Living Wittily

Gordon Fee and the intellectual deference of a New Testament scholar.

There are occasional Bible commentaries that have a long shelf life, and then there are those that are hacked out to meet the voracious appetite of publishers for niche series. The carbon footprint of commentary mania is brontosauran in its scale. There are currently around 125 biblical commentary series in production in various North Western World publishers. You can see them here if you click on Series button on the upper menu bar. I'm not sure whether to describe this as ludicrous, wasteful, exegetical overkill, marketing madness, unbiblical abuse of creation gifts, or just plain stupid. But out there somewhere people are buying them, seduced by claims of niche market, latest scholarship, and that underlying assumption that if the book is about the Bible it must be justified.

So. When I buy a new commentary now (it was not always thus for me), I have to have a good reason. It has to give me what I don't have and really need. The fact that it rehearses what everyone else has said, or the concern to defend particular positions, or the claim that it now adds a different perspective isn't enough. Nor do I want a commentary that forecloses exegetical options because the publisher takes a particular theological line - and that goes both for the conservative and the critical.

For the discerning commentary reader and user there are certain names that are the gold standard. Gordon Fee is one. Now Professor Emeritus of New Testament Exegesis at Regent's College Vancouver, he is a retired Pentecostal scholar of singular standing across the denominations. His exegetical honesty, focused erudition, rigorous scholarship, and crisp no nonsense writing style laced with fun and gentle critique of others' positions, make him a joy to read. His First Corinthians and Philippians are amongst my most used volumes - I've read them both and used them constantly. His two massive exegetical studies of the Holy Spirit (God's Empowering Presence) and of Christology (Pauline Christology) as well as his up-front honest exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles, are full of help for those who want to break sweat doing some exegetical excavations.

So now I am slowly reading my way through his newest volume on the Thessalonian Epistles. I'm going to blog on Fee once a week for a while - just highlighting what makes him interesting, reliable, for me the commentator of choice on any book he chooses to work on. And not because he is always right, or says what I'd like to confirm my own exegetical prejudices; but because he is to be trusted with a text, which he treats with an intellectual deference that nonetheless tolerates the hard questions. And because he knows when to expose nonsense, question unexamined assumptions, and link up creative connections across the range of the Bible, while making sure that pastors and preachers, scholars and enquirers see both the wood and the trees, and learn to love the view. Tomorrow a few characteristic quotes from Fee to show that all the above isn't just another sales pitch for another commentary to take up further space in an already overpopulated market. 

The Annoying Habit of Being Pedantic - mea culpa!

Now I try not to be. But sometimes I am. Pedantic that is. And sometimes my pedantry is no more than my discontent that someone doesn't share my biased and idiosyncratic view of the world. Pedantry is a kind of low grade intellectual showing off! And now and again I'm guilty.

Like tonight. Songs of Praise for All Saints Day. Edward Stourton was wheeled in as the spokesperson on behalf of St Paul. Asked if Paul's legacy still influences the writing of hymns today - "Why yes", says Edward. And the example used as evidence was "Purify my Heart".

Now I don't want to be pedantic, but is it not the Letter of Peter that makes much of purifying the heart, the refiner's fire, holiness as set-apartness? Sure you could find a reference here and there in Paul to those ideas, but short of writing to Brian Doerksen, the writer of the hymn, my guess is that it is more likely to be Peter.  I happen to like the hymn and have never detected an obvious connection between it and the theology of Paul. Not as obvious as 1 Peter anyway - look at 1 Peter chapter 1.

Here's the words - what do you think? Am I just being pedantic?

Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold and precious silver.
Purify my heart,
Let me be as gold, pure gold.

Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.

Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from within and make me holy.
Purify my heart,
Cleanse me from my sin, deep within.

Refiner’s Fire,
My heart’s one desire, is to be holy.
Set apart for You Lord.
I choose to be holy,
Set apart for You my master,
Ready to do Your will.

