learning southern vocabulary

"chain gangs" - when prisoners are let out of prison for work.  apparently it's still in vogue down here to refer to them as chain gangs.

"good ol' boys" - those people who are southern born and raised and whose grandparents, great grandparents, and great grandparents have lived here in the county.  they don't want anything to change.  they drive fourwheelers around, disregard fishing/hunting laws, and are otherwise known as "rednecks."

TACO bell - people here put the emphasis on the taco rather than the bell.  there is no taco johns or taco time here, so they feel the taco to be more pertinent than the bell.  can't say I blame them.

moving on

Two months ago, I moved.  But I still haven't moved on.

I miss Bellingham so much it hurts.  I realized, though, that I need to learn to manage my "homesickness," if only for my sanity.  There's no feasible way I will be moving back to the Pacific Northwest any time soon, and it's quite possible I'll never leave the South.  So it's time to learn to make this home.

I very quickly loved my friends here - that's not the problem.  The problem has been adjusting to the culture more generally, and most of all, adjusting to the lack of mountains.  I miss mountains way too much.  I'm not sure why it is that I fell so hard for mountains, but I don't know what to do with flat terrain.

In any case, it's time to move on.  Bellingham was beautiful, the people were beautiful, the culture was beautiful.  My year and nine months there was a time I will treasure forever.  But it's over, and dwelling on what I have lost is not helping me here and now.

And so I resolve to do my best to once appreciate the little things in life, even if there are no big things like mountains to make it easy to love my new home.

"Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns, part 3

Topic #3: "The OT and Its Interpretation in the NT"

In this chapter, Enns discusses the way that NT authors handled the OT, and the way that can sometimes seem strange to us as modern readers.  He comes to three conclusions throughout the chapter:

1. NT authors weren't concerned with original context or intention
2. NT authors were commenting on the text's meaning.
3. Their hermeneutical attitude should be embraced today.

These conclusions are accompanied by the overarching conviction that:

"The Old Testament as a whole is about him...Christ - who he is and what he did - is where the Old Testament has been leading all along." (120)

In other words, Paul began with the conviction that Christ is the OT's focus and then read the OT in light of this.  This isn't the only thing that Enns argues we need to keep in mind when studying the way that the NT talks about the OT.  In this chapter, Enns introduces us to "the Second Temple world," which is the time when the Second Temple was in existence (516 BC - 70 AD)  He goes into some detail about the way that apocryphal authors wrote about the OT.  In essence, the above listed conclusions summarize the way that Second Temple hermeneutics (interpretive method) worked.  Second Temple interpreters weren't concerned with the historical context in which the OT was written.  Rather, they were concerned with its meaning for them at the time.  Enns argues that the NT authors did the same thing, reading Christ back into the theology of the OT.

Of course, this raises some issues for modern readers.  Modernity is concerned with objectivity and historical certitude.  When we read the Bible (at least for scholarly reasons), we are concerned with historical context, i.e., What did the author mean when he wrote this?  The NT authors had few such concerns.  How then should we handle the OT?  Enns argues that:

"I suggest that we distinguish between hermeneutical goal and exegetical method.  The apostles' hermeneutical goal, the centrality of the death and resurrection of Christ, must also be ours..." (158)

In other words, we need to move away from strict adherence to a method, toward "Spirit-led engagement of Scripture." (160)  Enns argues that Biblical interpretation is a work of art (162) and is a community activity that stretches back through the years.  And perhaps most significantly, biblical interpretation is a path, not a fortress.  We have never arrived; our methods are always open to debate and correction. 

impressions

The more I learn about this place I live, the more depressing it is.  Of course, people are people everywhere.   But here things are just downright depressing sometimes.

1) the history.  I'm doing some reading on the African American settlement on the north end of the island.  It's so sad to read some of the oral histories and hear about the things the people - who I have come to love through the pages of history - had to face simply because of their skin color.
2) the politics.  today someone cheerfully admitted out loud that he voted for a candidate for county sheriff who spent time in JAIL for corrupt things he did with drug money when he used to be sheriff, among other things.  this same person proceeded to tell how he would happily vote for Huckabee for president because Huckabee likes to hunt, and Palin because she's attractive.  For the rest of the day, every time I saw him, he'd say "Bill Smith for President!" (that's the sheriff's name).  The only glimmer of hope is that the crook didn't win the election.  THEN, after all those shenanigans, I still had to sit there and listen to a bunch of blindly conservative individuals go on and on about Obama's failures.

upcoming reviews

Here's my reading list as far as I know it:

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Crazy Love by Francis Chan

That is probably the order in which I will read them, although it's possible that Ethics will be finished before The Cost of Discipleship, which I am reading simultaneously with a friend.

