A Gift from My Great-Grandfather

My great-grandfather, A. Bliek, was a pastor (Dutch Reformed) in southwestern Minnesota in the early 20th century. I don’t know much about him, to be honest. My dad remembers him vaguely, and my grandmother has never spoken of him at any length.

Recently, however, as my grandmother was clearing out her house in preparation for her move to a senior living facility, she stumbled upon an old box that belonged to Grandpa Bliek. When she opened it, she immediately handed it to my mom and said, “Eric should have this.” I have yet to really examine the contents in any depth, but a cursory examination shows that this box is going to be a LOT of fun! The box contains a collection of sermons and a couple of journals, all penned by my great-grandfather. Most of the materials are in English, but some are in Dutch, and everything in the box seems to predate 1925. What’s more, everything in this box is in stellar condition, having been shut up in a box for at least the last 50-60 years.

Over the next few months or so, I’m hoping to scan and OCR most of the materials in this box, and once I’ve brought some sort of order to the collection, I’m hoping that I can make it available in .pdf form to my family and whoever else is interested.

Until then, here are some samples from the box (click images for larger views):

Beroepingsbrief (letter of appointment) from 1909:

Some pages from a journal (sermon on Psalm 103):

A typed sermon on Hebrews 4:11:

Benedict XVI on Faith and Politics

In his Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, Pope Benedict XVI offers the following interpretation of the third temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (as recounted in Matt 4:8-10):

The Christian empire attempted at an early stage to use the faith in order to cement political unity. The Kingdom of Christ was now expected to take the form of a political kingdom and its splendor. The powerlessness of faith, the earthly powerlessness of Jesus Christ, was to be given the helping hand of political and military might. This temptation to use power to secure the faith has arisen again and again in varied forms throughout the centuries, and again and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle for the freedom of the Church, the struggle to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure, is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power and must bend to its criteria (39-40).

A bit later, Benedict concludes:

Jesus…repeats to us what he said in reply to Satan, what he said to Peter, and what he explained further to the disciples of Emmaus: No kingdom of this world is the Kingdom of God, the total condition of mankind’s salvation. Earthly kingdoms remain earthly human kingdoms, and anyone who claims to be able to establish the perfect world is the willing dupe of Satan and plays the world right into his hands (43-44).

Petaus, the Village Scribe, and Ancient Illiteracy

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post bemoaning the death of written communication. This morning, after remembering a papyrus that I read about a few years back, I decided that perhaps written communication has been dying for quite some time. The following image depicts the “Petaus Papyrus,” an Egyptian fragment that dates to the second century CE.

*image source is Jonathan L. Reed, The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 7.

The handwriting on the papyrus is that of Petaus, scribe of Hormu, a village in Egypt. The text reads, ΠΕΤΑΥΣ ΚΩΜΟΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΕΥΣ ΕΠΙΔΕΔΩΚΑ, or “I Petaus, village scribe, have entered.” This line is repeated over and over, and after the fifth line, he begins to misspell it. According to J. Reed, he “eventually tires of the exercise” (7). In short, Petaus, the village scribe, was illiterate. This papyrus is one of the ways in which he practiced his signature.

On one level, this papyrus serves to remind those of us who study ancient literature that “literacy” in the ancient world is certainly to be understood differently than it is today. That is, in the second century, one could be a village scribe without really knowing how to write! On another level, perhaps this papyrus will encourage me to be more forgiving when I come across minor typos today. We’ll see.

Reason, Faith, the SBL, and the F-Word

In a recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Ronald Hendel offers a scathing reflection on the current state of the Society of Biblical Literature. See the full article here, as well as responses from SBL members here.

The article suggests that the SBL, by failing to preserve a sharp dichotomy between faith and reason, has effectively abandoned its mission to promote and encourage “critical” biblical scholarship. By forgetting the lessons of Blaise Pascal (“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”, Pensées) and Baruch Spinoza (specifically, in his Theological-Political Treatise), the SBL has begun spiraling into “a confused domain of dissension and hypocrisy.” As this blog is, at least in part, an effort to explore and defend the inter-locution of faith in biblical scholarship, I feel that a response to at least few of Hendel’s points is warranted here.

