NAW Durham 5 -- When McDonalds is a dream

Continued from the last post
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30. Near the end of my first semester in England, I was so desperate for an American hamburger that I walked three miles to north Durham to get a McDonald's. It was wonderful. And I say that as someone who didn't particularly go to McDonald's much in the US.

There's a joke about European cultures that is both funny and pretty accurate. In heaven, the French are the cooks. The Italians are the lovers. The British are the police. And the Germans organize everything.

But in hell, the British are the cooks. The French are the police. The Germans are the lovers. And the Italians organize everything.

I did not find British food to be particularly delectable. There was this "American" restaurant in London everyone always bragged about, Garfunkels. I found their burgers mediocre. Frankly, I found Scottish Angus beef -- again, often bragged about -- pretty mediocre. I even bought hamburger from the store across Framwellgate Bridge and cooked it myself. It just was blah. 

Suffice it to say, although I am a meat eater, I had little craving for British meat. (England was also just getting over "mad cow's disease" at that time too. I wasn't able to give blood for years after I returned. As far as I know, I never developed it.)

I found the meals in John's generally mediocre, although the price was right (free for me). I have since come to believe that really high quality lamb can be tasty. But whatever they served in John's seemed pretty mediocre to me and sometimes gamey. (I'm also no fan of mint sauce.)

31. There was one English food I liked -- Yorkshire pudding. I've recently learned from Payne's -- an English restaurant out toward Upland -- that the Yorkshire pudding is actually the puff pastry. But it always came with a sort of beef stew, and I liked it. I would get it at the Half Moon, I think, across Elvet Bridge.

It was there also, I think, that I was introduced to the croque monsieur and the croque madame. The first was more to my liking, a ham and cheese basically. The latter adds an egg. It was there also that I was introduced to garlic mayonnaise, which I regularly would get with my chips. I was young and could eat such things.

I got to like an English breakfast. The sausages were quite different, tight on the outside and softer on the inside. 

By the way, I will never have a French hot dog again. I tried one in Paris and it was atrocious -- mushy on the inside. I have never understood the rumor that French cooking is the best (although Verzenay's in Chicago is a wonderful boulangerie). Angie and I actually ate at a French restaurant on High Street in Durham after a ceremony on Claypath in 1998. But I don't know what the fuss is all about French food.

32. The foods I loved most in Durham were foreign. I loved getting Chinese with Neil there, usually up on Claypath, I think. The Italian in town was fantastic. It was in Durham that I learned to love carbonara, I believe. The night before a ceremony we had, Angie and a group of us ate at an Italian place that was across Framwellgate. Delicious.

Durham was also the first place that I really tried Indian food. David Fox was particularly fond of Shaheen's on the Bailey. I always got "Bhuna Beef," not realizing that an authentic Indian restaurant wouldn't serve beef. Rachel Leonard and the others usually got far hotter food than me (Vindaloo, a song that came out while I was there, I think). Here I learned of peshwari naan and poppadom and chutney (which I didn't ever eat).

David had also seemed to think that "tak tak" was a euphemism for sex in Hindi. He would always ask the owner if he was going to be having "tak tak" later. Not sure what that was all about. I don't know that tak means anything in Hindi or any Indian dialect.

33. Getting used to British slang was a learning curve for me. For example, I had gathered from several conversations that to be "knackered" was to be exhausted. After one of the Tuesday evening worship services, I remarked to a woman that I was "a bit knackered" when she asked how I was. She grinned.

A little later, her husband informed me that, where he came from, "knackered" had the connotation of being tired from having sex. He grinned that I had told his wife I was knackered. Suffice it to say, even in the same country, there can be different idioms in different regions.

Which reminds me of the time I took a taxi in Newcastle. I haven't a clue what the driver was saying in his thick Geordie accent.

In my final year, a little store up near the viaduct started doing sandwiches. I would often walk there to get a ham with shredded cheese and mayonnaise.

34. I have never been particularly stylish. Rachel Leonard informed me that Doc Martins were all the rage. They were also more than I wanted to spend. I ended up getting a much less stylish pair of boots that I enjoyed nonetheless. Before we did our Scotland tour that summer of 1994, I got a green rucksack that I was quite fond of and used for many years.

I went to one rugby practice in the fall of 1993. The exercise was to get down on my knees (along with others) and then they would run into me. Of course no real padding in rugby. One practice and I thought, "That's going to hurt," and I didn't go back.

I was amazed one year when Phil Burns hurt something or another at football practice and we went to the hospital. In America, we avoided the hospital like the plague because of how much it costs, even with insurance. I think my father might have had a heart attack a few weeks before he died, but he didn't go to the hospital.

But with universal health care in England, when you needed to go, you went. After living in England, I really don't get people's resistance to it here. It seems mostly ignorance on our part to me.

[35. You'll have to buy the book to read this section.]

36. In those days, the fact that I was an American was very amusing to the people in the college. This was before the Iraq War -- and certainly before Trump. The British thought of us as funny, loud, somewhat ignorant people. They didn't yet think of us as dangerously ignorant people.

So, the students wanted me to be in their plays. I sang in the choir. It was all good fun. A German exchange student named Astrid did an American accent that I found hilarious. It was strange to think of Americans having an accent. I certainly never thought of myself as having one. Surprise!

I was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. I was in Much Ado About Nothing. I also did a two person medieval play with a woman named Elizabeth. There was a suggestion to have a nude scene in it -- I passed.

The choir was particularly enjoyable. I had not known Faure's Requiem before, but it is now one of my favorite choral pieces of all time. I haven't remembered the director. He was a brilliant student named Andrew, I believe. He wrote some pieces and I assume went on to be a composer. 

All of these performances were student led, and they were brilliant.

I hadn't known Andrew Lloyd Webber before England. Or really Queen either, just a couple songs. I hadn't really been aware of British music or of the music I knew in the states that was British.

37. At the end of my first semester, I had to make a formal declaration of what I was going to work on for my dissertation. I had done all my fall work on Hebrews, but I would have proposed something different.

When I came home for Christmas, I thought long and hard about switching to something like the messianic secret in Mark. Did Jesus deliberately downplay a messianic identity because it would have been misunderstood by those around him? Turned out that Dunn had already written an article like that.

But it would have been a weak play. It wasn't a distinctive hypothesis. It wouldn't have been a unique contribution. And I would have been a nobody in a glut of Gospel scholars.

Hebrews it was.

Notes Along the Way Durham 1 -- Spying Out England

continued from last week
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1. In the spring of 1993, I took a trip to Durham, England to spy out the land and interview with St. John's College. I think by then Dunn had more or less sealed the deal. As long as I wasn't a serial killer or someone outside British Christian allowances (which were quite broad frankly), I would be a Residential Tutor there.

This was my first trip outside the United States on my own. I had been to the Philippines with my parents to visit my sister in 1976 or 77, who was a missionary at that time. I had been on a missions trip to Bolivia in 1988 with a singing team from Asbury. But this was me by my lonesome.

My high school humanities teacher, Mr. Stock, had told us in the twelfth grade that some of us would later travel to Europe and remember that class. We would remember flying butresses, the art, the architecture, the history. At that time, I had no imagination that I might ever visit Europe. Now, it's hard to imagine what I was thinking then.

Living in England and Germany for some three years would broaden my perspective. Perhaps I will mention when I talk about Africa my thoughts on how visiting another country doesn't necessarily broaden a person. Two people visit a foreign country. One person sees him or herself more clearly than they had before. The other is more entrenched in their biases than before, inoculated against a broader view of the world. [1]

My mind was blown once again. Over and over again, it seemed, the boxes my view of the world was in exploded. When I would return, so much of American thinking -- particularly those of my own circles -- seemed so small. Just as I was glad I was raised in a more diverse south Florida rather than Indiana, I was glad to live overseas long enough to see so many things about America in perspective.

I took it as a compliment those years in England when I was repeatedly told that I didn't seem like the stereotype they had of Americans -- loud and relatively closeminded, while thinking I knew everything about everything.

2. On that first visit, I met with the Principal of St. Johns -- David Day at that time. I remember him being a little delicate on the faith question, which I found amusing. In my world, faith boundaries were everything -- far more important than scholarship, to be frank. Yet St. John's was an evangelical Anglican college (British style) with an Anglican/Methodist theological college associated with it at that time (Cranmer Hall). The Christian faith boundaries were fairly broad, but they existed.