I'm pretty excited.  And, don't worry, the final part of Enns is halfway written and will be finished within the next couple days. :)

"Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns, part 2

Sorry about the wait on part two.  Sorry about there being two (or maybe three) parts at all.  I just don't ever want reading to become a chore again, so I only read (and write about stuff I read) when I want to.

With that said, on to the exciting part - topic #2!

Topic #2: "The OT and Theological Diversity"

In this chapter, Enns addresses the issue of different places in the OT saying different things about God.  He opens the chapter with yet another common assumption, this one held by both evangelicals and liberals:

"God's word and diversity at the level of factual content and theological message are incompatible." (73)

For evangelicals, the seeming differences between OT authors are explained away as best as is possible.  For liberals, the OT must not be inspired by God.

One case study which Enns discusses is the fact that the first books of the Bible often talk about God as being the most powerful God rather than the only one.  One could read this as a contradiction: if God is the only God, why do some parts of Exodus make it seem as if there are others which God simply overpowers?  Enns solves this by arguing that God reveals himself slowly over a long period of time.  The early Israelites were not culturally prepared for the idea of there being only one God.

This argument is a bit confusing to me.  It seems a bit preposterous to claim that they wouldn't have been able to comprehend there being only one God.  Isn't the whole point that there is only one God?  Then again,  modern Christians believe there is only one God, and yet we worship so many other things.  Enns, too, points this out, saying:

"We also know that anything other than God, if it becomes an object of devotion (spouse, career, money, fame), is an idol.  But the Israelites of the exodus were living in the infancy of their national existence amid a polytheistic world." (102)

In any case, arguing over whether or not the Israelites would have been able to comprehend the other gods surrounding nations worshiped being fake will cause us to miss Enns' main point: the fact that some parts of the OT speak of God being more powerful than other gods while other parts claim him to be the only God should not cause us to assume the OT to be uninspired.

Enns also covers other seeming contradictions in the theology of the OT, including proverbs that directly contradict one another as well as differences between the history presented in Chronicles and that of 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Samuel.  I'm going to skip over his analysis of these subjects in order to get at his main argument, but I, of course, highly recommend reading the book in order to understand the evidence for his argument more fully.

Enns argues that the diversity of the OT speaks to the many sides of God, and that we should approach the Bible with humility and an open mind and heart, letting it speak to us on its own terms.  He writes:

I feel bound to talk about God in the way(s) the Bible does, even if I am not comfortable with it...God gave us the Bible so we could read it, not so we can ferret our way behind it to see how things really are." (106)

According to Enns, modernity requires consistency, so modern evangelicals attempt to mold the Bible in this way.  The Bible itself, however, challenges the idea that things can't be diverse. (108)  Furthermore, confessing at the outset that the Bible is God's word gives us freedom to more honestly explore what God has revealed to us about himself.  Tensions in the Bible show us that God incarnates himself throughout Israel's history.  Incarnation isn't a one-time deal.

The question is, should we accept the above claim, which is a central argument of Enns' book?  Is it theologically sound to claim that the Bible is just as much human as it is divine, and that this lends itself to historical and factual inaccuracies?  Perhaps Enns isn't arguing that it is (theologically speaking) entirely defensible.  Maybe he's simply saying that God worked that way with Jesus, so he may also work that way with His Word.  In some way the whole "incarnational analogy" argument seems to be an interesting but maybe unnecessary way to dress up the simple fact that it makes no sense to speak to one culture through the lens of another.  Although objectivity and "accuracy" are important to us today, it has not always been that way.  After all, Enns argues that the Bible is historiography; it is biased.

And finally, Enns writes the following in summing up the heart of his argument:

"The Bible is God's word in written form; Christ is God's word in human form...The written word bears witness to the incarnate word, Christ." (110)

More to come soon.  :)

"Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" by Peter Enns, part 1

I follow a few theology blogs, and ran across reviews of this book through those blogs.  Because the blogs I follow often tend toward the more liberal side of theology, I was expecting this book to have much the same tone as those blogs.  That is, I was expecting a good deal of irritation with "those crazy evangelical Christians" and plenty of doubt cast here and there through which I'd have to wade.

I was pleasantly surprised.

