Types of Scholarship

I had this thought last week.

1. On a popular level in the US, there is a good deal of skepticism toward scholarship. I suspect there are a number of reasons. Some of it seems ridiculous. Some of it seems threatening. Some of it seems irrelevant. Some of it seems incomprehensible.

2. As a card carrying "scholar," I would say that a good deal of scholarship probably is bunk, especially in an age where it is easier than ever to get letters after your name. At the Society of Biblical Literature, how many of the papers are worth much? 15%? I don't know.

I personally think my own guild, the guild of biblical studies, is in an "ahistorical" phase, like it was back in the days of Bultmann and Barth. Since history isn't going anywhere, I know this will eventually turn around and smack this generation of scholars in the face. That might be after I'm retired. I could do it, but "not everything is beneficial."

3. I think some scholarship is more or less poetic. A scholar has come up with an intellectually, elegant way of saying something that, really, has more or less already been said. To be sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and most people are not likely to find much erudition of this sort very interesting or relevant. And maybe it isn't. Maybe it is just truth for truth's sake.

Worthy, because all truth is God's truth. But not a priority. A luxury.

4.  Some scholarship truly advances the discussion in a particular area. This is the stuff I like. What percentage of scholarship falls in this category? 5%? I don't know.

This kind of scholarship is riding the wave of the current tide. This is why discoveries like calculus can suddenly appear in two places at about the same time and neither Newton nor Leibniz be plagiarizing.

5. A good deal of scholarship is relevant to ordinary life, but it may need what Halee Scott once called "stair runners." By this phrase she meant good teachers who could understand high level scholarship but who could bring it down the stairs to communicate it in a relevant and intelligible form.

Some thoughts...

Popular Scholarship, they know about popular...

I was reading Brian Small's summary of Paul Himes' resources on Hebrews. Notice the hat tips to David Alan Black's book arguing for Paul as author of Hebrews.

A whole host of thoughts run through my head. One is that popular sells and easy sells. Tradition sells. Popular even controls colleges, universities, and seminaries. One of the things I loved about England is that it really felt like the professors had few ideological strings attached. Not so in America, where liberal strings are attached to liberal institutions, conservative strings are attached to conservative institutions, and traditional strings are attached to institutions in particular traditions.

So D. A. Carson style scholarship seems to rule the roost in most American Christian colleges, it seems. This is the neo-evangelical power block that rules ETS and produced the ESV. IMO, a scholar in this world is the person with the most creativity in supporting what everyone already wants to think. The Bible expert in this realm, the teaching pastor, is the person who is able to memorize well.

The late twentieth century saw the increasing empowerment of Christian institutions to offer their own PhDs. This allowed traditions to teach their own in a more insulated way. For all the benefits, you also could now get a PhD for being clever at justifying your own tradition without engaging the "other" on its own terms. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, large churches can circumvent educational institutions altogether in deference to the great cloud of memorizers.

The Lord keep me from ever exploding with satiric wit on YouTube,.. you know, the Schenck Weekly Show. :-)

Publishing in Scholarly Journals

A friend asked about how to go about publishing in a scholarly journal.  Here's what I wrote back:

There are several elements to a journal article. They don’t have to come together in an exact order:

1. An idea – obviously you can’t get a journal idea published if you don’t have a spark of an idea.
2. What journal – journals sometimes have their own niches or styles. One approach might be to decide the journal early so you know what your style is.
3. Where’s the discussion – you’ll want to know the lay of the scholarly land. Find the most recent thing written in relation to your idea so that you can get a sense of what the most recent part of the conversation is.
4. Outline what you’re going to write
5. Start writing – often I find I don’t find my voice until I’ve slogged through an entire first draft.
6. Revise outline, rewrite as necessary
7. Submit
8. Revise and resubmit as necessary – you often get feedback with a rejection. That can help you before resubmitting to another journal. Of course sometimes you face scholarly whim… no advice for a bad reviewer except to try and try again.

Trends in Scholarship...

I've been intrigued by some "trends" in biblical scholarship. So has Mark Goodacre turned the tide on the existence of Q?  Or is it just that there is a lot of blogger buzz about the Farrer hypothesis with some of the most popular bloggers (including him) publicly questioning this over a century old consensus? The current standing of the blog poll says the consensus stands, so far. (You know that if it stands in blog land, it also still stands about the elite scholars who wouldn't stoop to blog or vote in a blog poll on the internet. Hey, what's a blog?).

