Daniel R. Driver - DRD.ac

The 2012 Tyndale Biblical Symposium

2012-01-09T05:51:50-05:00

Join us for featured talks by Tyndale faculty and alumni about their current research. The event will be held on Saturday, 4 Feb 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm.

Mary Conway: PhD Candidate, McMaster Divinity College; Lecturer, Tyndale Seminary; “‘In the Eyes of Yahweh’: The Role of Linguistic Evaluation Theory in Discerning Right from Wrong in OT Narrative”
Daniel Driver: Assistant Professor of Old Testament and Associate Dean, Tyndale University College; “Psalm 2 at Antioch: The Hermeneutics of a Christological Controversy”
Edward Ho: PhD Candidate, McMaster Divinity College; MDiv 2000, Tyndale Seminary; “Reconsidering the Arguments of Job’s Three Friends in the First Cycle”
Rebecca Idestrom: Associate Professor of Old Testament, Tyndale Seminary; “God’s Glory in the Book of Ezekiel”
John Kessler: Professor of Old Testament, Tyndale Seminary; “The Nature of the Relationship between Temple and Covenant in Haggai 1:1–15”
Benjamin Reynolds: Assistant Professor of New Testament, Tyndale University College; “The Otherworldly Mediators in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch”
Ian Scott: Associate Professor of New Testament, Tyndale Seminary; “‘On a Colt and a Donkey’: Metaphor and History in Matthew’s Gospel”

go.tyndale.ca/symposium2012

An Open Letter to the Proprietors of alistapart.com and fontdeck.com

2011-12-03T18:13:44-05:00

To the proprietors of A List Apart and Font Deck,

When you meet someone who gives the impression of being shit, anything else he says or does tends to confirm that first impression. In spite of this risk, I’m writing to explain the existence of two “ripped” sites, for which I claim responsibility, and to offer a limited apology.

I am an academic by trade – and therefore one who takes intellectual property very seriously – and an amateur web developer (if even that’s not too grandiose) only by accident. When I decided with a few colleagues to try to launch an open access e-journal, we started looking around for examples of how to do such a thing. Most instances in the academy are not very impressive, so we started looking elsewhere.

In the process of researching best practices I discovered ALA, Font Deck, and some other impressive sites, built by people who obviously know what to do with long-form text on the web. And so, to learn how it was done, I copied and studied the work of recognized masters, pared with different CMSes and parked at cognate domains, to see what I could learn. It was something I deliberately undertook as an exercise, fully aware that I could not claim any of the designs or code in the site that our little venture will eventually announce.

When Greg Hoy found the parrot of ALA and then thought that I switched it (because he was “on to me,” I guess) to a parrot of Font Deck, the irony is that, if he’d known where to look, he could have found two or three other borrowed designs (none his) that would probably have been just as recognizable.

It’s an unlikely line of defense, but believe me when I say that the intent was not to steal anybody’s work. It was simply to learn from it and then to put it away. Greg may remember that, in early 2011, I submitted a proposal to license the code behind Happy Cog’s Cognition blog. (We had about $1K to get started, not $100K.) He declined, and I decided then that I would just have to figure out how to build the site myself.

My mistake was in assuming – quite stupidly, I see in hindsight – that a series of experiments tucked away in an unclaimed corner of the web were anything less than live sites. For that I can only apologize. I am thoroughly embarrassed, and suitably chagrinned, at the way things played out.

Think of me as a copycat, if you want. Think of me as a thief, if you must. Alternately, think of me as a student who decided to enroll in the school of Hoy, Zeldman, Jon Tan, et al, to try to learn how a good web site is built. I bought a few books (including in the A Book Apart series), paid for some online tutorials (e.g. from Ryan Irelan), and then dissected, studied, and rebuilt some of the strongest real-world examples I could find.

People once learned BASIC by typing out lines of code from a magazine. Millions of writing students compose a “Shakespearean” sonnet. My own high school drafting teacher gave us a wrench and had us draw it to spec in AutoCAD. More than a few aspiring typographers have read Robert Bringhurst and then mimicked the layout of his book in LaTeX or HTML or whatever (see Tim Brown’s lovely article on ALA earlier this year, for example). The point is that aping the pros is a pretty traditional way of learning a craft.

The one thing that amuses me about the whole episode is that a president of a major web design group, self-described as “the best digital design firm in all of the lands” to thousands of Twitter followers, should feel anything at all for a half-baked, obvious copy of ALA. (Who in their right mind would use one of the most recognizable magazines on the web for their own new journal?) Imagine if Bringhurst himself publicly called out all the grad students who have used The Elements of Typographical Style to style their dissertations.[1] It’s hard for me to imagine that he’d be fussed.

Here’s a snapshot of traffic on the site most people found from the time it went up, less than a month ago, to yesterday.

JST’s big debut

Yesterday and today I took down every last unlicensed image and line of code that had been tucked away for private study at obscure URLs. You will not find any at scripturetheology.ca, .com, .net, .org (etc) in the future, including after its official launch. As for the ligature in our logo, I rest in the confidence that we spent a third of our seed money licensing the font of the excellent designer who made it.

Greg asserts that I am missing the point. Perhaps so. I also believe that imitation is how people have always learned, and that it is deeply imbedded in the structure of the internet in particular. To my mind the foul occurred somewhere along the boundary line between public and private use,[2] and I regret having given the impression of encroaching on the interests of Happy Cog or Font Deck, whose adherence to high standards of web design I continue to admire.

Sincerely, DRD

PS – As for the ironic use of religious language, let him the one has never used an illegal copy of Adobe Photoshop throw the first stone.

See, for example, the LaTeX template classicthesis and its derivative, arsclassica.
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How did @hoyboy even find the site? No matter: it was there to be found. I see that this amateur’s next project, before making a sandbox out of anybody else’s work, is to learn how to set up a MySQL database on a personal computer or private network. Security by obscurity is about as safe as the early withdrawal method.
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Backstory to a letter

2011-12-03T16:51:59-05:00

The catalyst was this tweet, directed at the little JST project I’ve been preparing to launch:

From the president of Happy Cog

An avalanche of accusations followed. Here’s a sampling of mentions sent to the two Twitter feeds I control, my own account and that of the planned journal.

Mentions of @JST_st on Thursday, 1 December 2011

Mentions of @danieldriver on Thursday, 1 December 2011

In part to clear my own head, and in part because I felt more embarrassed than guilty, I took the trouble to write an open letter in response.

Getting Spotlight to index markdown files in Lion

2011-09-20T17:49:40-04:00

After performing a clean install of OS X 10.7, Spotlight refused to index my markdown files, even with a QLMarkdown plugin derived from the one that Brett says does the trick for him. Following two similar sets of instructions, I was able to get the Spotlight index working again by adding the markdown file format to the .plist file located here:

/System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist

Depending on how you get there, it may be necessary to right click and “Show Package Contents” for RichText.mdimporter.

What I did from there:

Note the correct UTI, which for Markdown is net.daringfireball.markdown.

In Terminal you can get this for any file type by using the command mdimport -n -d1 somefile.ext, which in the present case returns: Imported 'somefile.md' of type 'net.daringfireball.markdown' with no plugIn.
Make a copy of Info.plist and then open it with a text editor or Xcode.
Add net.daringfireball.markdown as a string in the document content types array (detail below), and then swap out the modified Info.plist with the original.
In Terminal, give Spotlight a nudge to have it re-index your markdown files: mdimport ~/PathTo/MarkdownFiles/*.md

My modified Info.plist file looks like this:

...
<array>
    <dict>
        <key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
        <string>MDImporter</string>
        <key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
        <array>
            <string>net.daringfireball.markdown</string>
            <string>public.rtf</string>
            <string>public.html</string>
            ...

Back in Terminal you can verify that the import works as it should with the command from step 1. It should now return something like:

Imported '/Users/…/somefile.md' of type 'net.daringfireball.markdown' with plugIn /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter.

That’s it. I don’t know why QLMultiMarkdown wasn’t doing the necessary, but as MMD’s papa suspects some issues with it, I’m glad to have Spotlight indexing work independently of it.

R.E. Clements’ review of my book on Childs

2011-09-19T09:32:11-04:00

R.E. Clements wrote a generous review of my book for the JSOT book list.

The search for a fresh paradigm for a biblical theology resumed with new seriousness in the 1950s, and few scholars contributed more frequently and extensively to this debate than Brevard Childs in the USA. His advocacy of a canonical approach, in which the history of Christian exegesis of the OT was drawn more directly into the presentation, became a fundamental guideline for the new paradigm, resulting in a series of commentaries and introductions to the biblical literature. From the outset this occasioned a sharp confrontation with James Barr who, like Childs, had initially been much influenced by Karl Barth. It established a long-lasting debate expressed in reviews, articles and books, seeking to define more precisely how canon could serve to create a theological agenda. Childs seldom countered criticism directly, but proceeded to develop the original programme with exegetical writings and through encouraging a large number of students to develop his approach in a variety of directions. These inevitably modified the original programme, which became still further stretched as other scholars in Europe and the USA participated in the discussion. Additionally, responses to the Holocaust hovered in the background and elicited concern to re-engage Christian and Jewish exegesis in a fresh way. This detailed critique by D. explores the historical course of the debate, provides a comprehensive bibliography of the most relevant sources, including important reviews, and traces as closely as possible the points that have aroused sharpest contention. The result is a book that is indispensable in showing why, since World War II, historical and theological approaches to the Bible have found it difficult to establish a common ground. It is part biographical and part methodological, looking beyond the work of one scholar to examine major questions about the use and interpretation of Protestantism’s iconic book. It will certainly remain an essential work of reference for a while to come.

Clements, R.E. Review of Daniel Driver, Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 35 (June 2011): 17. doi:10.1177/0309089211403225

Fall 2011 syllabi are going up today, in several formats

2011-09-09T10:32:07-04:00

Final revisions of syllabi for the Fall 2011 are going up today. Students, welcome back.

