Cleaning off my desk, I found the scrap of paper where I'd tallied the votes from the last IWER session. So I posted them on the IWER blog. Better late than never.

There should be at least one more session before the end of term. I'll email out an announcement soon.

A colleague has posted photos from the annual St Mary's BBQ and Boules tournament. Seemingly the postgrads through quite a wrench (spanner) into the works by actually coming this year. The undergrads who kindly put on the event were seen running to Tesco for more food, and the tournament itself needed not just a new bracket, but a long round of prelims to eliminate players.

Unless you're from St Mary's you'll probably not recognize anybody in the pictures. I'm only in one, I think, which is fine with me. But you may be able to pick out Ian Bradley or Jim Davila or Mark Elliott. The faculty team beat both the undergrads and the postgrads. I think it's because they had more robes. The undergrads, being more experienced, knew this and planned for it. They lost probably because only half the team remembered to wear them.

See the photos here.

Tags: Personal, St Andrews

I just discovered Jon Levenson's review of James Barr's The Concept of Biblical Theology. The full text of the review is online at First Things. Though I've not worked through all of Barr's book yet (its over 700 pages), the review picks up on aspects of tone that are almost immediately observable. Here are a few paragraphs on Barr on Childs:

But Barr is harshest on the scholar to whom he refers as "my friend Professor Brevard Childs," the distinguished Yale Old Testament theologian known for his advocacy and practice of the "canonical method" of biblical interpretation and his sympathies with Barthian theology. Time and again, Barr returns to Childs, almost always critically, devoting two whole chapters and two subsections of another chapter to his work.

Barr’s distaste for Childs’ work is not surprising. Childs is explicit that his labors are in the service of the Christian message (though, like Barr, he is also learned in and deeply respectful of Judaism) and that historical–critical study, though indispensable, can never be an adequate foundation upon which to build a theological affirmation. Some of Barr’s criticisms are quite plausible, such as his point that Childs uses the word "canon" in several discrete and not self–evidently compatible senses.

But Barr vitiates his own potentially formidable case against Childs by continually allowing himself to be diverted from the great hermeneutical issues to attack Childs for this or that comment, some of them mere obiter dicta. For example, in response to Childs’ claim that "feminist positions . . . imply modalism in place of sound trinitarian doctrine," Barr remarks, "No feminist will find this argument other than laughable." Even if this unlikely claim be so, how does it answer Childs’ criticism? And what point does James Barr score against the canonical method by telling us (in the text, not the notes) that Childs’ indices are so poor that "the name of Karl Barth (or, indeed, my own) is cited in the text at numerous places which have been overlooked in the index"?

It is odd that a scholar so sympathetic to the history of religion should lack a characteristic absolutely essential to the proper practice of that discipline—the characteristic of empathy for what is strange and foreign and the eagerness to present it as fairly as possible before attacking it. To read Barr on Childs, one would have great difficulty guessing the identity of the perceived weakness in the older liberal theology that accounted for the rise and rapid spread of the dialectical alternative.

Part of the explanation for Barr’s acute distaste for Childs’ work may be biographical. Since Barr tells us he once believed in dialectical theology himself, perhaps his relentless attacks on it, and on Childs as its foremost exemplar in the biblical field, derive from the convert’s scorn for his past orientation. But there is also a larger and more important difference in their respective confessional stances. Whereas Childs is a Presbyterian committed to reformulating the classical Calvinist doctrine of sola scriptura in response to the challenge of historical criticism, Barr’s more modernistic position, as we have seen, awards a much smaller role to the Bible in the ascertainment of truth and a large role to post–biblical tradition, which he often sees as a corrective and an improvement over the Bible. Their differences on matters of biblical theology go back to more fundamental differences of religious identity of which neither scholar seems sufficiently cognizant. Their debates over method are mostly the old religious arguments carried on in a new idiom. One wishes that Barr had addressed this more fundamental point head–on, and without all the captiousness.

I've read that Barr was once quite an active evangelical in his days at Edinburgh. I wonder how much this experience drives him to write books like Fundamentalism. (Donald Dayton asks this question with more precision.) If Levenson is right, Barr's acrimony for Childs might be of the same kind.

Barr is an instructive case for me. I too can get quite emotionally involved in arguments I'm working through (ask Kevin if you know him). Barr's writing, whether on Fundamentalism, or Childs, draws attention to the need to gain a little critical distance from your subject, and to leave room for a little charity. A lesson I hope I can put into practice sooner rather than later.

Tags: Childs, Barr

As if you needed James to tell you that I'm a sporadic blogger! That's largely why I moved from blogspot to .Mac, where I can post content and then leave it alone for weeks on end. Kind of him to recommend this site anyway.

So I picked up John Barton's (or at Wiki) Reading the Old Testament again yesterday and am now reading it for the second time. It's proving to be an interesting exercise in that it was one of the first books I read at St Andrews, before I'd decided to definitely pursue the PhD. (The book is now in a second, expanded edition—first 1984, then 1996—but I do not have this available to me yet.) It was in a course with James, as it happens.

