8. Critical Issues in the Wisdom Literature

Previous posts have included:

1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
7. Critical Issues in the Psalms
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Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are sometimes considered wisdom literature. We can finish out a look at the so called Poetic Books of the Old Testament if we make a few brief comments at them and throw in Song of Solomon for good measure.

Job
The book of Job comes second in the Writings after Psalms, even though it appears just before Psalms in the Christian Bible. The book in its current form has the overall shape of a story, so it can and has been analyzed as one. It is also susceptible to speculation about stages it might have gone through in arriving at its current form (source criticism). In particular, the material on Elihu arrives somewhat unexpectedly after the prolonged dialog between Job and his three initial comforters. Similarly, the bulk of Job is in poetic form, while its opening and closing are narrative.

However, Job's relevance to all times and places comes chiefly in what is usually perceived to be its central topic, namely, the problem of why bad things happen sometimes to good people. Perhaps more than any other story in the Bible, Job illustrates the importance of taking point of view into consideration. The "evaluative" point of view in Job is clearly that of God at the end of the story. At that point, even Job repents of misunderstanding a good deal of what was really going on (42:6). In the earlier parts of the story, however, Job's view is clearly superior to that of his "comforters." One must be careful in appropriating the earlier chapters, because Job's comforters are often wrong, and Job is sometimes wrong.

In terms of the Christian canon, some of the message of Job seems sub-Christian. Therefore, even its evaluative point of view needs to be weighed against more fully developed Christian faith. For example, God in effect tells Job to "shut up" with his questions at the end of the book because he could not possibly understand (38:2-3). Other parts of the Old Testament and the New Testament, on the other hand, legitimate asking God questions about things that seem unjust (e.g., Hab. 1:2-17).

Much of Job, like Psalms and Ecclesiastes, seems to reject the idea of a personal, conscious continuation of existence after death (e.g., Job 14:14; Ps. 30:9; Eccl. 9:5). On the other hand, some do argue that Job 19:25-26 affirms resurrection. Since Christians believe in an afterlife, we would see ourselves further along in the flow of revelation if Job in fact does not affirm one.

Finally, Job embodies the entrance of "the Satan," the Adversary, into Jewish thought. It is not clear, however, that Satan is yet understood as a stark opponent of God or a "fallen angel" at this point in the flow of revelation. He seems rather more like an employee of God who reports back on the loyalty of the earth. His job is to test people, to see if they will stay faithful when they face trouble and hardship, and he seems to do his job with God's explicit permission.

The matter of the Satan raises issues of the dating of Job in its current form. In the past, some have suggested it might be the earliest book in the Old Testament, since the earthly story itself is neither located in Israel nor does it have any clear interaction with Israel as a nation. We can raise a number of questions about this line of thought, although it is certainly possible that the story of Job was very old.

First, there seems to be a tendency when it comes to Scripture to confuse the subject matter of the text with the dating of the text. I would argue that a fundamental reason for this is because Scriptures are seen as God speaking directly to us. This dynamic often leads to a suspension of the normal patterns of reading. Conclusions that would normally be obvious are completely missed.

The characters of the story subtly become speakers to us and, over time, traditions have a tendency to confuse the characters of a text with its authors. We may see this dynamic in relation to the Pentateuch, where a clear character in the story, Moses, somehow over time comes to be thought of as the author of the story. The subject matter of Job thus has no necessary implication for when it was written, since anyone today could write a story about Job too (e.g., Archibald MacLeish).

A second question has to do with the matter of genre. There is, again, a hermeneutical tendency when it comes to Scripture to assume that a story like Job or Jonah is about historical individuals. On the one hand, we have no reason to have a bias against such stories being historical. But it is often an unexamined assumption that such stories must be historical.

For example, nothing in the book of Job itself would tell us that it could not be read as inspired fiction. The book does not tell us its genre. We do have the fact that James 5:11 seems to think of Job as a historical figure, which for many is definitive in itself. So we once again come to the issue of whether the New Testament discusses the Old Testament in the categories of its day or in absolute categories.

This is an important consideration that shows up in a number of hot issues in the rest of the Bible. No one would accuse an author like Charles Dickens of being a liar because he made up characters like Tiny Tim or Madame Defarge. We know that he was writing novels. Unfortunately, however, when it comes to the biblical texts, we do not have the authors handy to ask them what genre they were writing in.

So while the story of Job certainly could be about things that happened in history, we have no evidence from Job itself to say that the author was not inspired to write truths about the problem of evil by way of fictional characters or by modifying a familiar story. Clearly the vast majority of Christians throughout the centuries have taken Job to be a historical figure. Each believer will have to work out what they believe is possible.

As far as dating, it seems significant that the concept of the Satan does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament except in 1 Chronicles 21:1 and Zechariah 3:1-2, both of which are post-exilic. Although Christians would later understand the serpent in the Garden of Eden to be Satan, it is significant to notice that Genesis itself mentions nothing about a Satan. Further, we have no evidence of any Jewish writing considering the serpent to be Satan prior to The Life of Adam and Eve in the first century before Christ. The New Testament then follows suit (e.g., 2 Cor. 11:3).

It is thus quite possible to see the concept of the Satan as one that entered the flow of revelation while Israel was in captivity. If so, then Job in its current form would date from the period after the exile, regardless of how old the story itself was. The fact that the Writings were the last to join the Jewish canon is sometimes taken to indicate that they tend in general to date later than the books of the Law and the Prophets.

Proverbs
The proverbs of Proverbs, like most of Job and all of Psalms, are poetry. They thus follow the patterns of synonymous, antithetical, and synthetic parallelism.

As someone once said about proverbs, they are sometimes true. The point is that proverbs are neither promises nor absolute predictions. They are rather observations about life that ring true enough of the time that people pass them on with knowing looks and tell-tale winks.

The example of Proverbs 26:4-5 is often given to illustrate. Verse 4 says, "Do not answer a fool according to his folly." Then verse 5 says, "Answer a fool according to his folly." Obviously, both statements cannot be true for all situations if the words are being used in the same sense. They are worded to sound like opposite statements. Proverbs thus are not absolute philosophical assertions. They are broad statements that are generally rather than always true.

By their very nature, proverbs tend to be passed down anonymously. Who knows, for example, who first said, "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush"? Certain personalities collect and perpetuate proverbs, but they are not necessarily the ones who coined them. It is thus no surprise to find that the proverbs of 22:17-24:34 overlap extensively with a collection of Egyptian proverbs called the Instruction of Amen-em-ope, which dates from before 1000BC. Some collections of proverbs in Proverbs explicitly identify individuals other than Solomon as their sources (e.g., 30:1 and 31:1).

The first verse of Proverbs identifies king Solomon as the source of the book. Since parts of the book attribute proverbs to other individuals, such a heading apparently was not absolute. Traditionally, the bulk of Proverbs has been thought written down by Solomon. But since 1:1 refers to the proverbs as Solomon's, we might think of a later collector actually putting the sayings together. We then get into the same question we have seen elsewhere of whether ways of referencing material are central to the truthfulness of the material.

Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes is a fascinating, even if possibly depressing book at times. Like Proverbs, its heading points to Solomon as the author of the bulk of its material. And like Proverbs, many have questioned whether that is a matter of tradition or history. At the same time, the question of authorship seems a little different with Ecclesiastes than with Proverbs or the other Old Testament writings we have seen so far. The Pentateuch does not claim Moses as its author, nor do any of the individual psalms claim David as their author. Proverbs implies that much if not most of its material was passed on by Solomon but does not claim that Solomon was the actual editor of the proverbs.

But Ecclesiastes both frames its material in 1:1 and 12:9-14 as Solomon's. 1:12 has Solomon himself, the "Teacher," as the voice of the vast majority of the book. Ecclesiastes thus purports to be the very words of Solomon. We thus must either 1) take this attribution literally, 2) consider it a literary device, where someone is writing from the perspective they believe Solomon would take, or 3) consider the heading of 1:1 a mistaken understanding of who the "Teacher" was.

The similarity of some of Ecclesiastes to Epicurean thought at some points has led some to date it to the 200s BC, after Israel came under Greek rule to the north in Syria. But nothing in Ecclesiastes needs such a hypothesis to explain it. There are two Persian loan words that lead some scholars to date the book in its current form to the post-exilic period. Once again, different Christians will have different senses of what options are appropriate to consider.

One of the most noticeable features of Ecclesiastes is its seeming denial of any afterlife. It is thus has comments similar to those we have seen in Job and Psalms. But Ecclesiastes has some of the starkest language in this regard. "A living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing. They have no more reward, and even their memory is lost... never again will they have any part in everything that happens under the sun" (Eccl. 9:4-6).

Thankfully, the New Testament and later Jewish understanding have moved beyond this apparently sub-Christian view. The framer of Ecclesiastes, either the Teacher himself or an editor who added the beginning and ending, has a bottom line reaction to the words of the Teacher. "Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the all of humanity" (12:13). Certainly this bottom line remains fully appropriate as one way of summarizing Christian ethics for our time on earth.

