One debate point among theological interpreters is the role of the Christian fathers in interpretation. There has been a tsunami of interest in the early fathers as interpreters of Scripture. Here is my position on the issue.
First, the early fathers are very helpful for helping is see the consensus of faith coming together. It is a rather simple observation, but it only clicked with me last week that the strongest reason for us to use the consensus of faith that developed in the first few centuries as the proper vantage point for integrating the varied parts of Scripture is... because that is actually where the integrated Christian view of Scripture actually came from in the first place!
That is to say, the common Christian view of Scripture that most Christians have had throughout history and that evangelicals and theological interpreters in general are trying to justify in their readings of Scripture actually developed in the first five centuries of the Christian era. The fathers (I'm sorry history hasn't left us too much evidence of the mothers from this period) thus give us witness to the development of an integrated view of Scripture and are of great interest. This would be fun to write on--to explore the fathers on the path to an integrated and commonly agreed understanding of the Bible. Someone's probably writing the book as we speak.
The fathers were, however, horrible original meaning interpreters. From Clement of Rome to the Epistle of Barnabas to Irenaeus to Origin to Augustine on, they simply weren't any more wired to read the Bible in its full historical context than anyone one else at the time. The person who uses them as a guide for what the books of the Bible actually meant originally is barking up the wrong tree. Such a practice is simply a retreat into pre-modern interpretation, which is not wrong at all. It just isn't the same as the original meaning.
Showing posts with label scholarship starters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scholarship starters. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Future of Ministerial Vocation: Greg Jones
We were delighted to have Greg Jones, Dean of Duke Divinity School, and Dorothy Bass of Valparaiso on campus tonight to talk about the future of ministerial vocation. Russ Gunsalus, Acting Chief Operating Officer of our new seminary, gave an excellent response alongside Dr. Bass.
My take-away from Dr. Jones was:
1. Ministry is a calling, but not about personal therapy.
2. Ministry is a profession, but not a way to earn money.
3. Ministry is an office, not a chance for power.
There was much monkey imagery tonight. Dr. Jones about monkeys who learned not to reach for bananas, even long after they could. Dr. Bass' response suggested that we might be monkeys who help other monkeys come to piles of bananas. And Russ Gunsalus warned the students to be careful what monkeys they hang around and to break open the cage and go out and take the bananas to other monkeys.
I had another book idea tonight (happens regularly, usually with no issuance).
"Faith in a Mystery: Christian Faith in the 21st Century"
Chapter 1: Faith is a Disposition (including how we process experiences)
Chapter 2: Faith in the Word (dealing with faith in Christ, processing questions about the Bible)
Chapter 3: Faith in Creation (dealing with how we process questions about science, time, space)
Chapter 4: Faith in History (dealing with problem of evil, minority of Christian faith)
Chapter 5: Faith in Destiny (dealing with processing questions about soul, afterlife, psychology)
Chapter 6: Faith in Action (the positive impact of people of faith in the world)
My take-away from Dr. Jones was:
1. Ministry is a calling, but not about personal therapy.
2. Ministry is a profession, but not a way to earn money.
3. Ministry is an office, not a chance for power.
There was much monkey imagery tonight. Dr. Jones about monkeys who learned not to reach for bananas, even long after they could. Dr. Bass' response suggested that we might be monkeys who help other monkeys come to piles of bananas. And Russ Gunsalus warned the students to be careful what monkeys they hang around and to break open the cage and go out and take the bananas to other monkeys.
I had another book idea tonight (happens regularly, usually with no issuance).
"Faith in a Mystery: Christian Faith in the 21st Century"
Chapter 1: Faith is a Disposition (including how we process experiences)
Chapter 2: Faith in the Word (dealing with faith in Christ, processing questions about the Bible)
Chapter 3: Faith in Creation (dealing with how we process questions about science, time, space)
Chapter 4: Faith in History (dealing with problem of evil, minority of Christian faith)
Chapter 5: Faith in Destiny (dealing with processing questions about soul, afterlife, psychology)
Chapter 6: Faith in Action (the positive impact of people of faith in the world)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Who were the Sadducees?
A Christian children's song has a verse, "I don't want to be a Sadducee, because they're sad you see..." The song points out the key aspect of Sadducees that sticks out to us--they did not believe in any afterlife.
Your typical New Testament survey class usually suggests a few other characteristics: priestly types, didn't believe in angels or spirits, only believed the Law was Scripture, Roman collaborators. Some of these stock characteristics are actually highly debated once you enter scholarly circles. Several of them, for example, are based on single statements in single sources whose interpretation is highly debatable.
For example, the idea that Sadducees didn't believe in angels or spirits comes pretty much from a single statement in Acts 23:8: "The Sadducees do not believe in resurrection, neither of angel nor of spirit. But the Pharisees confess both." Needless to say, it sure sounds like angel and spirit here expand in some way on the word resurrection. Acts thus seems only to be saying that Sadducees did not believe in life after death.
