Blue Cord

John Hobbins at Ancient Hebrew Poetry has an excellent post on the state of biblical interpretation training in seminary. His post has elicited several responses and posts on other blogs. Links to these can be found at the bottom of his original post.

John laments the fact that most seminary graduates have such a poor grounding in the Bible. In a phrase that cuts to the heart of the problem, John states:

Overwhelmed by many other claims on time and mind, students end up with a merely cursory and superficial preparation in the literature that is supposed to be compass, mirror, and anchor of the ministry they will carry out.

I wanted to make two points about biblical studies in seminaries.

The first flows out of John’s statement about the other claims on the time and minds of seminarians. Part of the blame for this comes from the fact that mainline churches — including my own — do not place as much stress on the Bible as they once did. Many other things clamor to be the central mission of the church, including social justice and pastoral counseling. And many parish search committees look more for someone who can be an administrator than someone who can interpret a biblical text. Is it any wonder, then, that the people who go to seminary look to focus more on things other than the Bible?

This is not to say that social justice and pastoral counseling are unimportant. They are, but they are not the reason that the church exists. They flow out of our commitment to the gospel of Christ Jesus, a gospel that is best understood through the Scriptures of the church.

I would be surprised if there were any medical schools out there in which students studied administration more than they studied the human body. Or a law school in which actually reading the law was required in only a quarter of the classes. But that is exactly what we are doing in a number of seminaries.

Sad to say, I knew more than one person in my seminary who could quote from memory more lines of T.S. Elliot’s poems than verses of Scripture.¹

My second point is that I am not sure requiring Hebrew and Greek of seminarians would improve this situation, especially if we mandated just the one year that some denominations require. If we are trying to create students who can responsibly use Hebrew and Greek, then no less than three years should be mandatory in each.

Obviously, few seminarians are going to go for this, and I am not convinced we should make them. Not all seminarians are cut out to be linguists (as my friend the Peripatetic Polar Bear can attest) nor should they be. But one year of language study creates a dangerous situation. We have all heard sermons where the preacher made basic mistakes in handling the original languages, and it often comes from thinking that they know enough of the language. Giving students one year of language equips them to make mistakes but does not really give them enough to understand the text better. I think Alexander Pope’s caveat needs to be recalled here:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

Are we really convinced that Hebrew and Greek are such simple languages that two semesters of each gives the would–be pastor the tools to delve deeper into the text? I think the student’s time would be much better spent taking additional classes on interpreting the text in English.

1. Granted, T.S. Elliot is de rigueur for us Episcopalians, but the Bible should be too. [back]

After publishing my previous post, it occurred to me that in some cases it might sound like I am using the word late in a pejorative sense.  This is, in fact, how some scholars (and theologians!) use the term.  If something is late then it is not original.  It is not fresh. It can be ignored.

This is not, however, how I am using the word.  Just because something is late does not mean that it is not a part of the Bible.  It is still in the canon and is still authoritative.  Things that are early are no better or worse than things that are late.

I am not one of those who is trying to place everything in the pre-exilic period.  Neither do I view everything as late as the Scandinavian school does.  I want to know the date of the texts I am studying, but I am no happier with an early or late text.  They are all part of the history of ancient Israel.

Last week, I wrote a post about humanism ransacking religious festivals and rituals for their own purposes. Several people have picked up on this and written their own posts on the subject.

James Pate had some thoughts and musings in a post whose title says it all: “But It Is My Tradition, Too”. James writes,

What exactly is wrong with Christians holding a seder, or incorporating elements of Judaism into their faith life? The Exodus is part of the Christian tradition as much as it is part of Judaism. And, sure, there are things that the Exodus means to Christians that it does not mean to Jews, such as the Passover lamb pointing to Christ’s sacrifice. But why can’t a Christian celebrate God’s activity in history on behalf of his people Israel? And why can’t a Christian do so while acknowledging that the Exodus story has specific significance for him, a Christian?

