גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב

The Pastoral Implications of Wise and Foolish Speech in the Book of Proverbs

2012-01-25T08:17:00.006-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

My colleague, Dr. Eric Ortlund, will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "The Pastoral Implications of Wise and Foolish Speech in the Book of Proverbs."

Please join us on Friday, January 27 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

More on the influence of E.P. Sanders

2012-01-22T20:56:00.000-06:00

As a footnote to my earlier post on the influence of E.P. Sanders, I observe that Sanders and Jacob Neusner are the only living scholars of early Judaism to merit a biographical entry in the Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism. (If memory serves, it was disagreement between Sanders and Neusner that prompted Sanders' Jewish Law from the Jesus to the Mishnah.)

The full list of biographical entries in the Eerdmans Dictionary is as follows:

Bickerman, Elias
Bousset, Wilhelm
Charles, Robert Henry
Goodenough, Erwin Ramsdell
Hengel, Martin
Moore, George Foote
Neusner, Jacob
Sanders, Ed Parish
Schürer, Emil
Smith, Morton
Tcherikover, Victor (Avigdor)
Wolfson, Harry Austryn

Who else should have been included?

Semester Class Schedule

2012-01-08T22:48:00.000-06:00

Syllabi are online here, if anyone is interested. Cue chaos:

Middle Eastern Irony

2012-01-07T07:44:00.001-06:00

It took me a little while to appreciate the irony of this letter that came in the mail from Bethlehem Bible College late last year:

The stamp looks innocuous enough, displaying a typical Israeli dish of St. Peter's Fish:

But I'm guessing that no one from the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank would have selected this stamp if they read the Hebrew:

שנהיה לראש ולא לזנב

"...that we will be the head and not the tail"

. . . and recognized the allusion to Deuteronomy 28:13:

וּנְתָנְךָ יהוה לְרֹאשׁ וְלֹא לְזָנָב

"The LORD will make you the head and not the tail"

The emblem of Bethlehem Bible College in the middle of the envelope points to a double irony. (Was it intentional?):

For Christians who affirm that the star which rose in the east pointed to the Star "that rises from Jacob" (Num 24:17), the "lion of the tribe of Judah," Deuteronomy 28:13 will find its ultimate fulfilment in Bethlehem Bible College's Messiah.

My youngest Hebrew student

2012-01-05T21:15:00.002-06:00

I started teaching Shoshana the Hebrew alphabet to vary her bed-time routine. Then I gave her Hebrew alphabet magnets for Christmas to help her learn the shapes. The first time she recited them all on her own she announced,

"I'm learning! Pretty soon I'll be able to go to SBL!"

This evening I showed her the first few videos from the Biblical Language Center's excellent Living Biblical Hebrew MP4. As it turns out, she's been making pretty good progress on the numbers too:

Click here for a sample of the first Living Biblical Hebrew picture lesson. Simple enough "that even a child can follow," as they say.

The influence of E.P. Sanders

2012-01-04T11:21:00.004-06:00

Mark Goodacre has described E. P. Sanders as "the greatest living New Testament Scholar" (here and here). Joshua Schwartz says something similar in his review of a festschrift in Sander's honour:

Most of us in academia hope to come up with a few new and original ideas that will impact upon scholars and scholarship. If we are lucky and this happens, we might remain in the eye of scholarship for a generation or two, but after that most of us and our work fade into various levels of academic oblivion. Only very few scholars produce work of such monumental importance that it becomes benchmarks not only for colleagues but for anyone wishing to study a particular field. Sanders has done this in not one or even two but in three centrally important areas of New Testament study: Judaism, Jesus, and Paul. Moreover, even if one does not study Christianity or Jesus, it is still impossible today to work on the Second Temple period without Sanders, and obviously this is the case regarding Jesus and Paul. This has been true for decades and will undoubtedly continue to be so for the coming ones. Few scholars have been able to bend, as it were, the not always pliant study of religious traditions and to form it into something new. Not all agree with him; his work has sometimes aroused opposition and criticism, but we cannot make do without it. The present volume is a fitting accolade for an outstanding scholar. - Joshua Schwartz, review of Fabian E. Udoh, Susannah Heschel, Mark A. Chancey, and Gregory Tatum, eds., Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) [http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/7140_7760.pdf].

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I was about to announce that גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב is officially on ice until further notice, but then I came across a few unfinished posts in my draft folder that seemed worth saving. The above quote was one of them.

And I thought I was busy...

2011-12-15T19:35:00.000-06:00

John Wesley "started his day at 4:00 a.m. and packed it with ceaseless activity. According to informed estimates, he preached over 40,000 times, traveled in excess of 250,000 miles, and produced more than 200 written works" - William Baird, History of New Testament Research Volume 1: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 81.

Matera on the Spirit

2011-12-06T19:30:00.000-06:00

"If contemporary believers find this Pauline teaching [on the Spirit] foreign, the fault does not lie so much with the apostle's theology as it does with the absence of an experience of the Spirit that often characterizes contemporary Christianity. For just as this experience of the Spirit accounts for the amazing growth and vitality of the early church, so the absence of this experience accounts for the malaise that afflicts much of contemporary Christianity." - Frank J. Matera, Romans (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2010), 210.

Why did the Crowd of Disciples Quote Psalm 118 at the Triumphal Entry?

2011-11-15T20:45:00.001-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

My colleague, Briercrest College Old Testament professor, Ken Guenter, will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "Why did the Crowd of Disciples Quote Psalm 118 at the Triumphal Entry?"

Please join us on Friday, November 18 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Asher Lev on integrity, artistic ... and academic?

2011-10-30T22:17:00.001-06:00

"The painting did not say fully what I had wanted to say; it did not reflect fully the anguish and torment I had wanted to put into it. Within myself, a warning voice spoke soundlessly of fraud. I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness. . . . Only I would have known. But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that?" - Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (New York: Fawcett, 1972), 328.

Attachment Theory and the Elementary School: A Brief Archaeology of the Autonomous Consumer

2011-10-18T21:49:00.001-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

My esteemed colleague, Glenn Runnalls, will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "Attachment Theory and the Elementary School: A Brief Archaeology of the Autonomous Consumer."

Please join us on Friday, October 21 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Robert Morgan's must-read C.K. Barrett obituary

2011-10-10T07:15:00.001-06:00

I break my blogging silence to mention Robert Morgan's must-read obituary of C.K. Barrett, who--says Morgan--tied with C.H. Dodd as "the greatest British New Testament scholar of the 20th century":

Barrett's natural gifts were reinforced by a robust constitution and formidable capacity for hard work. ... Each night [during his time as a pastor], the hours from 10pm to 2am were set aside for research. The lectureship at Durham in 1945, and chair in 1958, allowed him to settle into a more reasonable 14-hour day, which he carried into retirement.

Do read the whole thing. (HT: Mark Goodacre)

Here is another obituary in the Telegraph, whose author obviously missed Barrett's sense of humour.

My own reflections on Barrett are here.

A timely reminder of my most important vocation

2011-09-08T13:28:00.000-06:00

When I arrived at my office this morning to prepare for the first class of the school year, I noticed an illustration from one of Shoshana's favourite children's stories on my door. It took me a while to realize that my name tag had been changed too!

Click on the image for a close-up of the illustration and of my fall semester class schedule:

And here is Shoshana anxiously waiting to head off to preschool for the first time this afternoon:

C.E.B Cranfield on the writing of commentaries, the history of interpretation, and long sentences

2011-09-07T20:59:00.000-06:00

Take a deep breath, and then read the following sentence aloud:

"But to gain something more than an altogether superficial knowledge of the course of the tradition is to learn a deep respect and affection for, and gratitude to, those who have laboured in the field before one, irrespective of the barriers between different confessions, theological and critical viewpoints, nations and epochs; to learn to admire the engagement with Paul's thought of some of the greatest minds from the third to the twentieth century, but also to be humbled by the discover that even the weakest and least perceptive have from time to time something worth while to contribute; to learn that it is naïve to imagine that old commentaries are simply superseded by new ones, since, even the good commentator, while he will have some new insights of his own and will be able to correct some errors and make good some deficiencies of the past, will also have his own particular blind spots and will see less clearly, or even miss altogether, some things which some one before him has seen clearly; and, above all, to learn that all commentators (including those who in the next few pages will be most highly praised and also--and this is perhaps the most difficult lesson for any commentator to grasp--oneself) have feet of clay, and that therefore both slavish deference to any of them and also presumptuous self-confidence must alike be eschewed." - C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans 1.31-32.

Breathe.

(Brilliant stuff, really.)

Microsoft Anna reads I Kings 21:20 in Hebrew

2011-08-31T21:05:00.001-06:00

I was looking around in BibleWorks 9, and noticed a "Read Text" option, which sounded neat because I occasionally want to double check my Hebrew pronunciation. Evidently "Microsoft Anna" has yet to learn Hebrew:

(I'm really pleased with BibleWorks 9, by the way. A recording in the original languages was probably too much to hope for.)

R.I.P. C.K. Barrett

2011-08-28T00:45:00.001-06:00

On Friday afternoon I decided to post something by C.K. Barrett. Before I got around to it, the news came that he passed away at the age of 94. Barrett was one of my academic heroes. He published his first book in 1947, his magisterial two-volume commentary on Acts 50 years later in 1994 and 1998. Barrett's The Gospel of John and Judaism was originally delivered as a series of lectures in German. The preface to his Romans commentary describes the "sustained enthusiasm and even excitement" he experienced reading Luther's 400 page Scholia on Romans...in Medieval Latin. Robert Morgan's tribute to Barrett at 90*, mentions Barrett's close familiarity with Barth's Dogmatics; his preface to Romans says of reading Barth's commentary: "If in those [undergraduate] days, and since, I remained and have continued to be a Christian, I owe the fact in large measure to that book, and to those in Cambridge who introduced it to me." One of "those in Cambridge" was Francis Noel Davey, about whom Barrett wrote:

This is the first book I have published with S.P.C.K. since the death of its former Director, Dr Francis Noel Davey, and I cannot send it out without recording a sense of obligation that I shall never lose. It was in 1936 that I carried my first New Testament essay along Trumpington Street from Pembroke to his rooms in Corpus, and began an association that grew steadily in depth and in warmth. Information about the New Testament I had to collect for myself, but he more than anyone else helped me to see that to collect it, however great the labour, and to understand it, and the book itself, was the most responsible and rewarding task any scholar could undertake. He published my first book; and through the years a letter from him, the rare opportunity of conversation, have never failed to rekindle the flame. I can no longer thank him; but I am thankful to God for him. - C. K. Barrett, The Gospel of John and Judaism (London: SPCK, 1975), ix.

Barrett was a fine writer and he wrote a lot, and what he wrote is still worth reading because it was backed by scholarly substance. He had unmatched scholarly chops.
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*Morgan's tribute to Barrett, published in The Expository Times 199.6 (2008): 226-228 is behind a pay wall, but it is well worth looking up a library copy.
**Also, I have reluctantly updated my list of nonagenarian NT scholars.

Update: Links to obituaries here.

Tracking Pingbacks using Blogger

2011-08-26T16:52:00.002-06:00

I'm looking for a little technical help: When James McGrath published Episode I of his September Biblioblog Carnival a couple weeks ago, I noticed that Jason Staples had responded to my first post on Jewish ethnocentrism with a post of his own. Blogger used to send out messages when someone linked to one of my posts, but the service 'broke', as I recall, when they started sending notifications every time a blogger who included my blog on their blogroll posted something.

I was sorry to overlook Jason's post, so I subscribed to his blog, tried signing up for Google alerts, and turned on Blogger's backlinks service. The trackback service seems to have the same problem as before, and Google alerts don't reliably inform me of my own blog posts, so I imagine they are equally useless in the event that someone else links to my blog.

So to my question: Is there a way to track pingbacks or trackbacks on Blogger or is the only solution to switch blogging platforms?

Why Christianity is more ethnocentric than Judaism

2011-08-18T14:58:00.004-06:00

This post tries (just as provocatively) to flesh out a bit of what I left unstated here...

A moment’s reflection will show that “Christianity” shares the six characteristics that Hutchinson and A. Smith claim ethnic groups ‘habitually exhibit’:

(1) ‘a common proper name’: Christian, etc.
(2) ‘a myth of common ancestry’: ‘in Christ’ – Christians are called “children of God” by their participation in Christ. Just as God created Israel from the barren seed of Abraham, the New Testament affirms that God created a people of God from the Messiah. Denise Kimber Buell argues that the language of kinship in early Christian texts was considered real rather than metaphorical.
(3) ‘shared historical memories’: The story of Israel and of Jesus.
(4) ‘one or more elements of common culture’: Check.
(5) ‘a link with a homeland’: ‘Our citizenship is in heaven.’
(6) ‘a sense of solidarity’: Check.

According to 1 Peter 2:9, Christians ‘are a chosen race . . . a holy nation’. As with other nations, membership in the Christian ‘people of God’ is exclusive. New believers have to abandon their previous ethnic culture and polytheistic way of life to join in, and, as a result, they are no longer Gentiles/ ‘nations’. The Gospel of John suggests that love for members exceeds love for outsiders. Indeed, Christianity is more exclusive, more particularistic, more ‘ethnocentric’ than Judaism because orthodox Christianity holds that final salvation is limited to insiders, while normative Judaism expects righteous Gentiles to have a place in the world to come without having to become Jews (see Sanders, Donaldson, Runesson).

Note: My observations here are exploratory. My main point is to critique the common Christian denigration of Judaism as nationalist/particularist. Whatever Christianity is, it is not universal.

Bibliography:

Buell, Denise Kimber. Why this New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Donaldson, Terrence L. Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE). Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Hutchinson, John, and Anthony D. Smith. Ethnicity. Oxford Readers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Runesson, Anders. “Particularistic Judaism and Universalistic Christianity? Some Critical Remarks on Terminology and Theology.” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 1 (2000).

Sanders, E. P. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977.

Paul, the Former Jew

2011-08-12T15:17:00.006-06:00

I just had time to skim my former classmate Love Sechrest's published dissertation before returning it (late) to ILL. This excerpt seems to sum up Sechrest's thesis, more-or-less:

"Paul combines in himself both ascribed and voluntary elements of identity, as he things of himself as someone who was born a Jew but no longer considers himself one. That he privileges the voluntary without dismissing the ascribed is apparent from the way that he divides people into three distinct groups - Gentiles, Jews, and believers - while maintaining that the latter two collectives form separate groups of descendants from Abraham (Rom. 4.11-12, 16). Thus, in one sense Paul was both Jewish and Christian given that he was born Jewish and later chose to identify with Christ; but in another sense he was a former Jew, because he did not hold to both of those identities with equal loyalty when he considered the arc of his personal narrative (Phil. 3.3-11)." - Love Sechrest, A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (LNTS 410; London: T&T Clark, 2009), 159.

It's a really interesting argument, one that addresses a clear puzzle in Paul. I especially like her distinction between insider (voluntary) and outsider (ascribed) perspectives on group identity. I look forward to reading the whole thing carefully when I can drum up some time, and either $90 or a review copy--preferably the latter.

Update: I should note Joel Willitts's helpful critical response. Willitts thinks Sechrest "too boldly draws lines between the categories of Religion, Geography and Customs, Lifestyles and Laws", which may well be correct; I will have to check. In response to Joel's second complaint--that "Sechrest engages a narrow swath of scholarly literature"--it's worth observing that she engages helpfully with a wide "swath" of scholarship on race and ethnicity, and her choice of Daniel Boyarin and Caroline Johnson Hodge as conversation partners in the conclusion seems entirely appropriate.

Sympathising with Nicodemus

2011-08-06T15:54:00.000-06:00

A recent lunch time conversation at the Millers:

d.: That was when Mommy was pregnant. Who was Mommy pregnant with, Shoshana?

Shoshana (eyes wide): ...with me??

Mommy (helpfully): You were in Mommy's tummy.

Shoshana (incredulous): You ate me?!

Morton Smith on Forgery

2011-08-04T10:19:00.002-06:00

"...This anachronism is one of the many traces of an unusually clumsy forger, who may have had some genuine text to expand, but who expanded it with palpable absurdities." - Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 199.