Song of Solomon
This lovely piece of poetry was typically allegorized throughout Christian history as a parable of the relationship between Christ and the Church. Most now would recognize it as patent love poetry, whatever further theological meaning we might find in it as Christians. It also is attributed to Solomon in the first verse. And like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, some take this as tradition rather than history, pointing in particular to apparent Persian and Greek loan words that would not have existed in Solomon's day. Some believers will find it essential to defend Solomonic authorship, while others will find this quest tangential to this book read as Christian Scripture.

Harry Potter and Language Games

For whatever reason, my family follows Harry Potter closely. My two step-daughters are almost the age of the actors and actresses and so have grown up with them. When my youngest children are bored at a restaurant waiting for food, they often play "famous people" with the characters from Harry Potter a regular feature. My wife has already bought us all tickets for the 11:59pm showing Tuesday night and has been rereading the books and having Potter marathons in the evenings at home.

And I have to begrudgingly acknowledge that Rowling is quite brilliant. The narrative world she has created is phenomenally clever at point after point. I come at these movies with a little different lens since I consider myself a philosopher of language and not too shabby a narrative critic.

Last night we watched The Prisoner of Azkaban (the best, I think) and I turned off The Goblet of Fire just before the last challenge. There's a brilliant line from a philosophy of language standpoint in Goblet. Harry and Ron aren't speaking to each other, so at one point they have Hermione brokering a conversation.

Finally, exasperated, she exclaims, "I am not an owl!"

I love that line. In any normal conversation in the real world (read "language game"), it is completely meaningless. What do you mean? You're not wise? You don't stay up at night chasing rodents?

Rowling has successfully created an alternative universe, a narrative world. In the language games of that world, owls carry messages back and forth between people.

As I once said similarly of Jack Handy, frustrated at my own mediocrity, "She's a master!" Bill Patrick, are you out there?

Happy Birthday Calvin!

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, Dear Johnnie,
Happy birthday to you.

I'm a little late in the day, but three cheers for Calvin! He was one smart cookie.

1 Born at a Time and Place 1

I was delighted to receive a warm reception at Wesleyan Publishing House (WPH) not only possibly to write one book with life reflections on Paul, but to write two, as well as perhaps some Bible study material. I've designated Friday as my writing day on this project, and they were happy for me to do it publicly here on the blog. That means you can help steer things like tone and focus. What line of approach most interests you and would be most helpful/interesting to those in your congregation who like Bible study?

Another idea was to triangulate between WPH, our new seminary at IWU, and perhaps a church like College Wesleyan. The idea here is that at a time when some churches would ordinarily be having a Wednesday night or Sunday night service, perhaps even Sunday School, to crank up Adobe Connect so that churches could log on for a live Q & A with me over a week of the Bible study material.

Or I could even lead such an online hour of Bible study each week with PowerPoints, a talking head, and a chat feature. The church could put the webcast up on a screen at the front of the church and designate a person to type in chat questions. If someone wanted, we could give a certificate for finishing the Bible study, etc.

So here's a start. I'm thinking of dividing each chapter into two parts, the first of which has more to do with Paul and the second of which has more to do with life refections on Paul. Love to know what you think.

[By the way and completely unrelated, five days of my novel in progress are now posted :-)]

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1 Born at a Time and Place
It is hard to understand a person fully and what makes them tick if you do not know anything about their past. It would be nice to be able to take Paul out for coffee to ask him a few things, to fill in a few blanks. But thankfully, he has left us with three key passages where he gives us some personal information about himself: Philippians 3:4-6; 2 Corinthians 11:21-12:10; and Galatians 1:13-2:14.

We learn that Paul was a Jew. One significant difference between the way Paul likely understood himself and the way we understand ourselves has to do with how much of our identity we draw from the groups to which we belong. Westerners usually lean toward the "individualistic" side of the spectrum. That is to say, we identify ourselves far more in terms of how we are different from other people rather than in terms of those we are like. It was not so in Paul's world. In his world, your identity was primarily a function of the groups you were in rather than how you as an individual defined yourself.

As one scholar has put it, identity in the ancient Mediterranean world was primarily a function of three things: gender, geneaology, and geography. [1] Are you male or female (gender)? Where are you from and what is your ethnicity (geography)? What is your family like, its place in society and social status (genealogy)? We rightly question these sorts of stereotypes and pigeonholes today. They are the stuff of prejudice, and you could argue that our attempts to abandon them are a working out of gospel principles into the fabric of our society, although we have not completely arrived.

So if Western cultures tend--sometimes too much--toward the individualist, ancient and third world cultures have tended toward the "collectivist." Identity tends to be "group-embedded" rather than self-identified. For example, it is not surprising that marriages are often pre-arranged in group cultures, sometimes even before the children are born. When identity is primarily a function of "external" features like gender, family, and race, you know the compatibility of two people at birth. Two comparable families of the same race can pair up their children as long as they have a male and a female.

Today, we have such highly developed individual tastes and desires that we want to date to see if we are compatible. Will this other person make me happy? Will they really irritate me because they do not squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube or because they roll their toilet paper from the bottom. Most ancients spent their energies just trying to survive. They did not have the luxury and opportunity to worry about such trivial things. We often do not need each other to survive.

So Paul was a Jew. This was a significant statement of identity in his world. For an outsider, it meant he was wierd at the very least. "Why don't you eat pork," a Roman emperor once responded to a Jew who had waited months to see him about matters of life and death. [2] Jews were the ones who cut off the foreskins of their male children. What was up with that?! And they did no work from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, the day they called the "Sabbath." What was that all about?

For Paul growing up, though, it meant he was a part of God's chosen people. He was a member of the nation God had chosen out of all the nations of the earth to walk with and bless, if Israel would only keep His commandments (e.g., Deut. 32:8-9; 7:6-11). Paul was part of the nation to whom God had entrusted the "oracles of God," the Scriptures (Rom. 3:2). It was to Israel that God had given all the promises that had begun to take place in Christ (Rom. 9:4).

Since the early 100s, Christians have often had a skewed perspective on the Jews. We likely deserve some blame in various persecutions of Jews that have taken place over the centuries. Some of Martin Luther's comments on Jews in his later writings were atrocious, and it is not too surprising that the Holocaust took place in his Germany with significant support from many in the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches of his country at the time. [3]

Of course it would be equally wrong--indeed the same sin--to paint all the Germans of the day as anti-semitic. Germans like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rudolf Bultmann did not support Hitler. Bonhoeffer famously lost his life within months of the liberation of his prison for his opposition to Hitler. We will address some of the misconceptions of Judaism that persist to this day in the next chapter.

Paul calls himself a "Hebrew of Hebrews" (Phil. 3:5; cf. 2 Cor. 11:22), although interestingly he was not born in Jerusalem to some well established family of important Jews. He was born in Tarsus, in Asia Minor, according to Acts (e.g., 22:3). [4] To say he was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews” means that Aramaic was a first language for him and that his family was oriented around Aramaic-speaking Jerusalem. Yet all his letters are in Greek, and fluent Greek at that. He quotes as much from the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, as he does the original Hebrew.

In short, he has all the makings of a “wannabe,” someone whom others might easily put down as one of those "Diaspora" Jews scattered around the world. Someone might stereotype him as a Hellenistic Jew who spoke Greek instead of the Aramaic of the motherland. "No!" he might have protested in the days before he believed. "I am an Aramaic speaker like anyone in Jerusalem. In fact, I know Hebrew and read the Bible in the original language like the Pharisee and purist I am."

Whether this background accounts for some of Paul’s drive, we do not know. Did he spend a good deal of his early life trying to prove himself to those who looked down on him or dismissed him because of where he was born? If so, he would not be the first or the last to do so. Some of us spend our whole lives trying to prove ourselves to some phantom of our childhood that has long since passed.

Perhaps one casualty of this syndrome is Paul’s failure to mention anywhere in his writings that he was a Roman citizen, an honor very few in his world enjoyed. Was he a little ashamed of it? Was not Rome the political power that held sway over Jerusalem and the land of Israel? Would not the restoration of the land of Israel mean that the messiah would overcome the hold of Rome?

Even in Acts, Paul does not bring up his citizenship until Philippi, after he has suffered a beating and has spent a night in jail (16:37). Perhaps he finally sees that he can use his citizenship to his advantage in the spreading of the gospel. At the very least, he could use it to get out of a few beatings!

If Paul was a Roman citizen from birth, as Acts 22:28 indicates, it says some important things about him. It suggests that his family had some status. Paul did not pay for his citizenship or get granted citizenship by someone important. His family already had this status before he was born. Perhaps his grandfather made tents for Julius Caesar when he was traipsing around the Mediterranean chasing Pompey. Or perhaps he made tents for Pompey. In any case, some important Roman seems to have rewarded one of Paul's ancestors with the great honor of Roman citizenship.