Part of Hendel’s trouble with the SBL is that they have begun to allow the inclusion of what he deems “fundamentalist groups.” These groups include, but are not limited to, the Society of Pentecostal Studies and the Adventist Society for Religious Studies. Later in the article, he also includes “some postmodernists, feminists, and eco-theologians” as well as “creationists, snake-handlers and faith-healers” as implicitly under the same blanket. The problem with such groups, according to Hendel, is that some of their members proselytize at the SBL meetings. In response, I would say that Hendel needs to not use “fundamentalist” as a descriptor for every person who would seek to incorporate their own faith views into their biblical scholarship, or as a category for every person who would proselytize. The category of “fundamentalist” is, in my opinion, not a helpful one. It is somewhat akin to labeling someone as a conservative or a liberal…the categories may have meant something at some point, but now they are highly relative, as their meanings are largely constitutive of the person doing the branding. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fundamentalism” thus:

• A religious movement, which orig. became active among various Protestant bodies in the United States after the war of 1914-1918, based on strict adherence to certain tenets (e.g. the literal inerrancy of Scripture) held to be fundamental to the Christian faith.

In some contemporary Christian circles (and apparently, in some scholarly ones), “fundamentalist” has come to mean “someone who is militantly simple and closed-minded about issues related to faith, politics, culture, the Bible, etc.” Hendel’s use of the term in this article is both inaccurate and misleading. While I would agree with him that proselytizing has no place at SBL, I imagine the situations he describes in which it has occurred are exceptions, not rules. It seems to me as if Hendel’s frustrations with SBL, which he expresses in terms of “fundamentalists” now eating at the same scholarly table as historical critics, run deeper than simply allowing new groups to join and have their voices be heard. His lack of clarity regarding the word “fundamentalist” seems to highlight his tacit assertion that no one who would allow their faith and scholarship to converge should be allowed at SBL. On the absurdity of such a claim, Michael Bird once wrote a brilliant parody that is highly recommended reading.

The fact of the matter is that the SBL has always been populated by persons whose faiths and beliefs have influenced their critical scholarship. As I continue in the field of New Testament studies, I become more and more convinced that the possibility of exegesis without presuppositions is not really a possibility at all. We all approach the text from a certain perspective, and sidelining such perspectives for the sake of objectivity is proving to be quite impossible. This is, of course, a point of contention for some. My overall impression of SBL is that it is (and perhaps should be) a melting pot of sorts. True, there are persons in attendance at the meetings with whom I find little in common and with whom I have little interest in speaking about “scholarly matters.” I will refrain from outing them here. However, at one level, the sheer size of the conference, let alone the number of sessions held daily, makes avoidance of these groups and persons quite easy.

The course of action that is at least tacitly implied by Hendel’s article is that SBL should exercise strict guidelines in screening members for admission or participation. He fails to outline specifically what the criteria for membership might be, but one could imagine that it would have to go beyond the school at which one wrote their dissertation. What Hendel seems to hint at here is the need for a statement of faith (or lack thereof) that all members would need to agree to. What we’re talking about here is, for all intents and purposes, a CREED, a hermeneutical lens through which members would agree to read in community with other members. Adherence to said creed would control the interpretation of the biblical text so that influences such as faith would not be allowed to “corrupt” one’s reading. The creed of reason would, in theory, protect its professors from the meddling creeds of faith.

Am I alone in thinking that Hendel’s article is advocating its own brand of fundamentalism?

The Need for Historical Criticism

The tendency in much rhetoric concerning theological interpretation is to pit it against the long established methods of historical criticism. At most, historical methods are seen as necessary evils along the road to a more theological reading of the biblical texts. That is, one must venture into the realm of dry, perhaps even atheistic ground of historical criticism in order to guard any interpretation against the charge of ahistoricism. The dichotomy between historical and theological exegesis is not helpful, but the gulf that exists is the responsibility of scholars across the spectrum. On the topic of relating the two, I thought it may be helpful to post some observations.

