Notes Along the Way -- TF4 -- Ichthusman

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. Previous post here.
__________________________
1. My second year as Teaching Fellow involved two new preps -- Hebrew and Intermediate Greek. At first, I was a little annoyed at Bill Patrick for finageling a second two year term as Teaching Fellow. That meant he would teach the summer Greek intensive, which was money I wanted. But it seems like perhaps I was allowed to teach Hebrew then, which was perfectly delightful for me. Not all TFs got to teach Hebrew.

Lawson Stone had sung the praises of LaSor (although apparently not enough to use it). I loved it. It was my first experiment with teaching biblical languages inductively. It wouldn't be the last.

Teaching a biblical language inductively can require some pastoral skills. With LaSor especially, students had a good deal of miscellaneous information rattling around in their heads before they could see the big picture. And that is highly uncomfortable -- especially the more "J" you are.

Then, all of a sudden, everything comes together. And in a shorter time period than it would have taken otherwise.

But I loved it. It was great for me, having first learned Hebrew from Seow's textbook, to solidify my understanding with LaSor. Maybe a smidge selfish. But to this day, my sense of Hebrew phonetics is far better than it would be otherwise.

I had some really good students. I like to boast that I was Brian Russell's Hebrew teacher. Of course, I couldn't answer half his questions. So let's just say he taught himself.

Jeff Finger stands out to me as a student, not so much because of his Hebrew prowess, although I'm sure he got an A. Rather, he was a quite unique fellow. I remember one class where he was laying on top of his desk on his back holding LaSor up in the air. This is a desk chair I'm talking about.

2. He seemed like just the right person to play "Lust Boy" for Ichthus that summer of 1991. Denise Greenhalgh, as I recall, had asked me to be Ichthusman for the Christian rock festival. Bob Lyon had started the festival way back in the 70s, as I recall, as a Christian alternative to Woodstock. (I would later propose to Angie during the festival in 1998. This was before they moved it to the place where it died.)

As a small taste of what I had become, I made the suggestion in all seriousness of parachuting into the festival. After checking, the response was that the insurance company would drop us like a hot potato if we tried such a stunt.

So I invented the costume myself. Yellow cleaning gloves. Someone sowed a yellow fish (ichthus) on a black turtleneck I got at a Goodwill type store. Black pants. Purple cape. Some (cheap) cool 90s sunglasses. I had some used clothes that we cut up and vecroed so that I could rip them off to the tune of "This looks like a job for Ichthusmannnnnn!" The costume was underneath.

So that summer we vanquished Lust Boy. I think Scott Brown might have been "Sin Man" the next summer.

3. I also taught Intermediate Greek using Brooks and Winbery as a grammar and Metzger's Lexical Aids. Students were supposed to go through Galatians and both do sentence diagrams and give a semantic analysis for each word. 

No doubt, I was not the best teacher for this. That was I believe when I met Jim McNeely. I seem to recall that Bryan Blankenship was in that class as well, but I could be wrong. As usual, I learned a great deal while teaching.

The year after I was teaching fellow, I would take two semesters at UK in Sanskrit. It was a linguistics sequence. I wish I could say I gave it the time it deserved. I mention it because Sanskrit has an 8 case noun system, and Brooks and Winbery analyzed the five Greek cases using that Indo-European model. [1]

The Nominative, Accusative, and Vocative have always stood alone. But the genitive was originally a genitive and ablative. And the dative was originally dative, locative, and instrumental cases. Indeed, this is a curious thing to me. While we are used to thinking of things getting more developed over time, the Indo-European languages have actually become much simpler over time. Modern Greek is simpler than ancient Greek, and ancient Greek was simpler than its Indo-European ancestor.

I have always felt like I was just a step behind. If I knew everything that I have studied, I would be quite a knowledgable fellow.

4. McNeely likes to remind me that I was fined for trespassing on railroad property with a girl I was dating from Asbury College at the time. But I'll let that story pass.

[1] I suppose this is a good place to mention that I sat in on Dr. Stone's Akkadian class too my first year as Teaching Fellow. I didn't find the time to learn it as well as I wished. It was quite a fun deviation, since it used cuneiform for its syllables. He needed my warm body for the class to go, as I recall.

Notes Along the Way -- TF3 -- Postmodernism

... continuing my years as a Teaching Fellow at Asbury and student in classics at the University of Kentucky. Last post here.
______________________
1. In the years when I was a Teaching Fellow, I was learning more and more about literary criticism and, of course, postmodernism was in the mix. My original source of exposure here was Dr. Bauer at Asbury.

Dr. Bauer was a leader in narrative criticism, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, which I've mentioned before. As it was practiced in the United States, narrative criticism examined the stories of the Bible as stories. His Dokter Vater Jack Kingsbury and others like Mark Allen Powell bracketed the historical questions. You didn't ask whether or not these events happened. You assumed each Gospel was a self-contained story world. It was a very convenient hermeneutic for evangelicals to work on their PhDs because they didn't have to address those critical issues.

Alan Culpepper has a complex but helpful diagram in his book, The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel which captures the main dynamics. And of course, Mark Allen Powell wrote a helpful little book called What Is Narrative Criticism? The three main elements of a story are the events, characters, and settings. There is the narrator, the implied author, and the implied reader. There is narrative time and story time. I would use some of these categories in my PhD dissertation, as I've said.

When I got to Durham, I felt like they weren't quite as sophisticated at these hermeneutical approaches as Bauer and others were. They were still quite historically oriented, and those who were dabbling with narrative criticism had not fully disconnected their study of narratives from the study of history. 

Of course, as Joe Dongell once mentioned to me, the very use of language assumes a historical baseline. I would understand this better my first year at Durham when I was exposed to Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the idea of narrative criticism was to examine the text in isolation from historical questions and historical background.

2. As I've said before, in those days I felt like I was slowly moving through the historical progression of biblical criticisms. In the early 90s, I would catch up. Textual criticism asked whether the King James tradition was more or less original. Historical criticism searched for the history. Source criticism looked for written sources. Form criticism looked at oral traditions. Redaction criticism asked how the authors edited their sources. Composition criticism asked how the writings were composed. Narrative criticism analyzed the stories as stories.

Now, in the early 90s, I had caught up with reader-response criticism, the next step after narrative criticism. The first two thirds of the twentieth century had focused on the world behind the text, the historical. The 80s had tried to focus on the world within the text. Now, with the 90s, there was a turn to the reader, the world in front of the text.

Reader-response criticism had at least three varieties. First, there were those who viewed it with a historical lens -- what was the impact of the text on the original audience. David Smith, doing his dissertation at Durham in the late 90s, hypothesized how the passion narrative of Mark was written in a way to have an impact on the original audience. If the author ended the book at Mark 16:8, what kind of an effect would this have on the audience?

A second variety relates to the impact of the biblical texts on various groups of modern readers. How do women experience the letters of Paul (feminist readings)? How might an African-American woman experience the text (womanist readings). There were black readings and Latinx readings. There is ideological criticism, such as liberation theology readings.

I would read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism of the Gospels my first semester of my doctoral program. I found it very helpful to sort out these different approaches hermeneutically. I think I mentioned before the SBL presentation I managed to hear from him in 1991. You can find it in the helpful hermeneutical volume, Mark and Method.

Perhaps the most extreme form of reader-response criticism is the one that basically says you can read any meanng you want into the text (see Stanley Fish). As I began to embark on my doctoral studies, I would become acquainted with Paul Ricoeur and the notion of the autonomous text and the polyvalance of texts. Although I don't think the number is infinite, the same text can be interpreted in vastly different ways. Once a text is uttered, Ricoeur observed, it becomes autonomous. The author can no longer control what it comes to mean.

If you've had me for certain classes or read much of my hermeutical stuff, you will begin to hear where my understanding began to sharpen. There are virtually as many potential meanings to a text as there are readers. The text is often a mirror in which we see ourselves. 

3. In those days, I was gaining a good perspective on the way I grew up reading the Bible. We wanted God to "quicken" the text and speak directly to us. God might tell you to move to Florida or go to a specific mission field when a few words in a verse jumped out at you. I grew up with almost no sense of how to read the Bible in context. The meaning of the Bible was to some extent untethered from its historical moorings. We read the text in reader-response mode, shaped by the tradition we came from. 

In terms of ideological criticism, we made "holiness readings" of the text.

Those of a more charismatic nature regularly read the text this way. I've come to believe that if God didn't speak to people in this way, we would all be lost. Although pastors and people in the pew think they know what the Bible means, the fail rate is actually quite immense in terms of the details. I suspect that Sunday morning sermons across the globe are filled with some spectacularly creative interpretive moments.

Perhaps most scholars who come out of these backgrounds, like Gordon Fee, end up rejecting these sorts of reader-response readings. "The text can't come to mean something that it never meant," he wrote. He's right of course in terms of the original meaning, but can't God speak to people through the text however he wants to?

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern interpretation. I can overlay the people I was reading in the early 90s with it. Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative was quite challenging but the first few pages gave me a powerful sense of what I later called "unreflective" readings of texts. Two decades later, when our IWU Religion Monday reading group read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, an even deeper sense of the shift from pre- to modern was to be found.

Putting it all together, we start off as unreflective, "pre-modern" readers. We don't see ourselves as readers of the text. The meaning of the text seems obvious to us without us realizing that we are bringing our own "dictionaries" to it. 

Pre-modern or precritical interpreters don't read the text in context, but they don't know they aren't. They have a "what you see is what you get" approach. They think they are seeing meaning in the world that they are actually reading into it. Paul Ricoeur called these kinds of readings a "first naivete."

I recently encountered some Bible readers of this sort in discussions of biblical prophecy. It's quite clear that they have no idea how to read verses in context. They see the meanings someone has told them. 

When I taught inductive Bible study, it was very hard to get students to read certain Old Testament texts in context. It was quite discouraging actually. You might give them a text that the New Testament reads in relation to Jesus. But they couldn't detach themselves from that meaning to hear the verses in the flow of whatever Old Testament book it was in.

Meanwhile, my holiness forebears and modern charismatics are very open to these on-the-spot "zappings" of the Spirit too.