The idea that the Sadducees only followed the Jewish Law and not the rest of the Jewish canon comes largely from a single statement in Josephus book 13: "the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. "
But this passage is not contrasting the Law with, say, the Prophets or the Writings. It is contrasting some alleged following of the Law alone versus following the Law as interpreted by the "traditions of the elders." In reality, of course, we know that there never is some following of the Law alone. This is simply the normal perception of a religious group that they are following the Bible alone while other groups are following human traditions. In reality we all are following interpretive traditions.
The passage above goes on to suggest that the main following of the Sadducees was among the rich, and Josephus' statements that they were not a cohesive group probably indicates that they were not so much idealogicalically bound as socially bound, that is, what defined them as a group was primarily the fact that they were from a certain, somewhat aristocratic, priestly class of family.
The name "Sadducee" is close enough to "Zadok" to suggest a theory, namely, that when the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes took the priesthood away from Onias III in the early 2nd century BC, and then later when the Maccabees took over the priesthood (152BC), the displaced priestly families who were the true "sons of Zadok" continued to exist disempowered, but still wealthy and still in connection with the temple. They would represent a somewhat older strand of thinking, a more "conservative" one in the sense of resisting new ways of thinking like the newly risen apocalyptic stream of thought that arose in the early second century. Their rejection of an afterlife was simply the perpetuation of a point of view that was long standing at the temple, as we find in the Psalms. Sirach also seems to come from this social strand at the turn of the second century and embodies a similar view.
When the Romans took power in 63BC and then in 37BC when Herod the Great took over Jerusalem, the Sadducees were able to reinsert themselves into priestly leadership. We thus take largely at face value Acts 5:17 at face value to indicate a close association between many high priests and the Sadducean sect. They were Roman collaborators only insofar as it is good to be in power and when you can only be in power by maintaining a good relationship with those who grant you power, you walk a fine line.
The relationship between the Sadducees and the Essenes is an interesting one, as in some places the Dead Sea Scrolls take positions more similar to the Sadducees than the Pharisees. My hypothesis, one I haven't published and please remember me when you come into your footnotes, is that the Teacher of Righteousness was one of those displaced priests (here following James VanderVam's suggestion that the TR might have been the anonymous high priest of the years 159-152BC). But the group that would become the Essenes, "Enochic Judaism," I would suggest, was already in existence as an apocalyptic group well prior to this point.
The group we call the Essenes was thus a hybrid mixture of apocalyptic Judaism with a highly charismatic Sadducee. Even here, we are not talking about the Dead Sea group, which itself was a later, ultra-conservative spin off of this group that did not settle at the Dead Sea until some 50 years after the "Covenant of Damascus" was made, the settlement not existing until around 100BC.
And those are Schenck's thoughts on the Sadducees and Essenes, not likely to be developed in publication any time soon.
Your typical New Testament survey class usually suggests a few other characteristics: priestly types, didn't believe in angels or spirits, only believed the Law was Scripture, Roman collaborators. Some of these stock characteristics are actually highly debated once you enter scholarly circles. Several of them, for example, are based on single statements in single sources whose interpretation is highly debatable.
For example, the idea that Sadducees didn't believe in angels or spirits comes pretty much from a single statement in Acts 23:8: "The Sadducees do not believe in resurrection, neither of angel nor of spirit. But the Pharisees confess both." Needless to say, it sure sounds like angel and spirit here expand in some way on the word resurrection. Acts thus seems only to be saying that Sadducees did not believe in life after death.
The idea that the Sadducees only followed the Jewish Law and not the rest of the Jewish canon comes largely from a single statement in Josephus book 13: "the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the laws of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the tradition of our forefathers. "
But this passage is not contrasting the Law with, say, the Prophets or the Writings. It is contrasting some alleged following of the Law alone versus following the Law as interpreted by the "traditions of the elders." In reality, of course, we know that there never is some following of the Law alone. This is simply the normal perception of a religious group that they are following the Bible alone while other groups are following human traditions. In reality we all are following interpretive traditions.
The passage above goes on to suggest that the main following of the Sadducees was among the rich, and Josephus' statements that they were not a cohesive group probably indicates that they were not so much idealogicalically bound as socially bound, that is, what defined them as a group was primarily the fact that they were from a certain, somewhat aristocratic, priestly class of family.
The name "Sadducee" is close enough to "Zadok" to suggest a theory, namely, that when the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes took the priesthood away from Onias III in the early 2nd century BC, and then later when the Maccabees took over the priesthood (152BC), the displaced priestly families who were the true "sons of Zadok" continued to exist disempowered, but still wealthy and still in connection with the temple. They would represent a somewhat older strand of thinking, a more "conservative" one in the sense of resisting new ways of thinking like the newly risen apocalyptic stream of thought that arose in the early second century. Their rejection of an afterlife was simply the perpetuation of a point of view that was long standing at the temple, as we find in the Psalms. Sirach also seems to come from this social strand at the turn of the second century and embodies a similar view.