1. I recently read through Benjamin Jowett´s On the Interpretation of Scripture, which has in recent years become the paradigmatic example of historical criticism gone awry. In this famous piece, Jowett insists that Scripture must be read as any other book, and that while Patristic or other religious readings of the Bible may be creative or even profound, they do not constitute exegesis. He does not decry the belief that Scripture may provide theological truth or instruction, but he assumes the location of such truth to be that in the intention of the original author-hearer relationship. The original meaning, he concludes, has become tarnished by grime, and the task of the exegete is thus to approach the text with the intention of uncovering the original, pristine kernel of truth. The problem with Jowett’s approach (or at least one of them) is that his presumption from the ouset is that Scripture meant something different than the meaning established by hundreds of years of interpretation. For a scholar like Jowett, who helped to pave the way for the necessity of “presupposition-less exegesis,” the fact that his project begins with such a powerful presupposition should strike one as odd. Historical criticism may perhaps reveal meanings in the text that are at odds with later theological projects, but to enter the interpretive task with the assumption that the “true” meaning of a text was buried long ago is as much eisegesis as assuming that the Bible was written yesterday. Jowett does not presume to know what Scripture means, but he does presume to know what it does not mean.
2. Regarding historical critical methodology, George Landes once wrote, “What is bankrupt is not the method itself, but the attempt to make it serve purposes it was not intended to serve.” Michael Gorman echoes such sentiment in his Elements of Biblical Exegesis when he writes that the methods of historical and theological exegesis are the same…it is in the goals that we encounter the discrepancies. Gorman’s own work is decidedly theological, but one would be strained to dismiss his theological reading as ahistorical, eisegetical, or in contrast to the “original intent” of Paul. This is not to say that Gorman’s work is somehow a straight, undistilled Pauline theology (if there is such a thing), or even that Paul himself would read it and say, “Now THAT’S what I meant to say!” Rather, it is to say that such work proves the possibility of historical criticism and theological exegesis existing alongside one another in a way that is mutually edifying.
3. In a recent conversation with a colleague of mine, the point was made that to approach the Bible as an indifferent observer is itself ahistorical. That is, the writers of the New Testament (and the Old, for that matter) were persons who believed that God was real, and that this God participated in human history in a real way. The same can be said with regard to the original hearers. What then are we to make of the claim that to read the biblical texts as indifferent to the missio Dei is inherently more valuable than reading as a person of faith? To borrow an analogy from Markus Bockmuehl’s Seeing the Word, how much may one say about the stained glass windows of King’s College Chapel without stepping inside and viewing them from within? One must not be unattentive to the historical circumstances of any given text, but to approach the Bible with the belief that the Word became flesh does not make for sloppy exegesis.

These observations are intended as conversation starters, not answers. The role of history in any interpretation is an important question, and I hope that further dialogue on the issue may afford some clarity.

Theological Exegesis

Theological Exegesis has caused a stir among Biblical scholars in recent years. It is not a new phenomenon, however, as this “method” of interpreting Biblical texts has permeated the Christian faith since its advent. The stir resulting from the movement is not suspicion of its validity per se, as many Biblical scholars will maintain that interpretation of any given text in a theological light is perfectly suited to religious environments. The controversy surrounding it has in many ways resulted from questions of its position (or lack thereof) in the academy. Namely, can Biblical scholars, who have for centuries claimed to approach the text from an objective standpoint, now rush into a method of interpretation that allows for their confessional presuppositions to play an active part in their reading of a given text? Can Biblical scholars approach the Bible as Christians or Jews, and may they interpret the texts as documents written to and by the faithful? In a related vein, they ask whether “theological exegesis” will not ultimately devolve into ahistoricism and mere prooftexting of the interpreter’s own doctrinal postulations.

The concerns surrounding theological exegesis are many, and most are not without justification. This blog aims to explore the relationship between theological exegesis and historical criticism, in an effort to greater understand their strengths and weaknesses. I maintain from the outset that the two are not mutually exclusive, but that each, if exercised properly, encourages and perhaps even requires the other. This blog is thus an experiment, and like any experiment, one should not in principle rule out the possibility of failure, or at the very least, adaptation. The road will undoubtedly be long, and I invite both comments and criticisms of that which is posted here.