Is there an "emerging consensus" that there was an early "high" Christology or is it just that those with this reconstruction are the ones getting the most publicity in blogging and publishing? I don't know if there was ever a guild consensus on this one. Maybe there was. I wasn't in the mix in the 70s and 80s to say whether Dunn and others were a consensus or just a trend.

I have other questions. Is "liberal" scholarship in decline? Or is it just that demand for conservative scholarship is much higher, so that it is what is being published (e.g., N. T. Wright)? Or is it that the missionary drive of more "conservative" scholarship translates into more blogging? (I'm not sure Goodacre would describe his thinking as conservative, of course)

In the end, it especially highlights Thomas Kuhn. There are social and personal dimensions to scholarship. It's not just a matter of the facts.

The woes of trying to write scholarship...

If you read my blog much, you may think I find it easy to write. It would be more accurate to say that I find it easy to blog. The barest hope that there might be someone out there reading motivates me. How do I crank out so many books, someone asks. It's because blogging 500 words is like having a conversation before breakfast.

I have a friend who just can't get his dissertation done, but he is quite a verbal person. I've suggested over and over that he record himself talking in the car and then write it up or maybe even email me as a motivation.

Scholarly writing is a different bird. It can take hours to craft a sentence. It can take days to finish a footnote. You end up sitting for an hour combing through a book that you don't end up using. It's hard enough to write books like that when you teach 4 courses each semester. But it's easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for an administrator to write a scholarly book.

And let me be clear that I've only written one truly scholarly book. Most people have no idea what a real scholar looks like.

So sue me for moaning and groaning. Another frustrating feature of scholarly writing for me is that I often finish a chapter--or an article--and realize all I have really done is figured out the content of what I want to say. If I really want the material to have impact, I'll have to rewrite the entire chapter all over again in a different arrangement.

So I've written 10,000 words of a chapter introducing the "new perspective on Christian Judaism." But it's completely predictable--Sanders, Dunn, Wright, Hays...  I'm looking at it and feeling completely average, even below average. Surely I can come up with a better way to present this worn out path.

I just wanted to vent. I may end up going with it. In the meantime, I'm going for a run...

Thanks for listening... or not :-)

My Hebrews life is now complete...

David Alan Black has made a case for Paul as the author of Hebrews. Not too surprising, since he has a penchant for poking at 100 year old consensuses (he thinks the ending of Mark is original). This is a useful service he performs because there is a tendency for scholars to get more and more comfortable with a dominant paradigm and to think it is more certain than it is.

The first time someone suggests something, he or she may be cautious, tentative. I've found this true with my own ideas.  But over time, you get comfortable.  Your ideas may seem more certain than you thought the first time.  Over time, everyone believes in Q just because everyone believes in Q, not because they've done the hard analysis. (P.S. I still accept Q nonetheless.)

I personally am big on scholarly consensus. If the majority of "I'm willing to come to any conclusion" scholars [1] have more or less come to the same conclusion for over 100 years, you'd better be some crazy kind of genius to argue something different. Most push back on these things is not driven by evidence but by a certain stubborn comfort in traditionalism.

DAB is certainly smart, but probably not some crazy kind of genius. I'll buy his book and no doubt admire it. I'll certainly admire the fact that he will now be mentioned in every commentary on Hebrews for the next thirty/forty years (the last scholar to argue this was a pre-Vatican 2 Roman Catholic in the 40s--and I'm mentioning him 70 years later!). I hope DAB pulls a hefty royalty.

But in the end, he is an illustration of what happens when evidence isn't the real driving force behind your scholarship (dare I suggest that this is what people want to buy, that much of what is being published right now in biblical studies falls into this category, that the best scholarship will continue to appear in dusty monographs that most people will never hear of?).

I don't think Paul wrote Hebrews for a number of reasons: style, differences in theology and use of specific texts, the fact that I date it after the destruction of Jerusalem when Paul had been dead for about a decade, but mostly because I can't see Paul putting himself in the non-apostolic wing of the early church as the author does in 2:2. I have no doubt that DAB has ingenious explanations for these things--they always are. But as I've said before, many confuse being able to come up with a possible explanation, for the most probable one.

[1] Scholar = knows the evidence to a very high level as well as the history of interpretation on that issue.  "I'm willing to come to any conclusion" means the attempt to be objective and to follow the evidence to any likely conclusion, even if inconvenient.

Scholarship on the Road...

As usual, I'm on the road trying to finish something due at some point in the past.  Sometimes I feel like the surgeon in the old Michael Keaton Batman movie who tries to put Joker's face back together in some dirty abandoned building: "You see what I have to work with."

