Is a literal history, then, the only form of narrative consonant with truth? Probably only custom has induced the common supposition that it is. And yet the Bible, it is obvious, avails itself, with the utmost freedom, of varieties of literary form. Poetry and parable, oratory and allegory, argument and feeling, appear there as they appear in the literature of other civilized nations … It is remarkable what a subordinate place the plain, unadorned chronicle holds in the Old Testament.

— S.R. Driver, “Evolution Compatible with Faith,” pp. 1–27 in Sermons on Subjects Connected with the Old Testament (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892)

Wow, time flies! I can hardly believe that it’s been almost two weeks since I posted my brief comments on the introduction to Christian Smith’s The Bible Made Impossible. At any rate, let’s plunge into chapter 1 together. In chapter 1, Smith does two important things: he explains what he means by “biblicism,” and he identifies what he considers biblicism’s most damning weakness. Let’s take these up in turn.

This post offers more content »

Most Higgaion readers know of my lifelong identification with the Churches of Christ, a group that generally sits well down near the conservative end of the Christian spectrum. Today’s Churches of Christ have their roots in the convergence of multiple early 19th-century American unity movements. The leaders of these particular movements found the multiplicity of denominations distressing, and believed that Christians could achieve unity by eliminating creeds and ecclesiastical magisteria, replacing these with the simple, clear teachings of the Bible. These latter-day reformers, however, failed to realize this dream. Christians did not leave the denominations in droves to rally around the plain meaning of the Bible. Those Christians who did join with the new movement(s) eventually found themselves unable to hold together, and by the beginning of the 20th century a rift in the movement had opened between the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) and the Churches of Christ. Today, Churches of Christ continue to proclaim the Bible as the basis for Christian faith and practice—and for Christian unity—while constantly, it seems, fighting amongst ourselves about who has it right. We should have seen this coming. As Gary Holloway and Douglas Foster observe in their brief introduction to the history of Churches of Christ, Renewing God’s People (ACU Press, 2001), one of the main points of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address was that

[d]octrinal differences not based on the express teachings of the New Testament are the causes of division. More than sixty times in the Declaration and Address, Campbell uses phrases like “expressly exhibited,” “plain,” and “clear” to describe the binding teachings of Scripture. Where the Bible is unclear or silent, no disagreement should divide Christians. Thomas Campbell never spelled out exactly what those “express teachings” are. Neither does he address the difficulty of Christians strongly disagreeing over what the Bible “expressly” teaches. This would be a significant problem later in the Campbell movement.

With the long, checkered history of biblicism in Churches of Christ as part of my own religious heritage, I was instantly intrigued by news of the impending publication of The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith (Brazos, 2011). In conversations with others of my ilk, I have often commented on the self-referential incoherence of biblicism, that is, the difficulty of finding support within the Bible itself for a biblicist program. For his part, Smith (who joined the Catholic Church after—not necessarily as a result of—writing The Bible Made Impossible, and who describes himself as an “evangelical Catholic”), claims that

the problematic results [of biblicism] are not mere accidents or worst practices within an otherwise sound approach, but they are rather the inevitable outcomes of bad biblicist theory. … [M]ost biblicist claims are rendered moot by a more fundamental problem (which few biblicists ever acknowledge) that undermines all the supposed achievements of biblicism: the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism. (p. x; Smith’s italics)

In days to come, I’ll review The Bible Made Impossible chapter by chapter. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

And in discussing obscure matters that are far removed from our eyes and our experience, which are patient of various explanations that do not contradict the faith we are imbued with, let us never, if we read anything on them in the divine scriptures, throw ourselves head over heels into the headstrong assertion of any one of them. Perhaps the truth, emerging from a more thorough discussion of the point, may definitively overturn that opinion, and then we will find ourselves overthrown, championing what is not the cause of the divine scriptures but our own, in such a way that we want it to be that of the scriptures, when we should rather be wanting the cause of the scriptures to be our own.

— Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.18.37; trans. E. Hill, 1990

Last month, the Bible and Interpretation website published an op-ed piece in which Roland Boer comes out ‘against “reception history”’ (and, implicitly, the Blackwell Bible Commentaries series for popularizing the term; see footnote 1). Ironically, the occasion for this criticism seems to be Boer’s completion of Cave Droppings: Nick Cave and Religion (to be published by Equinox in 2012), a book that those of us involved in the Blackwell Bible Commentaries might consider an exercise in reception history to the extent that ‘Cave has written novels, plays, poetry and, above all, music which often engages with the Bible in creative ways’ (Boer). Whence the disconnect between Boer’s attention to ‘Nick Cave and his interpretations of the Bible’ and his stance ‘against “reception history”’?

