BANGOR – Eckehart Stoeve and Barbara Fink came to the Bangor Theological Seminary in August to learn ecumenism. They wanted to see firsthand how a school of theology functions with students and teachers who practice many different religions.

The husband and wife are theology professors at the University of Duisburg in Germany. In most of Europe and in all of Germany, theology is taught at state-run universities rather than seminaries, as is common in the United States. There, departments are divided by denomination.

“There are Catholic faculty and there are Protestant faculty,” said Stoeve last week in an interview at the Hannibal Hamlin House, where the couple lived while studying at the seminary. “They are two separate departments and there is almost no discussion or communication back and forth.”

Students, according to Stoeve, take classes in Catholicism or Protestantism, but not both. That is changing at the University of Duisburg, a small institution in the northwest corner of the state near the Netherlands border.

Stoeve and Fink returned this week to a merged department, similar to theology departments in American seminaries, colleges and universities. They take with them a spirit of interfaith cooperation and a renewed curiosity about other religions.

The couple leaves behind a detailed course, “The Birth of Reformation Theology,” that can be accessed through Web sites of BTS and the University of Duisburg, and on a CD. They also leave a European perspective on the rise of Protestantism and its influence in Europe, especially Rome.

David Trobisch, the Throckmorton-Hayes Professor of New Testament Language and Literature since 1997, met the couple when they all were students at the University of Heidelberg. Stoeve and Fink turned to Trobisch for advice when they learned their departments would merge.

“I told them that they have to come to Bangor,” said Trobisch last week. “We had a feeling we had something to offer them. There is no place in Germany where they could find a seminary that would function ecumenically.”

While BTS was founded as a Congregational seminary, it now has Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran and United Church of Christ faculty. Stoeve’s students were just as religiously diverse.

“With different students from denominations in my class, I saw that belonging to churches is not an impeachment for Christian existence,” he said. “They study together, discuss together and celebrate worship together. It is wonderful.”

Stoeve’s class also worked with Barbara Fink to put much of the class on CD and the Web. The advantages of the CD, according to Fink, are a shorter download time and the ability to have the course forever. Courses only remain on the Web for about a year at BTS.

The course includes many of Martin Luther’s sermons and his 95 theses. Stoeve also uses religious artwork to show the impact of the Reformation on the Church. Student Julie Armstrong worked to put on disc Michelangelo’s entire Sistine Chapel section by section.

Before the Reformation, according to Stoeve, a painting portraying the Last Judgement showed man called before God surrounded by bishops and high-ranking people. Michelangelo’s rendering, however, showed men and women nude or having no rank before God.

Fink and Stoeve, who married April 1, 1989, as “a joke on our friends,” did not spend all their time working. They traveled throughout New England, attended a conference in Nashville and had Thanksgiving with Trobisch’s mother in Springfield, Mo.

They even subverted the authority of BTS, but in a much smaller way than Luther did. Stoeve and Fink laughed as they took turns telling the story that involved a humanitarian deed.

On a sunny fall day, at the urging of the Rev. Dr. Susan Davies, academic dean at BTS, the couple took a walk along the Kenduskeag Stream. There, they found a black kitten. They brought it back to the Hannibal Hamlin House, a place where pets are strictly forbidden, and looked for the owner, took out an ad in the paper, placed fliers around the entrances to the path along the stream and called the Bangor Humane Society. No one came forward to claim the cat.

The BTS board of trustees also uses the Hamlin House for their meetings. Stoeve spent the most recent trustees’ meeting in his bedroom, holding the cat, making sure it did not escape or meow loudly enough to be heard downstairs. Finally, they drove the cat to Stockholm where Armstrong gave it a new home.

Stoeve and Fink will keep in touch with Trobisch and the rest of the seminary faculty and students via e-mail. Seminary staff are anxious to learn how their enthusiasm of ecumenism works in a German university.