Smith is referring to an alleged anachronism in a letter recorded in 1 Macc 10.26-45, but his description of forgery will be of interest to those familiar with Stephen Carlson's, The Gospel Hoax (Waco: Baylor, 2005), and the debate about Smith's discovery (?) of the Secret Gospel of Mark.

The problem of Jewish ethnocentrism according to the New Perspective on Paul

2011-08-02T21:53:00.002-06:00

Timothy Gombis's new book and excellent CT article on Paul seems to have stimulated a spate of positive posts on the "New Perspective on Paul" by evangelical bloggers. The "New Perspective" has taken on an ill-defined life of its own, but it originally referred to a reading of Paul from the fresh vantage point of a new understanding of Judaism instead of from the long tradition of Christian interpretation that--as John Barclay explains it--treated the Jews "in Paul's letters as symbols of something else, normally some negative trait in the human condition." For the sake of comparison, here are some prominent representatives of the old perspective:

Augustine: The Jews had a boasting problem. They were guilty of "the most fundamental human sin, the sin of self-reliance (an introverted idolatry)."
Luther: The Jews had a self-righteousness problem. "Luther took Paul's reaction to Judaism to be an assault on all forms of self-righteousness, which by 'doing' seek to make a claim on God and thus refuse his sheer grace in Jesus Christ."
F.C. Baur: The Jews had a particularity problem. "Paul stands for the 'universal' and the spiritual, as opposed to Judaism with its 'narrow' ethnic base and national 'particularity.'"
Käsemann: The Jews had a piety problem. "Paul is taken to criticize, via Judaism, the piety and self-conceit of 'the religious man': it is such piety that leads to pride in privilege or achievement, and where Paul discusses this problematic, according to Käsemann, he is attacking 'the hidden Jew in all of us.'"

(All quotations are from John M. G. Barclay's excellent essay, “Paul, Judaism, and the Jewish People,” in The Blackwell Companion to Paul [Stephen Westerholm, ed.; United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011], 188-201, here 190.)

I am very sympathetic to those who want a perspective for reading Paul that treats Judaism fairly. Perhaps I am prone to over-correction in this regard, since I find myself reacting to one common "New Perspective" construal of what Paul found wrong with Judaism. Consider the following examples:

First, Timothy Gombis's CT article: "First-century Judaism didn't have a legalism problem; it had an ethnocentrism problem. The first followers of Jesus were all Jewish, and had difficulty imagining that the God of Israel who sent Jesus Christ as their Savior could possibly save non-Jews without requiring them to convert to Judaism." (Also quoted and affirmed by Scot McKnight.)
Daniel Kirk, summarizing Gombis: "First, he challenges the common perception that at his conversion Paul left behind a legalistic Judaism in favor of a salvation-by-grace Christianity. This is a nice, short summary introduction to the New Perspective: Paul’s problem with Judaism wasn’t legalism, but ethnocentrism. But Paul himself remained a Jew and never called other Jews to leave their Judaism behind."
Michael Bird: "What have we learned from the New Perspective, what gains are we to keep? ...2. The problem of Jewish ethnocentrism. What Paul opposed in Galatians was the view that one has to become a Jew in order to be a follower of Jesus. Instead, Paul argued that God saves Gentiles as Gentiles through the Lord Jesus. This is all the more pertinent if we map Paul onto an increasingly aggressive anti-Gentile sentiment in Judea in the 40s and 50s. That is why the logical opposite of justification by faith without works of law is the notion that God is the God of the Jews only (Rom 3:29). Paul effectively dissolves the categories of proselytes and God-fearers for Gentiles and makes them equal with Jews in the new covenant." In a follow-up post, Mike adds that "Paul’s problem with Judaism was not merely exclusivism ...", but ethnocentrism apparently still remains a problem.

It is curious that new perspective scholars in the Dunn / Wright tradition still create a negative picture of Judaism as a foil for early Christianity. It may just be me, but the sins Augustine and Luther identify seem more fundamental to the human condition than 'ethnocentrism'. The ideas preach better, and with greater power because they are centred in a big view of God (and in deep elements in Paul's thought) rather than on an admittedly grievous social ill. So if we have to stereotype Judaism, I'll take Augustine and Luther, thank you very much.

But of course, we can try not to stereotype ancient Judaism--which leads me to my next point: What was wrong with Jewish ethnocentrism? What is wrong about the people of God thinking they are the people of God? Isn't that what the Old Testament encourages? Was it even conceivable to think that Israel would be a light to the nations without being distinctive as a people? Would anyone have imagined that God would save all the nations of the earth without their joining the covenant of the people of God? And does Paul ever criticize non-believing Jews for being ethnocentric? (What am I missing?)

Finally, was early Christianity any different? Sure Gentiles were not required to become Jews, but they were required to join 'the people of God'. I submit that first century Judaism was not any more "ethnocentric" than normative Christianity is.

Teaching or Research

2011-07-26T19:38:00.000-06:00

Whenever I work on a writing project, I worry that my time would be better spent doing something else. I'm used to it, but sometimes it keeps me up at night: How can I justify slaving over a technical article on a subject whose direct relevance to my teaching will amount to perhaps two minutes of class time in a course I teach every second year? Wouldn't my summer be better spent (only) reading and exploring questions directly related to the classes I have to teach this fall--even if nothing written or publishable comes of it? Is it enough to research something because it fascinates me? Does it pass the Annie Dillard test?

‎Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), 68.

In this case, maybe the best response is a note to self: Next time, think twice before volunteering to write on that esoteric topic!

But to counter Dillard and my internal interlocutor, I am reminded of a talk C.S. Lewis gave to a group of university students that defends the value of "Learning in War Time." Lewis's initial point is that, for Christians, learning in war time is no different than any other:

[E]very Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant. He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology. If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 44.*

I've quoted from Lewis's affirmative answer before. Lewis goes on to say that the pursuit of learning is worthwhile and--to qualify Dillard--we don't always need to be able to explain how all our little projects relate to the big questions in life:

Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not too much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God. That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters--for men who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience to our vocation. - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 49

Lewis, it seems to me, takes for granted a classic ideal of higher education that has been obscured, if not lost altogether, in a contemporary context where schools that emphasize teaching are distinguished from research universities, and where, in the latter, one is sometimes better off staying home and working through a textbook than attending class: The scholar is paid to research, not to teach. Since there is no reward for teaching, little effort goes into doing it effectively.

According to the classic ideal, teaching and research go together. You expect a scientist to do science not just to teach it. Part of learning from a scientist is to learn about what it means to live the peculiar life of the mind that is scientific inquiry--and that is best caught from someone who lives and loves their craft enough both to share it and to practice it.The point is not for all students to become scientists--or literary scholars, for that matter--but for all to learn disciplines of learning that will form them for their own vocation. Actually, Annie Dillard says something similar:

"Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of materials they used. The works possibilities excited them; the field's complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks" - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), 70-71.

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*Lewis, obviously, hadn't read Rob Bell.

Philipp Jakob Spener on Pastoral Training

2011-07-24T13:59:00.000-06:00

"In regard to the education of pastors, Spener [1635-1705] argues that they must be trained in universities and schools that should be recognized as 'workshops of the Holy Spirit rather than places of worldliness and indeed of the devils of ambition, tippling, carousing, and brawling.' In the selection of candidates for the ministry, Spener is convinced that 'a young man who fervently loves God, although adorned with limited gifts, will be more useful to the church of God with his meager talent and academic achievement than a vain and worldly fool with double doctor's degrees who is very clever but has not been taught by God.'" - William Baird, History of New Testament Research Volume 1: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 61.

Baird calls this "implicit anti-intellectualism." I wouldn't call it that as long as Spener didn't consider academic training dispensible.

A Twitter Miscellany

2011-07-09T14:07:00.003-06:00

A selection of less ephemeral (??) updates from my twitter account (@ntdmiller) since I began tweeting in February:

9 July: Why I suspect the prolific: "[P]erhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too." (Annie Dillard)
8 July: Just registered for #SBL
4 July: Contemplating organizing a study tour of Turkey and Greece...
Elmer Fudd Wikipedia (http://j.mp/kIUQ4G)! E.g., "In de Thai generaw ewection, de Pheu Thai Party... wins a wandswide majority..."
30 June: #Bibleworks 9 looks great on the NT side; still considering whether it is worth an upgrade for someone focused primarily on the Hebrew Bible
25 June: Great price for a fantastic resource: Randall Buth's Living Biblical Hebrew Part One MP4 Version (http://j.mp/kAiMFy)
24 June: Looking for a succinct, scintillating, readable #Romans commentary to use as an upper level undergraduate Biblical Studies textbook.
23 June: Absolutely loving Bruce Fisk's Hitchhiker's Guide to Jesus (http://t.co/pmUWgFX). The trick is creating a course to go with the textbook.
19 June: Nothing like having a Hebrew verb paradigm jingle running through your head for days on end.
8 June: "Any humanities professor who comes up with one genuine idea in a lifetime should be recognized." - Mark Bauerlein (http://bit.ly/kzVasn)
4 June: "Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly." - David Brooks (http://nyti.ms/kf7Mzd)
18 May: What's the benefit of a #Kindle book priced the same as a printed edition?
13 April: Here's to "a sensory deprivation tank in Siberia"! ...Dale Harris on the crisis in evangelical ecclesiology (http://bit.ly/enmzDu).
31 March: Jon Coutts on Rob Bell and the "twitter-fingers of a million popes" (http://bit.ly/enmzDu).
30 March: Attractive idea: "The Rules of Writing Group" (http://bit.ly/gqGkmG)
26 March: "Ideally, we would like to see a decrease in publishing... One good article is worth a dozen mediocre articles."-RDH (http://bit.ly/fcLcyp)
25 March: -18 C, feels like -27. Welcome spring!
9 March: Noticed Augustine's conversion account in Confessions 8 is a meditation on Rom 7; conversion for A is incomplete without radical life change
25 February: Decided I can't put off reading through Morton Smith's Palestinian Parties any longer.
24 February: Ideal language learning scenario: http://tinyurl.com/46krkbc.
21 February: Ehrman's Forged (http://www.bartdehrman.com/) looks like unwelcome support for Carson & Moo's Introduction (http://tinyurl.com/4gftqhp).

I need to go full-bore on a non-bloggable writing project this month, so posts that require independent thought (such as my unfinished series on Christian prophecy) will be limited--unless the ideas are so distracting they bleed onto the page.

Annie Dillard on courageous writing

2011-07-07T07:50:00.000-06:00

"Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. . . . The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin." - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989), 4.

What was old is new again: Richard Bauckham and Hugo Grotius on the Raising of Lazarus

2011-07-03T16:01:00.000-06:00

One of the intriguing proposals in Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses explains why the resurrection of Lazarus in John 11 is ignored by the earlier Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke:

"Lazarus could not have been protected in the early period of the Jerusalem church's life by telling his story but not naming him. His story was too well known locally not to be easily identifiable as his however it was told. For Lazarus 'protective anonymity' had to take the form of his total absence from the story as it was publicly told. . . . If the raising of Lazarus was not only the remarkable event that John portrays but also such a key event in leading to Jesus' death, its absence from Mark -- and so, presumably, from the pre-Markan passion narrative -- is certainly puzzling. But the difficulty is removed when we recognize that the need for 'protective anonymity' in Lazarus's case would require his complete absence from any public telling of the passion narrative in the early Jerusalem church" - Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006), 196.

The solution, it turns out, is not completely novel. According to William Baird, it was advanced at least as early as the 17th century, by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), and subsequently adopted by others:

"As to the reason the other evangelists neglected to record the raising of Lazarus, Grotius adopts the hypothesis--popular with later apologetic exegetes--that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wanted to protect Lazarus and his family from the wrath of the high priests (12:10) and, therefore, kept the story secret. Years later, after their Gospels were written and the danger had passed, John was able safely to recount the miraculous event." - William Baird, History of New Testement Research, Vol. 1: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 11.

Since Bauckham does not cite Grotius--or anyone else--in this regard, he may have come across the same solution independently. (After all, great minds think alike.) But Bauckham has a monograph on 16th century English apocalyptic thought, and he may have encountered Grotius in this connection.

Paul was no Genius

2011-06-29T11:12:00.000-06:00

"Paul was no genius: he was, after all, hardly remarkable as a literary stylist, of unknown competence as a tent-maker, and, when it comes to profundity, not to be compared with a Plato or a Shakespeare. But even to consider him in these terms, no matter how complimentary our assessment of his gifts, is to rob him of his true importance. Paul was an apostle who spoke with authority the divine message he was commissioned to deliver. As such, he commands a hearing." - Stephen Westerholm, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard, in the introduction to The Blackwell Companion to Paul (Stephen Westerholm, ed.; Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3.

Romans textbooks and the craft of scholarly writing

2011-06-26T22:47:00.003-06:00

The last couple times I taught Romans, I assigned as textbooks Leander Keck's commentary and Stephen Westerholm's accessible introduction to the worldview of Romans. I think Keck is great, but realized last time that it is still a little too technical for a third year undergraduate course. On a quest for up-to-date alternatives to both books, I ordered in several evaluation copies, all published within the last couple years:

Oakes, Peter. Reading Romans In Pompeii: Paulʼs Letter At Ground Level. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009.
Gombis, Timothy G. Paul: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum, 2010.

Hultgren, Arland J. Paulʼs Letter to the Romans: A Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Matera, Frank J. Romans. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.

I thought Reading Romans in Pompeii might substitute for Westerholm as an engaging secondary text on the social context of Romans. While I found it fascinating as a thought experiment about how the letter may have been heard by Gentile readers of Paul's letter, the book does little to welcome modern readers who are not already interested. After a 2.5 pp. preface, chapter one begins:

"We are standing in a street in Pompeii, looking into the doorway of Region I, Block 10, House 6 . . . flanked by the narrower entrances to Houses 5 and 7 (Figure 1.1)."

How can I assign undergraduates a book that opens with a data dump? ...Next please.

Introductions to Paul are a dime a dozen. I ordered in Timothy Gombis's Guide for the Perplexed because it is recent, because it received positive online kudos from J.R.D. Kirk and Scot McKnight, and because I was pretty sure T&T Clark would send me a free evaluation copy. There's lots to like here. Gombis does a fine job compiling verses on both sides of selected debates, there are helpful charts, and I love his articulation of Paul's mission:

"Paul is a herald of the Kingdom of God and of the victory and Cosmic Lordship of Jesus Christ. This is an intensely political vocation, since Paul is proclaiming the emergent reality of a radically new political order--the Kingdom of God--along with an alternative ruler; the crucified, risen, and exalted Jesus. This calling as a herald inevitably involved a pastoral task, since Paul's aim was to see the creation and establishment of Kingdom of God communities throughout the world." (23)

Unfortunately, Gombis's evaluation of debated issues sometimes struck me as simplistic and one-sided. No doubt this is partly because I sometimes disagreed with Gombis's conclusions, but--as will be clear below--I have no trouble assigning readings that I disagree with. My concern is that in a guide that aims to introduce debated issues, opposing views should be presented in such a way that critics will agree with the way they are portrayed. The upshot is that I've decided to stick with Westerholm.

One look at Arland Hultgren's large commentary on Romans convinced me that it wouldn't do as an undergraduate textbook. Compare the short paragraph in Keck's succinct commentary to the three pages Hultgren spends discussing the first line of Paul's letter. Still, it looks to be an important contribution--Scot McKnight thinks so too--and I hope to read it during the fall semester.

Frank Matera's contribution to the Paideia series is short enough to work as a textbook, and it looks like an insightful, up-to-date contribution by a first-rate Pauline scholar. I look forward to reading it. Unfortunately, I fear my students would not, after reading the first paragraph:

"Romans is the first of the Pauline Letters in the NT. Although it enjoys this pride of place because it is the longest of the letters, its placement is well deserved since it is the most detailed presentation of Paul's gospel, and since it has influenced the course of Christian theology more than any other writing of the NT."

Thud. Commentaries don't have to be written this way. Here is how Keck begins his:

"Like widely differing siblings raised by the same parents, each letter produced by Paul has its own distinguishing character. For the historically minded critic, each letter's unique traits provide important clues for detecting the circumstances in which Paul wrote it as well as what he hoped to achieve with it."

