Tag Archive - academia

Community Is Crucial

September 21, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 8 Comments

A few weeks ago I posted about friendship, claiming that “who you are when nobody’s looking” isn’t necessarily the truest testimony to who you are.

I want to riff on that a bit today, in conversation with my Open Letter to New Testament Intro Students. In short, community is crucial for keeping hold of your faith when your faith is challenged.

The context within which a dearly held conviction is challenged, and the way that faith is depicted in relationship to that challenge, can make all the difference in whether that challenge leads to a lost faith or a reconfigured and strengthened faith.

Image: Photography by BJWOK / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In response to my open letter, several commenters voiced their concern that critical reconfiguration of what the Bible is and what it says do not happen more in the church. And I think there is something tremendously important about this call. Yes, we have to handle the issues carefully and not unduly disturb the faithful.

But here’s the problem with pretending that the Bible is something it is not: if the context of faith depicts the Bible, or science, or belief in one way, and then a student enters a non-faith environment and discovers that the Bible or science or belief are entirely different it creates an apparently clear choice. Either stay with the faith and reject the learning or hold fast to the learning and reject the faith.

The reason why NT Intro destroys people’s faith in college is because the community of faith has not been forthright about what the Bible actually is, and so the student is confronted with a choice between belief or knowledge.

In general, communities help create and perpetuate systems of plausibility. This can be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on the truth and benefits of how the group is perceiving and articulating reality.

If Christianity is true, then the calling of the church is to articulate, and demonstrate, a coming reality that is often not visible to human eyes: Jesus is the enthroned and coming Lord. We need community to keep making that reality real, to help us be renewed by the transforming of our minds, by the conversion of our imaginations.

This means that when we’re struggling, we need the community. If we leave it, we are placing ourselves on an interpretive grid where this true reality is not accounted for in the interpretation of the world. And its unbelievability can quickly become unplausibility, and the faith withers.

It is precisely because context is crucial for wrestling with faith-challenging issues that I think it is a seminary professor’s duty to deal with all the difficult issues in class. The fact that Christians, in a Christian setting, while confessing Christ as Lord, can acknowledge these things is, itself, tonic against the notion that certain realities about the Bible or history tear apart the very fabric of Christian faith.

In the film Gods and Generals, Stonewall Jackson utters this provocative line to a dying man who confesses to unbelief: “Well then, I will believe for the both of us.”

When we’re struggling, we need people to believe for us. We need people to carry our belief when it cannot carry itself. We need ourselves to be infused with the gift of faith that comes from the participation in the body of Christ. And we need to know that our struggles can be Christian struggles, modes of living and doubting that honor the Christ whose faith saves us.

Blogging and the Classroom at Stage of Life

September 16, 2011 in Academia, blogging with 0 Comments

The website stageoflife.com has a page on digital literacy in the classroom.

If you scroll down the screen you’ll see that I have a post there on how I see the blog working in concert with my classroom teaching. Take a look, and then explore the stageoflife.com site. They are exploring some interesting, and wide-ranging, topics!

Open Letter to New Testament Students

September 13, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 54 Comments

Dear NT Intro students,

Our quarter will be kicking off in a couple of weeks. I love the process of digging into the New Testament texts with students–you bring a passionate commitment to living out the Jesus story that is too often missing in the halls of the academy. You remind me why we study the Bible in the first place.

But there’s something you should know. Bible classes are often the hardest classes for seminary students. And I don’t mean that they’re the hardest academically. I mean that they’re often the hardest on students’ faith.

You’re coming to study a book that you love. You’re coming to delve into a book whose various verses and chapters have spoken directly to your heart–and transformed you. You’re coming to build on what you know and to enrich what you’ve already discovered.

But if I am doing my job, you are probably going to undergo a slow process of discovering that what you thought was a book is, in fact, a bunch of books; you’re going to find out that what you know is often incorrect; and what has spoken to you has been edifying, but that text may not ever be able to speak with that same voice again.

Bible professors are not the only ones whose classes hope to leave you with transformed knowledge. But rarely do you have as much invested in the assumptions that the professor is trying to deconstruct.

People lose their faith in Biblical studies courses, and grad school in particular, because they discover the pervasive extent to which the NT was written by humans and speaks differently from what they anticipated.

This can all sound terribly bleak. But I want you to enter the class with your eyes open.

And more than that, I am going to make you a promise.

Here is what I promise to do for you: I promise to leave you with a Jesus who is worth following, a Christian vocation that’s worth risking your life on, and a Bible that will guide you toward both.

