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NT Job Opening in Egypt (Presbyterian)

June 8, 2011 in Academia, Jobs and Scholarships with Comments Off

Below is information on a New Testament Professor position in Cairo, Egypt. It’s through the PC(USA)’s missions agency. I’m guessing you need to be Presbyterian to qualify, but you’d need to follow up with the contact listed below to confirm or deny.

Position Description:

Professor of New Testament, Egypt

Organization: Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo

Location: Cairo, EGYPT

Ecumenical Partner: The Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo

Pattern of Service: Mission Co-worker

Position description: APPLICATION DEADLINE IS JULY 15, 2011.The co-worker will teach New Testament courses at the bachelor’s and master’s degree level at the seminary.

Essential job tasks and responsibilities: -Lecture in New Testament courses and other areas of biblical studies
-tutor students as appropriate, including guiding thesis work
-participate fully in the life and work of the academic community at the seminary
-engage in professional research and writing
-participate as appropriate in the broader Christian community in Egypt
-attend relevant national and international meetings and conferences in the region, as advisable

Mission description: The Evangelical Theological Seminary of Cairo was founded to train pastors and other leaders for service in the Evangelical Presbyterian Synod of the Nile. The Seminary strives to attain high academic standards in every area of biblical and religious studies.

Length of service: 3 years

Start date: 01/2012

End date: 12/2014

Full time, part time or either: Full-Time

Settings:

Education

Interest categories:

Education / Training/ Library
Mission Service (International)

Description of program location: Cairo is the capital of Egypt. The country is 1 1/2 times the size of Texas and has a
population of 81 million. Racial/Ethnic groups include Egyptian, Sudanese, Syrian, Bedouin, Nubian, Palestinian, Berber, and others. Languages spoken include Arabic, English, Nubian, and Berber. Egypt was an intellectual and mission center of the Christian Church for its first four centuries. When Islam arrived in the 7th century, Cairo became (and remains) the capital. The revival of conservative Islam in the Middle East has recently heightened an underlying tension between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Still, Egypt remains mostly tolerant and open. Egyptian Christians and Muslims have a long history of a chiefly peaceful co-existence. Around 85-90% of the population is Muslim with the remaining 10-15% population of Christians mostly Coptic Orthodox.

Required skills, talents and gifts:

Word processing
Writing
Public speaking
Confidence
Cooperative
Working with people
Dependability
Articulate
Relating
Cross cultural sensitivity
Instructing
Motivating others
Tutoring
Flexibility
Adaptability
Works as team member

Desired skills, talents and gifts:

Preaching
Spiritual development

Required experience, licenses and certifications: Some teaching experience preferred. Courses are taught in Arabic, though translation from English will be available for initial courses. Language study available.

Ecclesiastical status:

Member of PC(USA) Congregation
Member of another Christian Community
PC(USA) Candidate for Ordained Ministry
PC(USA) Presbyterian Minister of Word and Sacrament
Minister of another denomination

Required education and languages: Advanced degree (e.g., Ph.D.) in New Testament or related field.

Position benefits: regular co-worker benefits

Housing: ETSC provides housing for single people (couples or families will likely need an apartment). Food is provided for those living on campus and lunch for those living off campus whenever they are present. Utilities are covered for on-campus housing. Work-related (office) expenses are also covered.

Salary: regular co-worker salary

Contact: Mission Service Recruitment

Email: msr@pcusa.org

Phone: 888.728.7228 Ext. 2530

Tools in Hand, No Skill Required!

June 7, 2011 in Academia, Humor with 12 Comments

I want to tell you a little bit about how awesome I am. I’m usually not this direct, though many of you have suspected that this is how I see myself. Here are a few more things about my awesomeness you should know:

I have a circular saw. This means, of course, that I can build anything I want to. I can sit down and lay out plans for a tree house, buy the wood, fit the joints, and make the whole thing level, safe, and sturdy.