N.T. Wright prefers an extended metaphor:

"Romans is neither a systematic theology nor a summary of Paul's lifework, but it is by common consent his masterpiece. It dwarfs most of his other writings, an Alpine peak towering over hills and villages." (395)

Wright's contribution to the New Interpreter Bible Vol 10 is a very good, readable commentary on Romans. I've decided to assign it as a textbook this fall as a replacement for Keck.

Wright and Westerholm make unusual bedfellows, to be sure, since Westerholm is usually cast as an opponent of the "New Perspective" on Paul, and Wright one of its champions--but that (and the fact that I disagree with Wright here and there) is half the point. More important, Wright and Westerholm share the two qualities I'm most looking for in authors that I make my students read. (1) In different ways, both model exemplary scholarship; students will learn the craft by reading. (2) They are also fine, engaging writers. If, as John Trimble says, "good writing is good manners," they are both scholars and gentlemen to boot.

The bottom line: I want textbooks that students want to keep reading, that will help me teach by making my students more rather than less interested in the subject matter. I'm betting Wright and Westerholm will do the trick.

Portland's Finest Bookstores

2011-06-14T11:24:00.001-06:00

No trip to Portland is complete without a stop at Powell's City of Books, perhaps the greatest used and new bookstore anywhere.

No biblical scholar's trip should be complete without a stop at one of Portland's Windows Booksellers outlets. Better yet, plan in advance: Check the online inventory at their much larger bookstore in Eugene, and ask them to have your order ready to pick up when you arrive. The result is great selection, great prices and $0 shipping. As an added bonus, the copies of Caird's The Language and Imagery of the Bible and Davies' The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount that I ordered in were previously owned and annotated by Robert Kysar and Krister Stendahl respectively.

Hoskyns & Davey on Criteria for the Study of the Historical Jesus

2011-06-09T07:00:00.001-06:00

Perhaps this just shows just how little I know about 1930's historical Jesus scholarship, but these final two quotes from Hoskyns and Davey strike me as another instance of being ahead of their time.

This one reminds me of the reasonable insistence by recent scholars that one's reconstruction of the historical Jesus must be able to explain the existence of the church:

The life of Jesus "must be described in such a manner that the emergence of the primitive church is also intelligible on the basis of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. For any historical reconsturction which leaves an unbridgeable gulf between the faith of the primitive church and the historical Jesus must be both inadequate and uncritical: inadequate, because it leaves the origin of the church unexplained; and uncritical, because a critical sifting of the evidence of the New Testament points towards the life and death of Jesus as the groudn of primitive Christian faith, and points in no other direction." (170)

Their concern for the big picture reminds me of N.T. Wright:

"An historical reconstruction is possible only when the uniform nature of the whole material at our disposal is perceived, so that each fragment is seen not only to be part of the whole, but to contain the whole; or, to put it differently, so that each fragment of it not only rests upon a common background, but expresses it. To lay bare this uniform nature, this background, is to discover the Jesus of history" (172).

More from Hoskyns & Davey on Historical Criticism

2011-06-08T07:00:00.001-06:00

Stephen Neill commented that Hoskyns and Davey's The Riddle of the New Testament (3rd ed.; London: Faber & Faber, 1947) "has great and abiding value" because "[i]t puts in clear form almost all the problems which have to be dealt with in the interpretation of the New Testament" (219). Judge for yourself:

On the assured results of historical criticism: "The progress of critical historical investigation of the New Testament cannot be compared to a gradual mounting the steps of a ladder. One generation does not achieve a number of results which pass into the text-books, so that the next generation is enabled to mount a few steps higher. Rather, as each advance is made, the problem as a whole begins to look different; and the 'assured results' of the previous generation require constant reconsideration when seen in a new perspective. This does not, of course, mean that the modern critic stands aloof from the older criticism. He is completely dependent upon the work of his predecessors. But, where they supposed that they had reached definite and final conclusions, he sees new problems; and the older conclusions appear in their new context almost irrelevant, and, at times, trivial" (11-12).

History and Christian theology: "The historian of primitive Christianity is a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water; it is his function to act as the slave of the theologian or of the philosopher, as the slave also of the simple believer or of the equally simple unbeliever...The historian has therefore to make clear and accessible the material which has shown such remarkable ability to galvanize thought and faith and unbelief. The historian, then, is neither an apologist for the Christian religion nor an apostle of irreligion; still less is he an interpreter of the New Testament in terms of modern thought" (171).

History and faith: "The whole spiritual and moral power of the primitive church rested ultimately, not upon a mystical experience, but upon its belief that what Jesus had asserted to have been the purpose of his life and death was in very truth the purpose of God. Further than this the historian dare not and cannot go. On the basis of a purely critical examination of the New Testament documents he can reconstruct a clear historical figure, which is an intelligible figure; and he can, as a result of this reconstruction, show that the emergence of the primitive church is also intelligible" (177).

Hoskyns & Davey on Jesus' Jewish Context

2011-06-07T05:06:00.000-06:00

This statement about parallels between Jesus and his contemporaries seems ahead of its time:

"Those modern Jewish scholars who have busied themselves with a comparison between the ethical teaching of Jesus and the ethical teaching of the rabbis have given this judgement, that there is no single moral aphorism recorded as spoken by Jesus which cannot be paralleled, and often verbally paralleled, in rabbinic literature. With this conclusion Christian scholars working in the field of rabbinics are showing more and more agreement. For example, there can be no doubt that such a saying as 'The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath' would have been regarded as a self-evident truism by the best of the rabbis. Similarly, the constant insistence by Jesus that the righteousness which God demands is a righteousness of the heart could not have been strange or new teaching." - Hoskyns and Davey's The Riddle of the New Testament (3rd ed.; London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 135.

Hoskyns and Davey's statement of the difference strikes me as on track:

"It is not sufficient merely to draw up a list of parallels between his teaching and that of the rabbis. What requires explanation is the authority with which he spoke, the urgency which accompanied his moral demands, and the evident judgement of God which he declared would inevitably follow any refusal to obey him" (136).

The Riddle of the New Testament

2011-06-06T07:47:00.002-06:00

I first encountered Sir Edwyn Hoskyns in Stephen Neill's fantastic history of The Interpretation of the New Testament, and have been intrigued by Hoskyns and Davey's The Riddle of the New Testament (3rd ed.; London: Faber & Faber, 1947) ever since reading Markus Bockmuehl's Seeing the Word. Neill calls it "a series of hammer blows, at what . . .was a widespread understanding of the gospels" (215). It is that, but it is also a series of hammer blows against theological liberalism, for, as Neill explains, "[T]he most important thing of all about Hoskyns was that, like Karl Barth, he was a converted liberal" (213).

As one would expect from a book first published in 1931, parts of The Riddle of the New Testament are rather dated. I find the authors a little too confident in the results of historical criticism. However, it is worth your time at least as much as C.F.D. Moule's Birth of the New Testament, and it is an easier (and shorter) read. In many respects it seems far ahead of its time. It is also a model of clarity, forceful argument, and verve. The whole book is written around the riddle of the relationship between Jesus and the church:

"There is a riddle in the New Testament. And it is a riddle neither of literary criticism, nor of date and authorship, nor of the historicity of this or that episode. The riddle is a theological riddle, which is insoluble apart from the solution of an historical problem. What was the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the primitive Christian church? That is the riddle. The New Testament documents, all of them, emerged from the primitive church. They reflected piety and encouraged faith. Was there, or was there not, a strict relationship between this rich piety and exuberant faith and the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth? Did the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth control the life of the primitive church? or were his life and death submerged by a piety and faith wholly beyond his horizon? . . . The adequacy of the modern historical critical method is therefore finally tested by its success or failure in answering the problem of the Jesus of history. The authors of this book are confident that the critical method does survive this very severe test, and that it does disclose results, even assured results..." (12).

Hoskyn's and Davey's answer is, in a word, Yes. The life and death of Jesus controlled the life of the primitive church:

"No single strand in the evidence deprives Jesus of the conscious sense that he was bringing into being a new order and working out a purpose . . . . Nowhere in the New Testament are the writers imposing an interpretation upon a history. The history contains the purpose, and is indeed controlled by it. That is to say, the historian is dealing in the end with an historical figure fully conscious of a task which had to be done, and fully conscious also that the only future which mattered for men and women depended upon the completion of his task. The future order, which it was the purpose of Jesus to bring into being, depended upon what he said and did, and finally upon his death." (172)

I, for one, find their answer compelling.

C.F.D. Moule on the Birth of the New Testament

2011-06-05T15:29:00.001-06:00

Although it first appeared almost 50 years ago, and was last revised in 1982, it is obvious from the quotations I've posted that I think C.F.D. Moule's, The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed.; Harper & Row, 1982) is still well worth reading. Here's another gem:

"[I]n a genuinely Christian community there is a humility that renders mutual learning quick and easy--the intellectuals ready to learn from the silent witness of the less articulate, and vice versa." (207)

I found myself disagreeing with some of Moule's proposals--for example, that the Gospels weren't intended as preaching or that most of the NT can be dated pre-70. And, of course, one would turn elsewhere for a current introduction to Christian Origins. But for those already familiar with aspects of current scholarship, Birth offers an instructive glimpse into its history: to the giants on whose shoulders modern scholars--sometimes unknowingly--joust, and of those whose contributions have been forgotten to our collective loss.

Missing the Obvious?

2011-06-04T08:42:00.003-06:00

Why is it that when I 'get' the need for grace, I struggle to grasp conversion? Paul never says, "Sorry, churches, I goofed." His conversion, like Augustine's, seems complete and total. To be sure, Paul insists that our whole life is to be lived through God's grace, not our own effort, but he assumes radical transformation. When he addresses failure, he exhorts people to become what they are, and to repent. He doesn't admit to being a continuing failure himself. (I assume that Paul is not talking autobiographically about his experience as a Christian in Romans 7.) Paul doesn't emphasize God's grace to forgive, he stresses grace to live. In short, Paul is not one to sympathize with moral weakness. His life and letters give little comfort to those who, like me, sometimes feel stalled, who need to start over again, and again, and again. Paul left his σκύβαλα (Phil 3:8) when he met the Messiah; what about those of us who sometimes look inside and σκύβαλα is all we see?

C.F.D. Moule on New Testament Ethics

2011-06-02T08:49:00.001-06:00

"Strictly speaking, there are no 'cardinal' virtues in Christianity, for Christian character does not 'hinge' round the disciplined practice of virtue: it is a spontaneous growth, it is a crop of qualities springing from the seed of new life divinely sown . . .; or--more characteristically described--it is life in the new age, resulting from incorporation in the new humanity which is Christ . . . . Agape is not a virtue among other virtues so much as an impulse, divinely implanted: it is God's love for us in Christ, reflected and responded to. And what in other systems might be called virtues are the shape spontaneously taken by agape in the Christian community . . . . Therefore, although in fact many Christian qualities seem to coincide with those on the Stoic list, the difference is a radical one. The Stoic virtues are the proud struggle of the human spirit to conform to nature and to gain the mastery over weakness; the Christian virtues emerge after the recognition of sin and the confession of human helplessness: they are the result of committal to God and dependence upon him" (193-4).

"In the last analysis, it is questionable, indeed, whether a Christian ethical system, as such, can exist. Christianity is concerned with the transformation, in Christ, of personal relations. The code which provides a framework or scaffolding within which this operates must, strictly speaking, be a borrowed one, for Christianity, as such, does not offer a distinctive code or system of conduct" (274).

C.F.D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed.; Harper & Row, 1982).

C.F.D. Moule on New Testament Eschatology and Football

2011-05-31T09:00:00.001-06:00

"New Testament eschatology at its deepest level concentrates upon entering into, implementing, loyally expressing that which is already given, which is Christ: it does not say, 'How long will it be before the whistle blows for the end of the game?' but, 'Where ought I to be now, to receive the next pass?' In other words, the fact that the kick-off has taken place, that the game is on, and that we have a Captain who can lead us to victory, is all that matters." - C.F.D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed.; Harper & Row, 1982), 148.

(Football = soccer, of course.)

A child's experience of transcendence

2011-05-30T15:36:00.001-06:00

It was actually more like a parent's experience of transcendence and a child's experience of either trust or foolhardiness--I'm not sure which. She always wanted to go deeper:

"Wave, come here! My feet are dirty. Wash me!
. . . Don't pick me up Daddy!"

She loved the surging waves, the pull of the undertow against her legs. Terrified, I was never more than inches away.

...We'll save the water safety lesson for our next trip to the beach.

Luke's Conception of Prophets

2011-05-26T21:58:00.000-06:00

(This post is part two in a series on Christian prophecy; part one is here.)

In my 2004 Ph.D. dissertation, I offered the following definition of "prophet" based solely on the evidence from Luke-Acts:

"Prophets" may be defined as those who by virtue of their nearness to God are enabled by the Holy Spirit to have insight into matters hidden from other humans, and (sometimes) to perform deeds beyond the ability of ordinary mortals; prophets are also empowered by the Holy Spirit to address divinely-commissioned messages to other humans or to proclaim words of praise to God.

Comments:

My definition was self-consciously descriptive. I argued that the evidence does not permit a strict definition which isolates what is unique about the entity being defined—partly because Luke did not provide as many details about prophets as we would like and partly because there are few (if any) characteristics attributed uniquely to prophets. Nevertheless, I concluded that it is still possible to arrive at a descriptive definition of "prophet" which distinguishes between central and peripheral characteristics of prophets by analyzing the frequency in which characteristics appear and the degree to which they are tied to an individual's prophetic role.
In retrospect . . .

I'm surprised by the lack of reference in the definition to a worship context for prophetic activity since it appears so frequently in L-A and throughout the NT.
I would no longer include miracles in the definition, even though Luke obviously thought it was not unusual for prophets to perform them.
I wish I had thought more about how Luke might have defined prophecy and not simply what it meant to be a prophet. He seems to take for granted what it was, which makes our task frustratingly difficult.

You'll notice that I make no distinction between OT and NT prophets from Luke's perspective. That's because I concluded there is none.

Since I have no immediate plans to publish this section, I've made a longer excerpt available here, for those inclined to read more.

Feedback, of course, is welcome!

Next up: Did Luke believe all Christians are prophets?

C.F.D. Moule on "the vital and decisive distinctiveness of Christian exegesis"

2011-05-25T22:51:00.001-06:00

G.K. Beale's apologetic attempt to distinguish Jesus' approach to Scripture from that of the "wild and crazy" Essenes is worth comparing to C.F.D. Moule's more nuanced analysis:

"While it is undeniable that Christians applied the same arbitrary and artificial devices [as ancient Jews] and, again and again, used scripture in a merely 'vehicular' manner, the incentive for their choice of passages and their interpretations of them was the discovery that, in a historical and 'three-dimensional' way, Jesus actually implemented and achieved in his person, and represented the culmination of, that relation between God and man which is the basic theme of scripture. This genuinely historical and 'three-dimensional' approach to scripture--the lines of divine-human relations converging on Jesus--which has only become deliberate and conscious in 'modern' thought, is, nevertheless, implicit in ancient Christianity . . . . The 'vehicular' uses of scripture, common to both non-Christian and Christian exegesis, thus became in Christian exegesis only a symptom of something much profounder and deeper--something that the modern historian, whose approach is 'three-dimensional' not 'two-dimensional'*, can recognize as valid and supremely significant and quite distinctive." - C.F.D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed.; Harper & Row, 1982), 87-88.

*By contrast, in much typical Jewish interpretation, "it is broadly true no attention is paid to the original meaning or to historical perspective. The whole is treated in [a] . . . flat, two-dimensional way" (80).

C.F.D. Moule on Evangelism and Worship

2011-05-21T10:42:00.001-06:00

"[T]he Church lives by evangelism as fire by burning, and a non-evangelizing Church is dead or dying" (8)

"[W]orship, for a truly religious person, is the be all and end all of work; and . . . if worship and work are distinguished, that is only because of the frailty of human nature which cannot do more than one thing at a time. The necessary alternation between lifting up holy hands in prayer and swinging an axe in strong, dedicated hands for the glory of God is the human makeshift for that single, simultaneous, divine life in which work is worship and worship is the highest possible activity" (42-43).