When the Romans took power in 63BC and then in 37BC when Herod the Great took over Jerusalem, the Sadducees were able to reinsert themselves into priestly leadership. We thus take largely at face value Acts 5:17 at face value to indicate a close association between many high priests and the Sadducean sect. They were Roman collaborators only insofar as it is good to be in power and when you can only be in power by maintaining a good relationship with those who grant you power, you walk a fine line.
The relationship between the Sadducees and the Essenes is an interesting one, as in some places the Dead Sea Scrolls take positions more similar to the Sadducees than the Pharisees. My hypothesis, one I haven't published and please remember me when you come into your footnotes, is that the Teacher of Righteousness was one of those displaced priests (here following James VanderVam's suggestion that the TR might have been the anonymous high priest of the years 159-152BC). But the group that would become the Essenes, "Enochic Judaism," I would suggest, was already in existence as an apocalyptic group well prior to this point.
The group we call the Essenes was thus a hybrid mixture of apocalyptic Judaism with a highly charismatic Sadducee. Even here, we are not talking about the Dead Sea group, which itself was a later, ultra-conservative spin off of this group that did not settle at the Dead Sea until some 50 years after the "Covenant of Damascus" was made, the settlement not existing until around 100BC.
And those are Schenck's thoughts on the Sadducees and Essenes, not likely to be developed in publication any time soon.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Scholarship Starters: James 2:6
If I were a different person in a different life, I would try to publish these ideas, but alas, it takes so much work to write and article and my life is overfull.
I don't know if anyone has seriously suggested what I did in my explanatory notes Tuesday, that the situation in the first part of James 2 is a Christian Jewish subgroup of a larger synagogue and that the rich person is a wealthy Jewish patron from the larger Jewish community. The idea holds a lot of promise as it reflects new perspectives on Judaism and integrates new social scientific perspectives on the Mediterranean world. It would be a lovely contribution to scholarship on James.
If you beat me to it, which alas almost anyone could, remember me when you come into your footnotes. You can say you got the idea from Ken Schenck in private conversation, to save you the embarrassment of trying to publish something scholarly with a footnote referencing a blog :-) And of course if you'd like to have a private conversation, you know how to get hold of me...
I don't know if anyone has seriously suggested what I did in my explanatory notes Tuesday, that the situation in the first part of James 2 is a Christian Jewish subgroup of a larger synagogue and that the rich person is a wealthy Jewish patron from the larger Jewish community. The idea holds a lot of promise as it reflects new perspectives on Judaism and integrates new social scientific perspectives on the Mediterranean world. It would be a lovely contribution to scholarship on James.
If you beat me to it, which alas almost anyone could, remember me when you come into your footnotes. You can say you got the idea from Ken Schenck in private conversation, to save you the embarrassment of trying to publish something scholarly with a footnote referencing a blog :-) And of course if you'd like to have a private conversation, you know how to get hold of me...
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Scholarship Starters: Variations in Missional Hermeneutics
We're about half way through the first online week of an MDIV course called the Missional Church. Dr. Charles Arn is the professor of record and has really invested an incredible amount of time getting ready for this course. He's gone from never having taught an online course to becoming a Jedi master at Blackboard who runs circles around me, not to mention that he must have read every drop of missional literature, online and on book this summer, just to be all over it... and he is.
But I am the designated Bible professor for the course, which means that I will drop in a number of times to facilitate specific Bible discussions. These are really team taught courses. Bud Bence and Chris Bounds will be dropping in similarly to lead church history and theology discussions.
The discussions I'm facilitating this week have to do with Christopher Wright's book, The Mission of God. You can read my review here. And it has occurred to me that there really will be significant differences in the way one understands the Bible as the mission of God depending on what theological tradition you come from.
I am a bad person, so I have not kept up with all the excellent work Brian Russell of Asbury Florida has been doing on missional hermeneutics. I think he has a book soon coming out soon.
Anyway, I've started a new tag category. I have ideas for books and articles all the time. But I'm busy now with a seminary and I'm not like Joel Green or Ben Witherington, who have everything that's ever been published on the tip of their brain. The long and short of it is that writing articles takes time and a lot of work, and it's hard to find the time when you're busy doing other things that are more pressing.
So the new category is "scholarship starters," books and articles I could research and write if I had a special chamber I could go into where time stood still and you didn't need sleep. But since that doesn't exist and no one has asked me, I'll throw out the idea for someone else to write. I suppose I've already thrown out several of these from time to time, a call for some Wesleyan-Arminian to write an American church history book that is seriously critical of how Mark Noll treats fundamentalism, someone to write an American church history book backward, in a kind of "find your tradition" moving back in time kind of way.