I have a baseball bat. This means, of course, that at any given moment I could jump onto the local softball team and become their ringer. Every time I step up to the plate I can get on base, and I usually get a hit. I have a bat, after all.

I also have an encyclopedia at my fingertips. This means, of course, that I know a little bit about almost everything in the world. I know about all the presidents, all the countries, and all the bacteria that cause diseases.

I also have a smart phone. This means, of course, that anytime I wanted to I could create a spaceship to put people on the moon. My EVO4G is more powerful than any mainframe they had way back in the ’60s. I’m amazing. I have power untold at my fingertips.

I also have access to Accordance and Bibleworks. This means, of course, that I know everything I need to know about the Greek language. I can translate and parse and investigate what words really mean. I can preach from the Greek and Hebrew. And I can probably write a grammar.

I’m so awesome because I have awesome tools. And once you have tools, what further need do you have for knowledge or skills?

Read. Just Read.

June 4, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Dear Scholar,

I don’t know exactly where you are in your career. You may be a seasoned, experienced, well-published professor. You may be a young graduate student or aspiring, academically inclined seminarian. You may be an undergrad who likes to read too much.

But wherever you are in your process, I have the same request to make of you.

Please read.

I know this sounds obvious. So let me explain.

It seems that the pressure to accumulate footnotes is so great in our day and time that one is allowed to footnote and dismiss someone’s argument without actually engaging the argument or otherwise paying attention to what the article said.

This week I got in the mail a new Romans commentary. It was by a well-established senior scholar. In his discussion of Romans 6, he mentioned Robin Scroggs’ famous article on “the one who has died is justified from sin” in Romans 6:7. He cited it.

That is, he cited it in his discussion of Romans 6:6, and didn’t even mention in his commentary on Romans 6:7 that there was some debate as to whether this “one” might be a reference to Christ rather than a generic “someone.”

Despite the fact that the article he cited was devoted to making that very argument about a Christological reference, the article was cited with no mention of the actual point of it.

This same commentary cited my own article suggesting that dikaioma (δικαίωμα) in Romans 5:16 should be translated “reparation” rather than “justification.” A footnote dismissed my suggestion by saying it never means this anywhere else in Paul, so we should translate the word as “justification,” because the context leads us to expect that meaning.

In saying this, he ignores the evidence of the article to the effect that (1) Paul actually does use dikaioma in just this way–in Romans! and that (2) what dikaioma never means, ever, either in Paul or elsewhere, “justification.”

On the standard of his own argument, his own choice of words does not stand.

Read the article, please.

And don’t just read it, but read it so as to weigh the evidence. And, should you choose to cite it, please actually engage the argument that was made. And, if you choose not to agree with the article, please do so by offering a rejoinder to the argument actually made rather than sticking your fingers in your ears, closing your eyes, jumping up and down, and repeating your own position over and over.

Such a posture is unbecoming a scholar–grad student or senior professor.

Thanks, and best regards,
jrdk

The Church’s Jesus: On Not Overdoing It

May 10, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

Over the next few days I will likely be saying a bit more about the church’s Jesus, as I began doing yesterday.

But before I get deeper into this, I want to speak a word of balance. Yesterday I made some claims about the church’s Jesus being a Jesus that in some ways the academy could never affirm. The church must always stand in the place of rehearsing Jesus not merely as a historical figure but as one who demands that we follow.

And so, in this sense, what the church does with and says about Jesus will always bear a similarity to the Gospels’ original purpose that the “purely academic” study of the Bible cannot, and does not with to, incur.

But…

Where the church’s readings can start to lose their moorings is precisely the place where academic study not only camps out, but even excels and thereby often surpassed the church’s readings.

In a couple of the proposals for theological interpretation I have read, the church’s ideal stance of “obedience” has been held forth as something that places the church closer to the posture of an “ideal reader” of the text than the historical academic readings. But to my mind this concedes too much to the potential response and too little to the historical context.

