Photo above: Professor David Preus teaches a class. (Jana Inglehart). Photos below by Johanna Heidorn

Our Dominican seminary’s fourth academic year is well underway with fall classes. Pandemic restrictions are still in place, so classes are being taught via Zoom. With 11 residential students and 24 online students representing 12 countries, the enrollment for pastoral formation is holding steady.

The seminary’s deaconess program serves some 140 women in five countries, with coursework aimed at training women to share the Gospel as they do works of mercy in their churches and local communities.

To launch the school year, an intensive course on the sanctity of life was presented by Rev. Dr. David Preus. Based on Psalm 8:4, the online offering was entitled “What is Man that You are Mindful of Him?” Deaconess students, deaconesses, and pastors from five countries across the region attended the three-day seminar.

During orientation week for the seminarians, Dr. Preus presented the course again, though slightly modified to provide a deeper dive into the theology.

The major topics of the course were:

• The dignity of man
• Vocation of man
• Man as citizen
• God as man (for us men and for our salvation)

Biblical truths explored:

• Everything God makes is good and He continues to make His creation good today
• We inherited and earned the wages of sin, which is sickness and death
• Jesus became man for us, placed Himself under the law, was found to be in our condition, in our misery and He won the victory, restored us to that image in which God made us
• God calls us to our vocations
• God rules the world through the exalted humanity of His Son our Lord Jesus Christ.
• God completes man by creating the woman.
• The unique role of women in the rule over creation and how that is preserved in marriage
• Man created, man fallen, man redeemed, and we look forward to man being glorified

Supporting Bible verses for this study:

• Genesis 1-5
• Psalm 8
• Psalm 22
• Phil 2:5-10

During this pandemic crisis, our neighbor is often looked at as someone who might be a threat to our health and life, and someone to avoid. In this course, students explored how to look past that initial image we have of our neighbor and see our neighbor as someone made in God’s image, someone for whom Christ died.

Dr. Preus is a church planting pastor and seminary professor at Concordia the Reformer Seminary in the Dominican Republic. He is accompanied on the mission field by his wife, Jenny, and their eight children.