James is correct, of course, that the exodus is a part of Christian tradition. We should celebrate it as an example of God’s liberating work. The seder, however, is not a part of Christian tradition. Early Jewish Christians still celebrated Jewish holidays, but Gentile Christians did not, at least not in their original form. The seder became the Eucharist. The exodus is the central saving event for Jews. But for Christians, that event has been eclipsed by the cross.

The seder is central and unique to Judaism. It is almost a sine qua non. When outsiders, even well-meaning outsiders, take the seder and use it for their own purposes, they are taking something central and using it in a peripheral way. That to me seems insulting. It also amounts to cultural plagiarism, since we are taking something that our culture did not create and saying that it is ours to do with as we please.

In other words, we can celebrate the exodus as Christians, but we need to find a means other than the seder for doing so.

Aside from the seder, James does agree that syncretism is a bad thing, a point that is also picked up by John Hobbins in his post “Why Unitarianism is on a Roll”.  Both James and John (and Peter, I assume) point to an essay by John Levenson entitled “The Problem with Salad Bowl Religion”.  Levenson has some great things to say about syncretism.  The following paragraph cuts to the heart of the matter:

At the deepest level, an act performed in order to subordinate one’s own will to the will of God is vastly different from the identical act performed in pursuit of other goals—self-expression, aesthetic pleasure, familial nostalgia, ethnic identification, whatever. The motivation, of course, is not transparent, and if we go only by appearances, syncretistic worship that includes Jewish elements looks like a hyphenation of traditional Judaism with other things. In fact, it is only the semblances of the Jewish observance that have been imported. Their deeper authorization—the unique claims of the Covenant of Sinai upon the people Israel—have been tacitly but thoroughly denied.

The problem with the buffet style approach to religion is that it gets things backwards.  When we pick and choose from religions, we mold the religion to fit us.  But religion is supposed to be about religion molding us to be the people that God wants us to be.

The comparison with a buffet is apt.  When we eat meals chosen by a trained nutritionist, we have a well-balanced diet that provides us with all the protein, carbs, fiber, and vitamins that our bodies need.  I don’t know about you, but that is not what happens when I go to a buffet.  I end up eating foods I like, and the foods I like are not particularly healthy.  In the same way, few people are able to design their own well-balanced and nutritious spiritual diet.

For the past month, I have been trying to get through From Gaza to Jerusalem: An Old Testament Theology. I bought the book a few years ago at the annual SBL meeting. This is my second attempt at reading it, and for the second time I am giving up.

The book is authored by Donald Keyser, professor of religion at Campbell University, who died in March 2006. As far as I can tell, this is the only book he wrote. Being a church history professor, he asked Wayne Ballard,¹ an OT scholar, to help him with the book. Although he began as an assistant, Ballard eventually became the co-author.

Unfortunately, I am rather disappointed with the book. The book is intended to be used as an introductory OT theology. Keyser wrote it because he did not find any OT theology books he could use when teaching OT. But the book comes out sounding like Sunday School material.

The trend in recent OT theologies is to highlight the multiple voices that are found within the OT. This leads to a very textured reading of the Bible. By contrast, Keyser’s theology comes out rather two dimensional. This may, in part, be due to Keyser’s decision to structure the book according to the standard categories of systematic theology (e.g., God, humanity, creation, sin). While these concepts are certainly part of the OT, the OT does not center its own discussion around these loci.

The book is intended to be very basic, so I can’t fault it for not being a more in-depth treatment. But I can’t recommend it even for church Bible studies, at least not ones that want to study the theology in the Bible. It seems to me that what the book presents is not a theology of the OT so much as a theology that has been informed by the OT. The latter is certainly a valuable thing, but it is not an OT theology.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has used this book to teach OT theology, especially if they had a more favorable reaction to it than I did.

1. Ballard currently teaches at Carson-Newman College, my alma mater. [back]