Blue Cord

On the SBL site, Allan Rosengren has responded to David J. A. Clines’s response to Rolf Rendtorff’s reflections on the Yahwist, about which I blogged a few weeks ago.

Rosengren’s article begins with a discussion on the different between prose and poetry, noting that we don’t like seeing doublets in prose but accept them as part of poetry. He wonders whether we should look for parallelism in prose as well. I think we should, but I think when we do so we are engaged in redaction criticism instead of source criticism. It is the redactor (apologies to John van Seters) later author who has placed parallel stories side by side in prose, whereas it is one author who does it in the process of composition in poetry.

Rosengren points out that a desire for consistency is the reason we have the Documentary Hypothesis. I spent this morning pointing out the inconsistencies in the Pentateuch to students in my intro class, and I did so to show them the reason that the Documentary Hypothesis was created. Rosengren asks what the use of the Documentary Hypothesis is and answers his own question by noting that it creates consistency.  Or better yet, as he himself says, it creates consistencies.

He notes, however, that in doing so we often times overlook the various voices in the text. Instead of focusing on the multitude of outlooks that the Old Testament presents, we feel more comfortable with looking at four different sources that are each internally consistant. He suggests that we should speak of different voices in the text instead of sources, since sources implies an authorial mode. I would agree with him, but when doing source criticism I prefer to speak of layers instead of voices.

I think Rosengren’s suggestion of listening to different voices in the text is important, but it confuses two different tasks. The job of source criticism is to trace the development of the text. To speak of voices in the text is to treat the text synchronically, while source criticism is by nature a diachronic task. When we are doing redaction criticism, that is the time to pay attention to competing voices in the text, and as we move towards the theological task it is even more important.

Paying attention to the multitude of voices in the text is not the new approach that Rosengren thinks it is, however. We have been doing this for a couple of decades now. One need only look at Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament with its subtitle Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy to see how this approach has become part of Old Testament studies.

Since we are at the beginning of a new semester and many of us are engaged in teaching introductory classes, I thought I would point out a resource that I found last year at the SBL.  It is the book Teaching the Bible: Practical Strategies for Classroom Instruction, edited by Mark Roncace and Patrick Gray.

The book includes 273 exercises by about 100 contributors, each of whom has tried out the exercises in their own classes.  A short (2-3 page) essay on each exercise explains the activity and the idea it is meant to convey to the students.  I have been using this since November last year, and it is an excellent way to have the students work with a particular method or text instead of merely lecturing on it.

For instance, one of the exercises uses a text that is available on-line to illustrate the principles of textual criticism.  Since students cannot work with the original languages,
If you are teaching an introductory course on the Bible, I would highly recommend this book.

Tom Lutz has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times in which he talks about how we spend our time in academia. He points out that academia has one of the lowest years-of-education-to-pay-scale ratio possible. And, although having fifteen weeks off each summer sounds good, the reality is that most academics put in sixty hour weeks, even during the summer months. What, then, is the draw of academia?

He draws an interesting comparison between academics and workers in the 19th century, who left work frequently in the day for activities such as drinking and gambling. He points out that

During much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-control than there were about pay or working hours.

It is interesting that being able to set your own hours is often rated high in factors leading to job satisfaction. And that is one thing that we academics do have. Aside from the hours that I must be in class or a meeting, how I spend the rest of my time is up to me. Yes, I have to grade and prepare for class, but I get to decide when to do that. I can do it at the office between classes, at home during the day or at night, or at 2:00 am, when I am at my most productive.

Lutz concludes with this observation:

I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost doubled my salary, but which would have required me to report to an office in standard 8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment I felt like the circus worker in the joke: he follows the elephant with a shovel, and when offered another job responds, “What, and give up show business?”

Of course, he also fails to point out how much time academics spend in a similar manner to the guy who cleans up after the elephant, but I guess that is a topic for another post.