Plain text enthusiasts, this is the first time I have produced these documents fully from markdown. (Since my school has a MS Word syllabus template I needed to work up a little LaTeX styling, but that has been done now.) The benefit of abandoning Word? My content appears exactly as I wish, in several formats simultaneously.

Take Hebrew 201 for example. You can access:

The web version, which should serve up well on everything from your iPod to a computer lab PC.
The PDF version, hebr201.pdf, for printing or offline access.
The LaTeX file, hebr201.tex, by which the PDF was made.
The master file that generates all of the above, written in MultiMarkdown: hebr201.md.

If you want any of these, the easiest thing is to follow links to the page you’re after, and then click through to the PDF, or add the appropriate extension — .pdf, .tex, .md, .etc.

Did I mention that the whole site is now staged with a git repository?

Versioning is, for present purposes, probably most important with the syllabi. A syllabus is something I take to be a kind of contract, but one which must sometimes be amended in the course of a semester. (In my case that’s part of the contract.)

GitHub for Mac: Even when you can’t sync (like if your private repositories are not on GitHub), you can browse

Since I’m already building everything from the command line, it’s wonderful to be able to wrap up with a commit to my local repository and the simple words $ git push web.

Needless Rebuild 6.0: The Faster, Simpler, Responsive Edition

2011-09-03T23:17:29-04:00

There is nothing like an approaching deadline to make me feel like building or rebuilding a website. And so, just in time for the Fall 2011 semester — because in term time there is no time for coding frivolity — my home on the web gets a total renovation.

Three Visual Representations of `\renewcommand{cms,html,css}{alreadynew}` {#visuals}

This section goes out to everyone who remembers that the last big iteration happened not so long ago. What was wrong with the last site?

Baroque is the word that comes to mind. Not as in needs fixing, but rather as in needless complexity. This was true on the back end and the front.

Two up: left is the older site, dynamically rendered by ExpressionEngine; right is the latest release, served up “baked”

Stylistically I have kept De Walpergen Pica and other elements from the Fell types, bequeathed to Oxford by John Fell, D.D., in 1686, and digitized by Igino Marini last decade. The new text face, Skolar, is one I have used before. It’s a better companion to DW Pica than the last one, and it has been retooled for the web since the last time I tried it.

Yet I have taken pains to simplify content and presentation. There are now three menu items instead of four (plus a goofy search bar). Also, though the new layout has variety, there is much greater consistency. If you know about arranging html divs with css, consider how much relative and absolute positioning is involved in the layout on the left. Be sure not to underestimate the nested divs needed to display images with jQuery.popeye. (Non-coders, treat the following strictly as a visual.) The markup for the blue image box alone — to say nothing of the css behind four style variations — looks like this:

<div class="ppy" id="ppy3"> 
    <ul class="ppy-imglist"> 
        <li> 
            <a href="img.jpg"><img src="img_thumb.jpg" alt="{title}" /></a>
        </li>
        <li> 
            <a href="img2.jpg"><img src="img2_thumb.jpg" alt="{title}" /></a>
        </li>
    </ul> 
    <div class="ppy-outer"> 
        <div class="ppy-stage"> 
            <div class="ppy-counter"> 
                <strong class="ppy-current"></strong>
                <strong class="ppy-total"></strong>
            </div>
            <div class="ppy-nav"> 
                <div class="nav-wrap">
                    <a class="ppy-prev" title="Previous">Previous</a> 
                    <a class="ppy-switch-enlarge" title="Enlarge">Enlarge</a> 
                    <a class="ppy-switch-compact" title="Close">Close</a> 
                    <a class="ppy-next" title="Next">Next</a> 
                </div> 
            </div> 
        </div> 
    </div> 
</div>

A framed image, of course, doesn’t require any more markup than this:

<figure>
    <img src="img.jpg" />
</figure>

Now I’ve got nothing against complexity — quite the reverse. The lightbox alternative is admirably clever. But it comes with a lot of overhead. (Same goes for ExpressionEngine, wonderful as it is.) The point is that, having gone through its Rococo period, this site is now much simpler, inside and out. There are times when one really should heed the lex parsimoniae.

In addition to being elaborate, jQuery.popeye locked me in to a fixed width layout. Which brings me to the first of two main attractions: the new responsive layout. If that’s a new concept, it’s easier to show than to explain.

Eight up: the old and new sites at widths of 385, 680, 900 and 1150 pixels

Think of a smart phone’s 3.5 or 4 inch screen, think of a tablet oriented both vertically and horizontally, think of a full-fledged browser at various widths, and you can immediately see the power of responsive web design.

Most fluid layouts seem to owe a debt to Ethan Marcotte. Mine is further indebted to Joni Korpi’s templates, especially his golden grid system. It adds complexity to the back end, yes, but it’s lightweight (my css file weighs 16 kb), and it’s entirely elegant. Compare the media queries approach to the invasive, annoying use of Onswipe by Slate.com, Forbes, or ten thousand Wordpress blogs.

Go ahead, try it out. If you’re on a desktop, change the width of your browser. Use the full range, from min to max. If you’re on a tablet, rotate from landscape to portrait and back again.[1] If you’re on a smart phone, appreciate the custom fit. It’s like black magic, no?

The Guts: MultiMarkdown {#guts}

Responsive layout: that’s the first major attraction. The second hides on the back end, but it’s consistent with the design aesthetic of graceful simplicity. In a word, it’s markdown.

To see it, compare the markup of this page — command-option-U on a Mac — with the plain text file from which it was generated, and which sits beside it on the server at /2011/09/needless-rebuild.md. The only threat to intelligibility is the html I’ve cited. Add .md to practically any URL on this site (or index.md in some cases) to look behind the scenes.

If markdown is unfamiliar, you can learn more about it here and there. In a nut, instead of the awkwardness of hyper-text markup, markdown lets a person turn minimally formatted plain text files into html. So this site mirrors a hierarchy of html-generating plain text files that sits on my hard drive, much in the way that I keep my other work.

So what? The selling point for me is that, thanks to two robust extensions of the original MD script, MultiMarkdown and pandoc, you can also generate PDFs (via LaTeX), and half a dozen other useful formats. In short, I can write up a syllabus in MD, and, from the same source file, can then distribute it on the web and on paper. Or, to take another example, I could produce an online journal in the same two formats, print and web, and only shepherd one master file through the editorial process. I plan to do exactly this, in fact. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Pandoc’s John MacFarlane and MMD’s Fletcher Penney have each shared the code they use to render websites from markdown. For several reasons I’ve adapted Fletcher’s kit. It makes this site light weight and, now that it’s set up, wonderfully easy to maintain.

To summarize new features, then, we have:

Responsive layout
MultiMarkdown
Static files (faster, less liable to be slashdotted or fireballed)
Draft environment on my computer
Git repository for history and an off-site backup

To use Marco Arment’s words for his own personal brew of markdown CMS, Second Crack, this thing is “unsuitable and unnecessary for nearly everyone, but I like it.”

Comments {#comments}

Comments are entirely welcome, though some time back I turned off the the comments section. That remains true here. Tweet at me or send an email. I may even post your feedback as an addendum.

Mobile Safari currently has a bug that causes the page to zoom past %100 when rotating from portrait to landscape (though not the reverse). For now you either have to zoom back out manually, or I have to turn off zooming on this site completely. Requiring a few extra taps is the lesser evil, I think.
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Site migration

2011-09-02T11:04:00-04:00

I’m in the process of moving this site to a new host, to enable some back-end processes that my old host does not allow. For a little while yet the bulk of the old site is mirrored at http://danieldriver.ehclients.com/. Most of the core files are here, though some of the archives are missing yet.

Thanks for your patience, and please let me know if anything on the new site is absent or out of place.

Nerd Tools: Filing with custom ordinal date stamps

2011-06-10T15:47:00-04:00

Since late last year, when I closed some threads on my first book and started thinking more seriously about the next one, I have undertaken some self-improvement projects in the areas of data storage and backup. Part of this has meant reforming my digital filing system, and I settled on (managed) hordes of text files and PDFs marked with two sets of identifiers.

Archiving text files and PDFs with RICE

The first is a 9-digit date and time stamp with the pattern YYDDDHHMM, where DDD = the day of the year out of 365 (or 366 in leap years). Today, for example, is the 161st day of 2011. The hour and minute are the hour and minute in which this post began (a text file’s date created).
- If you ever ride public transit in Toronto, the ticket you get has a big number printed at the top. Today, that number is also 161.
- This way of counting time for files is useful for a quick reckoning of mental debts — I think of text notes like obligations in a 30/60/90 day billing cycle — and I settled on it only after a trial run of 10-digit codes with MMDD instead of a straight ordinal day count (sometimes, I think erroneously, called a Julian date). I think I made up my mind about the convention while riding the subway.
- The date stamp goes two places in my system:
  - It is the first part of the filename.
  - Prefixed with id (for a .txt and .md file) or pdf (for a .pdf, of course), it goes into an appropriate keyword field. With MultiMarkdown there’s a place in the document preamble. With PDFs there’s a field in the document metadata.
- Thus this file’s name begins with 111611306- and its body contains the keyword id111611306. A Spotlight (or Google Desktop) search for either will turn up only this file on my computer, unless I’ve used id111611306 as a cross-reference in some other file.
Along with the date ID is a keyword string inspired by that of AmberV over at the Scrivener forums. It consists of a letter, a number, a second number, and a single keyword identifier, all set in curly brackets. The tag for this post, for example, is {C2.1.OccPub}. Tokens go from broad to specific.
- There are only four letters, one for each of the four main classes of files:
  - R = Record, for all records of things I observe, in me, in research, in books, whatever.
  - I = Information, for more strictly factual knowledge, typically filed for reference purposes.
  - C = Communication, which includes everything from letters and email to forum and blog posts. (C1 is private, C2 is public. A C1.1 or C2.1 originates with me, and a C1.2 or C2.2 is received. Hence this post is a C2.1. Write a response on your site and I will file it as a C2.2.)
  - E = Exposition, for things put forth formally. E goes beyond most blog posts; although the distinction from C is slightly arbitrary, it reflects a class of work that is more creative, formal, and (ideally) recursive.
- The letter also goes in the filename, after the date stamp, thus: 111611306-C-.
- I call the whole thing the RICE archival system.