Haiku, Isaiah, and cultural fatigue syndrome.

Preaching this Sunday on Isaiah 40 and on the theme of weariness. I often explore Scripture text by reframing its themes into the disciplined focus of Haiku. Sometimes it works better than others - but most times it allows a serious playfulness, and invites an alternative approach to exegesis - contemplative exegesis. The three Haiku below acknowledge the soul fatigue and body weariness we often experience in the stampede of the Gadarene swine that we call daily living, in a culture built on an unquestioned assumption of constant economic growth and now facing the realities of an eaually unqestioning recession.

Isaiah 40 is a text for a culture like ours, which bought into the worship of finance and lost heavily when it's god began to dissolve by acid of its own making - a culture that now needs to find a less exhausting deity, a different liturgy and a new vocation as stewards of a fragile creation. One way Christian's witness to the Gospel in such a culture, is by a life less driven by acquisitive competition, and more impelled by agapaic generosity. But that will mean Christians like me learning to see the world differently, because from the heightened perspective and with the precision sighting of the eagle. But such a radically different worldview only comes when we wait, and are ourselves upborne by strength beyond our own, by the one Isaiah describes with defiant confidence, as the Creator and Redeemer.

Three Haiku on Isaiah 40. 29-31

Unable to run,

weariness weighs down the soul

unwilling to wait.

...

To walk and not faint;

yet the body has limits

we cannot transcend.

...

Borne on eagles wings,

resurgent strength uplifts me,

changing my worldview.

Conflict, conciliation and the sole authority of the Colossian Christ

Talking about how Christians make such a mess of living with difference and diversity in their understanding of their faith, a very good friend once remarked, "The way you relate to people demonstrates your conception of God."

Those who prefer conflict to reconciliation and argument to dialogue; those who see gentleness as weakness; those for whom openness to revision of thought is called compromise, and theological peacemaking is the culpable surrender of perma-fixed dogma; those who think certainty means the same as faith; those who believe that humanly framed theological propositions can be relied on to adequately express the mystery of sovereign self-emptying love as revealed in Jesus Christ; those whose standpoint is on that kind of terrain will have one kind of God.

But it will be hard to square that God with the God revealed and made known in Jesus Christ; the One in whom God was and is reconciling the world to himself; in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell in bodily form, in whom the Father who blesses all peace-makers as God's children is finally and definitively revealed; this God whose defining nature is love, and whose love is defined by the Cross.

I find this argument utterly compelling, and biblical in the most profound and searching sense of that often abused adjective - biblical. Amongst my theological and biblical ambitions (can you have such things?), for the next six months is to immerse myself in Colossians, that unparalleled exploration of what it is Christians claim when they confess, "Jesus is Lord!" - and in doing so bow in adoration before the One who is "the image of the invisible God..in whom all the fullness of God dwelt bodily", and the One through whom "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things in heaven and on earth, making peace through the blood of his cross."

The remarkable sculpture which illustrates this post is by Lyn Constable Maxwell. It was commisioned in 1994 and is titled ‘The Crucified and Risen Christ’. It adorns All Saints Pastoral Centre, London Colney.

God's eternal purposive love versus secular apocalyptic scenarios - the Book of Revelation as required reading

'Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.'

'Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.'

'You explain nothing , O Poet,  but thanks to you all things become explicable.'

The above are several one liners on poets and poetry that I've noted from here and there. The first one is whimsical and hints at the capacity of poetry to juxtapose the unlikeliest things, so that incongruity and ambiguity undermine logic and linear thinking. The second reminds of the partiality of our sight, the transience of our perceptions and the possibilities of seeing the unexpected. The third defends the significance of mystery as that which awakens our deeply human longing for explanation, while recognsing that part of that same humanity is recognising the significance of the inexplicable. Poetry does all these things.

