Blue Cord

Joe Cathey has put up a poll asking what his readers think the center of Old Testament theology is.  His choices are covenant, holiness of Yahweh, God’s self-revelation, communion, or none of the above.  I voted for none of the above, because I do not think it is any of these.  But none of the above suggests that I prefer another center, which is not that case.  Instead, I do not think there is a center to OT theology.
The practice of OT theology is actually two different practices that are related.  The first is merely a descriptive task, which outlines the theology of the different books of the OT.  The second task is a creative task, in which we try to systemize the theology of the whole OT by finding a single rubric that provides the key to understanding the Old Testament.  While I am very much in favor of the first task, the second task seems to me to be not only an impossible task but also not a desirable thing to do.

Finding the center of the OT is a standard way of organizing a book on OT theology.  But it is not a necessary step.  Of the two great OT theologies from the last century, only one of them sought a center.  This was Walther Eichrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament, which identified covenant as the unifying feature.  But Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology did not need such a center, instead focusing on the development of the theology.

The problem with covenant as a center is readily apparent: wisdom literature does not deal with the idea of covenant.  In fact, covenant is inappropriate in wisdom literature, since wisdom is a universal feature, while covenant is a particular one.  Eichrodt himself seemed to understand this, which is why wisdom literature received such poor treatment in his book.

A center for OT theology cannot be found within the text itself.  This much is clear from the multitude of studies which have tried and failed to find such a center.  This center can be created, however, and whenever someone writes a theology with a center this is what they are doing (whether they recognize it or not).  And it might be possible to create a theology that did justice to the whole Old Testament.  But such a theology would be, to a certain extent, external to the OT itself.  It might make some people happy, but it would be artificial.

What stands behind this search for a center is the conviction that the OT presents us with one theology that we can find and elucidate.  Increasingly, however, we have come to recognize that the OT contains not one theology but many.  The theology of Isaiah and the theology of Jeremiah were different.  Song of Songs is different than Psalms.  And wisdom literature is certainly different from anything else in the canon.  When we try to reduce all these various voices to one voice, we squash the diversity in the Bible and do not do justice to the text itself.  Usually, we end up interpreting one set of texts in the light of another set that we view as primary.

Why we would want to do this is not clear.  Why not let the Bible speak for itself?  Why not allow the various voices in the text to each have their own say, unfettered by what other texts say?  This seems to me to make the text much more useful, since it would allow it to speak to a variety of situations today.  True, finding a center would help us to tame the text, but to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the Bible is not a tame book.

Recent OT theologies have been following this pattern.  Most notable is Walter Brueggemann’s  Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.  It seems to me that we should be seeking centers of OT theology, instead of reducing the text to one center.  Covenant serves well for the priestly writings, but not for other texts.  Let’s not force the text to fit into our preconceived notions of what constitutes theology.

Those of you who have been using Internet Explorer to view this blog have probably been noticing problems with the display of the page. Although these problems were completely cosmetic, they were annoying. They came from the fact that IE does not always read XHTML well. When it find errors, it freaks out. And sometimes it freaks out even when it reads correct code that it thinks is an error (this is caused by IE 6 being horribly outdated).

I think I finally have the Internet Explorer problem solved. Ironically, it was fixed by moving my web page from HTML Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. This means there are no errors — not even minor ones — in my page’s code. The problem was that HTML errors caused IE 6 to go into quirks mode and assume I was using an older form of HTML. In reality, my HTML was ahead of IE, but did not validate. By validating my XHTML, this prevents IE from shifting into quirks mode, and it therefore interprets code correctly (as far as I can tell).

Unfortunately, the problem of the comment box is still present. I hope to have that fixed some time soon, but I can’t promise when that will happen. I apologize for the continued inconvenience.

I am back in the States now, and I managed to arrive in the middle of the huge debate over immigration. Unfortunately I was too tired to stay up to hear the President’s speech and I have not yet had a chance to read the transcript.

It seems to me that the churches have a huge responsibility to add a theological voice to the debate. Not having been here, I don’t know whether churches are doing that or not (I suspect Sojourners and other magazines are). I would love to hear what is happening in your churches over the debate. Are you holding any discussion groups or Bible studies?

Just off the top of my head, there are several factors that need to be addressed. These include:

• The place of the resident alien (ger) in Israelite society, a topic I covered briefly in a previous post.
• What does “love your neighbor” mean with regard to Latin America? How do we as US Christians work for their greatest good?
• How does loving the people of Latin America compliment or conflict with loving our neighbors in America? Can the greater good be accomplished for both, or does one side lose out?
• What are the ethics of one nation amassing huge amounts of wealth and then closing off the border to those who would like a chance to share in that wealth?

Being jet lagged right now, my thought on these issues are not particularly clear, so I am going to hold off posting on them until I have a chance of making sense. But I would love to hear what others say. I think we as biblical scholars have a responsibility to aid the churches in addressing this from a faith perspective (no matter what Hector Avalos and Matthew Fox have to say).

One of the things I did when I moved to Blue Cord from Karamat (at xanga.com) was to make Blue Cord into a completely academic blog.  Karamat had both academic and personal posts, but I decided to split these into seperate blogs.  After all, not everyone is interested in my personal life (I can’t imagine why that is).

Now that my family and I are heading back to the US to visit churches to raise funds for our missionary work (I am blogging from Riga, Latvia, right now), I have started up the other blog on this site.  It is called Out and About, and it covers personal experiences, reflections on our life and work, and posts about our traveling.  If any of you are interested, I encourage you to check it out.  It will have posts not only from me, but from my wife and son as well.  I hope you enjoy it.

The latest SBL Forum is out, and I wanted to call attention to one article in particular. This is Hector Avalos’s “The Ideology of the Society of Biblical Literature an the Demise of an Academic Profession.” It is interesting that this comes out on the heels of Michael V. Fox’s article criticizing “faith-based scholarship.” Apparently, taking biblical scholars to task for being religious is something of a trend at the Forum.

Although I will try to post something more in-depth when I have had time to reflect on this, my initial reaction to his essay is that it boils down to this: he thinks religion is not important, so he thinks biblical studies is irrelevant as long as it continues to serve theological ends. Avalos says,

In an increasingly global educational market, an academic discipline that is still perceived as serving the theological education of even one complex community of faith (e.g., the so-called “Judeo-Christian”) will be doomed to irrelevance in secular academia. Instead of helping channel more students to theological education, it is better to encourage students to enter a profession more practical for humanity (e.g., food economists or lawyers for the poor).

The problem is that he does not see theology as practical for humanity. If you share his presupposition, you might share his conclusion. But since most of us in biblical studies see theological studies in general and the Bible in particular as being of immense practical value for humanity, his argument carries little weight.

One wonders how a religious educational market in North America and Europe, where the majority of people are Christian or Jewish, could be irrelevant. Even if one just looks at the market, those are pretty strong driving forces. Avalos insists that scholars are merely creating the demand for their work, but that demand is already there. Many people are interested in the Bible, quite often because {gasp} they themselves are religious too. Saying there is a problem with biblical studies serving religious people is like saying there is a problem with a doctor serving sick people. Although he is correct in saying that biblical studies is largely an elitist endeavor (and I don’t agree that this is a negative thing), it is an elite that serves others.

Avalos does have some worthwhile things to say about the discipline, but they are overshadowed by his idea that religion is going to make biblical scholarship irrelevant.

I suspect the biblioblogosphere will be abuzz with this one for a few days. I look forward to reading what others have to say and to adding more to the conversation when I have more time to write (i.e., after I get to America on Monday).