It is thus possible that when Paul was back in Tarsus, he was much more like the owner of a tent-making or leatherworking business rather than a menial laborer himself. At one point in his letters, he seems to think of working with his hands as a kind of sacrifice for the sake of the gospel (1 Cor. 4:12). He had the kinds of means to be able to travel and leave his hometown behind. At some point he moves to Jerusalem, perhaps to live with his sister (Acts 23:16), and he studies with the Pharisees of his day.

And so he enters a quite different world than the one he was surrounded by as a child. If he had at least the beginnings of a Hellenistic "gymnasium" education, he now becomes a Pharisee. He no longer learns Homer and how to separate Greek syllables. Now he extends his knowledge of the Law, the Torah, and the traditions of the elders. We will think more about what it meant to be a Pharisee in the next chapter.

[1] As we move through Paul's life and letters, I will be suggesting the fifty or so books on Paul that a person might read to master Paul. Here let me mention the first: Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey's Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

[2] Philo of Alexandria had come to the emperor Caligula in the aftermath of a persecution against the Jews in AD38. The story is found in Philo's treatise, Embassy to Gaius.

[3] Especially Luthers, On the Jews and Their Lies.

[4] We only learn that Paul is from Tarsus in Acts, but we have no reason to question this claim. Some have questioned whether Acts was overstating things to call Paul a Roman citizen. The question of whether Jews were citizens was one of the things Philo brought as an issue to the emperor Caligula (see note 2).

Guide to American Christianity :-)

Baptists - American Christians

Pentecostals - Baptists who speak in tongues

Methodists - Insecure Baptists

Anabaptists - Baptists who don't fight back

Presbyterians - Baptists who read

Reformed - Elect Baptists

Lutherans - Baptists who baptize infants

Episcopalians - Baptists who completely disagree with everything Baptist

Catholics - European Christians who came to America

Orthodox - European Christians who didn't come to America

7. Critical Issues in the Psalms

Previous posts have included:

1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books
6. The Poetic Sub-Genre
_________
We have chosen to move through the Old Testament by way of its Christian rather than Jewish groupings. What are often called the "Poetic Books" of the Christian Old Testament are actually in the Writings of the Jewish Bible. They are not the only books in the Writings, but most of them lead off this division. Here we are speaking of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.

Types of Psalm
We have already encountered Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) for his form critical work in Genesis. His second claim to fame was his work in the Psalms. In particular, Gunkel suggested about five main types of psalm: 1) the hymn, 2) the community lament, 3) the individual lament, 4) the individual song of thanksgiving, and 5) the royal psalm, which Gunkel believed were about pre-exilic Israelite kings. In this list we can see once again his pre-occupation with the forms a psalm might take.

Gunkel further divided these categories into subcategories. For example, among royal psalms, he distinguished a) coronation hymns (Ps. 2, 110), b) a hymn for a royal wedding (Ps. 45), and c) hymn on the anniversary of a dynasty (Ps. 132). This type is of some interest to Christians since the New Testament generally read them in relation to Christ. Some have therefore called them "messianic" psalms.

Christian Interpretation
The distinction between thinking of a psalm as a "royal" psalm and thinking of it as a "messianic" psalm is very instructive. The earliest Christians engaged the books of Psalms and Isaiah more than any other parts of the Old Testament. But, as we will also see when we get to the Prophets, they did not always pay much attention to the original contexts of the texts through which they heard God's voice. This is again the distinction between a particular theological interpretation the early Christians read in the Psalms and the meaning one would infer when reading the Psalms inductively.

Thus Psalm 45 reads inductively as a wedding psalm for a king. Psalm 45:1 indicates the psalm is about a king. Verse 7 speaks of the anointing of the king at a particular time in the presence of the king's contemporaries. Verses 13-14 tell how the princess to be wed is in her chamber in lovely garments. Her virgin companions follow her as she enters the palace (45:14). Finally, verse 16 looks forward to the king having sons. Yet Hebrews 1:8-9 apply two verses in this psalm to Christ as exalted, eternal cosmic king.

From an inductive standpoint, nothing about the psalm suggests anything other than that this is a wedding psalm for a human king--that is, nothing except perhaps verse 6 that Hebrews quotes. In that verse, the king is addressed as "God": "your throne, O God, is forever and ever." Still, in the light of the Ancient Near East, it is scarcely surprising for a king to be considered divine in some representative or derivative sense. Indeed, God himself tells Moses in Exodus 7:1 that He has made him like god to Pharaoh.

This hermeneutic, this pattern of reading the Old Testament, turns out to be a fairly consistent New Testament practice. That is to say, the New Testament does not seem to read Old Testament texts by way of an inductive method that is concerned to read these texts in their original literary and historical contexts. They find different meanings in the texts than they originally had. We might say they read these texts in light of a "fuller sense" (sensus plenior) those words might take on when read Christianly. To be sure, some have gone to great lengths to argue that the original contexts of these texts were important to the New Testament authors. The individual student of the Bible will have to make up his or her own mind.

What is clear is that the earliest Christians saw Christ in these psalms. Indeed, in several cases, the early Christians read the "I" of a psalm as if Christ were speaking (e.g., Ps. 40:6-8 in Heb. 10:5-7). They might thus hear Psalm 22, a lament psalm, as the voice of Christ, perhaps following Jesus' own cue on the cross. Matthew and Mark remember Jesus quoting verse 1 on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" But this meaning for the psalm is a different meaning than its original meaning as an individual lament. Indeed, at some time the psalm was considered a "psalm of David."

Authorship and Date
With the Psalms, we face similar authorship issues to those we face in relation to the Pentateuch and Isaiah. The New Testament and Jesus material in the gospels refer to several psalms as if David were author. In more than one instance, Davidic authorship of a certain psalm is key to the point Jesus or the New Testament author was making. As such, these instances raise starkly the question of what truthfulness might mean in the "intra-biblical" use of other biblical texts. The New Testament language of David sometimes goes beyond a merely conventional way of referring to the Psalms.

Perhaps the issue is best presented by looking at how Jesus uses Psalm 110:1 in argument, one of Gunkel's royal psalms. In Mark 12:35-37 and its parallels, Jesus poses a question by way of this text: "The LORD said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand.'" Jesus assumes in his question that David is the writer, and David is saying that the "LORD," Yahweh, is saying something to the Messiah, the "Lord." If David calls the Messiah, "Lord," Jesus asks, then how is the Messiah David's son?

From a contextual, historical, and inductive standpoint, however, we would not naturally read Psalm 110 in this way. The very concept of a coming king most obviously would have arisen in the absence of a human king, in longing for God to raise up a king to restore the fortunes of Israel and restore a Davidic king to its throne. We see the concept develop most in the century or so immediately before Jesus. Historically, it is difficult to think of David having any concept of this sort of "anointed one" at all, which is what messiah means. After all, David was the anointed one of that sort at that time!

From an inductive standpoint, the most obvious reading of Psalm 110:1 is that of an anonymous psalmist speaking of Yahweh addressing the human king of Israel or Judah. The "LORD," Yahweh, enthrones the "Lord," the earthly, human king. God promises to empower the king to have victory over the nation's enemies.

Again, it would not be surprising in itself to find Jesus reading this Old Testament text in a different way from what it originally meant. We find over and over that the New Testament interpreted the Old in this way. But in this particular instance, the very point of Jesus' question seems to ride on David being the speaker in Psalm 110. Is it enough that Jesus' point (or the New Testament point) be true, even if it comes by way of a format and line of argument that is based on assumptions we do not have? Was Jesus teasing his opponents, following through assumptions of theirs he knew weren't true? The individual believer will have to work out what they believe is acceptable.

Most would accept that the psalm headings should be treated separately from the psalm texts themselves. That is to say, a heading mentioning "Asaph" represents later tradition and was not a title put on the psalm at the time it was written. The Hebrew usually says "to Asaph," which is a little ambiguous in itself. Perhaps we are to take the heading to mean something like "attributed" to Asaph.

The psalms do not clearly come from a single period of Israel's history. For example, Psalm 137 clearly was written during the years of Israel's captivity in Babylon (586-539BC). While some scholars do date psalms like Psalm 110 to the time of the Maccabeans in the second century BC, it is reasonable to date the royal psalms to the pre-exilic period, since that is when Israel and Judah had kings. Certainly the Psalms will have taken on their current form at some point in the post-exilic period, when they perhaps became the "hymn book" of the second temple.

Insights into History and Culture
Psalms study in the early twentieth century saw numerous attempts to relate the psalms to various moments in the worship and temple life of pre-exilic Israel. Perhaps the most prominent name here is that of Sigmund Mowinkel (1884-1965). He famously argued that the royal psalms Gunkel called "coronation" or enthronement psalms had featured at a yearly new year "Festival of Yahweh," where Yahweh as ritually re-enthroned as king of the cosmos (cf. Judg. 21:19).

Much of his proposal was clearly speculative. But he does provide a nice segway into the fact that the Psalms do seem at various points to interact with elements of Canaanite myth. One of the best known works on this subject, focusing primarily on Genesis however, is Frank Moore Cross' (1921-present) Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.

