Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Entries in Category |

Bible: Biblical Studies and Classics

What is needed in biblical studies is something analogous to the classicism of French scholars like Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet, and their followers.  They were carefully attentive to the literary riches of classical texts, but were at the same time anthropologists and cultural historians.

I see a few moves in this direction in biblical studies, but not nearly enough.  Girard does something like this, but is too eccentric; his theory masters every text he looks at.  Perhaps biblical studies just doesn’t attract minds like those of Vernant and Detienne.

Bible: Sabbath

Eugene Peterson writes that the Sabbath “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased.  It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.”

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another lectionary meditation at The Christian Century: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-4.html

Bible: Israel and the nations

Knight has a lot of intriguing things to say about Israel and the nations, among them: “As Israel suffers the gentile onslaughts, Israel is half-persuaded that it has to compete with the Gentiles as an equal rather than as their lord; Israel has to fight them as thought it were one of them, rather than bear them as a parent does a child.  Inasmuch as Israel succumbs to this temptation, Israel sins - Israel gentiles.”

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another lectionary meditation at the Christian Century: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-3.html.

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another of my lectionary meditations is up at the Christian Century web site.  You can find it at: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-towa-2.html#more.

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

Another of my lectionary meditations at the Christian Century web site: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/06/blogging-toward.html.

Bible: Blogging Toward Sunday

For the next several weeks, the Christian Century is publishing brief lectionary essays of mine on its blog. You can find a meditation on the readings for June 1 here: http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/05/blogging-towa-3.html.

Bible: Inspiration and Incarnation

I’ve finally had a chance to take a closer look at Peter Enns’s controversial Inspiration and Incarnation and wanted to jot down a few comments. (I’ve known Pete since my seminary days, but I’ll call him “Enns” here to maintain a measure of scholarly decorum).

The book has a number of useful themes and emphases. He states a central point at the beginning: “The problems many of us feel regarding the Bible may have less to do with the Bible itself and more to do with our own preconceptions.” Throughout the book, Enns insists that we should work out our doctrine of Scripture by looking at Scripture itself, not by seeing how well it measures up to some prior conception of what a “holy” or “perfect” or “divine” book should look like. Enns also wants to learn hermeneutics from the New Testament writers, rather than complaining that they don’t conform to proper (which is to say, our) methods. His discussion of “God changing His mind” is good, and his notion that Scripture should be read “christotelically” is helpful. His incarnational model is sound as far as it goes, and much of what he tries to capture with that analogy has long been emphasized by the best evangelical scholars.

But this leads to a more critical comment. Enns, I think, has created a rhetorical problem for himself.

Continue reading…

Bible: Ingratitude and biblical criticism

I have described Descartes’s cogito as modernity’s founding ingratitude, the thought experiment that justified (doubtless against Descartes’s ultimate intentions) countless political, intellectual, and cultural erasures of the past.

So also biblical criticism, though the ingratitude takes a specific form here.  Insofar as biblical criticism arises from “inner light” sectarians (and it does in large measure; see Reventlow), it is grounded in a notion of revelation that detaches it from tradition, not only from the tradition of interpretation but even from the traditio of  the biblical texts themselves.

If God guides me by an inner light, what need do I have of texts, what need of the writers, what need of the careful copyists who kept the text alive for millennia?

Inner light thus becomes the pious form of ingratitude, as reason is the impious.

Bible: Scripture and Philosophy

Kant admits that his philosophical interpretation of the fall is not “intended for Scriptural exegesis, which lies outside the boundaries of the competence of mere reason.” Putting the “historical account” to “moral use” leaves the issue of the writer’s intention, the text’s meaning, historicity to the side.

But perhaps the moral and philosophical use of the narrative is precisely in its historicity - the fact that the fall occurred in time, and was a fall from an original innocence.

How can Kant know otherwise? Only because his interpretation according to “mere reason” and for “moral use” excludes time and history from the outset. He already knows - somehow - that “historical cognition . . . has no intrinsic relation” to moral progress.

Bible: Scriptures and separation

Studying African independent churches, David Barrett concluded that the single most important factor in dividing independent churches from missionary-founded churches was the vernacular translation of the Bible. As soon as the Bible was available in the native tongue, readers could check the teaching and practice of the missionary churches against the Scriptural standard. Many found the older missionary churches wanting, and set out to found churches that matched the Bible more closely.

