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1. I think I was mistaken about when I did construction and when I substitute pastored for my brother-in-law at Zephyrhills. I believe I did these the summer after I graduated from Central. I was taking classes at Central both summers there.
I've mentioned that I studied David Thompson's workbook for Machen in the summer before I matriculated at Asbury. I was a Greek major at Central but it wasn't enough. The study I did in the summer pushed me over the top. I was able to test out of Greek and go straight into New Testament Exegesis.
Asbury had a bit of a multiple-personality disorder thing going on in those days. You had the English Bible (EB) department headed by Robert Traina, also with David Bauer and David Thompson. Then you had what I might call the exegetical Bible professors who followed a more mainstream evangelical approach to exegesis. These included Bob Lyon, Dr. Wang, John Oswalt, and Lawson Stone had just arrived.
It was no problem to me. I gained greatly from both and found the dual perspective on exegesis enriching and helpful. There was no real contradiction between the two, and a synthesis is easily enough achieved. During my time there, Lawson Stone tried to integrate both approaches in an Isaiah 1-11 special topics course he did in Hebrew. I'll explain the two approaches as I go.
2. My first semester I had Ron Crown for New Testament Exegesis. He only taught for a year at Asbury. He was Free Methodist. Given where I was at in my journey, he seemed liberal to me. Mind you, that didn't bother me. I only struggled with guilt about myself. I had no problem learning from people I potentially disagreed with. His salvation was his own business.
There is a dynamic I've observed with people from more sectarian backgrounds. Think Amish. Think Mormon. Think Seventh Day Adventist. In my case, think holiness. We are so used to being weird that it is normal for our teachers and co-workers to be completely different from us. The run of the mill fundamentalist these days is trying to take over society. That was not the feel I had growing up.
In fact, some would say this only changed in the mid-80s. Before then, we accepted that we were just different. Jerry Falwell weaponized us and we've been trying to take over the United States ever since, not least with the current president.
We used Gordon Fee's New Testament Exegesis. I liked it. It was classical neo-evangelical exegesis in the manner of Fuller and Wheaton. It laid out so well the steps for historical-cultural interpretation in the old modernist way, and it assumed you knew Greek. I gained a lot from the class.
3. At the same time I was starting the classical exegetical route, I also had David Bauer for Matthew, my first introduction to what at the time they called "EB," English Bible. They would later rename the courses inductive Bible study in hope that students would do it in the original languages. [1]
The father of EB was none other than Robert Traina himself, the author of the famed textbook, Methodical Bible Study. [2] Bauer has since updated the approach with his Inductive Bible Study. To say that Bauer and Traina were/are both "J" personalities is an understatement. Bauer would often, on the spot, say something like, "There are three reasons you should take the southern stairway..."
The flavor of EB was that it focused overwhelmingly on the literary phase of interpretation. Yes, yes, you did eventually engage historical-cultural context. Yes, there was a point where you did synthesis of the whole Bible ("evaluation"). Yes, there was application at the end.
But these were not the focus of the EB classes, as I experienced them. It was the exegetical professors and those courses in the curriculum that more engaged the historical and especially the critical. EB, especially under Bauer, focused on the literary context of passages.
This only made sense because Dr. Bauer's dissertation work at Union (in Virginia, under Jack Kingsbury) was a narrative critical approach to the Gospel of Matthew. [3] I came to Asbury right in the heyday of literary critical approaches to the Bible. The 70s had done a lot of redaction criticism and structuralism. Now we were doing narrative criticism and would soon slide into reader-response and deconstruction. I found it all very stimulating. More to come.
Although I loved my Central professors, many of my seminary professors seemed to be on the next level. I often felt stupid at Central, but it was not so much my professors who made me feel this way. Some of my professors at Asbury were so advanced that just being around them made me feel stupid. This was especially true of Bauer. He just seemed to know everything.
As an aside, he also knew a lot of scholars. We used to joke about how he would say something like, "Of course I know Bud." (In this case, Paul "Bud" Achtemeier.)
4. English Bible had its own language. When Bauer surveyed Matthew, he identified one structural relationship as "recurrence of particularization with filial language." We learned expressions like "particularization" and "detailed observation."
I heard a funny story about a new professor at Asbury once upon a time who was going to be teaching some Bible and sat in on some inductive Bible study sessions to get a feel for its approach. This person had a doctorate in Bible but found themselves wondering what in the world they were hearing.
I have taught inductive Bible study many times over my years at Indiana Wesleyan and Wesley Seminary. Students from my early years might remember frequent references to Asbury Seminary as I taught exegesis. I still hope to finish my own book on how to study the Bible, and the methods I learned at Asbury in it are evident.
Let's think of inductive Bible study as a five step process:
- Preparation
- Observation
- Interpretation
- Integration
- Appropriation
5. Another strength of Traina's method was the integration phase, which he called "evaluation." Books like Hays and Duvall's Grasping God's Word does not really have a phase like this. It is a little more fundamentalist, a little more mainstream neo-evangelical.
But Traina is more reflective. When I was at Asbury, there was a real commitment to hearing each book of the Bible in context. When you listen, you hear the tensions. You hear the unique voices of each book. It becomes necessary to negotiate between the contextual voices. You have to find center points.
Hays and Duvall do not negotiate between voices. They go straight to application from each individual passage. That is a blind spot because it does not map each passage to the other passages of the Bible. Traina's method was more advanced...
[1] Jerry Walls used to call David Bauer "EB" as a nickname. Jerry had these bets with Bauer. The one I remember is when Jerry bet Bauer that he could get an article published with Interpretation. This was quite unlikely for a couple reasons, and Bauer knew it. For one, Interpretation is a biblical studies journal, and Jerry is a philosopher. More importantly, publishing in Interpretation is by invitation only. Bauer won the bet and got a Chinese meal out of it, I think.
[2] I regret that I was not able to take Traina. My first year at Asbury was his last. There was a mad scramble to take his Pentateuch class in the spring of 1988, and the class was full by the time a lowly first year like me tried to sign up. He had developed the method at Union in New York.
[3] I personally think Bauer's work is spectacular, but his The Structure of Matthew's Gospel was tepidly received, I think in large part because mainstream scholarship doesn't speak his language. I got the sense that when a new Provost came to Asbury in the early 00s, he tried to curb Asbury somewhat of its IBS ways.
I see Bauer has just published an introduction to the Gospel of Matthew. I ordered it immediately!
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