Both quotations are from C.F.D. Moule, The Birth of the New Testament (Black's New Testament Commentaries) (3rd ed.; Harper & Row, 1982)--not the sort of book from which you would typically expect to find practical statements about church life.

New Zotero Citation Style for Currents in Biblical Research

2011-05-11T09:54:00.000-06:00

A new citation style for Zotero (and Mendeley) users who wish to have their bibliographies and author-date references automatically formatted according to the Currents in Biblical Research style sheet may be found here (scroll down to cbr). The style is based on the Chicago (Author-Date) style created by Julian Onions, and benefited greatly from feedback on this forum. (You will need to be running Zotero 2.1 for the style to work. For installation questions consider this page or search the Zotero support forums.)

This, my latest bout with productivity software, may well have taken more time than it would have to format all the citations in my next article by hand, but hopefully it will benefit other Zotero users who write for the journal, and I learned a lot about CSL (Citation Style Language) in the process. Now to write the article...

Hoskyns & Davey on historical criticism as a necessity for Christian faith

2011-05-09T08:02:00.000-06:00

"[T]he Christian religion is not merely open to historical investigation, but demands it, and its piety depends upon it. Inadequate or false reconstruction of the history of Jesus of Nazareth cuts at the heart of Christianity. The critical and historical study of the New Testament is therefore the prime activity of the church." - The Riddle of the New Testament (3rd ed.; London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 10.

Defining Prophecy

2011-05-02T12:04:00.001-06:00

This is the first in what I hope to be a series of posts on Christian prophecy. I’ll try to keep the posts to a more-or-less manageable size.

One of the challenges (or frustrations) in studying prophecy is the difficulty in defining precisely what it is. Well did Erich Fascher call the label “prophet” a “frame word without concrete content” [German: “προφήτης allein ist ein 'Rahmenwort' ohne konkreten Inhalt”] (Fascher 1927, 51). I'll make some observations below, but first take a quick look at these attempts at definition:

The prophet as the individual par excellence: “It belongs to the notion of prophecy, of true revelation, that Jehovah, overlooking all the media of ordinances and institutions, communicates Himself to the individual, the called one, in whom that mysterious and irreducible rapport in which the deity stands with man clothes itself with energy.” (Wellhausen 1885, 398)

The prophet as intermediary: “It is appropriate to think about prophets as intermediaries, typically representing the deity to the world of humans and in ways related to but different from priests and technical diviners.” (Petersen 2009, 625)

The prophet as [covenant] preacher:
Jesus’ “habitual praxis marked him out as a prophet, in the sense of one announcing to Israel an urgent message from the covenant god.” (Wright 1996, 185)
“[T]he biblical prophet is an interpreter of the present rather than an announcer of the future.” (Croatto 2005, 459)
Christian prophets were “the first theologians.” (Gillespie 1994)
The prophet as healer: “We will not enter Luke’s world without grasping the fact that healing and revealing were twin aspects of a single prophetic vocation” (Minear 1976, 75).

The prophet as persecuted mediator: Prophets are persecuted “messengers and mediators of Yahweh’s salvation.” (Moessner 1986, 225)

Prophecy as direct revelation:
Prophets are “individuals claiming to speak for God” (Greenspahn 1989, 37). Prophecy is “direct revelation” (37).
Prophecy was understood as “God . . . speaking directly to certain individuals” (Sommer 1996, 32).
Prophecy as spontaneous, impelled and/or “immediately inspired”:
“A Christian prophet is a Christian who functions within the Church, occasionally or regularly, as a divinely called and divinely inspired speaker who receives intelligible and authoritative revelations or messages which he is impelled to deliver publicly, in oral or written form, to Christian individuals and/or the Christian community.” (Hill 1979, 8-9)
“The early Christian prophet was an immediately inspired spokesman for the risen Jesus, who received intelligible messages that he or she felt impelled to deliver to the Christian community or, as a representative of the community, to the general public.” (Boring 1991, 38; cf. Boring 1982, 16)
Prophecy may be defined as “telling something that God has spontaneously brought to mind.” (Grudem 2000, 313; cf. 210)
“According to Luke and Paul, Christian prophecy was the reception and immediately subsequent public declaration of spontaneous [i.e. unsolicited], (usually) verbal revelation, conceived of as revealed truth [i.e. not regarded as a product of the speaker’s own reasoning processes] and offered to the community on the authority of God/Christ/the Holy Spirit.” (Forbes 1995, 236; cf. 229)
Prophecy as intelligible:
“[I]ntelligible messages from God in human language through inspired human mediums.” (Aune 1991, 103)
“[P]rophecy was a type of oracular speech: that is, it was an intelligible verbal message believed to originate with God, and to be communicated through an inspired human intermediary.” (Turner 2005, 184)
Or simply… “human speech on behalf of God” (Moberly 2006, 1)

Observations

(1) I included Wellhausen’s 19th century definition because it so clearly illustrates how much definitions can be shaped by context. Notice, for example, Wellhausen’s very modern valorization of the individual.
(2) Some definitions are based on content (Croatto, Wright), others on the experience of inspiration (e.g., Forbes).
(3) Definitions articulate what is essential and what is distinctive. Differences in definition often point to disagreement over larger issues:

What activities count as characteristic activities of prophets? Speech, obviously, but what about miracles? (See Minear’s definition and the biblical prophets Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah and Jesus.)
Calling prophecy “direct revelation” (Greenspahn, Sommer) presumably distinguishes it from divination. According to Sommer, it also excludes charismatic interpretation of Scripture and supernatural insight; Sommer regards dreams as a lesser form of prophecy. …It is fair to ask whether these are ancient or modern scholarly distinctions.
The criterion of intelligibility excludes glossolalia on the basis 1 Cor 14:1-5, but does not account for Acts 2 (where I would argue ‘tongues’ is included as prophecy) or, apparently, 1 Sam 10:9-13, 19:19-24.
The claim that prophecy is, by definition, spontaneous attempts to distinguish prophecy and teaching. It also tends to assume that divine action in prophecy is independent from the human action of the prophet.

(4) Variety is to be expected. Early Jewish and Christian understandings of the term, “prophet,” could be filled out in a variety of legitimate ways because there are different OT models to choose from.

Bibliography

Aune, David E. 1991. Repr. from 1983. Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Boring, M. Eugene. 1982. Sayings of the Risen Jesus: Christian Prophecy in the Synoptic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boring, M. Eugene. 1991. The Continuing Voice of Jesus. Louisville, Ky. Westminster/John Knox Press.

Croatto, J. Severino. 2005. “Jesus, Prophet like Elijah, and Prophet-Teacher like Moses in Luke-Acts.” Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (3): 451-465.

Fascher, Erich. 1927. ΠΡΟΦΗΤΗΣ: Eine sprach- und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Gießen: Alfred Töpelmann.

Forbes, Christopher. 1995. Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment. WUNT 2/75. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).

Gillespie, Thomas W. 1994. The First Theologians: A Study in Early Christian Prophecy. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Greenspahn, Frederick E. 1989. “Why Prophecy Ceased.” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1): 37-49.

Grudem, Wayne A. 2000. Rev. from 1988. The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today. Rev. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books.

Hill, David. 1979. New Testament Prophecy. Atlanta: John Knox Press.

Minear, Paul S. 1976. To Heal And To Reveal: The Prophetic Vocation according to Luke. New York: Seabury Press.

Moberly, R. W. L. 2006. Prophecy and Discernment. Cambridge studies in Christian doctrine 14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moessner, David P. 1986. “‘The Christ Must Suffer’: New Light on the Jesus - Peter, Stephen, Paul Parallels in Luke-Acts.” Novum Testamentum 28 (3): 220-256.

Petersen, David L. 2009. “Prophet, Prophecy.” Pages 622-648 in New Interpreterʼs Dictionary of the Bible. Ed. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Nashville: Abingdon.

Sommer, Benjamin D. 1996. “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation.” Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1): 31-47.

Turner, Max. 2005. Rev. from 1996. The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in the New Testament Church and Today. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers.

Wellhausen, Julius. 1885. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. Ed. Allan Enzies. Repr. 1983. Gloucester, Mass. Peter Smith.

Wright, Nicholas Thomas. 1996. Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress.

Persistent Widows: Religious Scripts in the Illness Narratives of Anne Halkett, Ann Fanshawe, and Alice Thornton

2011-04-20T16:41:00.001-06:00

I am happy to report that t. successfully passed her M.A. thesis defense in history at the University of Saskatchewan this morning. I am biased, of course, but when a potentially three hour long defense is over in an hour, when the examiners describe the thesis as "brilliant," "wonderfully well done," "very important," and "a treat," and when the only substantive suggestions for improving the thesis concern its future publication, it is fair to conclude that the defense went tolerably okay.

I've included the thesis abstract, which summarizes t.'s argument, and the dedication below the jump break . . .

Abstract

In the history of medicine “from below,” religious language has been sidelined as a convention that interfered with the expression of people’s genuine experiences and feelings. This thesis uses the autobiographical writings of three well-known seventeenth-century women, Lady Anne Halkett, Lady Ann Fanshawe, and Alice Thornton, to explore how religious language actually facilitated the expression and preservation of their illness experiences. Having suffered considerable loss during the Civil War and Interregnum, these women relied on familiar religious scripts to present their life stories, including many illness experiences, as persuasive apologies for their difficult situations as widows after the Restoration. Considering their individual expressions of thanksgiving, the good death, and balance within a broader literary context reveals the extent to which each woman not only employed but also adapted convention to suit her particular purpose for writing. The women’s illness narratives must therefore be read with due attention to their religious language, and both need to be interpreted in light of how the women’s particular social situations and writing habits related to the cultural conventions of their time.

Dedication

In memory of Shantelle Almeida

November 12, 1975 – October 12, 2006

“And much more it is to bee marvelled that to a Woman hee should first say…I am the Resurrection”

Lady Anne Halkett, “Meditation on St. John 11.25”

Egocentrism and College Composition

2011-04-18T20:33:00.000-06:00

The novice writer's "natural tendency as a writer is to think primarily of himself--hence to write primarily for himself. Here, in a nutshell, lies the ultimate reason for most bad writing. He isn't aware of his egocentrism, of course, but all the symptoms of his root problem are there: he thinks through an idea only until it is passably clear to him, since, for his purposes, it needn't be any clearer; he dispenses with transitions because it's enough that he knows how his ideas connect; he uses a private system--or no system--of punctuation; he doesn't trouble to define his terms because he understands perfectly well what he means by them; he writes page after page without bothering to vary his sentence structure; he leaves off page numbers and footnotes; he paragraphs only when the mood strikes him; he ends abruptly when he decides he's had enough; he neglects to proofread the final job because the writing is over . . . Given his total self-orientation, it's no wonder that he fails repeatedly as a writer. Actually, he's not writing at all; he's merely communing privately with himself--that is, he's simply putting thoughts down on paper." - John R. Trimble, Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (3rd Edition) (Prentice Hall, 2011), 3.

The paragraph strikes me as a particularly good description of a lot of beginning college composition, but I'm reading the book in the hope that it will help my own writing. So far Trimble's book is as bracing and brilliant as James M. Lang said it would be. Tolle Lege!

Blogging hiatus

2011-04-17T13:50:00.000-06:00

The blogging dry spell over the last several weeks has not been for want of ideas, but for lack of energy and time as the semester winds down. This will likely continue as our family enters a busy and significant week--on which more anon--as I polish off the last of my marking, and as we prepare for family visits later this spring. Then, of course, there are research projects waiting in the wings that seem more urgent than casual blogging. Nevertheless, semi-regular posting will resume eventually. In addition to several posts at various stages of drafting, I would like to begin a weekly series on Christian prophecy as a way to distill and work out ideas from this semester's Prophecy after the Prophets seminar. Look for the first installment next Sunday.

Mort's Day

2011-04-09T22:22:00.001-06:00

"Shamus and Findley sat silently on the slivered wooden bench as the dirty fog of darkness hovered over them. . . . "

So begins "Mourir," a short story I wrote as an assignment for grade 12 English. The story itself is best forgotten, but I am still intrigued by the idea of a Mort's Day--a term and concept borrowed from my high school physics teacher--which the story develops. According to Mr. Armstrong, a Mort's Day is a 24 hour period between 11:59 and 12:00 a.m. when time stops for everyone but you.

The possibilities are endless, though I most often wish for one when I enter my office and look wistfully at Edwyn C. Hoskyns and Noel Davey's The Riddle of the New Testament (London: Faber & Faber, 1931) or C.F.D. Moule's The Birth of the New Testament (3rd ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982) sitting unread on my shelves.

Perhaps as a warning against such utopian dreams, my short story concluded on a darker note, with the bench "stained red with Shamus' blood."

Bonhoeffer on Sanctification

2011-03-30T14:29:00.000-06:00

"[A]ll our good works are the works of God himself, the works for which he has prepared us beforehand. Good works then are ordained for the sake of salvation, but they are in the end those which God himself works within us. They are his gift, but it is our task to walk in them at every moment of our lives, knowing all the time that any good works of our own could never help us to abide before the judgement of God. . . . From this it follows that we can never be conscious of our good works. Our sanctification is veiled from our eyes until the last day, when all secrets will be disclosed. If we want to see some results here and assess our own spiritual state, and have not the patience to wait, we have our reward. The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, from chapter 31.

Pursuing grades and chasing after wind

2011-03-21T16:58:00.003-06:00

It's no secret that most academics' least favorite task is grading assignments. That's not to say we blow off the job, grading essays by throwing them down the stairs and marking where they land. I tell my students that learning how to think clearly and to express themselves well is one of the most important things they can learn, and I endeavour to provide constructive feedback along the way. Much more onerous is the task of actually assigning a grade, but I do my best to be fair here as well. (I typically assign all my students a preliminary mark and then review the bunch to check for consistency. After all, I tend to be more cheerful after supper than before it...and, who knows, my mood may affect my judgement.)

My complaint, though, is not with the urgent pile of marking on my desk, but with the whole system of marking, and the orientation it encourages. The problem is that competition for marks misses the main thing. Though top marks might help a student get into grad school, in all likelihood once they have a job, nobody will care. Pursue learning, strive to do your personal best, and the marks will follow. Pursue marks, and you run the risk of missing an education.

The spirit of competition that a misguided focus on grades can foster is the dark side of the force. It may lead to better results on your transcripts, but it does so by feeding on your soul. (If I seem unusually passionate about this it is because I struggle with the same problem, and need to be reminded periodically that the life of an academic--in any Christian sense--is not about status, publishing the most books or articles, or being--egad!--popular.) Christians are called to outdo one another in showing honour and to leave no debt outstanding except the continued debt to love one another.

The only positive kind of competition, then, is with yourself. Back in December I listened to an interview with Richard Carnegie (scroll down to page 8 in this pdf), a double bass player whose Youtube video won him a trip to play in the 2011 YouTube Symphony Orchestra at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Toward the end of the interview, Carnegie was asked what he thought of his chances of winning. He replied by saying something like, "I don't really know. All I'm really concerned about is improving my own performance, not ranking myself in comparison with others."

I can't find the interview online, but here is Richard's winning audition video:

The Good Gentiles of Romans Chapter 2: Hypothetical, Christian, or God-Fearers?

2011-03-17T09:10:00.001-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

Dr. Tim Stabell will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "The Good Gentiles of Romans Chapter 2: Hypothetical, Christian, or God-Fearers?"

This will be the last colloquium of the year, so please join us on Friday, March 18 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Winter Reflections

2011-03-12T21:28:00.000-06:00

I laughed outright when someone told me--before we moved--that Saskatchewan winters last six months. But sure enough, we've had snow on the ground since the beginning of November, if my memory serves, which means we are now well into month five.

I took the photos of our driveway this afternoon. The temperature: - 10 celsius.

We're supposed to have highs above freezing starting tomorrow, but I'll be surprised if the snow is all gone before April.

To be fair, this has been a long and cold winter even by Saskatchewan standards, and we've never had this much snow in the seven years we've lived here.

Speech Recognition FAIL

2011-03-10T11:16:00.000-06:00

I purchased Nuance Software's Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition program last month in an effort to streamline the process of creating course content for a new Distance Learning course on the book of Acts. I began recording my in-class lectures during the fall when I abandoned the idea of preparing full written notes while the course was in session. In theory, the recordings will help me get back into the moment of teaching and think about how to fill out my terse lecture notes. But who wants to listen to themselves talk for hours on end? Why not let today's technology transcribe the lectures for me? Answer: Today's technology is not up to the task. Here are the results from an experiment on a recording of a class on Acts 20:

First, my lecture notes:

Set up this section: Gaventa points out that this is an “extended account of life within the believing community” (276).