Getting all that metadata into PDFs is not uniformly easy. Hazel will automatically rename files with their date created, but the keyword field is not readily accessible, and my second string takes some manual input anyway.

Martin Michel’s Natina scriptlet presented a likely solution. His command line utility was ready to go, but it meant reworking his AppleScript framework to make it a pdf RICEr (not for potatoes). One problem in particular took some thought.

Ordinal (“Julian”) dates in AppleScript

So but here’s the part some Googling stranger might find useful. I could adapt the AppleScript easily enough, but how to build in my custom date stamp? It’s no problem at the command line, and if the current date were all I needed I could just do this:

set datekey to do shell script "date +\"%y%j%H%M\""

However, I needed to get a consistent 9-digit date from a variable in AppleScript. With some help from a Québécois scripter called Pierre, I managed to get the same result for the current date without recourse to a shell script.

set x to current date

set year_number to year of x
if year_number > 1999 then
    set year_number to year_number - 2000
else
    set year_number to year_number - 1900
end if
if year_number < 10 then set year_number to "0" & year_number

copy x to y
set day of y to 1
set month of y to 1
set day_number to (x - y) div days + 1
if day_number < 10 then
    set day_number to "00" & day_number
else if (day_number < 100) and (day_number > 9) then
    set day_number to "0" & day_number
end if

set SS to time of x -- in seconds
set HH to SS div 3600
set SS to SS mod 3600
set MM to SS div 60
set SS to SS mod 60
if HH < 10 then set HH to "0" & HH
if MM < 10 then set MM to "0" & MM
if SS < 10 then set SS to "0" & SS -- not used in my stamp

-- test that results are identical
display dialog datekey & return & year_number & day_number & HH & MM

It’s quite a circumlocution, but with the benefit that the x variable works on any date you might pass it in AppleScript.

NerdTool

One more thing. In addition to the homebrew nerd tools above, NerdTool is a great way to get any time and date stamp you might like onto your desktop. If you work for the TTC, all you might want is date +'%j'. To show the present moment’s unique ID, I tell it: date +'at %H:%M = id%y%j%H%M'.

Desktop screen grab on 10 June 2011

Here’s what my current desktop looks like, hommage à Brett Terpstra, Dr Drang and the Hubble telescope. Note the bottom left corner.

Review of Denis Minns, Irenaeus: An Introduction

2011-06-06T11:59:00-04:00

Denis Minns presents two major reasons for addressing the work of Irenaeus, despite the fact that the second century apologist had little direct influence on theological developments in the third century and beyond. The first concerns the breadth of his writing, which seeks to confound heretics with arguments drawn “from the widest possible base… In consequence of this strategy he has left us a remarkably comprehensive picture of what was believed by Christians who thought themselves orthodox in the late second century.” Minns‘ second reason lends his introduction clarity of purpose, for Irenaeus “offers to those more used to a catholicism overshadowed by the figure of St Augustine a remarkably fresh and different outlook” (p. 152). What makes this particular introduction stand out is the light touch with which its author handles so many historical moments — those leading up to and including Irenaeus; those of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan controversies by which Irenaeus’ thought has inevitably been judged; that of Erasmus in republishing Adversus Haereses after a thousand years; and so on — always with an eye to theology’s present interest and need.

For example, in an exposition of evil and the freedom of will, where the difference between Irenaeus and Augustine seems sharpest, Minns dismantles Irenaeus’ assumption that for humans to have a beginning is to begin in infancy. When Irenaeus writes, “God … could have granted perfection to humankind in the beginning, but humankind, being in its infancy, would not have been able to sustain it,” Minns does not mince words: “The logic of this is false. It is as though a Michelangelo were to say, ‘I can sculpt out of melting butter, but the butter is not able to sustain my art.’” And yet Minns spots “one of his most powerful theological insights” here, which is that humans are, for Irenaeus, “necessarily imperfect in the beginning” (p. 88). A resolution surfaces after thinking through what Irenaeus might have argued, had he been more careful, and what he did mean in his adaptation of the philosophical categories Being and Becoming. It amounts to quite a different and, seemingly, a more optimistic plan of salvation than the better-known ones of Augustine or Athanasius. God alone is; human creatures are set on an infinite progress toward perfection by which their natural state of Becoming approaches the asymptote of Being, for all eternity. For Minns, “The grounding of this positive evaluation of free will and the consequent sinfulness in the distinction between Being and Becoming might, in the end, sustain the free-will defence of the claim that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good” (p. 91). John Hick makes no appearance in the text of this book, nor in its superb bibliography, though Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966) would make a good companion to it on a reading list about theodicy.

If Minns raises questions for specialists, his book still succeeds as a basic introduction to Irenaeus. After a brief opening chapter, “Heresies” (Chapter 2) works both to inform a reader little acquainted with Marcion, Gnostics, or Valentians, and also to alert more knowledgable readers to how such problematic terms will be used. A sound case is made for staying close to what Irenaeus understands his adversaries to believe without spending too much time at Nag Hammadi. The argument from there is tightly structured. Heresies set the background for Irenaeus‘ confession of “The One God” (Chapter 3), who is simple and identified with the God of old. Chapter 4 gives a lucid and sympathetic account Irenaeus’ trinitarianism. That he is almost exclusively concerned with the economic over the immanent Trinity, to use later language, would cause some anxiety, but as Minns contends, "Within its own terms of reference, Irenaeus‘ theology of the Trinity was perfectly orthodox“ (p. 66). Chapter 5 handles the economy of salvation, culminating, as we have seen, in a sketch of an Irenaean answer to the problem of evil. Chapter 6 frames the important term ”recapitulation“ in a broader discussion of the way Irenaeus sees Adam as a type of Christ (cf. Rom. 5:14). Finally, ”From Christ to the Kingdom" (Chapter 7) closes with the church as Christ’s body, its institutions of baptism and eucharist, and Irenaeus’ strikingly immanent sense of Christ’s return.

Irenaeus emerges as a kind of progressive theologian’s hero, taking us “beyond the gloomy shadows cast by St Augustine” (p. 153) — a little ironically in that, judging by his remarks on tradition, he would have been loath to think he was defending anything new — and yet never at the expense of a frank accounting of Irenaeus’ own sometimes curious or inconsistent positions. Minns offers a smart, compelling overview that should leave its readers wanting to turn their attention back to Irenaeus directly, alert to why his work can still feel urgent.[1]

Review forthcoming in the Toronto Journal of Theology.
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Nathan MacDonald wins the 2011 David N. Freedman Award for Excellence and Creativity in Hebrew Bible

2011-04-29T11:29:00-04:00

That’s my PhD supervisor. SBL has more details on the Freedman award-winner. The NT equivalent was awarded to Matthew Rindge.

The New Yorker in Praise of Distraction

2011-04-05T16:16:00-04:00

On productivity, the web, and the human will:

A new study, done at the University of Copenhagen, asked participants to perform a simple task—watch videos of people passing balls and count the number of passes. But first they were presented with a distraction. One group of participants had a funny video come up on their screens; the rest saw a message telling them that a funny video was available if they clicked a button, but they were told not to watch it. After ten minutes, during which people in the second group could hear those in the first laughing at the video, everyone set to the task of counting the number of passes. And the curious result was that those who hadn’t watched the comedy video made significantly more mistakes than those who had. You might have thought that those who had spent the previous ten minutes laughing would become distracted and careless. Instead, it was the act of following company policy and not clicking that button that eroded people’s ability to focus and concentrate.

This study is one of the first to look at the specific impact of the Internet on performance, but there have been many similar studies of the limits of people’s will power. A classic experiment involved chocolate-chip cookies and radishes. The subjects of the experiment were told that they were taking part in a taste test, and were put in rooms with a stack of warm cookies and a bowl of radishes. Some of the people were told to eat the radishes, and not to eat the cookies. (To make this harder, they were told to skip a meal before the experiment.) Others were luckier; they were told to gobble up the cookies. Afterward, both groups were asked to solve a complicated puzzle that, unbeknownst to them, had no solution—the experimenters wanted to measure how long people would persist in a frustrating task. Those who had had to eat the radishes and resist the temptation of cookies showed little will power, and gave up after just nine minutes; the cookie-eaters kept going for twice as long. In other studies, people asked not to think of a white bear were considerably worse at solving anagrams than a control group, and people who were told to suppress their emotions while watching a sad movie ate far more ice cream in a taste test afterward than those who had been allowed to express their feelings.

The basic idea here is that for most people will power is a limited resource: if we spend lots of energy controlling our impulses in one area, it becomes harder to control our impulses in others. Or, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister puts it, will power is like a muscle: overuse temporarily exhausts it.[1]

These studies explain a whole lot more than my relationship to the Internet of work, of course.

James Surowiecki, “In Praise of Distraction,” The New Yorker, 11 April 2011. Posted from my office at 4:16 PM.
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Microfilm and the problem of information storage and retrieval

2011-03-29T16:44:00-04:00

The history of modern reference works includes not only tools that continue to thrive today, though often in new forms and under new names, but also examples of experiments that did not prove successful despite great investments of human and material resources. From 1910 to 1934, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Mundaneum in Brussels, which stored information in some 12 million index cards from which staff members would answer mail-in queries. In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a mechanical system of reducing, storing, and retrieving information, the “memex.” Many now see the Internet as a fulfillment of that vision, though the frequent references today to Vannevar Bush have more to do with creating a genealogy for the Internet after the fact than with actually explaining its origins. The only tangible result of Bush’s vision was the “rapid selector,” which Ralph Shaw built in 1949 to retrieve automatically documents on microfilm by having a photoelectric cell identify the congruence between a query code entered by the user and the subject code on the microfilm. After trying to use the rapid selector to sort through vast quantities of documents declassified after the war, Shaw considered it a failure and extolled books as “still the most efficient tool for storing and finding information.” But Bush’s vision of searching for information following every user’s trail of personal associative connections rather than pre-established headings has been more effectively realized with Internet searching Microfilm technology in general did not live up to the enthusiasm that surrounded its initial uses in the 1920s when it was touted as a definitive solution to the problem of information storage and retrieval. But in the 1990s, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and other projects that transfer microfilm images onto the Web have put to good use the massive investments made in microfilming decades ago.