Cranmer Hall was a unique partnership between the Anglican Church and the British Methodist church. It was an honor 20 years later when Jimmy Dunn included me on an email including several important Methodist influencers like Richard Hays, urging us to use whatever influence we might have to stop the British Methodists from stopping the use of Cranmer Hall to train Methodist ministers. Unfortunately, the Wesley Study Centre there was closed in 2014.

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the partnership between the Anglicans and the Methodists had only begun about five years earlier in 1988. I would get to teach a little at Cranmer my second year in England after Bruce Longenecker left, as I recall.

I also met with Margaret Masson, who had only been Senior Tutor for a year at that time. She would go on to work as Senior Tutor at St. Chad's in 2004 and then become Principal of St. Chad's in 2016. Chad's was the only other college at Durham that had its own theological training school. More on the structure of Durham in a moment.

I found all the staff at John's and Cranmer superb. The word that comes to mind is respect. They modeled a respect for everyone, a posture of listening. 

It was fertile soil for young people to grow in. Other than this boundary of mutual respect, the young plants weren't constrained in how they might grow. I knew both fervently Christian students alongside fervent atheists there. All of them spreading their wings.

3. The difference in what an evangelical college in Durham was and what an evangelical college was in America was striking. In America, Christian colleges were generally bounded sets, characterized especially by their boundaries. At Durham, St. John's was a centered set. The leadership was meant to be Christian. Every opportunity was given for worship. But it was an influence rather than a coercive model.

Neil Evans was the Chaplain, then an Anglican minister (he would later convert to Catholicism). He would become my best friend at Durham. His was the first face I met on my visit. Every morning and evening he held prayer in the small medieval chapel across the Bailey.

Later, when College Wesleyan asked me to facilitate a "Cathedral Service" venue, it was my brief encounter with the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) here that would serve me well. I wish I could say I was disiplined in my attendance. I had not yet had the pets and children that forced me to become a morning person yet. In those days, I would generally roll out for morning tea around 10am.

On Tuesday nights, there was a worship service with the Eucharist every week. I became a regular cantor for the service, singing the appropriate bits of the communion service. Hopefully I'll remember in a later post to talk about the singing and acting I did at John's.

But these Christian elements were meant to attract students to faith and deepen those who already had it. You were not forced to be a Christian to attend, nor were you forced to adopt a Christian ethic -- outside of the baseline of mutual respect and all that it entails.

4. The structure of an old school British university is quite different from that of an American one. In the US, if a university has colleges, they are purely by discipline: "College of Arts and Sciences." In the old days, places like Oxford and Cambridge were made up of somewhat independent colleges each with its own faculty.

At the University of Durham, there are now centralized departments like the Department of Theology. John's and Chad's are the only ones that still have their own faculties but only for ministry. Students in John's get their classes from the university at large now. In fact, the more advanced ministry students even in John's took classes with the Department of Theology.

5. I suppose I'll talk about my travel to and from England later. As I recall, I flew in on this occasion to Manchester, thinking it was closer on the map. I often did this sort of thing -- overconfident that I could figure things out without asking. Then finding out I didn't know what I was doing.

Yes, Manchester was closer on the map. But it wasn't faster by train. To get from Manchester to Durham you stopped at every little place in between. And Manchester was not a particularly attractive place from the train view. I would never fly in there again. Meanwhile, there's a three hour train from Kings Cross to Durham that only makes about five stops.

I was to fly out of Gatwick. Seems rather a rather strange route now. I suppose we must have booked it through a travel agent. I think my dad had given me traveler's checks to cash if necessary.

I spent the night in Islington at a Salvation Army place that the Wesleyan Church often used for missionary transit. I believe the London Honors students from Houghton still stay there when they are in England in the spring, although I don't think it's Salvation Army any more. Angie and I would stay there after we were married too.

On Saturday, I walked London from the Tower to Buckingham Palace. I had some guide to England that I had bought at some bookstore. By chance I happened upon Aldersgate Street on my way past St. Paul's. I felt my heart strangely warmed.

I believe I briefly hit the British Museum. In typical Ken fashion, I was wearing the dress shoes I had brought for my interview. They were ruined by the end of the day.

6. In the morning, Sunday, I was quite convinced I had figured out the Tube. Once again, not asking directions, I made my way to Kings Cross and studied the Underground map. Which line did I take to get to Gatwick? I had not seen it on the map in my guidebook.

Finally, I found an arrow at the bottom of the map with an arrow pointing toward Gatwick. Ah ha, I said to myself, I take the Victoria line to the end.

Nope.

I got to the last stop on the line, disembarked somewhat puzzled, asked the man at the booth how to get to Gatwick. Then he looked at me somewhat puzzled and said, "You need to take an above ground train, the Gatwick Express. It leaves from Victoria station."

That made me a little nervous, but I wasn't too worried yet. I was a strange mixture of overactive looking and leaping without looking. I don't know how these fit together. As my friend Micah once said, "Ken, sometimes you look. Sometimes you leap. But you never do them at the same time."

I took the tube back to Victoria, found the Gatwick Express. But by the time I got to the gate at the airport, they had just closed it. There was my plane, right there. It was still a half hour before departure. But rules were rules. I missed the flight.

7. I called Dad, as I usually did in such circumstances. I can't remember if he had given me an emergency credit card. Seems unlikely. But I was able to use whatever emergency means he gave me to stay at a Bed & Breakfast. Being the sort of person that wanted to try the culture where I was, I had steak and kidney pie that night for the first and last time. 

Yuck.

I might add that those were still the days before things were open on a Sunday in England. It must have been food served at the Bed and Breakfast. I think I was the only one there.

[1] A family friend and her husband did a bus tour through England while I was in Durham. I met them at the chippy near the bus park when their bus stopped at Durham. He had no interest in seeing another castle or cathedral, but he did complain that they didn't have any ketchup for his "fries."

"It's all true," I said to myself. Americans are imbeciles.

When my sister was a missionary, some visited her. As I recall, the expectations of the visitors were unreasonable for Manila. They had no sense that the appropriate move was to eat the normal food and sleep under the normal conditions of the country. Don't bother visiting the mission field otherwise. 

I heard the same complaint from nationals in Sierra Leone when I was there. The missionary doctors, one person said, lived with their higher standard of living separate from the people they worked with and ministered too. I'm sure that wasn't universally true, but I can believe it was true too often.

Durham - Final Year 14

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93. My last year in Durham focused of course on my dissertation. I wrote the last chapter on the heavenly tabernacle, the aspect of Hebrews I found most intriguing. It involved some minute exegetical work on Hebrews 8-10. I had a big stack of books from the library next to my computer for footnotes.

I seem to remember Rachel Leonard saying that footnotes were pointless. She was doing psychology, so the footnotes did nothing but credit sources. However, in biblical studies the footnotes can be some of the most interesting side notes. In them we spar with our opponents and make interesting tangents. Of course many of them are mere catalogs.

I called some footnote work "footnote chasing." The footnotes helped me know who all the significant players were and what the significant positions were. A footnote in one book led to another book with its own footnotes, which led to other books.

Some scholars seem always to know what books have just come out. I'm not sure how they do it. Bill Patrick was that way. Dave Smith is that way. I know others like that, Brian Small, Scott Mackie. I always felt like I was behind on this one. I would use the library at Notre Dame or the book hall at the Society of Biblical Literature to try to catch up.

94. I did two appendices. One over-viewed the story world of Hebrews as a whole, the other tried to infer aspects of Hebrews' background from the work I had done.

I was struck by how short the first appendix was. It reflects an insight I have gained over the years. In the last few years, Indiana Wesleyan added a theology course to its general education requirements. However, I'm not sure if it really does what its framers thought it would. Much of theology does not directly impact Christian life. It may not make a person love God or their neighbor more.