In other words, I promise that I will not leave you empty-handed; I promise that my goal is to strengthen you as a faithful follower of Christ. I have not come to steal, kill, and destroy, but to help you better see the One who is the way of life, and how scripture is a witness to him.

So for my part, I promise to leave you with a faith worth believing.

For your part, I ask that you come to learn. Here, more than anywhere else, if you have come to have your prior understandings validated through high academic marks, you are likely to experience frustration. Hold loosely to what you’ve brought through the door, and learn what is coming from your reading, from our discussions, and from the lectures.

Learn what is really on offer, resist jumping to conclusions, press to find out how it all holds together. I promise that I am striving to be a faithful teacher, I need you to enter in with the goal of being a faithful learner.

At the end of the quarter, we will likely disagree about a few things. Or maybe we’ll disagree about almost everything. That’s fine. I won’t down-grade you for that. But I need to know that you’ve learned. And, I hope that in the process you have seen more clearly a Jesus who is worth following. I believe with all my heart that this is what I’m helping you discover.

So if you feel like things are falling apart or spinning out of control, let’s talk. That’s not the direction this should go, but it’s always part of the danger of discovering that the Bible isn’t what we thought it was–or that Jesus isn’t who we thought he was. But the fresh acts of faith that such discoveries engender can themselves be the stuff of newness of life.

I look forward to learning with you in the weeks ahead.

Peace,
jrdk

John Schneider Resigns from Calvin College

August 25, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 12 Comments

Last year there was a bit of a storm over some articles published by John Schneider and Dan Harlow of Calvin College. The issue they raised was what Christians might do in the face of mounting scientific argument that there was no Paradise, and no single human pair from which the rest descended.

John Schneider has now resigned.

The Grand Rapids News ran an article about the resignation. They then ran a follow-up story about Dan Harlow being unhappy with how Calvin is portraying the matter. The latter seems to be following up on an article in The Banner.

The views of Schneider and Harlow were recently cited in an NPR story on Evangelicals and Adam and Eve.

If you’re interested in reading the essays that created the storm, you can download a PDF of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith.

This is the sort of controversy that always lurks in the back of my mind as I wrestle with how we conceive of our Christian identity and thus what it looks like to act Christianly, and read the Bible Christianly, in our world. I don’t claim to have any easy answers.

Generally, however, I wish we were more patient and had better practices of wrestling with new and controversial ideas. The questions raised about human origins by various sciences are only getting more pressing and complex. Now more than ever we need people who are willing to ask hard questions without presupposing we come with the answers in tow.

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.

The Church’s Jesus and Israel’s God

May 9, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 19 Comments

Last week I had a couple of confessional moments about theological interpretation and the biblical studies academy. My soul, lifted from the experience, now wants to explore a bit more who this Jesus is that I think is worth following–not the academy’s Jesus, but the church’s Jesus.

And it begins with the inseparability of Jesus from Israel’s God.

There are a few things that this could mean. And some of them are (or at least should be) acknowledged by the academy at all times as well. For instance, the connection between Jesus and Israel means that Jesus was a Jew and must be understood (and understandable) as a first century Jew who spoke and acted among other first century Jews. (Though both church and academy have lost sight of this from time to time.)

But the church’s Jesus is not merely a historical religious phenomenon.

The church’s Jesus is the one in whom and through whom Israel’s God is bringing about the fulfillment of God’s promises to that people. And so, when we go to study the church’s Jesus we find that each of the four Gospels demands of us that we interpret the Jesus story as the culmination of the Israel story.

Matthew invites us to consider what we are about to see in Jesus as the end of the era marked by Babylonian captivity, the fulfillment of the covenant promises to Abraham, and the realization of God’s promise to David. The whole story of Israel as such is telescoped into a genealogy marked by these three: Abraham, David, Exile… Christ.

The point of the generations is not merely that time has passed or that history is being observed. In Israel’s story these moments are marked by the dramatically intervening hand of God–for deliverance, yes, but even more so for promise of a better future. The claim of the genealogy is that the God of Israel is at work again, and that this Jesus can only be rightly understood as the one in whom this story culminates (or, perhaps, the one who embodies the story within himself).

Analogously, Mark begins his Gospel with a declaration that all we are about to see is in answer to Isaiah’s Second Exodus. The way of the Lord is being prepared by John the Baptist–and that means that when we see Jesus we see the work of the God of Israel, the deliverance and restoration promised through the prophets is coming about.

Do you see how the Gospels take us into an interpretive field that can never be entered by the academy?

We’re talking here about Jesus in relation to God. We’re not merely talking about how to read the books well–though here, perhaps, we could agree even as an academic guild. But we are talking about who Jesus was and what the proper framework is for interpreting his ministry correctly. While “religious studies” must, as an academic discipline, seek to understand Jesus as like unto other turn-of-the-era religious phenomena, the stories of Jesus themselves demand a different starting point.