The most likely interaction of the Psalms with contemporary myth is in Psalm 74 and 89. The first reminds us of the Babylonian creation story the Enuma Elish, where the God Marduk destroys the sea monsters of chaos in creation. So in Psalm 74:13-14, God breaks the heads of sea monsters, including "Leviathan." In Ugaritic literature, a related language of Israel's context, Lothan is one of the primordial chaos monsters as well. "Leviathan" and "Lothan" are the same basic word in these languages, sharing the same fundamental letters. They are thus quite possibly two versions of the same figure from contemporary stories.

Psalm 89 similarly speaks of Yahweh crushing "Rahab," also a figure of chaotic waters as perhaps in Genesis 1:2. We do not in any way have to assume that the respective psalmists took all these images literally. They read very well as poetic pictures of Yahweh's power. It is noteworthy, however, that the psalmist had no qualms about using such imagery from contemporary myth.

Psalm 82, as Psalm 89, pictures the other gods of the other nations as part of a divine council in which Yahweh is the supreme deity, an image not unlike the picture we might get of a Zeus presiding over the gods of Olympus (82:1, 6; 89:6-7). However literally the psalmist understood such pictures, we remember again that Israel at least in the pre-exilic period seems to have been henotheistic rather than monotheistic in the proper sense. They seem to have believed that other gods like Dagon and Ba'al existed. They just did not believe they came anywhere close to the power of El Elyon, the "Most High God," nor were they properly to be worshipped.

3.4 Multiple Services and Sites

As I often do, I send off a proposal and then let my mind wander. But I'm very close to finishing another chapter of my proposed book Generous Ecclesiology. Chapter 3 is titled, "How and Where We Meet" and I have written three posts in the chapter here on previous Mondays:

3.1 Houses and Synagogues
3.2 Cathedrals and Homes
3.3 Saturdays and Sundays

So here's the final installment to this chapter.
_________
We have argued in this chapter that the early church generally met on Sundays to celebrate Jesus' resurrection and that Christian Jews probably continued to worship on the Saturday Sabbath. Most assemblies probably met in houses, but we have no basis to say that all of them did. The long and short of it is that the New Testament does not lay down hard and fast rules for any of these things. Far from telling us where and when we have to meet, the New Testament does not even suggest that the early churches had hard and fast practices themselves.

One take away from all this discussion is that we can welcome the great creativity that churches today are showing in how and when they meet. Certainly nothing stops us from having the now tried and true meetings in church buildings on a Sunday morning. There is something to say for having a default. When the apostle Paul went to a new city, he could count on finding a synagogue gathering of some sort on Saturday. Similarly, there is something to be said for being able to find a worship service on Sunday morning when you are visiting a city you have never visited before!

But starting new services at new sites or even church "plants" are usually a sign of a growing, flourishing community of faith. Indeed, in some instances, the "core" congregation has so dwindled and is so anemic that grafting in a new branch in a second service or site may be the only way for that church to survive. That dying church whose neighborhood now looks completely different than the few still coming might do well to allow those in the community to start an afternoon, evening, or other day of the week service in your church building. That older congregation watching its grandchildren go elsewhere might do well to have a second service with a music and worship style they themselves cannot stand.

One thing that the house church movement has recognized so well--and that even mega-churches like Willow Creek have even come to realize--is that Christians do not usually grow if their only real "Christ time" is in a large group of people one hour on a Sunday morning. Even beyond "personal devotions," Christians need to be engaging other believers in small enough groups for accountability and the synergy of the Holy Spirit to take place. You cannot be a lone Christian for long under most normal circumstances before you wither away.

Such small groupings of Christians can take place in all kinds of different ways. The Sunday School and Wednesday night "prayer meeting" were unique American ways to create this important discipleship dynamic. Today we have cell groups meeting in homes, Starbucks, or wherever the group in question feels most comfortable.

John Wesley, the father of Methodism, had smaller accountability groups where the members allowed others to ask them the most intimate of questions. Are any sins ruling over you, either in your outward living or in your inward thinking? There was no "cheap grace" or sloppy excuses for someone who really had no interest or intention of allowing God's Spirit to help them grow. There was an optimism that God could and would give them the strength to defeat temptation in their lives when it might come.

It is hard to imagine any truly healthy Christian not longing for this sort of growth. And it is hard to imagine this sort of growth taking place if a person is not willing to submit to the loving accountability of the body of Christ. Willow Creek found out that this sort of growth will not likely take place in a large "seeker sensitive" service where the sermon and worship is primarily aimed at inviting those outside the church in. Discipleship and maturation are normally the stuff of smaller groups of believers. Here we remember that the entire church of Corinth, to which Paul addresses 1 and 2 Corinthians, probably consisted of less than 50 people who could fit in a single home.

Starting worship groups in other places and times allows the church to be in the community even before the community comes to the church. We resist the trend of some today who seem to think that the "church" need never be in the church, so to speak, whether the church be in its own building or in a home. The church is not the world, and from the New Testament till today Christians have always made a distinction between one who believes and one who does not yet believe. While God will decide the eternal fate of us all, there is a distinction between "not yet in the church" and "in the church," and the church is "in the world but not of the world." To think otherwise is to depart from what Christians have believed for two thousand years. We'll see what staying power the new trend in thinking has!

At the same time, certain cultural trends in America afford us some great possibilities today. In a pre-modern, traditional context, we might have assumed that there was only one right way to worship--our way or the way our tradition had always done it. "We've always done it this way." In the modernist era, we became ecumenical. We wanted a worship service that appealed to everyone. And in the process, we watered down that same single service to where it was blase and appealed to no one.

In a post-modern context, for lack of a better word, we can have multiple services with multiple styles. No longer is there any reason for a younger preacher to alienate an older congregation by making them abandon the hymns they so much enjoy. One group likes clapping and saying "Amen." Another likes to speak in tongues and have spontaneous prophecy. Another likes to say the liturgy Christians have spoken for most of these last two thousand years. Another likes to run the aisles shouting during a testimony time.

There is no basis for any of these groups de-Christianizing or de-spiritualizing each other any more than there was when the church of Corinth so long ago played the "I'm more spiritual than you are game." In a post-modern context, we not only can have different churches with different styles, all of whom serve our Lord with their whole heart. But in our context we are free to have different worship styles going on in the same congregation.

My own church, College Wesleyan Church in Marion, Indiana, has two services and up to six or seven venues every week. The first service has a main congregation that leans toward the older generation. They sing hymns and have typical American evangelical worship as it was in the sixties and seventies. At the same time, there is an ancient-future service in the chapel where we say the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer, take communion, and have open prayer surrounding the very same sermon, which is piped in on video feed at the appropriate time.

The second service is more contemporary, with songs the older crowd have never heard before. The songs go on a lot longer than most of the older people like--the music is as much or more the focus than the sermon. And they stand the whole time they are singing!

During the first and second services, there is a 30-40 something age service where they sit at round tables, drink coffee, sing guitar music, and have discussion questions around their tables before the same sermon is also brought to them on video feed. There is an evening service at 7:47pm for college students. There are services for teenagers where testimonies are given. Certainly most churches do not have enough resources to do this much, but most churches could do more than they are currently doing to let the good news of Christ take on whatever form speaks most to those they are starting with and those in their community who might hear God's voice through them.

So diversity of worship is far from a bad thing. Hopefully we will only move further and further away from the days where each group insisted that their way was the only right way at the only right place and time. And hopefully we can move beyond the "unity in diversity" view that melts down everything to vanilla, where we try to find the common denominator between everyone coming and only worship in that way at that place and time. We are now in a world of "identity within diversity," where we have our worship at our time and place in our way--we know who we are. But we worship alongside others who worship in other ways at other times and places.

And we think as highly of them as we think of ourselves. We know that we are serving the same Lord!

Two New Schenck Blogs

Yes, I know, I have way too many blogs on my dashboard. Most of them are ones I created for classes I was teaching. Blogger has a new feature where you can export a blog, so at some point I'll go through and save those old class things and delete the old blogs.

Anyway, two new blogs:

1. Wesleyan Seminary Blog
I probably won't continue to call it that after the name of the new seminary is officially announced, but it works for now. I'll be posting weekly seminary development updates there, deo volente, on Monday mornings. Mine will likely be of an academic nature as there may eventually be a more macro seminary blog.

The first post is up on the blog.

2. Novel Blog: Fragmented Chaos
I have started I don't know how many novels. It has to be about 30. I'm a fair story teller, especially with children... probably not as good a novel writer.

Anyway, I had this idea of posting a page of a novel a day on a blog, but no more than a chapter at a time. Then I thought I would have a link for those who were willing to donate a few pennies to read more than was posted ("fragments to date"). So I monetized the above blog.

I have about 50 pages of material already (so I wouldn't have to do much new on it for about two months), based on a novel I started a while back called H2 O2. Anyway, the first chapter is already uploaded and scheduled to post one page a day for the next 6 days. Assuming the system is working, you can donate 99 cents to get the whole week's chapter through PayPal right now. If anyone is foolhearty enough to do it, I'd love to know if it works.