Arguably, orthopraxy ("right practice") is of far more immediate and eternal importance than orthodoxy ("right belief"). [1] And the two aren't always closely connected. This is what I discovered with the story world of Hebrews. The same underlying story not only could have been discoursed in multiple ways. The same story could be argued from in many ways. The story itself potentially gives rise to many different realities. [2]

For this reason, a course on ethics--which was in harmony and dialog with theology and Scripture--would be much more powerful for students than one focused on theological ideas. And it would be very controversial. There are Christians who believe the right things who would view the current political situation in diametrically opposing ways. We return again to the Platonic fallacy. Right belief does not clearly lead to right action. Rather, humans tend to retrofit their ideas to fit their sense of action. Ideas are often "epiphenomena" of our social worlds. [3]

When I edited the dissertation into a monograph, I felt the need to add another chapter on the rhetorical strategy of Hebrews. Without a sense of the rhetorical situation arguing from the story, the story lies pretty facile and polyvalent. The substance of meaning comes as the story is discoursed.

The appendix on the background of Hebrews was indulgent. Narrative criticism brackets questions of historical background. But of course I was not exactly practicing narrative criticism. I was only using some of its tools. Still, I had tried to be exegetically disciplined in the study, not speculating on the key questions of background. Part of the introduction suggested that a disciplined approach that did not fill in gaps might result in an interpretation that would eventually help with background.

95. I discovered Craig Koester's The Dwelling of God in my final year. It had come out some seven years earlier. For a little bit, I was afraid he had already carved out the positions I was taking in my dissertation. It is of course death to find that you are not in fact doing something original. My narrative approach would have made it ok anyway. As I read through the work I found enough light between the two of us anyway.

I largely see the tabernacle in Hebrews as a metaphorical way of referring to the highest heaven where God dwells. I do not think Hebrews actually envisages an actual structure in heaven. I argue that Hebrews never pictures there being an outer room to the heavenly sanctuary. At best, one might consider the lower skies the outer room of a cosmological sanctuary but Hebrews never explicitly says this either.

96. Dunn's commentary on Colossians and Philemon came out in the spring of 1996. I can't remember if we spent a whole semester on Colossians, but I do remember us discussing Colossians 2 extensively. Dunn took the position that "worship of angels" in 2:18 did not refer to worshipping angels but to worshipping with angels. James McGrath and B. J. Oropeza were also there my final year.

In the spring, I think the research seminar looked at the Dead Sea Scrolls. Florentino Garcia's The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated came out early 1996. The whole Dead Sea corpus had only really come out around 1991. They had been hoarded since the 1940s by scholars who had divided the spoils and hoped to publish everything they could on their little fragment. But in 1991, the Biblical Archaeology Society published two volumes of photographs of the scrolls, mysteriously obtained by Robert Eisenman. The game was over.

I got into an argument with someone visiting John's over the Dead Sea Scrolls. She was convinced that the Roman Catholic Church had been hiding them because they proved that Jesus wasn't the messiah. It was completely ludicrous. But she wasn't having it. I think it was the first time I ever really lost my cool in a discussion.

91. I applied to teach at a college in southern England. I actually skipped coming home in the summer to interview. I missed a major family gathering honoring my parents in the lead up to their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

It was a bad decision. In those days, I sometimes felt like I made the wrong decisions when faced with two alternatives. I didn't get the job. It was a catholic college that ended up closing a couple years later anyway. Then over Christmas I skipped out on an interview that I might otherwise have got. It was in Manchester, seems like it was the Nazarene Theological College.

So I went to one I should have skipped and skipped one I should have gone to. My daughter Sophie reminds me that if I had stayed in England, she would never have been born. So there's the paradox of life. Good things can come out of bad choices. That doesn't make the choices good. But God can redeem anything.

92. The summer before my final year, Principal David Day had the idea of a dictionary of theological figures of sorts. I was to write four entrees: Nietzsche, Feuerbach, and two others I don't remember. So after returning from Germany, I spent the end of the summer reading through a good deal of Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, and others. As far as I know, the dictionary was never published.

93. I remember three major trips my last year. I've already mentioned the trip to Ireland with David Fox and Rachel Leonard in early 1996. Neil Evans graciously drove around Scotland with me. We went all the way to the tip of Scotland at John O'Groats. We briefly touched on St. Andrews and Aberdeen. We hit Inverness and came down the west side to Fort William, passing Loch Ness on the way.

I also met up with my old friend Todd Thompson at Sheffield. He was trying to do the same thing in philosophy that I did with New Testament. We headed south to Stonehenge and down as far as Cheddar. I had hoped to get to Cornwall, but it was just too far.

I remember thinking about the soul sometime that year. For the next few years, it seems like a lot of people were discussing the contrast between Christian resurrection belief and the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul. They are not the same. Resurrection is about the transformation and/or re-creation of our bodies for the kingdom of God. Immortality of the soul is not the primary mode of afterlife belief in the New Testament, although it is not incompatible with New Testament belief.

My question was this. If resurrection does not involve a soul, then how is it different from cloning a person and giving the clone the memories and personality of the original person. Where is the continuity of personhood? A computer might have all my memories and personality, but would that make it me? The convenience of belief in the soul provides continuity of personhood.

There's plenty of discontinuity even in our own lives. "Each man in his time plays many roles." There is some continuity of the person who grew up in Wilton Manors, but a lot has certainly changed. Am I the same person in the morning who went to sleep. "Sleep is a kind of dying." [4]

94. I had my dissertation done by the beginning of summer, 1996. I had missed the deadline for submission to graduate in August, so my parents and I flew back for the December graduation. We had lunch with Dunn thereafter in a restaurant this side of the Silver Street Bridge.

Before I left in the summer, Frances Young was my external examiner and Loren Stuckenbruck my internal. They passed me with only a few grammatical pointers. She did have some questions about my hermeneutics. I don't think she and Jimmy were exactly on the same page hermeneutically.

I don't remember on exactly what, but she did push quite hard on some issue. I thought I was going to have to do major revisions. I finally conceded and said something like, "I will have to look into that." Then she eased off and said, "I want you to know that we are pretty positive about your dissertation." So that was nice. It's not a "viva" unless you sweat a little, I guess.

I had hoped to have a teaching job lined up for the next year. I figured that, if I could get an interview, I would be able to move them in my direction. But I didn't even get an interview in the US. Seems like I applied to several. I remember the University of Louisiana being one of them. I wondered if I would have more contacts in the US if I had studied at a US school.

I often thought to myself in those days, "Everyone's happy to take your money but then it all dries up when you want a job." I was looking for a teaching job at a research institution. It was not to be.

[1] Ortho-volition is of the most eternal importance. With regard to the primary of choices over beliefs per se, Kierkegaard put it well: "What I really need is to become clear in my own mind what I must do, not what I must know… except in so far as a knowing must precede every action." It is amazingly possible to believe all the right theological ideas in general and yet do atrocious things.

[2] The underlying Christian story behind the New Testament is largely the same. What makes the theologies and ethics of the New Testament authors distinct is how they argue from that story. Indeed, this was one of the key insights of Richard Hays' work on Galatians--Paul and his opponents were largely arguing over the interpretation of the same story.

At some point the historical story lies in some relation to the theological story. The relationship could be close or tangential. For Bultmann, the historical Jesus was tangential to the theological story beneath the New Testament. For me, of course, it is much more closely related.

[3] An "epiphenomenon" is something that is a by-product of something, rather than part of its substance. Might we say that the beauty of a rainbow is not part of the substance of rainbow creation but we enjoy it all the same.

[4] At some point I had the fun thought of how eternal security could work. All God would need to do is resurrect a person at a point before he or she fell away.

England - Second Year 9

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71. I went home for a brief visit in late summer. Then I was back for Michaelmas in October. Second time teaching Greek. Another year as residential tutor. More acting and singing.

Christoph Lorentz was back to Tübingen. Helen Fox was off to continue her life. There was no more rowing team.

I did run my first marathon the next summer in Leeds. I did my training, but about mile 18 I hit the well-known wall. I came up over a hill to see another gully and another hill. I thought to myself, "I'll just walk up this next hill then start running again."

But I was unable to start up again. I little bit of Orangina at a hydration station might get me going for a few feet, but I mostly walked the last eight miles. It was very annoying, because the last few miles were well downhill, but I just couldn't get going.

I tried to jog the last few hundred meters. A 70 year old man pulled up beside me. He had run a marathon the previous Saturday in Belgium. Very humbling... especially when I suddenly developed a cramp in my leg and had to limp across the finish line. "Don't stop now!" The very few people left yelled from the sidelines.

