Category: The text as critic

Ben Myers at Faith and Theology (see my Favourite Blog sidebar for the link to Ben’s blog) has a link to a lecture by Archbishop Rowan Williams on The Bible: Reading and Hearing.

Ever since I read Rowan Williams prophetic and perceptive Lent Book, The Truce of God, around 1985 I think, I have read whatever he has written with care and a willingness to listen to this deeply spiritual and intelligent Christian thinker. Yes, I think Rowan Williams is first and foremost a thinker, of the kind the Christian church needs and should cherish, and should listen to with care and humility. That he was made Archbishop is in my view a mixed blessing – the politics and institutional tip-toeing required of his high church office may not be one of his strengths, though he’s no political lightweight either. But there is a generosity of mind, an imaginative and humane intellect, a spirit richly endowed with learning and experience, that make him one of the most important theologians the Church of England has produced in a century or two. He is deeply read in the fathers of the Church, sympathetic to the diversity of Christian spirituality, global in his sense of the scope and significance of the Gospel, and a persuasive if at times undogmatic apologist for the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In this lecture he states his aim early on:

my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself.  Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church.

A genuine theology of the Bible – absolutely. A placing of the Bible within a clear understanding of God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, the church receiving the Bible as God’s gift to be read, heard, preached, performed – as the script of the Christian community. Yes; but the script of the Gospel drama interpreted and performed as an expression of our relationship, not to theological ideas, but to a Person, Jesus.

I’m going to ponder Rowan Williams lecture some more – and then blog on it. Like the Archbishop, I think the way we approach the Bible, the way we interpret it and live it, and the way it interprets us and calls how we live into question, decisively forms our christian identity – for good or ill.

Today it’s my turn to blog at Hopeful Imagination – some reflection on the Letter of James and ‘An Ecology of Words’. You can find today’s blog here.

The Living Wittily contribution for today (posted below) continues my self-indulgence going on about reading, this time about novels. Trawling my memory for words that suggest going on and on about things, I can come up with ‘yabbling on’, ‘wittering on’, ‘yattering on’, new one in the office, courtesy of Joyce ‘vagueing on’ – I’m happy to add to this impressive list of semantic put-downs if you have any helpful suggestions??

• Below is a partial list of biblical commentary written by women. I’ll update this now and then, but I’ve found it an interesting wee diversion exploring how much (how little) women are used in the modern commentary industry. See post on Feb 8 & 14.
• Here are a few random observations:

• Intriguing, that commentary series increasingly ask women writers to comment on Ruth and Esther. Is this a recognition that the genre of these two books needs a different approach, perspective, experience? If so, why not extend it beyond the facile assumption that biblical books with women’s names, featuring women should be commented on by women – can’t women do Romans – or Matthew – or Isaiah?
• Anent the above complaint, a leisurely trawl through bibliographies and forthcoming schedules doesn’t show too many women being invited to tackle Psalms, Isaiah, Romans. Schussler-Fiorenza on Revelation in the Hermeneia could be a tour de force, though.
• Several of those noted below are in series that constrain the approach to a pre-set format – usually analytic, textually atomistic, or artificially compartmentalising information. Is that a kind of male approach or am I guilty of simplistic stereotyping of the most reprehensible sort?
• Often some of the best biblical commentary is not in series, or is in a series that allows individuality in approach within reasonable editorial control. So Gail O’Day in the New Interpreter’s Bible is a thoughtful and spiritually alert exposition of John’s gospel; Carol Meyers on Exodus avoids the hang-ups about historicism and conveys the excitement of the biblical text; Carol Newsom on Job, again in the New Interpreter’s Bible, is in my view a model of theological reflection, rooted in deep exegetical study, and some of the most penetrating pastoral comment that takes Job’s experience with human seriousness.
• Of those forthcoming I’m looking for Beverly Gaventa on Romans – she’s been doing a course on Paul and Karl Barth, shared with Princeton Barthian scholar Bruce McCormack; and Judith Gundry-Volf, scheduled to do I Corinthians in the Word series – due when I am old!
• Just issued, the commentary on 1 Timothy by Elsa Tamez (pictured below) is just as provocative as her earlier Scandalous Message of James. As a liberation theologian, she is interested in issues of power, poverty and the liberty of Christ – and she comes at the biblical text with the assumption that the liberating Christ is a primary and controlling hermeneutical principle.
• An earlier and later series of The Feminist Companion to the Bible covers now most of the biblical books. They are important contributions to biblical study in their own right, and are collections of essays written from a feminist perspective. I’ve found those I’ve used fresh, asking different questions, providing different answers to the same questions. My one hesitation is that I think there is a difference between a woman writing a commentary and a woman writing biblical study from a self consciously feminist or womanist position. Is that a fair point?

Anyway here’s the list so far

Biblical Commentary by Women

Genesis – Kathleen O’Connor, Smyth and Helwys (Forthcoming – no date)

Exodus – Carol Meyers, New Cambridge Bible Commentary

            -Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain (on the Ten Commandments

Numbers – Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, International Theological Commentary

Ruth, Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, Interpretation

Joan Chittister, The Story of Ruth. Twelve Moments in Every Woman’s Life

Samuel – Francesca Murphy, Brazos Theological Commentary (Forthcoming – date unknown)

Chronicles – Sara Japhet, Old Testament Library

Esther –  Karen Jobes, NIV Application Commentary

          – Joyce Baldwin, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary

Job – Carol Newsom, New Interpreter’s Bible

Ecclesiastes – Joan Chittister, There is a Season

Song of Solomon – Renita Weems, New interpreter’s Bible

Psalms – Ellen Charry and Anne Astell, Brazos Theological Commentary

Lamentations – Kathleen O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World

Ezekiel – Margaret Odell, Smyth and Helwys

Jonah – Phyllis Trible, New Interpreters Bible

– Rosemary Nixon, Message of Jonah. Presence in the Storm.