The first readers of the Bible were not merely worshipers of YHWH or followers of Jesus. They were not merely people who, ideally, would respond to the exhortations or shape their lives in accordance with the narratives.

They were all these things of course.

But they were also Jews living in exile under Babylonian rule. They were also Jews restored to their land in the Persian period and attempting to eke out a living there. They were also caught up in the currents of Roman rule of the Mediterranean world.

To reconstruct the hearing and response of an ideal reader of the text, taking into consideration that such a reader wishes to faithfully respond to God is a necessary component. But it is insufficient. The ideal reader of the text is also situated in a particular historical and cultural context within which the cues, clues, and commands means certain things, carry particular connotations, and aim for faithful response in that historical and cultural context.

The church needs an academy because the academy is always asking what we too often take for granted: “What was this text really trying to say, what response was it truly attempting to elicit?”

For this, we need more than faith. We need history. And for history, we often discover that those without the constraints of prior answers (i.e., an academy that, as such, has no constraint based on an agreed upon a priori right answer) often provide greater illumination than than those for whom history is not the main thing.

So for all that I said, and meant, yesterday about the church needing to say what the academy (as such) cannot, I will not say that people who do not share the church’s faith cannot read the Bible aright. Often, the academy does better with one of the necessary components (a historically viable reading of the text), even while the church’s posture of obedience allows it to affirm another necessary component.

While we in the church say, “God was at work in this history,” we often have to listen to those outside the church to learn better what “this history” is.

Blogsphere Confessional: I Don’t Worship the Academy’s Jesus

May 7, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 10 Comments

When I pontificate here on the blog, I am at times hard on the church and celebratory of the academy. Sometimes this is tied to how the church’s theology influences biblical interpretation or how the academy impacts our understanding of what the Bible is and says.

On Thursday, I entered my private confessional booth to acknowledge that I am a theological reader of scripture. In other words, when I grumble about ways that I see theology impacting biblical interpretation I am concerned about how that’s being done, not that people are reading theologically in general.

Today, here in the privacy of my living room, just between you and me (and please don’t tell anyone, this is all very personal), I feel like I’ve just got to confess something about the other side of things. You see, I don’t worship the academy’s Jesus (or the Biblical Studies Academy itself, for that matter).

“The Academy” has all sorts of problems. For one thing, at places like the Society of Biblical Literature you can talk about how the Bible oppresses your people, how it needs to be reread in creative ways if you’re from a certain part of the world or from a particular minority demographic, how its themes impact modern movies, how ancient texts that have nothing to do with the Bible talk about things having nothing to do with the Bible. But reading the Bible as a more or less traditional Christian arouses fierce denunciations–this is not the work of the academic guild!

Now, I must say that despite such challenges, the SBL is a much happier place for people who want to do some sort of theological work with the text. There was a Pauline Theology group for a number of years around the early 90s. There is a Pauline Soteriology group that regularly puts together some of the best sections in the program.

More importantly, however, the Jesus I serve isn’t the Jesus of academic reconstruction. One of the greatest weaknesses of scholarly work with respect to the church is that it too often sees the Bible as something to be gotten behind. What’s “really” important in much of scholarship is the world that inspired the text, what it points to outside of itself.

Modernist definitions of “history” have often too narrowly scripted the scholar’s task. During my time at Duke E. P. Sanders made a passing comment once about how he couldn’t understand scholars talking about the things the Gospels tell us Jesus was thinking or feeling at a given moment. To his way of thinking, that is not the stuff of history and is therefore off limits.

Even reading and understanding the ancient text as an ancient text with its own story to tell? Apparently, that’s not historical work. The job of the gospels is, in this way of thinking, to give us a window on the Jesus who lies behind.

But the historical Jesus is not the Jesus who shows us the way to God.