The significance of the itineraries “may lie in the consolidation of believers in a number of locations” (292).
Only pastoral speech to a Christian audience in Acts in the middle of the section.

Really important for my own attempt to peer over the shoulders of Luke’s audience: What about Acts is supposed to form the audience and what just describes the past? …Here we have a picture of church life.

Second, my own transcription of the first two minutes of the recording (where it is obvious why I don't like to listen to myself talk):

And what we’ve got in uh this section—So the first slide is trying to capture what what Gaventa said about this section that here is a concentrated section punctuated with travel narratives that talks about life in the church. So there’s not a lot of evangelism going on. Paul is spending time with churches. Um. And that I think is significant. Gaventa—this is interesting—suggests that the itineraries uh may be significant in that they consolidate the believers in a variety of different places. And there’s this really emotional meeting with churches in places where we haven’t even seen Paul spend time. And um so a sense of unity in the church and then right in the middle of the section you have the only pastoral speech in Acts where uh there’s an extended speech addressed to a Christian audience. This is uh important for me because as we’ve been going through Acts this time one of the main things that I’ve been interested in is trying to reflect on the question, “What what is Luke presenting that he thinks is maybe an ideal for the earliest church and what does he think is a model or what does he think is typical uh for the church in his own day? And I’m guessing, I guess, uh that this section is one of the the clearest windows, the most transparent windows onto the church in uh Luke’s own days, and and so what Paul is saying to the church, to the Ephesian elders, is presumably the types of things that that would be straightforward what Luke thinks church leaders in his own day should grab onto. And and so the types of things that he says can be maybe an interpretive key, a hermeneutical key...

And here is what Nuance came up with (notice the references to juice, a "policy research zone", Windows and zombies):

What we've got in this section so the first that talks about life church as it is unlikely with your juice and that I think is significant event. It is interesting suggests that the itineraries may be significant in that they consolidate the believers in a variety of different places in this is really emotional eating with churches and places were not and is a unity in the church and in right in the middle of the section you have the only pastoral speech in acts where it is an extended speech addressed to a Christian audience. This is important for me because as remain going through this on the meaning is done? Let us was median. I feel further policy research zone and I'm guessing I guess that this section is one of the the there is Windows the most transfer windows onto the church and the zombies and someone the types of things that that would be straightforward. What do things try to capture ...

For the record, the program worked great when I tried dictating clearly and deliberately into a microphone headset, but $100 is a lot to spend for a dictation program that I will seldom use. The idea sounds (and looks) nice:

...but unfortunately, I generally need to write down what I want to say before I say it. The thought of composing orally in complete sentences is as big a mental block as a blank screen. So here's hoping Nuance's 30 day money-back guarantee works as promised!

On the positive side, having to listen to my lectures again may help me improve my public speaking.

Academic Freedom and Teaching in a Christian Post-Secondary Context

2011-02-28T20:22:00.000-06:00

Blog posts are always work in progress: In my previous post I was thinking exclusively of research, academic writing, and intellectual environment. I should add that there are all sorts of factors that affect what I say in class (and, to some extent, what I post on my blog). The most important of these are students and the school's mission. According to Briercrest's home page,

Briercrest College and Seminary is a community of rigorous learning that calls students to seek the kingdom of God, to be shaped profoundly by the Scriptures, and to be formed spiritually and intellectually for lives of service.

I aim to help my students cultivate a robust faith that combines the kind of critical thinking that a university is supposed to strive for, and a responsiveness to God that is at the heart of the Christian tradition. The point is not to tear down--much less to be "an incubator of evil"--but to build up. As Thomas H. Benton (aka William Pannapacker) put it not too long ago, to steer "students away from self-gratification, materialism, and worldly ambition toward a purity of purpose sustained by cultivation of the intellect, discipline, and cheerful self-denial."

It is common, I think, for first year university students to be more interested in answers than in learning to think through questions. A Christian context adds an additional twist in that some students suppose that critical thinking and spiritual formation are opposed to each other. Questions can be threatening. If I can't wed the two or demonstrate the practical relevance of what I am teaching, I risk losing my students.

So because I want to begin by reaching my students where they are at, and because there is a positive goal of contributing to students' formation, there are limits on a say-whatever-you-like version of academic freedom. But, again, it is a voluntary restriction and, arguably, richer for having a shared purpose. And, of course, there are similar restrictions on the academic freedom of "secular" university teachers. In a non-confessional university context, for example, I would not have the same freedom to talk openly about the practical significance, for Christians, of Christian Scripture, or to discuss how one can live Christianly with the difficult questions that academic study sometimes raises.

Doctrinal Statements, Academic Freedom and the CAUP

2011-02-26T15:43:00.003-06:00

As other Canadian bloggers have noted, the Canadian Association of University Teachers has taken it upon themselves to investigate Christian universities which require faculty to sign a doctrinal statement. According to this National Post article, CAUT claims that "An institution that includes or excludes teachers on basis of a faith test is antithetical to what a university is supposed to be" and that it wants to let the public know the "realities of the institution." This is obviously a witch hunt. Although no one at the universities in question has complained, CAUT appears to take it as a foregone conclusion that the academic freedom of scholars is necessarily compromised if they teach at faith-based institutions which require adherence to a doctrinal statement, that financial pressures keep them from doing even-handed work, and that, as a result, their scholarship may be presumed to be of doubtful quality.

Ironically, CAUT's position appears to rest on a predetermined conclusion that doctrinal statements force employees to reach predetermined conclusions. As James McGrath put it last week, signing a doctrinal statement "essentially forces you to choose between following the evidence where it leads and keeping your job" (see the comment thread for additional nuancing). What CAUT has apparently not done is inquire whether this is a necessary function of a doctrinal statement.

For my part, I don't find that a Christian confession has the effect of specifying which conclusions one is or is not allowed to reach. I view the creed, or doctrinal statement, or what have you, as a framework, a starting point, part of the preunderstanding that everyone necessarily brings with them when they encounter a text. Update: I've tried to discuss how this can work in relation to Historical study of the Bible here.

I am required to affirm a doctrinal statement every year. If I could not agree with the doctrinal statement I would not have applied for the job. If I ever stop agreeing with it, my job will be on the line. The decision was and is voluntary. Some institutions may brandish their doctrinal statements or hire an underground thought police; mine does not. I do not think that, in my day-to-day work, adherence to a statement of faith determines the outcome of careful investigation any more than other social, financial and other pressures may prejudice the work of scholars in "secular" institutions.

Update: See part 2 here.

Wright and Sanders on First Century Jews

2011-02-25T16:12:00.002-06:00

I've commented before that I think N.T. Wright's portrayal of first-century Judaism is "a flawed historical model moulded to serve a theological purpose," and I've tried to rehabilitate the Pharisees (here and here). This may only mean that I am more influenced by Sanders than I am by Wright. At any rate, the contrast between the two is stark. Consider the following examples:

N.T. Wright:

The Gospels thus also tell the story of corruption within Israel itself, as the people who bear the solution have themselves become (with terrible irony that causes Paul to weep every time he thinks of it) a central part of the problem. The Pharisees are offering an interpretation of Torah which pursues a kind of holiness but only makes matters worse. The priests in the temple are offering the sacrifices which should speak of God's grace but which instead speak of their own exclusive and corrupt system. The revolutionaries try to get in on the act of God's in-breaking kingdom (Matthew 11:12), but their attempt to fight violence with violence can only ever result in a victory for violence, not a victory over it. This means that the death of Jesus, when it comes, is bound to be seen as the work not only of the pagan nations but of the Israel that has longed . . . to become "like all the nations" (1 Samuel 8:5, 20) and now is reduced to saying that it has no king but Caesar (John 19:15). - N.T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (IVP, 2006), 80-81.

(Wright is describing what he takes to be the portrayal of the Gospels, but it appears that he agrees with it.)

E.P. Sanders:

The various actors in the period that we have surveyed are often the objects of moral censure. We shall understand them better if we view them sympathetically. I rather like the chief priests. I think that on the whole they tried hard and did better at staving off revolt and protecting the Jewish population from Roman troops than any other group could have done -- except a succession of Herods. . . . I rather like the Pharisees. They loved detail and precision. They wanted to get everything just right. I like that. They loved God, they thought he had blessed them, and they thought that he wanted them to get everything just right. I do not doubt that some of them were priggish. This is a common fault of the pious, one that is amply displayed in modern criticism of the Pharisees. . . . Mostly, I like the ordinary people. They worked at their jobs, they believed the Bible, they carried out the small routines and celebrations of the religion: they prayed every day, thanked God for his blessings, and on the sabbath went to the synagogue, asked teachers questions, and listened respectfully. What could be better? - E.P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE - 66 CE (SCM, 1992), 493-4.

My question: Do the Gospels present the Chief Priests, Pharisees and rebels as corrupt for the reasons Wright cites, or is it--as Sanders has argued elsewhere--a case of solution to plight? In other words, the main thing the Gospels find wrong with the Chief Priests and Pharisees is not their piety (or hypocrisy) but their rejection of the Messiah.

"Don't Do as the Romans Do": Anti-Assimilation and Old Testament Narrative in Revelation

2011-02-23T10:30:00.002-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

Luke Johnson will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "'Don't Do as the Romans Do': Anti-Assimilation and Old Testament Narrative in Revelation."

Luke graduated from Briercrest College in 20078 with a BA in Biblical Studies. He is currently pursuing an MA in Theological Studies (New Testament) at Briercrest Seminary, and working as Briercrest's assistant webmaster. (Luke is also the composer of a fantastic Reconstructed Koine Alphabet Song.) Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the paper!

Please join us on Friday, February 25 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Update: Luke has posted a description of the paper and a link to the full text on his blog: νόες σχεδίων.

Responding to Bart Ehrman

2011-02-21T20:34:00.002-06:00

Since Misquoting Jesus, at least, bestselling author Bart Ehrman has framed his popular-level books around his own journey from fundamentalism to agnosticism. The narrative implies that agreeing with Ehrman's arguments will lead naturally to the abandonment of one's faith. It is no wonder, then, that Ehrman is public enemy #1 for some evangelical apologists. He even gets free publicity in the form of a website, the Ehrman Project, that is dedicated to refuting him.

In his critical review of the Ehrman Project, Bob Cargill points out that "most of Ehrman’s textual arguments are essentially the well-established and long-accepted consensus views of just about every worthwhile critical biblical scholar not teaching at a Christian university, seminary, or school with the word “Evangelical” in the title," and that "the criticism of Dr. Ehrman (and the larger academy by proxy) is largely being done by a small number of vocal scholars at very conservative seminaries at the behest of a campus minister and a religion major who didn’t like their faith challenged by critical scholarship."

I confess that I have not done more than look around at the Ehrman Project, but I suspect Cargill has a point. In the field of textual criticism, at least, Ehrman is a first-rate scholar whose methods are widely accepted across the theological spectrum. I would simply like to add that--in regards to textual criticism, at least--the theological spectrum includes evangelicals.

I've had a lot of respect for Ehrman's stature as a textual critic ever since Ehrman and his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was mentioned positively in a graduate course in textual criticism that I took at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I regularly require my Greek Exegesis students to read an essay by Ehrman that I regard as an excellent introduction to textual criticism. I read Misquoting Jesus when it first came out and, though I disagreed with some of his examples, I was impressed by how conventional most of the content was. The only (?) really sensational bit was the anti-Christian autobiographical spin. Far from prompting me to question my faith, however, Ehrman's anti-testimony struck me as a sad parable about the dangers of a view of Scripture so narrow and rigid that it is unable to handle the evidence about the transmission of the biblical text.

It seems to me that the best response to a scholar like Ehrman is not to attempt to marginalize or denigrate his scholarship but to counter the story by showing that the practice of textual criticism need not threaten one's faith. The scholars involved in the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog do an excellent job on this score.

Note that since the only popular level work by Ehrman that I have read is Misquoting Jesus, my comments only relate to what Ehrman has to say about textual criticism.

Sympathizing with Augustine

2011-02-20T20:23:00.001-06:00

Among the just-plain-fun parts of reading Augustine's Confessions are the insights into the life of a 4th century academic. Complaints about students, for example, are apparently universal, though the particulars vary from age to age:

"I began to be busy about the task of teaching the art of rhetoric for which I had come to Rome. I first gathered some pupils at my lodging, and with them and through them I began to be known. I quickly discovered that at Rome students behaved in a way which I would never have had to endure in Africa. Acts of vandalism, it was true, by young hooligans did not occur at Rome; that was made clear to me. But, people told me, to avoid paying the teacher his fee, numbers of young men would suddenly club together and transfer themselves to another tutor, breaking their word and out of love of money treating fairness as something to be flouted." (5.22)

And teaching demands left little time to pursue the big questions:

"I myself was exceedingly astonished as I anxiously reflected how long a time had elapsed since the nineteenth year of my life, when I began to burn with a zeal for wisdom, planning that when I had found it I would abandon all the empty hopes and lying follies of hollow ambitions. And here I was already thirty, and still mucking about in the same mire in a state of indecision. . . . There is no time for reading. Where should we look for the books we need? Where and when can we obtain them? From whom can we borrow them? Fixed times must be kept free, hours appointed, for the health of the soul. . . . Why do we hesitate to knock at the door which opens the way to all the rest? Our pupils occupy our mornings; what should we do with the remaining hours? Why do we not investigate our problem? But then when should we go to pay respects to our more influential friends, whose patronage we need? When are we to prepare what our students are paying for? When are we to refresh ourselves by allowing the mind to relax from the tension of anxieties?" (6.18).

Tweet, Tweet

2011-02-16T15:47:00.002-06:00

What does one do with blog-related thoughts that are not developed enough to be blog worthy? My answer used to be Facebook, but I've decided to experiment with Twitter as an additional venue.

I use 'experiment' advisedly: I don't get the lingo yet, and, since I can't keep up with my own blog feed, I don't expect to have time to engage meaningfully in the conversations that Twitter is supposed to encourage. We'll see.

In the meantime, you can now 'follow' me on Twitter @ntdmiller.

Tweet tweet!

Christ Imagery in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

2011-02-13T23:35:00.003-06:00

We took a break the other night to watch Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the "Best Picture of 1936" according to the National Board of Review. It's a charming comedy and, as is frequently the case in classic movies, good acting compensates for the lack of special effects. My enjoyment was enhanced by an added dimension missing from the Wikipedia plot summary and rarely discussed in detail elsewhere:

Parents: The first clue--I missed it--is that the names of Longfellow (Gary Cooper) Deeds's parents are apparently Mary and Joseph. (In his excellent detailed review, Tim Dirks calls this "an unusual Christ-like reference.")
Betrayal and Crucifixion: Longfellow proves himself surprisingly shrewd, with the exception of "Babe" Bennett (Jean Arthur), a New York reporter who gains his confidence in order to "crucify" him in the local press.
Disciples: In addition to Babe, Longfellow's converts include his initially sceptical troubleshooter and, perhaps, his men-servants, whom Longfellow prohibits from kneeling before him. He'll put on his own shoes, thank you very much.
(Virtually) Sinless life and Gospel Message: According to the corrupt lawyer who wants to manage Longfellow's new-found wealth, Longfellow is "naive as a child." Babe declares, "You're much too real." Ironically, Longfellow said much the same thing to Babe. I conclude that Longfellow's gospel message is égalité, fraternité, et realité. Salvation, as one would expect, is through romantic love.
Cleansing the Temple: Longfellow hosts a reception for the opera, and then turns them out "bodily."
Feeding of the Multitude: After an encounter with a homeless man, Longfellow decides to give away his fortune to provide a new start for down-and-out farmers. He orders his aide to provide sandwich lunches for the 2,000 men waiting to register for the program.
Arrest and Imprisonment: To stop Longfellow, the lawyer arranges to have him arrested on the charge of insanity. He is imprisoned briefly in a mental hospital.
Trial: At his insanity trial, Longfellow says nothing in his defense ...until, of course, Babe professes her love and the whole thing turns around. Longfellow, it turns out, is the only truly sane (=real) person in the courtroom.

