Keep in touch...!

The Straw Man

2012-01-13T07:42:00.000-08:00

I've been seen on various social networking feeds of people posting up a particular video being hailed as one of the best videos regarding Christianity in recent months (years?). As of this morning (Jan. 13, 2012), it has over 6.2 million hits since being uploaded three days ago, titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." It's quite a polished performance and aesthetically speaking, well made (in my view anyway). See the video here:

However, there's been some pushback of course on this issue, in a form of blog post (e.g. here) and in another spoken word (though not quite as "polished" as the former):

The problem here lies in the fact that to set up "religion" against "Jesus" is something of a straw man argument. What I mean to say is, its portrayal of "religion" sets up a false relationship between Jesus and "religion" in order to prove its case. Now, I don't think this video proposes anything new with regard to discussions on secularization, Christianity, religion, etc., but just poses the question in a clever way that is meant to help people understand what Christianity is about. The term "religionless Christianity," as far as I know, originates from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and it is something of a popular catchword among some folks, who trumpet this phrase as if it's their personal motto of Christianity. Bonhoeffer wondered the following:

"You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried, by my theological thoughts and the conclusions that they lead to: and this is where I miss you most of all, because I don’t know anyone else with whom I could so well discuss them to have my thinking clarified. What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious.'
Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the ‘religious a priori’ of mankind. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form – perhaps the true form – of ‘religion’. But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless – and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any ‘religious’ – what does that mean for ‘Christianity’? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our ‘Christianity’, and that there remain only a few ‘last survivors of the age of chivalry’, or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as ‘religious’. Are they to be the chosen few? Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervour, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity – and even this garment has looked very different at times – then what is a religionless Christianity?

If I'm not mistaken, Bonhoeffer is writing this within the context of his own perception of the horrors of Nazi Germany that displayed the Church's callousness to the ordeals of the Jews, despite their Christian "religion" or "religiosity." Bonhoeffer is not advocating some type of Jesus vs. religion (i.e. if following the definition put forth by that popular video, "religion" is defined as something like = 'Following a set of do's and dont's a la the Jews'), and isn't this the same man who wrote Nachfolge (Discipleship)? This view of Judaism is overtly polemical and basically ignores what recent scholarship has revealed about its intricacies and diversities. Furthermore, in my view, Bonhoeffer's critique of "religion" seems to be a type of religion which is overly focused on the other-worldly, that does not translate to careful ethics and Christian discipleship on the ground in any given moment.
Additionally, the video does not seem to take seriously even the simplest commands found in the Scriptures and leaves me scratching my head on some of the following questions. What is the function of the OT for Christianity? What is the point of pursuing holiness? Should there even be a moral vision for the Christian community (to take a phrase out of one of my professors' books)? What is this video's implications for supersessionism? Granted the video is not some kind of systematic theology in spoken word form, it still falls far short of I think what the Scriptures portray as robust Christianity. I can understand its popularity (in the twenty some minutes to write this post, the video garnered an extra 500,000 some viewers!) and want to recognize its hope to explicate Christianity in a simple way, but also wished there was more depth in its rhetorical flourish and artistry.

New issue of JSNT

2011-12-15T08:34:00.001-08:00

The new December issue of JSNT is out, a short volume that only has three articles. But the fun part is that they are all focused on one issue, namely a publication from one of the professors here at Duke, Prof. Douglas Campbell.

Here's the list:

R. Barry Matlock
Zeal for Paul but Not According to Knowledge: Douglas Campbell’s War on ‘Justiﬁcation Theory’

Grant Macaskill
Review Article: The Deliverance of God

Douglas A. Campbell
An Attempt to be Understood: A Response to the Concerns of Matlock and Macaskill with The Deliverance of God

Should be a fun read. Go check it out here.

Winter

2011-12-13T13:11:00.001-08:00

It's been a very busy semester, as I'm finishing up five classes, a bunch of papers, and an Aramaic oral exam to prepare for. This is on top of applying to various schools for doctoral work, and also researching/writing my own stuff. Anyway, it seems like most of that (besides applications) will be over this week, so I'm excited to have a break when I can just relax, read what I want, research my own areas of interest, and go from there... My plans are also to read a bunch of books that have been collecting dust on my shelves and finish up some books that I'm currently reading (very slowly).

On the list:
Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible
New Testament and the People of God
A biography on Steve Jobs
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Historiographical Jesus
A book about Wall Street

And I also hope to read various journal articles, chapters from books, and hope to get some good work done. Very happy that this week is almost over.

Vanhoozer Rejoins Trinity

2011-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

There's been blog posts and twitter feeds about the announcement of Kevin Vanhoozer's departure from Wheaton College to return to his former position at Trinity. I was wondering why he decided to make the move after a short three-year stint at Wheaton, and it seems that the reason is mostly logistical in nature. Check out Wheatonblog's explanation here. My studies haven't taken me to much of Vanhoozer's writings, but from what I hear, he's done good work in his respective field. In 2010, he was part of Wheaton's Theology Conference, engaging with the work of N.T. Wright, and in my view, he was the most engaging presenter in the entire conference (though I also enjoyed very much the presentation from my current teacher, Prof. Richard Hays). Anyway, this seems to be a big loss for Wheaton but a significant (re?)gain for Trinity.

New JSPL out

2011-11-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

The fall volume of the new journal, Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters is out:

Duke doesn't have access to the journal yet, but I hope they will order it for the library soon (especially since two of the editors are faculty members)... Go check it out if you can!

HT: JSPL Blog

Numbers game

2011-11-10T10:36:00.000-08:00

With the annual meetings of the SBL, AAR, and ETS coming up in San Francisco, I've seen a few posts (here, here, and here) regarding the representation of women in these meetings. I won't argue with the point that the percentages are a bit staggering in comparison (though I wouldn't go so far as to call it "disgustingly low" as one blog post put it): ETS (1%), SBL (29%), and AAR (41%). I am not a member of ETS or AAR, and at this point in my academic career, I don't really have a dog in the fight in any "camp" (if you want to call it that), but there seems to be an unwarranted bias against the ETS without looking further into the numbers.

For example, how many women are actually members of these groups? And how many women tried to present papers? I think to make the case that the one percent is "disgustingly low," you also have to make the case that there are enough women who wanted to present but were not given the chance to do so. The question of whether or not women feel welcome is a different issue altogether, and if that is what is at stake here, in my view, the percentages do not make a difference. To put it another way, if female scholars don't feel inclined to present at ETS, what does it matter how low the percent is? The bigger issue would be to ask why they don't feel inclined to present, why they might feel unwelcome, etc., the percentage doesn't play into that issue since due to the "unwelcome" nature of the society, the number would probably be skewed anyway due to a small sample size. And even if 30% of the presenters were women, that would not negate the fact that they might feel "unwelcome."

Furthermore, to play the numbers game, you could make the case that ETS is just as gender neutral as the other two societies, hypothetically speaking. I don't know how many women are actually members of these societies, and unless someone gave me the actual numbers, you cannot make the case that women members are being biased against. For example, one of the blog posts indicates that 8 out of 700 presenters in ETS are by women. So what if 100 female members applied for presenting and 8 were given a spot? That would be equivalent to 8% true representation of women (I call it "true" because it represents the presence of female scholars against the number of women who wanted to present at the conference). On the flip side, I am assuming SBL is a much larger animal, and if there were 2000 female members who applied and 203 of them were given a spot (as a hypothetical, say 29% of 700 spots), then this would be equivalent to 10.2% true representation of women. In this case, then, the differences in percentage are not as staggering as it first appeared.

Now, I know all this is hypothetical as I don't have access to the exact numbers of membership, spots given, presentations, etc., but the point I am trying to get across is, unless someone were to actually do the math, one cannot a priori state at the outset that 1% is "disgustingly low." I agree, it does sound like a very low number, but it's not really about what it seems or how I might feel about the percentages, is it?

And if we're going to go PC on these societies, then what about other non-white European presenters? What about Latino-Americans? What about Asian-Americans? What about African-Americans?

Quote of the Day: Barth

2011-11-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

"In our enquiry into the relation between the norm and the exception in obedience to the commandment, we now turn to situations in which it is a matter of the killing of one person by another. We have already noted in passing that the gravity of the question is no less but always necessarily greater in this case. There may be a necessary surrender or self-sacrifice of one's own life. But how can it ever be permissible or obligatory to sacrifice that of another? Can any of us be judges in respect of the life or death of others? What scruples there must be at this point regarding the sanctity of human life! What reservations are necessary in respect of the exceptional case!
Is it superfluous to interject a word at this juncture on the common crime of murder or homicide in the sense of the civil code? At least it is not superfluous to recall, on the basis of Mt. 5:21-26, that the so-called offender against the life of his fellows in the primitive sense is to be found in a preliminary form in all men, even though it does not usually result in the crime itself. In most of us the murderer is suppressed and chained, possibly by the command of God, or possibly by no more than circumstances, convention, or the fear of punishment. Yet he is very much alive in his cage, and ready to leap out at any time.
This is revealed by the amazing ease with which, in spite of every deterrent, war has always been approved and even enthusiastically welcomed and vigorously prosecuted not merely by individuals but by whole nations. It is pertinent that when the shooting of traitors became necessary in Switzerland in the Second World War, an astonishing number of volunteers is said to have offered for this melancholy duty. How are we to explain this? Even if we had not already learned it from Dostoievski, the experiences of our own day have surely taught us that we can no longer have any illusions as to what is dormant even in the heart of the average man in this respect. The presence of this sinister factor, of this "Hitler within us," can be verified in almost all of us by occasional dreams."

Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4:413

New Google Reader

2011-11-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

For my more tech-savvy friends, how do you 'share' stuff that you read on Google Reader now with the people you orig. had listed as being able to read whatever it is you 'shared'? I usually share stuff that I find interesting with my wife and now that ability seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur with this "new" change (seems more confusing and aesthetically-deficient to me)...

HELP!

Boohoo

2011-10-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

On The Guardian (in case you didn't know, a British newspaper) today, Richard Dawkins wrote an article titled, "Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig." And also, if you happened among the 'elite' who Dawkins claims do not know who he is at all, Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology (see his website here and his faculty profile here). It appears that Dawkins wants to take the 'high road' and refuse to debate with someone who is clearly beneath one with such stature as Dawkins, but to me, it all just sounds like the tantrums of a crying child. Randomly, it also reminds me of how Floyd Mayweather Jr. is crying about reasons why he can't fight Manny Pacquiao. I know it's a random connection, but still, it made sense to me. Also, I'm not even sure that Craig would win or lose in a debate with Dawkins, but it is interesting to me that Dawkins continues to evade the matchup despite good reasons for having a debate between a prominent Christian philosopher and a highly regarded atheist.

My opinion? Either debate/fight the guy and "win" or just leave it be.

Theology Conference

2011-09-27T18:57:00.001-07:00

Just saw this in my Google Reader feed: Wheaton Theology Conference 2012:

Awesome! It was really great that Wheaton seems to do this every year (at least the last few years) and I especially benefited from Wheaton making available their 2010 conference titled, "Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright" (here). I probably won't be in the Chicagoland area at the 2012 conference, but hopefully they'll make those videos available as well because Bonhoeffer has been a fascinating figure to read about and to learn from.

How fares the 'evangelical mind'?

2011-09-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

To my readers, apologies again for the long silence! I'm taking five classes this semester and am preparing to apply for various programs, so my mind has been focused elsewhere. Anyway, the title of this blog post is straight from the final chapter of Mark Noll's recently published book, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. In my opinion, this book was a breath of fresh air, especially in light of all the recent bickering among 'evangelical' circles over Michael Licona's book, The Resurrection of Jesus. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see the various discussions here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Of course Noll's thesis bears on bigger topics and issues than just the doctrine of inerrancy, but I should mention that Noll does talk some about Peter Enns and his book, Inspiration and Incarnation, and its intersection with the doctrine of inerrancy, which contributed in part to his eventual suspension/departure from Westminster Theological Seminary (though I find it odd that they are still selling his book at their own bookstore, here).

In the final prologue of his book, Noll takes inventory of the state of affairs since the publishing of his earlier book nearly two decades ago, and states rather dryly that for the most part, "I remain largely unrepentant" (151) regarding his historical arguments in that first book. Of course, he does concede a few points here and there where things have shifted since 1995 to 2011 but I agree with him that there is much more work to be done. His own words are as follows:

"Yet on the whole, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind still seems to me correct in its descriptions and evaluations. Like their compatriots throughout the world, Americans in pietistic, generally evangelical, Baptist, fundamentalist, Restorationist, Holiness, "Bible church," megachurch, or Pentecostal traditions face special difficulties when putting the mind to use. Taken together, American evangelicals display many virtues and do many things well, but built-in barriers to productive thinking remain substantial.
These barriers include an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now; a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations; and an antitraditionalism that privileges current judgments on biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated). In addition, as this book has suggested, we evangelicals are susceptible to a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of corporeal, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities by God). We also much prefer to put our money into programs offering immediate relief, whether evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions promoting intellectual development over the long term...
We remain inordinately susceptible to enervating apocalyptic speculation, thus consuming oceans of bathetic end-times literature while sponsoring only a trickle of serious geopolitical analysis. We are consistently drawn to "American Christianities" — occasionally of the Left, more often the Right — that subordinate principled reasoning rooted in the gospel to partisanship that demonizes opponents and excuses enormities in our friends...
To be sure, forces hostile to Christianity in the academy and in elite culture are large, vigorous, and growing rapidly. At some American universities and colleges, Christian scholars must operate as if from foxholes. In general, the intellectual climate is by no means propitious for Christian perspectives. No one can deny that in American society very strong trends are working against all intellectual efforts, and not just Christian efforts, to use the mind responsibly. These trends include, as a very partial list, the pace of modernity that has been accelerated by every one of the technological breakthroughs of recent decades; the nearly imbecile state of public political debate; the widespread striving for money and success as ends in themselves; the explosion of moral irresponsibility; and television."

Now, lest you accuse Noll of just waxing eloquent about the doom of evangelicalism yet again, he then has a subsection titled 'Hopeful Signs' where he lists various signs that there is hope to be found for the intellectual life of evangelicals. I don't want to give the whole book away, but I think for the most part, Noll has proved himself again to be an astute observer of history and culture, and thankfully it's less about doom and downfall and more about change and hope. So to repeat the question from the title of the blog post, in your view, how fares the evangelical mind?

Bio busts

2011-08-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, the two biographies I mentioned in an earlier post, on John Calvin and the other on Cicero, were not very interesting at all. They were dry, too detail-oriented, without giving any real insight to the unique personalities. The Cicero one was a tad bit better, but I eventually got bored of that one as well. To switch gears a little bit from famous political-historical figures, per a friend's recommendation, I am going to start reading the autobiography of the greatest college basketball coach in history (I don't think I'm biased here, even if UCLA is my alma mater), John Wooden. Another friend of mine had the chance to visit Coach Wooden at his home to take a portrait shot before he passed away, and told me what a gentleman he was. I'm not much of an autobiography fan, but let's hope it's better than the last two!

New Blog

2011-08-19T06:07:00.001-07:00

I wanted to advertise for a new blog which a friend of mine is part of, called "The Two Cities." It has a very nice layout and with the diversity of writers, it should make for a good place for conversation. My friend, John Dunne, is starting his PhD this Fall as the first batch of N.T. Wright's students (or maybe his only student; I don't know how many students he took this year) at St. Andrews. Check out his first blog post titled, "Alcohol in the Bible: Part One (The Old Testament)." Go check out the rest of the blog here.