This is not to say that historical Jesus studies are without value. Often they are of great value (as Sanders’ own work often is) in helping us to be better readers of the texts that make up the canon of Christian teaching. But we never bow the knee to the historical Jesus of anyone’s reconstruction. That would be a bowing of the knee to the academic, and the academy, itself.

Indeed, so long our Jesus is circumscribed by the academy we will not be able to say the most important things there are to say about Jesus: (1) that God was at work in this man, testifying to him by signs and wonders (Acts 2); (2) that this crucified claimant to Israel’s throne is, in fact, resurrected and bodily standing in the presence of God the Father; and (3) that this crucified one is now the Lord over all things.

That Jesus–one in whom God is at work, one who rules the world, can never be the academy’s Jesus. The Jesus who is worth studying can never be the object of academic affirmation as such.

For all my celebration of the ways that academic study of the Bible has made us better readers of scripture and shed light on the text that reading and responding in faith on its own could never do, it is in fact the reading and responding in faith that makes one a faithful reader of the texts that we actually have.

Job Opening at King’s College London

May 2, 2011 in Academia, Jobs and Scholarships with 1 Comment

From the BNTS listserve:

Lectureship in Theology/Religious Studies & AKC Programme Director

The Dean’s Office, in association with the Department of Theology &
Religious Studies, King’s College London seeks to appoint a Lecturer
in one of the main theological sub-disciplines to be Programme
Director of the AKC (Associate of King’s College, the original award
for King’s College London, open to all staff and students alongside
their degree) with effect from 1 September 2011 (or as soon as
possible thereafter).

The successful candidate will oversee the academic coordination and
development of Distance Learning modules for the AKC for the Dean’s
Office as well as offer course teaching (both undergraduate and
postgraduate), research and supervision in the Department of Theology
& Religious Studies.

For further details, see:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/pertra/vacancy/external/pers_detail.php?jobindex=10204

[How] Do You Love?

April 28, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 17 Comments

Over the past couple of days I’ve had a chance to think a bit about my posture toward the church. This was spurred by a conversation that began with a friend telling me that I come across as not loving the church.

Is Storied Theology the ravings and ramblings of someone who is against the church?

On the one hand, such a perception surprises me, because I think of everything I do as aimed toward making the church more healthy and faithful in its following of Jesus. But on the other hand, I recognize that I approach the church with the assumption that much of what it does and says is less than ideal.

I had a pastor friend once who was widely reported as saying that 90% of what we do in church is crap. I have sympathy for that assessment, to say the least.

So is there any way that someone with my critical posture toward the church can be said to love the church as well?

In fact, I do see all of my work as an act of love toward the church. And here’s what I’ve been thinking about different ways of conceiving that task:

Some of us love the church like scribes. It is easy to see what love means here, because there is a deep appreciation of all that has come before, a true synthesizing and honoring of the tradition, a bringing out from the storehouse of treasures old and new.

Others of us love the church like prophets. It is often more difficult to recognize this as love because there is a deep suspicion of what has come before, a concern that love of the past is hindering faithfulness in the present. The prophet’s use of the old makes the old uses of the old sound extinct, and the new becomes the driving energy behind the prophet’s voice.

I love the church like a prophet, not like a scribe.

This is not what academics usually do. At least, not in evangelical-like theological circles.

But both are ways of loving the church. And each of us no doubt needs the other. The scribes remind us that God’s love and provision have gone before us in the church’s story, as earnest seekers of the Way of Jesus have spoke and acted with power and faithfulness. And they keep the prophets from so wildly thrashing about toward the future that they lose their moorings that keep them tied to the Christian Story.

The prophets remind us that manna in a jar is great, but trying to live on yesterday’ manna is faithless. They push us to be earnest seekers of the Way of Jesus in our own day, to learn afresh what it means to speak and act with power and faithfulness.

At their best, these two ways of loving the church work together, the power generated by their disagreements and divergent postures creating a power that propels the Body faithfully forward. And if we’re honest we also recognize that, at its worst, the energy created rips the body apart. And that is where we know that love is no longer love.