The rapid changes in technology, especially in recent decades, have also highlighted, sometimes poignantly, the tremendous investment of human labor in tasks that were soon made obsolete by computers. Many large indexing projects launched in the first half of the twentieth century were completed just as computers were becoming widely available: for example, the Isis Cumulative Bibliography of publications in the history of science was completed in 1984 after sixty-one years of collective work. As an example of the contrast between manual and current computer indexing, the indexes to the early editions of Bartlett’s Quotations took twenty people six months to complete, while the computerized indexing of the current edition takes a computer 3 hours to compile—down from about 19,200 hours of labor in the nineteenth century. Reference tools are prone to going out-of-date not only in their contents but also in their methods of composition. Our own current practices and results will no doubt rapidly become obsolete too.[1]

Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 265–266.
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Careful scholarship between the Internet doomsayers and the info-boosters

2011-03-29T00:00:00-04:00

Historical research rarely delivers any clear lessons for the present. The story of the management of textual information in personal notes and printed reference books, 1500–1700, could be presented as a decline narrative from the heights of great learning to an increasing reliance on shortcuts and substitutes, or alternatively, as a triumphalist account of new methods democratized and made increasingly sophisticated. Similarly, among those reflecting on current and future developments, the doomsayers on the one hand and the info-boosters on the other often seem the loudest voices. I have tried to steer clear of such extreme positions, although I am conscious of having leaned more toward an optimistic stance because I am confident that new research tools and techniques can both enhance our ability to do thoughtful scholarly work and widen access to learning for broader audiences. The decline narrative has been in use for centuries and continues to appeal today, often fueled by general anxieties rather than specific changes. But given the long history of the trope, it seems no more appropriate to our context than it does to the Renaissance or the Middle Ages when it was used so extensively.

Technology still has its limits. In my line of work, no tools exist to stand in for personal mastery of one’s subject matter and careful judgment, informed by contextual understanding. Human attention is one of our most precious commodities and many forces compete for it with an ingenious range of software and hardware devices. Even while information storage has been delegated to other media, human memory still plays a crucial role in recalling what to attend to, and when and how. Similarly, judgment is as central as ever in selecting, assessing, and synthesizing information to create knowledge responsibly. The opportunities to settle for misleading or partial information, and to rely on snippets turned up by an Internet search without attending to their context, have never been more abundant. Whereas early modern reference books were criticized for failing to yield material on a topic of interest, an Internet search invariably offers results. Whether those results are good or not depends on our skills in optimizing searches and assessing results. Those skills themselves will require constant honing, in response to changes in the search engines and in the material available for searching. While a savvy user of early modern reference books needed to be familiar with a fairly stable canon of authors quoted and of finding devices, a skilled Internet user must assess an ever-broadening range of materials that can appear on a list of results, from shopping sites to blogs, from government agencies to elaborate scams. With the digitization of massive amounts of printed matter it will be useful (and perhaps increasingly difficult to younger generations) to understand the tools and categories of the world of print, including reference books, library catalogs, indexes, and the conventions of different genres, which are obscured by their presentation in electronic form.[1]

Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 267–268.
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NY Times: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

2010-09-15T14:05:52-04:00

Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits:

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington Universityin St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

The techniques recommended by the newer research are “alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above.” Students, I recommend that you read the whole article for yourselves. The beginning of a new year is a great time to think about the kind of study habits you want to foster.

Jeremy Keith on HTML5

2010-09-11T15:02:41-04:00

Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers came in the mail yesterday. It’s short. I was able to read half of it while giving the kid a bath last night, and the rest this morning. It’s also full of terse, helpful examples. If you build or tweak anything in HTML but don’t know what to make of the hype surrounding HTML5, this book is a superb place to start.

You have to order the book directly from the publisher, at abookapart.com, since it doesn’t (yet) show on Amazon or Google books. Alternately, you can watch the keynote Keith gave last month at Drupalcon Copenhagen. (Our uni’s network administrator put me on to the video, which he found because our school’s website runs on Drupal.) The video’s hardly shorter than the book, and less shiny, but it gives a fine overview of some of Keith’s basic observations. He is, despite his beef with institutionalized religion, a pretty good evangelist.

A Book Apart, 2010

HTML5 for Web Designers

Jeremy Keith.

New York: A Book Apart, 2010.

View on: amazon.com, amazon.ca

Anton Chekhov's unfinished play on the book of Ecclesiastes

2010-08-28T18:13:48-04:00

Anton Chekhov, it may surprise you to learn, had outlined a play based on Ecclesiastes in a notebook (c. 1892). Would that it had been written. A fragment, packed with allusions to the book, concentrates on the theme of darkness:

Solomon (alone) ‘Oh, how dark life is. No night during the days of my childhood has ever terrified me so much with its darkness, as has my incomprehensible existence. My God, you gave my father David only the gift to combine words and sounds, to sing and to praise you on a harp, to weep sweetly, to make others weep and to enjoy beauty, but why have you given me also a pining spirit and hungry thoughts which cannot sleep [5:12; 8:16]. Like an insect, born from dust [3:20–1; 12:7], I hide in darkness, in despair, trembling all over and growing cold with terror [12:3, 5]. I see an incomprehensible mystery in everything [3:10–11, passim]. Why does this morning exist? Why does the sun rise from behind the temple and gild the palm? Why are my wives so beautiful? [cf. 2:8, 11] Where does this bird hurry, what is the purpose of its flight, if it itself, its nestlings, and that place where it is hurrying must turn into dust, as I must? Oh, better not to have been born or to be a stone, to which God gave neither eyes nor thoughts [6:3–5; cf. 4:2–3]. To exhaust my body for the night, I spent all day yesterday like a simple worker, carrying marble to the temple, but now night has come and I cannot sleep [5:12; 8:16] … I will lie down once more. Forzes told me that if you imagine a running flock of sheep and think of it incessantly, your mind will get confused and fall asleep. I will do this …’ (He goes away.)

Then again, I can see why Chekhov never took the concept further. It is interesting that some biblical scholars recommend thinking of Ecclesiastes as a one-man play, though.

Wiley-Blackwell, 2007

Ecclesiastes Through the Ages

Eric S. Christianson.

Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.

View on: amazon.com, amazon.ca

The citation comes from a 1968 study of the fragment by Peter Rossbacher. I copy it as cited in Eric Christianson’s Ecclesiastes Through the Ages, p. 68. Christianson highlights the biblical references in brackets.

Farewell to the SBL Hendel forum

2010-08-17T00:33:23-04:00

For those who missed the excitement over Ron Hendel’s farewell to SBL, it is now too late to comment. The forum in SBL’s membership pages closed yesterday. This afternoon I skimmed the accumulated 95 posts, by quantities known and unknown, looking for anything that might be useful for classroom use.

The best I could find was by Alan Cooper.

Alan Cooper
(#38, posted 24 June 2010)

Those interested in the history of scholarship on this topic might wish to (re)visit Jacques Berlinerblau’s essay, “What’s Wrong With the Society of Biblical Literature?” in the November 10, 2006 issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education. See also the letters in the January 12, 2007 issue and Berlinerblau’s response to them (February 9). Also Michael Fox’s challenging posting on the SBL Forum, “Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View,” http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=490, which provoked many responses, including an interesting one from Berlinerblau, “The Unspeakable in Biblical Scholarship,” http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=503 . On the way the field has been transformed over the years—mostly for the better, in my view—may I immodestly recommend my article, “Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies,” in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman and published in 2002. I use a lot of this material in a seminar on “Methods of Biblical Interpretation” in order to stimulate discussion among the students about what it means for them to be members of the “guild.” I wonder if my friend Ron and those who are responding to him know that they are walking along a well-trodden path. By an odd coincidence, last year I was invited to speak on “A Jewish View of Historical Criticism” in the SBL Christian Theology and the Bible Section (sic!). It was a terrific session, with both panelists and audience deeply engaged in the topic. It manifested the openness, eclecticism, and diversity of the society nowadays, in vivid contrast to the (critical) methodological dogmatism that predominated in my student days. Unlike Ron, I feel more comfortable now at the annual meeting than I did in the old days. There’s plenty of stuff at the meeting that I don’t like or that I think is silly, and guess what: I don’t go to those sessions.

I remember that session last November, and Cooper’s contribution in particular. It was stimulating.

Review: Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung

2008-03-10T13:33:00-04:00

My review of Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: Methodenreflexionen und Beispielexegesen (eds Egbert Ballhorn and Georg Steins) has at last been published on RBL.

To view or download the review, go here.

Barton on Biblical Criticism and Religious Reading

2008-02-04T17:47:00-05:00

Over the weekend I finally read John Barton’s The Nature of Biblical Criticism. I had picked it up at SBL last summer, in Vienna, and skimmed parts of it thereafter, but I only just blocked out time to read it carefully from cover to cover.

I resist the urge to say much about it yet, or even to rate it. I’ll have to interact with the book in my dissertation and I don’t want to pre-empt what I’ll say there. I do note, however, that this essay of Barton’s, which originally heraldedThe Oxford Bible Commentary in September 2001, anticipates themes in the book at several points. This is especially true of the last two sections, “A Turn to Theology” and “‘Advocacy’ Readings.” Under the former, for instance, Barton states

Every so often there is a movement to ‘reintegrate’ biblical studies and theology, or to ‘give the Bible back to the Church’. I personally believe that scholars have never really taken it away from the Church, and have often indeed been if anything too ‘reverent’, avoiding hard critical questions. But there can be no doubt that many people do feel there is a division between the scholar in the study and the worshipper in the pew, with the preacher in the pulpit uneasily wedged between them. And a repeated reaction to this perception has been to try to develop some way of making biblical study more ‘theological’.

