RE246 The Gospel Record

After the genial style of Dr Ian Gillman this subject in second semester 1992 was a return to the formidable Professor Michael Lattke.  I had done two external subjects of his but this was the first time I met the man.

Again, I must have been leaving work early on Wednesdays to attend lectures at the University of Queensland. My recollection was that I was one of the few attendees not training or already in ministry. Lattke took no nonsense from Christians who were used to their own interpretation of scripture. If they suggested anything other than what was there he would say “I do not see that in the text” and that was it.

This was my last religion subject at UQ and meant I completed a major in the rules of the day. It was also the last course that I used my strange two disk (no hard drive) computer with a dot matrix printer and Webster’s word processor.

I was rather out of my depth here and his assessment methods exposed that rather well. I doubt he trusted undergraduates to work and so we had a mid semester exam, which I did poorly in, an essay and a viva.

Now I had done vivas in my medical course, which were pretty terrifying, but Lattke’s amazing office with floor to ceiling books and his no nonsense questioning were something else entirely. He called it an academic conversation. It is a great technique to find out what people have absorbed in a course and I suspect far too labour intensive for use these days. He told me I was a solid 5 (out of 7) student and that is what he gave me overall.