Grade Inflation

April 17, 2011 in Academia, Humor, Spirituality & Prayer with 4 Comments

In case you ever wonder what sort of prayers you might utter while the professor is in the act of grading, prayers that might have an inflationary effect on the professor’s evaluation of your work, I offer the following insight into the grading process.

HT: JR

Gap Between Lectern and Pulpit

April 11, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts, Church with 22 Comments

Over at Akma’s Random Thoughts, Akma has posted a few thoughts on the gap between academy and church in how we read the Bible. I resonate with much of what Akma says there. If you’re a Christian or an academic of biblical studies then you live in the strange world where those who have devoted most of their lives studying the book are not the ones preaching from Sunday to Sunday or listening to that text in the pew.

A gap will always exist between academy in church due to the fact that professors, for all our complaints about how much our administrative tasks take us away from our research, spend our lives learning the text and the things around the text that will, if all goes well, make us better readers of it.

But there’s another factor as well. Akma writes:

Perhaps the minister and congregation exemplify the sort of theological inquirer who wants not so much to learn about the Bible and theology as to find authority figures who will reaffirm the congregation’s predispositions.

Do you experience this gap? How do you handle it?

To my mind this is actually the most significant presenting problem, though I wouldn’t put the matter in quite this way. The way it’s stated, this sounds like there’s a peculiar “sort” of inquirer, a minority perhaps, who comes with only the demand that the text will reaffirm the congregation, church, etc.

But it seems to me that the two issues of time researching the text and its environment, on the one hand, and the church’s theology, on the other, come together in almost all churches as invisible constraints that perpetuate the finding of the church’s theology in the text whether or not it is intentionally “the sort of theological inquirer” who “wants” to find it there.

I think that Akma and I are actually largely in agreement here, but I want to take it in my own direction for a bit.

I’ve recently had opportunity to sit in a church context other than my house church. As I sat and listened to the teaching going on around me, I recognized a couple of things. One was that the persuasiveness of the teaching depended on a prior agreement with the point of view of the speaker, together with a general lack of knowledge about the details and issues being discussed. This is not a condemnation of any particular brand of Christianity–it’s what we find in most congregations of every stripe. Lay people aren’t experts in the Bible or its history, and they tend to be found in largely like-minded congregations whether those are liberal or conservative or somewhere in between (or beyond!).

But the other thing that troubled me, as an academic, as I sat listening was the realization that any student who came Fuller from that church (or went to any number of respectable seminaries around the state or country) would not be able to take what they’d learned in our classroom and bring it directly to this people without either (a) getting fired; or (b) splitting the church.

So I’m troubled afresh by the gap between academia and the church, between lectern and pulpit. I have a couple more thoughts about this, including what I’m not willing to do about it, and what I am. Perhaps more on this tomorrow.

But as I get into this, I remind you what I said last week: the solution is not to stop listening to the church and just to listen to the academy. Though the academy is my primary vocational location, I don’t think that the answer is to create an alternative, academic service of worship.

In the mean time: What do you think? Do you experience this gap? How do you handle it?

Audio Bible MP3 Downloads

March 31, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

Today I have been working on a presentation of electronic resources for studying the Bible.

In doing so, I have discovered a couple of ways to download MP3s of scripture.

First, the Net Bible has an Audio button at the bottom of each page. You can either press the button an listen while you’re sitting at your computer; or, you can right-click and “Save Link As…” to save the MP3 to your computer and play later through iTunes, on your iPod, or whatsoever you desire.

Second, a site that focuses on the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinic Tradition has the entire Hebrew OT available on MP3. This is a great resource for students learning Biblical Hebrew. (If you’re interested, there’s a story about the reader of the MP3s on Boulders to Bits.)

Finally, MP3 download of the Greek New Testament (and Latin Vulgate as well) is available at Greek and Latin Audio.

Happy listening!

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