I don't know if I'll keep it up, but I thought I would list a few thoughts, new or old, from my week of teaching.
1. The first is a quote from Mary Douglas' Purity and Danger that I have long found profound: "Dirt is matter out of place." Students in my honors NT classes read a chapter this week in the New Testament Introduction of David deSilva of Ashland Theological Seminary on cultural background to the NT. deSilva used Douglas' construct in relation to how we have purity concepts in our world. He mentioned homeless people as an example of individuals whom society views as "unclean" because they are "out of place." People don't belong lying down asleep in front of a store.
I used my own example of how you wouldn't like someone eating with their toes even if they had scrubbed and washed their feet so well that they were far cleaner than the normal hands. I mentioned in my regular NT Survey that in fact the Levite and the priest in the Parable of the Good Samaritan were actually obeying the Bible in avoiding the mugged man, given the level of uncleanness he potentially held in store.
2. My intertestamental class remains perhaps my favorite subject that I teach. Yet I have mixed feelings about the way in which it can take away the innocence of a person. On the one hand, the paradigm we use to read the biblical texts is often quite different from the way we would read or think about any other text. In particular, we are not programmed to read them as documents created in the course of normal events and contexts of history. We process their content by different rules than we do other texts.
But Protestant students have no defenses up against normal reasoning when it comes to 1 Enoch, Tobit, or the story of Ahiqar. At some point, some will realize how vastly the criteria of what is appropriate or inappropriate belief changes depending on whether they are dealing with one or the other. To be consistent, they either have to start thinking about these intertestamental books in some of the same ways they do in relation to the Bible or they will have to accept that scholars by and large aren't part of a conspiracy to destroy faith, that the majority of scholars usually believe what they do because it is the most likely conclusion given the evidence as it currently stands.
This thought leads me to ponder where, if anywhere, evangelical scholarship should go. There are any number of issues where we are in the minority and we are the ones with the presupposition that keeps us from following the evidence to its logical conclusion. But evidence isn't always stacked up toward the right verdict of course. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. So I maintain the boundaries as I perceive them, and wait for a prophet to come along and tell me what to do with the unclean stones (see 1 Maccabees).
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last week over lunch my friend "Tom" (graduate of Liberty University)adamently defended the authorship of the Pentateuch as belonging to Moses. He vehemently denies the Yahwistic/Priestly source and I realized that almost everyone around the table disagreed with him. (I didn't say anything because 1.) I don't know what to think yet and 2.)Most people have no idea what a Wesleyan is so right now I'm a "closet evangelical") All this to say that in light of the evidence provided to use in class and after reading over a great amount of material, I realize now that Evangelicals must look silly sometimes to the majority of Biblical scholars. It almost seems like there are times in which Evangelicals have to create all sorts of crazy theories in order to say that every Pauline Epistle was writen 100% by Paul. So here's my question. Does it take more faith to believe Paul wrote every book attributed to him or to believe that someone else could have written them and yet they stil remain authoritative?
Here's the thing. I know some Tom types of thinkers. In my experience, of the group of you at that table who have faith, he's the most likely to lose his. In general, these are the people whose faith is least centered on Christ. Their faith is often based on a very narrow and cultural understanding of the Bible. Once one jot or tittle fails from that view, the rest of their faith tends to fall apart like a deck of cards. Hopefully that won't be the case with the Tom in question!
Does it actually matter in terms of faith and Christianity who wrote certain books? It's too late to de-canonize them and their content doesn’t change. If Moses penned the whole Pentateuch or none of it the content does not change. From a scholarly point of view it does matter but I don’t see it as meaning much to Christians. I shouldn’t say that; I see it as meaning too much to Christians, we shouldn’t be basing faith on the Pauline Authorship of the Epistles we should be basing our faith on Christ.
Maybe we should return to the simplified phrase the Bible says… instead of saying Paul the author of says… From a non-scholastic Christian view we should be teaching the Bibles authority regardless of author (as Kevin alludes to). We are causing people to focus on book details of the bible instead of helping them fix their eyes on Christ.
-Kurt A. Beard
http://delayedepiphany.blogspot.com/
I have a couple articles/presentations in play right now on the New Testament's theology of Scripture. My gambit isn't too controversial: that the inspired message the NT audiences understood and considered Scripture read the books with God as the author rather than a human in a certain context. After modernism, we can return to reading the Bible this way--which is the way we read it before we got "educated." But now, we read it that way knowing that the meaning we see, the inspired meaning, is only peripherally related to the original meaning. Much more to be said here...
But if we model ourselves on the Bible, that's how the Bible does it...
Dr. Schenck,
If we post-modernly (in the most chronological sense of the word) return to reading the scripture as the words of God, then how do we prevent ourselves from stepping of the deep-end when it comes to interpreting passages whose message may be bound in "their" time and culture?
The key to me is that we do consciously what we have been doing unconsciously and inconsistently: we read the words through the eyes of common Christian understanding (I avoided the word "tradition" because it's a dirty word to some, but that's really what we're talking about here).
Impressesed.
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