Similarly in the book he concludes: “There is a battle going on at the moment between those who believe that biblical criticism is too much in the grip of a secular and skeptical spirit and those who think it has still not managed to escape the hand of ecclesiastical and religious authority. My sympathies lie on the whole more with the second group” (185).

Barton’s dissent from the many advocates of theological exegesis makes his new book essential reading for those with an interest in the same. He sees his program as closer to the essence of true religious reading, which makes it especially provocative. That his thoughts show evidence of long reflection (themes from his classic Reading the OT [1984] are also present in 2007) makes the argument all the more important.

Of course, not all will agree with Barton’s diagnosis, let alone his prescription. Regarding canonical approaches he writes (in the online essay, but again in line with the book):

Older biblical criticism was often practised by scholars who did have a high commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. But they thought the proper way to study it was first to analyse it critically in the ways I have described, and only then to move on to questions of its religious significance. This was true of Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars alike. The newer movement denies that this division of labour is desirable, or even possible.

But practitioners of the canonical approach are likely to reply that any division of labor will be different simply because the task envisioned is different. In short, Barton’s work aims at the very core of the confessional exegesis movement (if it is proper to speak of such a thing). In particular he targets Brevard Childs, Chris Seitz, Francis Watson, and Walter Moberly. And debate with these figures (indeed, among them) has long been underway.

Finally, I understand that a response to Barton’s book, by Moberly, is already due to appear this year in JTI (issue 2/1). One hopes that engagement from all parties will turn up fresh soil where the ground has already so often been plowed.

Christopher Seitz: Accordance

2008-01-22T11:44:00-05:00

Featured in yesterday’s Morning Star, the weekly newsletter from Wycliffe College, is an editorial by Chris Seitz. Appropriate to the venue, it includes a few personal reflections. And it sounds a familiar theme in Seitz’s work—“accordance,” as the title indicates.

Brevard Childs’ death is mentioned. St Andrews is remembered. Richard Bauckham’s Eyewitnesses is commended, and this leads into a brief discussion of Irenaeus on the accordance of eyewitness testimony with the scriptures.

Read it all. It’s not long.

Augustine and the “new testament” in the old (Jer 31:31–34)

2008-01-04T11:23:00-05:00

What does it mean that “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6)? JD Dawson, through Origen, explores several suggestions. And a fellow student of mine at St Andrews, who successfully defended his PhD mid-December, focuses a different but related set of considerations through an “Augustinian” reading of Jer 31.

The study is Johshua Moon’s Restitutio ad Integrum: An ‘Augustinian’ Reading of Jeremiah 31:31–34 in Dialogue with the Christian Tradition.

Some key quotes:

In his anti-Pelagian writings, emerging at the height of his influence, Augustine put forward a reading of Jer 31:31–34 that contrasted belief and unbelief—a state of affairs deserving judgment and salvation (’Heil und Nicht-Heil’). The point at issue for Augustine’s reading was the claim by Julian of Aeclanum that the Holy Spirit was tied to the novum testamentum, and thus was absent in the vetus. In an argument that shifted the point of contrast in Jer 31:31–34, Augustine made a distinction in the use of vetus testamentum—the popular use (referring to the era or part of the Christian canon from before Christ), and the use of Scripture. In this latter the members of the vetus testamentum are distinguished form the novum in an absolute or ‘salvific’ sense—the possession of the Spirit, regardless of the era in which one lives. The contrast involved in Jer 31:31–34 was for Augustine the contrast of unbelief apart from the Spirit, and faithfulness with the Spirit.

Though Augustine’s reading would remain overshadowed by uses of the contrast with reference to the mutatio sacramentorum or a similar contrast of two successive religio-historical eras, Augustine’s influence can be seen at a number of significant moments in Western theological history…

In modern interpretations the discourse shifted significantly, so that many theological concerns of the previous era were distanced from the consideration of a ‘historical’ location of the oracle. But the central issue remained the same: to what is the ‘new covenant’ contrasted? (284–285).

Moon argues that the contrast is with the “broken covenant” (cf. in particular Jer 11, 7). “What is made the case in the oracles of salvation is an idyllic state—everything is made the way it always ought to have been. What we find in 31:31–34 is precisely this contrast: the universal infidelity bringing judgment is overturned in a promise of universal fidelity to Yhwh. The people of Yhwh are restored to their proper state (restitutio ad integrum), and a world is projected in which all is as it always ought to have been” (286).

He provides some really excellent details in his reading of the tradition, from Augustine, to Thomas, to the reformation period, through the break typified by Duhm, and on to Lohfink, Dohmen and Levin. I’m glad I took the time out to read through it today. Somebody needs to publish the thing soon!

Revisiting Christian Figural Reading

2008-01-02T18:24:00-05:00

Over the holidays I re-read one of the first books I tacked for this PhD, namely, John David Dawson’s Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity.

Dawson’s tightly written book is one of the more intriguing comments on supersessionism I know. And as an exploration of its core concern, Christian figural reading, I know nothing else quite like it. It sets three modern concerns about figural reading—the body (represented by Daniel Boyarin), history (Erich Auerbach), identity (Hans Frei)—against a treatment of Origin, that ancient, (in)famous allegorizer, chosen for what he has to say to those who would read Hebrew Scripture as the Christian Old Testament. The book repaid a second reading every bit as much as the first.

Two New Collections on Kanon/Canon

2007-12-17T14:43:00-05:00

While it is still 2007 I felt I should mention two new collections of essays on canon (“kanon” in the German spelling). I’ve had the chance to work through them both by now, and have just submitted a review of the larger collection to RBL. Since it has to be approved by the editors first, I expect it will not appear there for a few months yet (but if you’re desperate for an English summary, feel free to contact me).

The first to appear, in September, was Bernd Janowski, ed., Kanonhermeneutik: Vom Lesen und Verstehen der christlichen Bibel (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2007). It contains essays from six contributors.

The second to appear, in November, was Egbert Ballhorn and Georg Steins, eds., Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: Beispielexegesen und Methodenreflexionen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2007). It contains 21 essays by 17 scholars. I quoted from this volume here recently, and I will certainly link my review once RBL processes it.

The Moratorium on Canon

2007-11-30T21:19:00-05:00

I am currently reviewing a new collection of essays that puts me in mind of two canon sessions I attended at SBL. Unfortunately, running the sessions in parallel seemed a recipe for parties of the debate not just talking past one another, but talking only to themselves. In one session S. Chapman argued for a core canon extending to the biblical period. In the other, several panelists upheld a “consensus” moratorium on canon terminology.

But as one editor of the new volume writes (in context, he is addressing four typical strategies for banning talk of canon):

Nach der dritten Strategie ist „Kanon“ ein „anachronistischer“ Begriff, weil er in den biblischen Texten selbst nicht auftauche. Dieses neben den genannten Strategien ebenfalls in mehreren Beiträgen von Hubert Frankemölle ständig wiederholte Argument ist wenig überzeugend, eigentlich sogar unwissenschaftlich, weil es den Status von „Kanon“ als Reflexionsbegriff ignoriert. Mit dem gleichen Argument müsste man den anachronistischen Begriff „Theologie“ mit Bezug auf das Neue Testament streichen; denn weder kommt dieser Terminus im Neuen Testament vor, noch wird er heute in der gleichen Weise gebraucht wie etwa in der profanen oder christlichen Antike. Die auch bei Frankemölle zu Recht weiterhin verwendete gewohnte exegetische Fachterminologie hat ebenfalls keinen Anhalt in den zu untersuchenden Texten; aber das ist auch wissenschaftlich überhaupt kein Problem. Mit der unverzichtbaren Differenzierung von vox und res und der Einsicht in die Wandelbarkeit von Begriffen entspannt sich die Situation und verlieren auch die Vorbehalte gegenüber einer Reihe gängiger exegetischer Begriffe ihren Grund. Im Übrigen ist jede Bibelauslegung notwendigerweise „anachronistisch“, wenn sie relevant sein will.

And a little later Steins suggests:

Unausgesprochen scheint mir den genannten Vorbehalts-Strategien die Sorge zugrunde zu liegen, dass die Exegese sich unter der Hand von einer primär historischen in eine dogmatische Disziplin wandeln könnte, also Weichenstellungen des späten 18. Jahrhunderts revidiert werden könnten. Diese „Weichenstellung“ bedarf jedoch ihrerseits der Kritik, denn sie hat verhindert, im 19. Jahrhundert den Kanon als historisches Phänomen in die Exegese zu integrieren. Der Kanon ist gewissermaßen als Phänomen der Verfremdung der Bibeltexte aus der kritischen Bibelwissenschaft ausgeklammert worden. Dass in der gegenwärtigen Diskussionslage ein anderer Umgang mit dem Kanon in exegetischer Perspektive möglich ist, sehe ich als großen Fortschritt an; die Gefahrdes Dogmatismus besteht immer, ist aber kein Argument.

Those quotes come from 115 and 116, respectively, of G.Steins, “Kanon und Anamnese,” in Ballhorn and Steins, eds., Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: Beispielexegesen und Methodenreflexionen (Kohlhammer, 2007). I’ll post more on the collection under review in due course.

Richard Bauckham Retires

2007-11-03T01:13:00-04:00

As has been mentioned, Richard Bauckham retired from his post as Bishop Wardlaw Professor of New Testament this last Wednesday. I wanted to comment it sooner, but it took me a while to upload the photo of him fielding questions on his last day in the Biblical Studies seminar—a seminar he founded at St Andrews sometime after his arrival here 15 years ago. It’s been a privilege to learn from him.

image

Jim Davila posted his speech as head of school, and supervisee Mariam Kamellcomments here.