All of these readings are exercises in reader response, and there are potentially as many meanings as there are interpreters.

4. This, of course, is why the notion of sola scriptura itself was pre-modern because it assumed the meaning of the text is intrinsic and self-evident in the text. The Reformers were more or less premodern and non-contextual. They increasingly knew literary context. Melancthon understood literary context, but he didn't understand the depth of historical context. Wesley largely did not know how to read the Bible in context. And so when he said he was a man of one book, the book he had in mind was the Bible filtered through his reader-responses.

Now to be sure, his reader-response interpretations had a massive archaeology. As an Anglican, he had massive amounts of church tradition rattling around in that head of his. Somewhere in the back of his head were vast numbers of historical texts and of course the biblical text. He knew those texts as Tradition had brought them to him.

And here, let me tip my hat to Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer suggested that we do not actually read the text as it was originally, but we read it as it comes to us through layers and layers of tradition. I would say this is absolutely true for the pre-modern, unreflective reader. They have no idea of the glasses they are wearing when they read the text. So it was with Wesley.

5. Postmodernism is then a step beyond reader-response criticism. Jacques Derrida did not believe the text had any stable meaning. Of course, this seems to deconstruct in that he wrote books. [1] In my opinion, he deliberately wrote ambiguously to try to make his point. But the fact that we all know his point suggests that words can indeed have meaning.

Postmodernism is thus a warning sign rather than a philosophy in itself. It tells us that our confidence in the meaning of our words is almost certainly overconfidence. Some like Stephen Fowl have pointed out that the meaning of many texts, including biblical texts, is frequently underdetermined. That is to say, we may lack sufficient evidence to know for certain what their original meaning actually was.

But in my mind, he has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. He effectively says, because we cannot know for certain the meaning of certain texts, why don't we just assume that they're orthodox. This is a certain brand of what has been called "theological interpretation." 

In the end, interpretation is a never ending struggle. But at any point in time, it does seem likely that we can identify a host of things that the text didn't likely mean -- including a lot of the meanings that people from various church traditions give it today.

6. The hermenutical struggles of those years left me concluding that there is more than one legitimate path to biblical interpretation. First, there is the original meaning, about which we can have varying degrees of certainty. If you want to be an expert on this original meaning, you must know biblical languages. You must know biblical history. You should know the history of interpretation. 

This is something beyond the level of most pastors. They're simply not trained on this level. And many don't have the aptitude.

Then, there is the reader-response understanding of broad orthodoxy. It does not tell you how to interpret every verse, but it gives boundaries to your appropriation of Scripture. The more we dig into the history of orthodoxy, the more nervous we might get about this reading. We almost have to have some sense that God was behind the scenes, directing this process. Even within the Bible itself, an honest contextual understanding inevitably has to believe that God directed the flow of revelation within the pages of Scripture.

I wrote up how this might work in a book I first published in 2006. I had first submitted the text to Westminster John Knox in a competition. Then, I gave it to Abingdon for year, at the end of which they published a curiously similar book with someone else. 

7. In addition to the orginal meaning, there are the many different reader responses to the biblical texts. There are denominational readings. There are our "tribal" readings of various kinds. Finally, there are individual readings when God speaks directly to you.

These years were the crucible in which I was catching up with the postmodern discussions of that moment. I was learning to distinguish between what I thought was valuable and what I thought wasn't. It would eventually allow me to have a second naivete (another Ricoeur phrase). My childhood church involved readings of a first naivete. 

With a second naivete, we can read the texts in the same way we did in our first naivete. The difference is that, now, we are consciously reading the texts out of context. First, we read it out of context without knowing it. But now, we can read it that way quite conscious of what we are doing.

[1] Deconstruction is the term used to refer to his philosophy. It's the idea that meaning unravels in the very act of trying to construct it. He did not claim to try to construct a philosophy--his was an anti-philosophy. But, ironically, his own attempt to deconstruct meaning was a veiled attempt to construct it.

Notes Along the Way -- TF 2 -- The First Iraq War

Continuing from last post
_______________________
1. On January 17, 1991, the US launched an attack against Iraq from Kuwait, the beginnings of the first Iraq War. I was standing in the University of Kentucky student center when it launched, suddenly realizing that, at 25, I was still an age that had once been drafted.

I remember some trepidation about a war with Iraq. I don't know how widespread my feelings were, but I felt like we had been under a hangover from the Vietnam War up to that point. Could we win a war? It sure hadn't seemed that we had won Vietnam. It had seemed that, in the end, we had cut our losses and hightailed it out of there. 

In that sense, the first Iraq War restored our confidence. At least it restored my confidence. We got our mojo back. 

Bush senior wisely didn't go into Baghdad, unlike his son. In hindsight, that seemed prescient, although he was sharply criticized for it. The next time, when Dick Cheney had the chance, he and the neo-cons talked Bush junior into it, resulting in the second longest American conflict. P. S. He started the longest one so far too, in Afghanistan.

2. I was at the University of Kentucky (UK) because I was starting an MA in Classical Languages and Literature, that is, classical Greek and Latin. I was following in the footsteps of Joe Dongell, who had done the same thing when he was a Greek Teaching Fellow. They foolishly gave me the same scholarship they had given him, not knowing how much smarter he is than me.

It was my second semester teaching beginning Greek, and the courses I was teaching that spring were the same ones I taught in the fall. In short, I was already getting bored.

I only took one class, Greek Poetry. It certainly wasn't the ideal class to begin with. Poetry in any language tends to break the most rules and be the least explicit. It doesn't use the full grammar of prose.

And it was painful. This was a master's degree. We had a lot of lines to do for each class. I was just solidifying my Koine Greek. I had no idea that ινα could be used with the indicative. I had no idea that ου could be used with a participle. There was no Google yet, and there certainly wasn't any AI yet.

I would teach Greek in the morning at Asbury, then drive 30 minutes to Lexington to an Arby's not far from the UK campus. I would spend the next two or three hours trying to create an interlinear from a blown up version of whatever text from Sophocles, Aeschylus, or Euripides. I had an English translation to try to retrofit the Greek text if I was totally lost.

And there were cherry turnovers involved.

I almost never had the translations entirely done, which was embarrassing. I would try to predict where we would be in the text by the time they got to me and, if I hadn't gotten that far, I scrambled to have something to say.

3. However, Dr. Hubert Martin was the best professor to have for such an incompetent fool as me. Soft spoken, infinitely merciful. He must surely have known how much I was struggling.

The other students had done classics in their undergraduate work. I had not looked at Latin since high school. I had taken 2.5 years of it with Mrs. Mrozek -- and high school Latin is a lot different from master's degree Latin. In the summer of 1991, I crammed Wheelock's 40 chapters down my throat. Thankfully, I had started Latin when my brain was like a sponge, so it came pretty easily.

One of the students had done his undergraduate work at Berea College. I don't remember his name but, man, he was sharp. There was another woman fresh out of undergraduate classics too. I felt SO stupid around them.

4. I believe we read Oedipus at Colonus for this stint. I had known the Oedipus trilogy since high school. But it has been interesting to think about it from a theological angle. The ancient world was fatalistic, as the story of the Three Fates shows. But they didn't see "free will" and fate as contradictory. Rather, as we humans went about making free choices, we ultimately end up where it was said we would end up. (reminds me a little of Molinism)

You probably know the story. Oedipus' father gets a prophecy that his son will kill him. He has Oedipus exposed -- put outside for animals and the elements to kill him. But, of course, a shepherd rescues him. He ends up raised thinking his father is the king of Corinth.

He then gets the same prophecy. He doesn't want to kill his father, so he heads north. And who should he meet on the way but, unbeknownst to him, his father. In the first recorded incident of road rage, he kills him. He goes north to Thebes where he brings about the Sphinx's end and, as a reward, gets to marry the queen of the city -- who interestingly is his mother.

Everyone in this story thinks they are acting freely. Yet when the story is done, they have all fulfilled their fates.

I've wondered if something along these lines is a better explanation of the tensions in the New Testament rather than Augustine or Wesley's more philosophical approaches. In any case, it speaks to the cultural framework in which Paul and others lived.

I would end up taking Greek Poetry again in year 3 because there wasn't another option. It was at least a little better the second time -- with different readings of course. I always felt like, when I got to the end of these degrees, I was about where I would liked to have been when I started.

We read Prometheus Bound. I wasn't very acquainted with the story before. Prometheus is punished for helping humanity by giving them fire. It's a reminder that the biblical creation story is unusual when God actually likes us. We are much more of a thorn in the side of other creation stories.

Martin had us read J.B. by Archibald MacLeish alongside PB. It is a play on Job. It has Job say that famous line, "If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God." I would wrestle quite a bit with the problem of evil over the next couple years. It wasn't Dr. Martin's fault.

5. The second Greek class I took was Thucydides (with Robert Rabel). That was an eye-opener with regard to the standards of ancient history writing. He apologizes for not being more entertaining. Many historians of the day were more prone to make things up for the delight of their readers, apparently.

But the most striking passage is where he indicates he made up some of the speeches in his history. If he didn't have access to witnesses or wasn't present himself, he invented what he thought they probably said. This potentially has implications for the speeches of Acts and the Gospels. Thucydides was not being pernicious at all. He was genuinely trying to present the flavor of the events. 

To me, it showed that the parameters of ancient history writing were just different than they are for us.

I would take Plutarch with Dr. Martin in the program too. Plutarch was a moralist. He is potential background for what biography was like at the time of Christ. My main take away was that he was far more interested in what lessons or morals we might take from the figures he told about than portraying them with great historical accuracy.

What was important was that the story about the person present a truth rather than you track down and be absolutely sure it happened.

I always laugh when I think that, while Herodotus is often called the "father of history," Plutarch called him the "father of lies." This was actually because Plutarch could not be objective about history. The Greeks always had to be superior to any other people. Meanwhile, part of what earned Herodotus that title was the fact that he could critique his own people. 

In the end, Plutarch was a tribal thinker and nowhere close to an objective one.

Fatalism, Herodotus, and Thucydides would show up in my philosophy classes at IWU, because the first two are mentioned in Sophie's World.`

To be continued...