Jesus, claim the Gospels, is the one thing that the scriptures had prepared us for; he is the one event we were told to expect. Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel’s story, the great and saving act of Israel’s God.

And so when Luke begins with a declaration that the things he writes are things that “have been fulfilled among us,” when his story begins with an old barren couple conceiving a child and moves on to songs of promises fulfilled–the point in all is that we only know this Jesus rightly when we recognize that in his advent the God of Israel is at work again.

And when John begins his Gospel with the words that start all of scripture (in the beginning), we are being told that to understand this theos who is on the scene, we must first understand the theos who created the world and all things in it, according to the biblical narrative.

So when the church whose stories these are begins its creed with an affirmation of the God who created heaven and earth, they are giving a necessary (if insufficient) indicator of the identity of the Jesus from whom we derive our unique identity as a people. The church’s Jesus is the messiah sent and empowered by Israel’s God, by the creator God.

What the academy can never say is what the church must say first and foremost and most clearly, as Peter does in Acts 2: This Jesus was a man attested to by God.

By the One God.

By the God of Israel.

“Israel” is not merely a context within which Jesus makes sense, but also a narrative within which God was at work prior to Jesus and consummately at work through Jesus. This is the church’s Jesus. In part…

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

Church and Academy Need Each Other

April 13, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 5 Comments

Over the past couple of days I have been talking about the divide between the church and the academy–a divide that sometimes plays itself out in a more general “theological” versus “historical” readings of the Bible battle. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. (Part 1: Gap Between Lectern and Pulpit; Part 2: The Bible Reader Divide.)

But it has been drawn to my attention that I have been somewhat hard on the church the past couple of days. I apologize for that. It wasn’t what I set out to do. I was mostly walking through my own process of being reminded of the gap between what we take for granted in the academy and what we take for granted in the pew.

Actually, I think that the church and the academy need each other–and we sometimes reflect this interdependence in ways that we are unaware of.

First, since I’ve been hard on the church the past couple of days, let me say why the academy needs the church.

The church always remembers what the academy too often forgets: the Bible was written for real people. We academics get so caught up in the “real people” back then for whom it was written that we lose touch with the fact that this is still the Christian canon, still the word of God that people in churches today open up in order to hear God’s voice speaking to us.

If a church is thriving, one reason is likely because it has understood that part of its business is contextualization–whether it has realized this self-consciously or not. It is speaking the words of scripture into the lives of its actual people.

It is somewhat surprising that biblical scholars, who spend all our time thinking about the Bible’s own indications of its own contextualization find it seemingly impossible to recontextualize its message into a new framework. But we struggle here. And need the church’s help.

And the church needs the academy as well.

The most important reason that the church needs the academy, in my estimation, is because the church actually thinks it is giving historical readings of the Bible, good readings of what the Bible meant, when it tells you what the Bible says and means today.

Christians sitting down with their Bibles and applying it to their lives are not conscious, in general, of transforming the meaning and application of a text from the scripture to themselves. There is something important in this honoring and apply of the text. And it happens, in large part, because folks think that they are hearing and doing what the Bible actually says.

The church needs the academy to help it hear better what the Bible is saying, to help it read better–not because we are introducing an alien reading strategy, but because this is what Christians actually think they’re doing, anyway, when they read the Bible.

Most Christians, for example, read Jesus’ engagements with the Pharisees and can tell you what the Pharisees were like and what they believed. They might be 60% right, or dealing with impressionistic pictures, but they will tell you that Jesus is doing and saying what he’s doing and saying, in part, because Pharisees were a certain way and believed certain things. So when a NT scholar says, “Actually, if you study early Pharisees, they were more like x than y,” we are affirming the reading strategy while providing different data and helping the church come to better readings.

The academy is, in general, doing what the church thinks it’s doing as well.

One other point to consider is that the church’s assumed readings of today are yesterday’s academic cutting edge. Why do Protestants read the Bible and find rampant affirmations of “justification by faith,” despite its only being articulated in 2 or 3 books in the NT? Because the academic elites of our early tradition–the Luthers and the Calvins, told us that this was how we were supposed to read the Bible.

Arguments for the importance of the academy are not necessarily indicative of an academy vs. church divide, but arguments that the church which has been deeply influenced by certain times and trajectories of the academy continue to hear what the academy has to offer.

In the comments yesterday a reader said that academic readings of the Bible eliminate the readings of Jesus and Paul. That raises its own set of important issues, and I’ll tackle it tomorrow.

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?

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