:-)

6. The Poetic Sub-Genre (Critical Issues Series)

Darrell Pursiful has suggested these posts be cataloged (Thanks for the plug! I hope to get them published as a short guide too). So here are the posts in the series so far:

1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch
5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books

As an illustration of my frustration with myself, I dug up a copy of Ronald Clements' 1976 book A Century of Old Testament Study to help me with some OT issues. I think it was one of a few books I took to Sierra Leone, West Africa, when I was there for a couple months in the winter of 97 (not a great time to be in the country, if you remember what happened there in the spring). Typical of me, I noticed this afternoon that I have underlined things throughout the book.

I remember none of it.
_________
Strangely, it was apparently not until the time of Robert Lowth (1710-87) that anyone seems to have pointed out the secret to understanding Hebrew poetry. You will notice, for example, that the King James Version of 1611 and even the current revision of 1769 do not have the Psalms or relevant passages of the Prophets in poetic form, as most modern translations do. While stereotypical poetry in recent centuries rhymes sounds, and while classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry followed a certain meter, ancient Hebrew poetry "rhymed" thought.

The secret to Hebrew poetry is thus parallelism, "say it; say it again" or "say it; say the opposite." Although various scholars have proposed refinements on the various categories of parallelism, the simplest categorization admits of three basic types.

Synonymous parallelism is of the type, "say it; say it again."

"Create in me a clean heart, O God,
And renew a right spirit within me.

"Cast me not away from your presence,
And do not take your Holy Spirit from me" (Ps. 51:10-11).

In the lines above, you can see that the second line in each stanza "rhymes" or parallels the thought of the first in a roughly synonymous way. Recognizing the generally synonymous nature of parallel lines can be a great help in interpretation.

Antithetical parallelism is of the type, "say it; say the opposite."

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
Fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Prov. 1:7).

In this case, the second line says roughly the opposite of the first. We can thus possibly infer that a "fool" here is not a stupid or ignorant person but a person whose attitude toward God is wrong.

Synthetic parallelism was the category into which Lowth lumped other instances of Hebrew poetry that neither were roughly synonymous or antithetical. In many such instances the next line or lines extend the thought.

"Know that the LORD,
He is God!
It is He who has made us,
And we are His.
We are His people,
And the sheep of His pasture" (Ps. 100:3).

Notice how each line seems to extend or in some cases complete the thought of the line before.

Various subcategories of the above are often mentioned (e.g., step parallelism, introverted parallelism, etc.). Such categorizations are far more meaningful to us as catgorizers than helpful in interpretation. They are categorizations of form that describe the artfulness of the text but do not contribute much to our understanding of meaning. The general breakdown into three general headings seems sufficient for us to know how to interpret Hebrew poetry.

Happy Independence Day!

May this day of remembering the great privileges of living in the United States, as well as what good things it has contributed to the world, be grand for all who chance across this post!

Are we perfect? Certainly not. Are we more righteous than all other nations? A horrible question even to ask! But everyone has a family, and I love mine, warts and all. Cheers to the good parts, therapy to those we can rehabilitate, and prison for those who refuse to follow the social contract :-)

I am deeply grateful and privileged to be an American.

By the way, happened across an irritating piece on Christian radio on the way to the store today. The guest was giving a lovely piece of special pleading for Benjamin Franklin as a righteous man. Don't get me wrong. I am fond of Franklin and admire him in very many ways.

But I would never spin him as this godly, almost a Christian man, who might have believed on Jesus if only someone had shared the gospel with him before he reached his 80s. The guest's reading of this Letter to Ezra Stiles was a glorious exhibition of civil religious spin.

I stand corrected on the certainty, but it was at least strongly rumored in his day that Franklin was a womanizer, particularly in France with various women, while his wife stayed behind in America. His suspicions of Jesus' divinity were not some unthought through off the cuff answer. He was a child of his age and not close to a Christian in any historic sense and certainly not in any evangelical sense.

There was much of good to this man... but don't try to spin him as a Christian.

5. Critical Issues in the Historical Books

Previous posts include:

1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch
4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch

We mentioned in the second section on the Old Testament Canon that the books we currently call the "Historical Books" actually incorporate books from two quite different sections of the Jewish Bible. The books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are the "Former Prophets" of the Hebrew Bible. Meanwhile, Ruth, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther were part of the Writings, the third part of the Jewish Bible. Ruth and Esther in particular were two of five scrolls in the Writings collectively known as the Megilloth.

Composition
Since the days of Martin Noth (1902-68), it has been conventional to call the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings the deuteronomistic history. Prior to this time, individuals like Wellhausen and others had noticed how smoothly Deuteronomy flowed into Joshua and so had spoken of the "Hexateuch," including Joshua as part of the same final product as the Pentateuch, drawing on the same J and E sources. Indeed, some scholars believed the original epics of Israel went all the way from parts of Genesis to parts of Kings.

Noth's suggestion went rather the other way, namely, that Genesis through Numbers formed a kind of Tetrateuch and then that Deuteronomy was a quite different document that served as a kind of a preface to the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. He believed that the same person who wrote the opening chapters of Deuteronomy was the final editor of the deuteronomistic history.

As with other source debates, the conversation has continued in the years since, with some suggesting that the deuteronomistic history went through at least two major revisions, beyond the use of previous sources such as a collection of David material and so forth. Theorizing about such things has not faced much resistance because these books do not have a traditional author that the New Testament mentions. In general, the New Testament does not engage these writings as much as they do Genesis, the Psalms, and Isaiah.

Theology
The "deuteronomistic history" is so called in part because it interprets history according to a certain theology, namely, the theology of Deuteronomy. Some of the key features of this deuteronomistic theology are 1) a sense that as long as Israel keeps God's commandments, God will bless them in their land, 2) that if Israel does not appropriately serve Yahweh, they will be cursed and become enslaved to foreign powers, and 3) that part of obeying Yahweh's commands involved offering sacrifices to Him only in the place He would put His name, namely, Jerusalem and its temple. This same theology is also associated with the book of Jeremiah.

We thus find throughout these books that Israel only loses in battle if someone has disobeyed God's commandments in some way. Similarly, none of the kings of the north can by definition be good kings, because none of them offer sacrifices to Yahweh in Jerusalem. We also find operative the idea that the sins of the fathers can be visited on the children. This is particularly noticeable when Josiah, the most righteous king of all (from a deuteronomistic standpoint), is unable to offset the sins of his long dead father Manasseh, whose unrighteousness sends Judah into exile (and not the sins of the actual generation that suffers).

This theological perspective seems to be sub-Christian, as the New Testament and indeed other parts of the Old Testament itself (like Job) teach that a righteous person can suffer. Indeed, it seems difficult to account for Jesus' suffering purely on the basis of deuteronomistic theology. Herein is an argument that the books of the Old Testament are in a flow of revelation, and the books of the Jewish Bible are not yet Christian Scripture until they are read through Christian eyes and in the light of further revelation.

History
There persists to this day a collection of scholars, many of them ironically Jewish, whom we might call biblical minimalists. Such individuals might deny that there ever actually was a king named David or Solomon. On the other hand, recent archaeological discoveries would seem to put the existence of David on secure evidentiary ground.

Nevertheless, we are sorely lacking in archaeological evidence to confirm the historicity of much of the Historical Books. As it is often said, however, "absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." For example, when John Garstang (1876-1956) excavated Jericho, the science of archaeology was still in its infancy. His team blew through thousands of years of dirt without carefully cataloging it and discarding most of it in a pile that stands to this day.

When he arrived at an impressive structure, he assumed it was the ruins of Jericho from Joshua's invasion. Even to this day you occasionally hear someone hail Jericho as one of the great confirmations of the historicity of the Bible. However, the subsequent archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon (1906-78) determined that the structure dated to about 3000BC. The layer from the time when Joshua would have lived is thus lost to Garstang's rubble.

Again, you will find differing senses among Christians of how important the precise historicity of such individuals and events are, ranging from those for whom it is essential for all the historical of details of the Historical Books to be accurate, to those who think the theological import of the stories is what is important. Each believer must wrestle with such questions in the context of their relationship with God.

Chronicles
The ending of Chronicles makes it clear that it was written in the post-exilic period. Chronicles covers the same territory as 2 Samuel and Kings, so it is fairly easy to see the theological emphases of its author at work. For example, Chronicles clearly has a much greater interest in the Levitical priesthood and in priestly matters by far than Kings did. It seems to reflect a time when the temple had become the center of Israel's political life, while the kings were more likely the center in the memory of Kings.

Other theological shifts are evident as well. For example, 2 Samuel 24:1 says that God incited David to number the people of Israel and Judah. But in 1 Chronicles 21:1, it is the Satan who does so. Like Job, Chronicles has developed a sense of the Satan as a servant of God who goes around testing the loyalty of people to God. Chronicles thus gives us a moment a little further along in the flow of revelation than Samuel, at least on the subject of the Satan.