So here I am in a hotel in Florida at a conference in between things, trying to do a word study on "to preach the good news" (euangelizomai) in the Septuagint.  I made a PDF of the entry in Hatch and Redpath before leaving (still don't know where to find a good Septuagint concordance on the web).  Now I'm bouncing back and forth between blueletterbible and biblegateway.  I used to have Logos on my laptop but every time you switch computers with IT, you have to reload everything and I haven't got around to it.

Earlier today, I pieced together a Hebrew for ministry assignment using the snippet snapshot tool in Windows to take a picture of an amazon.com preview page of a commentary... I'm not at a library to make a PDF.

So I rejoice in the internet and technology... and remember the good old days when you had a chalkboard and a library?

Every denomination should have a Bible scholar ;-)

I come from a revivalist/Pietist denomination.  Our history has tended to assume, I think rightfully, that the most important qualification for a minister or church leader is an "anointing" from God.  This goes along with things I've said about the heart being God's number 1 priority.  It shows our proximity to the charismatic movement (which grew from the same soil as the holiness movement).

We have tended to admire the down to earth, not necessarily too educated soul through whom God chooses to speak, the "fool" through whom God changes the world.  Indeed, in our history we have sometimes seen education as a tool of Satan to lead the church astray.  Not a single institution in my denomination grants a PhD in any area. ;-)

I'm involved with a PhD dissertation defense today at Andrews University and was finishing up the dissertation this morning when an amusing thought hit me.  You know, every denomination should at least have one or two Bible scholars, in addition to all its Spirit-filled prophets and leaders.  Every denomination should have one or two experts on what the Bible actually meant.

And what does that involve?  It involves things that I agree are not the priority for a minister or necessarily a denominational leader. I doubt massively that the most impactful pastors and leaders need to be or will be biblical scholars of this sort. Although I'm clearly having fun in this post, I really mean it when I say the heart and not the head is the number one priority even for a minister or church leader.

But you cannot be an authority on the original meaning of the Bible unless you know thoroughly and deeply:

• the biblical languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic
• the historical-cultural background, meaning for OT the archaeology of the relevant sites and the relevant Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Canaanite literature; meaning for the NT the relevant Second Temple Jewish and Greco-Roman literature and archaeology
• the history of interpretation/analysis for the last 100-200 years (the history of ancient interpretation is of minimal value in terms of the original meaning)
• enough textual criticism to be able to reach an informed conclusion on the way the original text read
• how to follow a train of thought inductively, including being able to ask questions the text wants to answer and to answer them using inductive evidence from the text read in its historical context

This is what you need to know to speak authoritatively on the original meaning of any biblical text.  God must more often than not speak in living and fresh ways regardless of these things.  But I was thinking this morning, every denomination should at least have one or two people somewhere on retainer who are actually qualified to speak to what it really meant too. ;-)

The Bible and the Academy

A little more than a month ago, the University of Sheffield almost shut down its famed biblical studies department. The department at the University of Gloucestershire is still on the block, as far as I know. Both attempts by university administrations brought rallying cries from biblicists all over the world and, at least in the case of Sheffield, they were successful. I'm very glad and give my best wishes to those at the University of Gloucestershire.

Now I love the scholarly interpretation of the Bible, the dispassionate, "objective" pursuit of truth for its own sake. Of course I also think a good bit of biblical scholarship isn't of much lasting value. There are the very valuable depth studies on the most obscure topic you could think of--they do advance our knowledge of some small piece of the puzzle and are worthy. And there are the milestone works by those who we all come to recognize as advancing the field. They are certainly worthy.

But make no mistake, the reason the biblical studies industry is such a big market is because of people with faith, those for whom the Bible is Scripture. I think sometimes secular and mainstream scholars sometimes forget that it is the people with faith, most of whom are conservative--for lack of a better word--that primarily fuel the market. Without them, the field of biblical studies would be no different from worthy departments of classics or Egyptology--and it would have the parcity of market those worthy fields have.

My marketing advice to British universities--hire faith-filled professors like Richard Bauckham, Larry Hurtado, and Simon Gathercole. They're the ones who will attract students from all over the world. And faith-filled American seminaries and universities will also be the ones with the vast majority of students, not the ones that basically market to recovering fundamentalists with anger issues (which I'll admit is currently a significant market--but there is something a little sick about basing your market off of harvesting organs from road kill).

You can "blah, blah, blah" about the truth or good scholarship all you want. But most of those who want to study the Bible are looking for something that builds up, not tears down. The market is what people want, not what you want to give them.

