We've all had to find ways of getting through days and weeks of lock down, and staying at home more than we ever have before. Once the garden is tidier than tidy, the grass is cut almost to manicured standard, the car is washed to an unfamiliar gleam, the study spring cleaned and each book affectionately dusted, the entire house hoovered – serially, the daily walk completed (recently walks, plural), the essential shopping procured through stealthy raids when most folk are doing other things, – once all that's done, what's to do?
That's where books have been my lifeline – mental, emotional, intellectual, imaginative lifelines to that necessary balance between escapism and realism. When I review what I've read in three months I'm intrigued that I've largely stayed away from novels; for some reason fiction hasn't worked. That surprises me because I've read novels throughout my life, and often as a way of dealing with stress by either escapism (think Lee Child, John Grisham), self-reflection through narrative (think Salley Vickers,Gail Godwin, Marilynne Robinson), or whodunnit detectives, (Val McDermid, Jacqueline Winspear – these two are very different in levels of dark).
I've read poetry, these past weeks, mostly by those I already know; George Herbert, R S Thomas, Mary Oliver, Denise Levertov and browsing in a serendipitous way in a few anthologies. I've read biography, the real life experience of people seeming more rooted in a world where, for a while now, so much seems unreal. The word surreal has become an overused descriptor for anything slightly unusual – our experience of the pandemic has been more than slightly unusual; not even surreal describes the vortex of confusion, fear, anxiety and the recent loss of confidence in the way the world is experienced as low grade dread. Biography has a way of carrying us inwardly into a life other than our own, a time different from now, and a place where pandemic is a word for another time and place.
The photo shows four of the books I've spent time reading, other than poetry and biography. I decided to catch up on reading a number of recent books in New Testament Studies. The State of New Testament Studies is a refresher course on recent development over the past 20 or so years, in the many and various strands of New Testament scholarship. There isn't an essay in this book, and there are 23 of them, that doesn't repay the reader's time; taken together they provide a map of the current landscape with enough detail to show the important routes ahead and how we got to where we are.
Constructing Paul vol 1 by Luke Timothy Johnson is readable scholarship, authoritative and persuasive, independent in its conclusions, and is a constructive account of Paul's life, social context, cultural environment, and relations with the churches with which he corresponded. Johnson does two things that make this book an important contribution. First, he uses all the canonical letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament. His defence of this approach is based on his deconstruction of the critical consensus that there are only seven "undisputed letters". Johnson insists that using the thirteen letters provides a much more rounded picture of what he calls the canonical Paul. I have always been hesitant about the confidence with which Pauline authorship of certain letters has been dismissed; I found Johnson's reasoned rebuttal persuasive in itself, and more so when the results are then set out in a way that allows for the complexities and ambiguities of Paul's personality and compound identities as Jew, Greco Roman, apostle and controversialist.
In addition to using the entire canonical corpus of Paul's letters, Johnson gives decisive weight and substance to the New Testament accounts of Paul's personal experience of Christ. Johnson is known for considering religious experience an essential body of evidence in constructing a credible account of Paul's life, the lives of the earliest Christian communities, and indeed for understanding the faith and practices of contemporary Christians. Paul's encounter with Christ, his experience of life in the Spirit, and the reconfiguration of his worldview, created for Paul a radically new understanding of God's purpose for Israel, the Gentiles and the new mission of the communities formed by faith in Christ. But that radical newness was not seen by him as a final discontinuity, but a fulfilling of God's purposes through Messiah Jesus. While Johnson has long insisted that the religious experience of believers is relevant data in trying to understand the historical, social, cultural and ecclesial context of those early Christian communities, it is in this book that he pursues that line of investigation in constructing Paul. The result is a tour de force, readable, persuasive, and for me, convincing in its portrait of Paul.
The biography of Rendel Harris is a huge book just short of 700 pages. I'm still immersed in it. A full review of it will appear in a Quaker Journal later this year. But this Quaker biblical scholar is a deeply fascinating subject. His travels in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, on the hunt for ancient manuscripts read like the best travel books, often illuminated by his wife's journals. He and his wife were outspoken in their protests and political representation on behalf of the Armenian people many of whom were massacred and their communities destroyed under the order of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Harris worked as a scholar in America, Cambridge, and especially in Birmingham as the first Principal of Woodbrooke, establishing the primary Quaker Research Institution in the world. His textual studies, contributions to ecumenical co-operation, curatoriship of important manuscript collections and so much more, make this late Victorian Quaker one of the most attractive and at times eccentric figures in English nonconformity.
George Hunsinger is a leading Princeton theologian, a world class authority on Karl Barth, and the founder of The National Religious Campaign Against Torture. His commentary on Philippians published only last month reflects much of that depth and range of theological understanding, his continuing passion for social justice, and careful unfolding of Paul's letter from prison to the Philippian believers. I'm almost finished this one.
Hunsinger is a refreshing and generous commentator, at ease with exegeting the text and then exploring how such ancient guidance to an upset house church in Philippi, can become contemporary and urgent in our own faith struggles of the 21st Century. There are some verses where Hunsinger decides to dig down deeply to discover the theological foundations on which Paul is building. His take on what Paul means in Philippians 3.9 "not having a righteousness of my own…" is simply superb. Those few pages are an education in how to balance historical critical exegesis with what Hunsinger calls an ecclesial hermeneutic.
There is similar stimulus in his treatment of the Christ Hymn Phil. 2.5-11. So much has been written on this passage; it would be easy to either repeat what others have said, but more briefly; or try to find something novel to say. Hunsinger does neither. The exegesis is woven through his theological reflection on Christology, the Trinitarian relations of the Godhead, and how Phil 2 relates to the Nicea-Chalcedonian definitions. This has been a deeply satisfying study of one of Paul's letters, one I already knew well – I now feel I know it better.
There's something reassuring about intellectual engagement with familiar subjects and disciplines. A good therapist might deconstruct what is actually going on here, and that's OK. It has worked for me, and there are the additional longer lasting benefits; the uncomplicated joy of reading, the contentment of a mind supplementing its store, delight in new discovery and some hard to hide smugness when you are able to say, "Oh, I knew that."