That's putting it lightly, actually.  This book changed my life, or at least changed the way I think about the nature of terms like "inspiration."  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Let me start at the beginning...

The problem that Enns is addressing is the perception that the Bible needs to be historically accurate in every last detail as well as perfectly internally consistent in order to be the inspired Word of God.  With the advancement of historical knowledge about ancient societies over the past century, this belief has come under serious attack.  Christians often find themselves having to choose between clinging to a high view of Scripture (scripture as the inspired, inerrant word of God) and a low view of Scripture where the Bible is nothing but a flawed human document that talks about God.  Enns offers a middle road.

Enns' thesis:
Enns argues for an "incarnational analogy."  That is, just as Christ was both fully human and fully divine, so too is Scripture both fully inspired and fully a part of the historical contexts from which and to which it came. Although he does reference John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"), Enns does not attempt to scripturally (I may have just made that word up) prove his thesis.  Rather he simply uses the incarnation of Jesus himself as an analogy for what he sees as the incarnation of the Word.  He writes that just as "Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible." (Enns, 17)  The Bible is connected to and spoke to the cultures from which it came.  For Enns, "the human dimension of Scripture is essential to its being Scripture." (20)

And so, Enns covers three separate but broadly related topics falling under the umbrella of Old Testament (OT) studies.

Topic #1: "The OT and Ancient Near Eastern Literature"

One thing that Enns really likes to do is point out incorrect assumptions that we evangelical Christians (or sometimes even liberal theologians) tend to bring to our reading of the OT.  In this chapter, Enns addresses the fact that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are very similar to other ancient Near Eastern myths, and in fact the Genesis stories are most likely much younger than other accounts of the prehistoric past.  I won't go into the nitty gritty here, but if you find yourself reading this and saying, "Oh my, Marilee, you crazy liberal," please read the book.  He goes through in pretty great detail his reasons for coming to the conclusions he does, and if you still disagree or agree or whatever I would love to have that conversation with you (and I'm not even kidding - you may have information that he's omitting of which I am entirely unaware - this is pretty much my first foray into this subject matter).  In any case, back to that first assumption he points out:

Since OT literature looks like other ancient sources, it must be less inspired.

First, Enns makes a careful definition of the term "myth."  He defines it as "an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?" (40)  When the word "myth" is thrown around, it usually carries connotations of being made-up or from a storybook.  To think of myths in this way, though, is to impose modern sensibilities on the past.  In regard to that assumption, he replies:

Is it not likely that God would have allowed his word to come to the ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have understood them?" (41)

He also points out a second assumption:

Revelation is "thoroughly distinct from the surrounding culture." (42)

Ironically enough, as Enns argues, both sides of the debate hold the above assumption.  In the case of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, conservatives remove the scripture and thus revelation from its historical context, arguing that each story must be entirely accurate in all of its historical detail. Meanwhile, liberals take away the inspired nature of Scripture, arguing that the Bible is just like every other culture's founding myths.  Enns writes that "what needs to be called into question is the assumption that both sides of the argument are making, namely, that the situated/enculturated nature of the Bible poses a problem to the definition of divine revelation." (43)

Enns thus proposes two assumptions of his own to replace the above:

1) extrabiblical evidence is important in order to understand Scripture.  

2) the Spirit leads us toward the truth - we don't simply get plopped down right in the middle of it. 

 Genesis, according to Enns, is set apart from other sources by its claims about God: "What makes Genesis different from its ancient Near Eastern counterparts is that it begins to make the point to Abraham and his seed that the God they are bound to, the God who called them into existence, is different from the gods around them." (53)  In other words, God met the Israelites where they were, using their cultural beliefs and assumptions.  "And if God was willing and ready to adopt an ancient way of thinking, we truly hold a very low view of Scripture indeed if we make that into a point of embarrassment." (56)

Enns closes the chapter by making the argument that the Bible is historiography, and as such is not objective.  He argues there is no such thing as objective history; even God has an "agenda."  On a personal note, this portion of the chapter made me uneasy as a historian - although I am well aware of the human impossibility of objectivity when writing history, objectivity is what I strive toward.  I suppose I always assumed God had objectivity mastered, since He's perfect and all that.  So, I need to think through this portion of Enns' argument a bit more.

At this point I am going to break - I will talk about the second and third topics in another post (or maybe two).  I had hoped to cover it all in one, but I quickly realized there is way too much material to gloss over.  Sorry about that...