Notes Along the Way -- 4.1 A Fork in the Road, with a side of Ordination

Last week I finished my reminiscences on my student years at Asbury Seminary.
____________________________
1. Asbury had a sweet set up where each year they would choose a graduating senior to be a Teaching Fellow for two years. The task was primarily to teach Greek, but I was privileged to get to teach Hebrew as well.

I applied that final year and waited to see what door might or might not open. I put out a sort of fleece. If I was chosen as the Teaching Fellow for that year, I would teach my two years and go on to do PhD work in New Testament. I would minister primarily as a teacher of ministers. If I was not chosen, I would take a church in Florida and perhaps go on to do graduate study at some point in the future.

Perhaps this is a good place to say that, when I first felt a call to ministry at Central, my first thought was to focus on theology. This reflected my philosophical bent. Besides, I thought, the meaning of the Bible is pretty obvious. But I thought there would be all sorts of puzzles to solve in theology.

This was the naivete of my unreflective youth and pre-modern background. As it turned out, there were countless puzzles to solve in biblical studies. Meanwhile, the basic beliefs of Christendom had been established for over 1500 years. When Thomas Oden set out to write his three volume systematic theology, his goal was to have no new idea.

Of course, I would eventually become sympathetic to constructive theology, a theology that engages with the contexts of those who reflect on it. There's a lot of synthesis to do there. But that's not important right now. 

The bottom line is that my attention shifted to biblical studies when I realized how many challenges there were there. And, I think somewhere deep down, I realized the power and authority that an expert on the Bible had in my circles. Subconscious, not noble, but alas.

Of Old and New Testament, as I've said, I was far more attracted to the New Testament. The New Testament is more directly theological; the Old more poetic and ancient. Mind you, I love the Old Testament world.

There seemed far more landmines in Old Testament studies than in New Testament studies. I taught Old Testament Survey my first semester at IWU. What should I mention? What not? I also remember a girl coming up after I made a joke about the King James being good enough for Peter and Paul. She sincerely asked after class, "Peter and Paul didn't use the King James?"

Finally, the New Testament is determinative of Christian faith. The Old Testament certainly provides critical background. But, in some ways, even then it was the Old Testament as interpreted in the Intertestamental Period that provided the framework from which first century Judaism emerged.

I realize there is much to debate in that paragraph, but I'll let it fly. Perhaps to be continued.

So, I put out the fleece. A fork in the road. Biblical studies or the pastorate.

2. I had done supply pastoring for a few months over two summers at Zephyrhills Wesleyan. I believe the summer after graduating from Asbury was when I was the youth pastor for my home church in Fort Lauderdale -- now New River Church. My sister Sharon was pastor at that time.

I should point out that my sister is ultraconservative by any reckoning. She hasn't cut her hair since she was a teenager, only wears skirts or dresses, has no jewelry, doesn't buy on Sunday. AND, she is an ordained minister.

It is a reminder that women in ministry is not a liberal or secular feminist thing for the Wesleyan tradition. We were ordaining women in the 1800s before it was cool. The United Methodists didn't start ordaining women till the 1950s. It goes back to the fact that we were a "Pentecostal" tradition before tongues got involved.

3. My sister had been Assistant Pastor for a while under Dr. Everett Putney. He had been so kind and gracious. He's the one I had asked about Hosea 11:1 after my first year at seminary. He was also a middle school principal, I believe in one of the public school systems in the western part of Broward County. At that time, it was up against the Everglades, but I imagine "civilization" has pushed much farther inland since then.

An interesting window into my holiness background was the question of whether we should eat in the fellowship hall where we had children's church. By the time my family arrived in Fort Lauderdale in 1970, they had expanded the original building so that, across a cemented hallway outside the original back of the church, there was a series of Sunday School classrooms, a pastor's study, and a larger room for children's church. That room was used as a fellowship hall when we would have a church pitch in dinner.

However, at some point, because it was now under the same roof as the sanctuary, there was a question whether it was appropriate to eat there. I can't remember the reason. As far as I know, no one had ever asked that question in the early days of the church. It was an extension of not eating in the sanctuary. I'm sure there was a prooftext. Maybe it was 1 Corinthians 11:22, where Paul asks if the Corinthians don't have homes to eat and drink in? 

But there was also a tendency to see the church as a kind of version of the temple. It was holy ground and so you shouldn't run or eat in it. You should dress up in honor of God. My father always wore a suit and tie to church--to the day before he died. Maybe it was something like the moneychangers violating sacred space?

4. I haven't fully studied this tendency, but I think it finds its origins in Scotland. Remember Chariots of Fire when he won't run on Sunday, which he understands to be the Sabbath (which it never was). The holiness movement was "sabbatarian," if that is an appropriate word for it. We ate pork chops, but there was a strong tendency to consider Old Testament law as still binding on Christians.

We find this tendency in many circles today despite what seems to me to be the clear teaching of Paul in relation to Gentile believers. Paul does not bind the Sabbath on Gentiles. Mark 7 does not bind the food laws on Gentile believers (perhaps any believers, despite a valiant attempt at reinterpretation by Logan Williams). Hebrews does not bind the sacrificial system on anyone anymore. The New Testament does not really talk about a tithe as the basis for giving in the church.

It is a misinterpretation of Matthew 5:17-19 to say that all the OT laws are still binding, despite the interpretation of my mother and many others. The rest of chapter 5 makes it clear what fulfilled law looks like and it changes some things (e.g., an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth). The final paragraph of 5:43-48 makes it clear that the fulfillment of the Law is love, which 7:12 and 22:40 confirm.

All of that is to say that, by the summer I was youth pastor, all fellowshiping was done in a duplex behind the church that they had bought for such purposes--ultimately so we didn't eat under the same roof as the sanctuary.

5. This seems as good a place as any to note that I was ordained the following summer of 1991 in the Florida District. With an MDIV, you only needed one year of further ministry service. Without, you needed two. Between my summers of supply and youth pastoring and my year under appointment as an educator at Asbury, they considered me cooked enough to ordain.

I had gone back to Central for two weeks to do my remaining ministerial courses. I believe it was my first summer after graduation from Central. I believe it was Wesleyan Church History and Discipline that I needed. Perhaps I also took the Theology of Holiness at that time with Herb Dongell. Those are the two that usually slip through the cracks.

Those were the days when the process wasn't nearly as rigorous as it can be sometimes today. I met one time with the whole District Board of Ministerial Standing (as it was called back then). My father was on it, and my brother-in-law Dennis Waymire head it up as Assistant District Superintendent.

I had all sorts of things bouncing around in my head. I was frankly worried where my head would end up going, but I felt like I was able to affirm all the requirements. Rev. Noel Taylor asked the most discerning question. "Kenny, we've known you since you were a boy. But sometimes people change their minds as they grow up. Have you changed your mind on any of your beliefs?"

It was a great question. I said that, while I had made many of the beliefs my own, I still affirmed the teachings of the Wesleyan Discipline.

6. I never expected to end up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan University. Young and immature, we had laughed when it changed its name from Marion College. "You can't make yourself sophisticated just by calling yourself a university," we said. I don't remember who the "we" were. I would later admire President Barnes for his business savvy.

Tom Sloan had tried to recruit me to Marion out of high school, I think I said. The Bostics were good friends of Marion College and they spent the winters in Fort Lauderdale. Big donors to IWU--Terry Munday mentioned them to me just last week. As a reflection of his virtue, he took care of them till Mrs. Bostic eventually passed at Colonial Oaks. They were close friends of my parents, and they often had breakfast together at their favorite diner. They would have been delighted for me to go to Marion.

To go even further down the rabbit hole, I don't think I've mentioned what Wesleyan/Methodist "royalty" my home church had attracted in my childhood. Clayton Luce, an old time Methodist and beneficiary of the Blue Bird Bus company attended our church with his wife and her nurse. I was able to take a ride on his yacht once.

Rev. and Mrs. C. Wesley Bradley also attended. He had been a Wesleyan Methodist District Superintendent in Jersey. My father was executor of his will and we ended up with much of his Wesleyana collection.

There was another Pilgrim General Superintendent of old, William Neff, who attended our church when I was a boy. (These were the days when my brother-in-law Dennis was pastor.) I remember he would pray up a storm when called on. 

7. So many diversions. Making Wesleyan theology my own.

I bring up teaching at Indiana Wesleyan because returning to a Wesleyan context after my doctoral work pushed me to refine my Schenckification of Wesleyan doctrines. But I had worked out the seeds in time to be able to make the appropriate affirmations for ordination.

I think I have already mentioned my journey with entire sanctification. Having detached the doctrine from Acts, I reformulated it in a more "Wesley"-an way. At some point I had read Wesley's sermon on the new birth, where he talks about not always being able to discern the moment of death, but you know that there is a point when you know someone is alive and you know when someone is dead.

Wesley was not specifically talking about entire sanctification there, but I thought it might apply as well to sanctification. I reimagined entire sanctification logically, the transition from not surrendering everything to God and surrendering everything to God. Bounds of course helped perfect my understanding later. Sanctification is God's work, not a work of our will, although full surrender is a prerequisite. 

In any case, you can read how it all ended up here.

On inerrancy, I found Asbury's statement, "without error in all it affirms" to be helpful. That raises the question, "What does the Bible affirm?" In other words, it allows not only for interpretation but for theological integration. It thus can be taken in terms of the whole counsel of God as the final answer more than atomized pieces. Indeed, we can even go further to think about a Christian reading of Scripture. 

Here is an early attempt to capture some of these thoughts in 2005.

I was asked what version of the Bible I would like to be given at the ordination service. I chose the NASB because I thought it would be more intelligible to the Florida District than the RSV they used at Asbury, which might be thought liberal. I had moved beyond the KJV of course. I didn't respect the NIV at that time and wouldn't be very comfortable with it until the revision in 2011. I used to make fun of its random insertions of words that weren't there so it could smooth out evangelical theology (like "now" in 1 Peter 4:6).

I used the NIV at IWU because Lennox had used the NIV Study Bible as his textbook for Old Testament and New Testament Survey. With each passing year, I was becoming more and more of a pragmatist, having started out as an idealist.