I had fish and chips in a nearby chippy afterwards. Very greasy. One of the best meals I had for my whole time in Britain. :-) [1]

I couldn't let that be my last marathon so my final year I ran in the London marathon. I was determined never to stop. Even if I slowed down to a pace that could hardly even be called a run, I must not stop. And I didn't. I believe it was 4 hours and 20 minutes.

72. Christoph left and Alex Jensen came. Alex was not a stereotypical German. He was from Hamburg in the north and also a Tübingen student.

Alex's very first degree was a PhD. It takes seven years to get your first undergraduate degree in Germany. I've also mentioned already that you have to do the equivalent of two doctorate degrees to get a teaching post in Germany.

So Alex did a year abroad in Durham in something like his sixth German year. Then he switched to Durham as a master's student. Then after satisfactory process, I think with Stephen Barton, he became a PhD student. He did his work on theological hermeneutics and the Gospel of John.

Alex was a hoot. In his early days you could tell when he didn't understand what you had said because he would go "uh huh." Of course my German was much, much, much worse than his English.

I believe it was in my third year that George van Kooten wandered through Durham from the Netherlands. He has gone on to become quite a significant scholar at Cambridge. I saw him this fall at SBL.

73. With the departure of Sandy Wedderburn, Loren Stuckenbruck came to the university my second year. Postgraduates had participated in the sample lectures at the end of the previous year. Another well-known scholar also presented. I enjoyed that presentation as well. He suggested that the Jews would have likely understood the star over Bethlehem to be some sort of heavenly being.

But Stuckenbruck's presentation was clearly the best. He fielded the questions well and did a great job teaching. Over the years, I have found him to be one of the most personable brilliant people I know. He's clearly a genius, so it is always a little surprising to find him also to be one of the most helpful of people. It always seemed like he bent over backward to help students on their path, even well beyond graduation. It didn't matter whether a person was his student or not.

His work on Angel Veneration and Christology was helpful to my work on Hebrews, since he deals with Hebrews 1 in his book. He studied with James Charlesworth at Princeton and so was particulary good when it came to the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Jewish literature. In recent years he has been heavily involved with the Enochic literature.

I was also sad to see Bruce Longenecker leave Cranmer at the end of my first year. Bruce is the son of well-known evangelical scholar Richard Longenecker. He is currently thriving at Baylor and has a great book on Pompeii coming out next month.

So in my second year we also interviewed for Bruce's replacement, who would eventually be Mark Bonnington. I don't remember the name of another person who interviewed but he didn't choose a good topic for the setting. I felt sorry for him but it was pretty amusing.

His paper was on the seven last words of Jesus. [2] He basically did a historical Jesus study on the words, asking which words it was likely that Jesus actually said. Principal David Day wasn't impressed. He made some snarky comment like, "So you're saying that Haydn got it all wrong? Good luck with that."

74. I believe Dunn was working on a small commentary on 1 Corinthians in my second year. So the graduate seminar worked through 1 Corinthians. It was incredibly helpful and enjoyable. It was because of that semester that I would jump at the chance to write a commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians for the Wesleyan Commentary series.

Scholars would occasionally come through. Paul Trebilco wandered through Durham one semester. Carl Holladay appeared. I seem to remember a brief exchange with him about coming from a fundamentalist background. I got the impression that a lot of prominent mainstream New Testament scholars had come from more sectarian backgrounds.

Ralph Martin gave a presentation once. I remember being struck with how "in progress" his work was. It gave me hope. I felt pretty inferior in those sessions. I felt like if I would say anything, I would inevitably look stupid. There would be some obvious work that I should know about but didn't.

Stephen Barton encouraged me once on this score. He said I always prefaced my comments with something like, "this probably is overlooking something but ..." Yet he said my questions and comments were always helpful or insightful. That was encouraging.

75. I believe it was at the 1995 British New Testament Conference that I presented a paper. My paper was "Did Hebrews Know Wisdom?" In it, I argued that the book of Hebrews demonstrates an awareness of the book of Wisdom.

[1] I had some family friends do a bus trip around England, and they stopped down at the Durham City Centre. They had seen enough castles and cathedrals so weren't interested in seeing another one. But they were up for some fish and fries. The most memorable moment was when he complained something like, "What do I have to do to get some ketchup for these fries?"

[2] There's a famous piece by Haydn called The Seven Last Words of Christ. We may have even performed it that year. I can't remember.

England - Traveling Britain 7

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59. It took me a long time to formulate positions on issues. [1] The arguments on both sides usually seemed pretty strong. The same was true of my Hebrews writing. It was hard to decide. I might go for a run or a walk, talk myself through a question.

Sometimes I would get to the part of my dissertation where I had to take a position on an issue and would sit there trying to decide what position to take. I remember doing this when I got to Hebrews 2 and needed to decide whether I thought "son of man" referred to humanity in general or Christ in particular.

Eventually I began to take positions. Each position taken suggested more likely positions to take on other questions. Eventually I had my own interpretations.

60. Being in St. Johns was such a blessing. I made all sorts of friends. I don't know whose idea it was but I was on a rowing team with friends from Germany, Spain, and England. Christoph Lorentz was a theology student from Tübingen doing a year abroad in Durham. Juan was doing the same from Spain. Jonathan was a normal English student.

Together, we were the "international team." Helen Fox served as cox: "Stroke, stroke, stroke." We were horrible. We came to be known as the "crowd-pleasers." But it was good fun.

In the early summer I flew with a group from Johns to Belfast in northern Ireland to do a 200 mile bike race. The only other person I remember going, maybe, was Ceri Huws, a Welsh student who played the harp. It was my first and only time in northern Ireland.

I bought an orange bike for £100 and started training. The seat feels like a knife over time if you don't get used to it. But that was fun, riding out into Durham County to train for the race.

At that time, Britain was at the tale end of trouble with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a northern Irish group that would bomb things in England. There were still signs in the London subway warning about packages left alone. So there were still armoured vehicles patrolling up and down the streets of Belfast with machine guns aimed at the sidewalks. It was quite a sight.

In the morning we started the 100 mile trip to Dublin. The border was about half way. Although I didn't like Snickers bars in general, I very much enjoyed one at the half way point that day. In Dublin I saw a Subway shop from the bus shuttling us to Trinity College to spend the night. It was the first Subway I had seen over there. So close, yet so far away.

Then the next day it was 100 miles back to Belfast.

By the way, the closest McDonalds to me was a three mile walk. I was not a super-McDonalds fan before I went to England. But the hamburger was so scarce and bad that I did actually walk to McDonalds and back early on to get something that tasted half good to me. Six miles for a "hamburger royal" or whatever they called it.

61. I can't remember if it was that spring that I was Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. My American accent was amusing to them and so I was cast in a few plays put on in Johns. I was also in Comedy of Errors and then Dame Sirith my final year. I also did some singing. Andrew Lloyd Webber was really big at the time.

In the summer I went with a couple friends to the Edinburgh festival. I think it was Neil and possibly Alistair Kirk. It was my first time to Edinburgh. We climbed to the top of Arthur's Seat. We walked the mile.

I tried blood pudding and Haggis while I was there. Haggis is pig innards in a sheep's bladder. It basically just tasted like anything fried. Same with blood pudding. I had a twinge of conscience because of Leviticus, but felt like it had to be done. Once a year, on Burns night, Jimmy Dunn would sometimes read Robert Burns' Ode to a Haggis in a thick Glaswegian accent.

62. At some point I parachuted with Rachel Leonard, which I mentioned before. I think we both intended to go back. I think you had to do five jumps before you could pull the cord yourself. We could have gone again immediately but we both chickened out.

I think it was also that summer that Rachel, James Quirk and I did a backpack trip around Scotland. I bought a great military green backpack. We went up by bus from Edinburgh to Inverness, then headed west to the Isle of Skye. The mountains were magnificent, the most stunning I had ever seen.

There wasn't a bridge to the island at that time. We took a ferry. I had booked a hostel for us in Armadale in the south, but it was a Sunday. In those days (unlike the trips I took later with my family), I expected everything to work out. But there were no buses after 5 to Armadale on Sunday.

No problem. We'll take a taxi. When we got to the hostel, the guy had given our beds away. "I know I guy who'd like to get in the hostel business," the hostel manager said. Then ensued Rachel's nightmare.