Sappy, to be sure, but more fun than I've made it sound.

Note: There is a 2002 remake starring Adam Sandler and Winona Ryder, which had a budget of $50 million and received a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 21%. My advice: Watch the original, which cost under $1 million, and won Frank Capra a second Academy Award for best director.

Other general discussions of Christ imagery in Frank Capra movies may be found here, here and here.

I-Monk on the Suburban Jesus

2011-01-27T13:28:00.000-06:00

I've been reading excerpts from this rant by the late Michael Spencer to my Gospels students ever since I came across it a few years ago, and thought it would be worth sharing here:

I am just amazed at why anyone would want to be involved with Jesus unless you were convinced that what Jesus said, Jesus taught and Jesus did was the truth. I cannot understand why someone wants to be involved with Jesus if they don’t either intend to believe and emulate Jesus or at least encourage, assist and applaud those who do. Taking the Christian label and then acting like Jesus was someone from whom we should never take advice or example is incomprehensible.

I used to get paid by large churches to tell their kids all about Jesus, get them into Bible studies and take them on mission trips- which I choose to be in the inner cities of Chicago and Boston, not the beach. The basic assignment was actually to keep these kids out of drugs, jail and pregnancy so they could go to college, make lots of money and pursue the lifestyles of rich Americans while attending large prosperous megachurches.

I figured this out early on, but I kept telling myself it wasn’t the case. I thought that if one of those kids becomes a serious Jesus revolutionary, going among the poor, giving up the suburban lifestyle, my churches would have applauded.

Then, a few years ago, a church kid from Minnesota came to talk to me. She’d been out of college for a few years, had come to Appalachia to teach English, then taught and coached at our school for a while, after which she took off for Africa for a couple of years. She brought me a letter from her parents where they told her what they thought about her life.
...
In this letter, the parents honestly said what they thought of this girl. They thought she was nuts. The called all the ministries she worked for abusive, slave labor operations. They begged her to come home, take her college degree into the city and make some money, get a house in the suburbs and find a husband with wealth and security.
...
Hey, I understand what parents go through. I feel their pain. I really do. But that letter told me, once and for all, that I had been right all those years ago, and I’m still on target today when I feel this way. Suburban Christianity is frequently not about an honest following of Jesus. It’s about an edited, reworked Jesus who blesses the American way of life and our definition of normal and happy.

It’s Jesus the sponsor of our beautiful church. It’s Jesus the bus driver of the ticket to heaven. It’s Jesus the guy who wants us to be nice to children. It’s Jesus who presides over all kinds of niceness.

...[I]f we don’t really believe Jesus is the one for whom we sell it all to buy the pearl of great price, what’s the point?

I also know my own answer. Learn to know the virtues of relative poverty. Learn to see poverty as Jesus and the saints saw it. Keep real poor people in view. Keep real poor churches in mind. Don’t listen to the broadcasted, published propaganda of the suburban Jesus. Read the sermon on the mount. Remember that Jesus is a true revolutionary, and those who want Jesus but reject the revolution always have a nice slide show and plenty of facts and figures.

Grading Class Participation

2011-01-24T19:06:00.001-06:00

I've never been completely satisfied with the ways I have tried calculating class participation in the past, so I decided to look around a little bit before deciding on an approach for this semester's seminar. Everyone seems to agree that it is complicated. For instance, how many contributions in a class session count as an "A"? Do you assign a 0 if someone doesn't participate verbally at all? How do absences factor in? How does one distinguish between quality and quantity . . . on the fly? Obviously, I don't want everyone vying for participation. And I don't want to unfairly penalize students who are clearly engaged but who aren't as loquacious.

For these reasons, I tend not to assign a separate mark for class participation. (And I've had experiences in the past where I've assigned, say, 15% for class participation because it is important, only to realize at the end of the semester that I didn't keep track well enough to hand out a meaningful mark. In such cases, strong memories of positive or lacking contributions may affect the mark, but in general class participation works out to the student's average in their other assignments. This sort of "fudge factor" grading is obviously not ideal.)

In a small 4th year seminar, however, creating an ethos of community participation is vital; learning to contribute thoughtfully to high level discussions is part of the point of the course. In this context, assigning a grade for participation, however small, is important and makes sense.

But how does one do it efficiently and fairly? Here are a couple suggestions from an article and comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"If they are actively participating every day, they get a perfect score. While active participation is easiest to measure by those students who speak in class and contribute to discussions, I also consider those who are clearly following the conversation and being thoughtful about it. If you don’t regularly participate in class, your score drops. Those who never participate in class but have perfect attendance will end up with a score around 60-70%." - Brian Croxall
"A person who comes to every class but never contributes earns a 50. A person who contributes to every class but never says anything of value–working for that tick mark–gets a 75. I tell shy students who protest that they don’t “like” to talk that I am certain they have classmates who don’t “like” to take exams or write papers. Don’t like the policy, don’t take the course. I send around a clipboard at the end of class for students to claim their participation and I keep weekly records. This all translates into real grades–not quite a bell curve, but stand outs and freeloaders earning their As and Ds, with various shades of B and C for most." - englishwlu (scroll down to the comments); profe1 in the same thread recommends a mid-semester self-evaluation.

Good suggestions, but lacking in detail. I'm tempted to adopted this rubic by Adam Chapnick or perhaps this one by John Immerwahr.

I'm curious. What have you found that works well? (Both student and teacher perspectives are welcome!)

Briercrest Writes

2011-01-24T13:40:00.001-06:00

Whatever I might say in general about the cancerous state of contermporary academic publishing, I am genuinely enthusiastic about the publications of my colleagues at Briercrest College and Seminary . . . and 2010 was a particularly good year for Briercrest authors:

My NT colleague, Marty Culy, saw the publication of his Ph.D. dissertation:

Culy, Martin M. Echoes of Friendship in the Gospel of John. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010.

...as well as a handbook on Luke, co-authored with Mikeal Parsons and Josh Stigall:

Culy, Martin M., Mikeal C. Parsons, and Joshua J. Stigall. Luke: A Handbook on the Greek Text. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010.

Eric Ortlund also published his dissertation, a steal of a deal at $118.76:

Ortlund, Eric. Theophany and Chaoskampf: The Interpretation of Theophanic Imagery in the Baal Epic, Isaiah, and the Twelve. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2010.

Charles Hackney's Martial Virtues: Lessons in Wisdom, Courage, and Compassion from the World's Greatest Warriors (Rutland, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2010) has already been published in Italian and is about to come out in French translation.

And from Blayne Banting we had Take Up and Preach (Xulon Press, 2010).

Finally, my colleague Susan Wendel's published dissertation, Scriptural Interpretation and Community Self-Definition in Luke-Acts and the Writings of Justin Martyr (NovT Supp. 139; Leiden: Brill, 2011) is scheduled to appear in February.

Well done, one and all!

Mental Health and the Goal(s) of Sanctification

2011-01-20T10:42:00.001-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

Dr. Charles Hackney, Associate Professor of Psychology at Briercrest College, will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of this year's Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "Mental Health and the Goal(s) of Sanctification." Please join us tomorrow, Friday, January 21 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

A culture of rigor and higher education...in Saskatchewan

2011-01-18T09:43:00.001-06:00

Two recent pieces from the Chronicle of Higher Education intersect in interesting ways with my own teaching context. The first is about the challenge of recruiting international students to Canadian Universities:

"Usher....notes that emerging demographic challenges are particularly great in Canada’s Atlantic provinces and Saskatchewan. 'Here, the choice is not between a cheap-to-recruit domestic student worth $12,000 vs. a hard-to-recruit international student worth $16,000 – it’s an international student or nothing. For schools off the beaten path, it’s often easier to recruit students from Thailand than from Toronto.'"

The second reviews a new book that "makes a damning indictment of the American higher-education system":

"In the statistical analysis that sums up their book, they identify two significant college-level variables. First, all else equal, students' CLA [Collegiate Learning Assessment] scores are more likely to improve if they report that faculty members at their college have high expectations. Second, students' scores are more likely to improve if they say they have taken at least one writing-intensive course and at least one reading-intensive course in the previous semester.

It might sound trite, Mr. Arum says, but those observations boil down to the lesson that colleges must find ways to build cultures of academic rigor. He says that task is something that each campus will need to do for itself."

This made me glad that Briercrest included "rigor" as part of our mission statement:

"Briercrest College and Seminary is a community of rigorous learning that calls students to seek the kingdom of God, to be shaped profoundly by the Scriptures, and to be formed spiritually and intellectually for lives of service."

Of course, articulating a mission and living the reality are two different things. To be sure, we are still in progress. But I'd like to think the kind of writing assignments we routinely require of our students goes some way toward addressing the concerns raised in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Bonhoeffer on Asceticism

2011-01-16T19:48:00.000-06:00

"If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. . . . Any objection that asceticism is wrong, and that all we need is faith, is quite beside the point; it is cruel to suggest such a thing, and it is no help to us at all. When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, from chapter 16.

Augustine on Friendship

2011-01-12T20:34:00.000-06:00

"There were other things which occupied my mind in the company of my friends: to make conversation, to share a joke, to perform mutual acts of kindness, to read together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to disagree though without animosity--just as a person debates with himself--and in the very rarity of disagreement to find the salt of normal harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with impatience for those absent, to welcome them with gladness on their arrival. These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved and are expressed through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand gestures of delight, acting as fuel to set our minds on fire and out of many to forge unity." - Augustine, Confessions, 4.13 (Henry Chadwick trans.; Oxford World Classics, 1998).

Second Semester Schedule

2011-01-06T14:55:00.000-06:00

MONDAY	TUESDAY	WEDNESDAY	THURSDAY	FRIDAY
8:00 – 9:15 Gospels		8:00 –9:15 Gospels		9:00 – 12:00 Advanced Studies in New Testament Literature
9:30 – 10:30 Office Hour


			1:30 – 2:30 Office Hour

	4:00 – 5:15 Hermeneutics		4:00 – 5:15 Hermeneutics

With all that blank space in the middle, it doesn't really look that busy, does it? Well...

A commonplace update

2011-01-04T16:51:00.001-06:00

I've been wondering whether I should revert to my original description of גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב as

"A commonplace book containing items of interest to a biblical studies professor at a confessional Christian college. My voice will only intervene in the event I have something to say."

I do have notes here and there that might eventually materialize as substantive posts, but at the moment reading about prophecy and preparing for what will be another busy semester takes priority--and feels more satisfying. Also at t.'s recommendation we have resolved to take a "writing date"* three evenings a week this semester. The procedure is simple: Put s. to bed, set up mood lighting, prepare snacks, turn off the internet, and sit for an hour working uninterrupted on our respective projects. The result so far is less time for blogging, but measurable progress on an article I thought I would have to shelve until the school year is done (because I don't have time). It is also refreshing and, in its own way, fun.

*The idea comes from this excellent column by Rachel Toor.

In other news, today is the one year anniversary of my mom's seizure.

On Hallowing God's Name

2010-12-28T20:48:00.001-06:00

"The purpose of Israel's existence is to sanctify God's name, that is, to attest to His existence, to publicize His oneness, and to advertise His greatness, by worshipping Him and by keeping His laws. Their failure to do so has the opposite effect: His name is profaned, that is, His fame is diminished and His reputation tarnished." - Baruch J. Schwartz in The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford, 2004), 262.

The quotation suits the Lord's Prayer to a T, but Schwartz is commenting on Leviticus 22:31-33:

You shall faithfully observe My commandments: I am the LORD. You shall not profane My holy name, that I may be sanctified [= "hallowed"] in the midst of the Israelite people -- I the LORD who sanctify you, I who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God, I the LORD. (NJPS)

An advent reflection: divorce, first-century politics, and the kingdom of God

2010-12-24T16:58:00.004-06:00

Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?" 4 He answered, "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' 5 and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 7 They said to him, "Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?" 8 He said to them, "It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery." (Matt 19:3-9 NRSV; cf. 5:31-32)

When Jesus' prohibition of divorce comes up in my first year Gospels course, we normally look at the relevant NT passages and discuss contemporary implications. Never, as far as I recall, have we turned to Matthew's account of the birth of Jesus and the slaughter of the innocents. Perhaps this is because the Pharisees' question about divorce "for any cause" is typically interpreted in the context of a well-known legal debate between the schools of Hillel and Shammai about proper grounds for divorce. On this reading, Jesus the teacher is faced with the sort of practical legal questions that any religious teacher would encounter; the story functions to emphasize Jesus' wisdom and, perhaps, to inform Matthew's Christian audience.

A few weeks ago, however, as I listened to our pastor's advent sermon about John the Baptist, it occurred to me that the Pharisees' "test" resembles their later question--which Matthew calls a "trap"--about paying taxes to Caesar (Matt 22:15-22). By prohibiting divorce Jesus was aligning himself with John the Baptist who had been imprisoned for telling Herod Antipas that it was wrong for him to marry his brother's wife (Matt 14:3-4). Jesus and Matthew's audience knew well enough that John lost his head over the question (Matt 14:1-11). Divorce, no less than taxes, was a political hot potato in first-century Palestine.

Reading Jesus' teaching about divorce in this political context fits into a larger pattern within Matthew's Gospel that raises other implications in addition to the problem of divorce in contemporary society: The kingdom Jesus announces and embodies regularly threatens the political status quo. It is an upside down kingdom where the great among you must be your servant, where "the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many" (20:26-28). It is a kingdom of peace rather than the sword, but it is not merely a "spiritual" kingdom--the king has at his disposal "more than twelve legions of angels" (26:53). No wonder Herod the Great was frightened at the announcement of one born King of the Jews (2:2)! No wonder Herod's son, Antipas, wanted to put him to death (14:5).

Hibernation

2010-12-17T22:27:00.002-06:00

The semester's grades are in as of this evening. Early Sunday I leave for a few days' visit with my parents. (Almost a year after her seizure, my mom is still in hospital.) Weather permitting, I'll be back in time for Christmas. Then it's the rush of reading to prepare for the winter semester. Blogging will have to wait until I have something to say and the energy to say it.

Right now what I'd really like to do is curl up in a hollow tree for the next five or six months and dream about spring.

Prophecy after the Prophets Syllabus

2010-12-04T10:22:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned earlier (here and here), I am teaching a seminar next semester on early Christian prophecy within its early Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. Here is a description from the course syllabus:

This course differs from other Biblical Studies courses in that it focuses on a theme rather than a specific text. However, it has the same goal of contributing to a deeper understanding of Scripture, for extended reflection on a specific theme invariably leads to a more careful, observant reading of passages in which the theme is found. The theme of prophecy is also important and fascinating in its own right. Questions we will consider this semester include the following:

What happened to prophecy between the Old and New Testaments? Did it cease only to be restored in the New Testament? Was it transformed or did it continue unchanged? What is the relationship between Old Testament prophecy and early Jewish apocalyptic literature (including the book of Revelation)?
Perceptions of past prophecy: How did early Jews and Christians interpret the written prophets? In what ways did respect for the “prophets” as Scripture shape how they viewed contemporary inspired experiences?
Future prophets: What role did prophets play in Jewish expectations of the future? How did early Jews and Christians understand Malachi’s prediction of the return of the prophet Elijah, and Deuteronomy’s prediction of a “prophet like Moses”?
Jesus the prophet: What sort of prophet was Jesus? How does the title “prophet” relate to the title “Messiah”?
Christian prophets in history: What role did Christian male and female prophets play in Paul’s churches? How would Christian prophecy have been viewed in comparison with Greco-Roman conceptions of prophecy? What was the experience of Christian prophecy?
Christian prophets and theology: Are all Christians prophets? What is the relationship between prophecy and tongues? What are the characteristics of Christian prophets? How are prophets different from apostles? Is Christian prophecy different from Old Testament prophecy?
True and False prophecy: What is the authority of Christian prophets? What does it mean for someone to speak for God? How does one distinguish between true and false prophecy?
What happened to prophecy after the New Testament?