Ezra-Nehemiah
Ezra-Nehemiah is a single book in the Hebrew Bible, and the storyline picks up where Chronicles left off. Some have suggested that Ezra returned after Nehemiah, but the majority opinion is that the returns took place in the current order of the two books: Ezra first, then Nehemiah a little over ten years later.

Esther
The book of Esther poses some interesting issues in relation to the canon. For example, it is one of only two books of which no trace at all was found among the Qumran documents. It seems reasonable to assume that it was not a part of the Essene canon.

Indeed, it poses some interesting theological issues. It is the only book of the Old Testament that does not use the word "God." And Esther's apparent sexual cooperation with a pagan, Gentile king as one of many candidates, clearly created issues for later Jews. It is no surprise that the Greek translation of Esther includes a number of additions and revisions that soften these issues. It is this version of Esther that is considered Scripture by the Orthodox, and these expansions are in the Roman Catholic Bible as well.

Death of Martin Hengel

I was sad to see on Jim West's blog that Martin Hengel has died. What a wonderful and enjoyable man he was! He was a model of a person with warm hearted faith who nevertheless didn't play games with the evidence. What is it about the European evangelical community that is free of the quasi-fundamentalist politics of the ETS scene?

Aside from his always painstaking and ever thorough scholarship, I think most of his work, first, on Judaism and Hellenism. It was his work more than any other that put to death the absolute distinction people used to make between Hebrew and Greek thought. Good grief, Palestine had been hellenized for over 300 years before Jesus was even born.

Then there was his work on John, The Johannine Question. While this book has not commanded as much attention as Raymond Brown's, it made consummate sense to me when I first read it. It's on my top five list of books on John you need to read.

Hengel would not have known me, but I have delightful memories of four brief intersections with his person. One was while I was a teaching fellow at Asbury and we went to see him in Louisville (that was before Albert Mohler destroyed Louisville Southern Baptist Seminary, a place I wouldn't recommend now to my pet rat, if I had one). My good friend Bill Patrick still teases me that I answered "Yes" when Hengel asked me if I was German. As it turns out, I was born in America (and in the meantime, I now know that my great grandfather was from Holland).

A second is a delightful memory of sitting on the steps of the Stiftskirche in Tübingen during a semester of research there. (The kebabs in Tübingen are sehr ausgezeichnet, and there was a lovely little hole in the wall that sold them right next to the church) As I sat there thinking mediocre thoughts, Martin Hengel wandered across the cobbled stones in front, looking absent mindedly at something or another. Cool, I thought to myself. What a privileged life I lead.

A third was during a symposium at Durham where I was privileged to sit on the sidelines while the big dogs gave papers that would be eventually published as Paul and the Mosaic Law, a must read, indeed a good starting place on the topic of Paul and the Jewish Law. I remember Hengel coming up to a table where I was sitting at supper and interrupting a conversation with Dunn, I believe and a few other notables. Gushing forth with the topic obsessing him, he blurted out something about Luke breaking up the Sermon on the Mount--"I can't imagine that he would be able to break up such a masterpiece" or something like that. I believe he was working at that time on The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Hengel would always say that he got a late start on the study of the Bible, since it had been his second career. He had started out as a businessman. So he would say he had to work doubly hard to make up for lost time. Of course he did more of scholarly worth in his first five years than I'll do my entire life.

His wife went along with him on most of his ventures and even participated in discussions every once and a while. She clearly engaged his every thought and was a true partner. My greatest sympathies to her, as she has no doubt lost a more than best friend. She was with him the last time I was in a room where he was, at a conference in Chicago. My wife Angie and I drove up to the University of Chicago to hear him and others speak. She was sad to hear of his death.

I've almost given up on engaging in that world. My life has taken a different direction. But I mourn with the scholarly world today.

4. Critical Issues in the Pentateuch

Previous posts include:

1. Faith, Evidence, and Biblical Scholarship
2. The Old Testament Canon
3. Genres in the Pentateuch

Some of the earliest firestorms in biblical studies centered on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The reason they created such controversy was not only because they called the historicity of these books into question but also because they came at a time when some of the most fundamental ways of looking at Christian faith were being challenged from every side. All in all, there are four basic responses we might make to these issues.

The first and the last were those taken respectively by fundamentalists and modernists in the early twentieth century. Modernists largely reformulated what Christian faith they had around being a good person and denied the supernatural element of the Pentateuch and the Bible in general. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, focused--one might even say reformulated their Christian faith around defending the historicity of the biblical texts tooth and nail.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, two additional gradations present themselves. The one might accept the general historicity of the Pentateuchal accounts, while not being overly concerned with variations that might result from the use of sources or in the variations of oral tradition. Another largely ignores the historical issues altogether, finding the Scriptural import of the text in the theological meaning and significance Christians have ascribed to the texts.

Source criticism
Source criticism is that branch of biblical studies that asks what written sources might have been used by various books of the Bible. It has been applied in particular to the Pentateuch in the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the New Testament. In theory, God clearly could inspire a person to edit sources just as easily as to inspire a completely new writing. Nevertheless, the idea of sources behind various biblical writings initially encountered strong resistance, particularly in relation to the Pentateuch.

We can suggest several reasons why source criticism of the Pentateuch has encountered such strong resistance. Perhaps the most obvious is that source criticism has generally tended to diminish to one degree or another the historicity of the Pentateuchal narratives. In itself, the idea of sources would not need to imply that the final form of the text was not fully historical. But the way the discussion of the Pentateuch proceeded in the 1800s led in this direction, especially the form it took in the theory of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).

A second reason is the fact that the New Testament, including Jesus in the gospels, seems to think of Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (e.g., Luke 24:44). Most of these instances are referential rather than substantial, meaning that they might simply be taken as ways of referring to material in the Pentateuch in the categories of Jesus' day. However, Pentateuchal source criticism--especially as Wellhausen developed it--has tended to go further to suggest that the bulk of the material about Moses is not historical either, especially the sacrificial material.

Wellhausen is usually the target of attacks on the documentary hypothesis, the idea that certain documents have been spliced together to form the five current books of the Pentateuch. But the idea in various forms had been around for well over a century before he published his version of the idea in 1878. For example, W. M. L. de Wette (1780-1849) had earlier suggested that the "book of the Law" found in 2 Kings 22:8 was a portion of Deuteronomy rather than the entire Pentateuch.

Whether one agrees with this suggestion or not, it is easy enough to see why de Wette suggested it. The phrase "book of the Law" does not appear anywhere in Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers. In Exodus, we find only the expression "book of the covenant" used once, and it seems to refer only to the legislation from Exodus 21-23 (cf. Exod. 24:7), presumably given while Israel is still at Mt. Sinai in the desert.

At the same time, if one takes a statement like Deuteronomy 31:26 as a literal presentation of history, then Moses is speaking about putting the "book of the Law" in the ark of the covenant, and this is forty years later in time. But if he is saying this about a book, then the part of Deuteronomy telling about him saying it could not be part of the book he is talking about. de Wette took this statement as a presentation of history and so concluded the book of the Law was a portion of Deuteronomy.

It is primarily the book of Joshua (e.g., 1:8) and 2 Kings where this phrase "book of the Law" is used. And Joshua 1 follows closely on the heals of Deuteronomy 34. Following an inductive method, it is at least understandable why de Wette saw 2 Kings 22:8 primarily referring to a portion of Deuteronomy. Only Deuteronomy mentions such a book in relation to some of its own content. So before Wellhausen, de Wette had argued that there was a source behind the Pentateuch that consisted of a portion of the book of Deuteronomy.

Another idea that preceded Wellhausen was that there are distinct sources behind the Pentateuchal narratives based on the name for God used in particular passages. For example, God tells Moses in Exodus 6:3 that He did not reveal himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by his name Yahweh. Instead, He revealed himself as El Shaddai. When we turn back to the patriarchal narratives, the stories of the fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we interestingly find some stories that refer to God as Yahweh and other stories that refer to God as Elohim, the more generic word for God in Hebrew.

Again, regardless of what one concludes, it is easy enough to see why some scholars of the Old Testament came to the conclusion that there was a Yahweh source and at least one Elohim source that Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers had edited into one storyline. The idea is that in the Elohim version, God is not called Yahweh until Exodus 6. In the Yahweh version, on the other hand, God is called Yahweh from the very beginning. Only occasionally do we find a passage where both names are used in the same pericope or section.

As an example of this line of thinking, Genesis 15 and 16 refer consistently throughout the two chapters to God as Yahweh. The LORD (the way God's proper name is usually translated into English) promises Abram will have numerous descendants. Sarai follows common Ancient Near Eastern practice and suggests Abram have a child by Hagar, which he does. Then when we get to Genesis 17:1, God now calls himself El Shaddai. Once again, God promises Abraham that he will have numerous descendants. Sarah laughs at the thought of having a child at the age of 99, and so forth.