But I didn't really like the NASB, to be honest. I found it's translation too stilted. But it was considered respectable and conservative enough in my circles. Also, to be honest, I didn't like the formatting of the RSV. Too much block text. It worked for inductive Bible study. Not so much for good reading, IMO.

8. I was grateful to be chosen as a Teaching Fellow in 1990. That was a fork in the road. The rest of my life followed.

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 3.3 -- The End of Seminary

continued from last week
____________________

1. There was a provision at Asbury that, if a student was on a more academic path, they could exchange some of the pastoral ministry classes for Bible or theology. Similarly, if someone had taken some of the required courses in college, you could take more advanced classes.

With the second provision, I did an independent study in Aquinas rather than take an introduction to theology. I took Philosophy of Theism instead of Philosophy of Religion. I took Patristics instead of church history. I had taken the introductory courses at Central.

In terms of opting out of practical ministry classes, I petitioned out of Servant as Liberator, the social justice course at that time. I also had taken evangelism with Bill Philippe at Central so I petitioned out of that course as well.

This allowed room for two extra Bible classes. I mentioned the independent study I did in the summer with Dr. Bauer on Acts. In the J-term of my final year, I did another independent study with Bauer on the book of Hebrews.

2. My interest in Hebrews had come from my holiness background. I had been told that Hebrews was the Leviticus of the New Testament. And Leviticus had a lot to do with holiness. Hebrews of course had that great holiness preaching text -- "Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man will see the Lord" (12:14, KJV). There are also verses about being sanctified and perfected through the sacrifice of Jesus (10:10, 14).

I had highlighted these verses in orange in college as having to do with entire sanctification. By my final year of seminary, I knew that they were not about a second work of grace but about the purification that happens when one first comes to Christ. True, Hebrews insisted one must remain pure thereafter as well. Still, Hebrews seemed like a challenge, perhaps the most challenging book of the New Testament (perhaps outside Revelation).

Two years later when I was applying for doctoral studies at Durham, Hebrews seemed a good topic to run by Jimmy Dunn. Along with Acts, I probably had a more thorough knowledge of its contents than any other book. It wasn't necessarily because I loved it more than Paul. I would say I loved Paul more. But it seemed my best hand to play.

Bauer had also introduced me to a key article by C. K. Barrett on the eschatology of Hebrews. In it, he had argued for a synthesis of the Platonic and the eschatological. I included that in my letter to Dunn. I was not aware at the time, I don't think, that Dunn had put forth a similar thesis in his Partings of the Ways. Dunn liked my proposal, I suspect thinking I might be able to support his hypothesis in greater depth.

I was privileged to meet Barrett when I was in England. I mentioned that his chapter in the Festschrift for C. H. Dodd had a significant impact on me. He smiled and said that he wasn't sure if he still agreed with it -- or even fully remembered what it said.

3. Barrett was an interesting person, it seems to me. He was a Methodist preacher. However, someone told me that the small, blue-collar, grassroots congregations out in the countryside sensed a disconnect between his books and preaching (sometimes formerly coal-mining communities--Margaret Thatcher had brought their epoch to an end). Of course, I have no sense that Barrett was in any way liberal in the vast scheme of things (Witherington studied with him, I believe). 

But I understood this disconnect. It seems to me that, when you have come to know so much that is under the hood, you realize that much of the car's inner mechanics are not particularly helpful to the person who merely needs to drive the car to get places. Perhaps Barrett in his own way, not entirely unlike Boers, thought that it was the surface story that those congregations needed to drive the car of faith to where it needed to go.

I want to be clear, though, that Barrett believed in the central story--the cross, the resurrection. In that he was quite unlike Boers. He just had a much more precise conversation when he was presenting papers or writing commentaries. That's my take.

4. I also finished out the practical ministry courses that final year. I had Wayne Goodwin for "Servant as Leader." (As an aside, I found that "Servant as" curriculum a bit cheesy in title.) I remember three things from the course. First, he loved a systems approach to management. I was never quite sure what the big deal was. It seemed like common sense to me.

I remember him setting out five leadership styles. It was something like autocratic, charismatic, laissez-faire, democratic, and systems approach. 

Lastly, he was enamored by Walter Ong's recently published book Orality and Literacy. It stayed with me as I moved more deeply into the field of biblical studies. I had first learned about paradigms and paradigm shifts -- Thomas Kuhn in other words -- with a 1 hr capstone we had to take at Central. That was the only class I had with Martin LaBar at Central.

Ong basically argued that a paradigm shift began to take place in the early 1500s between civilization consisting of an oral culture toward a more literary culture (primary to secondary orality). With the advent of computers in the late 1900s, people said we were at the dawn of an information age. But things have changed dramatically even since then. Is this a digital age? Will it be the age of AI?

5. I took Servant as Proclaimer with Don Demaray. I thought it was a great class. I had taken preaching with Ken Foutz at Central and had enjoyed that too. I think I've mentioned that I preached all over the South as a student, mainly in North and South Carolina. We traveled, mostly singing, from Virginia to Florida to Tennessee. 

Demaray had us preach the pieces of a sermon and then finally the whole one. I changed my topic at the end. He had loved the build up pieces on running the race of faith. I still got a good grade when I switched at the last minute to the problem of evil, but he wished I had finished the other one.

He would begin every class by saying, "Let's pray that this will be the best class ever! Why not!" I always thought that was funny. They can't all be the best class. We would all explode.

6. We were required to do supervised ministries, one church and one institutional. I did my church one as a summer internship at Zephyrhills Wesleyan Church in Florida. My brother-in-law Eduardo Garcia was pastor in those days. Ironically, I heard that the church is closing today. Sad. Zephyrhills has exploded as a retirement community. My father-in-law has a place there.

I did that a couple of summers while my sister and brother-in-law were in the Philippines. It was a good experience. I enjoyed preaching. I didn't enjoy visitation so much but that was very much expected. I think I've mentioned the visitation I did with Jim Wiggins when I was at Central. 

Another supervised ministry I did was at a nursing home near Shakertown. I enjoyed the case studies. I did one on whether you should correct someone who was having delusions of being somewhere special, like at a beach. It seems silly to me now. Of course you shouldn't correct someone who is not in complete control of their faculties. 

That's the conclusion I came to then. But I was coming out of a mindset with a very impoverished understanding of fact-telling. There's a difference between what is known and what should be said. My wife insists I am not "on the spectrum," but the fact that it's ever been a conversation probably says something. My mother used to say, "You don't have to tell everything you know."

My first and last "integrated reflection community" (again, who came up with these names?) had Stan Beck as supervisor. Skip this paragraph if you are prudish. We always laughed about him because he insisted on asking everyone about masturbation. I nicknamed him "Stand Back." Those were naturally funny conversations for a 20 year old (I started seminary at 20).

7. We took Myers-Briggs in that first course, I think I've mentioned. I found the test helpful. I didn't take it as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It genuinely rang true to my sense of myself. It gave me words to describe my characteristics. An introvert, although not extremely. Intuitive off the charts--a struggler with details and the concrete. A feeler--more interested that people get along than that they be corrected for being wrong. Desiring completion more than wanting things to linger incomplete.

This grid has proved helpful to me ever since, and I was sure to include Myers-Briggs in Wesley Seminary when we founded it. I would learn more about the categories then. One of these is a dominant function. For me, it is being intuitive. I have come to consider myself unusually gifted at seeing the big picture.

That means of course that "sensing" is my inferior function. I have come an incredibly long way with managing details and the concrete, but it remains a constant fight.

I can be friends with almost anyone. I once mused that I even like the people I don't like. To me, "thinkers" are often illogical because they don't understand people. They don't understand the world or how it works. I laugh at Aristotle's focus on humans as rational animals. The same with Descartes and humans as thinking things. 

We are more often irrational animals. We are herd animals. Even those who fashion themselves thinkers are frequently driven and tossed by the winds of their own unexamined assumptions and biases. Their sense that they are consummately rational often leads them to miss their own skew.

8. I've already mentioned some pieces of my time at Asbury. My senior year, Chris Fisher, Ed Ross, and I edited the Short Circuit. I mainly did cartoons for it. I had worked in the cafeteria all three years at Asbury. The first year, Ed and I were dishwashers. My last two years I was the front cashier and I put up the menu for the night on the board.

At some point early on, I got tired of just listing the items and began to draw them into pictures that were often along the lines of The Far Side. Those two years at Christmas I did a Menu Calendar that I gave away as Christmas presents. I would pick my top twelve favorite menu drawings to go along with each month. I also made Christmas cards from card stock with drawings. I was never a spectacular artist, but I was above averaage I suppose.

I also did improv my last year. It was something along the lines of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" I think I did pretty well. I don't remember being funny in high school or college. I was too painfully shy I suppose. My Dad and the Miller side of his family were funny (Old German Baptist folk). 

Sometime while I was at Asbury I think I started being funny. Maybe because I had moved out of paralyzing fear into the freedom of the Lord. The next couple years were probably the happiest of my life.

9. I always sang. I was in the choir at Central. I was in the "Singing Seminarians" at Asbury, under Bill Gould. We went to Bolivia my last year, Santa Cruz. Scotty and Rachel Gulledge, Mike and Cathy Rash were on that trip too. Alvin Whitworth played for us in the US, although I don't recall that he went on that trip.

A few things stand out to my memory. I tried to learn a little Spanish but of course wasn't close when we were there. I remember trying intently to listen to an older man say something to me in a church. The national superintendent said to him, "El no habla Espanol." Ouch.

I remember spending a very cold night sleeping on a bus just a little up country.

I remember a time when Scotty complimented them (in a southern accent) for their "cheese biscuits" and the translator was a little dumbfounded at how to translate that. Then another time Mike said a somewhat complicated sentence and the translator said something about how difficult a sentence it was, and everyone laughed. Mike was taken aback with a little paranoia because he hadn't said anything funny.

10. Those were great years. I feel privileged to have experienced them. Of course, when we started Wesley Seminary, we didn't plan to reinvent the wheel. There were already plenty of seminaries like Asbury. And most of them weren't doing particularly well. What there was a market for was a practically-focused seminary. We targeted the 85% of Wesleyan pastors who didn't go to seminary.