These thoughts link in my mind with a book I recently ordered, Seeing Things John's Way, by David DeSilva, (Westminster John Knox, 2009). It's an examination of the Apocalypse using rhetorical theory, and exploring what John does with words and images used to rhetorical effect in the service of theology. John's goal is to help his readers / hearers to see things in a new way, (or in the words above), opening and closing doors in order to give glimpses into an alternative reality, explaining nothing but enabling all things to become explicable. For Christians under the constraints of Empire, such rhetorical deconstruction of power, and reconstruction of divine purpose, would embolden faith by recharging the imagination with visions of the majesty of Christ, and the planned future for a Creation in which God will be all in all.

It's one of the great losses to Christian discipleship that the Book of Revelation has far too often been made to say and mean what it was never intended to say and mean. While on the other hand the author's artistry as a poet and his prescience as a prophet have seldom been given the attention they deserve as great gifts of vision and imagination capable of subverting even great empires, by appeal to the One who is greater and whose Kingdom is more durable. At times of cultural crisis, we need the poet prophets to deconstruct the rhetoric of empire by exposing it to the rhetoric of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, who sits in the midst of the throne, and who thus redefines power and majesty in ways that have eternal and cosmic consequences.

I remember as a young and innocent (ignorant?) Christian reading through the Book of Revelation and being thrilled, scared, puzzled and hooked. Since then NT scholars like Austin Farrer, G B Caird, and Richard Bauckham have educated my responses. There's a lot in this new book that should be preached today (you can see the contents on the amazon.com site) - and I don't mean the allegedly safe first three chapters. In a world awash with secular apocalytic scenarios, projected and actual, the Book of Revelation represents a triumphant canoncial contradiction of all those who say it has to be that way. And it does so by calling in question all those counsels of despair that simply assume evil and power have an unbroken monopoly in human history.

I hope De Silva's book is taken seriously by preachers, and will make a substantial contribution to the kind of preaching on Revelation that is neither other-worldly, world-hating nor world-denying. Instead, using this massive visionary text, preachers will once again call in question secular apocalyptic scenarios, by pointing to a redeemed and renewed creation, imaged in some of the most theologically potent ideas which focus on Christ as Lord of all, the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, and the permanent overwhelming of evil by that which finally negates it. In his Apocalyse, John speaks forth the renewal, redemption, reconciliation and eternal shalom of God's Creation, and the reign of a God whose nature, revealed in Jesus Christ, is eternal purposive love, expressed as communion and endlessly creative mercy.

Two Big books in one Week. 2 Beginning from Jerusalem, J D G Dunn

The first book I read by J D G Dunn was his Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Then his commentary on Romans in the word series. Those who want a readable and theologically rich reading of Romans (from the "new perspective") won't find much better than the Explanation sections of Dunn's two volume commentary - except Tom Wright's Romans in the New Interpreter's Bible. Then there was his The Parting of the Ways, followed by The Theology of Paul the Apostle, his two books on Galatians and the first volume of his magnum opus on Christianity in the Making, Remembering Jesus - which I am now well through but with a few hundred pages to go! And now this huge weight training resource has landed with a satisfying if intimidating thump on my desk. So finishing the two Dunn volumes over the summer has become an ambition that has every chance of being frustrated - but not if I can help it!

Over the years I've slowly worked through a number of big books on biblical studies - some of them shifting my perspectives, opening up new ways of coming at the biblical revelation, and time and again challenging me to think myself towards a much more reflective and much less predictable take on that wonderful complexity of faithful understanding, critical integrity, prayerful patience and immediate human communication, that, at its best, we call preaching. Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; W D Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount; N T Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God; Beasley Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God; F F Bruce, Paul. Apostle of the Heart Set Free; Gordon Fee, God's Empowering Presence; Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament - and so many more.(The volume by Bruce is hardly cutting edge now - but it is still one of my favourite books, a tribute to the kind of scholarship that makes a difference to what and how you preach - or so it did for me.)

