My Address

By the way, if anyone ever wants to send me any mail over here (not that I would presume to expect mail from anyone and not that I would ask for people to send me anything...) my address here is:


Peter Eckardt
150 Altkönigstraße
61440 Oberursel
Germany

"Spiritus sanctus non est scepticus."

- from De Servo Arbitrio (On the Bondage of the Will)

Little did I know that I was going to be reading Latin while here in Oberursel...  My classes are in full swing now, and it turns out that the readings for many of them include some Latin texts, an extra challenge I hadn't really expected.  For instance, in the class which I think I will enjoy the most this semester, Biblical Hermeneutics in Lutheran Orthodoxy, we discussed Luther's famous writing, On the Bondage of the Will, which Luther wrote in Latin, not German.  I did have one year of Latin at Augustana 5 or 6 years ago, but now I wish I had taken more, or had kept it up.  At the suggestion of a classmate, I made a last-minute decision to take a Latin 3 which is being offered this semester, one day a week for two hours.  The three of us in the class and our teacher, Frau Dr. Adam (a very nice lady who's been teaching Latin for 25 years) will be working our way through St. Augustine's Confessiones and reviewing grammar and vocabulary as we go.  I think this will be a relatively painless and even enjoyable way of improving my Latin.

Allow me to share with the rest of the classes that I'm taking this semester.  So far, I'm very pleased with the selections I made.  I believe I have a challenging but rewarding semester ahead of me.

The Augsburg Confession

The Formula of Concord 

     These are the names of two of the eleven documents of the Lutheran Confessions, assembled in the Book of Concord, which all pastors of the Missouri Synod (and virtually all of our sister churches) must subscribe to upon their ordination.  It is subscription to these documents that makes the Missouri Synod a confessional Lutheran church.  Apart from the three ecumenical creeds (Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian) the remaining texts of the Book of Concord were written between 1529 (Small and Large Catechisms) and 1577 (the Formula of Concord) as a way of clearly stating the evangelical Lutheran faith, as derived from the Scriptures alone (sola scriptura!), over against the errors of the Roman Catholic Church and other churches which had arisen from the Reformation and invented new errors.

The Gospel of Luke

Systematics/Dogmatics III (Pneumatology and Ecclesiology)

     This class is already proving to be very interesting, and I am doubly excited because it should fulfill my requirement for Dog III at CTS in Fort Wayne which I still need.

The Form of the Sermon

Latin III

Biblical Hermeneutics in Lutheran Orthodoxy

Anyone who knows me very well knows that I could go on for hours about everything that's going in my life and describe all of my classes and activities in full detail.  But I'm also well aware that such detail doesn't necessarily translate into the most engaging reading.  With that, I'm going to move on and post some more pictures from this past week.  Most of them are from a nearby town (Bod Homburg) that I explored last Saturday with the accompaniment of a few other students (1 German couple, 1 German/South African, and 1 Canadian).

This first church honestly wasn't that pretty, but it did have some nice features, such as the stations of the cross carved in stone around the church.

 And I liked the huge crucifix.

 Next church: much more interesting.

 But not necessarily attractive.  I don't know.  I sort of like the mosaic, but that cross made out of light bulbs needs to go.

 Jeremy, I don't think you're supposed to go up there...

 I don't like this cross either.  The corpus is androgynous and ugly.

 I got some nice pics from the outside, though.

 Then we went to this castle, former summer home of the German Kaiser.

 This awesome-looking tree is a cedar of Lebanon... like in the Bible!

 And then all of a sudden we were in California...?

 I love the look of these houses.  We could use some of this aesthetic back home in Kewanee...

 I made this dinner all by myself.  Lecker!

 More soccer battle wounds.  But this injury came seconds before I scored the game-winning goal!

I got hit in the face again, too.  :)

How often do you see your clock read 0:00?  That's army time for ya.

But it was lots of fun./!

This one's mostly a picture post.  That is, a post of pretty places... and plants which I purposefully took pictures of today for the primary purpose of posting on this plog.  I mean blog.  Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

The lovely entrance to the campus

  A nice big field.  I played volleyball yesterday - can't really remember the last time that happened... but it was lots of fun.  In the background is Dorm 1 (of 2).  My room is the upper left one; you can see the window behind the leaves.

I'm going to go on a little excursus here: I wish there were a mini-exclamation point, or some sort of punctuation that shows a little excitement and emphatic expression, but not too much.  For instance, in the above caption, I couldn't decide whether to place an exclamation point after "it was lots of fun" or simply a period.  I went back and forth 3 or 4 times before leaving it with just the period.  I feared that the exclamation point might have given the impression that I'm slap-happy about playing volleyball and that you might imagine me with this sort of expression on my face:

But that's not the case.   