People's lives are interesting... to me at least (and hopefully to you too)

2011-08-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what it is, but I've always been very curious to learn the details behind the lives of figures in history. So, one of my reading habits is reading biographies of anybody I'm mildly interested in whenever I get the chance. I don't even recall what my first biography was, but thankfully, for the most part, I've enjoyed almost every single biography I've read to date. This past year, I've read a biography of the following (in no particular order):

George Whitefield

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (#2)
Winston Churchill

George Washington

Cleopatra

Jonathan Edwards

Louie Zamperini
Alexander the Great

I admit, a couple of the books above I did not finish because they were not very good, but otherwise, the rest of them were fun to read. In terms of being the most compelling read, I'd have to say Metaxas' book was probably the best page-turner (despite the critique of some reviewers). And on the other hand, the Vanderbilt book lost a lot of steam as it continued and I basically skimmed the 2nd half... I'll be starting two biographies soon: one on John Calvin and the other on Cicero. Hopefully they'll be interesting reads.

My question to you is, do you like biographies? If so, what have you read that is worth reading? Any suggestions welcome!

Guilty by association?

2011-08-12T12:33:00.001-07:00

I just saw on Christianity Today's blog (here) that there's been a small (or large? I guess it depends on the way you look at it) controversy surrounding Willow Creek and the CEO and founder of Starbucks, Howard Schultz. I know Willow does a bunch of conferences every year and for this year's Global Leadership Summit, Schultz was supposed to be one of the main speakers of the event. However, after some noise from folks that Schultz's association with an "antigay" (in quotes because although the opposition claims that Willow is antigay, I don't know what evidence they have to make this case) institution such as Willow Creek is unacceptable, he decided to withdraw, with Willow's permission to break the speaking contract without any penalty. Admittedly, I've gone back and forth on Willow Creek as well, having attended one of their conferences many years ago (being in awe of their organizational prowess), then criticizing them a few years later for various reasons.

Be that as it may, when you watch this seven-minute clip,

I think you'd agree with me that Hybels is being very gracious and not "antigay" by any means of the word. I understand he does talk about certain convictions he has concerning Christian ethics, but that does not automatically make him "anti" anything. What is interesting to see with regard to the 'other' side—the "pro-gay" side if you will, that started this whole 'Let's boycott Starbucks and sign the online petition' business—is that people are unable to clearly distinguish what constitutes outright support of and identification with a particular entity from loose association and overlap of interests. Further, it annoys me a bit to see that when it concerns "the Church," people seem to get a free pass to throw anyone and everyone under the bus, but then if the offended may respond negatively to that type of action, it's deemed "hateful" or "anti____." Now mind you, I'm not condoning ultra-fundamentalism that calls anything moving or breathing a millimeter outside of its boundaries as minions of Satan, but I do think there's something to be said that here we see a fairly well-known evangelical Christian responding with grace and humility while the ones who perpetrated this whole ordeal in the first place just thought about how they might tarnish the image of one of the most ubiquitous corporations in America (and apparently some very nasty emails to Howard Schultz).

Is Schultz (and Starbucks) guilty by association? You make the call (wisely).

Good article

2011-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

I just came across an insightful article by Professor Stanley Hauerwas who teaches here at Duke, and in it, he lays out a strong critique of American Protestantism, and how its own presuppositions are contributing to its possible demise (at least in its current form). I recommend you all go read the article for yourself, but here's a quote to whet your appetite:

"More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go. For the church is assumed to exist to reinforce the presumption that those that go to church have done so freely. The church's primary function, therefore, is to legitimate and sustain the presumption that America represents what all people would want to be if they had the benefit of American education and money. That is what Americans mean by "freedom."

Journal article help?

2011-07-05T12:03:00.001-07:00

I thought I'd ask for some help from my readers: does anyone have Stephen Westerholm's article from Svensk Exegetisk Arsbok 51-51 (1986-7) titled "On Fulfilling the Whole Law (Gal. 5.14)"? I'm sure if I went digging I could probably find a hardcopy somewhere and scan it, but I thought I'd give it a try here first to see if anyone might have a PDF or something they can send along...

Much appreciated!

Minority rules?

2011-07-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my wife's suggestion, I started reading an interesting new book titled The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs. It seems to be a semi-response (though this is only a minor impetus for the writing of this book as far as I can tell) to the classic, How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. In it, he references a recent research conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts titled "Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Legacy" (For the full report, go here). The first conclusion found in this research caught my eye:

What surprised me was that the findings found in 2008 showed that for the first time in 26 years(!), the percentage of adult readers increased. In other words, since 1982, they conducted this survey 5 times and they have only witnessed a downward trend of adults in America who read a work of literature in the past 12 months. I suppose the advent of eBook readers may have contributed to the recent findings, but more than the increase in % readership, what intrigued me was that for the first time in almost a decade, the "majority" (by the slightest of margins; 50.2%) of Americans read some work of literature in the last 12 months.
I've been thinking about the kind of problems that the seemingly infectious aversion to reading creates in our society, and in my view, I don't know what other conclusion one can come to besides negative ones. It has shocked me more than a few times to hear some folks declare that they have not read a single book cover to cover since high school, claiming this feat as a badge-of-honor. And if not the detriment to society in general, then what about to our families and our churches? The study proved that the American-reader is now the "majority" over against the "minority" of American-illiterates, but it certainly feels as if minority rules strong in the overall American culture.

What interesting reads have you come across lately and what are some ways to battle this ubiquitous aversion to reading?

Prosperity

2011-06-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

For my research assistant job over the summer, I've been doing a lot of digging into all things related to "prosperity" (i.e. prosperity gospel). It's been very fascinating to dialogue with my professor over a topic that I really don't know much about. Before this summer, the only reason I was vaguely even aware of this brand of Christianity was because of these two buildings:

If you're from Orange County (CA), you're probably very familiar with these buildings (even if you didn't know what they were) because both buildings can be seen from two major freeways that run through Orange County. The first one on the left is the Trinity Broadcasting Network, found by Paul (and Jan) Crouch, and a couple other former associates. The second is the Crystal Cathedral, found by Robert Schuller. I think both institutions are intertwined with what's understood as the prosperity movement, which is often highly disparaged by mainstream evangelicalism. Leaving aside the polarizing debate about their theology for the moment, I started thinking about the brand of evangelicalism that I myself have known and experienced.
The churches I know from home are situated in a very affluent, upper middle-class area (a TV show and a movie was named after the general area I'm from, after all), I began to wonder if there is anything practically (I'm not talking about the theological foundations or lack thereof that might undergird each of the two groups) different from prosperity churches and mainstream evangelical churches that I have seen. Most upper-middle class evangelicals seem just fine accumulating vast amounts of wealth (e.g., houses, cars, bank accounts, toys, vacations, clothing, etc.), and from their ivory tower of enjoying every level of creature comfort that man could think of, they quickly turn around and "abominate" any hints of the prosperity gospel (to use John Piper's words, though this present post is not talking about him or his lifestyle: I just think his word fits the vehemence with which we tend to critique the "other side", viz., the prosperity gospel).
To me, it all seems a bit intellectually and theologically dishonest to sing "You are my all in all" on a Sunday morning, while driving away from church in a BMW, checking one's Cartier watch to make sure they're not late for brunch at the new French-American joint that opened up, and simultaneously using Twitter and texts on his or her iPhone4. I apologize for being overdramatic, but the affluent middle-class evangelical appears to me, mutatis mutandis, as a practical prosperity-believer. I don't think possessing wealth itself is the distinguishing marker between being a mainline evangelical or a prosperity-believer, but I do think the manner in which that wealth is viewed and handled makes the difference. One can deny that they dislike (or even "abominate") the prosperity gospel, but I think their lifestyle might tell another story.
Now, don't misunderstand me as one who has successfully negotiated the theological tension that exists between middle-class wealth and Christian discipleship in a world filled with immense poverty. But, as I'm seeing more and more of my Christian colleagues and friends enter into the professional world, earning salaries that will more than provide for all sorts of luxuries, it does worry me somewhat whether we have carefully thought about what role money should play in our individual lives, our families, and the rearing of our children.

Handmade

2011-06-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

In our modern culture of industrialized goods, often there is a big premium placed on "handmade" goods. Handmade things are special in the sense that they are unique (if they are handmade, it's more than likely that no two are alike) and more often than not, personal (I think of friends who knit things for friends — handmade).

In the LXX and NT, the same word can be found: χειροποίητος. It's interesting that the word means, literally, "handmade." However, in the Scriptures, handmade things are seen in quite the opposite light; they are symbols of idolatry and if I'm not mistaken, the majority (if not all) of the occurrences of the word is used negatively. To make this point clear, translators of OT will make this case by rendering the Greek word as an "idol" or "image" (E.g., Lev 26:1; Isa 2:18).

In the OT, the critique appears to be against the handcrafted item of a god as opposed the unimageable YHWH (See the two examples above). And in the NT, the invective is against "handmade" circumcision as opposed to the spiritual/heart circumcision and the "handmade" temple as opposed to the spiritual temple (E.g., Mk 14:58; Acts 7:48, 17:24; Heb 9:11). While this might have been a prominent theme that flowed through Jewish thought, I didn't think that Greco-Roman culture gave all that much thought to this until I came across Seneca's letters today (albeit his very different angle). In it he writes:

"You are doing the finest possible thing and acting in your best interests if, as you say in your letter, you are persevering in your efforts to acquire a sound understanding. This is something it is foolish to pray for when you can win it from your own self. There is no need to raise our hands to heaven; there is no need to implore the temple warden to allow us close to the ear of some graven image (simulacri), as though this increased the chances of our being heard. God is near you, is with you, is inside you (prope est a te deus, tecum est, intus est). Yes, Lucilius, there resides within us a divine spirit, which guards us and watches us in the evil and the good we do. As we treat him, so will he treat us. No man, indeed is good without God — is any one capable of rising above fortune unless he has help from God? He it is that prompts us to noble and exalted endeavors. In each and every good man: A god (what god we are uncertain) dwells" [this last sentence is seen as a quote from Virgil's Aeneid].
--Seneca, Epistle 40.1-2

Though I'll probably have to study more about the kind of theology (if any) Stoic philosophers subscribed to, this paragraph from Seneca is an interesting parallel.

2 Baruch 72

2011-06-18T06:04:00.000-07:00

These days, I've been reading 2 Baruch in Syriac to keep up with the ancient language (using this text here), and so far, it's been a very interesting book to read. I've really enjoyed taking Syriac for the past year now (great professor [Dr. Lucas Van Rompay] as well as a bunch of interesting texts [Ephrem's commentary, Aphrahat's Demonstrations, NT/OT Peshitta, Odes of Solomon to name just a few]). This morning I was reading 2 Baruch 71-73, and if I'm not mistaken, this critical text contains a translation error (his transl.):

72.1 "Hear, now, also concerning the bright waters which are to come at the end, after these black (waters): this is the word. 72.2 After the signs have come, of which I have spoken to you before, when the nations become confused and the time of my Messiah comes, he will call all the nations; and some of them he will spare, and some of them he will kill. 72.3 These things, therefore, will come upon the nations which are not spared by him. 72.4 Every nation which does not know Israel and has trodden down the seed of Jacob, will live. And this because some from all the nations will be subjected to your people. But all those who have ruled over you or have known you will be given over to the sword."

My question concerns 72.3, which the critical text reads (I'm using a font called Estrangelo Edessa, so if you don't have Syriac fonts installed, it might not show correctly):

ܗܠܝܢ ܗܟܝܠ ܐܬܝܢ ܥܠ ܥܡܡܐ ܐܝܠܝܢ ܕܥܬܝܕܝܢ ܕܢܚܘܢ ܡܢܗ

Gurtner translates this as, "These things, therefore, will come upon the nations which are not spared by him". But the difficulty for me concerns the second to last word in the sentence which is from the root ḥy’, which is of course in this form means to give life, save, or spare. If my reading is right, it should be read: "These things, therefore, will come upon the nations which are spared/saved by him."

Quote of the Day: Seneca

2011-06-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

As I wrote in a previous post, I've been reading a little bit of Seneca's Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, and today, I wanted to quote him on one function that letters seemed to play during his time.

"Thank you for writing so often. By doing so you give me a glimpse of yourself in the only way you can. I never get a letter from you without instantly feeling we're together. If pictures of absent friends are a source of pleasure to us, refreshing the memory and relieving the sense of void with a solace however insubstantial and unreal, how much more so are letters, which carry marks and signs of the absent friend that are real. For the handwriting of a friend affords us what is so delightful about seeing him again, the sense of recognition (agnoscere)."
- Seneca, Letter 40.1

In our modern age of easy travel, texting, phone calls, and even video chatting (FaceTime, Skype, etc!?), it might be difficult for us at times to imagine how letters might have been perceived and accepted by their recipients. Consequently, when we come across letters in the NT, we are prone to search out possible universal apothegms that we would like to apply in our current situations. However, a quote like above shows the tender and personal (also in some ways private?) nature of letters that insists on our more careful attention to particular situations, expressions of friendship (or enmity?), etc., that exist in the NT epistles.

Testimonium Flavianum

2011-06-14T09:42:00.001-07:00

I've been just trying to understand a bit more about what Josephus offers in NT studies, and today's post is just one small intersection between Josephus and the NT. The title of the blog post is about a passage (which scholars call testimonium flavianum) from Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, which contains the following (at least as the text we have today):

About this time comes Jesus, a wise man, if indeed it is proper to call him a man. For he was a worker of incredible deeds, a teacher of those who accept the truth with pleasure, and attracted many Jews as well as many of the Greek. This man was the Christ (ὁ χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν). And when, in view of [his] denunciation by the leading men among us, Pilate had sentenced him to a cross, those who had loved at the beginning did not cease [to do so]. He appeared to them on the third day alive again, for the divine prophets had announced these and countless other marvels concerning him. And even now the tribe of the "Christians"—named after him—has not yet disappeared.
Ant. 18:63-64

What's striking is the sentence in the Greek shown above, a succinct and unqualified assertion that Jesus was the Christ. In all of the Josephus corpus, he only uses the term "Christ" twice (here and in Ant. 20:200). I think most (if not all) scholars would be agreed that Josephus was not a Christian by any means, and therefore, this statement is somewhat at odds with how Josephus normally thought and wrote in the rest of his literature. This then engenders a few questions:

(1) Is this testimonium original to Josephus?
(2) Is this a later whole cloth creation by later Christian scribes?
(3) Did Josephus mention Jesus in some other way that provided the foundation from which later editors were able to create this assertion?
(4) Was Josephus a Christian? (if we were allowed to entertain this as a viable option)

I can understand why most scholars view this as a later redaction (or insertion) by Christian scribes, but I suppose if that was true, why only here and why in such a brief note? I would think that if they wanted to make Jesus available within Josephus' writings, they might as well scatter a few more pieces of information elsewhere (and possibly in larger chunks)...

UCLA and manuscripts

2011-06-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

Just found out today that my alma mater, UCLA, now holds the largest repository of Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. Some excerpts of this article:

he UCLA Library has acquired the largest private collection of Ethiopic manuscripts and scrolls in the U.S., given by Gerald and Barbara Weiner. Together with the library's existing collections, this gift makes the UCLA Library the leading repository for Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. A classical Semitic language, Ethiopic is used as the liturgical language of the Christian church in Ethiopia. Dating from the 18th to the 21st centuries, the collection of 137 bound manuscripts and 102 scrolls is particularly rich in elaborately illustrated liturgical texts. Highlights include a late 19th/early 20th-century version of the Gospels containing 78 miniatures; a 19th-century "lives of the saints" with 40 miniatures; a 20th-century compilation of a table blessing and miracles performed by Jesus with 37 miniatures; and a 20th-century collection of prayers with an image of John the Evangelist and 26 miniatures.