I'm not qualified to review Dunn's life work, carved and shaped as it is from an enormous accumulation of knowledge - in this volume 1330 pages! I'm just happy to sit at the feet of this Scottish Gamaliel, exiled to Durham, and admire and ponder the work of a virtuoso scholar whose grasp of the field of NT studies is sure and whose treatment is respectful. Today I jumped to a late chapter on Ephesians - which he doesn't think Paul wrote (I'm not so sure) - but there are sentences, footnotes, paragraphs and references that coax you back to the text, to think again - because Dunn is a master at critical appreciation and theological appropriation of text. What more would you want from a NT teacher than that persuasive invitation to go look again.

Song of Songs: "the riddled journey towards mutuality...."

Recently listened to some of the tracks on this CD on Classic FM. My own copy arrived the other day. Captivating.

For myself? Not sure how to preach on Song of Songs in ways that would avoid a mass exit by those uneasy with the idea that love, physical, passionate, deliriously, intoxicatingly overwhelming love is itself a gift of God. Yes agape as indefatigable good will. And yes, phileo as faithful friendship. But eros? That too God's gift? Explicitly descriptive? Legitimate desire? Incurable infatuation with the other? The ache of delight and the joy of longing?

Yes. All of that, and here, in the love poetry of the Song of Songs, set to music by one of the finest contemporary composers and with a Welsh soprano soloist whose voice exults in the language and music of the heart's desire. No wonder this series of poems, found tucked between the gentle cynicism of Ecclesiastes and the great Isaianic trilogy of defiant trustful hope, has survived as a statement of what human love is when two people discover in each other a love that demands language at its best.

But even then language can fail. Sometimes the reality of human love doesn't live up to the language of love, while at other times our language describes fantasy in terms that make us discontented with the reality that love between fallible humans is. The truth is, human love is seldom unambiguous, unmixed blessing, pure in motive and selfless in gift. It is after all human. But where there is faithfulness and companionship, persistence as well as passion, patience as well as urgency, and giving as well as receiving, then something is being shaped that mirrors the love of God.

Christian spirituality has plundered this book for images of divine love, metaphors for the soul's love of God and Christ's love for the Church. From Bernard of Clairvaux's 86 sermons, to the intense intimacy of Samuel Rutherford's descriptions of Christ the Beloved, the Song of Songs has provided powerful descriptions of Christian devotion. But read at another level altogether, the level of human relationships in all their perplexities and passions, these poems provide a theology of human createdness and human creativity. "To the extent that [the Song of Songs] is about anything, it is especially about male and female expressions of love and intimacy, the communion of self with the other, and the riddled journey toward mutuality". (New Interpreter's Bible, Renita Weems on Song of Songs, Vol. V., page 423.

Here is a CD which is itself an exercise in biblical exegesis, and the hermeneutical principle which compels attention and invites some understanding, is the way the poems, and their musical performance, capture our all too human love and longing, for that which is beyond us, but not so far beyond that we are discouraged from reaching for it in persistent hopefulness.

Tom Wright, New Testament Exegesis and music

Following the good conversations we had about music and exegesis on the Leonard Cohen post a couple of days ago, I came across this paragraph from one of my favourite books, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986, Stephen Neill and Tom Wright (OUP, 1988).

"What is it that makes people go on studying the New Testament? Behind all the details of exegesis - of textual criticism, of historical and background studies, even of specific theological debates - the trained ear can hear a counterpoint so fascinating that it compels one to stay where one is and listen. Here, on the one hand, is the busy, running little melody of history: endless detail, constant variety, unexpected surprises, unpredictable people and events. Here, on the other hand, is the slower but richer theme of theology: a powerful sustained tune, taking its time, rising in majestic cadences to its own proper climax. To take another example, and perhaps an appropriate one, from J. S. bach (who after all deserves a place in a book on modern Western interpretation of the New Testament, and not only because of the association in one's mind with Albert Schweitzer), we might think of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Either of the two themes would by itself be worthy of attention. The combination - the tensions as well as the harmonies - is, for those who stop to listen, utterly compelling." ( pages 439-40.)