This was the "F" of my Myers-Briggs coming out. I loved the Asbury model. But I knew it wasn't the model for most people. It wasn't the model that most ministers needed.

That's in large part why Wesley grew to over 500 students in 6 years. We created a practical, accessible, and affordable seminary. After Wayne Schmidt and I left, in my opinion, the gravitational field of traditional seminary education increasingly moved it in the direction of all the dying seminaries. 

I wonder if we have just seen the long term result. They have had to abandon their building for reasons of emptiness. 

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 3.2 -- Theology Old and New

Continued from the previous post.
_______________________
1. My final year at Asbury was filled with theology. I had contemporary continental theology in the fall with Larry Wood. I had Wesleyan Theology Today with Steve Harper in the spring. I had biblical theology in the spring with Harold Kuhn (theology of the church). I feel privileged to say so.

I loved Harold Kuhn's biblical theology class. We used Hans Kung's The Church. as a text. Kung, a Roman Catholic scholar, was a brilliant scholar and orthodox in belief. Kuhn would never have used him otherwise. Kung was of course stripped of his right to teach by the RCC in 1979. Too many uncatholic elements.

I wouldn't learn until decades later that Kuhn had been instrumental in the scandal that led to resignation of Claude Thompson in 1950. I would like to think that he later had regrets about that incident. Misguided youthful zeal.

2. Steve Harper's class on Wesleyan theology was, in some respects, my first deep encounter with John Wesley's thought. This is an interesting fact. The Wesleyan Church is not Wesley-an. He was our great grandfather, but who knows what their great grandfather was like?

The Wesleyan Church is as much Baptist as Wesley-an. We were born of the nineteenth century holiness movement, a child of our grandmother Phoebe Palmer, who was only a shadow of Wesley. I don't think I ever heard a word about Wesley in all the holiness preaching of my youth. 

I learned Wesleyan theology from H. Orton Wiley's theology book, a twentieth century Nazarene scholar, with James Bross as professor (Bross didn't actually use Wiley). And of course, Bob Black gave us insights into Wesley in church history class. It was at Central that I learned that Wesley was not particularly gifted in his relationships with women.

I would say Chris Bounds had as much to do as anyone with a revival of interest in Wesley among Wesleyans during his years at IWU. That layer of Wesleyan pastors and thinkers have a love of Wesley that frankly was completely foreign to my youth. While I value Wesley, his foreigness to my formative years bequeathed me a complete freedom to critique him. I was always more of a "constructivist" Maddox type than a devotee like Ken Collins.

I remember then GS Earl Wilson saying at the first Wesleyan theological symposium that he had never heard of Bounds' breakdown of views of sanctification into longer, shorter, and a middle way. As holiness folk, we only knew Palmer's shorter way.

I always felt like Harper had a heart of gold. He would later direct the Asbury Orlando campus, which unfortunately has more or less been closed. I personally think that was a foolish mistake. But, then again, I don't know many academic institutions that know how to thrive. They seem wired for self-destruction.

Asbury's board would take away Harper's emeritus status in retirement because he published a book that was LGBTQ affirming.

3. Larry Wood was exactly the kind of quirky professor you love to have and tell stories about later. He would sit in front of the class and talk seemingly without ever actually looking at us. I wondered if it would matter if anyone was even sitting there. I seem to remember one day when he got confused about what class he was lecturing to and gave us a lecture for a different class.

For me, Larry's greatest bequeathing was his argument that Wesley knew John Fletcher's sense of Acts as baptisms in the Spirit and that Wesley assented to it. Wesley did not formulate Christian perfection in terms of Acts. That was the thinking of John Fletcher. So, it has been possible to say--and I have even said it--that you can believe in entire sanctification without thinking that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were such. After all, that's not how John Wesley preached it.

Wood has argued (in part in damage control for Bob Lyon's biblical argument against the Spirit-fillings of Acts being entire sanctification) that Wesley knew of Fletcher's approach and was ok with it. To me, that is a noble effort and probably true. However, it doesn't change the fact that Acts was not the way that Wesley preached it. To me, it is an example of an obscure argument to try to preserve a tradition.  

I am not trying to be hard on Wood at all. He has made a good argument, one very worthy of being made.

4. We used Paul Tillich's History of Christian Thought as a text for Contemporary Continental Theology. Of course Tillich was not an evangelical theologian in the slightest. But Asbury might be allowed to use his book to discuss theologians. Tillich saw God as the "ground of all being," which sounds great until you know what he meant by it. It's more existentialist language that sounds perfectly normal but means something else.

I'm sure we touched on Barth and Bultmann in that class, although I confess I don't remember all the details. I'm sure somewhere in here I learned about Emil Brunner, who was more to my liking than Barth. Brunner still believed in natural theology.

I know we touched on Jürgen Moltmann in this class. Moltmann never gelled with me. He probably sounded too social activist for my taste then, although he was more theoretical than activist. He saw Christian ethics in the present as a function of our hope for the future ("theology of hope"). Of course, I would have mocked things like social activism and liberation theology at that time. 

He also wrote a book called The Crucified God. In part to process the things that had happened during Nazism, he wrote about God identifying with human suffering on the cross. I'm not much into "patripassianism," which is what this sounded like--God the Father suffering. But I don't think Moltmann meant that God the Father literally suffered. I think he meant that God identified with our suffering.

One thing I learned is that my existing categories usually misinterpreted these theologians. I very much came with a foundationalist, even fundamentalist view of the world. I learned that these thinkers almost never meant what their words said to me. They were like poets to me who never meant what they said.

I would later joke that philosophers (and theologians) invent their own language and then call you stupid for not understanding them.

I would later find out that, while Moltmann was all the rage in America, he was hardly talked about in Germany.

5. Wolfhart Pannenberg was closer to my frequency. He was concerned about history. He was more evidentiary and modernist. For him, Christianity stands or falls on the historicity of its central claims--especially that of the resurrection. (Take that, Barth)

What seemed somewhat out of place to me at the time was that Pannenberg did not consider the virgin birth essential to Christian faith. This was very curious to me. Most of us consider the virgin birth essential to Jesus being divine. 

Of course, Jesus is not half-man, half-God. He is not a demigod. He is fully God and fully human. His DNA was not a splicing of Mary's chromosomes and Holy Spirit chromosomes. In other words, the virgin birth is not part of the mechanics of his divinity. N. T. Wright calls it a gift to us.

I believe in the virgin birth for sure, but in retrospect I think I get Pannenberg a little better now.

6. On a side note, I adjuncted some classes for Midway College (now university) while I was a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. Intriguingly, I was asked by Robert Miller to teach New Testament Survey to some nursing students. Bob was a member of the famous Jesus Seminar, so I was surprised he would ask someone from Asbury to teach for him.

The Jesus Seminar was the group started by Robert Funk that aimed to come up with a "true" red letter version of the Gospels. I used to make a lot of fun of this group, which voted with colored beads to decide what to print in their Bible (red, pink, grey, black). Perhaps I'll come back to the quest for the historical Jesus later.

Along with Harris' New Testament Survey text, they had a source book on literary parallels with the New Testament. It was interesting since I hadn't really come across some of the Greco-Roman (supposed) parallels.

But the reason I thought of this was because of an argument I used in class for the virgin birth. My argument went like this: "Paul believed in the virgin birth, and he would have known." As I looked back, I realized that Paul never really mentions the virgin birth one way or another. For all my studying, I was still to some extent a pre-modern interpreter. I saw the Bible as one book rather than 66 books written by dozens of authors over 1000 year period.

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 3.1 Old Testament Interpretation

Here's the previous post.
_________________________
1. The fall of my third year at Asbury featured Foundations of Old Testament Hermeneutics with John Oswalt. Oswalt was a very good teacher and, I would say, took a scientific approach to issues and critical questions.

This was the late 80s. Postmodernism was not yet in full swing. Whether you were traditional or mainstream, you still played the game. You gathered evidence. You examined competing hypotheses. You chose the one that seemed to best account for most of the evidence in the most economical way.

Of course, this is often a game. For Wang or Oswalt, you always knew where they would come out on a critical issue. If it was an issue where they were allowed to think freely, they were/are tremendous scholars--far more capable than me at cataloging the evidence and history of interpretation. 

But there is an electric fence around many issues in some circles, and they would never go near it. They're not allowed. Their positions on such issues are totally predictable. The only creativity is in how they get there. I'm not saying they didn't believe what they taught. I'm hypothesizing that they didn't ultimately think inductively on such issues. There were hidden variables.

2. Oswalt's main claim to fame is of course his commentary on Isaiah. For chapters 40-66, he sees Isaiah having a vision of Israel 150 years after his time. This is a way for him to see Isaiah as the direct author of these chapters with them still being about the late 500s BC.

By this point, however, Asbury had reoriented me around inductive Bible study. What is the most likely conclusion based on what the text says? Let the text drive the car, not tradition.

Consider that Isaiah is never mentioned in chapters 40-66. They never say he was the author of that portion. (For perspective, I think it's also worth noting that we have Isaiah in a book, where it is all in one place. In ancient times, Isaiah was probably on multiple scrolls.)

The context of Isaiah 40-66 is clearly the late 500s BC. It mentions Cyrus, king of Persia, for example (45:1). It does not speak of him or its context as a matter of the far off future. That is, it is not in the form of a prophecy about the distant future. It is worded about the present or near future. "Comfort my people... make straight in the desert a highway for our God" (40:1, 3). Inductively, it reads like something going on in present time.

The bottom line is that, if we let the text drive our conclusions, Isaiah 40-66 doesn't want to be read as a text directly written by Isaiah. It wants to be read as a text celebrating the return of Israel from captivity around the year 538BC. It is easily read as a text in the tradition of Isaiah. The mainstream view is that authorship was not as limited in ancient times as we think of authorship. Documents associated with a figure could be collected under his name.

3. So when Oswalt goes with a different conclusion, IMO, it is not because he's listening to the text. It's because he feels compelled to argue for the tradition. And, of course, he is ingenious. Sometimes I felt like I just wasn't smart enough to argue for some of these things that seem to go against the obvious evidence. 