"Words cannot express our deep thanks to Jerry and Barbara — first, for building this gorgeous collection, then for giving it to us," said UCLA University Librarian Gary E. Strong. "These extraordinary items, noteworthy both for their research value and their beauty, will be of great interest to students and scholars, as well as to the extensive Ethiopian community in Southern California." ...

To see more, go to the UCLA newsroom here.

HT: PaleoJudaica.com

Quote of the Day

2011-06-07T16:27:00.001-07:00

This past semester, we talked at length about Paul's letter to the Romans, and despite spending an entire semester looking hard at the text, it's evident to me that there is much more to be wrestled with and learned before I can confidently say I know something about Romans. The more we seemed to dig into the text, the more I became convinced that much of my own understanding of the letter was built on assumptions that may not necessarily be right. Granted, my teacher had a specific angle to the text that colored our own discussions, but nevertheless, it was very helpful to think critically about this important letter in the NT. One issue that we began to unpack a little bit is the fact that Romans is, in the end, a letter. This means that we should be careful about viewing the book wholesale as a systematic theology book, where we might be prone to believe that everything we wanted to know about anything in Christianity is found in Romans. I'm currently reading Richard Longenecker's Introducing Romans: Critical Issues in Paul's Most Famous Letter, and in it, he makes the same point. I would like to quote some words from a wise Pauline scholar:

"Throughout the first eighteen centuries of the Christian church, Romans was most often understood as a theological treatise or tractate that sets out a relatively complete statement of Christian belief — or, at least, that clearly enunciates the basic features of Paul's teaching ...
Romans, however, is a real letter, not a contrived literary epistle. It contains personal allusions, definite travel plans, and rather specific instructions for a particular people. There are in it, as in Paul's other letters, digressions, parentheses, and unfinished sentences. More importantly, while the longest of the apostle's extant writings, Romans lacks a number of subjects that seem from his other letters to be absolutely essential to Paul's thought and proclamation — most obviously, (1) the omission of any discussion of the resurrection of believers, which was such an important topic in his earlier letters (cf. 1 Thessalonians 4-5, 2 Thessalonians 2, and 1 Corinthians 15), and (2) the lack of any reference to the Lord's Supper, which was a matter of great concern when writing to converts at Corinth (cf. 1 Cor 11:17-34). As a theological treatise, therefore, Romans is somewhat truncated and a bit disappointing in its coverage of important doctrinal themes."

This is something that I think we need to wrestle with a bit further, but at this point, it is significant to note that Romans was not written at the end of one's life. Actually, as Longenecker points out (following the quote above), "Paul writes as a man in mid-career," having completed much of his work in the east, and setting out toward missionary work in the west.

Know your Bible

2011-06-06T18:15:00.000-07:00

This CNN article lists various "phantom passages" that are often mistaken as being found in the Bible. Some interesting ones are:

"This, too, shall pass"
"God helps those who help themselves"
"Spare the rod, spoil the child"
"God works in mysterious ways"

I think I've actually heard some of these phrases used as if one was quoting from Scripture. Have you heard of any others?

Quote of the Day

2011-06-04T16:07:00.000-07:00

I've just started to read Seneca's Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, probably as a small way to make up missing out on a class on Greco-Roman philosophy this past semester (I wasn't able to take it due to schedule conflicts). Plus some quotes I've read from a friend got me curious about this famous Stoic philosopher, and so far, it's been a fun read. I will leave you today with a short quote from him:

"Similarly, people who never relax and people who are invariably in a relaxed state merit your disapproval — the former as much as the latter. For a delight in bustling about is not industry — it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind. And the state of mind that looks on all activity as tiresome is not true repose, but a spineless inertia. This prompts me to memorize something which I came across in Pomponius. 'Some men have shrunk so far into dark corers that objects in bright daylight seem quite blurred to them.' A balanced combination of the two attitudes is what we want; the active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined toward repose should be capable of action. Ask nature: she will tell you that she made both day and night."
- Seneca, Epistle III

Angry?

2011-06-02T11:30:00.001-07:00

NT Wright mentions briefly what gets to him at times:

How about you?

Quote of the Day

2011-05-24T09:14:00.000-07:00

I just started reading Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind because I heard it was a pretty good book, and the topic just interested me in general. I'm just about finishing up the first chapter and so far Noll paints a pretty bleak picture (though I think in a large measure an accurate one) of the state of evangelicalism and the ~~bitter~~ fruits that we are now reaping from its anti-intellectualistic tendencies. Noll describes his book as a "historic footnote" in support of the words of an Lebanese diplomat, scholar, and Eastern Orthodox Christian who was invited to Wheaton College in 1980 for the opening of the Billy Graham Center. This diplomat (Charles Malik) relayed some important words which I think is worth quoting here in full:

The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among the evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does your mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode of thinking in the great universities of Europe and America which stamp your entire civilization with their own spirit and ideas?
It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism.... Even if you start now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will be a century at least before you catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes, and think of where these universities will be then! For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, the Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence."

With thirty some years since Malik's wise words, I still wonder just how much (or little?) evangelicals have progressed (or digressed) in this regard. Having spent most of my education at great secular institutions, I personally can't say that things have changed at all since then... What do you think? Has evangelicalism shed its shell of anti-intellectualism? Are there scholars who are beginning to contribute to the wide-range of disciplines at our universities?

Stay-at-home Dads

2011-05-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

I read something earlier today that shows that the concept of "stay-at-home dads" is not such a novel thing:

Just as the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers, so, too, have they instituted customs and laws contrary for the most part to those of the rest of mankind. Among them, the women buy and sell (ἀγοράζουσι καὶ καπηλεύουσι), the men stay at home and weave; and whereas in weaving all others push the woof upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards.

-- Herodotus, Histories, 2.35.2

I suppose maybe Herodotus was trying to exaggerate the fact that Egyptians do things "backwards", especially given the fact that even the Nile River seemed to flow "backwards" (South to North) in their eyes. Nonetheless, it appears that stay-at-home dads wasn't an invention of the 20th century.

Multi-Site or Single-Site?

2011-05-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

There's been some talks in the blogging world about comments that Mark Driscoll has made recently at a Q&A session in Belfast (For example, see here and here) about his own views about the congregational model of a church. I think his thoughts then necessarily impinge on the notion of multi-site churches, of which Mars Hill Church seems to be the current paradigm (If I'm right, they have over ten different campuses and that not even in the same state). If you want to listen to the Q&A go here. I've been thinking about this a lot more recently because of a couple reasons:

1. Mars Hill has decided to plant a church in my own hometown (or home-area, I guess, to be more exact): Orange County, California. I've been thinking about the idea of watching a pastor preach to you, who in actuality lives over 1,000 miles away on another state.

2. In the area that we live in now, there is a "megachurch" called The Summit Church, that has over ten services in five different locations. My wife and I have visited a few times, and it seems to draw significant attention in the greater Research Triangle area (i.e. areas surrounding Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill). When you ask a bunch of people around here who is the person to listen to, it's usually JD Grear (he's the head teaching pastor I think at Summit). Whether or not I agree, that's a different issue, so I won't get to that here.

3. Our own church is currently dealing with some issues that somewhat overlap with this topic and so it is something I've had to think about for the past few months.

Mars Hill has also recently posted up a blog post about this (See here), and my initial reaction is: I'm not very convinced. The article proposes that people have committed a methodological error by focusing too intently on the use of the word ἐκκλησία in the NT, and maybe they are right, but I also think they themselves have committed another error: by using the model of multiple house-churches in Corinth as the normative model. In a discussion recently in class, we've talked some about the real possibility that Corinth was the exception that proved the rule: that most early Christian communities were of the lower class who did not have a patron or someone of means to provide a large atrium or triclinium for people to gather.

Furthermore, what has been troubling to me is that from years past when Mars Hill was just a few campuses in the Northwest, to now, there appears to be some shift in language. For example, in much of the audio I hear now from Driscoll, the focus is on numbers: We have ___ number of people baptized last week, we have ___ number of people gathering at Qwest Field for Easter, we have ___ number of people worshiping over ten campuses, etc. As Stephen Holmes has intimated in his blog post above, much of the justification for doing church Driscoll's way is based on the practical and not theological. Also, I think his discussion about the congregational model is often caricaturing and pictures the worst possible scenario in order to make his case that his model is the better one. I'm not saying congregational model is the best model, but neither will I disparage it unless I've done full research on its possibilities as well as its theological foundations. Driscoll just seems to run the gamut of how terrible it would be in situations X, Y, and Z, and therefore concludes (pragmatically) that it just does not work. Furthermore, in one part of the Q&A clip above, Driscoll asks the sarcastic question along the lines of, "What if we did a congregational vote with our current 10,000 members?" as if to say that the ridiculous nature of the answer to that question necessarily means that he is doing it right. I remember even watching one video (here), where he is basically attacking Mark Dever for not setting up multi-site in the DC area, where he would then potentially reach thousands and not just the 800-900 currently attending Capitol Hill Baptist Church. So, does that mean, if I can preach to more people or I can get more people to sit and watch my video, it is more successful than actually interacting with a few?

I must admit, I'm still not sure where I completely stand on the issue of multi-site churches, but I do think there's quite an imperialistic feel to the Mars Hill brand (or other megachurch multi-sites) of Christianity that does not sit comfortably on my heart at the moment. I could be convinced otherwise, so I'm all ears to your comments.

HT: scientia et sapientia

Welcome to the blogosphere

2011-05-07T11:05:00.000-07:00

I would like to give a shout-out to my fellow Dukie and friend, Ross Jahnke to the blogosphere. He's just about finished with his Th.M at Duke Divinity School and I've enjoyed the numerous conversations we've had this past year (and sad that him and his wife will be moving away so soon!). He just started a new blog here, called Ross Jahnke: sharing half-baked reflections from a Christian life. A modest blog title for a very smart fellow! Please drop by his blog and say hello if you get a chance!

Too many conferences?

2011-05-06T14:58:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking lately... is there such a thing as too many conferences? The above is a collage of a bunch of conferences that I'm aware of. In my RSS feed in Google Reader and tweets that I see from different people I follow (or retweeted by them, etc), it seems more than ever there's a booming "industry" (if I could be allowed to use the word for a minute) for Christian conferences. I admit I've gone to my share of them and they are definitely helpful at times, but I'm wondering if there may be a trajectory that these conferences are starting to turn into a business (hence the word, industry). With the hefty sums paid out to speakers, setting up of bookstores, etc, it appears that these events are turning into a consumers' affair. I'd have to check to be sure, but the conference prices (generally speaking) are much more expensive than years previous, and more than ever they seem to be highlighting the "big names" who will be speaking at these conferences. Are we unwittingly creating a Christian celebrity culture where leaders/pastors of our churches are putting certain men/women on a pedestal?

What do you think? Have you gone to these conferences, and if so, what was your experience like and is putting together a conference that could potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars (speaker fees, facilities, hotels, etc.) worth it rather than if that money was used elsewhere?

What text are they referring to?

2011-04-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some research into Lev. 19:18 and its relationship to Paul in Rom. 13 and Gal. 5. Anyway, I read something today that was very odd. In Witherington's Romans commentary, he says about 13:8-10, "But Paul is also following a longer Jewish tradition that suggested that the pith or heart of the Law could be summed up in one phrase" then gives two references: Testament of Issachar 6 and the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a. I'm trying to hunt down both of these references, but they seem to be either wrong or I might be missing something.

First, the T. Iss reference seems to be a mistake because when I read through that book in the OTP, chapter 6 has nothing (as far as I can tell) about the Torah being summed up in a phrase.

Second, I'm having a hard time trying to find the Talmudic reference. Does anyone know where I can get access to it online? I figured the Talmud would be online somewhere, but I can't seem to find it...

Anyone know what texts Witherington (among other commentators) are referring to and where I can get access to them? Any help is appreciated!

Bonhoeffer and Anti-Semiticism

2011-04-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've finished reading through Bonhoeffer's Life Together during this Lent season (My other Lent posts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), so I've been reading other material from Bonhoeffer during this time. In the early 1930s, as Germany began to adopt laws that became more and more explicltly anti-Semitic, Bonhoeffer was one of the few who recognized the dangers of the Church merging its interests completely with that of the State. The 'Aryan Paragraph' espoused by the German State/Church eventually led to a full-on legislation to distinguish the 'Aryans' from 'non-Aryans' with charts such as these:

If one has three or more grandparents (dark circles at the top), then you fall under the category of Jude ("Jew").

Against these kinds of ideologies, Bonhoeffer wrote a pamphlet titled 'The Aryan Paragraph in the Church' which is clear evidence of how differently he thought from the majority of German Christians around him. In it he writes:

"The German Christians say: We are not so much concerned with these thousand Jewish Christians as with the millions of our fellow citizens who are estranged from God. For their sake, these others might in certain cases have to be sacrificed. We answer: We too are concerned for those outside the church, but the church does not sacrifice a single one of its members. It may even be that the church for the sake of a thousand believing Jewish Christians that it is not allowed to sacrifice, might fail to win over those millions. But what good would it do to gain millions of people at the price of the truth and of love for even a single one?"

Radio silence

2011-04-16T18:53:00.001-07:00

To my readers:

Apologies for the lack of any posts lately! Finals are coming up and I have two big (or three I guess if you count something I've been working on for journal submission since last semester) papers as we approach the end of this semester. Duke likes to assign a ton of reading and it's been super busy, so please excuse the infrequency of posts. I'm hoping to have more collected thoughts over the summer, so we'll talk more then. I'm glad that my first year at Duke is almost over and if you're wondering what my Fall schedule might be like, this is the tentative outlook:

OT in NT seminar
Learning Theology with CS Lewis
Intro to Aramaic
History: Between Augustine & Anselm
Christian Scripture & Ethics

Hopefully it'll end up being a great semester. Wish me well for the upcoming finals week!

Lent Part 3

2011-04-07T20:48:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading through Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together (Lent Part 1, Part 2) which has been a very refreshing book to read as this semester has inundated me with reading a whole bunch of journal articles and monographs. I read something this morning which I hope will be an encouragement (or perhaps rebuke?) to you. This comes from a section entitled 'The Ministry of Listening':

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.
Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words. One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 97-98.

Lent Part 2

2011-03-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

Continuing my posts about Lent (So far: Part 1), I read something earlier today by Bonhoeffer that I think would be beneficial for us to think about during this Lent season. On a section titled 'Meditation' he writes:

It is not necessary that we should discover new ideas in our meditation. Often this only diverts us and feeds our vanity. It is sufficient if the Word, as we read and understand it, penetrates and dwells within us. As Mary "pondered in her heart" the things that were told by the shepherds, as what we have casually overheard follows us for a long time, sticks in our mind, occupies, disturbs, or delights us, without our ability to do anything about it, so in meditation God's Word seeks to enter in and remain with us. It strives to stir us, to work and operate in us, so that we shall not get away from it the whole day long. Then it will do its work in us, often without our being conscious of it.
Above all, it is not necessary that we should have any unexpected, extraordinary experiences in meditation. This can happen, but if it does not, it is not a sign that the meditation period has been useless. Not only at the beginning, but repeatedly, there will be times when we feel a great spiritual dryness and apathy, an aversion, even an inability to meditate. We dare not be balked by such experiences. Above all, we must not allow them to keep us from adhering to our meditation period with great patience and fidelity.
It is, therefore, not good for us to take too seriously the many untoward experiences we have with ourselves in meditation. It is here that our old vanity and our illicit claims upon God may creep in by a pious detour, as if it were our right to have nothing but elevating and fruitful experiences, and as if the discovery of our own inner poverty were quite below our dignity. With that attitude, we shall make no progress. Impatience and self-reproach will only foster our complacency and entangle us ever more deeply in the net of self-centered introspection. But there is no more time for such morbidity in meditation than there is in the Christian life as a whole. We must center our attention on the Word alone and leave consequences to its action. For may it not be that God Himself sends us these hours of reproof and dryness that we may be brought again to expect everything from His Word? "Seek God, not happiness" — this is the fundamental rule in all meditation. If you seek God alone, you will gain happiness: that is its promise.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 83-4.