Genesis 15-17 flows fine as a single narrative, but we can see from it what some scholars prior to Wellhausen were thinking. They considered Genesis 15 and 16 largely to come from an epic of Israel's story that used the word Yahweh consistently for God. They called this source "J" because these thinkers were mostly German, and Yahweh is spelled Jahweh in German (although pronounced similarly to the English). Meanwhile, they saw Genesis 17 as part of a different epic that had God call himself "El Shaddai," or "God Almighty" to Abraham, only to reveal himself later to Moses as Yahweh. They called this source "E" for Elohim.

[chart breaking out supposed J and E sources in the Flood story]

From the above discussion, it is clear that Wellhausen's work was really much more of a synthesis and systematic presentation of ideas that had already been around prior to him. He followed others in proposing that the Pentateuch was the result of four basic sources edited together. Two were epics of Israel's history, one of which used Elohim for God up till the point of Moses (E2) and the other of which used Yahweh throughout (J). D was then some form of the book of Deuteronomy.

Finally, Wellhausen suggested that another source that used "Elohim" for God represented the work of a later editor who contributed most of the priestly material in Leviticus and so forth. The scholars that followed Wellhausen called this source "P" for priestly, although Wellhausen himself did not. It was probably this suggestion, more than any other, that fueled opposition to Wellhausen.

Although he did not originate the idea that this so called P source was a later priestly editor, Wellhausen argued for the notion more than any had before him. Earlier scholars had accepted the idea of another Elohim source of this sort, but they had argued it was early. By arguing it was one of the latest sources, Wellhausen basically implied that none of the sacrificial legislation of Leviticus actually went back to Moses.

Again, whether we agree with this theory or not, we can see why Wellhausen drew this conclusion. So much of the sacrificial element of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy seems completely absent from Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Wellhausen's first writing was on Samuel, so he particularly noticed its absence. So he concluded that sacrificial legislation did not exist at the time. The other possibility is of course to see this teaching as largely ignored by Israel until the time of Josiah.

The letters JEDP have long since become synonymous with Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis. Of course those who believe there to have been sources of this sort have not simply reproduced Wellhausen's ideas these last hundred thirty years. The idea of an "E" epic has often been questioned, and the "holiness codes" of Leviticus are not usually considered part of some P document in later scholarship. So while the idea of sources continues, current theories look significantly different from Wellhausen's famed suggestion.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this section, Christians react differently to these suggestions. Some will deny the idea of sources altogether, arguing that any editing done was either done by Moses or was done using Mosaic sources. Others will insist that, whatever sources might stand behind the Pentateuch, its essential historicity is intact. Still others, as we mentioned, find questions of historicity tangential to the essential meaning of the Pentateuch as Christian Scripture.

Form Criticism
In the early twentieth century, a number of Old and New Testament scholars at least recognized that before the stories about Abraham and Moses were written down, they would have been passed along as oral tradition. Although this was a great insight, it was not profitably pursued at the time. It has only been in the last couple decades that the idea has begun to pay off.

In the early twentieth century, an inordinate amount of attention was given to various forms that oral tradition allegedly took. The study of such forms was called form criticism, as if the ancients only used certain "templates" when they told stories of various kinds. It was a similar kind of thinking that led Adolph Jülicher (1857-1938) to suggest that Jesus could only have told parables that had one point, because that was--he argued--the form of a parable. Parables with more than one point could thus not truly go back to Jesus, at least not in the form they appeared in the gospels.

Nevertheless, the suggestion that we might find in the Pentateuch or synoptic gospels different versions of the same original story is not ridiculous. Whether in the end we agree or not, it is curious that we find three versions of a very similar storyline in Genesis involving a patriarch, his wife, and a king. So we find Abraham telling Sarah to pretend she is his sister to Pharaoh (Gen. 12:10-20 in a text that uses Yahweh). We find Abraham telling Sarah to pretend she is his sister to Abimelech (Gen. 20:1-17 in a text that uses Elohim, and Sarah is at least 90 years old). And we find Isaac telling Rebekah to pretend she is his sister to Abimelech (Gen. 26:6-11).

Form critics like Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) suggested that these were all versions of the same oral tradition. He suggested that the earliest form of the story was that of the lesser known individuals Isaac and Rebekah in relation to Abimelech. But then the story gravitated to the better known Abraham and Sarah and then from Abimelech to the better known Pharaoh.

The way one reacts to ideas of this sort will depend on how important one considers exact historicity for God to speak authoritatively and truthfully through the biblical text. For some, it is essential to consider each of these three versions distinct historical events. For others, it will matter little whether they are three versions of the same oral tradition or not. Each Christian will have to work out their own sense of what the limits of inspiration are.

Seminary Vision (7-2-09): Leading Edge

The final of the IWU Seminary videos is "leading edge." I've been providing further commentary along with the videos. Here are the links to the commentary, and each video on YouTube is further linked there:

Missional
Communal
Integrated
Spiritually Enriching
Personalized
Economical

The final video is on the Leading Edge aspect to our degree.

1. As I thought about what is leading edge about our seminary, really, all of the items on the above list fall into that category. A couple of them are now fairly common, although they weren't 10 years ago. For example, the fact that you don't have to move somewhere for three years--or even for one--is a new innovation that has saved the very existence of seminaries. You can do 2/3 of the degree online and the other third by coming to campus for 1 week intensives. Thanks to Asbury for pioneering much of this.

2. Asbury gives good training to its online profs. By the same token, Indiana Wesleyan has really perfected adult education both online and at satellite sites. We use the cohort model, where you take a sequence of courses in a particular order with the same group of fellow students. The model of course creation is usually three stage: 1) course content is generated by content experts, 2) the content is put into instructional form by pedagogical experts, which then is 3) taught by good facilitators.

This process in itself is a leading edge process. Most schools focus on getting content experts with name recognition. This makes a school look good, and it does privilege a group of students who are on the same wavelength with that professor.

But in practice, world renown content experts are rarely spectacular teachers. The majority of students thus do not benefit as much from having a world class professor as they would from a less brilliant scholar who is a more brilliant teacher. This is an interesting irony and self-defeating aspect of most educational institutions. That which is most valued--spectacular names--more often than not undermines the very reason for most educational institutions' existence: to teach.

A unique curricular process has evolved in the design of our seminary at IWU. Yes, our online courses with syllabus, grading process, and specific assignments are preset in a template in Blackboard, regardless of the particular professor. This is potentially discouraging to the maverick prof but is student oriented. It ensures the best pedagogy with the best content.

The content is generated collaboratively, not by a single content expert but by a half dozen brilliant minds. The pedagogy has also been generated collaboratively, by a group of people including several with significant online teaching. We have changed the standard format of Blackboard. I didn't use to like Blackboard, but I realized the reason was more than anything the way they generally package and promote its format. A small tweak--making each of the left hand buttons correspond to one week's assignments and discussion forums--and all is good. I'm left dumbfounded at who these Blackboard people that they have promoted such a counterintuitive format all these years in so many different institutions!

I have concluded that, really, big name scholars are best reserved most of the time for one week intensive formats. For the long haul, you want a good facilitator. Good education is not the transmission of information. The lecture in itself is the most inefficient form of teaching. Learning that is most retained and appropriate is learner generated, and thus the best teacher is one who designs a learning experience that leads a student to generate his or her own understanding. And it will hit multiple learning styles.

The teaching of individual courses will also include a collaborative element, where the course is led by a practitioner, but you receive some feedback from Bible and theology/church history professors, and other professors will feel free to drop in and comment too. We are thus trying to set up a true learning community, rather than a bunch of lone ranger superheroes like you get at other seminaries.

The seminary at IWU has also convinced IWU to add the Blackboard Community add on, making it possible for students across various cohorts to interact with one another. Asbury had this with its Cafe that so irked its board of trustees during the presidential crisis a few years back. But it was a great thing to create across the seminary cohesiveness and camaraderie. We will implement something like this as well, including alumni of IWU's MA program so they can keep in touch.

3. You can see from the process of course creation that integration has been a primary concern. It has been a challenge, but we have managed to meet in the middle on course design. There have been differences. One person wants a book that is just too long and too much for one element of a course. Some of the debates we've had as course designers have made their way into discussions for the course.

Is the missional movement wrong when it opposes thinking about attracting people to your church? Does your church community have to include the community immediately surrounding it or can your church be located in an area with which it has little interaction? We've debated and disagreed and finally made these discussions things for students themselves to make up their minds up in the course.

We've mentioned already how we bring Bible, theology, and church history to bear on topics. I'm excited for a couple weeks in the missional course where students will look at social justice in the prophets one week and study Rauschenbush and the early twentieth century social gospel in the next.

And as we've said, it is the leading edge of seminary education for training to be done in ministry, on the job. Students in our MDIV have to get in a church if they are not. We will be refining and retrofitting our MA degrees for those not in local church ministry. We haven't abandoned you in the parachurch or you lay leaders or you ministers wanting to beef up a particular skill set. But the MDIV is on the job training, "take your church to seminary."