There's a problem with using a period though, too.  Isn't it a bit oxymoronic to write that something was "lots of fun" and then to punctuate that with a boring, matter-of-fact period?  I can just imagine someone responding sarcastically, "Oh sure - sounds like you had a blast!"  

See my dilemma?  In the end, I decided the period to be the lesser of two evils.

Just so you know, this sort of thing actually goes through my mind quite often regarding punctuation.

Top left is my room.

A nice place to sit and have coffee and enjoy the sunshine (while it lasts).  Sehr gemütlich.

An interesting thing about Germans is that they like their drinking water spritzig, that is, fizzy.  If you ask for water in a restaurant, they might ask "Mit oder ohne Gas," which is "With or without gas (referring to the carbonation)?"  Weird, right?  Not a big fan.

Aufenthaltsraum = Common Room
I've already watched a couple movies in here with some fellow students, and this is where I've been coming lately to use the Wi-Fi internet since it's not reachable in my room and the ethernet connection isn't set up yet.  The Hausmeister (landlord)  is on vacation, so I have to wait until next week.

Library all the way on the left and the (as in the only one) lecture hall in the middle with the big windows.

Administration Building

I don't quite know what to say about this, except that I've heard it's gone unused for a while now.  And that I hope it stays that way...

Die Mensa = The Cafeteria

Lovely view from the cafeteria.  It makes me think of the dining hall in Jurassic Park...

New students learning Hebrew
Haha (in a Nelson-from-the-Simpsons voice)!

I like this tree.  As I was helping Frau da Silva rake leaves the other day (aren't you proud of me for voluntarily doing yard work, Mom?) she told me that it's a "Platane."  Well, I just looked it up and, sure enough, it's from the genus Platanus.  In English, it's a sycamore tree or plane tree.  Now I know what Zacchaeus climbed up.

This is how I looked after playing 2 hours of Fußball(soccer) this evening and getting the ball kicked right in the face from about 4 feet.  

I was EXHAUSTED.  And my face still stings.

More battle wounds.

It's worse than it looks.  I can just tell it's going to develop into a big fat blister...

But it was lots of fun!

Ich bin da!

This year is already showing signs of going by fast.  I’ve been here since Thursday morning, but it doesn’t seem like more than a day has gone by.

For anyone who might be worried about how I’m doing so far (Mom), let me say that I’ve only experienced wonderful things so far.  Well I guess that’s not entirely true; I did have a bottle of dish soap open up and spill all over my first set of German groceries… and I did have a bottle of beer drop, shatter, and spill all over my floor.  But that’s all water under the bridge now, or soapy German beer, as it were.  Bad joke.

Now for the good things:

~ My friends Sebastian and Mathias (the 2 guys that I already knew before coming here) picked me up at the airport and have helped me immensely in the last couple of days to get settled.  For instance, Mathias spent all of Friday morning in downtown Oberursel with Jeremy, a very nice student from St. Catharine’s Seminary in Canada, and me taking us to the bank to open student accounts, to an insurance office to get health insurance, and to the city hall to register as foreigner students.

~ I’ve enjoyed meeting a dozen or more students here already.  They definitely seem like a great group of guys.  On Thursday night, a group of people got together in the dorm’s common room to watch the movie Seven (Sieben in German), an awesome thriller with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.  I had seen it a few times before in English, so it was a fun experience to watch it here with the German voice-overs.

~ I had a Döner today.  It was five years since my last one, so the €3.90 (a bit pricey for a Döner) was easily worth it today.  Rather than trying to describe in detail what a Döner is, I’ll simply post this picture of one and heartily invite you all to visit Germany to partake of one.  I suppose it’s somewhat similar to a gyro, except way, way better.

~ I really like speaking German.  Other than with Jeremy and the St. Louis student Matthew and his wife Holly, whose German skills are still in their beginning phases, I’ve been enjoying speaking German all the time.  I’m a bit rusty, but it’s coming back to me quickly, and I’m looking forward to learning German as well as I possibly can.  Being a perfectionist has its advantages, especially when it comes to learning a foreign language.  I want to get it right! 

~ The campus here is beautiful.  It reminds me a bit of being in the woods of Wisconsin.  Check out the view from my room!

~ I got to see the SELK church today, which is right next to the seminary campus.  It’s a nice little building with a pleasant pipe organ that I got to play on today.  Next week they’re actually starting a €15,000 project to renovate the organ!  So that’s exciting.  I’m looking forward to going to church there tomorrow (there’s communion every Sunday - yay!)  It should be rewarding to participate in the German liturgy and hymnody and to hear Pastor Wenz (whom I met today) preach.

~ I like my room.  Here are some pics:  

Tune in next time for more.  You stay classy, America!

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"He cannot have God for his Father who does not have the Church for his Mother." - Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258)