Read the rest on the Blackwell Bible Commentaries website.

Ever heard somebody claim that Christianity is largely to blame for sexism, or at least has done nothing to oppose it? While many Christians and institutional churches have certainly engaged in more than their share of sexist behavior, a strong tradition of Christian egalitarianism runs deep. Consider Clement of Alexandria:

Let us understand that the same virtue pertains to men and women. For if there is one God for both, there is also one Pedagogue for both. One church, one self-restraint, one modesty, a common food, a common marriage bond, breath, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love, all are alike. Those who have life in common, grace in common, and indeed salvation in common also have virtue and a way of life in common. … Therefore also the name “human” is common to men and women.

— Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies 6.100.2–3, trans. Roberts and Donaldson, quoted from Nonna Verna Harrison, God’s Many-Splendored Image (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010)

Clement was not, of course, an egalitarian in the modern sense—he probably would have opposed the idea of a female bishop, for example—but theological understandings like his laid the foundations that would eventually lead to modern gender egalitarianism.

Some scholars—Michael Fishbane is probably the one who first springs to mind—use the term “inner-biblical exegesis” to describe a biblical passage’s allusions to or outright interpretation of another biblical passage. It turns out, however, that identifying when “inner-biblical exegesis” has happened is trickier than you might think. Consider, for example, James 5:11, “You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” Has James actually read the book of Job? Have the recipients of his letter, whom James says have heard of Job, actually read the book of Job? Have they heard the book of Job read to them, or have they had the story of Job told to them? I don’t know that James 5:11 gives us enough data to know—but anyone who has attended Sunday school and then grown up to read the Bible for himself or herself understands this distinction.

In Traditions at Odds: The Reception of the Pentateuch in Biblical and Second Temple Period Literature (New York and London: Clark, 2010), John Choi addresses himself to this question with regard to “the echo of Pentateuchal elements in non-pentateuchal texts,” as he puts it (p. vii). Choi’s study is meticulous and his thesis is provocative. This post offers more content »

Higgaion readers may already know that my current scholarly project is writing Genesis 1–21 through the Centuries for the Blackwell Bible Commentaries series. Fewer people know—well, until right now, at any rate—that I have recently also taken up the responsibility for maintaining the Blackwell Bible Commentaries website. We’ve recently “rebooted” the site by converting it from static HTML pages to a WordPress-powered site. I hope that this will generate increased content postings by series authors; I know that it will make my behind-the-scenes job of maintaining the site considerably easier.

If you’re at all interested in the reception history of the Bible, pay a visit to the site, and add our news feed to your favorite RSS reader. If you don’t know what reception history is, start with the essays on the “Reception History” page.

Christopher Rollston recently published “The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon: Methodological Musings and Caveats” in Tel Aviv 38 (2011): 67–82. In this article, which I strongly recommend to anyone considering the implications of the Qeiyafa Ostracon for an archaeologically-informed take on Israelite and Judean history, Rollston concludes:

I would be happy to state that the Qeiyafa Ostracon was written in a particular language, if there were some diagnostic features in it that are most characteristic of a particular Iron Age Northwest Semitic language. The problem, however, is that there are not. For this reason, it is necessary to state that there is not sufficient evidence to make a determination. (p. 78)

Rollston also warns, with reference to attempts to use the several and significantly differing reconstructions of the Qeiyafa Ostracon’s content (or, in some cases, almost the Qeiyafa Ostracon’s mere existence) to draw conclusions about state formation and/or literacy somewhere in the vicinity of the turn of the first millennium BC:

[T]he field of scholarship must be very cautious about saddling this document with freight that it cannot readily carry.

Again, I strongly recommend the entire article for a no-nonsense assessment of whether or not the Qeiyafa Ostracon is written in Hebrew and what it can(not) tell us about early Israelite/Judean state formation. According to the publisher’s web site, Tel Aviv publishes open access papers; however, the online issues are served up by Ingenta, which has the articles from the June 2011 issue marked as subscriber-only rather than open access. I’ll use the closing words of Rollston’s article as the closing words of this post: when dealing with such sparse and inconclusive evidence, “[c]aution … should be the modus operandi.”

Once upon a time, during a Sunday morning worship service, I almost laughed out loud when the man on the stage said, “Look around you and see all the people who aren’t here this morning.” I couldn’t see them, of course, because they weren’t there! We all have blind spots, things and—unfortunately—people we overlook. I know that I have them too … and by definition, I don’t know what they are.

The insidious power of blind spots reared its ugly head in a poll I answered today. The Christian Chronicle, “an international newspaper for Churches of Christ” (to quote its masthead), currently has a poll on its home page.

Notice anything missing? Can you see the people who aren’t there?