Google Books - A research library trip without the library or the trip

Google Books made my day this afternoon. I was looking for an important article on Josephus' understanding of prophets in the following arcane-sounding volume: Josephus' Contra Apionem: Studies in Its Character and Context with a Latin Concordance to the Portion Missing in Greek. Published by Brill, it retails for the low price of $193.68 US at Barnes & Noble.com. The Latin concordance has no doubt contributed to sales, but it is not exactly a bestseller. For some reason our library does not own a copy.

Fortunately for me, Google has the whole book scanned. With the help of Gadwin's free PrintScreen program, I was able to make screen shots of the whole essay, trim them in Paint, and print them out:
More time-consuming than a photocopy, but a whole lot easier than driving to the nearest research library that has a copy of the book!

Another thing that made me happy this afternoon was the first installment of my order from R.G. Mitchell's review program:Alas, it remains true that acquiring books and articles is easier than reading them. To work!

Piper and Pedagogy

I started working on this post back in March shortly after Piper John's comments at the 2008 Resurgence Conference hit the blogosphere:

Here’s my rule of thumb: the more responsible a person is to shape the thoughts of others about God, the less Arminianism should be tolerated. Therefore church members should not be excommunicated for this view but elders and pastors and seminary and college teachers should be expected to hold the more fully biblical view of grace. Do you separate from a denomination that allows pastors and seminary teachers to believe and teach this error? You can. We do. (See desiringgod.org for the whole talk; HT: Scot McKnight's Weekly Meanderings)

There is plenty to take issue with in this statement--see here and here for some examples--and Piper himself decided they required nuancing:

By way of clarification, I would say: In an Arminian institution, Arminians should be allowed to teach. But in institutions that regard Arminianism as a defective view of God’s grace, they should not be allowed to teach. Or, more broadly, in an institution that thinks the truth is better served by having advocates of Arminianism and Calvinism, both should be allowed to teach.

Then the question shifts to whether churches and Christian educational institutions should be devoted to a mix of Arminianism and Calvinism. No, I don’t think they should be. I think the truth, the church, and the world are better served by confessional institutions—that is, institutions which settle on the great things about God that they believe, and then build their teaching and research upon them.

Why, one might ask, is the church better served by institutions that require all faculty to side with either Arminianism or Calvinism? And how does one avoid the charge of indoctrination?

When this kind of teaching and research are done well, the charge of indoctrination does not stick. No one’s ultimate aim should be to be Calvinist or Arminian. The aim should be to be biblical. Therefore, teaching and research will labor with all their might to show students what the Bible teaches. That will not be indoctrination. It will be true education.

The fact that we all have blind spots and profit from perspectives different from our own does not imply that we should hire someone to teach those perspectives in our pulpit or class room. It means we read and listen and carry on whatever conversation or dialogue or debate is appropriate.

In my 22 years of formal education . . . it became increasingly clear to me that diverse theological positions on the same faculty of a Christian institution diminished the importance of those differences. For some issues, that is good. For others it is not. Which those are is one of the great challenges of every generation.

If I did not agree with Piper to some extent, I would not be teaching at a confessional institution. We all work within a framework of understanding, and it is appropriate to agree on where the major boundaries are. However, Piper makes it sound as though everything boils down to what one considers the big issues on the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy. Piper thinks Arminianism is a heresy worthy of excommunication. I don't. End of story.

But there is more to my uneasiness with Piper's comments than mere disagreement about the boundary lines of Christian orthodoxy. At issue is two differing conceptions of the goal of a confessional Christian education. Piper seems to live, think, and teach as though he has the Truth within his grasp, and he knows what it is. I am much more comfortable with Miroslav Volf's chastened epistemology, but my concern here is that this posture seems to disregard the process of learning:

As Piper acknowledges, the goal of a "true education" is not adherence to a party line. But it is also more than showing "students what the Bible teaches" as if students are only so many empty vessels to be filled with knowledge. A true education will encourage in students the ability to think for themselves so that they can continue to be nurtured by their own ongoing study of Scripture. What better way to encourage careful thinking than in a setting where faculty are able to model respectful debate (and disagreement) about vital issues within the framework of broader Christian orthodoxy?

"We are born for fellowship"

In Josephus's panegyric on the Law which concludes his apologetic work Against Apion, the Jewish historian has this to say on Temple worship:

"Our sacrifices are not occasions for drunken self-indulgence--such practices are abhorrent to God--but for sobriety (σωφροσύνην). At these sacrifices prayers for the welfare of the community must take precedence of those for ourselves; for we are born for fellowship (κοινωνίᾳ), and he who sets its claims above his private interests is specially acceptable to God" (Josephus, Against Apion, 2.195-6; Thackeray LCL vol. 1).

Josephus's description is a salutary reminder of such NT passages as Acts 2:42-47 and Phil 2:1-4, contrasting as it does with the solitary individualism still so pervasive among academics, for whom "libraries are our natural habitat" (James Dunn as quoted by Mark Goodacre).

Summer reading in the mail...

Any guesses what one of my summer writing projects will be?

Britannica Webshare

Clicking on the links in the previous post will take you to the Encyclopaedia Britannica articles rather than the free Wikipedia entries. As a "Web Publisher" I applied for, and received, complimentary access to the venerable Britannica. The full text of all Encyclopaedia Britannica articles I link to on this blog is free for my readers.

Initial impressions:

• I like being able to point to and use a more consistently scholarly resource. (Strictly speaking neither the -paedia nor the -pedia should be regarded as authorities in their own right. Articles will be more or less authoritative depending on the quality of their contributor(s). Both are good resources that should be read critically.)
• I don't like the commercialism of Britannica.
  
• Wikipedia is easier to use since once doesn't need to login or wait for a slow website to load.
• The Wikipedia entry on Middlemarch is also much more extensive than anything Encyclopaedia Britannica has to offer.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Dad said he lay awake the night after our homestead trip, thinking about the sad obliteration of his father's farm and trying to remember the words to Shelley's Ozymandias:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear׃
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The poem reminds me of Mr. Lydgate in Middlemarch and, in general, of scholarly attempts to gain fame by shedding "new light" on ancient subjects.

Josephus and the προφηταί: Exploring the Non-Use of a Label

In addition to preparing syllabi for the fall semester, most of my time this month will be occupied writing a paper for the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Annual Meeting in Vancouver at the beginning of June. Here is the abstract I submitted in December:

Josephus’s general reluctance to employ the label, προφήτης, when he speaks positively of contemporary inspired figures has often been cited as evidence for the cessation of prophecy. Others scholars, who note Josephus’s self-characterization as a prophetic figure, suggest that his diction was influenced by a certain “nostalgia for the past,” that he believed prophecy continued even though the label had fallen out of use, or that the “wise would understand” he was a prophet even though he never employed the term with reference to himself. In this paper, I will assess how these and other explanations account for Josephus’s willingness to use words of the προφητ- root in reference to the biblical prophets and John Hyrcanus, but not to other later inspired figures. I will then attempt to move the discussion about Josephus’s use of the label forward by considering the relationship between his larger narrative interest in the Jewish politeia and his portrayal of prophets.

In my dreams, the paper will shed important new light on Josephus's understanding of prophets, but first I need to find out what that "new light" is. I have a hunch, but I am not far enough along in the research process to be able to substantiate it. Not the most comfortable place to be in the paper writing process!