4. The attention to spiritual formation is not unique to our program, but it is unusual. Tht we require it across the curriculm is fairly unique. And the robust way in which we address it is fairly unique. We look at the process of real change rather than the less productive--go and pray approach. And when you look at some other programs in spiritual formation, they usually myopically focus on the personal dimension, when in fact the corporate dimension must be present for the personal dimension to flourish. This is a blind spot of Western individualism that shows up even in the most noted spiritual formation programs in the US.

5. Finally, we have designed a program that is both faith-full and mature in its understanding. We are in the Wesleyan tradition, which means we are most interested in life change more than adding a set of mental widgets or skills. We are interested in you being able to do ministry more than in you knowing things. To be sure, knowing things is good and important, but we are getting the priorities of seminary education straight.

We are hermeneutically mature, especially for evangelicals. Most evangelical seminaries play a game here--if I learn Greek, diagram the sentences of the Bible, study a little historical background, then I will somehow mysteriously and almost automatically know God's will for today. We're seeing this paradigm unravelling before our very eyes. God has as often as not used the words of the Bible in ways other than their original sense and intent. This fact in itself undermines a curricular program at most seminaries that dedicates as much as a third of the curriculum to the pursuit of the original meanings of individual biblical books.

And of course, very little attention is spent in this typical curriculum to teaching what to do with that original meaning once you think you have it. How do I get from that time to this time. For that matter, how do I get from my class in Romans to my class in pastoral care and counseling, let alone to my class in preaching?

I have mentioned elsewhere that this is a great time for the Wesleyan tradition because of currents in the intellectual flow today. And as such, this is a great time to be starting a Wesleyan seminary!

Seminary Vision (7-1-09): Economical

The public "opening" of the seminary is October 1-2, around the time of homecoming. The practical opening of the seminary is when students show up for classes August 3. But as a quiet note of celebration, today is the technical, legal opening of the seminary (woo-hoo!). Shh, don't tell anyone. Today it officially exists within the structure of the university. Pop, goes the non-alcoholic bottle of champagne.

The next of the IWU Seminary videos is "economical."

So far we've featured the Missional, Communal, Integrated, Spiritually Enriching, and Personalized vidcasts. Today we feature the Economical vidcast.

It's true. If you can get into Princeton or Duke, there's a fair chance their endowment machine will give you some hefty financial aid. That is, at least before the economic crisis.

But as far as evangelical seminaries go, it's going to be hard for anyone to justify going anywhere else but to IWU's new seminary--especially Wesleyans!

The per hour tuition rate for IWU's MDIV is 367 per credit hour. That's respectable. It shows we're affordable but not cheap. We have to put the number somewhere around there so that no one thinks we're the Dollar General of seminaries (P.S. aren't people stupid--that people would pass up real value because it is inexpensive!). Fine. We have a respectable number, 367 a credit hour.

BUT, then we give scholarships. For Wesleyan ministers, it's half off, which brings the number down to $183.50 a credit hour. That's pretty good... certainly beats anything a Wesleyan minister would get from the other institutions Wesleyans usually look at.

THEN, because we are now the only denominationally owned seminary of the Wesleyan Church, we have instantaneously, as of today, equal status in the eyes of the denomination to Asbury. That means all Wesleyan ministers who take our MDIV will get the same amount of denominational loan grant that only on campus Wesleyan students at Asbury get. I don't know the exact number, but it's about 80 dollars a credit hour, a fifth of which is "forgiven" by the denomination for every year served in ministry.

That brings us down to aroun $103.50 a credit hour for a Wesleyan minister.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL! Many districts have funds for seminary education or matching funds. I believe two years ago one of the Michigan districts gave $85 dollars a credit hour for their ministers to go to seminary. That brings us down to about $20 bucks a credit hour.

So let's see, a Wesleyan minister from that district could do their whole first year, 20 credit hours, for about 500 bucks for the whole year!!!

To be sure, this equation couldn't support a thousand people. But in the meantime, from an economic perspective, you'd have to be crazy as a Wesleyan minister to go to one of the other places Wesleyans typically look at. You'd be like the Sprint commercial with the guy taking a bag of money out with the trash or the woman shoveling her quarters into a public fountain!

Christianity and Original Sin

I have a writing assignment due today for a particular denomination's Sunday School literature. I thought I would draft it here.
___________
“Original sin” is not a topic we hear much discussed or even mentioned from the pulpit these days. Many Christians may never have even heard of it. It refers of course to the first sin of our human parents, Adam and Eve, the “original” sin. In terms of us today, the question of original sin has to do with how the sin of Adam and Eve has left its impact on us as human beings.

At least since the days of a Christian named Augustine (354-430), it has been conventional to think of our human nature as “fallen.” That is to say, our humanity is not what God intended it to be originally. God intended for us to do good and not to do evil. God intended us to be able to think more clearly and understand the world more accurately than we do.

Instead, Augustine—and then later Protestant leaders like Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley—believed that we have a sinful nature inside us, a “carnal” or “fleshly” nature that makes it impossible for us to do good or choose God without the power of the Holy Spirit inside us. Without the Holy Spirit, our plight is that of Romans 7:15: “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Augustine believed this sinful nature was passed down “genetically” through sex, thus providing a partial explanation for why Jesus needed to be born of a virgin.

The default state of humanity is now “totally depraved,” incapable of doing any good in its own power. Although “total depravity” is more often associated with John Calvin, many of us in the Wesleyan tradition (as well as many Calvinists themselves) might be surprised to know that John Wesley affirmed this idea as well. Like Calvin, Wesley did not believe that we as human beings are able to choose God or do good on our own. Like Calvin, Wesley believed we could only choose God or do good if the Holy Spirit was empowering us to do it. The difference is that Wesley believed God offered this power to everyone, while Calvin believed that God only selected a few choice individuals to receive it. Such people were only God’s puppets, forced to do only what He made them do.

Another key difference between Calvin and Wesley is in how optimistic they were about God’s power to help us do good in this life. Luther did not believe we should even discuss such things, for the very discussion might tempt us to boast in our own righteousness. By contrast, Calvin did think the drive toward becoming more righteous in this life was important. But he believed the imprint of the original sin inevitably stayed with us our entire lives, with the result that we would never be able to stop sinning. The sinful nature inside us would be a part of us till we were glorified at the point of our deaths.

Wesley, on the other hand, was more optimistic. He believed that God wanted to overcome our sinful natures entirely, to “sanctify” us entirely and make us completely holy in this life. In the century that followed Wesley, various thinkers responded to these ideas. The Wesleyan tradition has historically affirmed that God wants to eradicate our sinful nature and destroy it. Others, like the Keswick tradition, have taught that our “carnal nature” will always be around, tempting us to sin, although they believe God can and wants to empower us to win over such temptation, even though it will always be a struggle on some level.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we have the benefit of recent studies that help us look at Paul’s writings with fresh eyes. As a result, several aspects of the historical debate we have just mentioned seem a bit out of focus. For one, the phrase “sinful nature” is misleading at best, even though the New International Version and other translations use it consistently. But Paul nowhere uses the word nature in this way. The actual word he uses is flesh.

To begin to understand what Paul means by “flesh,” we only need take the word in its normal sense: skin. Paul understood our bodies to be enslaved to the power of Sin, along with the entire creation (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). This understanding is similar to what Augustine and later Christian thinkers have thought, but also significantly different.

In Paul’s thinking, the entire creation, including the skin of my body, has come under the power of Sin as a result of Adam’s sin. It is better to think of this power as a power over me rather than a power inside of me. To be sure, we have to take such images as metaphors. Paul was not thinking of the frontal lobes of our brains, but God was giving Paul’s audiences true pictures of the human condition in terms they could understand. We get into strange waters indeed when we try to mingle Paul’s ancient psychology with modern categories!

So Paul says things like, “I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin” (Rom. 7:14, NASB). A nice way to define flesh in this sense is my skin under the power of Sin. However, Paul does not see this state as the norm for the believer. Many readers of Romans 7 strangely stop without going on into Romans 8, where Paul indicates that “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). In other words, Christians not only can get “out of” their sinful flesh—they cannot please God if they do not!

The confusion in debates over our “sinful natures” follows both from subtle misreadings of Paul we have inherited from Augustine and from taking various metaphors too literally. Basically, Paul teaches that the default state of humanity is one of moral disempowerment and alienation from God. Christ has made it possible, not only for us to be reconciled to God, but also for the Holy Spirit to empower us in relation to sin.

The powers of Sin in this world will be around until Christ returns. But we as Spirit-filled believers are not consigned to defeat in the face of temptation. “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to us all. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13, TNIV). This truth, consistently proclaimed by Paul, has largely been lost to contemporary Christianity to such an extent that it is scarcely believed even by those of us in the Wesleyan tradition.

But it is a truth we more than any other tradition are responsible to bring to this generation of believers. God has made it possible, through the power of the Holy Spirit, for us to live Christ-like lives in this world. What was impossible in our own power and in our own flesh, “God did: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and ... condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:3-4, NASB).