The guy had this small trailer that looked like it had been under water. James and I slept in it. Rachel slept in the bedroom of one very disgruntled daughter of this guy. We gave her the bedroom because, frankly, we expected the house to be better than the trailer. We were very happy to leave the next morning. In the words of Rachel at one point on that trip, "Basically, you're crap." :-)

63. I learned to despise Henry VIII. David Fox, maybe James Quirk, and I took a walk up the Weir once to Finchale Priory, beautiful walk. The priory is in ruins. It ceased to be used after the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. You could see that some of the stone from the priory had been used to build the farmhouse next door.

Neil turned out to be in an interesting phase of his spiritual pilgrimage. Prior to coming to Johns, he had done master's work on John Jewel. As I understand it, Jewel had argued in the mid-1500s that the Anglican Church was in fact a catholic church, not a Protestant one. In fact, Neil would always correct me if I said "catholic church" in reference to the Roman Catholic Church. I would say "Catholic Church," he would interject "Roman Catholic Church."

So it was very interesting to hear after I left England that he had finally converted to become a Roman Catholic priest. I would not have guessed it at the time, since he had worked so hard to claim a truly catholic identity for the Anglican Church. It was from him that I really learned about Cardinal Newman.

There was a woman teaching church history? in Cranmer at the time (Anne?) who was part of the first wave of women to become priests in the Anglican Church. That transition first took place while I was living in the country. I remember having a conversation with her about whether lay people could serve communion. I didn't see any biblical basis for prohibiting them. With a smile on her face, her response was that, having spent so long waiting to become a priest, it was hard for her to relinquish the authority of communion.

It was interesting to watch Neil process the ordination of women. His hesitance was not biblical but historical. It represented a departure from "catholic" practice. They even set up "flying bishops" as I recall for individuals concerned about apostolic succession. There was quite a flight to the Roman Catholic Church in those days.

Another professor in Cranmer at that time was the late Michael Vasey. I believe he taught theology. Not long after I returned to the States he came out openly as gay. He published a book revisiting the key passages on the subject in the Bible. It was interesting to be around individuals who were openly gay in England in an environment in which there was no stigma attached. Apart from the student I knew at Asbury, it was really the first time the subject was not just a matter of ideas but actual people.

64. I attended the United Reformed Church while I was in Durham, with Bob Fyall as pastor. It was on Claypath, but now looks to have become an evangelical Anglican church. Bob taught Old Testament for Cranmer Hall. He was the first person I ever remember taking about how God conquering the "chaos monster" Leviathan. I'm not sure who first invited me to go there, but it was a little more evangelical in flavor.

I've already mentioned the Tuesday evening service in John's. It was evangelical Anglican. I cantored for it often. I did attend some services in the cathedral. They were quite ethereal. There was a school with young boys associated with the cathedral. They sang angelically.

Life in Durham was delightful. British food is not known for its greatness. There was a restaurant called Garfunkel's in London that I was told had American hamburgers. Several suggested I just had to try it because I was American, but the hamburgers just didn't quite taste the same. In fact, the hamburger I myself cooked didn't taste the same. The Angus steaks from Scotland that were supposed to taste so great didn't quite float my boat.

There's a joke I heard about the peoples of Europe in the afterlife. In heaven, the French are the cooks, the English are the police, the Italians are the lovers, and the Germans organize everything. In hell the English are the cooks, the French are the police, the Germans are the lovers, and the Italians organize everything.

There were some English options I liked. For a while there was a place that made great cold sandwiches under the train bridge. At the Court Inn I could get "chips" with garlic mayonnaise. Once or twice I got the Croque Monsieur. Yorkshire pudding wasn't a bad option in those places that had it.

But the non-English food was phenomenal. Every once and a while Neil and I got Chinese from a little place up Claypath. There was an Italian restaurant just across the Silver Street Bridge. I learned to love spaghetti carbonara in Durham. I've rarely found good carbonara in the States.

There was an Indian restaurant on the Bailey that Fox, Leonard, and the crew sometimes visited. They loved the chutneys. Again, I've found it hard to find peshwari naan, papadum, and beef bhuna in the States.

65. There was a bookstore on the Bailey that had used books. Given the location of Durham, I was sometimes able to find biblical studies classics there. On perhaps my first trip home for Christmas, I took the bus to Oxford to look around. There I was able to see the famous Blackwell's book store.

I would eventually visit Cambridge with Neil. When Neil and I visited Cambridge, we were sure to get out to the Orchard Tea Garden, which Wittgenstein used to frequent. I can't remember if we also went to Stratford on Avon on that trip. It seems to me Neil and I also did a brief drive through Wales as well, his homeland. As in Scotland, the mountains were magnificent.

I preferred the flavor of Cambridge to Oxford. Oxford seemed so cluttered and showy. It also seemed more snooty. I had a friend named Elisabeth who had done her undergraduate work at Oxford. Even as a northeasterner, she had found Oxford pretentious. She and I were the actors in Dame Sirith.

We had a race on to write. She was a grad student in English. I was hoping to finish a novel in a year. Of course that didn't happened. I've started over fifty novels over the years. Finally self-published one in 2017. I don't know whether she ended up writing.

I made a couple trips to the Birmingham area while I was in Durham. The first was to visit David Wright and his family. He was coordinating the Wesleyan work in Birmingham and London at that time, a largely Caribbean community. We went to church in London. I remember him asking me if I thought postmodernism was actually amenable to our Wesleyan heritage.

Then after he left, Kerry Kind brought me down to see if I would feel called to continue where he had left off. I still had over a year to go on my doctorate. There was a school consortium of some sort at that time too. But it was not the right mix at that time.

66. In my final year, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, and I went to the west coast of Ireland. David had a relative with a cottage there. I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of Galway. I remember having to stop in the middle of the drive across so that sheep would get out of the road. It was still a little cold, so there wasn't much swimming.

Durham on the whole had mild temperatures. Although we were pretty far north on the globe, the Gulf Stream kept it much like the temperatures of Indiana. Sometimes there was some wind up the Bailey. There was almost never snow. But it only got really warm for a few weeks in the summer. In the winter it got light at 8 and dark at 4pm. Then in the summer it was light till about 10, as I recall.

[1] In my younger years, I might have looked to my tradition to answer such interpretive questions. What did Wesleyans think? What did Adam Clarke think? Now the question had become, "What is true?" What is the most probable interpretation? Obviously this is no guarantee that someone will be right, but it makes you more likely to be right.

England - Paul and the Law 6

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52. The highlight of my first year in England was surely the Durham-Tübingen Symposium on Paul and the Mosaic Law in the spring of 1994. The papers from the conference were later published. Jimmy was the convener of the meeting and scholars on Paul came from all over.

Looking through the Table of Contents of this book you can see that we graduate students were privileged to sit on the sidelines of the greatest world experts on Paul at that time--and we literally did sit in chairs at the edge of the room. Frankly, I do not think that the current lay of the land has yet added anyone comparable. Now that Dunn is retired, I'll give John Barclay the nod, who, interestingly enough, currently sits on Dunn's chair in Durham (or shall I say Lightfoot's). And he was present at the conference.

Dunn was obviously there, whom I consider the greatest scholar of Paul in that generation. Tom Wright and Richard Hays were there. I got to show Wright to the train station as he left the conference a little early. I believe he was at Oxford at the time. It's hard to believe that the later Bishop of Durham would need to be shown how to get to the train station, but I think we were meeting in St. Johns, with which he might not have been as familiar. Perhaps I am mis-remembering.

From Germany had come Martin Hengel, whom I had met in Kentucky. At one of the meals he came over to the long table where I was sitting and spoke to Richard Hays, I think it was. I think Stephen Barton was also at the table. He was not a man of small talk, as I experienced him.

He launched in, "Luke could not have used Matthew as his source instead of Q. Can you think of it, taking a hammer to the Sermon on the Mount and scattering it around the Gospel of Luke." I don't know what got him on the topic but he was addressing the Farrer/Goulder/Goodacre hypothesis that Q did not exist and that Luke used Matthew and Mark. It seemed like an out of the blue comment at the time.