It didn't occur to me that, if refugee descendants of king David had resettled in Galilee, they might have named their village after the branch of Isaiah 11:1, and that might explain why Matthew might think Jesus settling in Nazareth was a fulfillment of prophecy. My mind just isn't that beautiful.

I didn't feel the pain at the time, but the reason the authorship of Isaiah 40-66 is a big deal is because the New Testament thinks of this material as coming from Isaiah. For that matter, Josephus thinks of this material coming from Isaiah. It was the traditional understanding at the time of the New Testament.

I am at peace with God revealing himself to the New Testament authors within their framework of understanding. It goes back to the distinction between the message and the envelope in which it comes. I'll talk a little more about this at the end. In any case, I would come to lean toward those who side with what the text seems to imply rather than what tradition says.

4. Of course, this opens a can of worms--listening to the text. I was so happy to pursue New Testament studies because there are so many landmines in Old Testament studies. In evangelical circles, I was so happy not to have to teach the Old Testament. I also was glad to stay away from teaching Daniel and Revelation or the Pastoral Epistles. Leave them to Steve Lennox and Dave Smith. It's not that I don't love those books. It's just that I don't like getting shocked by electric fences.

Inductively speaking, Moses is never mentioned in Genesis. He is always spoken of in the third person from Exodus to his death in Deuteronomy. That is to say, inductively speaking, you would not conclude that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He did this. He did that. He went up on a mountain and died. It's not the way you write when you are the he.

There are psalms that inductively do not seem to be written by David. The titles, after all, were added later. One of the most striking instances is Psalm 51, which talks about building the walls of Jerusalem. It seems to me that this fits the late 500s better than David's day. I've mentioned Psalm 110, which doesn't seem to be by David but rather a tribute about an unspecified king.

These conclusions are easy to reach if we are allowed to follow the text rather than tradition. But, for most Christians, traditions about the text drive the ship, not the text itself. In New Testament times, these traditions were assumptions, so the New Testament operates on the assumption of Mosaic and Davidic authorship. Was that part of the inspired point or the clothing in which the inspired point came?

4. Like Wang, Oswalt had a way of pushing me toward the opposite positions of those he argued for. It's because I could see my earlier self in them--not using the evidence to identify the most likely conclusions but using their intellect to argue for traditional conclusions. I suppose trying to be objective and questioning my own biases is now such second nature to me that I can't see how hard it is for others.

In this current political moment, the most likely interpretation seems so obvious to me. But I have to remember that, IMO, evangelicals are not wired to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusions. They are wired to play an evidence game with hidden variables. IMO, they tend to configure evidence to support their existing frameworks and traditions. They don't approach evidence in search of the truth. And many are wired to mock opposing interpretations with the confidence of someone who thinks they speak for God.

So Oswalt went through all the usual suspects. I learned about JEDP and all the critical issues in the Old Testament. By the way, in my first semester teaching at IWU, I made a document in which I put all the verses from the Flood story that used Yahweh on one side and all the verses that used Elohim on the other. It's easy to do.

What do you know? The result is basically two different tellings of the same story with some variations. One has 7 of every clean animal, for example; the other 2 of every kind. One has a raven; the other has a dove. I don't know why someone would splice two versions of the same story together, but I went from mocking the theory to realizing why someone came up with the theory.

In fact, once you see it, it's hard to unsee it. There are these "doublets" all over Genesis and the early part of Exodus. One version uses Yahweh. The other uses Elohim. Some of it would make perfect sense as oral tradition--the three stories between a patriarch, his wife, and a person who thinks the wife is a sister. So many of these "off limit" theories make so much sense if my brain is allowed to think rather than go on lock down.

5. During my first decade teaching at IWU, I had the opportunity to adjunct for Notre Dame. It was a precious experience, although quite tiring. I would teach a 7:50 at IWU. Drive to South Bend and teach back to back Foundations of Theology classes. Then I would drive back to teach an evening class at IWU. It was good money for a new family, and I was still relatively young.

They used Stephen Harris' Understanding the Bible as a text. Wow. I had never used a mainstream book like this, especially on the Old Testament. I've always felt a little guilty that, in England, I did not have to take comps. If I had earned my doctorate in the States, I would have had two years of course work and comps before starting my dissertation. In England, you start writing from Day 1.

So I was not as well-versed in critical scholarship of the Old Testament going into teaching. In that regard, even though Harris was an introductory text, it was an eye-opener to me on some issues. It made me a better Bible teacher because there was now a lot more under the surface. If I have appeared smart from time to time, much of it may have to do with this part of the iceberg beneath the surface.

6. It was in the 90s that I really had the paradigm shift to realize that meaning always takes place in my head or in your head. When I read a text, it's my head that understands a meaning. The "pre-modern" or better, the "pre-reflective" reader thinks the meaning is in the text. And yes, a text is someone's attempt to capture, to some extent, the meaning in their head.

But when it comes to me, the construction of meaning always and inevitably is mine. You can help try to direct it. If I'm open and able, I can take that into the meaning in my head. 

But the buck stops with my head. In that sense, the most critical moment of inspiration must inevitably take place inside of me. Practically speaking, it doesn't matter how inspired the Bible was originally if the meaning that gets in my head right now isn't. My head is the delimiting factor, the limiting agent. 

In my circles, we worry a lot about original inspiration. But you can see that none of that matters in the slightest if the meaning in my head isn't right or isn't what God wants me to see.

This insight eventually led me not to worry so much if the New Testament was reading the Old Testament in context. The meaning God inspired them to see can be true just the same. 

The same goes for the meaning you or I see in the text. It can be a truth even when I am not reading the text correctly. And, since few of us are scholars, it almost has to be that way if God is to speak to us. This changes the locus of hermeneutical, inspirational concern to the moment of reading, not the moment of writing. And you can see it really undermines our culture wars on these issues.

7. I'll end with an illustration. My paternal grandfather used to preach the highway of holiness passage in Isaiah 35:8 like this -- you don't have to be smart to be entirely sanctified. It says in the KJV that "men, though fools, will not err therein."

A fool was not a stupid person in this context. A fool was a wicked person. And to err in older English meant to wander. And of course Isaiah wouldn't have a clue what you meant by entire sanctification. The text is probably saying that there will be no wicked people on that journey of Israel back to Jerusalem from captivity.

But the point of my grandfather's sermon wasn't wrong. You don't have to be smart to follow Christ. That was the meaning in his head. That was the meaning in his congregation's heads. It was a true meaning. Perhaps it was truly what God wanted them to hear, so that's ok. 

It just wasn't what Isaiah was thinking.

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.4 -- End of the Second Year

Here's the previous breadcrumb.
___________________________
1. My second year at Asbury was my first full foray into Hebrew. I had dabbled a little into the letters and some vocbulary when I did my honors project at Central, but CWC had not offered Hebrew. Frankly, I think it was good for me to get my Greek a little more solidified before tackling another language -- although Greek and Hebrew are quite different. It was for this reason that I decided not to take Aramaic my first year as a Teaching Fellow. I didn't want to scramble my Hebrew.

That was Lawson Stone's first year at Asbury, fresh from Yale and a dissertation on Judges. The previous year, Eugene Carpenter had taught Hebrew inductively using Genesis 1. I bought his cassette tapes and had started memorizing his pronunciation. 

I didn't feel too bad to miss Carpenter. Lawson was superb as a teacher. I would run into Carpenter again my first year teaching at IWU in 1997-98. He tried to recruit me to come teach at Bethel in Mishawaka. Perhaps I will tell that tale if I keep writing these memories. Unfortunately, he would drown while fishing on a lake in 2012.  It always seemed strange to me but none of my business.

2. Lawson was enthusiastic his first year teaching, clearly a genius. I seem to recall he was enamored with Barth that year or two. He was full of ideas. In the spring he talked several of us to do a special Isaiah 1-12 in Hebrew class. His goal was to integrate the inductive Bible study method with an original language exegesis course. Very exciting to be a part of that. I think Dave Smith may have been in there too.

We used Seow as a textbook, but he would try LaSor thereafter. LaSor taught Hebrew by starting with Esther 1:1 and proceding through the whole book. When I taught Hebrew as a Teaching Fellow, I used LaSor and loved it. That experience teaching Hebrew from the biblical text itself had a huge impact on me, an impact that has led me to teach biblical language inductively several times.

As someone who was just being exposed to more advanced biblical studies, I found Lawson eye-opening and open-minded. He seemed open to critical theories, although I always wondered if he lived under some peer-pressure from having Dennis Kinlaw and John Oswalt in the neighborhood. I was frankly surprised to find out how traditional Lawson had become in the 2000s, but perhaps I was the one who moved.

3. I also had Minor Prophets English Bible with David Thompson that spring. Thompson's style was quite different from David Bauer's.  Bauer was authoritative and at least felt exhaustive. Thompson was tentative and modeled epistemic humility. One lesson I've learned in the "real world" is that confidence is extremly important if one wants to advance in this world. If there is one humble soul that is tentative and another confident soul that is typically wrong, the second often wins.

It was good to continue exercising these English Bible/Inductive Bible Study skills. I wouldn't have a good bird's eye sense of this method until I taught it online for Asbury a few years later. At the time, it was like a game. You learn how to play the game and don't necessarily ask why the game has the rules it has. I seem to recall that Ruth Ann Reese was a little puzzled by the method when she came to Asbury. She already had a PhD in hand, but what the heck was "particularization with recurrence of filial language"?

4. I would do an independent study with David Bauer that summer on Acts. I hadn't been able to take the class. It was a defining experience, I suspect. I had taken Acts with Ken Foutz at CWC, so I had made a pass at the material already. And Acts had featured significantly in my honors project on sanctification. Now I applied the English Bible study method to the book.

That was also when I reversed my understanding of the Spirit-fillings in Acts. With my honor's project, I had still taken the position that the Spirit-fillings in Acts were events of entire sanctification. But now that I was reading the text inductively and trying to go with the most likely interpretation given the evidence, it just didn't seem to be the case.

