

Hello. His pastor's wonderful remembrance about Pat says to send things we'd like to share to the above address. Mary Miller Brueggemann asked me to post the paragraph found below. Pat gave me a set of his lecture notes for the introductory class when I began my teaching career in 1990. The paragraph was from his initial lecture for OT01; I have quoted it in my own initial lecture for the introductory HB class for thirty years.

“All their strangeness and distance cannot conceal the way in which the scriptures do in fact deal with and in this world in which I live, where nations are at war, where tribalism leads to destruction of neighbors, where human beings experience the deepest pain and cry for help not knowing whether their cry will ever be heard, where the life and death of families and nations are the context in which the providence of God is wrought out, and where goodness and blessing are—nonetheless—meant to be the goal of all of life. The Old Testament is rooted deeply in this world, in the terrors and possibilities of human life under God, in the conflicts of peoples and nations. And if it dares to say, as it does over and over again, that God is with us and God will help us, it does so clearly aware of all there is in human life that calls that into question.” --Patrick D. Miller, Jr.