Frankly I find this argument persuasive. I can see Matthew collecting and molding Q sayings around a sermon core in Q, but I find it hard to believe that Luke would break the majestic Sermon on the Mount into pieces. Similarly, it seems to me that Luke's scattered Q sayings are sometimes less edited than Matthew's versions (e.g., "poor in spirit" in Matthew versus just the "poor" in Luke).

53. Hermann Lichtenberger was the leader on the Tübingen side. He would be my host when I spent a couple months there in the spring of 1995. He was a Methodist and a man of faith. Also from Tübingen was Otfried Hofius, who wrote a couple books on Hebrews: Katapausis ("rest") and Der Vorhang vom dem Thron Gottes ("The Veil before the Throne of God").

I believe it was Hans-Joachim Eckstein that I spoke with over a meal about Hofius' work. Eckstein was working on his Habilitationschrift that year. Germans not only have to write a dissertation but, in order to become a professor, they must write the equivalent of a second dissertation. To be frank, the rigor of the German system made me feel minuscule.

I remember saying something to Eckstein about how I had not really dug into Hofius' work because I considered the Gnostic reading of Hebrews to be anachronistic. Patiently, he explained to me that Hofius' work actually had argued against the Gnostic reading of Käsemann. Man, did I feel stupid! It would not be the last time. I plowed through most of Hofius' Vorhang eventually.

Others at the conference included from Germany, Karl Kertelge and Hans Hübner. Hübner was the strongest representative of the "old perspective" on Paul. It was interesting to see Hübner function as a man out of time, a man who had lived beyond the moment of his paradigm. In a similar vein, I believe Charles Cranfield came to one of the sessions. In retrospect I would put Stephen Westerholm from Canada as someone who was a little bit of a fish out of water.

Representing French-speaking scholarship were Peter Tomson and Jan Lambrecht. During the conference, each speaker was welcome to speak in their most comfortable language, but it was pretty much German and English. The French speakers spoke English. The other English speakers included John Barclay, Graham Stanton, Stephen Barton, and Bruce Longenecker. Sandy Wedderburn was German but spoke English. Heikki Räisänen was the sole Scandinavian representative. [1]

54. A notable absence from the conference was Ed Sanders. I heard a rumor that he was not invited out of respect for the name of Joachim Jeremias. Jeremias was a mid-twentieth century German scholar who is much respected as a person in both Germany and English speaking countries. Many would know his book, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus. I believe that he was a good man and a good scholar.

His work, however, was a child of its age. It was skewed by the centuries-long inability of so many scholars to see ancient Judaism accurately rather than through the lens of the Protestant Reformation. I want to be clear. I am not saying that Jeremias was anti-Semitic, not at all. I am saying that the old perspective on Paul took some time to shake its stereotypical view of what Judaism was and what the nature of early Christianity was in relation to it.

It is often said that Luther was anti-Semitic, with quotes that seem to demonstrate it. We cannot pretend that centuries-long stereotypes of both Jews and Christianity in relation to them did not play a role in German attitudes in the lead up to the second world war, culminating in the Holocaust. Frankly views toward Jews often were not terribly different in England and the United States prior to the war. In the Protestant Reformation, Luther imposed his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church onto Paul's conflict with Judaizers. The Jews became the Catholics, and Paul was Luther.

Sanders more than anyone broke the dam on this misreading of Paul and Judaism in his 1977 book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. A Methodist by background, Sanders was able to see that the Jewish writings did not reflect the kind of "works-righteousness" that Luther and high Protestant scholarship ever since had read into it. In fact, as he went through the intertestamental literature book by book, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, it was clear that the grace of God permeated these texts.

The problem was a blistering chapter in a Festscrift Sanders wrote in 1987. In it he accused Jeremias either of being an incompetent scholar of rabbinic literature or, as Sanders seemed actually to think, of Jeremias intentionally misrepresenting Judaism. You can read the aftermath in two articles, one by Ben Meyer and the other by Sanders in a 1991 issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

It's my impression that Sanders was somewhat isolated in the Pauline scholarly world for some time after that. Only recently has he published Paul: The Apostle's Life, Letters, and Thought.

55. There were responses to Sanders, not least the two-volume collection of Don Carson and Peter O'Brien, Justification and Variegated Nomism. I did not personally think that these volumes undermined the basic thrust of the new perspective on Paul. If anything, I thought they embodied to some extent its influence.

Calvinists and Lutherans stood to lose the most to this new reading of a Judaism that believed in the grace of God and a Paul who expected works as part of the life of a believer. Wright has done the best job of synthesizing Calvinism with the new perspective, in my opinion. For him works are part of final justification, but if you are truly justified initially, you will have those works finally.

As someone from the Wesleyan tradition I have found the new perspective refreshing. Wesleyans have long been accused of works-righteousness, like the Jews of high Protestantism. A sense that Paul saw one's actions as potentially undermining final justification fits hand in glove with Wesleyan theology. You can see where there would be a natural resistance in other theological quarters.

56. Thinking back to Jeremias, rabbinic literature in itself is problematic when it comes to the study of the New Testament. I would agree with Wright that the destruction of the temple in AD70 fundamentally shaped the nature of subsequent Judaism. For example, there were militant Pharisees prior to that time. It is thus unclear the extent to which the practices and thought of rabbinic Judaism go back to the time of Christ. When I encounter Christians who do Seders, I always have the lingering question in the back of my mind--was it really done this way at the time of Christ?

It is quite common in the church to be enamored with those who might bring rabbinic insights to the New Testament. However, the Talmud and Mishnah largely do not provide background to the New Testament. They are much more the after-life of the Judaism of Jesus and Paul's day.

I was once privileged to tour Israel with a dear friend. However, I was also conscious on that trip that my friend was not really an expert on first century Judaism. It is not clear in my mind, for example, that the synagogues of Capernaum and Nazareth actually met in buildings at the time of Christ. A synagogue was a gathering, like an early church house "assembly." At the time of Christ there seems to have been a transition underway toward meeting in buildings. So maybe. Maybe not.

Disciplined history can really ruin the sentimentality of a biblical tour. [2]

If you want to know about the Judaism at the time of Christ, read the intertestamental literature. Read the Apocrypha. Read the Pseudepigrapha. When I taught the course, I used James VanderKam's An Introduction to Early Judaism, along with Vermes' Dead Sea Scrolls and a copy of the Apocrypha. This is the background to Judaism at the time of Christ, not so much rabbinic literature.

57. Dunn was a little disappointed that no greater consensus was reached by the end of the conference. I think this reflects his "T" personality. He is a modernist through and through, expecting that a group of scholars could reach common conclusions if they were objective enough. He hoped that the most likely reading of the facts would win out. This was far too optimistic.

I heard that he presented lectures at the Pontifical Institute in Rome on Hebrews, not long after I finished at Durham. Quite bold! He argued that the book of Hebrews indicated that there was no need for any human intercessor or priest between humanity and God because Christ was the sole intermediary. Of course he is right but what a cheeky thing to teach in Rome!

Chris Bounds would later describe me as a "chastened modernist." I am still generally a modernist. I aim for objectivity even though I know it is unattainable. But I have taken my lumps from postmodernism.

58. If you were to ask me what I have taken from these scholars in relation to the new perspective, it might go something like this:

• From Sanders I took that the sense that keeping the Law was more a matter of "staying in" the people of God than "getting in." 
• From Sanders I took the sense that some of Paul's argument is a movement back to the problem from the solution. Paul knew Jesus was the answer, therefore the problem could not be inadequate keeping of the Law because he did fine at that (cf. Stendahl). His little book on Paul was much more helpful to me than his more scholarly version.
• From Dunn I took the insight that the "works of Law" on which Paul was focused in his arguments were primarily the works that excluded Gentiles, matters like circumcision and purity rules. His seminal essays are now collected in one place.
• From Wright I took the sense that Romans 2 is about Gentiles who keep the Law even though they do not have the Law by nature. From him I took support for a final justification by works in 2 Corinthians 5.
• From Hays, although not really a new perspective name, I would eventually take a sense that Romans 3:22 and Galatians 2:16 are initially about the faith of Jesus Christ. But I agree with Dunn that Paul moves on in those arguments to talk about human justification.

It is still hard for many scholars to kick against the pricks. So much of scholarship today, it seems to me, has become sentimental. Has postmodernism empowered sloppy exegesis in the guild?