Paul Book off...

God's Christmas present to me, my present to myself (and my wife's, since she created some space for me) is the finishing of the draft of my first Paul volume. I don't usually have to do too much reworking once it reaches this stage, but I am about 10,000 words over my allotment (I'm at 164 pages), so we'll see.

The chapters are:

1. Born at a Time and Place
2. A Change in Life Direction
3. The Unknown Years
4. Life Beyond Death (1 Thessalonians)
5. Disunity at Corinth
6. How Not to Have Sex
7. Disagreement and Disorder
8. Mutiny in Galatia
9. Joy in the Face of Death (Philippians)
10. Reconciliation and Disappointment (2 Corinthians)

Yoo-hoo!

Who's a scholar?

I was musing yesterday at the "scholarly" coping mechanism that has evolved in biblical studies to gloss over scholarly developments and consensuses. On the one hand, we should probably celebrate that all points of view can get published, a situation bequeathed to us from postmodernism and pluralism. But I can't help but feeling that in an age where it feels like people have given up on even trying toward objectivity, in my mind there's a glut of special pleading out there now on the biblical studies book market.

It seems like whenever a study or trajectory of real significance arises, some "conservative"--meaning someone resistant to change--then commissions a counter-study to address it. Such counter-studies, far from actually disproving the new development, more innoculates the complacent, who can now simply say, "You can see that the new book by D. A. Carson or John Piper shows that this or that is not in fact true but another liberal conspiracy to corrupt the masses."

So Krister Stendahl in the 60s and E. P. Sanders in the 70s expose the faulty understanding of Judaism that has pervaded scholarship since its inception. Now finally D. A. Carson, Mark Siefrid, and Peter O'Brien strike back with two volumes, Justification and Variegated Nomism. It can now become the "scholarly" excuse for ignoring genuine developments. Of course the volumes themselves are far more "new perspective" than old. They remind me of the current "conservative" views on race. There are no Republicans in Congress today who have the same views as Strom Thurmand did in the 50s. Like it or not, the perspective on Judaism has changed, and these sorts of works are more foot dragging than real defenses of older views.

So also N. T. Wright introduces the actual ancient background of the New Testament into his interpretations of Scripture and it begins to make its way down into the masses. Commission a study! So John Piper produces a "scholarly" volume refuting it to innoculate the masses. Sorry. Just because you can write a book doesn't mean you haven't been caught snoozing in the cockpit.

Another reactionary "scholarly" innoculation is D. A. Carson and Greg Beale's Commentary on the Use of the Old Testament in the New. Sorry. The truth doesn't care. The New Testament simply isn't majorly concerned with the context and original meaning of Old Testament passages.

There have been a glut of new commentary series it seems this last decade, but most of them promise to fill Amazon with these sorts of innoculatory pacifiers. Books to allow us not to grow, not to wrestle truly with hard issues.

Oh where is objectivity to be found? Nowhere, of course, but there are better and worse examples of the attempt. It used to be that we simply ignored the experts. Now the anti-intellectuals have infiltrated them, across the spectrum of scholarly disciplines in America.

If you want to change Bible teaching at IWU...

... all you need is a well placed bomb during dinner here in New Orleans. All but Wilbur Williams are here: Brian and Elaine Bernius (OT), Steve Lennox (OT), Dave Smith (NT), Bart Bruehler (NT), and me (???).

A browse through the book hall brings the usual feelings:

1) fun to see many faces of old friends--a new phenomenon is meeting old friends you've never met before from the blogosphere,

2) fun to ride the elevator with Gordan Fee or sit at a table next to Kevin Vanhoozer (who in my case you don't announce yourself because of various things you've said on a blog),

3) fun to meet budding scholars and students, some of whom think you know something because you've written a book (you, of course, all the while know better),

4) you feel sad for these budding scholars, knowing that even the best are going to have trouble finding a job and that the guild of biblical studies itself is probably on the decline (cf. Sheffield, Gloustershire, etc...),

5) you look at the book hall and see that Witherington or Tom Wright has published 4 new books this year beyond the ones you already knew about... you figure you'd better get writing,

6) you see a bunch of books that make you think Christian academic publishing is mostly much ado about nothing--I disparage of writing anything else, others think, I could write better than this, why am I not publishing...

7) you feel privileged to get to come to places like this every year, see old friends, grab the most stimulating ideas on many topics before they get published, every once and a while your children get a great experience of some great place... and you're glad your son is in his own world like you are and doesn't even notice the smut all over the place on Bourbon Street (your daughter, on the other hand, who is observant like her mother notices it instantly).