No doubt many acted schismatically and immaturely. No doubt many of the independent churches have developed bizarre theologies. But what else could have happened? The Bible will finally bring new life, and it will eventually bring unity. Mbiti, in fact, argues that it already does, as independent churches and more traditional churches find they read the Bible similarly.

Along the way the Bible falls into the wrong hands, it topples traditions, it uproots and tears down. It is the living word of God, and cannot be contained or controlled. However erroneously we use it along the way, it goes out in the power of the Spirit, and we can trust Him to preserve the Word.

Bible: New Pentecost

John Mbiti, a Kenyan African theologian, describes the impact of a vernacular translation of the Bible: “When the translation is first published, especially that of the New Testament and more so of the whole Bible, the church in that particular language areas experiences its own Pentecost. The church is born afresh, it receives the pentecostal tongues of fire. As in Acts 2, the local Christians now for the first time ‘hear each of us in his own language. . . we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God’ (Acts 2:6-11). The Spirit of God unlocks ears and people to the Word of God, speaking to them in its most persuasive form. Local Christians cannot remain the same after that.”

Bible: Ear for Ear

Zeno of Verona wrote, “As the devil by his implausibility had found a way into the ear of Eve, inflicting a deadly wound, so Christ, entering the ear of Mary, brushes away all the heart’s vices and heals the woman by being born of the Virgin.”

Bible: Israel is Egypt

The Lord says through Isaiah (chapter 19): “So I will incite Egyptians against Egyptians; and they will each fight against his brother and each against his neighbor, city against city and kingdom against kingdom.”

Jesus says of Israel, “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death” (Matthew 10:21) and “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes” (Matthew 24:7).

Bible: Scripture’s eloquence

De Lubac cites this passage near the beginning of his Medieval Exegesis: “The eloquence of Sacred Scripture takes many shapes, and its meanings are many and varied. For this reason someone has said: He compares things that are celestial with things that are earthly, so that likenesses that we find well-known and familiar may provide a field of play for the things that incomprehensible greatness veils from our understanding.”

Bible: Philosopher or poet?

The doctrine of accommodation (which is rife in the tradition, as basic to Thomas as to Calvin) says: When God speaks in His natural voice, He speaks like a philosopher. He speaks like a poet in Scripture because He’s dumbing it down for humans imprisoned in a sensible world.

Scripture, however, indicates that God’s natural voice is that of a poet.

If Scripture speaks in poetry rather than philosophy, how could anyone have ever discovered that God’s natural voice is philosophical?

Bible: Critical Scholarship

One of the most annoying things about critical biblical scholarship is the way that every discussion has to contribute to questions of composition, authorship, historical setting, etc. Harrington gives a very intriguing paper on holiness in Ezra-Nehemiah, but the whole thing is part of a “larger” argument about the common authorship of the two books.

Without a church to serve with edifying theological interpretation, scholars serve the pseudo-church of biblical scholarship.

Bible: Criterion of antiquity

John Milbank claims that the Wellhausen documentary hypothesis is shaped by what he calls the “liberal Protestant metanarrative,” the view that Christianity moved from a religion of inner simplicity to a religion of complex external ritual (JEDP traces this story). In his SBL presentation, Nick Perrin of Wheaton showed how a form of this same metanarrative shapes New testament scholarship. The assumption of 19th and 20th century historical criticism is the “criterion of antiquity,” the notion that earlier texts are necessarily more accurate. Perrin saw the source of this criterion in the Romantic linking of primitivism, antiquity, and authenticity, a linkage he traced from Vico through Herder, Goethe and into the biblical scholarship of Holzmann, Westcott, and Harnack. Romantic conceptions thus shaped some of the fundamental methodological assumptions of modern NT scholarship.

Bible: Incarnational revelation

Westminster OT professor Pete Enns has been a friend since he taught me German at seminary nearly twenty years ago, and as editor of the Westminster Journal he regularly published my work. I have raised questions to him in private in the past, and we have had our friendly disagreements. I offer the following public responses to his ETS in the same spirit of friendship.

Pete gave a provocative talk to a crowded room on the “incarnational” model of Scripture, drawing on Warfield, A. A. Hodge, Ridderbos, Bavinck, and C. S. Lewis for support. Much of Enns’s project is to emphasize that the Scriptures are a thoroughly human, as well as thoroughly divine, set of writings, a regular theme of the Princeton-Westminster tradition. He made some excellent points about the apologetic problems that arise when the human character of Scripture is ignored.

But I’m suspicious of a few things.

Continue reading…

« Previous Entries in Category |