[1] I used to joke about Räisänen, for whom Paul's theology was completely incoherent. He has been my footnote for that position ever since. Although extreme, I have come to appreciate him for his attention to detail and as a representative of a certain detailed savant who can only see detail and difference rather than similarity and connection.

[2] Gordon's tomb is a perfect example of this. Some nineteenth century soldier sees an outcropping of rock that looks to him like a scull. There's a garden there--1800 years later. A tomb there fits the picture book in his head, unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is far too catholic in feel. All of it is rubbish. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the most likely location for the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.

England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).

England -- First Term Studies 4

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42. For whatever reason, Jimmy suggested I start by reading Ernst Käsemann's The Wandering People of God. It is a classic in Hebrews studies. Its underlying problem is that Käsemann read Hebrews in terms of Gnosticism. Many scholars of his day saw Gnosticism as part of the context of early Christianity.

Bultmann and others had reverse engineered a hypothetical Gnosticism at the time of Paul out of later sources and their imagination. They created the "Gnostic Redeemer Myth," a hypothetical backdrop to Christian thinking where a spirit being partakes of evil material but is freed upon death and leads others out of the prison house of the body to salvation. The problem is that it doesn't exist. It is a pastiche of bits from here and there. Philo is skewed as a source, for example.

The real Gnosticism didn't rise until the late first century. These days it is only invoked when discussing the background of the letters and Gospel of John. It is gone from discussions of Colossians and Hebrews.

43. I read Lincoln Hurst's, The Epistle to the Hebrews: Its Background of Thought. He went through all the backgrounds that had been suggested for Hebrews up to that point. My main take away had to do with Hebrews 8:5, that the earthly tabernacle was a "copy and shadow" of the heavenly one. Hurst showed that "copy" was not a typical translation of hypodeigma and thus that, while the verse had a Platonic feel, it was not straightforwardly Platonic.

Indeed, from Hurst and James Thompson I learned about Middle Platonism. A few years later I would read Thomas Tobin's The Creation of Man, which helped me more than any other source in understanding how Stoicism and Platonism mixed together at Alexandria in the century before Christ to form Middle Platonism between Plato and Neoplatonism.

So I read James Thompson's The Beginnings of Christian Philosophy. I thought he went a little too far with a Platonic background, but I found him a kindred spirit. At some point I plowed through L.K.K. Day's The Intermediary World and Patterns of Perfection in Hebrews and Philo. I felt like a learned quite a bit about Philo but very little about Hebrews.

44. I went home for Christmas. I remember going for a walk trying to decide whether to move forward with Hebrews or perhaps to switch to something else. I have always liked Paul more than Hebrews, but so did everyone else. There was plenty being done on Paul. Dissertations have to come to some new conclusion, use some new method, or look at some new evidence. [1]

The subject of the historical Jesus was intriguing but potentially perilous. I did not necessarily expect to get a job in Wesleyan circles, but clearly a topic in such an area would require explanation and possibly raise eyebrows. It had only been a year or two previous that Houghton College had expelled another pupil of Dunn for writing a book that assumed Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles. Some have suggested it was not entirely for his position but also for his attitude.

As a side note, when I was finishing up, Dunn told me he would write a reference for anywhere but Houghton. He wasn't really serious. No doubt the fact that I had studied with Dunn was in the back of Bud Bence's mind when he hired me at IWU. Bud had been Dean at Houghton during the crisis I mentioned above.

One possible idea I had in the area of Jesus studies was to argue that Jesus did indeed keep his messianic identity somewhat hushed because the expectations for a Messiah were different from his own mission. I wasn't too surprised to find that Dunn had already published something along these lines.

By the way, one of the big insights for me in those days was a realization that Jews did not think of the Messiah as God come down as earth. Indeed, not even all Jews were expecting or wanting a Messiah. Those that were generally expected God to anoint a human figure to rise and overthrow Roman rule. The 1987 Princeton Symposium on this topic seems a benchmark here: The Messiah: Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity.

45. With regard to Hebrews, my exposure to literary approaches was percolating. I read Stephen Moore's Literary Criticism and the Gospels. Bill Patrick and I had gone to hear him give a funny SBL session where he read Mark from a deconstructive point of view. His book gave me a certain typology for categorizing literary approaches.

Between Richard Hays and N. T. Wright, I became aware of structuralism as a way of analyzing stories. At some point I plowed through Wright's The New Testament and the People of God. He uses the "actantial" model of structuralism to analyze stories of salvation. By the way, at the time I found Wright's work incredibly stimulating. There was a time in the late 90s when I couldn't wait for his Paul book in this series to come out. By the time it did 15 years later, I had largely lost interest. :-)

One feature I loved in this first volume to the series was the way that he processed worldview in terms of story, symbols, rituals, and answers to basic questions. He also gave me one of my first exposures to critical realism. He gave me my first nuanced sense of who the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes were. It was a major point in the development of my thinking.

Richard Hays had also used the structuralist model in his own dissertation, published as The Faith of Jesus Christ. By the way, by God's grace I just happened to go to the famous 1988 debate between Dunn and Hays on the expression "the faith of Jesus Christ." It would take me years to get a sense of what I think on this issue, well into my time teaching at IWU. I would eventually conclude that Paul argues "from Hays to Dunn."

Hays' work on Galatians looked for the narrative substructure of Galatians. My idea was to look to the narrative substructure of Hebrews. I later set this out in my book, Understanding the Book of Hebrews. If a story has the elements of events, characters, and settings, I eventually decided in my dissertation for focus on the settings in the narrative substructure of Hebrews.

I should mention here that my friend James Quirk was also studying structuralism as an archaeology major. He introduced me to Claude Levy-Strauss. I did not understand it all and of course it was too tangential to spend much time on him. Let's just say I was impressed at how much more advanced the students at Durham were than any of the undergraduate students I had encountered before.

[1] I've always joked that the implication was that all dissertations are wrong. I've also joked that the only thing scholars agree on is that all dissertations but theirs are wrong. Indeed, the unique claims of dissertations are often based on creative thoughts formed before a thinker reaches maturity in their thoughts. I have always viewed Tom Wright's thoughts on Jesus as the embodiment of Israel in this light, as we as his sense that return from exile is a major key to New Testament thought.

I am being a little hyperbolic here. I do think there are some exceptional dissertations out there. There are, I think, some immature elements to my own dissertation (e.g., the annihilation of the creation). But in my defense, it was more of a new method of looking at Hebrews than completely novel claims.

Choosing a Doctoral Program 5

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18. Once I became a Teaching Fellow, the plan was to go on and do doctoral work in New Testament. The Joe Dongell track of course was a thought--Union in Virginia. That's also where David Bauer had gone. Paul "Bud" Achtemeier taught there. Could I perhaps study Paul with him?

The thing was that he was apparently nearing retirement. The worst nightmare stories of doctoral students come when you switch advisers. It had happened to Ron Crown at Oxford when George Caird died suddenly.

By the way, I had a lot of respect for G. B. Caird in that period of my life. Bauer had first exposed me to him with his article, "The Exegetical Method of the Epistle to the Hebrews." This short piece highlighted the way the argument of Hebrews could be seen as structuring around certain key scriptures. [1]

My second exposure to him was a book that Bill Patrick used in intermediate Greek, called The Language and Imagery of the Bible. It was one of those books that was like genius. As I read I kept thinking, "Of course." "Of course!" "Of course!"

I remember Steve Lennox saying he was with him until the later chapters. This is where he talks about phrases like "the sun was darkened" being similar to our "earth shattering events." Caird suggests that Acts sees the Day of Pentecost as the fulfillment of Joel on this score.

A key light that Caird turned more fully on was an understanding of the difference between what is literal and what is figurative. There is a tendency in certain circles to fight over whether the Bible is "literally" true. However, these discussions often do not really understand what the word literal means in this context. If something is taken "literally," then the words are taken in their normal sense. [2]

Dunn used to tell a story of a student that vehemently argued with him over whether the expression, "the trees will clap their hand" was literal (Isa 55:12). Clearly it was not meant so but the student insisted it must be because everything in the Bible (for him) was literal. The student later lost his faith, clearly being set up by his background to believe completely indefensible things. If trees literally clap hands, then they must at some time sprout hands like ours and make sounds putting them together.