R.R. Reno has an article in First Things in which he publishes his opinion on the seminaries in the United States. The article has the standard conservative slant that you would expect from First Things, and seems to take a fairly one-sided view of theological education. While I don’t know enough to discuss his opinion of all the seminaries, I did want to take issue with a few that he cites. Many thanks to Ben Witherington for drawing my attention to this article.

For starters, I do agree with him that Duke has an excellent divinity school. Richard Hayes and Ellen Davis are wonderful teachers and do a great job at engaging the text at a theological level. If you will notice in my “Currently Reading” section, I am in the middle of a book by Ellen on preaching the Old Testament.

But like most people on ends of the spectrum, whether right or left, Reno views most seminaries as being problematic. He refers to them as being in a “post-Christian” phase or being in a “liberal Protestant death-spiral.” Even Marquette and Fordam are seen as being places where it is hard to get a good theological education. This is standard fare: conservatives see most seminaries as being unorthodox while liberals see most seminaries as living in a dead orthodoxy. I long for the day when we can get past such ridiculous categories of liberal and conservative. They do not map well onto Christianity.

One of the schools he takes to task is Yale Divinity School

Yale [has] seen a decline in serious intellectual life brought on by the intensely ideological agendas of Christian feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, as well as recycled versions of liberal Protestantism.

As a somewhat recent graduate of YDS (M.Div. 1993; S.T.M. 1994), I have to disagree with him. While there are certainly liberation theologians (Leddy Russell is one of the best in the country) and gay and lesbian concerns, these hardly dominate the curriculum. They were not required, and I ended up not taking any of them, although I wish I had had time to do some liberation theology. Most of my classes were very solid theologically, and we were very interested in how the Bible speaks to the church today.

I think a perusal of the faculty who were there when I was there should dispell his theory. First, Ellen Davis and Richard Hayes, whose work he praises at Duke, were both associate professors at YDS while I was there. Steven Chapman and Amy Laura Hall, whom Reno calls “excellent younger faculty” at Duke, are both products of YDS and the Yale doctoral program (and were classmates of mine). For another YDS grad from the same period who engages the text on a theological level, check out fellow biblioblogger Stephen Cook at Biblische Ausbildung.

As for other faculty, you can hardly accuse Brevard Childs of being a “recycled version of liberal Protestantism.” In Robert R. Wilson’s Old Testament class, I learned to engage text on a theological level, something that Reno apparently thinks is lacking. We did the same thing in Leander Keck’s New Testament class. These last two classes are both year long introductions to the Bible that are required of all students and form the basis of most subsequent studies. Some of these scholars are now retired or on the verge of retiring, but they are being replaced by scholars in the same mold. I doubt things have taken such a drastic turn for the worst in the ten years since I graduated.

Basically, Reno seems upset that seminaries don’t teach theology the way he wants. And, of course, people on the ends of the spectrum need a crisis (such as a crisis in academic instruction) to rally people to their cause. Unfortunately in Reno’s case, this means that he finds it necessary to paint the picture bleaker than it actually is. This is unfortunate, as it might end up scaring students away from seminary, thereby preventing them from obtaining the theological education that Reno wishes they had.

A friend e-mailed me a link to a site that I had not come across. It is trekjews.com, a site that discusses Jewish aspects of Star Trek. It is run by a Hasidic rabbi, who had just written a book entitled Jewish Themes in Star Trek (Where No Rabbi Has Gone Before!). He is currently looking for a publisher for the book.

Among the better parts of the site (a site that suffers from poor production value) is a page of links to other sites that discuss this topic. Apparently one of the hot button issues is whether the Ferengi are an antisemitic stereotype.

When I came across this, I couldn’t help but remember the closing scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World: Part I. It was supposed to be a preview of Part II, and it depicted Jews flying around in space ships shaped like the Star of David. It had a great theme song:

We’re Jews, in outer space
We’re zippin’ along protecting the Hebrew race.