I particularly appreciated his last paragraph where he criticizes the notion that we think it is "our right" to always enjoy great times of meditation. Hopefully this short quote was helpful to you as it was to me.

Lent

2011-03-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

We're just about half-way into Lent and as I was working through John 12 today for class, I was reminded of how pivotal the scene of the 'Triumphal Entry' was for all the Evangelists. I thought it would be interesting to see how each Evangelist portrayed the proclamation of "Hosanna." We often overlook this because of our familiarity with the Passion Narratives, but each Evangelist has a distinctive flavor that makes these readings worthy of reflection.

Matthew 21:8-9
A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Mark 11:8-10
Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"

Luke 19:37-38
As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!"

John 12:12-13
The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, "Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord-- the King of Israel!"

Of course the larger narrative should be read and understood before we can comment at length about these short passages, but I find it fascinating that even a small snippet of a scene of the triumphal entry reveals something about the viewpoint of each of the Evangelists vis-à-vis their understanding of the person of Jesus Christ and the role that he plays within the narrative of Israel and/or God's kingdom.

Quote of the Day: Bonhoeffer

2011-03-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

In an earlier blog post (here), I alluded to multiple reviews of this biography of Bonhoeffer. Some of the reviews have been questioning just how "evangelical" Bonhoeffer was, and how some biographers might have in some ways "evangelicalized" Bonhoeffer to make him appear to be more palatable to the Christian Right. Personally, I don't think either labels are very helpful (whether he is "evangelical" or "not") because reading through his works shows a kind of depth in theology, ethics, philosophy, etc., that moves beyond simple categorical caricatures. I don't think I would label him as a "liberal" but I don't think I would straight label him as an "evangelical" (as the term is widely used today) either. Further, the term "evangelical" seems to change in definition from group to group, some using it almost pejoratively, while others wear it as a badge of honor, etc. It's just very difficult to pin down exactly what anyone means when he/she says "____ is an evangelical."

I'm currently reading through Bonhoeffer's Life Together, and he also has some words about what an "evangelical" is (not?):

"What we call our life, our troubles, our guilt, is by no means all of reality; there in the Scriptures is our life, our need, our guilt, and our salvation. Because it pleased God to act for us there, it is only there that we shall be saved. Only in the Holy Scriptures do we learn to know our own history. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God and Father of Jesus Christ and our Father. We must learn to know the Scriptures again, as the Reformers and our fathers knew them. We must not grudge the time and the work that it takes. We must know the Scriptures first and foremost for the sake of our salvation. But besides this, there are ample reasons that make this requirement exceedingly urgent. How, for example, shall we ever attain certainty and confidence in our personal and church activity if we do not stand on solid Biblical ground? It is not our heart that determines our course, but God's Word. But who in this day has any proper understanding of the need for scriptural proof? How often we hear innumerable arguments "from life" and "from experience" put forward as the basis for most critical decisions, but the argument of Scripture is missing. And this authority would perhaps point in exactly the opposite direction. It is not surprising, of course, that the person who attempts to cast discredit upon their wisdom should be the one who himself does not seriously read, know, and study the Scriptures. But the one who will not learn to handle the Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian."

GJohn and Anti-Semitism?

2011-03-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

I saw this on my Twitter feed last week. Piper is currently preaching through the Gospel of John, and as Richard Hays is the dean of the school I'm at, as well as the fact that I'm currently taking a seminar on the Fourth Gospel, it piqued my interest. I downloaded the message from this past weekend and listened to it on my way to/back from school. The text that he preached on I think is from John 8:30-59, and in one particular section, he quoted from something Hays wrote (he doesn't acknowledge which book it's from and as far as I can tell, the website doesn't either). In a section of the sermon he titles 'Scholars Slandering the Word of God', Piper says [Piper in blue, Hays in brown]:

We should be ashamed of this part of our history. But unlike so many critical scholars, we should not lay the fault of this history at the feet of the Gospel of John, which is what so many do. I mention this now in our series on John because chapter 8 is the climax of what the critical scholars see as the problem. For example, concerning our text today, Richard Hays, Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, says:

Nowhere in John's Gospel does the superheated animosity toward the Jews come to more vigorous expression than in chapter 8. . . . The dialogue [of John 8:39–47] is the most deeply disturbing outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment in the New Testament. . . . John makes a fateful theological step: from the empirical fact of the unbelief of the Jews . . . . The Jews who do not believe must be children of the devil. . . . The conclusion of verse 47 articulates the chilling logic of this position: the reason they do not hear the word of God is that they are not from God. . . . One shudders to contemplate the ethical outworking of such a theological perspective on the Jews. . . . The Gospel of John really does adopt a stance toward Judaism that can only engender polemics and hostility.

This is a great sadness that ordained Christian teachers in the church should slander the word of God in this way. Let me mention four problems with this way of dealing with Jesus' very hard words in John 8—for though they are hard, they are especially offensive to modern, soft, pluralistic ears. Four responses, and the fourth one will launch us into an exposition of the text itself to let Jesus and John speak for themselves.

Someone could correct me but I'm guessing this is from his Moral Vision of the New Testament. Anyway, what Piper means as "this part of our history" is the often ugly animosity between Jews and Christians that have existed basically since the first century. The four responses that Piper has is this:

(1) If we want to excise from the Gospels any anti-Semitic language, we'll have to do far more than just John 8. Piper says, "Jesus' language toward the Pharisees is almost uniformly negative everywhere in all four Gospels, and often intensely so... If the Jesus of John has to go, so does the Jesus of all the Gospels."
(2) All unbelievers are labeled as "sons of the devil" by Jesus. Piper then quotes from Mt. 13:38-39 that describes the weeds as the sons of the evil one, that "Jewish people are not unique in their unbelief and their vulnerability to the blinding and distorting effects of the devil."
(3) Paul teaches that all unbelievers are under the "sway of the devil... [and that] the New Testament as a whole, not just John's Gospel, sees in the ongoing resistance to Jesus, whether in Jew or Gentile, the deadness and blindness of sin and the accompanying work of Satan. John 8 is not unique."
(4) Parallels in 1 John 3:8, that "sinning" is "of the devil."

I think on some levels, I commend Piper for his fierce convictions and willingness to go where the text may lead him, and while I'm definitely not a Piper-hater or a TGC-basher (do they go hand-in-hand?), I have a few comments:

First, it doesn't seem that Hays is commenting on anything beyond John 8 in the quotation. He isn't speaking about what does the rest of the NT say, or what does 1 John say, or even that we have to excise from our Bibles any seemingly 'anti-Semitic' texts. Hays' quote (unless Piper left out more of Hays' quote that actually touched on these issues) seems to be a simple comment on what is observable from the Gospel of John as it stands.
Second, Piper's statement that Jesus' comments toward Pharisees is basically negative is acceptable in the Synoptics, but it does not explain why the Fourth Evangelist decided to label them 'the Jews.' He is right to point out that everyone is technically 'a Jew', but if you read through the four Gospels, John by far outstrips the Synoptics in his use of the phrase οἱ Ἰουδαῖοι. By a quick scan, I would even venture to guess that John uses the term "the Jews" more than all three Synoptics combined. I appreciate how Piper urges his congregation to take the text seriously, and if that is the case, then I think we seriously have to account for this fact.

Anyway, that's just a couple quick thoughts I had as I was mulling over the sermon and the Gospel of John. What do you think? Is Piper right? Is Hays right? How do we locate the term 'anti-Semitic' on a given text?

Fall 2011

2011-03-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks, I'll be registering for my next semester of classes... here's a few that I'm interested in (grouped in respective categories):

Church History
Between Augustine & Anselm
Life & Times of the Wesleys
Eucharist in the First Eight Centuries of the Church

Historical Theology
Luther and the Reformation in Germany
The Theology and Ethics of Ambrose of Milan

Biblical studies
The Old Testament in the New
The Gospels & Historiography
Christian Ethics & Scripture

Christian Ethics
S. Kierkegaard

Christian Theology
Learning Theology with CS Lewis
Film & The Christian Life
The Thought of Augustine of Hippo

There's so many good classes to choose from! I guess that's a good problem to have... hope I can get into the four classes that I will decide on in a few weeks time.

Nature-grace model?

2011-03-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

This week we had to read an excellent article from Alan Torrance titled, "Forgiveness: The essential Socio-political Structure of Personal Being." It's good to see continuity in our discussions as a lot of the things I read from Torrance sounds like conversations we've had with Dr. Campbell in class. Anyway, in this article, Torrance critiques what he calls the "nature-grace" model that has influenced Christianity in the West (for the worst). He defines this model as such:

"[it] interprets grace in terms of nature, where nature is understood by appealing to the categories of natural law as it is discerned by the light of reason and where reason is an independent capacity constitutive of natural man. Accordingly, it asserts the primacy of nature over grace and of (natural) law over grace. Grace presupposes and perfects nature and natural justice which provide the prior context, structures, and categories in terms of which alone grace can be understood. On this model therefore nature is interpreted separated and independently of Christ."

He then goes on to give some examples of how the nature-grace model has informed the church to its detriment. Here is an excerpt of those examples:

The theology of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa is grounded in the Federal Calvinist dichotomy between the sphere of Nature and the sphere of Grace. God has created some people white and some black and the distinctions and differences between these races are discernible by the light of natural reasons as having been ordained by God as part of the ordo naturalis. The judgements of the state grounded in these natural differences and distinctions can therefore be interpreted as reflecting the eternal purposes of God for these different orders of his creation - purposes to which nature itself testifies accordingly.
Consequently, in the theology of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa the relevance of who Christ is, his person and work, and also therefore the doctrines of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation, are conditioned and restricted by the prior concept of the oroers of nature and of creation and has no place in informing its understanding of the state and its function. Its anthropology is governed not by the second Adam, the true man in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, black nor white, but by the nature-grace model which restricts the relevance of Christ merely to the spiritual realm of the redemption of the elect. The result is that free reign is given to man in his establishing, by appeal to his enlightened capacity for reason, some very "private Weltanschauung as a kind of papacy" (Barth) in determining what are and are not God's purposes in nature. Such a person's own individual, esoteric apperception becomes his or her authoritative hermeneutical key to theology, with the result that Christ who alone is the "second Adam", the eternal Logos and the one in whom the fullness of God with his purposes for Creation dwells bodily, is sacrificed on the altar of an anthropology grounded in a particular and unenlightened perception of nature. The result is that white Christians dehumanise themselves in their dehumanising of Christ and of their black brothers and sisters.

Barth and godlessness

2011-03-01T18:37:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to read as much Barth as my mind is capable, and in IV/2 §65 (The Sloth and Misery of Man), he talks a little bit about "godlessness" (I think it's appropriate to put it in quotes insofar as I understand Barth to be saying that such a thing really is not possible in the absolute sense). At this point in my venturing into Barth, some parts are still inexplicable to me, but today I read a little bit which I thought was very insightful (and true to Barthian form I'd say):

Without the knowledge of God, which the stupid man despises, there is no meaningful companionship between man and man, no genuine co-operation, no genuine sharing either of joy or sorrow, no true society. But work which is not co-operation is busy indolence. Joy which is not shared is empty amusement. Sorrow which is not shared is oppressive pain. The man who is not the fellow of others is no real man at all. And a society composed of men like this breaks up as soon as it is formed and even as the most zealous attempts are made to build and maintain it. But the stupidity of man calls for this. Even in its noblest forms humanity without the knowledge of God has in it always the seed of discord and inhumanity, and sooner or later this will emerge. From the vacuum where there is no “Glory to God in the highest” even the sincerest longing and loudest shouting for peace on earth will never lead to anything but new divisions. This is the first thing which all the concealment of human folly can never alter.

The line that struck me (if I understood him alright) is that in some way, an insistence on atheism is a betrayal (or even dehumanizing?) of our own humanity. That is an interesting take on atheism.

Jesus or the evangelist?

2011-02-26T16:02:00.000-08:00

As we've been working through the the Fourth Gospel in one of my seminars, one interesting "seam" that I can see between maybe what was originally the words of Jesus and the works of a later author and/or redactor is the switching between singular to plural verbs at points when it doesn't seem to make sense. For instance, John 3 begins with Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night, at which point they discuss the issues of being born again (or above? another topic which I wanted to blog about later). The chapter begins with Jesus and Nicodemus talking back and forth (all singular verbs mostly, though I guess the "we know" of v.2 is an exception) from vv. 1-6. At verse 7, Jesus says: "do not marvel that I said to you (singular), it is necessary for you (plural) to be born from above/again." And again at verse 11: "Amen amen I say to you (sg.) that what we know, we speak and what we have seen, we bear witness, and you (pl.) have not received our testimony." Then it goes further with various uses of plural verbs to make his point.

While it may be possible to say that Nicodemus did not come alone (hence, the "we know" of 3:2) so that's why Jesus could address the "you" as plural, it still doesn't make sense that Jesus all of a sudden begins to say "what we know" or "what we have seen", etc. In my view, it seems that there is something of a blurring (accidental or intentional is another issue that I would like to study further) of lines between what Jesus has spoken and what the evangelist now wants to convey as a collective witness to the truth in their contemporary period. Another interesting aspect can be seen when we bring in some ancient translations of the GJohn, for instance the NT Peshitta. In John 9:4, again Jesus uses the plural and says: "we must work the works of the one who sent me." The Syriac says: (apologies if the font doesn't show, I'm using a font called 'Serto Jerusalem' which is supposed to be unicode but I'm not sure how it functions really in blog posts):

ܠܺܝ ܘܳܠܶܐ ܠܡܶܥܒ݁ܰܕ݂ ܥܒ݂ܳܕ݂ܶܐ ܕ݁ܡܰܢ ܕ݁ܫܰܕ݁ܪܰܢܝ

It can be translated as something like, "to me it is necessary to work the work of/from the one who sent me." For the Syriac translators, they found it necessary to flatten the plural statements into singular. I thought they would be compelled to do likewise in John 3, but in the examples above, the Syriac also has the switching of singular to plural forms (darn these inconsistencies!). Nevertheless, I think in some ways the translators into Syriac may have felt uncomfortable just as we do in our close readings of the text with the awkwardness of the whole singular to plural and back to singular forms of verbs/nouns in Jesus' discourses.

Is this an indication of the work of the evangelist? I'm not sure at this point, but I'm going to look into the Syriac some more to see if there's evidences elsewhere of flattening them all into singular verbs/nouns.

No such thing as "bad" publicity?

2011-02-26T15:27:00.000-08:00

Recently, there's been some talks in the blogging world regarding the Christians' response to certain "bad" books, quotes, etc., that essentially give those very people a voice and a venue to be heard. Some have said we need to just calm down (here), another has elaborated on this issue in an article for Christianity Today, and another wonders if Christians are overly contentious and that we just love a good fight whenever we can find (or create!?) one. Just at the heels of a series of these types of blog posts and articles, I saw this post from another widely-followed blogger who comments about yet another forthcoming book, basically labeling it as heresy.

Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be as naive or dishonest to think that anything and everything goes in the realm of Christianity (because I don't), but I wonder if all of this just goes to prove the old adage: there is no such thing as bad publicity.

With hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people reading these blog posts slamming this or that book or author, I wonder if it just makes people want to read them even more than had we just flat-out ignored them?

Cursing?