I've been working in Childs quite a bit since that first reading, and one of the things that seems so clear to me now is how much Barton takes Barr's 1980 criticism of IOTS on board. Barr worried that the fundamentalists would misuse Childs. Barton's case of the "disappearing redactor" similarly blurs the distinctiveness of Childs' actual position with the likes of G Wenham (cf. "The Coherence of the Flood Narrative," VT 20, 1978), and even worse, with "fundamentalist opponents of non-conservative biblical criticism" for whom, "when the magic box that contained the redactor is opened, not only is the redactor gone, but Moses himself has stepped into his shoes: a very frightening prospect indeed for a higher critic of any kind" (p57 in 1984 edition, but apparently the same in 1996).

As Fergus Kerr quipped in a seminar last week, it is always very instructive to ask who or what a thinker is afraid of.

For the rest of you who aren't particularly bothered what one OT guy said about another, I hope your weekend is as sunny as ours is shaping up to be.

Tags: PhD

Eleven days ago I was going to call this post "Where I've Been: One Week Ago", but now it's already 2 weeks since I was making my way back from Cambridge. This has been one hectic spring. However, I've landed on my feet this Friday afternoon, and I have enough time left in it to write a quick post about my trip south before I have to dash off to a "retreat" in Glen Esk this weekend.

Cambridge is amazing. Or at least it is if you're into books. I'd heard about Tyndale House as the third best biblical studies library in the world, and as (according to the Duke of Edinburgh) the best kept secret in Cambridge. I've not yet been to the Ecole Biblique or the Vatican library, nor do I know Cambridge well enough to confirm or deny either of these claims. But I can say this: I was very glad to get a day desk at the Tyndale House library so I could read into the night, and have a home base for the week. The people there were kind and helpful. Yet impressive as its holdings are for a specialist library, its real advantage is in being just three blocks away from the Cambridge University Library, and with the Divinity Faculty Library directly in between.

I've never experienced anything like it. In the morning I'd read an important-looking source that I'd found the day before. In the afternoon, I'd dash from library to library, tracking down promising leads from the footnotes. In the end I spent a small fortune on photocopying, and I put my hands on dozens of books that I normally would have had to wait weeks to get through inter-library loans. I'm still a little dizzy.

I also spent part of an afternoon with the Damascus Document and a few other manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. I was pleased that I could still read most of what I'd read with Jim Davila one year ago.

Of course, the whole purpose of the trip was to meet Brevard Childs, who was in residence there at the time. This privilege will almost certainly surpass the others in my memory. I've been a bit puzzled what to say about that afternoon in this post, though. I've decided to keep my comments rather limited.

Two things impressed me about his demeanor. First, he was impressively magnanimous towards scholars with whom I know he disagrees. Second, he remains a remarkably agile thinker for an octogenarian. In the end I felt I'd come into contact with an era of scholarship that no longer exists. He trained in Germany under that robust generation of post-war Old Testament scholars (he sat under both Eichrodt and von Rad). And more than simply offering reminiscences of days gone by, I sensed that I was in the presence of the person who keeps that tradition alive, probably more than anybody else still living.

The only other thing I should mention about the trip to Cambridge is the colleague who accompanied me. My thanks to Gary for making the trip lively and memorable in the evenings, at mealtimes, on the train, and for exploring the University Library's special collections in tandem.

OK, I'm off.

Tags: Personal, Childs, PhD

Two weeks ago, I read some books in preparation for a research trip to Cambridge (last week—I'll post on that soon enough).

I finished a monster book, and read two journals dedicated to reviewing it.

Upon completing it, I thought I might change the exegetical focus of my thesis to Deuteronomy. I've not made up my mind on that one yet.


Then I read this:

It's a good deal more approachable than IOTS, particularly if you're not invested in the questions of critical scholarship. It rehearses some of the same themes, but topically this time rather than book by book.


Finally, I read:

Magisterial comes to mind. It's the sort of thing one could only write towards the end of a very impressive career, I think. It forms a real challenge to OT scholarship, and I have the feeling I'll be wrestling, or struggling, for a long while yet to know what to make of it, in practical terms.


You can see where these titles fit in Childs' career here.

Tags: PhD

The haggis has by now all but disappeared from view. Three trips to the NHS Dental Access center later, my opened root canal has still not been properly filled. Last time, the dentist was due for a lunch break, and so told me to come back in a week so somebody else could finish the job. Today, just over a week later, I was sent away again because the next appointment had arrived, even though this dentist said it would only take her another 15 minutes to finish up. I'm now at the bottom of a two week waiting list.

I was actually composing this post while in the dental chair, but whatever clever things I was going to say about what was playing on the radio (the Cure, then the Police, at which point the dentist started singing along), or about three women with wildly different accents wrestling my mouth to put a stubborn rubber dam in place, have been eclipsed by my frustration at the whole process. In short, I'm a bit less impressed with the NHS than I was in part one.

On the drive back to St Andrews, I tried to talk myself back into an appreciation of all the government does. I tuned in to Radio 4, but still felt bitter. I turned my thoughts to the roads, but then almost immediately queued up for road works.

Hopefully the next trip will be the last. If not, will a temporary filling last the year and a half until I can return to my uncle's practice in Oregon?

Tags: Personal