The book we’ve been discussing for the last four sessions is Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. If you feel you’re missing out, you can have a look at the blog series Chris Tilling ran on the book, or on the same site an interview about it with Bauckham. I hear the book is about to go on tour: first at Gordon-Conwell, then at both ETS and SBL in San Diego. Details for the SBL panel review of the book are as follows:

Theme: Panel Review of Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006)

Jeffrey Peterson, Austin Graduate School of Theology, Texas, Presiding John Kloppenborg, University of Toronto, Panelist (20 min) Adela Yarbro Collins, Yale University, Panelist (20 min) James Crossley, University of Sheffield, Panelist (20 min) Richard Bauckham, University of St. Andrews-Scotland, Respondent (25 min)

Childs and (vs) Frei on Barth, YDS 1969

2007-10-23T17:27:00-04:00

In preparing for a seminar discussion I’m leading tomorrow, I dug up some papers I haven’t looked at for a while, including the very rare transcript of Karl Barth and the Future of Theology: A Memorial Colloquium Held at Yale Divinity School January 28, 1969—held barely a month after Barth passed away. Brevard Childs and Hans Frei were among the panelists.

Charles Scalise made a lot of the piece in his dissertation on Childs and Barth (1987), and again in a follow-up article in SJT 47 (1994): 61–88, which has sometimes been cited by those wishing to criticize Childs by associating him with Barth. (The Childs essay in question is: “Karl Barth as Interpreter of Scripture.” Pages 30–39 in Karl Barth and the Future of Theology. Edited by D. L. Dickerman. New Haven: Yale Divinity School Association, 1969. When I first tried to get my hands on it, the librarian at St Andrews told me there was no copy in Britain.)

Childs’ essay was reworked in 1989, though it remains unpublished. (It was pulled out again at the Beecher lectures, where Childs filled in for Lee Keck, who had been in a car accident.) But what Scalise, and to my knowledge everybody else too, fails to mention about the YDS colloquium volume is that, at the back, it includes a transcript of the Q&A which followed the paper session.

It’s really illuminating stuff. A while back I OCRed it (it appears to have been transcribed from a cassette tape by a research assistant way back). As I think virtually nobody has seen this, and it’s chatty and informal, and it highlights a number of important points, I’m posting the script here.

Points of note:

Childs lines up with Frei (indeed, partly learns from Frei) on “the heart of the problem: that for Calvin, the sensus literalis IS Jesus Christ. And it was only when you have the eighteenth century identification of the literal sense with the historical sense that you’re just hopelessly lost.”
When they say this (Frei: “That’s right.”) nobody knows what they’re talking about.
Allegorical readings can’t be dismissed out of hand for either Childs or Frei.
But when it comes down to a few finer details, Childs differs from Frei on the matter of reference.
Specifically, for Childs the “ontology” issue at stake means “the scope of the canon; namely, the reality which is in dialectic with the text, defined by its canonical context. I don’t see how you can avoid a dialectic between text and reality, in some sort.”
For Childs, this is why “the new hermeneutic is not only mistaken, but it one colossal cul de sac.”
1969 is incredibly early—the year before Childs’ Biblical Theology in Crisis, and five years before Frei’s Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.

The full discussion (minus a few digressions):

STUDENT: I have a question. You’ve commented tonight on the truthfulness of Barth’s use of scripture. You’ve commented on the wide-ranging homiletical force of much of his writing. But when you look at it closely enough in some respects in some places, it is not textually predicated or warranted sometimes, and may even sometimes be allegorical. How do you appropriate, still, some of this live genius that’s there, and yet at the same time remain more controlled by the text? That would probably be one question.

And the second question would be, Do you see any person on the horizon who shows promise of being as crucial, as forceful, and yet takes more seriously what the text is saying—controlling himself at this point more than Barth?

BREVARD CHILDS: Well it seems to me for the last twenty or thirty years people have been trying to combine the orthodoxy of Barth with the historical-critical approach. It seems to me that this enterprise has now come to and end and has proven unfruitful—that you are now at the turn of the road, you have to go either right or left; that the type of move that said Barth is right in seeing theological dimension, but now we have to take history more seriously and bring in the whole baggage—I don’t think this can—

In other words, I’m suggesting that the problem is far deeper than this. It’s a problem that certainly didn’t just arise with Barth. (And much of what I’ve learned about this has come from talking with Hans Frei.) But it has often bothered and puzzled me. You see, when you read Calvin, he fights against the whole medieval tradition by saying it’s the sensus literails that counts—it’s the literal sense—and you have page after page against the whole church dogma. But then you read Calvin on the Old Testament, and here’s Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ. How could it possibly be? And everybody just says that Calvin is just inconsistent.

It seems to me that this doesn’t at all touch the heart of the problem: that for Calvin, the sensus literalis IS Jesus Christ. And it was only when you have the eighteenth century identification of the literal sense with the historical sense that you’re just hopelessly lost. And it seems to me that it’s something along that line—that we’ve just been unable to understand what Barth is doing.

HANS FREI: That’s right.

JULIAN HARTT: Would you mind repeating that?

CHILDS: It sounds better in German, though.

STUDENT: Is it something we can do today?

FREI: Sure, because you see [tape unintelligible] in his exegesis he’s looking at the text. He’s not looking through the text at the person who wrote it. He is, I think, a highly literal reader—what’s set before you there—whereas I noticed that one goes back (in questioning his exegesis) constantly to and earlier version of Barth that he pretty clearly forsook very soon: namely, the Barth for whom the letter became transparent and pointed him to something deeper, something else.

I think, because one thing about Barth is that he’s very much controlled by the letter—no spirit without letter—very much controlled by the letter, and in regard to that and historical criticism, he simply made the move: when you’re doing historical criticism, you’re doing a pretty fine thing, I’m sure. But it’s just logically different from reading the text, burrowing under it, and cropping out all over it, lots of nice things. And I’m sure that there’s an awful lot of illumination to be gained by that. But you’re not reading the text, you see. Barth reads the text. It cannot be qualified with other things.

In Scripture we know that when we read a story, a historical investigation of the story is a very good thing to do. But we need to know how that text works, what’s in the text. And though we have a hard time describing how we do that, in fact when we compare about what we think it says we often find that we can agree on things, and I think fundamentally it is as simple as that. That’s how it works for Barth.

SALIERS: … [But the] assumption that we can treat things as a literary whole which gives us a certain critical concept of literalness, which we can then employ, is a thing that the Biblical people, at least the ones who knit their brows when you said that, are probably worrying about.

CHILDS: Well, it’s a real problem. I wouldn’t go quite with Hans in this direction. It seems to me that the problem came up very early in church history when Jerome attempted to translate the Bible from Hebrew. Augustine called him into question. He said the New Testament and the Church is receiving the Old Testament in terms of the Septuagint, and therefore this is the context and there’s no use going behind it. You can’t go behind it. And Jerome of course just killed him at this point in defending the need for seeing the original context.

Here, it seems to me that both had a point. Obviously, Augustine was right in taking seriously the fact that the Old Testament had taken another form and had assumed another context by being passed through the Septuagint. But Jerome obviously was right in claiming that the next context of the church did not obliterate the older context in which it was seen. In other words, what I’m saying is that the problem that remains the most thorny one is how the various contexts relate. And Barth, in criticizing the historical critics’ insistence that you read the original context but take seriously the theological-confessional context, it seems to me, is in the danger—just as Augustine—of obliterating the need for dealing with the original context.

[… After a few minutes, the discussion returns to Childs’ differences with Frei.]

CHILDS: But you see [Barth] doesn’t use the term “context,” but he talks about the canon, namely: that Scripture is the apostolic, prophetic testimony all linked together. Don’t go behind this, don’t separate it. And this is a context; in other words, this is a theological context—

ROBERT JOHNSON: You’re speaking, then, of the historical context that Barth says is in the word “history.”

CHILDS: No, no. That’s the whole point: that Barth objects to everyone who does this.

JOHNSON: So, from the point of view of what Hans is arguing, what he’s really talking about is not the historical context but the literary context.

CHILDS: That’s where Hans and I differ somewhat. I move in a little different direction here. In other words, it seems to me that there are problems when you get—I would agree fully with Hans when he’s combatting those historical critics who would want to go behind the text, but it’s interesting when you begin to deal with the narrative text, as a context. One has to keep in mind that the early church, in the controversy with Judaism, took quite a different move. When the Jews were saying, read the text! read the text!, the Christians said, there’s something behind the text. It’s what the text points to, namely: Jesus Christ. And there was a dialectic between the reality and the text.

It seems to me, what buttresses this from getting into the kind of ontology you’re talking about is the scope of the canon; namely, the reality which is in dialectic with the text, defined by its canonical context. I don’t see how you can avoid a dialectic between text and reality, in some sort.

[… The conversation turns to a student, Johnson and Frei momentarily.]

CHILDS: It seems to me that this question about the Jesus that Paul—excuse me, that Barth—raises, was very much a part of the mood of the early churchmen. They are concerned: How do you know what the Old Testament is talking about? You hear the Gospel; that is, the dialectic between old and new. Who is Jesus? You don’t get it just from reading the narrative of the Gospel. That’s the whole point that the early church worked on: He’s the Servant; He’s Suffering Israel; He’s the eye of the Sun; all this sort of thing. It seems to me, therefore, that I fully agree that the new hermeneutic is not only mistaken, but it one colossal cul de sac.

[This is Childs’ last comment for the evening.]

Seminar on Childs and his followers

2007-10-18T19:54:00-04:00

Next Wednesday (24 October, 9:15 a.m.), at the Scripture and Theology seminar here, I am giving a paper and leading a discussion on the topic of Brevard Childs and his followers.

Discussion will proceed on the basis of my paper and two readings, circulated in advance. The first and more involved of these is G. T. Sheppard’s introduction to a Puritan commentary he edited for re-publication. Toward the end it picks up the issue the seminar discussed yesterday—whether there is an alternative to “story” for coordinating our exegetical efforts.