2011-02-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

Even though my main interest is in the New Testament and I spend most of my time reading books, journals, monographs, etc., about NT studies, I also enjoy reading biographies throughout the year to give my brain a break. In 2011, I've finished one on WWII, a short (saw the longer version and got intimidated... will probably read it later) one on Jonathan Edwards, and currently reading two others: one on Bonhoeffer and one on George Whitefield. George Whitefield has always interested me to some degree and reports of him preaching to thousands in open-air preaching without amplified sound piqued my skepticism as well as curiosity in what really happened in his life. Dallimore's two-volume biography has been pretty good so far, and I like how he includes excerpts from Whitefield's own writings. In one particular sermon, titled Cursing and Swearing, Whitefield writes (and preached):

"What shall we say to the unhappy men who think it not only allowable, but fashionable and polite to take the name of God in vain; who imagine that swearing makes them look big among their companions, and really think it an honour to abound in it. Alas! Little do they know that such behaviour argues the greatest foolhardiness and degeneracy of mind.
...Men dare not revile a general at the head of an army. And is the Almighty God, the great Jehovah, the everlasting King, who can consume them with the breath of His nostrils, and frown them into hell in an instant; is He, I say, the only contemptible being, that may be provoked without fear and offended without punishment?
No! Though God bear long, He will not bear always!..."

I suppose in some ways, Whitefield was ahead of his time, as it is virtually ubiquitous that you'll hear on a given day: "Oh my God!" or "Jesus Christ!" or the more modern adaptation, "Jesus H. Christ!"

Are we free?

2011-02-22T18:09:00.000-08:00

In our Pauline theology seminar, one issue we discussed is the notion of "freedom" and how Western, post-Enlightenment, judicial ideas of "freedom" have severely crippled the way we can properly understand what Paul was talking about with regard to freedom in Romans. What Dr. Campbell has been stressing to us in class is that true "freedom" as designed by God is not that we get to do what we want, choose what we want, etc., but rather true freedom for humanity is their proper responding to God's benevolent acts, especially as experienced through Jesus Christ. A week or two ago, he assigned to us a reading out this book by Richard Bauckham (who is in town to lecture @Duke this Thursday/Friday):

The chapter that was assigned is the second chapter (though after I read this chapter, I've decided to try to read the whole thing sometime in the near future) titled "Freedom in Contemporary Context." There was one particular issue that Bauckham addressed which I thought was thought-provoking.

Under the subheading 'The car as symbol of freedom,' he writes:

"There is no more pervasive symbol of this freedom and its destructive futility than the car. Cars are the modern sacrament of freedom; they symbolize it and promise actually to give it. We can glimpse the kind of freedom they promise in the typical television advertisement: an individual driving through open countryside, mountain ranges, and deserts with the widest possible horizons. Some also navigate nimbly through picturesquely narrow streets. Cars offer individuals the freedom to go wherever they wish, whenever they like, as fast as possible. They give independence, freedom to be entirely one's own master, not dependent on others, not even accompanied by others. They suggest the freedom of escape from any situation and of new opportunities and experiences always to be found along a new road. They give the feeling of control over one's destiny. This is why most car owners cannot imagine living without one. But, as always, this kind of freedom restricts the freedom of others. The more people have cars, the more difficult life becomes for those who cannot afford them or are too old or too young to drive; public transport decays, and shops and community facilities are no longer within walking distances. But the more people have cars, the less the car owners themselves enjoy the freedom they value. Commuters spend highly stressful hours in bumper-to-bumper, slow moving traffic. Motorways become car parks. Roads destroy the countryside the car owner wants the freedom to enjoy at the weekends. Moreover, since car ownership has become common, cities and most aspects of life in cities have developed in such a way that normal life requires constant long journeys. The freedom to travel has incurred the necessity to travel. Against typically of this kind of freedom, cars increase personal independence at the expense of the community. Many a vast residential area is for many residents no more than a place through which they drive on the way from their houses to other destinations.

All this would be true even without the ecological disaster. But we must add that cars are the single largest drain on the earth's resources and major polluters of the environment. Most cars still belong to the affluent West. As they spread inexorably to the rest of the world, the environmental consequences will be dire. What applies to the differential between car owners and others in our society applies to a much greater degree on a world scale. The planet can support the kind of freedom the car gives only for an elite. The more car owners there are, the more the freedom of others suffers. The more car owners there are, the more the quality of their own life suffers. There is no way out of this trap except by reevaluating freedom."

"Critical" Scholarship?

2011-02-19T10:52:00.000-08:00

Brian LePort recently blogged here about critical scholarship and the value of faith-based commitments for many scholars. His questions made me think, if scholars are clamoring for "critical" scholarship, would they also be self-critical? Would they unswervingly commit to a standard of "critical" scholarship outside of their own interests? Is that even possible? For example, in my Synoptics Gospels class, we've been talking at length about NT scholarship's stance on Q and the various "solutions" to the Synoptic Problem. From what I can gather, it seems like there are three main camps (though not divided equally into thirds): (1) Two-Source theory, which is Markan Priority + Q, (2) Griesbach or Two-Gospels theory, which is Matthean Priority with Luke coming second, and Mark conflating the two, and (3) Farrer theory, which is Markan Priority without Q, viz. Matthew following Mark, then Luke using both. One thing that strikes me though is how differently a scholar from a particular camp interprets the data, and how unlikely it is to me that they will ever change their individual conclusions on this issue.

Would a scholar who claims to be "critical," after a decade or two having devoted himself or aligning himself with a particular stance, even be able to self-critically come to a point where he/she would flip-flop on the issue? I suppose for various other issues in NT scholarship, there is a kind of spectrum whereby you can shift your stance somewhat, but in something like the Synoptic problem, that doesn't seem possible. Either Mark was first or Matthew was (or Luke for that matter!), and either Mark conflated Matthew-Luke or he didn't. I don't know that you could find a middle-ground per se on this issue. Seems to me that it is quite possible for scholars to hold tightly to their own conclusions and keep publishing and building on it even if an "objective" (if something like that is even possible) perspective has basically proven it to be false. On some levels, isn't this the same as a faith-commitment that is so often disparaged in academia?

The Pride and Fall of Man

2011-02-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

The title of this blog post is the title of Barth's CD IV, 1 §60. I should've known that I wasn't going to get away from running into Barth at some point in my career here at Duke, so now I'm head deep in his Church Dogmatics, trying to make sense of his whole theology. Anyway, our reading for this week was from section 60, and in it, he does say some interesting things, so I thought I would leave you tonight with a snippet:

4. The knowledge of Jesus Christ is finally the knowledge of the significance and extent of sin, or in the words of Anselm: quanti ponderis sit peccatum.

Granted that we have before us the reality of sin, its negative character, its truth as the determination of every man and the whole man, of man himself, we still have to ask what it means that from all these different standpoints man is the man of sin. May it not be that even on all these presuppositions his existence can be comprehended and expounded as a phenomenon which is purely relative, which can be estimated, its irregularity being finally explained and its part in the great nexus of God and the world and man understood?

Is it not conceivable that, although we have to correct all the individual errors and weaknesses in the modern Protestant view of sin as we have seen it, yet when we survey the whole we are brought back to the grandiose teaching of Leibniz which underlies it? Wrong is simply the negation of good, that which (like evil and death) is not willed and caused by God, but which since the possibility of it was necessary to man as a free rational creature He had to permit for the sake of the relative imperfection and therefore the perfection of the world distinct from Himself. In its own way, therefore, it is a necessary and in its own place a positively ordered and effective element in the harmony of all existence and therefore of the existence of man. Can we not finally hazard the construction that man can and does sin on the basis of his metaphysical imperfection which is inalienable to him as man and the complement of his relative perfection, but that in so doing as an 'asymptote ofthe Godhead‛ he is engaged in a constant approximation to its removal? Of course, the creature is not God, so that this can only be an approximation, a relative and not an absolute perfection. But as an approximation it does represent the attainment of his relative perfection. Why should not the presuppositions to which we have just come enable us to think and say this or something similar?

If we try to approach this aspect of the problem only in the light of Jesus Christ, we shall be well advised to start from the moment in which we see the element of truth in every form of optimism. From the act of atonement which has taken place in Jesus Christ it is clear that in evil we do not have to do with a reality and power which have escaped the will and ork of God let alone with something that is sovereign and superior in relation to it. Whatever evil is, God is its Lord. We must not push our attempt to take evil seriously to the point of ever coming to think of it as an original and indeed creative counter-deity which posits autonomous and independent facts, competing seriously with the one living God and striving with Him for the mastery. Evil is a form of that nothingness which as such is absolutely subject to God. We cannot legitimately deduce this from a mere contrasting of the idea of evil with the idea of good. But we can say it in the light of the fact that in Jesus Christ, in His death (the meaning of which is shown in His resurrection to be His victory and the liberation of man), we see evil overcome and indeed shattered and destroyed by the omnipotence of the love and wrath of God— and this in such a way that in its supreme aggression, in its most blatant manifestation, it was impressed into the service of God and contrary to its own nature became necessarily an instrument of the divine triumph. Whatever else we may say of its origin and nature, however seriously we have to take it in its significance for ourselves, it is certain that we have no reason to fear that in it we are dealing with a factor which is the complement of God and confronts Him on the same level. Its claim to be this was given the lie once and for all on the cross of Golgotha. But if in relation to God its impotence has been unmasked, then in relation to man and his world as the creation of God it may cause serious concern, but it cannot and must not give rise to any final doubt, to any unrestrained anxiety, to any pessimism, defeatism, hopelessness or despair. Certainly we can say this only with reference to God as the Lord and Creator of His creation and the covenant partner of man. Certainly we can say this only with reference to His grace, whose superiority over sin has been unequivocally demonstrated in Jesus Christ. But in the light of God and His grace which alone is sovereign there can be no absolute fear of evil, as though evil itself were an absolute.

Books?

2011-02-06T13:04:00.001-08:00

I tell people, if I can study for the rest of my life and make a living out of it, count me in. However, there's one thing that's a bit cumbersome at times: the number of books that I'm concurrently reading (or perusing, for that matter). The semester just started a few weeks ago, and right now, I have 18 books arranged or stacked in all sorts of Tetris-like ways on my desk. I wish there was some way to have all the books arranged on a desk that is 20 feet wide! Alas, my desk is probably five feet at the most, hence the juggling of books.

Will this ever end? I suppose not, if anything I should expect it to get worse if I eventually make it as a professor. Though maybe I'll have some super nice office that has lots of desk space, with five ten-feet high bookshelves... (Wishful thinking!) Maybe this is why people are buying E-book readers.

How many books are on your desk?

105

2011-02-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 105th (would-be) birthday of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His life is so interesting and the two biographies I own (here and here), have helped me to understand a bit more of who he is (though I haven't finished the second one yet). While the first book has received mixed reviews (For example, see here, here, here, here, and here) However, I still think his biography was well-worth reading, and it was definitely well-written in terms of drawing the reader into the world of Bonhoeffer. Here is an interview from the author of that first biography, Eric Metaxas:

Happy 105th birthday to one of the most interesting men in Christian history!

Luke the skeptic?

2011-02-03T07:31:00.000-08:00

For a while, there was a very popular video on YouTube:

I remember watching this video with a bunch of church friends, going back and forth in debate about the feasibility of such a feat. We never came down to one firm conclusion, but I think everyone felt a bit skeptical of such thing. In our Synoptic Gospels class, we've been looking at various pericopae, and one thing that is striking is what's called Luke's "Great Omission," where he basically leaves off his Markan material from Mark 6:45-8:26. Particularly interesting is the first pericope that he leaves out of his own Gospel, Jesus' walking on water (Mark 6:45-52 + pars.). What's striking about this is that even John includes this in his Gospel which, to me, shows the prominence (or popularity?) of this scene in the Gospel sources. Why does Luke leave it out? Again, just like the video, our class didn't come to one satisfactory conclusion, but if you follow the Farrer Theory (as Dr. Goodacre does) or the Two-Source Theory (positing Q and Markan Priority), the absence of this pericope in Luke does a number on you.

What was it about Jesus walking on water that Luke felt compelled to leave out of his own Gospel narrative?

Gospel Communities?

2011-02-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

I blogged earlier this week about Richard Bauckham, who, as I suspected was not a big fan of scholars who put much stock in viewing the communities of the Gospels as the limited main audience of the first four books of the NT. This was first confirmed to me by Nick Norelli in a comment he posted on my blog, suggesting that I read The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, edited by none other than Bauckham himself. It just so happened that a chapter of it was assigned for class anyway, titled "For Whom Were the Gospels Written?" by Bauckham, and in it, Bauckham makes some pretty strong arguments against reading too much into the Gospel communities being the only audience in a limited, specific way. Here's one paragraph that I thought was very good:

[This is following his paragraph about the debate on the genre of the Gospels]

"However, the full force of the difference of genre will come home to us only if we add a second consideration. We need to ask, about both an apostolic letter and a Gospel, the question: Why should anyone write it?—by which I mean: Why should anyone put this down in writing? In the case of 1 Corinthians, for example, the answer is clear: Paul could not or preferred not to visit Corinth. Paul seems only to have written anything when distance required him to communicate in writing what he would otherwise have spoken orally to one of his churches. It was distance that required writing, whereas orality sufficed for presence. So the more Gospels scholarship envisages the Gospels in terms approximating to a Pauline letter, addressing the specific situation of one community, the more odd it seems that the evangelist is supposed to be writing for the community in which he lives. An evangelist writing his Gospel is like Paul writing 1 Corinthians while permanently resident in Corinth. Paul did not do this, so why should Matthew or the other evangelists have done so? Anyone who wrote a Gospel must have had the opportunity of teaching his community orally. Indeed, most Gospels scholars assume that he frequently did so. He could retell and reinterpret the community's Gospel traditions so as to address his community's situation by means of them in this oral context. Why should he go to the considerable trouble of writing a Gospel for a community to which he was regularly preaching? Indeed, why should he go to such trouble to freeze in writing his response to a specific local situation which was liable to change and to which he could respond much more flexibly and therefore appropriately in oral preaching?

This was a very persuasive argument to me, and since this is only one chapter of the book, I'm hoping to delve further into this issue as the semester goes on.

Kenneth W. Clark Lectures

2011-01-28T13:56:00.001-08:00

I suppose the clout that Duke has in scholarly circles is a good thing for students. Late last year we had N.T. Wright in town for a few lectures and for 2011, I found out that this year's Kenneth Clark lectures (Feb. 24-25) at Duke will be given by:

The distinguished scholar, Richard Bauckham. I checked out his website, which says the title of his lectures are "Individualism and Community in the Gospel of John." I'm currently taking Dr. Joel Marcus' seminar on the Fourth Gospel, so it would be interesting to hear what Bauckham has to say regarding the Gospel of John. The main texts for the class has been Lou Martyn's History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel and Moody Smith's commentary on John, and if I remember correctly, I think Bauckham stands on the other side of the debate concerning the 'Gospel communities' and their influence in the formation of the first four books of the NT (though I could be wrong here!).

I'm not sure where I stand on this issue yet, but it's a very fascinating subject that piqued my interest when I first came across Martyn's book a couple years ago. I don't know how packed the lectures will be (I'm going to assume it'll be full), but hopefully I'll get to hear him live at least on one of those days!

"Only a lunatic..."