Today's is for someone to point out the differences between the way a missional hermeneutic plays out for a Wesleyan-Arminian in contrast to a hard core Reformed person. Right now I seem up to my ears in Fuller books and Reformed books, because everyone in mission and evangelism these last forty years seems to have come from these places and traditions. I've dabbled in everything from Van Engen to Bobby Clinton. They are worthy of great praise and kudos!
But there are important distinctions that need to be brought out in a Wesleyan-Arminian context, even though all are welcome to chose. For example, I strongly disagree with the feel I get from Clinton that everything that happens to me is God trying to make me into something. I don't believe that everything that happens to me happens for a reason, like God is some divine micro-manager.
And here's a big difference that someone should write on. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan is not to create a world God will later redeem. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan-Arminian is to create a world of beauty where God's creatures can thrive and excel with humanity as a kind of steward. The mission to save the world is thus a back up plan, not always the plan. It was for Adam posse non peccare, possible not to sin.
The Reformed and Fuller literature tends to assume an extremely deterministic perspective. I deliberately decided not to go with Glasser, Van Engen, and Gilliland's Announcing the Kingdom, as well as Leslie Newbiggen's The Open Secret in part for this reason. There is much good in these books, but they are not Wesleyan-Arminian in approach.
There's nothing wrong with Reformed theology. But it will take some work for the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition to create a literature that will provide a genuine alternative. I fear that, as the down side to a tradition that is more heart focused, the Arminian voice has largely been absent from the table. And since these other sources are so close to our way of thinking, many of our leaders have absorbed some foreign ideas they would not have to.
So have at it, if anyone is interested...
But I am the designated Bible professor for the course, which means that I will drop in a number of times to facilitate specific Bible discussions. These are really team taught courses. Bud Bence and Chris Bounds will be dropping in similarly to lead church history and theology discussions.
The discussions I'm facilitating this week have to do with Christopher Wright's book, The Mission of God. You can read my review here. And it has occurred to me that there really will be significant differences in the way one understands the Bible as the mission of God depending on what theological tradition you come from.
I am a bad person, so I have not kept up with all the excellent work Brian Russell of Asbury Florida has been doing on missional hermeneutics. I think he has a book soon coming out soon.
Anyway, I've started a new tag category. I have ideas for books and articles all the time. But I'm busy now with a seminary and I'm not like Joel Green or Ben Witherington, who have everything that's ever been published on the tip of their brain. The long and short of it is that writing articles takes time and a lot of work, and it's hard to find the time when you're busy doing other things that are more pressing.
So the new category is "scholarship starters," books and articles I could research and write if I had a special chamber I could go into where time stood still and you didn't need sleep. But since that doesn't exist and no one has asked me, I'll throw out the idea for someone else to write. I suppose I've already thrown out several of these from time to time, a call for some Wesleyan-Arminian to write an American church history book that is seriously critical of how Mark Noll treats fundamentalism, someone to write an American church history book backward, in a kind of "find your tradition" moving back in time kind of way.
Today's is for someone to point out the differences between the way a missional hermeneutic plays out for a Wesleyan-Arminian in contrast to a hard core Reformed person. Right now I seem up to my ears in Fuller books and Reformed books, because everyone in mission and evangelism these last forty years seems to have come from these places and traditions. I've dabbled in everything from Van Engen to Bobby Clinton. They are worthy of great praise and kudos!
But there are important distinctions that need to be brought out in a Wesleyan-Arminian context, even though all are welcome to chose. For example, I strongly disagree with the feel I get from Clinton that everything that happens to me is God trying to make me into something. I don't believe that everything that happens to me happens for a reason, like God is some divine micro-manager.
And here's a big difference that someone should write on. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan is not to create a world God will later redeem. The mission of God in creation for a Wesleyan-Arminian is to create a world of beauty where God's creatures can thrive and excel with humanity as a kind of steward. The mission to save the world is thus a back up plan, not always the plan. It was for Adam posse non peccare, possible not to sin.
The Reformed and Fuller literature tends to assume an extremely deterministic perspective. I deliberately decided not to go with Glasser, Van Engen, and Gilliland's Announcing the Kingdom, as well as Leslie Newbiggen's The Open Secret in part for this reason. There is much good in these books, but they are not Wesleyan-Arminian in approach.
There's nothing wrong with Reformed theology. But it will take some work for the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition to create a literature that will provide a genuine alternative. I fear that, as the down side to a tradition that is more heart focused, the Arminian voice has largely been absent from the table. And since these other sources are so close to our way of thinking, many of our leaders have absorbed some foreign ideas they would not have to.
So have at it, if anyone is interested...
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