Sheppard, Gerald T. “Between Reformation and Modern Commentary: the Perception of the Scope of Biblical Books.” Pages xlviii-lxxvii in A Commentary on Galatians, William Perkins. Edited by Gerald T Sheppard. Pilgrim Classic Commentaries New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989.

The second is a short piece by C. Seitz—I think originally a review of Childs‘ 1992Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments. Among other things, it gives some feel for the minority position Childs’ followers feel themselves to be in.

Seitz, Christopher R. “’We Are Not Prophets or Apostles’: The Biblical Theology of B. S. Childs.” Pages 102–109 in Word Without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998.

If you are not a usual participant but wish to come along—on the condition I guess that you are also reasonably near St Andrews—contact me and I can circulate the readings.

Kugel, Alter in Mainstream Media

2007-09-18T19:32:00-04:00

James Kugel and Robert Alter, two of the most notable American Hebraists working today, have both surfaced in mainstream media publications recently. (This via PaleoJudaica, which mentioned the stories here and here [compare here].)

The New York Times reviewed James Kugel’s gargantuan How to Read the Bible on Saturday. Kugel, who calls himself and American and a Zionist, and who proved his conviction by relocating from Harvard to the Orthodox Bar-Ilan Univeristy outside Tel Aviv (he says he did it for the tomatoes), has started a web site in connection with the new book, www.jameskugel.com. The site is a work in progress, though it does already contain an appendix on “Apologetics and Biblical Criticism.”

The NYT review focuses on Kugel’s thesis that “ancient interpreters” and “modern scholars” have interpreted the Bible in radically different ways.

Charles Augustine Briggs, a 19th-century pioneer of modern biblical scholarship, declared that by sweeping away the “rubbish” of centuries of biblical interpretation, modern scholars would finally “recover the real Bible.” Professor Kugel admires the audacity and genius of scholars like Briggs, but he believes that in their contempt for the “rubbish” of ancient interpretation, modern scholars have let the “real Bible” elude them. They have been left, instead, with “the raw material that made up the Bible.”

The reviewer wonders if the two approaches have to be seen as irreconcilable. Given this summary, I imagine I can see why Kugel was among the few who came to the Childs session in Vienna this summer (mentioned near the end of this post).

Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered (one of the things I miss most about commuting in the US of A) broadcast Robert Siegel’s interview of Robert Alter, about his new translation of the Psalms. In the interview Alter explains why “soul” is a bad translation of “nephesh.” Translations can be “like those thick layers of veneer that were put down on paintings in the Victorian period so you couldn’t see the true colors.” They impose later ideas about the division of body and soul, or about the soul surviving after death, onto the ancient text. “I scrupulously avoided ‘soul’ in order not to give the wrong impression.”

Alter also reads Psalm 8, drawing attention to translation choices that aim to preserve the strong rhythms and compactness of the original Hebrew. He comments about the strange mythical language preserved in Psalm 82, which has God among the gods. “Our God, the big guy, presides over the assembly.” He summarizes the message to the small-g gods: “You’re going to be demoted to human status because you haven’t done your job of administering justice.”

Listen to the entire interview. It’s not long. NPR also includes an excerpt of Alter’s translation and commentary on Psalm 23.

Very much looking forward to browsing both books when I can get my hands on them.

POST SCRIPT (20 Sept): Kugel’s online appendix is worth reading. In it he actually goes after Alter a bit (similarly Jon Levenson, whose Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son I reviewed just last night), proving that the alignment which brought them together here does not entail alignment in other matters—obviously.

Professor Kugel, if you should happen to find this, thank you for your efforts on your web page, especially for publishing some real content there.

Brevard Childs this Fall: Service and SBL Session

2007-08-22T13:52:00-04:00

Early this fall there will be a public memorial service for Brevard Childs. It will take place on Tuesday, 25 September, at 5:00, at Yale Divinity School in Marquand Chapel. A reception will follow in the common room. (I’d try to attend if I weren’t a continent away.)

Later, at the November SBL Congress in San Diego, a panel will reflect on his career. The members of the panel are still to be announced, though I know at least Christopher Seitz is involved. As it stands on the SBL site today, the details are:

S18–50

Reflections on Brevard Childs

11/18/2007 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Room: 30 E - CC

A panel of scholars, in light of Child’s death in July 2007, is being assembled. The panel will reflect on the contributions of Brevard Childs’ career. Among the topics to be covered will be his influence on form criticism, reception history, Old Testament introductions, New Testament studies, and theology.

As I am giving a paper there the day before, I do of course plan to be in attendance. A much smaller session was hosted in Vienna (on Wednesday, 25 July 2007), thanks to quick arrangements by Kent Richards. Memorable comments after Seitz’s paper included those of James Kugel and Erhard Gerstenberger. The latter recalled splitting some obstinate wood for the Childs household on one visit to Yale, and contributing a critical essay to the first Childs FS that was nevertheless received with warmth and gratitude.

Because a little more time has passed, the November session promises to be more comprehensive, and more directed to Childs’ diverse scholarly efforts.

In Vienna there was also a session for James Barr. I am sorry that it does not look like a similar session has been planned for him in San Diego.

Americans in Paris

2007-06-29T14:01:00-04:00

Adriel and I are off to Paris to learn French for a month, studying at the ILCF - CUE(in English here). We expect a few visitors already, so if you’re in the area give a shout. We’ll be on email (but not on the blog!).

I do plan to make it to Vienna for the canon/Kanon session, and perhaps to attend a special session in honor of Brevard Childs, which may or may not happen on Wednesday morning.

I’m looking forward to unplugging myself from my workstation. Further updates to this site can be anticipated in August, though.

Vienna SBL Sessions on Canon/Kanon

2007-06-29T13:36:00-04:00

Georg Steins is co-hosting two session in Vienna on the closure of the canon, one in the morning and one in the evening of Tuesday, 24 July. I hope to be there. Details and abstracts, from the SBL program book, are as follows:

24–09

EABS: The Closure of the Hebrew Bible Canon: Inside and Outside

Perspectives / Der Abschluss de Kanons der Hebräischen Bibel. Innen- und Außensichten Session I

7/24/2007

8:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Room: HS 28 - Hauptgebäude

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück, Presiding Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel, Presiding

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück Zwei Konzepte - ein Kanon. Zur Gestalt und Gestaltung des TaNaK / Two Concepts – One Canon. Form and Design of the TaNaK (30 min) Discussion (15 min)

Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel Die Reichweite der Kanonformel in Deuteronomium 4,2 / How Far Does the Canonic Formula of Deuteronomy 4:2 Reach? (30 min) Discussion (15 min) Break (30 min)

Andreas Ruwe, Universität Greifswald Zur Entstehung des Pentateuch: Kanonisierung als fortschreitende Konstitutionalisierung / On the Formation of the Pentateuch: Canonization as progressive Constitutionalization (30 min) Discussion (30 min)

24–35

EABS: The Closure of the Hebrew Bible Canon: Inside and Outside

Perspectives / Der Abschluss de Kanons der Hebräischen Bibel. Innen- und Außensichten Session II

7/24/2007

1:30 PM to 4:30 PM

Room: HS 28 - Hauptgebäude

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück, Presiding Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel, Presiding

Egbert Ballhorn, Universität Osnabrück Psalm 151: Eine Innensicht Davids - außerhalb des Psalters / Psalm 151: David from Inside, Outside of the Psalter (30 min)

Matthias Millard, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel Der Kanon als ein didaktisches Konzept / The Canon as a Didactic Concept (30 min)

Carola Krieg, Universität Mainz Der Bibelkanon - Javne - Rabbinsche Stimmen / The Canon of the Bible, Javne, Rabbinical Voices (30 min)

A number of the contributers are involved in the soon-forthcoming Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: Beispielexegesen und Methodenreflexionen, edited by Steins and Ballhorn.

From about a year ago I found this list of contributors scheduled for that volume:

Egbert Ballhorn (Hildesheim), Christoph Dohmen (Regensburg), Thomas Hieke (Regensburg), Matthias Millard (Bielefeld-Bethel), Tobias Nicklas (Nijmegen), Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr (Jena), Silvia Pellegrini (Berlin), Klaus Scholtissek (Würzburg), Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger (Passau), Georg Steins (Osnabrück), Johannes Taschner (Bielefeld-Bethel).

Looks like the SBL sessions could be a good preview for the book.

SBL Obituary by Chris Seitz

2007-06-28T13:53:00-04:00

Christopher Seitz has written a laudatory obituary for the SBL website. An excerpt:

Childs’s control of the history of ideas, especially continental scholarship; his immersion in the apparatus of classical theological reflection from the Reformation period and from the wider history of biblical interpretation; his technical training in Hebrew language; and his deep love of and concern for the church, and the way the Bible made its renewing voice heard, as the speech of God for every age: these characteristics of the man and his work mark him off as a scholar whose best analogies are to be found in figures like Jerome, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, or his teacher from a more recent day, Karl Barth. No one who ever heard him lecture will forget his carefully composed prayers, and no one who heard him preach or pray will have failed to note a man of great learning, humility, Godly fear, and deep Christian hopefulness.

…

As we mark and mourn his passing, we lean into the confident hope that Brevard Childs will be read and heard, and his work continued, well beyond the years he gave us. He was never a man to call attention to himself, but rather to point to the God who in every generation raised up women and men of faith, to extend the legacy of prophet and apostle in their own way, in their own generation. This challenge never failed to energize Brevard Childs, and we who give thanks for his life do so in gratitude to the God who sent him and gave us these years of service and proclamation, always to his greater glory. May God grant him joy and rest eternal with his saints from every age.

Universität Osnabrück on BSC

2007-06-27T15:04:00-04:00

Sehr geehrte Frau Childs,

mit großer Bestürzung und Betroffenheit habe ich die Nachricht vom plötzlichen Tod Ihres Mannes, des Kollegen Professor Brevard S. Childs, erhalten. Als Direktor des Instituts für Katholische Theologie an der Universität Osnabrück spreche ich Ihnen, Ihren Kindern und der ganzen Familie mein aufrichtiges Beileid aus.