2011-01-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

If you were a lunatic editor, what kind of tendencies would you display in editting a text? There's an answer in one of the readings for this week for my Synoptic Gospels class. It is B.H. Streeter's classic, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, an older but very insightful book. In a chapter titled, "The Fundamental Solution" (that is, a solution to the 'Synoptic Problem'), he has some words to say about the strength of the argument for Markan Priority:

"The attempt has recently been made to revive the solution, first put forward by Augustine, who styles Mark a kind of abridger and lackey of Matthew, "Tanquam breviator et pedesequus ejus." But Augustine did not possess a Synopsis of the Greek text conveniently printed in parallel columns. Otherwise a person of his intelligence could not have failed to perceive that, where the two Gospels are parallel, it is usually Matthew, and not Mark, who does the abbreviation. For example, the number of words employed by Mark to tell the stories of the Gadarene Demoniac, Jairus' Daughter, and the Feeding of the Five Thousand are respectively 325, 374 and 235; Matthew contrives to tell them in 136, 135 and 157 words. Now there is nothing antecedently improbable in the idea that for certain purposes an abbreviated version of the Gospel might be desired; but only a lunatic would leave out Matthew's account of the Infancy, the Sermon on the Mount, and practically all the parables, in order to get room for purely verbal expansion of what was retained."

Sounds weird?

2011-01-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

I remember during my Ephesians exegesis class, I ran into a weird phenomenon. In Ephesians 6:12, the Greek reads:

ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ἡ πάλη πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σάρκα ἀλλὰ πρὸς τὰς ἀρχάς, πρὸς τὰς ἐξουσίας, πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, πρὸς τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις.

Which can be translated: "Because/For our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against the spiritual things/forces of evil in the heavenlies."

What is interesting to me is the fact that many major translations (NIV, TNIV, ESV, NKJV, NASB with the exception of NRSV) translates it as "flesh and blood." As far as I can tell, there was one other place where this happens in the NT, at Heb. 2:14, which even the NRSV goes ahead and flips the order around to translate it as "flesh and blood." Is there something about the way the phrase sounds that appeals more to the translators? Even as I say it out loud, "flesh and blood" versus "blood and flesh," the latter sounds a bit more awkward. But then again, I'm wondering if it's because of the striking presence of the first instance of this phrase in the NT, Matt. 16:17, where Jesus declares to Peter that his confession is not due to the revelation of "flesh and blood" but rather his Father in heaven. However, I didn't have time to check the critical apparatus, to see if there is some textual variant that might have caused this.

Either way, I think it's interesting that translators take certain liberties with the ordering of certain words, and while it might not have significance in terms of theology, it's still one example of how reading the text in its original language can be helpful.

Busy

2011-01-21T14:02:00.001-08:00

Apologies to my readers for my lack of much blogging lately. The workload at Duke is definitely pretty hefty, but my first semester went well and the second semester already began last week at full speed. Right now, I'm reading an article from John Kloppenborg titled "Synopses and the Synoptic Problem" which was presented at an Oxford conference in 2008 that I believe now can be found as a chapter in a Festschrift for Christopher Tuckett published in 2011. The question that we're thinking about is: are all synopses necessarily biased (that is to say, must they assume a particular stance to the Synoptic problem before presenting the evidence)? And if so, what do we do about it?

Qualms

2011-01-20T14:04:00.000-08:00

I think someone is hoarding books secretly at the Duke Divinity School library. I've been meaning to check out various books, and as I searched for them on the library catalogue online, it says "Available," but when I go look for them, it's not there! Now, I know what you might be thinking, that someone was probably using it at that time, but this has happened multiple times (for the same books even!) I've checked with the circulation desk and they say the same thing, "it must be in use by a student right now..." but frankly, either they're super incompetent by placing books in the wrong shelves numerous times (which I don't think they are) or someone is definitely hoarding these books or something and keeping a secret stash! I don't know, either way, it's been very frustrating.

Q?

2011-01-13T13:43:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading through Studying the Synoptic Gospels by EP Sanders and Margaret Davies as introductory material to my Synoptic Gospels class this semester. In one section, they showed a diagram of one scholar's solution to the 'Synoptic Problem':

This is FC Grant's 'Multiple Source Theory,' an elaborate cousin to what's widely known as the 'Two Source Theory' that posits Markan Priority for the Synoptic Gospels as well as the presence of a hypothetical source called Q (Quelle, German for 'source'). But my reaction when I saw this chart was not 'Ohh, I finally get it.' but rather 'What!?!' It's so complicated that I couldn't bear to really think through the implications of all those lines and sources. I know my professor, Mark Goodacre, is a proponent of the Farrer Theory, which posits Markan priority without the necessity for Q. I'm still not sure yet where I stand on this issue and it'll be interesting to see where I land as the semester unfolds. He'll have us create our own synopses and color-code various tradition materials (Double-tradition, Triple-tradition, etc.), which I think will be an excellent way to get our feet wet in the Synoptic Problem.

My question for you is: What's your take on Q and why?

A reading program for the new year?

2011-01-01T09:46:00.000-08:00

I hope you all enjoy a wonderful weekend with family and friends, as we kick off another new year. I recently came across a blog that has created a chart for reading these two volumes in one year!

The two volumes of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. The first volume contains apocalyptic literature (e.g. 1 Enoch) and various testaments (e.g. Testament of Moses) and the second volume contains expansions of OT and legends (e.g., Letter of Aristeas, Joseph and Asenath, etc.), wisdom/philosophical literature, prayer/psalms/odes, and fragments of lost Judeo-Hellenistic works (e.g. Ezekiel the Tragedian). Today and tomorrow is only the introduction in the first volume and the intro to 1 Enoch, so why not go here, and get started on a new reading program for 2011?

Happy New Year!

Justification and Politics?

2010-12-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading through Douglas Campbell's Deliverance of God as mentioned in my previous post. So far it's been pretty good but one consistent critique that I've encountered in virtually every review I read of this book is its length. One particular scholar, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, summarizes this critique as such in Christian Century:

"This is a book that deserves to be read, but virtually every conversation I have heard about the volume has touched on its formidable length (some of which is in small print). Campbell insists that his project requires such length if he is to bring down the citadel of Justification theory. I fear that the length is self-defeating, as it means that only the most determined specialist will work through to the end, and Campbell will have lost the readers he most wants to persuade."

On some levels, I think I can agree, I'm currently on page 305 and he's still clearing the ground, so to speak, so that he can eventually lay down his own interpretive framework, namely, an apocalyptic reading of Paul. Be that as it may, it's been very instructive so far and in this subsection titled 'Justification and Liberal Political Individualism,' Campbell looks into John Locke's political theory to see how the Justification paradigm fits with Locke's own program, furthering its own agenda while circumventing the need to have a tight connection to the Pauline texts themselves to establish the paradigm as viable. In one subpoint, Campbell lays out a pretty strong critique:

"In addition to its enjoyment of four significant affinities with liberal politics — individual contracts, the notion of consent, the privatization of religion, and the characterization of all human relationships in terms of a discourse of currency — Justification is unable to protest very vigorously against liberal politics ... Special revelation associated with either the Scriptures or the Christian dispensation is limited to the private sphere and constrained by the individual's need for faith alone. And tradition and institutional control are repudiated as not genuinely religious. Moreover, Justification finds it notoriously difficult to generate any significant ethical observance from its converts (indeed, it arguable cannot generate this). The theory is hostile to any religious activity beyond faith, labeling it derisively as "works." The ecclesia constituted by the theory remains similarly weak; it is fundamentally individualist, confessional, and voluntarist, rooted in consent. It can ask very little from its converts. And these limitations raise a frightening prospect."

I'm still on this chapter, so we'll see where this all leads. Meanwhile, it seems that the axe that Campbell is grinding is getting bigger and bigger...

Reading list

2010-12-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

There's been a few comments here and here about books and what we might be reading in the upcoming year. I also have a few books that I've purchased (either a long time ago or recently) that I've been meaning to read. As always, I'm willing to bet I won't be able to read all of these books, but at least I can try!:

Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther

This is a book I won from a giveaway at this blog, and I'm looking forward to reading this book. I was set on taking a class next semester on John Calvin and the Gospel of John with Dr. Steinmetz here at Duke, but due to some circumstances that will not be the case. I've been interested in the theological impacts of the Reformation on NT studies for some time now, and I suppose this is a good book as any to get an introduction to one of the giants of the Reformation. Afterwards, I may buy this book to make up for not taking Steinmetz's class.

William Baird, History of New Testament Research, Vol. 1

I've been meaning to read through both volumes (third volume is supposedly in the works) to get a better handle on what people have said, where people have gone, and what people are saying now to better understand the landscape of NT research. I don't imagine it to be a stimulating book, but I still intend to work through it bit by bit.

Wayne C. Booth, et. al., The Craft of Research, 3rd. ed.

I read this before, but I think it would be good to read it again as I gear myself up for thesis research in the Fall semester of 2011. I'm planning to just read the relevant portions to help me be a better writer.

Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Reading of Justification in Paul

This is required reading for my Pauline theology PhD seminar next semester, but I've been meaning to read this book anyway. The Galatians seminar this semester (and its required reading of Martyn's AB commentary) I think has given me a good vantage point into the 'apocalyptic reading' of Paul that Campbell proposes here.

Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World, Insights from Cultural Anthropology

I obtained this book as review copy from WJK press and it's about time I got around to doing a review for it.

J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel

I read this book a couple years ago, and at the time, to be honest, a lot of it went over my head. I couldn't quite grasp what Martyn was getting at, but after a few years reading through various books on the GJohn, etc., I think it's time that I read this book again. Plus we just finished reading through all of Martyn's AB commentary on Galatians and I feel confident that I can trace his thoughts a bit better this time along. Also, I'm considering taking Joel Marcus' Greek Exegesis of GJohn next semester and this may be a required reading for that class.

Mark Noll, Turning Points, Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

I bought this book a long time ago and I've been meaning to read it. Christian history has always been a fascinating subject to me, and I think this will be a light book to read from time to time, to get myself away from monographs and journal articles.

Whew, that's a long list, and this doesn't even include a bunch of required readings in my upcoming classes. Hopefully I'll be able to get through most of the readings.

For my readers out there, are there any recent biographies on Christian figures of the past worth reading? This year I finished one on Bonhoeffer and one on G.E. Ladd, and they have both been very good books to read apart from the typical NT studies related things I immerse myself in. Any suggestions are welcome!

Tome

2010-12-08T10:17:00.000-08:00

Pronunciation: \ˈtōm\

-noun
1. a book, esp. a very heavy, large, or learned book.
2. a volume forming a part of a larger work.

From time to time, I've seen various books referred to as "tomes," but I don't think any of them comes close to this one:

Amazing! The book comes in at 1248 pages (at least that's what Amazon says, though the page numbering actually ends at 1218 [probably earlier unmarked pages = 30 pp.]), with four parts that are broken down into 21 chapters. I'm really excited to start on this "tome," as I was given permission by Dr. Campbell to enroll in his PhD seminar on Pauline theology for the Spring semester. I've done work on Corinthians, Galatians, and 1 Thessalonians, but not much on Romans, so this should be an exciting but also challenging class to help me think after Paul's thoughts.

I hope I can walk away from this with some measure of confidence that I have grasped a little bit more of Paul's theology. From what I heard, Campbell has an interesting take on it which should make our classes very interesting. He mentioned in the introduction to the book that this work is over ten years in the making, so it's no surprise that it is so hefty. I was already intimidated by books that come in at pages number counts such as 535, 718, 740, 741, and 876, but this one is at 1248! Hope I can get through this in a timely manner...

Spices

2010-12-07T09:40:00.001-08:00

First there was this ultra-funny Old Spice commercial:

Then there's this, New Spice:

HT: Near Emmaus

Non-canonical Gospels

2010-11-24T08:43:00.001-08:00

There's always talks about what Gospel actually has "real" data in terms of the historical Jesus, more accurate historically, etc. etc. And one document outside of the canon is the Gospel of Peter, which I just read today from the NT Apocrypha (it's not that long, so if you're interested go here to get the Greek text). In this document, there is an interesting little section:

9.34. Early in the morning, when the sabbath dawned, there came a crowd from Jerusalem and the country round about to see the sepulchre that had been sealed. 35 Now in the night in which the Lord's day dawned, when the soldiers, two by two in every watch, were keeping guard, there rang out a loud voice in heaven, 36 and they saw the heavens opened and two men come down from there in a great brightness and draw nigh to the sepulchre. 37 That stone which had been laid against the entrance to the sepulchre started of itself to roll and gave way to the side, and the sepulchre was opened, and both the young men entered in.

10.38 When now those soldiers saw this, they awakened the centurion and the elders - for they also were there to assist at the watch. 39 And whilst they were relating what they had seen, they saw again three men come out from the sepulchre, and two of them sustaining the other, and a cross following them, 40 and the heads of the two reaching ot heaven, but that of him who was led of them by the hand overpassing the heavens. 41 And they heard a voice out of the heavens crying, 'Hast thou preached to them that sleep?', 42 and from the cross there was heard the answer, 'Yea'.

I've heard this passage being referred to from time to time to show the fantastic nature of these "later" Gospels, in particular with respect to a talking cross. I was just reminded by Brian LePort that one scholar, Mark Goodacre recently blogged about this. His suggestion is "that we conjecturally emend the text from σταυρον to σταυρωθεντα, from "cross" to "crucified", so that it is no longer a wooden cross that comes bouncing out of the tomb but rather Jesus, the "crucified one" himself." I haven't personally looked at the Greek text yet, but this is an interesting post that has generated some discussion, so go and read the Gospel of Peter if you're interested and join in the discussion at the NT Blog.

Quote of the Day

2010-11-23T18:39:00.000-08:00

Francis Watson on Paul and Habakkuk:

If it seems self-evident that the apostle and the prophet can have little or nothing in common, this betrays the continuing influence of a hermeneutic according to which texts are addressed to and contained by their immediate circumstances of origin, and that all subsequent usage marks a deviation from their "original meaning". In the present discussion, the limitations of this hermeneutic have become clear at point after point. The text of Habakkuk explicitly presents itself as written for a future of unknown duration; it privileges the reader over the author, and confines its reference to an identifiable historical situation toa single allusion to the "Chaldeans". It is the same "canonical process", but at a more advanced stage, that leads to the incorporation of this book within the larger collection of the Book of the Twelve. While the arrangement of the book is designed to reflect the unfolding canonical history, it also expresses the conviction that these products of earlier historical situations continue to lay claim to the present, and that their pastness is to be subsumed in the message they address to the present. There is clear continuity between the text's orientation towards its future reader and the logic of the larger canonical collection. Indeed, since we possess the text of Habakkuk only within the canonical Book of the Twelve, and as part of that larger book, the attempt to restore the entire book to a Sitz im Leben within the obscurity of "pre-exilic" Judah can only be regarded as historically naive and hermeneutically perverse."

How many?

2010-11-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

Language, לָשׁוֹן, γλῶσσα / διάλεκτος, ܠܶܫܳܢܳܐ, sprache, lengua, 언어

These are some of the languages that I've interacted with over the years and while learning a new language is hard, I suppose it's also rewarding to be able to read something in a language that looked like scribbles just a few months ago. I'm just wondering where this will end... I'd much rather be very good at a few languages than knowing a little bit of many, but with PhD applications, ability to interact with a broader scope, etc., it seems like having "acquired" numerous languages is more advantageous. This is hard though! The more I get into one language, the more I'm prone to neglecting another and then I start wishing I had some type of time-freezing machine so I can just study these languages for 5000 hours in one day. One of my professors amazes me with the ease at which he moves from one language to another, not just in terms of translations, but its linguistic tendencies, idioms, etymological background, etc. He seems to be pretty comfortable at all of the following (and this is probably not even exhaustive!): French, German, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, and Hebrew! I hope someday I can know half as much as he does...

Hab. 2:4

2010-11-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

I've been reading through some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and today in particular, I was reading through 1QpHab (A commentary on Habakkuk) and found something interesting with regard to Habakkuk 2:4. The tradition of this text is not unanimous, as seen in the differences in the MT and LXX:

MT (2:2-4)
2 Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. 3 For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. 4 Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith.