Luke – Loveday Alexander, Black’s NT Commentary

John – Gail O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible

       – Marianne Meye-Thompson, New Testament Library Commentary Series (forthcoming 2008?)

Acts – Beverly Gaventa, Abingdon NT Commentary

       – Loveday Alexander, Black’s NT Commentary (Forthcoming)

Romans – Beverley Gaventa, New Testament Library Commentary Series (Forthcoming)

– Marva Dawn, Truly the Community. Romans 12 and How to be the Church

1 Corinthians – Linda Belleville, Word Biblical Commentary (Forthcoming 2010)

2 Corinthians – Linda Belleville, IVP New Testament Commentary

Ephesians – Pheme Perkins, Abingdon NT Commentary

Philippians – Morna Hooker, Black’s New Testament Commentary

                – Carolyn Osiek, Abingdon NT Commentary

                – Bonnie Thurston, Sacra Pagina

1 Timothy – Elsa Tamez, Struggles for Power in Early Christianity

James – Elsa Tamez, The Scandalous Message of James.

1 Peter – Karen Jobes, Baker Exegetical Commentary

I John – Judith Lieu, New Testament Library Commentary series (Forthcoming)

Revelation, Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, Hermeneia (Forthcoming – date unknown)

– Marva Dawn, Joy in our Weakness. The Gift of Hope from the Book of Revelation.

Kathleen O’Connor’s commentary, Lamentations and the Tears of the World is beautifully written. The exegesis is at the service of hearing the text and overhearing its message to a broken world. She doesn’t mimic Brueggemann’s style, but she writes with that same gift of opening the text by allowing text, theology, political realities and human yearning to share in the hermeneutic of our experience.

Joan Chittister is a Benedictine whose writing on the Rule of Benedict I have read for years. Her commentary on Ruth is a deep reflection on twelve defining moments in the experience of women – loss, change, friendship and so on. It is a series of essays, each one so soaked in Ruth that they are Ruth flavoured! And that’s another way of reading a text. Chittister is a consummate essayist, who turns the theme she is writing about like wood in the lathe, and shapes it to bring out the contours of the grain.

The New Interpreter’s Bible has several commentaries by women – Renita Weems is one of them and it is an education to read her commentary on the Song of Songs alongside Robert Jenson’s one in the Interpretation series. Weems is an African American Woman, who writes as a professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt, out of her experience of growing up in Tennessee, and as one deeply ambivalent about the treatment of women and the use of female imagery in the hebrew Bible. For that reason her commentary is unabashedly about God’s gift of human love, which is to be celebrated as of the essence of the human. Her book Battered Love is an exploration of women and violence in the Hebrew prophets, and it is the lack of violence, and the celebration of mutuality in the Song, that gives her commentary a radical freshness.

Jenson is an elder statesman in the parliament of Systematic theologians – one of the most creative and demanding writers in the field, who admits to stepping outside his academic bailliwick in writing this commentary. He takes it as a story of the human love for God, and offers an interpetation of love that is theological, and of God that takes full cognizance of divine affectivity. Reading the two together I didn’t want to decide who was "right" – I found both had listened intently to the text, to their own theological and human experience, and had written out of who they are.

All of which leads up to the question I want to ask. Who are the other prominent female voices in biblical commentary writing? Margaret Thrall’s Second Corinthians, 2 volumes in the academic benchmark series International Critical Commentary; Morna Hooker on Mark, and Philippians. But who else? Have you read, or do you know of, biblical commentary written by women? I’d like to post on this later – I have a feeling some of the most creative biblical interpretation is to be found here.

I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they couldn’t. (Mark 9.18)

Failure, if taken rightly to heart, is an education in humility, in self understanding, an opportunity to grow. But not for the disciples in Mark’s Gospel. Having failed to exorcise an evil spirit themselves, they then become the self-appointed Regional Quality Assurance officers for Exorcisms. Not surprising, that desire to regulate others, control the boundaries,  – they’d just been having an argument about who is the greatest. A kind of Blair Brown ambition-fest as to who would be the leader of the disciples. And Jesus had just given the kind of answer that only works in the politics of the Kingdom of  God, ‘Whoever wants to be first , must be last of all and servant of all.’ And like the self-preoccupied movers and shakers they believed themselves to be, they didn’t, as John Reid would say, ‘get it’.

So failed exorcists with a lust for leadership, presume to disqualify others from their ministry, and they do it in Jesus’ name, and so unwittingly disqualify themeselves. The not so Blessed John Reid would say, ‘Disciples not fit for purpose’. The whole scary story forced the question, "How dare any of us erect boundaries around compassionate ministry exercised in Jesus’ name?"

And Jesus reply was generously inclusive, ministry affirming, welcoming compassion wherever it rears its beautiful head …whoever is not against us is for us.

Such radical open-mindedness implies an ecumenicity of the heart, only possible when being first is an irrelevance, and being servant of all is a priority. Whoever is not against us is for us – this inclusive principle, gives not only the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of trust. To live with such an attitude of openness to goodness, to see each act of kindness as Christ-serving, to believe each costly casting out of evil wherever it lurks collaborates with God’s Kingdom, to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate compassion wherever it radiates into human lives, is to take on the generous inclusiveness of Jesus who welcomes all the help the world needs.

The text critiques our motives and self image- there is uncommon honesty in any of us who can identify that part in each of our hearts, that leads us to say, without thinking clearly what we mean, ‘we tried to stop him because he was not following us’ – as if our kind of discipleship could ever be normative!