Mit Brevard S. Childs verliert die internationale Bibelwissenschaft eine mutige Persönlichkeit und einen herausragenden Gelehrten. Ihr Mann gehört zu den Pionieren einer Neuen Biblischen Theologie in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Wiederentdeckung des Kanons als Schlüssel einer theologischen Bibelinterpretation hat zahlreichen Kolleginnen und Kollegen nicht nur einen Weg gewissen, sondern eine breite Bahn geöffnet, auf der wir in noch unerforschtes Neuland gelangen können. Ich wüsste keinen anderen Exegeten zu nennen, dessen Werk in den zurückliegenden Jahrzehnten in der Fachwissenschaft so tiefe Spuren hinterlassen hat.

Die neue Richtung des „canonical approach“ findet in der deutschsprachigen Exegese erst allmählich größere Beachtung; lange Zeit stieß der Ansatz ihres Mannes in der Fachwelt auf Skepsis, nicht selten auch auf Ablehnung. Die Bibelwissenschaft in Osnabrück ist dem Wirken Ihres Mannes schon seit längerem auf besondere Weise dankbar verbunden: Wir, d.h. mein Kollege Professor Christoph Dohmen (der jetzt in Regensburg lehrt) und ich, haben Anfang der 90er Jahre begonnen, das Werk Ihres Mannes intensiver zu studieren und mit seinem Blick die Bibel als Kanon zu reflektieren. Von Christoph Dohmen kam dann die Anregung, das großen Werk „Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments“ ins Deutsche zu übersetzen; die Übersetzung ist schließlich 1994 und 1996 unter dem schönen Titel „Die Theologie der einen Bibel“ in zwei Bänden beim Herder Verlag in Freiburg im Breisgau erschienen.

Das Werk Ihres Mannes hat für nicht wenige Exegetinnen und Exegeten der jüngeren Generation in Deutschland schon jetzt gewissermaßen „kanonischen“ Rang erreichen, in dem Sinne, dass es auch unabhängig von seinem Autor weiterwirkt und immer neue Kräfte freisetzt – zum fortwährenden Hören auf das Wort Gottes in den vielen Worten der einen Heiligen Schrift.

Wir wollen Gott danken, dass er uns und der Welt diesen Diener des Evangeliums geschenkt hat, und wünschen Ihnen und Ihrer Familie in all Ihrer Trauer und Ihrem Schmerz das feste Vertrauen auf den, der unseren Anfang und unser Ende in seinen guten Vaterhänden hält.

Es grüßt Sie

gez. Georg Steins

Radner on BSC

2007-06-26T16:47:00-04:00

Ephraim Radner’s comment was pretty well buried among the other responses to Saturday’s news. (That list has been updated today.) I post it here because it’s heartfelt and colorful. It also tracks with with Seitz’s comment about BTONT’s readership, from yesterday.

I am certain of Brevard Childs’ rest with the saints. But he will be missed in a great way. There have been and are Old Testament scholars of enormous gifts and contributions. But Childs almost single-handedly—single-mindedly and single-heartedly—wrested serious Biblical studies away from the diseased grip of historical-critical irrelevance, with its fragmenting of the divine text, with respect to Scripture’s reality as the Word of God. The movement of renewal he inititiated is still in its infancy, and its future for the Christian faith and Church still uncharted. I pray we may be worthy of the legacy he has left. But I would not be surprised if, when histories are written of Scriptural scholarship, he is not viewed as among the greatest in the last 50 years. That he fulfilled his vocation while being a man of humble faith, prayer, and warm affection for students and colleagues is a testimony to the marvelous grace of God. May the Lord bless him in His Kingdom, and may our hearts be thankful.

Brevard Childs Dies

2007-06-25T12:05:00-04:00

Brevard Childs died on Saturday, 23 June 2007, in New Haven. He sustained injuries from a bad fall in a few days earlier from which he was unable to recover. Born 2 September 1923, he was 83 years old.

The following is excerpted from a brief biography by Gerald Sheppard.[1] The correction in the first line is courtesy of C. R. Seitz.

Childs grew up in Southern Presbyterian churches [sic][2] and studied at the University of Michigan (A.B. and M.A.). After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, he earned his B.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary before pursuing a doctorate at the University of Basel, Switzerland. At Basel Childs studied Old Testament with Walther Eichrodt, among others. In addition to his studies in Basel, he took advantage of Near Eastern scholarship at Heidelberg University.

In Basel Childs met his wife, Ann, who had attended some of Karl Barth’s lectures with him. This was an exciting period for theological study. Besides the vigorous table talk among the visiting and local students, inexpensively published journals of essays and debates between theologians, biblical scholars and historians further stimulated the intellectual atmosphere.

At the University of Basel Childs completed his dissertation on the problem of myth in the opening chapters of Genesis just at the the time when Walter Baumgartner replaced Eichrodt as the senior Old Testament scholar. Creating consternation at the time, Baumgartner informally refused to accept the methodology of Childs’s dissertation, so Childs had to change his plans in order to undertake a full revision, now informed by a new grasp of form-critical analysis. That obligation helps explain why Childs became one of the leading tradition historians in North America. The revised dissertation, Der Mythos als theologische Problem im Alten Testaments (1953), was never published, though Childs circulated major portions of it under the title A Study of Myth in Genesis 1–11 (1955) among his wide network of English-speaking scholarly friends.

In 1954 Childs began teaching Old Testament at Mission House Seminary and in 1958 accepted a teaching position at Yale Divinity School…

Childs was the Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University, where he remained an emeritus professor for the duration of his life.

I met Childs breifly at his house in Cambridge last spring. He and Ann spoke fondly of their student days in Europe in the early 1950s, and Childs remembered in story his many “unforgettable teachers,” including von Rad, Zimmerli, Cullmann, Bornkamm and Barth. (Compare the prefaces to Myth, Memory, Exodus, and especially to IOTS,NTCI, OTTCC and BTONT.) Due in part to this training, he was able to bridge the gap between German and Anglo-Saxon scholarship as few ever have. His passing is marked with sadness not least because he was one of the last Old Testament specialists to control the entire field, Old and New. His readers frequently note how very much more he read than the rest of us.

Childs’ work is among the most misplaced of any biblical scholar since Hermann Gunkel, except that in Gunkel’s case the methods associated with him (Gunkel did not exactly approve of “form criticism”), at first controversial, soon won almost unanimous support. Childs wrote at a time when a broad consensus had ceased to be a possibility.

Childs spent a lifetime confronting the dissolution he experienced. As he explains in the preface to his landmark Introduction to the Old Testament at Scripture (1979),

Twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from four years of graduate study in Europe, the area within the field of the OT which held the least attraction for me was Introduction. I supposed that most of the major problems had already been resolved by the giants of the past. Even allowing for the inevitable process of refinement and modification, could one really expect anything new in this area? I was content to leave the drudgery of writing an Introduction to someone else with moreSitzfleisch.

Two decades of teaching have brought many changes in my perspective. Having experienced the demise of the Biblical Theology movement in America, the dissolution of the broad European consensus in which I was trained, and a widespread confusion regarding theological reflection in general, I began to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the foundations of the biblical discipline. It was not a question of improving on a source analysis, of discovering some unrecognized new genre, or of bringing a redactional layer into shaper focus. Rather, the crucial issue turned on one’s whole concept of the study of the Bible itself. I am now convinced that the relation between the historical critical study of the Bible and its theological use as religious literature within a community of faith and practice needs to be completely rethought. Minor adjustments are not only inadequate, but also conceal the extent of the dry rot.

Major controversy followed the publication of IOTS in 1979. Few were won over to the new approach, and a handful (some very prominent) insisted that an allegedly incoherent method stood in need of reconstruction. On the other hand, at a Yale lecture in the early 1980s, Rolf Rendtorff asked Childs to translate for the audience his reaction to IOTS: Es war als fielen mir die Schuppen von den Augen.

This anecdote is related by Christopher Seitz, who prominently among Childs’ students has defended the sanity of the canonical approach (for the Rendtorff story see Seitz’s essay in Canon and Biblical Interpretation, p84). Much like Gunkel’s reception at an earlier time, however, it proved easier to assume that the challenge to the reigning order signaled more chaos than creation. As Machiavelli once wrote, “the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions.”

Seitz is close to the mark, I think, when he writes of a later book (1992): “Childs’sBiblical Theology may prove to be a book in search of an audience, and for that reason it will be judged by the widest variety of readers as learned but unsatisfactory and by an even smaller audience as the most brilliant proposal for theological exegesis offered in recent memory, but one unlikely to gain the sort of foothold necessary to transform the church in its use of scripture.”

It is still much to early to assess the significance of Childs’ long and productive career. I know a few who place themselves in the second, smaller group—some who have passed through St Andrews in recent years. I myself came to the controversy late, and I maintain hope that many more in my generation will avail themselves of the immense learning and insight on offer in Childs’ work. Like me, more may come to wonder about the contents of the book (on the NT again!) Childs never had the time to complete, or failing that, to recognize the complexity and enormity of the task he undertook as a Christian exegete.

The funeral service will be held this coming Saturday, with and family and close friends in attendance.

At this time our thoughts and prayers are with Ann, the family, their close friends. Brevard Childs is lamented for the acumen and memory that passes with him. His personal warmth, gentleness, and charity make the loss sadder still. May his memory be for a blessing.

Gerald Sheppard, “Childs, Brevard (B. 1923),” in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (ed. Donald K. McKim; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 575–584.
↩
He was baptised Episcopalian in Columbia SC. It was only when he moved north to Queens (a consequence of his father’s ill health) that the family attended the Presbyterian Church. He and Ann attended an anglican church in Cambridge.
↩

Childs Notices Online

2007-06-23T17:00:00-04:00

Listed here are links to other online mentions of Childs’ passing. Some include personal reminiscences. I have artificially set the date and time back, obviously, and for a time I will add links as they multiply.

My own remarks are here.