LXX (2:2-4)
2 And the Lord answered me and said: Write a vision, and clearly on a tablet, so that the reader might pursue them. 3 For there is still a vision for an appointed time, and it will rise up at the end and not in vain. If it should tarry, wait for it, for when it comes it will come and delay. 4 If it draws back, my soul is not pleased in it. But the just shall live by my faith.

Hab. 2:4b in particular is cited three times in the NT: Rom. 1:17, Gal. 3:11, and Heb. 10:38 with all sorts of interesting questions surrounding those passages. It makes me think that this verse in Habakkuk was received in various but also in important ways, evinced, for example, by how Paul goes to it twice in important discussions regarding Law and faith. Now, how does this connect to the Dead Sea Scrolls? While the translators and early NT writers seemed to take this verse as an interesting point of departure for all sorts of discussions, the 1QpHab has only three lines about this verse that's relatively straightforward:

Col. VIII, 1-3
1 This refers to all those who obey the Law among the Jews whom 2 God will rescue from the place of judgment, because of their suffering and their loyalty 3 to the Teacher of Righteousness.

This is interesting because with Paul and the other witnesses, the big deal is with the "subject" of the faithfulness, i.e., individual believers, a Christian community, God, etc. But here, the focus seems to be on none of that, but rather on being loyal to the Teacher of Righteousness. It just made me wonder how else the Dead Sea community modulated faithfulness as faithfulness to their Teacher.

Complaint

2010-11-18T11:01:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else think transliterations of original languages (e.g. Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, etc.) in books are cumbersome? Not that I know every word in those languages but these wanna-be Romanizations are annoying!

Book review

2010-11-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

New Testament Apocrypha, Volume One: Gospels and Related Writings

Editor: Wilhelm Schneemelcher
Translator: R. McL. Wilson
Publisher: Westminster John Knox, rev. ed., 2003
Paperback: 560 pp.

WJK (Thoughtful Christian)
Amazon

Thanks to Emily Kiefer and the team at Westminster John Knox for this review copy. I already had volume 2 of the NT Apocrypha and was hoping to get my hands on the first volume, so this is a very welcome addition to my library.

From the Table of Contents, I can see that this book is well organized. It first begins with a General Introduction by Schneemelcher on things such as the history of the NT canon, apocrypha, testimonies of the early fathers, the history of research in apocryphal literature, and an introduction to non-biblical material about Jesus. These first 70-some pages are very helpful for one to gain some knowledge about this topic. Then it is divided into twelve sub-sections, each devoted to specific materials from the perspective of various scholars.

They are divided into: (I) Isolated Sayings of the Lord (Otfrid Hofius), (II) Fragments of Unknown Gospels (Joachim Jeremias and Wilhelm Schneemelcher), (III) The Coptic Gospel of Thomas (Beate Blatz), (IV) Jewish-Christian Gospels (Philipp Vielhauer and Georg Strecker), (V) The Gospel of Philip (Hans-Martin Schenke), (VI) The Gospel of the Egyptians (Wilhelm Schneemelcher), (VII) The Gospel of Peter (Christian Maurer and Wilhelm Schneemelcher), (VIII) Dialogues of the Redeemer (various), (IX) Other Gnostic Gospels and Related LIterature (Henri-Charles Puech and rev. Beate Blatz), (X) Infancy Gospels (Oscar Cullmann), (XI) The Relatives of Jesus (Wolfgang A. Bienert), and (XII) The Work and Sufferings of Jesus (various). These chapters contain some very interesting books that we might have heard of (from say... a certain movie?) such as the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, Protevangelium of James, and more.

At the beginning of each chapter, there is an overview of some important topics such as the literature (e.g. different editions, translations, etc.), attestation, tradition, genre of text, provenance, theological themes, relationship to canonical Gospels, etc. [each chapter varies because not all contain any relevant information for each sub-topic]. Overall, this is an excellent volume that will be of benefit for anyone interested in the canonical and non-canonical Gospels. There is a wealth of information from a whole array of scholars that are contained in this book. I have some interest in possibly pursuing some research in this topic so this is a very important volume that I will start digging into bit by bit in the coming months.

Verdict::Recommended! (Granted that this is not really a "book" but more of a reference volume.)

Spring '11

2010-11-05T18:27:00.000-07:00

Here at Duke, it seems like there's a mad rush to get into the classes of your choice, and it was no different this week as registrations opened up for the Spring semester. I had my eye on a bunch of classes and it looks like this will be my coursework for the upcoming semester:

Calvin and the Interpretation of John with Prof. David Steinmetz

Exegesis of Acts with Prof. C. Kavin Rowe

Seminar on NT and Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy with Prof. C. Kavin Rowe

Greek Exegesis: Synoptic Gospels with Prof. Mark Goodacre

[informal] Readings in Syriac with Prof. Lucas Van Rompay (hopefully...)

There was a Greek Exegesis in the Gospel of John by Prof. Joel Marcus that was super tempting, but due to schedule conflicts, this is how it ended up. There's still a few kinks that needs to be worked out, but I think this will end up being my classes for the Spring. I'm loving the classes this semester, but am also excited for the Spring semester!

Review copies

2010-10-29T17:31:00.001-07:00

Checked the mail today and got two books for review copy. Big thanks to Emily Kiefer and the generous folks at Westminster John Knox, I received these two books:

New Testament Apocrypha, Volume One: Gospels and Related Writings, Revised ed. Edited by Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson

The New Testament World, Insights from Cultural Anthropology, Bruce J. Malina

It's been a while since I received books for review, so I'm excited to have received these two titles. Both of course are books in fields I am interested in (i.e., NT vs. the non-canonical Gospels and the sociological background of the NT), so these two books should be welcome additions to my library. Look for reviews in the upcoming weeks.

What's up, Michelangelo?

2010-10-15T19:12:00.001-07:00

I always wondered why some sculptures of Moses, including this one from Michelangelo, looked like this (do you see what I see?):

Moses has horns!?! I learned today that it was due to a mistranslation of the Latin Vulgate of the theophany described in Exodus 34. Exodus 34:29 reads, "Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God." The word "shone" here is the verb קָרַן which is a very rare verb in the OT (which can cause translation problems as we can see here). In one sense, it can mean "to send out rays" but in another "to display horns." The Latin Vulgate translates this verse as: "cumque descenderet Moses de monte Sinai tenebat duas tabulas testimonii et ignorabat quod cornuta esset facies sua ex consortio sermonis Dei." The verb here is translated as cornuta which is a derivation of the word cornu for "horn." I guess it's too bad for Moses that one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance didn't read Hebrew...

Why not Cain's?

2010-10-09T20:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why Abel's sacrifice was acceptable to God but not that of Cain? You might have heard these answers that I've heard: (1) Cain's attitude was wrong, or (2) Cain did not offer his very best. As I see it, I don't think the text actually says any of that explicitly (though I guess you could argue that the explicit mention of Abel bringing the "fatty" portion or "firstlings" of his flock is an implicit criticism of Cain doing otherwise...) Anyway, I'm currently reading through this book on the Septuagint, and I must say, this is a very fascinating subject! I never knew that there were so many text-critical issues surrounding the LXX and with my interests in intertextuality, I think getting to know the LXX a bit better will do me some good. For instance, see how bringing the LXX into our discussion sheds (or darkens?) light on the issue:

Genesis 4:6-7
⁶The LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? ⁷If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it."

This is a pretty straightforward passage of the narrative, and I never thought much about it, but its meaning is actually much more difficult to figure out than evidenced in our translations. For example, here is verse 7:

MT
הֲל֤וֹא אִם־תֵּיטִיב֙ שְׂאֵ֔ת וְאִם֙ לֹ֣א תֵיטִ֔יב לַפֶּ֖תַח חַטָּ֣את רֹבֵ֑ץ וְאֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָת֔וֹ וְאַתָּ֖ה תִּמְשָׁל־בּֽוֹ׃

LXX
οὐκ ἐὰν ὀρθῶς προσενέγκῃς ὀρθῶς δὲ μὴ διέλῃς ἥμαρτες ἡσύχασον πρὸς σὲ ἡ ἀποστροφὴ αὐτοῦ καὶ σὺ ἄρξεις αὐτοῦ

The English translation above follows the MT, but the Hebrew in verse 7 is awkward and difficult, so they often rely on the Greek text, which also show evidence that the translator himself had a difficult time with his Hebrew text:

NETS
"If you offer correctly but do not divide correctly, have you not sinned? Be still, his recourse is to you, and you will rule over him."

Very different from our regular English translations, no? As Jobes states, "Part of the translator's motivation, undoubtedly, was a desire to understand why God should be upset with Cain for bringing an offering that is approved in the Mosaic legislation. His rendering may be evidence of an ancient interpretation to the effect that the reason Cain's offering was defective was that he failed to follow the proper cultic rituals." So why not Cain's? Maybe he did it wrong afterall.

What do you want to know?

2010-10-01T16:51:00.001-07:00

In my Greek Exegesis of Galatians class, Dr. Eastman informed us early in the semester that the author of our main textbook, J. Louis Martyn, has agreed to come to our class the last week of class for an informal discussion/interview where we will get to dialogue with a premier NT scholar. She asked us this week to start thinking about some questions that we might want to bring up, and as our class is only about eight or nine people, I think there will be plenty of time for everyone to get their fair share of questions in. So I thought, I could elicit some questions from all you fellow bibliobloggers and blog about it afterwards as a small gift to you. Does anyone have anything they would like me to raise with Dr. Martyn? Of course there's no guarantee that I will ask everything, but still, I'm curious to know what you guys are thinking.

Ask away!

Logos giveaway

2010-09-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

For all my blog readers, if you're interested, per Logos:

Logos Bible Software is giving away thousands of dollars of prizes to celebrate the launch of Logos Bible Software 4 Mac on October 1. Prizes include an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPad, an iPod Touch, and more than 100 other prizes!

They’re also having a special limited-time sale on their Mac and PC base packages and upgrades. Check it out!

That is all.

The Sabbath

2010-09-17T16:54:00.001-07:00

For my OT interpretation class, my professor assigned a PDF chapter out of a book titled, The Ten Commandments: Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church by Patrick Miller, a retired professor from Princeton Seminary, and just as Dr. Portier-Young said, his chapter did not disappoint. I'd like to quote to you a short section from the chapter on the Sabbath:

"The people of ancient Israel were far more concerned about release from toilsome labor than about ensuring that the work got done. For those who think that divine judgments of Genesis 3 created a fixed order that cannot be ameliorated, the Sabbath command is one of the things at work in God's way to offset their force. The power of work to control human life is forever relativized in the Sabbath. There is no eternal assembly line in the community that lives by these guidelines. The Sabbath helps to guard against one of the primary idolatries to which many, if not all, are prone: idolizing our work by making it the center value and meaning for our lives. The Sabbath relativizes human work and makes it possible regularly to set aside our goals and plans, our ambitions and accomplishments, to think and care about the God who created us and God's work, about God's plan and our place in it. The Sabbath, therefore, is both a safeguard against one of the central ways in which we violate the First Commandment and also a barrier against the constant inclination to justify ourselves and to define ourselves by our work, what we do. The Sabbath cuts human beings loose from their work and calls them to do nothing but give praise to God. It is a constant reminder—and exemplar—of what the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism says is the goal of human existence: "to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." (emphasis original)

Know that phrase!

2010-09-16T19:08:00.000-07:00

I've been really enjoying Dr. Eastman's Greek Exegesis of Galatians class, and if you've looked through this text in Greek, there are a few phrases that biblical scholars have been wrestling with for... oh, I don't know, decades? I might be wrong, but it seems like the debate will never end. Anyway, here's two phrases that you might be familiar with:

(1) ἔργων νόμου
(2) πίστεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

The first phrase, most often translated as "works of the Law" occurs seven times (if I'm counting correctly) in the NT: Rom. 2:15, 3:20, 3:28; Gal. 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, and 3:10. The problem lies in what Paul actually meant by "works of the Law." Is it some type of legalistic adherence to Jewish law, customs, traditions, etc. as the Reformers have understood Paul? Or is it the food laws, circumcision, etc., that are the "markers" or "badges" of the ones in the covenant? In addition, this phrase is very odd and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls with 4QMMT (one of the texts from the find), we now have another understanding of the phrase "works of the Law" or מעשי התורה.

The second phrase, most often translated as "faith in Jesus Christ" is actually not as neatly translatable as it seems in the popular English versions. It occurs in this construction five times in the NT: Rom. 3:22, Gal 2:16, 3:22, 3:26, and Phil. 3:9. It is in what's called the genitive construction and in this particular case, most often understood as objective genitive (i.e., faith in Jesus Christ, where Jesus Christ is the object of the faith) or subjective genitive (i.e., faith[fulness] of Jesus Christ, where Jesus Christ is the subject of the faith). Plenty of ink has been spilled on this topic and while the traditional view of seeing it in objective genitive relationship prevailed for a long time, recently the subjective genitive has been gaining support.

Why am I bringing this up? Well I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this whole debate and wanted to know what you all thought about these phrases. We haven't hit either of these phrases yet in my seminar class, but I'm looking forward to the lively debate.

Desert Spirtuality

2010-09-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

In my class called Introduction to Christian Spirituality, we're currently in a section regarding the "Desert Fathers" and the spirituality that they showed and taught. One of our readings for this week comes from John Climacus who lived around 6-7th century CE, writing a book titled Κλίμαξ or Scala Paradisi in Latin, meaning the Ladder of Divine Ascent. We're only reading a portion of it, but it was interesting to read what I was used to seeing from Reformers & Puritans almost a thousand years before they said it:

Let us fear the Lord not less than we fear beasts. For I have seen men who were going to steal and were not afraid of God, but, hearing the barking of dogs, they at once turned back; and what the fear of God could not achieve was done by the fear of animals. Let us love God at least as much as we respect our friends. For I have often seen people who had offended God and were not in the least perturbed about it. And I have seen how those same people provoked their friends in some trifling matter, and then employed every artifice, every device, every sacrifice, every apology, both personally and through friends and relatives, not sparing gifts, in order to regain their former love.

I wonder if the Reformers & Puritans and others of the "Western" Christian persuasion read the Desert Fathers?

Say 'ma'?

2010-09-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

ܝܶܫܘܽܥ ܕܶܝܢ ܐܷܡܰܪ ܠܗܴ̇ܝ ܐܱܢ̱ܬܬܴܐ. ܗܰܝܡܳܢܘܽܬܷܟܝ ܐܱܚܝܰܬܷܟܝ. ܙܶܠܝ ܒܰܫܠܴܡܳܐ

If you know Hebrew, you would know my post title means, "Say what?". I say that because at least some words (like 'what' for example) are the same in Syriac (thankfully), and therefore, you'd be thinking "say what?!" as you read (or saw) the above script (at least that's what I thought when I first started reading Syriac last week!) This is my first attempt to type one verse from the NT Peshitta (anyone know from where?) in Syriac, and I have to say, this is tough! Dr. Van Rompay started to pick up the pace, so I better get to studying.

What's in a letter?

2010-09-03T21:10:00.001-07:00

These are all letters that are short for certain hypothetical documents that according to source criticism, redactors have used to form certain documents of the Old Testament (e.g. the Pentateuch) and the New Testament (e.g. the Gospels). Obviously I'm not at the level of a, say, Julius Wellhausen, but still, these hypothetical sources still confuse me at best and annoy me at worst. How do scholars posit such a certainty of these documents when as far as I know, no independent sources apart from the current "redactional" states (i.e. the forms as it is appropriated in the Scriptures) exist? I'm currently in an OT interpretations class, and the lectures have been very stimulating so far, but when it comes to the issue of Documentary Hypothesis, I've never been fully convinced no matter where I hear it (not when I heard it first at Talbot and not now at Duke). Is there something to these conclusions through source-criticism that I'm not getting? I guess I'm not too terribly off-track on some levels because even one Professor here at Duke, Mark Goodacre, rejects "Q."

