If you know me, you'll know I am a committed footnote chaser! I don't mean those avalanches of tedium that sometimes serve as a disclaimer 'here's everything I read when writing this!" No, judicious footnotes, clear footprints on the scholars path, and where it's an extensive note, perhaps a signpost pointing back to how we got here, and pointing forward to other possible paths. Here's how this odd but happy exercise in scholarly serendipity works if you go chasing footnotes.
At the end of this seasonal festival, perhaps Good King Wenceslas gives good advice for footsteps, and footnotes! "Mark my footsteps, good my page; /Tread thou in them boldly."!
This particular jaunt began with re-reading a chapter of I (Still) Believe, a book in which 18 biblical scholars write about the relationship between their faith and their scholarship. The line-up is impressive including some of the best known biblical scholars of my generation – I mention only five – Walter Brueggemann, J. D. G. Dunn, Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Richard Bauckham, John Goldingay. I've read books by all the contributors, and several of them I've read enough to know why what they are saying is well worth the reading.
The chapter I re-read is the one by Andrew Lincoln: he chose the title 'Responding to and Searching for Truth.' In it he refers to one of his previous books which I had read, describing it as "probably the one with the most orientation to contemporary appropriation…" (p.151) I knew the book, and had much enjoyed reading the section he referred to in his clear exposition of the theology of Ephesians. I went looking for it to re-read it. It's still a brilliant summary and guide to the theological and practical appropriation of Ephesians.1
Oh, then there was footnote 12 in which Lincoln left clear footprints showing where some of his ideas came from! Footnote 12 reads: cf. W. Brueggemann, 'Covenanting as Human Vocation'. This was first published in the journal Interpretation in 1979 – outside the dates for which the University has access. But wait a minute, I've read this. I knew I had it in one of Brueggemann's many volumes of collected essays so I went hunting. Sure enough, there it was in one of Brueggemann's most significant essay collections, The Psalms and the Life of Faith. I read it again and was astonished at how relevant Brueggemann's essay is for a world more sold on contract and competition than covenant and co-operation.
Brueggemann does footnotes, and he does them with considerable diversity of sources across biblical studies, sociology, cultural criticism, philosophy and psychology. There it was again, a footnote that sent me further down the promising paths of possible discovery. Footnote 36 contains a telling quotation from A. J. Heschel, from his 1963 lectures Who is Man. I've read Heschel for years, and that book more than once. But I took it down and read that final lecture on 'How to Live' as a human being in the presence of God in God's own world.
So there's the footnote circle that took about an hour to complete. A New Testament scholar sends me to another of his own books, which shoves me in the direction of an Old Testament scholar whose essays I consider hard wearing gold, and he in turn points to a Jewish philosopher whose thought remains seminal in my own understanding of what it is to be human before God. Ignore the footnotes and you miss so much.
1 The Theology of the Later Pauline Epistles. (CUP: 1993)
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