A paper about which I am very proud, the first paper I gave after we started the Hebrews Group at SBL, is "An Archaeology of Hebrews Tabernacle Imagery." It looks at the sacrificial metaphors of Hebrews in layers. This, to me, is a key to understanding Hebrews and it makes moot a host of studies trying to pin Hebrews down to one sacrificial perspective.

Some of Paul Ricoeur's thought on metaphor has been helpful to me here. It seems like there is a vast swath of earlier thought that is sheer rubbish on this subject, going back to Aristotle. Metaphors are typically more powerful than literal language, not mere flourishes of language.

The older Reformers spoke of the "plain sense" of Scripture and distinguished it from the literal sense. Sometimes the plain sense of Scripture is literal and sometimes it is figurative.

So it's no surprise that Tom Wright studied under Caird, given his penchant to take things like this figuratively. I was struck with Wright's suggestion that Mark 13:26 is about the Son going on the clouds rather than coming. I don't agree, but it's genius. And it's exactly what I would expect of a Caird pupil.

Two other students of Caird were Lincoln Hurst and Marcus Borg. I read Hurst the first semester of my doctoral program. I also read some Borg in my doctoral work in preparation to teach some Christology. I found him interesting but unattractive in his thought.

19. Another possibility was to apply to Notre Dame. Harry Attridge was still there at the time, and he had recently written one of the best commentaries on Hebrews for the Hermeneia series. I'm embarrassed to say that I got a little confused over New Testament study there being under Theology. Of course it was the same at Durham.

In any case, Attridge left for Yale soon enough anyway. Interestingly, Greg Sterling followed the same pathway about 15 years later.

I did apply at Duke, thinking I might study with Richard Hays. Of course Hays wasn't working on Hebrews at that time. I'm not sure if Duke even took three doctoral students at the time. They did not accept me. Durham, England was a much better result for me than Durham, North Carolina, although I continue to like Duke Divinity School and Duke's basketball team. :-)

20. I should perhaps back up a little and talk about Hebrews and James D. G. Dunn. I've already mentioned a little of my Hebrews path. It starts with my interest in holiness as a Wesleyan and thinking of Hebrews as the Leviticus of the New Testament. Then it moves to my independent study with Bauer and the paper I presented both at Asbury and at the regional SBL in Atlanta. It was known for being difficult Greek and difficult to understand, and I considered it a challenge.

I mentioned how I had been attracted to the work of James Dunn--the way he thought and approached questions. He seemed to me a real truth seeker. Come to find out, his background was not entirely dissimilar to mine. He was raised in conservative, Scottish Presbyterianism. He had a somewhat mathematical background in economics and statistics. He used to say he was Presbyterian north of the border and Methodist south of it.

He was a popular person to study with if you were an open-minded conservative or an evangelical on the edge. Scot McKnight was one of his early pupils when Dunn was still at Nottingham. Graham Twelftree as well. Both are now renowned scholars with a strong faith. [3]

Asbury conveniently had him come to campus to speak the year of my searching. I met him there. He was the head of the theology department, the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity. Another way that he was like me is that he understood that universities survive if they have students. He took a number of students, some part time, some full time.

21. When he was on the Asbury campus, I seem to remember that he was questioned about one of his more idiosyncratic positions in the question and answer session in Estes chapel. Although I suspect the focus was his new book, The Partings of the Ways, he argues in his book, Christology in the Making, that the Philippian hymn of Philippians 2:6-11 is not about the pre-existence of Christ. He argues that it is a Last Adam argument. Here's a paraphrase of his interpretation

• Although he was in the image of God, like Adam,
• Jesus did not try to grasp after equality with God, unlike Adam.
• But he emptied himself...

In this interpretation, nothing in the hymn is about Jesus' pre-existence.

Few have followed Dunn in this interpretation, and I don't agree with his interpretation of this passage. However, when I read Christology in the Making, he did convince me that many passages in Paul that are glibly taken of Christ's pre-existence may not actually be saying that.

For example, take 1 Corinthians 15:49: "Just as we have born the image of the earthly man [Adam], so we will bear the image of the man from heaven [Christ]." It is tempting to read this verse in relation to Christ's pre-existence, but what is this chapter about? The chapter is about our resurrection body. The man from heaven is the resurrection man. We are not going to be like Christ in his pre-existence. We are going to be like Christ in his resurrection.

I find this convincing. It is another example of how we read later theology into earlier texts. Take Ezekiel 37, about dry bones coming to life. If we listen carefully to this text, it is not about the individual Israelites who died. It's about the resurrection of Israel as a whole. It is not about the end times. It is about the return of Israel from captivity and its reconstitution as a people.

Dunn helped me overcome my later theological glasses to see biblical texts in context as they were originally meant. Not perfectly of course because no one can completely overcome their biases and unreflectivity. I will confess that I encounter many a New Testament scholar today that I do not think has learned to listen to biblical texts on their own terms. I have a hunch that the rise of theological interpretation has given a green light to a fundamental inadequacy in the scholarly community.

If I might toot my own horn, my article in the Journal of Biblical Literature titled, "A Celebration of the Enthroned Son" does with Hebrews 1 what Dunn did with some of these other passages. I have taken positions about which I have significant doubts, but I am quite proud of most of this article.

When I read, for example, Richard Bauckham's interpretation of Hebrews 1, as well as some other friends of mine I won't name, I frankly think they have not been able to overcome their theological glasses to hear this chapter for what it seems to say. Hebrews 1:5 is not about the eternally begotten Son. I believe that Jesus is "eternally begotten of the Father," but this is just not what Hebrews was saying. Hebrews 1 is primarily, perhaps completely a celebration of the resurrected and exalted Son.

22. Dunn and his generation saw the development of early Christology as following a pattern something like this:

• The earliest Christian faith focused on the resurrected Jesus. To say Jesus is Lord was to confess that God had raised him from the dead and enthroned him as Lord, Christ, and Son of God.
• I don't remember if Dunn thought this, but some would then argue that Mark located Jesus as becoming Messiah at his baptism, a kind of adoption of him by God at that point.
• Then perhaps Matthew and Luke saw Jesus becoming Son of God at his virginal conception.
• Finally, John saw Jesus as the pre-existent, incarnated Logos.

Dunn and others thus saw the understanding of Christ unfolding among Christians over the period of the first and second generation of Christians. More on this later.

Of the first point, Dunn easily convinced me. Romans 10:9, Philippians 2:11, and other passages clearly locate Jesus as Lord at the point of his resurrection. Acts 13:33 locates Jesus as Son of God to his exaltation. Acts 2:36 locates Jesus as Lord and Christ to his resurrection.

It is at least a legitimate observation that John 1:14 is unique among the Gospels in its sense of incarnation. Matthew and Luke teach the virgin conception, but they do not mention that Jesus existed before then. Mark doesn't mention the virgin birth.

Simon Gathercole, a student of Dunn after me, has tried to argue that the Synoptics do teach Jesus' pre-existence, but I find most of his arguments strained. The Transfiguration might indicate his pre-existence. Mark 12:35-37 might imply Jesus' pre-existence, but it seems clear to me that the Synoptics say almost nothing about it.

Silence doesn't mean they didn't believe it. Absence of presence is not presence of absence. I hope it's obvious that I believe in the pre-existence of Christ. But, once again, Dunn helped me to see how many assumptions I brought to the biblical texts that the biblical texts do not clearly say.

[1] Asbury had this "elenchus" in the library basement that had article file cards in relation to various verses. It was a spectacular research tool in the day before the internet, Google, and electronic databases. The old time scholars almost had to keep all this information in their heads. Many of them could! Tenley Horner once challenged me to find a book in my library. I succeeded immediately.

Craig Keener is of course bizarre in this regard. From what I hear he has a complex and extensive filing system in his basement with notecards from things he's read and studied. I also here he is practically nocturnal.

[2] I am fully aware of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By, another book that Bill Patrick first clued me in on. They argue that language has its roots in metaphor and thus that even things we now think of as literal were once figurative. A scholar once tried to put me in my place by pointing this out when I already knew it. I used to be intimidated by senior scholars, but I've gotten over it.

[3] "Doctor father," the person you got your PhD with. Dunn is my Doctor Father, C. F. D. "Charlie" Moule was his, and C. H. Dodd his.