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? What's your take on source-criticism in general, and these specific sources specifically?

Fall 2010

2010-08-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow begins my first day of class as an MTS student at Duke Divinity. Thankfully my Talbot degree got some introductory classes out of the way, so unless something changes drastically in the next few days, this looks like my schedule for the Fall semester:

Greek Exegesis of Galatians
Christian Spirituality
Old Testament Interpretation
Elementary Syriac

It's been a while since I started classes at a new school, I'm pretty excited! Wish me luck for the first week.

New school

2010-08-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

To all my patient readers, thank you for not deleting me from your blog rolls! In the past month, we packed twice, had three wedding receptions, went on our honeymoon, shipped our cars, moved into a whole new city across the US, so please forgive the month-long silence. Anyway, I'm starting school finally this week and here's my prospective schedule so far:

Greek Exegesis of Mark with Dr. Joel Marcus (waitlisted...)

Greek Exegesis of Galatians with Dr. Susan Eastman

Old Testament Interpretation with Dr. Anathea Portier-Young

For my fourth class, it's still a toss-up I guess depending on what they let me do, but I guess if I can get my way, it might be:

The Septuagint with Dr. Melvin Peters

Elementary Syriac with Dr. Lucas Van Rompay

Some words of appreciation go out to various people I've met through online venues, a few who I don't even know their names/blogs, and one John Anderson who is a Duke-MTS alumnus who helped me from time to time along this whole process. Much appreciation to all of you!

And finally, I also need a job.

From now on, blogging will be from Durham, North Carolina!

Weird writings

2010-07-23T15:43:00.001-07:00

Every now and then, I come across some very bizarre statements from ancient documents, and today I ran into one.

This is a fragment from Clement of Alexandria:

But those who set themselves against God's creation because of continence, which has a fair-sounding name, quote also those words which were spoken to Salome, of which I made mention before. They are contained, I think (or I take it) in the Gospel according to the Egyptians. For they say that `the Saviour himself said: I came to destroy the works of the female'.

--Strom. iii.9.63

What's up with the Egyptians?

Eyewitness Testimony

2010-07-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

I'm reading through Bauckham's book, and in a subsection titled Eyewitness Testimony, he says some things which I found helpful. I'm somewhat puzzled that critical scholars tend to pit the Synoptic Gospels against the Gospel of John in terms of history and theology and regarding this issue, Bauckham briefly comments:

"The vital importance that was attached, in Greco-Roman historiography, to the firsthand testimony of eyewitness participants in the events, and the way in which the Gospels reflect this concern, has been highlighted recently in Samuel Byrskog's Story as History—History as Story, and I have discussed the Gospels in this light at length in my book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. So a brief treatment will suffice here. The historiographical ideal, which meant that strictly speaking one could write only contemporary history, history that was still within living memory, was that the historian himself should have been a participant in many of the events and that he should have interviewed eyewitnesses of those events he could not himself have witnessed. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, for example, praises the historical work of Theopompus of Chios because "he was an eyewitness (αὐτόπτης) of many events, and conversed with many of the eminent men and generals of his day" (Pomp. 6). In a literary context of this kind John's Gospel would seem readily to meet the contemporary requirements of reliable historiography, probably better than the Synoptic Gospels. Its claim, whether authentic or not, is to authorship by a disciple of Jesus who notes his own presence (in the third person as was the normal historiographical convention) at key events in the story he tells, and makes it plain that he belonged to a circle of other disciples from whom he could be reliably informed of other events. Widespread failure to recognize that this Gospel's claim to eyewitness testimony is at least a straightforward historiographical one (doubtless it has also a theological dimension) has resulted from the influence of the dictum that this Gospel is theology, not history, and consequent isolation of it from its literary context in ancient historiography."

Blogging and the 'biblioblog' dilemma

2010-07-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

There's been some recent discussions here, here, and here about what biblioblogs should and should not be doing, and with the proliferation of blogs, one might be inclined to quickly remove a blog that has not posted anything recently regarding biblical studies. Unfortunately, I think I fall under that category, and I hope my readers have not removed me from their feeds! With graduating two months ago, to wedding planning, to moving, etc., there's been absolutely no time for me to really think about anything interesting in biblical studies, so apologies to my readers if they've been seeing a huge drop-off in anything interesting lately. I hope as I enter back to school in the Fall at Duke, I'll have some more interesting thoughts, but until then, bear with the random musings!

WWJHLL

2010-07-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

What would Jesus have looked like? (WWJHLL)

Here are some popular and past depictions:

Many popular depictions show Jesus with light-brown hair, sharp blue eyes, and a well trimmed beard with very European features. One of the pictures above even shows an Asian depiction of Jesus. In Popular Mechanics 2002, they think he looked more like this:

I suppose that does more justice to his Palestinian roots, it was just very different than any other depictions of Jesus I've seen.

WWJHLL?

HT: Justin Taylor

The age of digital readers

2010-07-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

It seems that the past few years has brought on a whole new age of reading: the age of digital readers. Some of the devices vying for your reading pleasure:

1. Sony PRS-900

2. Barnes & Noble Nook

3. Apple iPad

4. Amazon Kindle 2 and Kindle DX

I'm not really that serious in buying one, but I suppose it would be nice to have one instead of carrying all my books, not to mention the ability to access the hundreds of journal articles I have on my computer on one portable device. However, I have not really had a chance to actually mess around with any of these devices and from what I can tell there are some shortcomings of these devices. First, if they are quick, full-color with multi-touch capabilities (e.g., iPad), the battery life is very low, the price is very very steep, and for reading, they would be terrible for your eyes. Anyway, I think iPad is not really meant to act as an e-reader. Second, if they are basic and focused on reading (e.g., the other devices), the response times are slow and most of them lack any ability to mark up the books (though I might be wrong here). The only exception I think is the Sony PRS-900 with its stylus; unfortunately, this device only has a 7-inch display, the response times seem slow, and the book store is Sony's instead of an already well-established source like Amazon. Who reads books without marking them up?

I guess if I could have it my way, it would be something like the Kindle DX that is less than $200, with a stylus, with SD-memory support, and strong PDF support. Does anyone own one of these devices that want to weigh in?

Find that quote

2010-07-05T22:30:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading through this book on the historical Jesus, and in Luke Timothy Johnson's critique of Darrell Bock he says this:

"My complaint here is not nitpicking concerning Bock's prose. It cuts to the heart of his enterprise. He is not expressing himself clumsily; he is committing historiographical fallacy. The fact that other Jesus questers (including Crossan, Meier and Wright) regularly commit the same fallacy does not make it any more acceptable. As Chesterton once remarked, "a fallacy does not become less of a fallacy merely because it has become a fashion."

I tried to Google that quote from Chesterton (he didn't provide any references on it) and got nothing. I'm just curious, does anyone know where that quote is from?

Carnival

2010-07-03T14:48:00.001-07:00

When I think of the word "carnival," I just think of something like the picture above, with some fun games and ferris wheels, but in literary terms, I learned that it has been used in a different way to understand a given text. I'm trying to read books that introduce different "criticisms" of the New Testament, and the book that I'm currently reading is James L. Resseguie's Narrative Criticism of the New Testament. I'm not sure if I can agree with all the tenets of narative-criticism that I've read so far, but it's still interesting. In a subsection titled, "Carnivalesque," Resseguie says something about carnival that I want to quote in full:

"Carnivalesque is a concept, popularized by Mikhail Bakhtin, that highlights the upside down, inside out, top to bottom, inverted world of carnival. Carnival predates Christianity and expresses "life drawn out of its usual rut" and "the reverse side of the world ('monde à l'envers') in which everyday social hierarchies are turned upside down and mocked by normally suppressed voices of the culture. Carnivaleque is prominent in the passion scenes of the Gospels, where symbols and actions mock a staid, authoritarian society and provide the transforming regenerative power for an alternative society. Opposites that underscore the relativity of all structure and order are paired in carnival: king with slave, crowning with de-crowning, exaltation with debasement, and sacred with profane. Similar opposites are paired at the crucifixion: an innocent man dies while an outlaw goes free (Barabbas); the sun fails at noon; the temple veil is torn from top to bottom; a carnival procession mocks the king, which, in turn, mocks the triumphal processions of conquering heroes; a cross serves as a throne; jeers (carnivalistic laughter) deride while ironically affirming truth. The images of carnival are linked to the paradox of death and rebirth. Carnivaleque is never simple negation but has a second, positive level of meaning. The downward, negative movement that characterizes the crucifixion world of abuse, curse, debasing, profanation, mockery, and death contains within it the regenerative power of an upward, positive movement of rejuvenation, renewal of life, and transformed symbols of power. In this sense, carnivalesque is like a U-shaped plot with a downward turn that moves upward to a new stable condition."

How things have changed...

2010-07-02T23:06:00.001-07:00

During my last semester at Talbot, my professors were mentioning that much of the journal databases at the Biola Library were being changed to digital format, with no hard copies being available on site. It's amazing how much things have changed over the years, and I'm grateful that through my student ID, I get access to a bunch of library databases through Biola as an alumni. Unfortunately, the access they provide of theological journals only go to say, 2004, 2005, 2007, etc., at the very least a couple years old (which is huge I think in terms of recent scholarship). Great news! I just checked my Duke ID, and it seems that their database is much more vast as well current (this is not a knock on Biola, but just shows the level of research/endowment available and accomplished at Duke). Not only that, I already have access to their library database and e-journals, even while still living 2500 miles away from campus. How things have changed! For the better that is (at least in my opinion). I must admit, sometimes I just download a bunch of articles and completely forget about them... I suppose I will get to them sometime. Are any of you avid downloaders of journal articles?

New journal

2010-06-30T22:43:00.001-07:00

The first publication of a new journal, Student Journal for New Testament Studies, is now available here. It seems that students (either advanced undergraduate, masters, and doctoral level) are the sole contributors to this new journal, and while that might mean a "watered down" level of scholarship(though even that might not even be true) in comparison to journals like JBL, NTS, and the like, it seems like a good place to see what kind of research are being done by students around the globe. Go take a look!

HT: DukeNewt

Bonhoeffer

2010-06-21T00:30:00.001-07:00

I've been reading the recently published biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, and I have to say, Bonhoeffer was one legit dude. He finished his PhD by age 21, with his doctoral dissertation Sanctorum Communio (a theological study of the sociology of the church) and finished at age 23 his habilitation, a post-doctoral degree which is basically another PhD (arguably even more research-focused, with stricter rules on publishing, lectures, etc.) with Akt und Sein. He was eventually hanged for his involvement with the plot to assassinate Hitler during WWII. Near the end of his life, he was almost finished with his magnum opus, Ethics, eventually compiled/editted by his best friend Eberhard Bethge. I'm almost done with the biography, and I have to say, Bonhoeffer was an amazingly unique individual with immense intellect as well as a pastoral heart and love for people. I am going to start reading through his various works soon, and as a way to whet your appetite for his thoughts, I will quote the opening lines of Ethics here:

"Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand--from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?' Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: 'What is the will of God?'"
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

ETS

2010-06-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

In case you dropped by thinking this to be a blog post about the Evangelical Theology Society (by the way, my former professor Dr. Clint Arnold is the president-elect this year), sorry, that's not the group I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the wonderful group we all are familiar with, the Educational Testing Service, raking in millions (maybe billions!?) of dollars through standardized tests like APs, SATs, and GREs. Although I already took the GREs, I might take it again in the future so I've been studying vocabs and in one of the practice questions, the right answer to a blank was "ludology." What the heck is ludology? I went to dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, and MSN Encarta dictionary, and ALL of them said this word does not exist. It was only after I typed it in Google that I got "study of games (esp. videogames)." What the!

These kinds of words better not show up on the GRE.

The New Bridge Illustration?

2010-06-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

Do you guys remember the bridge illustration? It was a simple evangelism tool that was developed a long time ago, and it looked something like this:

It was especially helpful for cross-cultural ministries because it was simple, clear, and interesting (well... opposed to just reading a bunch of words on a page, I suppose). Anyway, I just saw this on my Google Reader feed, and well... it seems like the old method is out and you better bring a sketchbook with you with a full script for the details.

Quote of the Day

2010-06-12T17:27:00.001-07:00

I've been reading through N.T. Wright's first volume, and in the chapter dealing with important symbols for Israel, Wright says this regarding the temple:

"But the Temple was not simply the 'religious' centre of Israel--even supposing that a distinction between religion and other departments of life could make any sense at the period in question. It was not, shall we say, the equivalent of Westminster Abbey, with 'Buckingham Palace' and the 'Houses of Parliament' being found elsewhere. The Temple combined in itself the functions of all three--religious, national figurehead and government--and also included what we think of as the City, the financial and economic world ... When we study the city-plan of ancient Jerusalem, the significance of the Temple stands out at once, since it occupies a phenomenally large proportion (about 25%) of the entire city. Jerusalem was not, like Corinth for example, a large city with lots of little temples dotted here and there. It was not so much a city with a temple in it; more like a temple with a small city round it."

I guess this is nothing really new, I just liked the way Wright put it at the end.

A break... sort of.

2010-05-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

So, I finally walked yesterday, graduating from the Talbot School of Theology with an MA in New Testament. I originally started out as an MDiv and was probably about two-thirds of the way done, but I wanted to focus on biblical studies and not do all the practical theology, so here I am. I will be heading to Durham, NC soon to look for an apartment in the Fall, so please pray for us that we'll be able to find a decent place for us to begin a new family together! What else will I be doing? Well, as one of my classmates said yesterday, "I'm going to inhale books during the time off." I don't know about that kind of speed, but I do have a bunch of books I wanted to read, as well as get a chance to think more about potential research topics for my thesis at Duke. Oh, and I might take the darn GRE's again for my future PhD apps, so if anyone has any good tips (for verbal), please share your wisdom.

Anyway, some books on queue:

on the historical Jesus, Christian origins, Acts, intertexuality, OT in Paul, the Iliad, and the Apocalypse.

What are you reading these days?

Say what?

2010-05-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

Though I've learned a lot from the many scholarly articles and monographs that I read this year thus far, sometimes, I do understand what John Piper meant, when he said, "Using technical jargon that only insiders understand and that often conceals ambiguity." There are times that I feel like I'm reading pages and pages of one long sentence, to eventually be plopped down onto a conclusion which I'm not quite sure how the author arrived at.

Anyway, on this thought, it made me think of a few funny videos that pokes fun (well, the first one I think was serious, but the second was not) at "technical jargon" that seems to mean nothing and say nothing. Enjoy the monographs my friends, but do remember, sometimes it's just better to say it in 5 words instead of 500 (oh and apologies in advance for some foul language in video #2):

Cliche?

2010-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you have heard the cliche, "Do not judge a book by its cover." Well, the more I read/buy books, the more I'm convinced that the cliche is oftentimes wrong. I mean, who doesn't like the way this book looks on the outside? Regardless of whether or not you read the book, you gotta admit, it's a cool cover. One other book that I recently added to my wish list, is one I saw on my Google Reader feed, from a review by Andy Rowell, who is a ThD student at Duke.

Here's the cover:

The book is hot off the press (April 2010) and I have to admit, I didn't really read what Andy had to say about it, the cover just got me. Not to mention Tim Keller wrote the forward to the book. Seems to me, sometimes a book should be judged by its cover.

What do you think?