As important as these questions are in themselves, they will also serve as an opening into other more general issues in the study of the New Testament, such as the relationship between the Old and New Testaments and between Christianity and the early Jewish milieu out of which it developed, the function of the Bible’s historical contexts, and the ways in which our own experiences affect what we perceive in Scripture. I hope that as we progress through the course we will become more convinced of the relevance of the topic for the church today, and increasingly sensitive to the continuing work of the living God.

This course will encourage the development of, and familiarity with, a diverse exegetical toolset. You will be challenged to hone your ability to analyse and evaluate scholarly arguments, to engage in constructive dialogue, and to present the results of your study persuasively, both in written form and orally in front of your peers.

If you'd like more information, you can download the college (BLST415) and seminary (BT829) versions of the syllabus on my website here.
________________________________
Any guesses what I'll be reading over Christmas break?

Keck on the Agony of Theological Education

2010-12-02T10:30:00.001-06:00

"One reason a modern theological education brings so much agony to the students is that they find the ramparts of faith on which they thought they were standing to be really the ruins of Christendom, and that the gospel actually summons them to a radical kind of faith for which they are scarcely prepared. They are in agony because no one has told them that believing and preaching the gospel in a world without Christendom means literally risking their lives. None of the things they had taken for granted, such as the authority of the Bible, the absoluteness of the gospel, the meaning of Jesus, and the work of the church can be taken for granted today, but must be avowed as decisions of faith. Students are pained because, in our day, learning more about the Bible, theology, Jesus, and the church does not make it easier for them to believe, but actually defines the borderline on which they must be willing to make a commitment in faith." - Leander Keck, Mandate to Witness: Studies in the Book of Acts (Judson Press, 1964), 107.

Ambition is the mother of all heresies

2010-11-28T14:49:00.000-06:00

John Calvin on Acts 20:30:

Therefore, ambition is the mother of all heresies. For the sincerity of the word of God doth then flourish when the pastors join hand in hand to bring disciples unto Christ, because this alone is the sound state of the Church, that he be heard alone; wherefore, both the doctrine of salvation must needs be perverted, and also the safety of the flock must needs go to nought, where men be desirous of mastership. And as this place teacheth that almost all corruptions of doctrine flow from the pride of men, so we learn again out of the same that it cannot otherwise be, but that ambitious men will turn away from right purity, and corrupt the word of God. For seeing that the pure and sincere handling of the Scripture tendeth to this end, that Christ alone may have the preeminence, and that men can challenge nothing to themselves, but they shall take so much from the glory of Christ, it followeth that those are corrupters of sound doctrine who are addicted to themselves, and study to advance their own glory, which doth only darken Christ. - John Calvin, Commentary on Acts, vol. 2 at CCEL.

HT: C.K. Barrett

Publish and Perish: Of Making Many Books

2010-11-25T22:43:00.001-06:00

A few years ago, I asserted that the blooming Biblical Studies publishing industry--with its multiplied commentary series--is a sign of cancer rather than health. No doubt my view has some connection to the fact that I have not yet published any books of my own. If I were a Ben Witherington III with a commentary on every NT book to my name, I would presumably have a higher opinion of the industry.

As time goes on, I grow more comfortable with differences in gifting and ability. Some folks have a way with words, seem naturally to be prolific, and to write things worth reading. How many average composers does it take to make a Tchaikovsky, about whose 1812 Overture he wrote ". . . I have written two works very quickly . . . . The overture will be very loud and noisy, but probably has no artistic merit, as I wrote it without either warmth or love"?

Biblical scholarship is not--or should not be--a competition. So more power to the Wrights' and the Goldingay's. Nevertheless, instead of a Chesterton, I would rather take as my ideal the late great C.F.D. Moule, who published his first book at 40. And I like this description of Canon John Sweet: "He was equally clear that there were too many books in the world; and accordingly he himself wrote sparingly, and only when he had something to say."

The forgiveness of sins in Luke-Acts

2010-11-18T22:13:00.000-06:00

When I issued my "lament for unanswered questions" last month, I had just read Jeremiah 31:34--"for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more"--and was reminded that for several years now I've wanted to think about what it would have meant for Jesus to forgive sins in a first century context. The question is somewhat embarrassing since forgiveness is so prominent in the Gospels, and because I used to think forgiveness of sins was the main thing about being a Christian. It doesn't help that most of my first year students assume that the meaning of passages like Luke 5:20 and 7:48 is obviously to show that Jesus is God. (Why couldn't the Pharisees understand?) To be sure, Luke's Christology is high indeed, and the passages emphasize the son of man's authority to forgive sins; Jesus acts on God's behalf.

My question, though, is not with Christology, but with why Jesus would forgive sins in the first place when there was a functioning cult center in Jerusalem that operated a system of atonement that had been established by God. Why forgive sins when this is what the Temple was for?

(1) E.P. Sanders, who has probably done more than anyone else to raise the question, concluded that the historical Jesus offered forgiveness without requiring repentance from the sinners he gathered around him. Unfortunately, Sanders does not help us with Luke's understanding of forgiveness because Luke is careful to emphasize that Jesus called sinners "to repentance" (5:32).

(2) John Howard Yoder connected the forgiveness of sins to Jesus' quotation from Isaiah 61 in Luke 4:18, and argued from allusions in Isaiah 61 to the year of Jubilee (Lev 25) that Jesus meant to inaugurate God's Jubilee. Announcing forgiveness is the Jubilee 'release' in action. See this post for more details on Jubilee imagery in the OT.

(3) N.T. Wright argues that Jesus believed the Temple's system of atonement was broken, and that forgiveness in Jesus' ministry means what it did in Jeremiah: return from exile. It's an interesting suggestion with a great deal of explanatory power when it comes to the New Testament, but--as I've suggested elsewhere--the idea that most Jews believed they were in exile is problematic.

Although I have been working around the question for a little while, I have not yet taken the time to work carefully through the theme of forgiveness in Luke-Acts, and I'm still puzzled. If you can point me to the answer, please do so!

The difference three years make

2010-11-16T20:11:00.003-06:00

The birthday girl (as of yesterday):

The birthday cake:

...and some things never change:

(For the sake of comparison, consider last year's photo.)

Why Christian schools don't need to worry about plagiarism

2010-11-16T11:30:00.001-06:00

...or not:

"I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

...

"I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked." - "Ed Dante", academic ghostwrier

Read the whole sad story here.

HT: Cheese-Wearing Theology

Prophecy after the Prophets: Draft Schedule and Reading List

2010-11-13T09:39:00.002-06:00

The syllabus for my BLST415 / BT829 Prophecy after the Prophets course is officially due a month from Monday, so ~~this draft list is probably pretty close to final, but~~ there is still time to make changes. Does the reading seem too heavy? Are there other, better readings that I should include? What am I missing? I welcome any and all feedback:

Part I: Biblical Prophecy and its Aftermath

Introduction // Old Testament Prophecy: An Overview (14 Jan)

Secondary Reading (27 pages): Petersen, David L. “Prophet, Prophecy.” Pages 622-648 in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Vol. 4. Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, ed. Nashville: Abingdon, 2009.

Primary Reading: 1 Kings 17-2 Kings 10; Jeremiah 1-4; Ezek 1-3; Amos

What Happened to Biblical Prophecy? Part I (21 Jan)

Secondary Reading (23 pages):

Wellhausen, Julius. “Chapter X: The Oral and the Written Torah.” Pages 392-410 in Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. Edinburgh: A&C Black, 1885. Repr. New York: Meridian, 1957. Online: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/phai/index.htm.

Cross, Frank Moore. “A Note on the Study of Apocalyptic Origins.” Pages 343-6 in Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Primary Reading: Isaiah 24-27; Daniel 7-12; Zechariah; 1 Enoch 1-16

What Happened to Biblical Prophecy? Part II (28 Jan)

Secondary Reading (58 pages):

Greenspahn, Frederick E. “Why Prophecy Ceased.” Journal of Biblical Literature 108.1 (1989): 37-49.

Sommer, Benjamin D. “Did Prophecy Cease? Evaluating a Reevaluation.” Journal of Biblical Literature 115.1 (1996): 31-47.

Grabbe, Lester L. “Thus Spake the Prophet Josephus . . . : The Jewish Historian on Prophets and Prophecy.” Pages 240-7 in Prophets, Prophecy, and Prophetic Texts in Second Temple Judaism. Michael H. Floyd and Robert D. Haak, eds. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 427. New York: T&T Clark, 2006.

Miller, David M. “Josephus and the προφηταί: Exploring the Non-Use of a Label.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Vancouver, BC, 3 June 2008.

Part II: Perceptions of Prophecy and Inspired Experience in Early Judaism

Perspectives on the Past and the Present (4 Feb)

Secondary Reading (52 pages):

Barton, John. Pages 96-140 (Chapter 3 “Prophets and their Message”) and 266-273 (Conclusion) in Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile. Repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Brooke, George J. “Prophecy.” Pages 694-700 in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls. L. Schiffman and J. VanderKam, eds. Vol. 2. Leiden: Brill, 2000.

Primary Reading: Excerpts from Josephus, Philo and Ben Sira

Reading the “Prophets” (11 Feb)

Secondary Reading (66 pages):

Barton, John. “Chapter 4: Modes of Reading the Prophets.” Pages 141-153 in Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile. Repr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Wendel, Susan. “Chapter One: Early Jewish Exegetes and Community Identity.” Pages 27-79 in “To Hear and Perceive: Scriptural Interpretation and Community Self-Definition in Luke-Acts and the Writings of Justin Martyr.” Ph.D., McMaster University, 2009.

Primary Reading: Habakkuk; 1QpHab

Eschatological Prophets (18 Feb)

Secondary Reading (77 pages):

Allison, Dale C. Pages 73-84 in The New Moses: A Matthean Typology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

Faierstein, Morris M. “Why Do the Scribes Say That Elijah Must Come First.” Journal of Biblical Literature 100 (1981): 75-86.

Allison, Dale C. “Elijah Must Come First.” Journal of Biblical Literature 103 (1984): 256-258.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “More about Elijah Coming First.” Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (1985): 295-296.

Barnett, P. W. “The Jewish sign prophets--A.D. 40-70--their intentions and origin.” New Testament Studies 27 (1981): 679-697.

Horsley, Richard A. “‘Like One of the Prophets of Old’ : Two Types of Popular Prophets at the Time of Jesus.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47 (1985): 435-463.

Primary Reading: Deut 13, 18, 34; Malachi 3-4; DSS and Josephus excerpts

Part III: Prophecy and Early Christianity

Prophecy and the Historical Jesus (25 Feb)

Secondary Reading: (59 pages)

Jeremias, Joachim. “The Return of the Quenched Spirit.” Pages 76-85 in New Testament Theology: Part One: The Proclamation of Jesus. London: SCM Press, 1971.

Wright, N.T. “Chapter 6: The Praxis of a Prophet.” Pages 147-195 in Jesus and the Victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.

Primary Reading: Luke 1-2

Prophecy and Luke-Acts Part I: Christology (4 Mar)

Secondary Reading: (48 pages)

Robinson, John A. T. “Elijah, John and Jesus: An Essay in Detection.” New Testament Studies 4 (1958): 263-281.

Croatto, J. Severino. “Jesus, Prophet Like Elijah, and Prophet-Teacher like Moses in Luke-Acts.” Journal of Biblical Literature 124.3 (2005): 451-465.

Kingsbury, Jack Dean. “Jesus as the ‘Prophetic Messiah’ in Luke’s Gospel.” Page 29-42 in The Future of Christology: Essays in Honor of Leander E. Keck. A. J. Malherbe and W. A. Meeks, eds. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993.

Primary Reading: Luke 1-4; 7; 9; 13:22-35; 16:16; 20:6; 22:63-71; 24; Acts 3:11-26; 7

Prophecy and Luke-Acts Part II: Christian Prophecy // Research Workshop (18 Mar)

Secondary Reading: (67 pages)

Aune, David E. “Chapter 8: The Character of Early Christian Prophecy.” Pages 189-231 in Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

Ellis, E. Earle. “The Role of the Christian Prophet in Acts.” Page 55-67 in Apostolic History and the Gospel: Biblical and Historical Essays Presented to F. F. Bruce on his 60th Birthday. W. Ward Gasque and Ralph P. Martin, eds. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. Online: http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/prophet_ellis.pdf

Stronstad, Roger. “The Prophethood of All Believers: A Synthesis.” Pages 114-124 in The Prophethood of All Believers: A Study in Luke’s Charismatic Theology. Journal of Pentecostal Studies Supplement. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.

Primary Reading: Acts 2:1-47; 11:27-30; 13:1-12; 15:1-41; 19:1-21; 21:1-16

Prophecy and Luke-Acts Part III & Prophecy in the Greco-Roman World (25 Mar)

Secondary Reading: (74 pages)

Moessner, David P. “‘The Christ Must Suffer’: New Light on the Jesus - Peter, Stephen, Paul Parallels in Luke-Acts.” Novum Testamentum 28.3 (1986): 220-256. (ATLAS)

Forbes, Christopher. “Chapter 11: Prophecy and Oracles in the Hellenistic World.” Pages 279-315 in Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment. WUNT 2/75. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995. Repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997.

Primary Reading: To be determined.

Paul and Prophecy Part I (1 Apr)

Secondary Reading: (52 pages)

Grudem, Wayne A. “Appendix 5: Why Christians Can Still Prophesy.” Pages 313-328 in The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today. Rev. ed. Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 2000.

Gillespie, Thomas W. “Chapter 4: Prophecy and Tongues (1 Corinthians 14:1-40).” Pages 129-164. The First Theologians: A Study in Early Christian Prophecy. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

Primary Reading: 1 Cor 11-14; 1 Thess 5

Paul and Prophecy Part II (8 Apr)

Secondary Reading: (55 pages)

Turner, Max. “Chapter 12: Prophecy in the New Testament.” Pages 185-220 in The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts in the New Testament Church and Today. Rev. ed. Peabody MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998

Moberly, R. W. L. “Chapter 7: Prophecy and Discernment Today?” Pages 221-239 in Prophecy and Discernment. Cambridge studies in Christian doctrine 14. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Primary Reading: 1 Cor 11-14; 1 Thess 5

Revelation and Beyond (12 Apr)
Primary Reading: Didache 9-16; Hermas, Mandate 11; Justin Dialogue 82.1-2; Tertullian, On the Soul 9.4; Eusebius, Ecclesiatical History 5.14-19

C.S. Lewis on the Learned Life

2010-11-10T09:00:00.000-06:00

This selection from "Learning in War-Time" is my last post from Lewis's wonderful collection of essays, C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949). Hopefully, it will whet your appetite to read the whole (short) thing:

"By leading that [learned] life to the glory of God I do not, of course, mean any attempt to make our intellectual inquiries work out to edifying conclusions. That would be, as Bacon says, to offer to the author of truth the unclean sacrifice of a lie. I mean the pursuit of knowledge and beauty, in a sense, for their own sake, but in a sense which does not exclude their being for God's sake. An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain. We can therefore pursue knowledge as such, and beauty, as such, in the sure confidence that by so doing we are either advancing to the vision of God ourselves or indirectly helping others to do so. Humility, no less than the appetite, encourages us to concentrate simply on the knowledge or the beauty, not too much concerning ourselves with their ultimate relevance to the vision of God. That relevance may not be intended for us but for our betters--for men who come after and find the spiritual significance of what we dug out in blind and humble obedience to our vocation." (49)

"The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. . . . [W]e may come to love knowledge--our knowing--more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar's life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived." (50)

"There are always plenty of rivals to our work....If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come." (52)

A Gospel for a New Nation: Once More, the ἔθνος of Matthew 21.43

2010-11-09T09:00:00.000-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

Dr. Wesley Olmstead will be presenting a paper on Friday as part of our 2010 Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series. The paper is entitled "A Gospel for a New Nation: Once More, the ἔθνος of Matthew 21.43." Please join us on Friday, November 12 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Wes will be presenting a revised version of the paper on November 20 at SBL in Atlanta as part of a session in memory of Graham Stanton.

