Frederiksborg Castle, Hillerød on Christmas Eve at sunset A brilliant Christmas Eve
Danes celebrate Christmas on December 24. This year one of our daughters gathered the families of us and our daughters in their home in Hillerød. When Danes celebrate Christmas this very special evening, many first attend church, then eat far too much, walk around the Chrstmas tree, exchange presents and enjoy a lot of the famous Danish “hygge” – a conviviality, or just plain relaxation and happiness in cosy surroundings.
One of the great moments of that day was to walk with my daughter and see the sun set on the historic Frederiksborg Castle in their neighborhood. We had attended a wonderful service focusing on the expectations in Isaiah 60: Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. We then watched a rare Christmas greeting through the sunset over the historic castle.
It was a truly brilliant day full of memories and experiences! THE SUNRISE FROM ON HIGH HAS VISITED US!
These years, I am try to create a senior career as The Online Professor.
For one, I have a calling to engage further into my global mission. My main mission is to focus on Bible Online Learner distributed on TheWell.
It all started as a visiting professor in Madagascar in 2010 and continued in 2013, 2014 and 2015. We created the predecessor of the Bible Online Learner in pilot projects and made it work at the graduate school and local seminaries. The great Dean at SALT during that time saw the vision and shared it with a Danish mission. Unfortunately, returning to Madagascar will probably remain a fable dream of a great gone-by past.
I have invested most of my resources into projects in Addis Abeba and learned a lot from this, and my dream is still to find a home for my global mission there. In 2019 I was a visiting professor and had great success with Biblical Hebrew at the Mecane Yesus Seminary. My goal was to train a teacher to use Bible Online Learner, but Covid 19 disrupted a continuation of this project.
I returned in 2022 to teach a course for Wycliffe Ethiopia and teach small groups of students in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 I had two training courses at the Evangelical Theological College. Directors of the main institutions in Addis welcome my work, but I am presently waiting for local leadership to make the next moves.
In the meantime I am now scaling up in Kenya. I have received a very cordial invitation to start up in Nairobi at the Pan Africa Christian University. They have organized it professionally very well. I will offer two courses in January and March. My goal is to train-the-trainers for this university and for local Bible translators.
I am still an affiliated researcher at the VU University. I had a great week in Paris in September discussing the great EU project Resilience and sharing my ideas on training trainers, and I continue do research, innovation and development in this area.
I October I participated in Bible Translation Conference 2025 and had a paper introducing my new PERSUADE model and presented TheWell.
Another good news is that Reinier de Blois, director of the Nida Institute, is now serving as my advisor for future operations. When we gave 15 years of development away in 2023, we entrusted it to his leadership. He has found funding for the first years and a younger generation will take Bible Online Learner into the future.
I don’t have a job anymore, so there is no salary and no benefits for research and conferences any more. Fortunately, however, thanks to a special donation, I have for 2024-2026 some project money to serve as an editor for the Free Danish Bible.
We are using the clause relations of the ETCBC databasse of the Hebrew Bible, and I am learning a lot from this approach. Currently we are exploring various challenges for the years to come, but I sincerely hope that this project will continue one way or the other.
I have also made some experiments with AI-assisted translation.
My involvement in the project hopefully continues. Over the next years I will focus on the texts that are included in the liturgical readings of the Danish Lutheran Church – the people’s church (“Folkekirken”).
As part of my work on the editing of the liturgical readings, I started to offer an almost weekly online course teaching about the upcoming Sunday’s Old Testament readings. This will be a two or three project. I do it for free. Nobody wants to pay for my competence anymore, so why continue, really?
Participants who appreciate what I offer can support my mission in Ethiopia with a tax-deductible donation. But this is not the reason – not many support this important task and the donations will not bring me far on the way to Ethiopia.
So why, really? It’s probably a matter of a candid confession. I’ve been a workaholic all my life – just ask my children and the wife. No rehab is easy.
When a journalist asked me why I do it, I emphasized that “it’s good to find a calling for one’s senior life.” I am passionate about continuing to work as a translator, interpreter, and conversational partner.
The next morning I woke up and knew the answer is quite different. So I wrote to the journalist and instead explained: “It is the joy of digging deep into the biblical text! I really want to discover new depths in the text, understand its structure, and find its very special message.
I feel like the merchant searching for the pearl and betting the shop to own the field of his tressure hunting, to borrow an image Jesus so beautifully uses in Matt. 13:45. I experience this contendment every week when I work on the text for the liturgical readings and use the Bible Online Learner in order to improve on the translation in Free Danish Bible.
The Pope has had his jubilee year in 2025. Next year, I will have been teaching for 50 years, so it will be my jubilee year.
I started as a substitute, teaching Greek in the spring of 1976, when I was 22 years old and was back home from a one-year study program in Jerusalem the previous summer. The Hebrew University had changed my life and carved my career. I was taught by giants like Yigal Yadin and Amnon Ben Tor and I meet many great scholars.
In the autumn of 1976, I was then hired at the Danish Bible Institute (DBI) as a part-time teacher of Hebrew, introduction to the Old Testament, and interpretation of texts. I was allowed to be at DBI 1976-1991 and 2002-2023, and at Lund University and MF 1991-2002, at Aalborg University 2001-2015, and from 2015 at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.
In addition to my unpaid activities as The Online Professor I am also an assistant pastor in Emdrup.
In my jubilee year, there will be an event in Copenhagen that I am very much looking forward to. In collaboration with my local pastor, Joannis Fonsdal, we will organize a day course in Emdrup Church on Saturday, August 29, 2026. We will focus on the biblical readings that I now teach online. On the Sunday, I will preach in a service, and we may invite an exciting guest of honor for a lecture.
I don not expect any international celebrations and have no academic projects or invitations coming up.