Education

The Seven Stories Bible Course will be held on Wednesday nights from 7pm to 9pm for the 2017-2018 academic year. The first class is October 4th, 2017. 

The Wood Hath Hope education course summarizes many of the Wood Hath Hope basic beliefs about Jesus and humanity.  It understands God as nonviolent and discovers the bible as the lens by which to grasp this revelation.  We use the bible as our main resource.  Most classes are in-depth bible studies following a traditional lecture format with questions and discussion at the end.  A few classes pull from other resources in order to give a more complete historical or anthropological picture.  

We study the bible using historical, literary, and anthropological tools of critique; the last one drawing from the work of Rene Girard.  These three tools together offer a unique combination, a prism which breaks open the bible's revelation of human violence and God's long patient plan of transformation. 

We believe that the bible is the revelatory work of God and is alive in us as a text that moves and shifts as we grow in new understanding and knowledge.  Our focus in this course is discerning the love of God as it is revealed to humanity throughout the evolving stories of the bible.  We study both the Old and the New Testament and use the Apocryphal books as supplements, useful in historical and anthropological criticism.  We look at the bible as a long narrative or story.  God is revealing His love for humanity in a persistent, little-by-little opening of human eyes to see him as He truly is. The text is the revelation of this process and reading it is the process of revelation. 

To tell a story is to engage in a relationship between the teller and the audience.  We look at the bible narrative split into seven stories which condense the overall drama of revelation.  God is the teller and humanity is the rapt audience.  We see that dynamic at work today and seek to find how our own lives mirror these seven stories.  We believe that part of experiencing God’s love is through deep understanding of what has been revealed in the bible and that understanding is gained through pursuing a discipline of study.  

The course schedule/syllabus can be found here.  We hope you'll join us.  Any questions, please contact Tony Bartlett for more information.  

We are pleased to announce the publication of our seven stories course book!  Available on Amazon.  

Please feel free to join us!  All backgrounds and denominations welcome!

For more information, please contact Tony Bartlett at ​tonywbartlett@gmail.com.