The chief art of the teacher is to conceal himself

2010-11-08T13:43:00.001-06:00

Isaac Gross at The Ground Beneath Your Feet posted this quotation by John Stott on preaching the other day. I've been wondering how it might relate to teaching:

“The main objective of preaching is to expound Scripture so faithfully and relevantly that Jesus Christ is perceived in all his adequacy to meet human need. The true preacher is a witness; he is incessantly testifying to Christ. But without humility he neither can nor wants to do so. James Denney knew this, and had these words framed in the vestry of his Scottish church, ‘No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save.’ Something very similar was spoken by John Watson, the ‘Ian Maclaren’ who wrote the best-selling novel Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, ‘the chief effect of every sermon should be to unveil Christ, and the chief art of the preacher to conceal himself.’” - John W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 325.

Hmm...

My advice for improving airport security

2010-11-06T20:53:00.000-06:00

I was not surprised to hear that a disguised man made it onto an Air Canada flight from China without showing a photo ID. I had the same experience flying out of Toronto on Air Canada last month: Although my boarding pass was checked twice, no one in airport security or Air Canada checked my photo ID. (For the record, I wasn't wearing a mask.)

My simple advice for improving airport security: check photo ID.

Scooping the story or plying a craft

2010-11-03T21:47:00.001-06:00

The pit of anxiety when I'm writing (or thinking about the writing I'm not doing) signals something amiss. At times it is the worry that someone else will get there before I do, leaving nothing left to say for all my effort. More often it is the background chatter of imagined voices assigning praise or blame, or telling me I have finally arrived.

Perhaps the chatter is inevitable. One writes for an audience, after all, and recognizing the natural desire for approval is surely better than the self-deception that insists, "I didn't build it for me."

Still, the best one can do is ignore the "deadly poison of self-admiration" (or, for that matter, self-blame), for it is the siren cry of what Lewis calls the "Inner Ring" where vocation is reduced to a tool to be manipulated for personal advancement. It is much better to ply your craft for its own sake:

"The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. this group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ringer can ever have it." - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 65.

Perfect humility dispenses with modesty

2010-10-27T13:53:00.002-06:00

"[N]othing is so obvious in a child--not in a conceited child, but in a good child--as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. . . . Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures--nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment--a very, very short moment--before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex for ever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero's book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself" - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1949), 9.

Top Ten Books I Never Finished

2010-10-22T22:31:00.000-06:00

I usually ignore memes, but Dale Harris's recent list of "Top Ten Books I Never Finished" is too good to pass up:

"So here's my list of the top ten literary ghosts of my past, rattling their unfinished chains at me from the dusty corners of my bookshelf. What about you? Any books back there that you started with the best of intentions only to get bogged down and abandon somewhere between "Once upon a time" and "happily ever after"?"

So among the scores of unread books on my shelves, here's a list of ten that I have attempted and, for the most part, grudgingly replaced:

10. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. I began Don Quixote in high school because it was one of the books in our temporary residence, and a classic. I read enough to learn what quixotic means.

9. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan. I read the picture book as a child, but have never made it through the unabridged edition.

8. Modern Times, Paul Johnson. A gift from my uncle. I always thought I should finish it, until I realized that it is now a piece of history in its own right.

7. G. W. F. Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel. This collection from the writings of Hegel is, hands down, the most boring book I have ever attempted. Although I returned it to my bookshelf years ago, the bookmark is still in place.

6. Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Compared to Hegel, Gadamer is impossible to put down. Lots of good stuff here, and I hope to return to it someday. Book-mark in place, but back on the shelf for now.

5. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin. My failed dream of reading through Calvin's Institutes on his 500th anniversary is documented here. 600th anniversary, anyone?

4. Paul and Palestinian Judaism, E.P. Sanders. I read the first 238 pages (on rabbinic Judaism) as a requirement in grad school, and loved it. Someday I'd like to return to the final 400.

3. The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis. After two attempts, I decided the problem with this book was not mine: Lewis's apologetic is dated and not to my taste.

2. The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard. I could make a separate list of failures as read-aloud-before-bed books. Whatever his other merits, Wallace Dillard (as he is affectionately known in our household), does not write for the ear. This one is still on my night stand, but has been usurped by #1.

1. The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As I recall, I read through most of The Cost of Discipleship in Kenya in 1995, but left the country without the book with a few chapters still to go. I am now trying again....

The Afterlife of ‘Life’ and the Birth of Jewish Legalism

2010-10-20T09:00:00.000-06:00

A public service announcement for sojourners in Southern Saskatchewan:

Our 2010 Briercrest College and Seminary Bible and Theology Colloquium series kicks off on Friday with a paper by Dr. Martin Culy on "The Afterlife of ‘Life’ and the Birth of Jewish Legalism." Please join us on Friday, October 22 in room S113 @ 12:30 PM if you can make it out.

Marty will be presenting a revised version of the paper on November 17 at the ETS annual meeting in Atlanta.

A Lament for Unanswered Questions

2010-10-17T14:11:00.002-06:00

Teaching, grading and interacting with students to one side, preparation for current courses and work on active writing projects leaves little time to think about the Big Questions.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my current writing projects, and I hope they contribute in some small way to the larger scholarly issues of which they are a part.

The Big Questions I have in mind are central to my life as a Christian and embarrassingly basic. I am not concerned to find something new to say about them. I don't need to publish anything. I just want to resolve them to my own satisfaction.

In an effort to keep the questions on the table, I plan at least to introduce one or two of them here. Maybe someone will be able to point me to the answers...

Prophecy after the Prophets

2010-10-16T15:25:00.001-06:00

I will be offering an upper level seminar at Briercrest College and Seminary next semester on early Christian prophecy within its early Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts. The course will be cross-listed in the college as BLST415 Advanced Studies in New Testament Literature, and in the seminary as BT829 New Testament Specialty: Prophecy after the Prophets.

The questions we will consider include the following:

What happened to prophecy between the Old and New Testaments? Did it cease only to be restored in the New Testament? Was it transformed or did it continue unchanged? What is the relationship between Old Testament prophecy and early Jewish apocalyptic literature (including the book of Revelation)?
Perceptions of past prophecy: How did early Jews and Christians interpret the written prophets? In what ways did respect for the “Prophets” as Scripture shape how early Jews and Christians viewed contemporary inspired experiences?
Future prophets: What role did prophets play in Jewish expectations of the future? How did early Jews and Christians understand Malachi’s prediction of the return of the prophet Elijah, and Deuteronomy’s prediction of a “prophet like Moses”?
Jesus the prophet: What sort of prophet was Jesus? How does the title “prophet” relate to the title “Messiah”?
Christian prophets in history: What role, if any, did Christian prophets play in the transmission of the Jesus tradition? What role did Christian male and female prophets play in Paul’s churches? How would Christian prophecy have been viewed in comparison with Greco-Roman conceptions of prophecy?
Christian prophets and theology: Are all Christians prophets? What is the relationship between prophecy and tongues? What are the characteristics of Christian prophets? How are prophets different from apostles? Is Christian prophecy different from Old Testament prophecy?
What happened to prophecy after the New Testament?

I will post the syllabus when it is complete. (My next major task is deciding on the readings--the single most important part of designing a successful seminar. Any recommendations?)

The course is currently scheduled on Friday's between 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m., so you'll need to be in the Caronport area if you'd like to participate.

Bonhoeffer Thought for the Week

2010-10-03T20:29:00.002-06:00

"[H]e was in deadly earnest when he called for Christian action and self-sacrifice. This explains why Bonhoeffer always acted spontaneously, 'in hiding', frar from all publicity, and why he considered self-righteousness and complacency great sins against the Holy Spirit, and regarded ambition and vanity as the start of the road to hell." - G. Leibholz, "Memoir", p. 18 in The Cost of Discipleship (New York: MacMillan, 1959).

Good thing biblical scholars and theologians aren't motivated by ambition or vanity.

The Society of New Testament Literature (?)

2010-10-02T21:54:00.001-06:00

This is a good year for Luke-Acts scholars at the Society of Biblical Literature's Annual Meeting: I counted 4.5 sessions dedicated to the Book of Acts, the usual 2 sessions on the "Formation of Luke-Acts," and another 3 sessions dedicated entirely to the Gospel of Luke, for a total of 9.5 sessions--and that's not including papers in other sessions that happen to focus on Luke and/or Acts.

Is this because Luke-Acts remains a "storm-center in contemporary scholarship" to use the over-worked description that W. C. Van Unnik originally penned in the 1960's? Or is something out of balance here? (Or am I just jealous because I'm not going?)

For the sake of comparison, there are 6 sessions on Matthew, 4 on Mark, 3 on Isaiah (2 on the Formation of Isaiah; 1 on "Reading Isaiah as Christian Scripture"), 3 on Jeremiah, 2 on Genesis (if you include one on Christian readings of Genesis), 1 on Exodus. Notice a pattern? Of course, there are also plenty of sessions on various hermeneutical theories and approaches, but my guess is that a majority of text-based papers in these sessions focus on the NT.

Jerome Kodell on Salvation, Preaching and Community in Acts

2010-10-01T15:10:00.000-06:00

First, the gem: "In preaching the word, the believer is preaching his own life as lived in community, and the offer and challenge of faith is an offer of community."

The context (including several more gems):

"Salvation through Christ and life in the church is a complex mystery in Acts. Christianity is acceptance of the message that Jesus is Lord and Christ and adherence to him in personal faith. But acceptance of Christ and his message is still only a beginning. This act leads necessarily to baptism into a community, where believers share life together in κοινωνία [fellowship]. Because the church is missionary, this fellowship is not introverted, but opens out to the world under a mandate to witness to Christ by preaching the word to others by word and deed. Faith leads to community, community to witness. The circle is completed when the believer, having accepted the word through the church, takes the word to others as a member of the church.

"After the resurrection, the word of God is embedded in the Christian community. It lives in the church in a community of life with the believers. In preaching the word, the believer is preaching his own life as lived in community, and the offer and challenge of faith is an offer of community. Luke sees the word so bound up with community life and witness that he can say "The word of God grew" when the church adds new members."

- Jerome Kodell, “‘The Word of God grew’: The Ecclesial Tendency of Λόγος in Acts 1,7; 12,24; 19,20” Biblica 55 (1974): 505-519, here 518.

On Blogging

2010-09-29T09:34:00.001-06:00

Some interesting thoughts (by a blogger) about why young students and scholars should avoid blogging:

Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons

It's good advice for those who do blog too. In its immediacy, blogging can inhibit reflection.

Since I am obviously not following Blum's advice to avoid blogging altogether, I may as well mention that (1) Blum doesn't address the public service aspect of scholarship and (2) while I agree that peer review is important, I am more inclined to put whatever "new" ideas I have out there because I think that there is something fundamentally broken about the way the academic publishing system works (more on this, hopefully, another time). Or maybe it's because I see myself as a גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁב.

Here is another perspective mentioned in the comments to Blum's post: The Common School.

My Favourite Bonhoeffer Quotation

2010-09-26T23:03:00.000-06:00

"Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

The quotation demands a hearing precisely because Bonhoeffer was no supporter of the status quo. It reflects Bonhoeffer's experience running an underground seminary--actually an experiment in communal living--during the years leading up to World War II.

The Meaning of Ioudaios in Ancient Judaism

2010-09-23T10:54:00.001-06:00

Since it began as a series of posts on this blog--and since publishing events are still rare enough in my case--I thought I'd mention that my article, "The Meaning of Ioudaios and its Relationship to Other Group Labels in Ancient 'Judaism'" Currents in Biblical Research 9.1 (October 2010): 98-126 has now been published.

SAGE is offering free access to its journals until October 15, so if you'd like to peruse a free electronic copy, now is your chance. Click on this link for instructions.

I originally pitched the article as a revision and expansion of my December 2007 "What's in a Name?" blog series on the meaning and translation of the Greek term Ioudaios (normally translated 'Jew' or 'Judaean'). What emerged was something of a prequel. Here is the abstract:

This article, the first in a two-part series, describes and critically evaluates major contributions in the last seventy years of scholarship on the relationship between Ioudaios (‘Jew’ or ‘Judaean’) and other group labels. The first section examines the common suggestion that Ioudaios was an outsider label, and ‘Israel’ an insider label. The second section surveys explanations of the relationship between Ioudaios and other terms such as ‘Galilaean’, ‘Idumaean’ and ‘Ituraean’, evaluating them in light of the evidence from Josephus. The conclusion sketches the decline of religion and rise of ethnicity as interpretive categories in scholarship on Ioudaios, and raises questions about the meaning of the term that require further discussion. The second article in this series will analyse the use of religion and ethnicity in scholarship on the meaning of Ioudaios, and evaluate the debate over the term’s English translation.

My conclusions run counter to the positions of Richard Horsley and John H. Elliott, in particular:

(1) Elliott (2007: 153) has recently argued that since ancient Jews normally referred to themselves as ‘Israelites’ not Ioudaioi, modern scholarship should follow suit, adopting ‘Israelite’ as the normal scholarly designation for Jesus and his Second Temple ‘Israelite’ contemporaries. (2) Horsley (1995: 13) argues that since Ioudaios was closely associated with the region of Judaea and typically opposed to ‘Galilaean’, it should be translated as ‘Judaean’ rather than ‘Jew’. I will argue against Elliott that Ioudaios, like ‘Israelite’, was in use as an insider self-designation, and against Horsley that Josephus, at least, regarded Galilaeans as Ioudaioi. (100)

Part 2, which will interact more directly with the work of Shaye Cohen, Philip Esler, Steve Mason and others, is still in production, but you can get a sense for what I expect to say here.

A sarcastic Jesus?

2010-09-22T10:08:00.003-06:00

I was reading Mark 14 this morning and noticed that the standard Greek editions (NA27 and UBS4) do not punctuate Jesus' final comment about the disciples' sleep with a question, as the translations I grew up with do.

According to the NIV, NRSV, NET, ESV, NKJV, and NASB, Jesus returns the third time and asks a variation on the question he addressed to Peter in verse 37: "Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." (NIV)

The sentence could also be a command, however, since in Greek 2nd person plural indicative and imperative verb forms are identical, and the original text would not have indicated the difference between a question and a command by punctuation. A (sarcastic) command fits the context well. This was the interpretation that the KJV adopted, and that the NLT returns to:

And he cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough, the hour is come; behold, the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. (KJV)

When he returned to them the third time, he said, "Go ahead and sleep. Have your rest. But no -- the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. (NLT)

He came back a third time and said to them, 'You can sleep on now and have your rest. It is all over. The hour has come. Now the Son of man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners. (NJB)

On this interpretation, the disciples have missed their chance to watch and pray; they may as well sleep. It fits the context and is consistent with Mark's portrayal of Jesus. What do you think?

Reflections on Keck and Carson on Reading the Bible as Scripture

2010-09-18T15:08:00.002-06:00

This posts reflects on the quotations by Leander Keck and D.A. Carson that I posted back in August here and here, and continues a conversation that Nick Meyer started in the comments.

The quotes from Keck and Carson share a lot in common. Carson speaks of a "questing obedience"; Keck is concerned about genuinely "reading the Bible as Scripture" in a way that leads to "serious questions about what we read" and, ultimately, an obedient response.

Readers of this blog may know that my tendency is to emphasize questions. I prefer to refer to my approach as a hermeneutic of wonder rather than a hermeneutic of suspicion, but the distinction can get blurred. For this reason, Carson's challenge to approach Scripture with "reverence, a certain fear, a holy joy" comes as an important reminder.

Yet there's something that niggles at me. Carson is concerned about the dangers of an approach that by its very nature leads to a godless resistance to the text, while Keck is concerned to guard against a pious subversion of it. The one emphasizes reverence, obedience over questing, the other the genuine questioning required for questing obedience to be authentic. It seems to me that Keck fingers the fundamental problem in the evangelical conviction that the Bible is true: Because it all has to be true, there is a tendency to tame the text instead of wrestling with it. It is more honest to disagree (as an immediate, not a final response)--more honest and more dangerous because serious wrestling runs the risk of being mastered by the text (or rather, being mastered by the God who speaks through the text).

I resonate more with Keck not only because I think it is a bigger problem in my context, but also because it gets at the struggle that is involved in genuine interpretation. I am happy to affirm, with Carson, that the Bible is God's Word and that when "God speaks to us through his Word, those who profess to know him must respond in an appropriate way." But the sense of struggle is missing here, and I wonder if it is because Carson's formulation of the authority of Scripture conflates text and interpretation.

(See also Nick's independent post, as well as Larry Hurtado's thoughts on approaching the Bible as Scripture.)