Texts Under Negotiation: Brueggemann and Exegetical Confidence

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
     the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
     his understanding is unsearchable.
he gives power to the faint,
     and strengthens the powerless. (Isaiah 40 28-29)

I've read various commentaries on this passage, and learned much. Westermann, Childs, Seitz, Goldingay, and Brueggemann's own commentary. But just to prove that the best comment on Scripture text isn't always found in commentaries, here's Brueggemann in his book with the disconcerting title Text under Negotiation. The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) It is replete with theological insight expressed in pastorally alert terms, and earthed in text, church and world. My copy is split, and the loose pages make it more like a loose-leaf folder - but I don't want to buy another because this one is annotated. But it's still in print and it remains a significant and persuasive example of exegetical confidence in the capacities of biblical text to help us reconceive our world in the light of the Gospel. So here's his comment on that famous Isaiah 40 text, found on pages 35-6.

Creation not only works for the powerful, the mighty, and the knowledgeable. It works as well for the faint, the powerless, the hopeless and the worthless. It works by giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. It works so that strength is renewed. It is creation that precludes wearniness and faintness, and invites walking, running and flying.

Evangelical concern may derivatively raise the issue of our terrible disorderedness that issues in unseemly anxiety and in inescapable fatigue. It is a good question to raise in a local parish; Why so driven, so insatiable, so restless? The answer, in this doxological tradition, is that our lives are driven because we are seriously at variance from God's gracious food-giving program.

And where there is a variance and a refusal to trust:
youth are faint and weary,
     the young are exhausted,
     and there is little liberated flying or exhilarated running. (Isaiah 40.30)

Sisters of Sinai - best lecture I've heard in years!

On Thursday night last, Janet Soskice was all that you want in a philosophical theologian delivering a public lecture which is the story of two Ayrshire Victorian women and their extraordinary contribution to NT textual criticism. In their fifties they visited Mt Sinai Monastery and discovered a palimpsest on which were the faded words of the four Gospels, dating back much earlier than previously known texts, and representing a crucial comparative landmark for textual critics.

My childhood was spent in Ayrshire. One of my side-interests is the history of NT Interpretation. Biography is a favourite genre and an important theological resource in its own right. My own subject fields are theology and history of Christianity, but this was a masterclass in controlled erudition laced with gentle but telling humour. Add to these Soskice's gift for telling a story and building a rounded biographical portrait of these two remarkable women, and the obvious sub-stratum of assiduous research behind this lecture - and it was indeed a very satisfying evening.

Sheila and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I sent an email to say thank you to Dr Soskice for telling this story, and recovering the contribution of two women to NT scholarship. The work of excavating lives like these from a largely male dominated history remains an important form of protest and balance restoration in historiography, and perhaps particularly in the historiography of Church history. Even in the telling of the story of these two women, the academic jealousies of Victorian Cambridge, the in-fighting of male scholars claiming intellectual property rights over their original work, the appearance of Professor William Robertson Smith (one of the greatly wronged scholars in the collision of ideas that accompanied the demise of Victorian Scottish Calvinism thirled to the Westminster Confession) as their sponsor in establishing the importance of their find, all of it a tale of intrigue, amateur versus professional scholarship, and huge stakes. If this story is dramatised for TV it would be rivetting viewing - the book on which the lecture was based is now on sale. It's a dead cert holiday read for Sheila and I. The story of a key episode in NT scholarship that doesn't even get a footnote in the standard histories - unlike Tischendorff, they were women, and they didn't remove the codex - they photographed it onto glass slides and then returned to transcribe it. Oh, and by the way, these Irvine lassies (amateur scholars, indeed!), taught themselves Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Egyptian, Syriac - and the Syriac was mastered in 9 months!