If we bracket tradition and listen to the text, nothing about Acts suggests that these baptisms in the Spirit were second works of grace where the heart was cleansed of inbred sin. They seem to be gateway experiences. Chris Fisher, Ed Ross, and I edited a student newspaper called the Short Circuit my last year. I wrote up a piece on this topic. I think it grieved some of my family.

This experience with Bauer in Acts was probably far more future-shaping that I could imagine. It gave Dr. Bauer a chance to see my growing interpretive skills -- something that probably helped me become a Teaching Fellow. It also exposed me to Jimmy Dunn's Baptism in the Spirit, as well as Bob Lyon's classic Wesleyan article on the same subject. That would shape where I did my doctoral work.

5. I took three other courses that spring of 1989. One was Patristics with David Bundy. I was not drawn to the fathers the way Chris Bounds was, whom I think was also in that class. In fact, I quickly came to believe that the fathers were largely incompetent if you judge them by the standards of inductive Bible study. They were "credulous," "pre-modern" interpreters who saw their own theology in the text rather than hearing the text on its own terms.

When I went to Indiana Wesleyan University, I was pushed to develop a "second naivete" about them and the development of doctrine. The end was to have my cake and eat it too. I could read the Bible in context following the rules of inductive Bible study and yet affirm the theology they saw in the text as a fuller sense that was directed by the Holy Spirit in the development of doctrine. Postmodernism and the polyvalence of texts were helpful here. 

6. A second was David Seamands' "Servant as Pastoral Care Giver." Here I was exposed to his books Healing for Damaged Emotions and The Healing of Memories. Although I made fun of the concept of "damaged emotions," I found his basic concept helpful. Like the movie Inside Out (and the approach Scott Makin takes in the Campus psychology course), our memories can be "damaged" in ways that inhibit us from thriving and functioning fully in life. You need to deal with those memories to fully move forward (a bit of Freud peeking through as well).

I believe I've already talked about his concept of "damaged love receptors" (also very cheesy). I came to wonder if my God "antennae" were damaged. Was God beaming his love to me but I couldn't receive the transmissions because my antennae were damaged? In the next few years, a sense of God's silence would plague me.

I believe it was also around this time that I was exposed to the God-concept video, one of which is God as sheriff -- "every move you make, every step you take, I'll be watching you." Another was the absent God, the give you what you want God, and perhaps the party God. Then the right one was the father of the Prodigal.

7. Finally, I took apologetics with Jerry Walls, my second class with him. My biggest takeaway from that experience was James Sire's The Universe Next Door. It was my first real exposure to the notion of a worldview. This book has continued to influence me over the years.

That's a lot. I came across in some bookstore a book that tried to condense an MDIV into one book. Obviously it only aimed to hit the highlights. I would love to write something like that too. On the bucket list.  

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.3 -- Barth and Bultmann

For the previous breadcrumb, click here.
_________________
1. Last week, I mentioned that I would eventually get to Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). I decided that this week was actually a good time.

Bultmann was quite the boogie man in seminary, another person for me to mock. Certainly someone for Wang to mock. Why? Because he didn't think that the resurrection was historical.

Wang's arguments for the resurrection have blurred in my mind with Jimmy Dunn's, my Doktorvater. Dunn's book on the subject was The Evidence for Jesus. 

The historical argument for the resurrection hangs on two key points: 1) the empty tomb and 2) the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Both seem beyond reasonable doubt to me. That is to say, the body of Jesus was not to be found on Easter Sunday, and a lot of people were convinced that they had seen Jesus alive thereafter. 

A force multiplier for the second point is the fact that 1) they were not expecting a resurrection and 2) many were so convinced that they were willing to suffer and die for that belief.

A corroborating argument for the first -- one that I may have first heard from Wang -- is that the rumor in Matthew 28 that the disciples stole the body only makes sense if in fact there was no body to be found.

Bultmann did not believe that the resurrection really happened in history.

2. However, if God takes the heart into account, Bultmann was actually trying to save Christian faith in his own way. That is to say, his head told him that the "Jesus of history" was not the "Christ of faith." He believed, like Albert Schweitzer, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who died with great disappointment.

But Bultmann believed in the "Christ of faith" as he understood him. He believed that the resurrection was a metaphor or a parable for an existentialist choice. I'm sure that many of you are thinking, "What are you talking about?" Welcome to seminary.

Existentialism is a philosophical school that basically holds that we have to choose the meaning of life. For Kierkegaard, this is a leap of blind faith. It is a very personal choice. For 1950s existentialists like Sartre or Camus, life in itself is actually meaningless. But that's the glass is half empty way to look at it. The positive way to think of it is that we can pick any meaning we want.

Victor Frankl, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, put it this way, "A man can live with any how if he has a why." Your "why" could be any number of things as long as you truly and wholeheartedly believe in it.

3. For Bultmann, the resurrection was the ultimate symbol of finding meaning out of meaninglessness. It was a metaphor for meaning rising from the dead meaninglessness of existence. To be raised was to find authentic existence in the midst of a dead world.

You might remember me mentioning Hendrikus Boers at Emory beginning his sermons with, "Let me tell you a myth" before then preaching a perfectly wonderful sermon. Boers had studied under Bultmann at Marburg, and he was echoing him with this line. But "myth" for Bultmann was not the hamfisted myth of David Strauss. A myth for Bultmann and Boers was a meaning-expressing story, a story that expressed a fundamental truth or mystery of life.

So when Bultmann said that the resurrection was a myth, he was saying it was true in a symbolic way. To him, it was the consummate expression of humanity's search for meaning in a meaningless world.

If God ever looks at the hearts of people who's heads are wrong, then we may find a once confused Bultmann in heaven. During the Nazi regime, Bultmann -- like Bonhoeffer -- was part of the confessing church. (Bonhoeffer too was not exactly orthodox, by the way)

There is an unpleasant truth here. Unorthodox thinkers sometimes turn out to be more in tune with the heart of God than some conservative ones. I stayed in the home of Frau Else Michel when I was in Germany in 1995. Her husband, the great conservative Hebrews scholar Otto Michel, was initially in support of the Nazi cause. Only when it got to a certain point did he realize his error. He would spend the rest of his life after the war working toward reconciliation between Jews and Christians.

I wish my German had been better, but I did understand her when she mentioned that Bultmann had once stayed in their home. She smiled as she said with understatement, "Natürlich, er war ganz anders als wir" ("Of course, he was entirely different from us").

There is something about conservatism that regularly falls for the strong man. Kristin Kobes du Mez has at least captured some elements of the equation in Jesus and John Wayne. I suspect that part of the issue is taking some of the anthropomorphic elements of the Old Testament too literally. There is also perhaps some confusion of tradition with faith.

So, there is the paradox of two men. One was orthodox but initially fell for National Socialism. The other was a heretic but saw right through it. I believe this is a story that regularly repeats itself.

4. What convinced me to go ahead and write on Bultmann was the memory that my project for Wang was to evaluate Bultmann's History of the Synoptic Tradition. It was an overly ambitious project (as usual) and I did not succeed at working through it. It was too far beyond me at that time. (Too bad ChatGPT wasn't around -- I could have had it explain the book to me.)

I don't remember much from the book except I think that Bultmann argued that the Transfiguration might have originally have been a resurrection appearance story.

I would overestimate my abilities again in Dr. Wang's Romans 1-8 class. We were all supposed to pick a commentary and follow along as we worked through Romans. I picked Otto Kuss' Romans commentary in German.

What German did I know? Well, I had dabbled with it at home, checking out a German language record over a summer from the Broward County library. And I had taken Dr. O'Malley's German for Reading Knowledge course, which used Jannach as a textbook. Suffice it to say, I was grossly underprepared to read a German commentary on Romans.

It is mostly my fault, but I didn't get much out of that class. I believe David Smith might have also been in that class. One incident I do remember is when a former missionary at the end of class asked Dr. Wang about another possible way of reading a passage. Although he repeated himself more than once, Dr. Wang couldn't quite see what he was saying.

Finally, I think on the third pass at it, Dr. Wang said with a grin, "Oh, oh, oh, oh. I see what you're saying. I'll come back next time with three more reasons why I'm right." He was a good natured soul.

5. In my senior year, I took Steve Seamands' course on Karl Barth (1886-1968). I did not get Barth. I wanted to. I remember asking in class once, "So is Barth saying we have a God shaped vaccum waiting for God?" Dr. Seamands explained that that would be quite the opposite of Barth's approach.

Barth, like Bultmann, was part of neo-orthodoxy. Both, in their own ways, were trying to reinvigorate faith after critical German scholarship had more or less wittled it away. The Liberal Christianity before them had the ethic of Christianity without the orthodoxy.

Bultmann reasserted faith in a non-literal way. Barth did it by way of "dogmatics." To me, his system hung in mid-air without any support. Apologetics was anathema to him. He was in a sense an incredibly verbose fideist -- someone who holds that you just have to believe.

I was nevertheless intrigued by the early Barth of the 20s who focused on the otherness of God and the necessity to know God by analogy. This seemed to me a more humble version of Aquinas. Of course, Barth would then go on to write his immense multivolume Church Dogmatics.

I also would like Barth's emphasis that Jesus is the Word of God (John 1:14). This is of course both biblical and orthodox. The fundamentalism of my circles, however, ran the risk of seeing the Bible as more the word of God than Jesus himself. This may also be one of the reasons why conservatives sometimes lose focus. I have heard a conservative say to stay away from anyone who might say Jesus is the Word of God in comparison to the Bible.

Preaching, then, for Barth, was a third level word of God.

6. Barth was really cool in the 80s and even in the 2000s when I was teaching at IWU. We had a Monday reading group and one semester we read portions from the Dogmatics, with Chris Bounds to lead and others like Keith Drury and Steve Lennox along for the ride.

In the end, Barth didn't speak my language. I think faith should be able to cut the mustard of evidence and reason if it is legitimate. Barth strikes me as a very smart dodger. The post-liberals of that era strike me the same way. They gave up on the evidence game. Or they used Gadamer to cloud the truth in uncertainty. The subconscious goal in each case, it seems to me, is to shield faith from evaluation.

But if faith is true, it should be able to stand up to such scrutiny, it seems to me.

Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.2 -- Biblical "Criticisms"

For the previous breadcrumb, click here.
_______________________ 
8. Dr. Wang's New Testament History and Criticism course introduced me formally to the various biblical "criticisms," although I'm sure I had encountered some of them before and I would live through them afterwards. The word criticism seems like an unfortunate choice of words to me, because it sounds like the goal is to criticize the Bible. But, language shifts meaning over time. Historically, the term simply referred to an approach that sought careful, disciplined, and relatively objective investigation.

When I started teaching college in 1997, I had the thought that my journey had somewhat followed the path of these criticisms. The first "criticism" on my journey was textual criticism, in which I decided what I thought on the text of the New Testament. Was the King James Version more like the original or new versions like the Revised Standard Version or the NIV?

Textual criticism has always been allowed for evangelicals. Since the late 1700s, these studies had been called "lower criticism." What was viewed with great suspicion were the "higher criticisms" I will soon mention. Josh McDowell's More Evidence that Demands a Verdict targeted these in 1975.

In the 1950s, Stephen Paine (then president of Houghton College) urged the Wesleyan Methodists not only to put "inerrancy" in their church Discipline, but to specify that the Bible was inerrant "in the original manuscripts." He would become deeply involved in the translation of the NIV and fully accepted the findings of lower criticism with regard to the biblical text.

9. Next stop on the journey was source criticism. The goal here was to identify any written sources that might underlie the biblical materials. Over the years, I have found little to object to here from an evidentiary point of view. Not only are the cases quite compelling from an objective standpoint, but it seems to me that most of the objections are based on feelings and sentiment rather than substance.

For example, can't God inspire editing as well as writing? Of course he can. What if Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source? Why would that be a problem for inspiration -- especially if we can switch to an oral paradigm rather than an anachronistic literary one? [1]

The biggest objection is that it implies that what you see may not be precisely what happened. But then again, all of the Gospels are in Greek, and Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic. So, from the very beginning, we do not have the exact words of Jesus (the ipsissima verba). In the end, our obsession with precise wording and history probably says more about us and our culture than about the Bible and its context.

I have not found nearly as much resistance to source criticism of the Gospels as toward source criticism of the Pentateuch. I suspect there is a little hangover from history here. The German Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) did not come across as a friend of the Bible when he proposed his JEDP source theory of the Pentateuch. The source theories of the Gospels had more English connections and came across less hostile to faith when they reached the public, I suspect.

10. Perhaps I will do a more detailed version of my hermeneutical journey elsewhere. I was uncertain at first what to conclude about all these things. My background had all sorts of warning lights going off. But then again, my background knew almost nothing about such things and was not evidence or truth oriented. It was "use your intellect to defend tradition" oriented.

I remember being very impressed with Donald Guthrie's New Testament Introduction. He presented each position so objectively that they all sounded convincing. Only when he came to his conclusions did I know what he actually thought. I have found this to be a model of scholarship over the years.

It all just kind of hanged there until I started to take a position here or there. "OK, this position seems to fit the evidence best." Then if I took that position on that issue, then this position on this issue seemed coherent.

After the next few years, I traced the steps of the great biblical interpreters, drawing my own conclusions in dialog with the text and history. I consider myself fortunate to have studied in England where I didn't have interest groups vying for my reasoning. I was free to be as objective as possible there. Over time, I have mostly concluded that there were good reasons for the great consensuses of the twentieth century.

What were these consensuses? For one, that Mark was the first Gospel and that Matthew and Luke constructed their Gospels with Mark as their starting point. I still think it most likely that there was another source of Jesus' sayings in the mix (so-called "Q"). It's quite popular to reject Q at the moment, but I attribute much of this to scholarly sentimentality, although I think Mark Goodacre is an honest innovator.

With regard to the Pentateuch, it seems virtually certain to me that these books had different sources that used different names for God, although what precise form they may have had is a matter of great debate. It's somewhat silly to attack Wellhausen. He's been dead for over 100 years. His theories have been evaluated and reformulated repeatedly. [2] You're 150 years late to the game.

11. I think part of the problem is that we narcissistically think that the Bible is for me. But it wasn't written to me or you. It says so. It was written to Israelites, Corinthians, and Romans who have been dead for 2000 years. To say differently is to reject the text. 

There is a lot of naivete here. For example, someone might make a counter-suggestion that the Bible was written to everyone (which is really another way of saying, for me!). It is an attempt to say that the meaning was the same for them as it is for me.

Suffice it to say, language just doesn't work that way. There is no such thing as timeless, contextless meaning in a text. [3] If you don't know the intended meaning, you will inevitably fill in context for the text with your own assumptions. These insights became crystal clear to me during my years in England as I became aware of the later Wittgenstein (1889-1951).

So if someone suggests that the text isn't how it appears to me, I may get very defensive, perhaps even very angry. This is my book! And you're suggesting it's different than it looks to me?

An example is those who say Acts couldn't have been written after Paul's death or else it would have told us how he died. 

But it wasn't written to you!!! I strongly believe that the people for whom Acts was written knew that Paul died at the hands of Nero. To tell that part of the story would have distracted from the author's purposes in writing, some of which were to highlight that Christians were law-abiding, authority-respecting individuals under the Empire.

12. After source criticism came form criticism, which tried to trace oral traditons behind the biblical texts. I personally feel like the Germans made a bit of a mess with this one. The study almost had to be rebooted fresh in the late twentieth century. For one thing, their obsession to classify everything rigidly was ludicrous when we are talking about the way humans pass along stories. 

I especially laugh when I think of Adolf Jülicher (1857–1938), who said that if you find sayings of Jesus in the Gospels that have more than one point or are allegorical, Jesus probably didn't say it. Oh ye great German categorizer. People in oral cultures can do whatever they d*mn please whether it fits your spreadsheet or not.

The initial work of Kenneth Bailey (1930-2016) was very helpful here. [4] Learning from his missionary work with nomadic peoples in the Middle East, he suggested that oral tradition in oral cultures is "informal controlled" tradition. That is to say, the details to the story-telling can vary, but the core elements tend to stay the same. [5]

This is exactly what we find across the Gospels and even in the Pentateuch. It is actually an argument for the kernel of traditions being historical even though some of the details among the variations might not be. But this is a hard pill to swallow for many evangelicals. Perhaps there is an idol of certainty at work here.

If we weren't talking about the Bible, I think we would readily acknowledge some of these dynamics. Forgive me for saying it is like we are required to turn our brains off and think irrationally. How does that fit with a God of truth? It's no wonder, in my opinion, that the evangelical church gets so easily caught up in conspiracy theories and counterfactualism.

Perhaps some day I will go into more detail.

13. Next was redaction criticism in the 60s and 70s. It shifted away from the search for endless hypothetical sources to the question of how those sources might have been modified given the theologies and ideologies of the editors. How does the way Matthew edited Mark reveal his theology?

In the 1980s, there was a turn. Instead of studying hypotheticals, why don't we study the texts we have? Narrative criticism looked at the Gospels as stories. This allowed us to forget the question of sources and go with the texts as they are. Who are the characters, what are the events, what are the settings in Matthew? We can ignore the historical questions and just focus on the text as it is.

It was a nice way to get a PhD in a critical environment without violating any institutional faith statement. It reminds me of the story of Bud Bence when he went to do his doctorate at Emory. He was told he could study Wesley in the church history department but not in the theology department. After all, the thinking of Wesley was "obviously wrong" as a theologian, way out of date.

I think David Thompson (if I remember correctly) did his dissertation on some arcane aspect of Hebrew grammar at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Wang and my college professor Ken Foutz were at Emory together too, I think. Wang used to talk about how Hendrikus Boers was required to speak in chapel once a year. Apparently, he would get up and preface his sermons with something like, "Let me tell you a myth." Then he would preach a perfectly wonderful sermon.

Although it happened a decade before I came to Asbury, apparently Dr. Wang announced on July 30, 1976 -- the day of Rudolph Bultmann's death -- "Today, Bultmann die. Today, Bultmann know." I should surely mention Bultmann somewhere in these reflections, although this doesn't seem the time. Perhaps when I get to my first stay in Germany in 1995.

14. Narrative criticism is where the flow of scholarship was when I was in seminary, and Dr. Bauer was all over it. My doctoral dissertation was on the settings of the narrative substructure of Hebrews, a triangulation between what I had learned from Bauer and the early work of Richard Hays on the narrative substructure of pistis Christou in Galatians.

As I was leaving seminary came postmodernism in the 90s. There was reader-response critiicsm, which focused on how various audiences read the biblical texts. This could be divided into different ideological groups like feminists or African-Americans or Latin@s.

I was fortunate to attend a playful seminar with Stephen Moore presenting a postmodern interpretation of Mark in 1991. It was hilarious. [6] After the resurrection, Jesus is the "post-man," and as the postman, he sends a letter to his disciples.

In good postmodern fashion, when asked why he was doing this, he answered that he needed a job and this approach seemed as good as any to secure one.

15. These last two posts have covered some of my first delvings into New Testament studies (yes, I used the word delve--it's not AI). Dr. Wang's class seemed a good place to present some of these wrestlings. In the words of Dr. Bauer, "Of course, much more could be said."

[1] I remember enjoying Wayne Goodwin's Servant as Leader course my third year at Asbury. I remember 1) that he loved a systems approach to management, 2) he set out five leadership styles, and 3) he loved Walter Ong's then recent book that had come out on Orality and Literacy.

[2] It's a little like thinking that you are making headway against evolution by attacking Darwin. Contemporary evolution is nowhere close to straight Darwinism. 

[3] Some texts may approach being "omni-contextual" because of common human experience, but this is not a-contextual meaning. It would be accumulated contextual meaning. Yet even here, the connotation of a statement like "God is love" will vary some from context to context.

[4] Although I was far less satisfied with his interpretive work. When I looked at the Table of Contents of his book on 1 Corinthians and saw that he interpreted it as a giant chiasm, I closed the book and never opened it again.

[5] "Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels," Themelios 20.2 (January 1995): 4-11.

[6] I believe you'll find it in this volume on Mark and Method (Fortress, 1992).