This is Ken Schenck, reporting on the ground in New Orleans...

Notre Dame Library Blues

In one final preparatory effort for SBL next week, I made a visit this weekend to the research library at Notre Dame to fill in some footnotes. ... and I got that same sinking feeling I'll be bombarded with next weekend.

Who can keep up with all the thoughts on all the things that people are thinking through! And of course the practical question, why are we all doing this? Why would I want to contribute yet another book to this massive pile of mostly idiosyncratic studies?

Don't get me wrong. I'll keep writing, reading, and buying. But I feel guilty expecting anyone to buy any of it. Most of it is a strange, self-perpetuating game between universities, professors, and publishers. Only a few studies truly advance the discussion. The rest contribute to the massive footnotes. A solid biblioblog could easily be more valuable than half the twelfth floor of the Hesburgh library.

Don't get me wrong. I love it! But it depresses me. My first reaction is always depression. My second reaction is always, I should write novels and do the rest for free on my blog. My third reaction is to go back to my day job.

New Book Feature

I've decided to add book links on the right in relation to books I'm reading and links to my books at the very bottom. In addition to some small change, this will hold me accountable for reading. I would be embarrassed to change the books on the right too often or not to finish them. And I'll start getting embarrassed if they stay up much more than a month at a time. I will say, though, that Moral Vision is a whole semester book rather than a one monther.

So here's to Simon Gathercole, a fellow Dunnite who has recently taken a position at Aberdeen in New Testament. You'll notice that Dunn doesn't give any of the blurbs on the back of his books. I suppose that's because he has to some extent made his brief but already well known reputation by disagreeing with Dunn! Having said that, I'm sure Dunn would have if he had asked.

Bon appetite!

Climbing the Mountain of Knowledge

This is a slightly different kind of post. These are some of my reflections for those in PhD programs in biblical studies or who are younger professors of Bible who are post-doc and wanting to keep up to date or to publish.

When I finished my PhD and had defended my dissertation, I told one of my examiners that I felt like all the scholarly knowledge I was supposed to know as a biblical scholar was like a mountain that I hadn't even begun to climb. This December is the tenth anniversary of my defense, and I have a few reflections on climbing the mountain. Here are some thoughts

1. If it is your calling (or perverse hobby) to be an "original meaning" resource for the kingdom of God, first study with those near the top of the mountain. They'll give you the fast track past many dead ends and lead you straight to their own :-) Get as close as you can to those who seem to know the most. Get where you have access to the best libraries and a steady stream of visiting scholars on the cutting age of your field.

2. Skim through the Journal of Biblical Literature, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and New Testament Studies as each new issue comes out (every three months). Read more thoroughly those that represent gaps in your knowledge or areas of research interest.

3. Scan the Review of Biblical Literature that SBL puts out each week. Skim through the book reviews, especially again those that represent gaps or areas for research.

4. Find a way to scan the catalogs of the main publishers each quarter (Eerdmans, Fortress, Baker, IVP, Westminster JK, etc...). See what's being published. I think you will get these automatically if you are a member of SBL.

5. Join the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Go to the yearly meetings. Pick an area and join the group. Get on the program. At least send one proposal each year. Better yet, propose a new group. Start a blog in your area and network with the young whipper snappers who are all over this stuff (see my links to Euangelion and Scot McKnight... follow their links... you'll be amazed at how many young scholars are blogging their stuff out there).

6. Write something, at least one thing a year. Follow a trail of scholarship. Even if it doesn't get published, you'll get really helpful reviews from someone established in the guild. You'll have grown in the process of writing. Try a smaller journal if you don't get in to a big one. I now try to pick one of the courses I'm teaching each semester and brainstorm on something I might publish relative to that course (once a year is success to be sure).

7. Pick an area or a specific scholar you like and read everything in that area or everything by that scholar. He or she will almost certainly introduce you to a circle of scholars that are in dialog with each other about something. Join the dialog. It's important to find a subcircle in the guild. One way is to be the expert on some tiny slice of the pie. Then you will be referenced and invited to give that slice on whatever the broader topic. I wouldn't advise you to do this intentionally, but being intelligently quirky--having an infamous position--can work this angle too as long as it's not just plain whacko.

8. Try to go to some of the conferences that pop up here and there. Give a short paper. Try to get in the conference volume.

I don't suppose this blog entry is relevant to too many of those who might be reading this, but these are some of my thoughts today on the subject...