“God is Not in this Classroom” or Reading the Bible in a Secular Context

Description: Teaching biblical literature in a secular Liberal Arts environment requires allowing the texts to speak for themselves, so that students might hear what the texts have to say (which may not necessarily be what we want to hear). This is easier said than done since we must attempt to leave religious convictions, traditions, and specific agendas behind. At the same time, we must also recognize that we will not always be able to avoid our own historical context and bias. In light of these challenges and through my eight years experience as a Christian teaching courses in a Jewish Studies program at a secular university I have developed methods (and discarded others) for teaching the Hebrew Bible that include reading the texts critically as literary and historical sources while salting the course with Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other interpretations. The goal is to use the potential handicaps of preconceived ideas and convictions as gateways into the material. God may well be in the classroom and miracles may well occur, but the students know that they have to determine that for themselves.

When I originally proposed this paper, as you can see from the description I intended to share with you how I sprinkled my courses on the Hebrew Bible with readings of various readings of the text. Next semester I will be teaching Genesis, for example, and in that course we will being by reading the biblical text itself and then read Bonhoeffer’s little work on creation. When we get to Noah we will read the Genesis Apocryphon and when we get to the story of Tamar we will look at a feminist reading of the text (and make oblique references to The Red Tent). But I think this approach is fairly self-evident, that by showing students multiple readings of the same or similar text they will begin to see the challenges and promise of reading a text that is so ancient and yet still so relevant to so many. I also realized, as I surveyed the field and looked at the other proposals for today, that this is an approach that many have found useful and I did not want to burden you with my rendition of this theme.

It seems that the sort of strategies most often employed in teaching the Bible in a secular liberal arts context involve teaching the Bible as something, e.g., “The Bible as Literature,” “The Bible as History.” Or we might provide “readings” of the Bible, such as a feminist, liberationist, modern, etc. Please note, this is not a criticism per se, these are legitimate and useful strategies and that I regularly employ, yet each of these methods is an attempt to read the biblical text as something other than it is.

Recently, and independently of preparation for these sessions, there has been a fair amount of discussion on the internet, on the so-called “biblioblogs,” about just how we teach the Bible in a secular, liberal arts context. On one site, Kevin Wilson’s BlueCord.org, a lively debate ensued as to whether or not one could read the biblical text purely as “historical” or whether or not, as Steve Cook asserted,

You are engaging a text whose existence is owed to the historical community’s valuing of it as Word/Witness to the transcendent. There is an inherent “theological” dimension to this text’s preservation until this very day and its existence in your hands.

In other words, by the very act of engaging with these texts that are both theological in content and theological in their preservation, we are dealing with theology.

I have become convinced that a very productive method of teaching the Bible, particularly where we are concerned with actually conveying some of the content of the text to our students, is to teach the Bible as what it is, a theological text. The vast majority of biblical texts are, after all, fundamentally theological texts and as Cook pointed out, Jews and Christians have viewed even the process of transmission as a theological matter. The challenge for us as teachers is that we are teaching in a fundamentally secular context. So how do we teach these theological texts without teaching or doing theology? Today I will offer a modest outline of a method for reading these theological texts.

This brings me back to my title, “God is not in this classroom.” This is the statement with which I begin my first lecture of most courses dealing with the Bible and I quickly follow it with the observation that it is not an assertion of fact since I cannot prove it and most religious traditions would argue otherwise. God may be in the classroom and God may not. God may be in the text and God may not. What is certain is that the authors (and most likely their audiences) believed that God was active and interactive and many of them, if not all, believed that God was indeed in the giving and receiving of the text. “The word of the LORD came to me.” The next question is what do we, the faculty and the students, believe about the texts?

Internal Inventory

We must first recognize that it is very difficult to isolate one’s own theological convictions (even and especially when we believe we do not have any) from that of the texts we are reading. It is difficult, but I do not think it is impossible. In an effort to deal with this I encourage students, without calling upon them to share out loud, to reflect upon what affect their own background and religious convictions or lack thereof has upon their reading of the texts. And I will then come back to that point throughout the course since often we are unaware of this influence upon our thought. This “internal inventory” is imperative, in my opinion. For example, I never ask my students to decide whether or not they believe the miracles in the Bible occurred, but I do ask them to consider whether they believe that miracles could occur and then consider how that conviction will influence their reading of the text.
At this point we also discuss briefly the history of textual reception, manuscript traditions, and translations. The task here is to make the students sufficiently aware of the complexities involved in textual criticism without causing them to despair of ever knowing what the text says in its simplest form. (I present the material following the Jewish canonical form for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because it is the most ancient structure and ordering that we have of these texts. See Childs.)

Historical-Theological Approach

Once a “base text” (as fictive as that may be) has been established we engage in a simple reading of the text. Trying to determine the basic meanings of the words we are reading and what they mean when placed together to form sentences and complete units. At this point we can begin to talk about content and ask “what is the text saying” and the related question “what does it mean.” This last question must be asked first and foremost, whatever later application one might have, in reference to the original author and audience. The challenge here is, of course, that we are radically removed from the author by thousands of years, miles, and cultures. But we must do our best.

I try not to present an extended lecture on the beliefs and practices of ancient Israel because any such reconstruction is bound to be a synthesis of disparate sources and mar the very object of our student. Instead I begin with the text in front of us and build out from there. As a result, for example, very quickly we being to discuss monotheism and the transcendence of God in reading Genesis 1 but only one chapter later we are discussing the immanence of the LORD God and the introduction of sin into the world. Both accounts provide very different “theologies” while also providing opportunities to discuss source criticism, literary criticism, and developing worldviews. We even touch on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design.
This is in many ways an “historical” approach. The quotes around “historical” are present because I do not refer to teaching the Bible as history, rather teaching the historical beliefs and theological convictions of the authors and the communities that preserved these texts, in so far as we are able to discover them. In our secular context, where we are not bound by a creed or code, this provides us with the reassuring protection of being able to say “they believed,” thus distancing ourselves from whatever we say following that clause and absolves us from making any judgment about the validity of that belief. We are merely observers. It also serves, I hope, to at once both challenge and disarm those students who might have more traditional or orthodox views of these passages.

This is, I think, the first and necessary step in engaging both our students and the texts. If we truly want our students to understand what they are reading they need to have some sense of its importance, if not for themselves, than at least for the people who wrote and preserved them. In describing what they believed we will invariably (or we ought to) consider why they held these convictions and this often leads to very relevant and contemporary concerns. For example, the Deuteronomic assertions that God punishes his people for their sins may be foreign and unacceptable to many of us, but once we understand that these convictions developed, at least in part, as a means of explaining the suffering of seemingly innocent people in this world, we may begin to better understand that view even if we do not espouse it ourselves.

The theological concerns of the biblical authors are not so different from our own, even if we do not identify them as theological, and of course the Bible deals with many issues that may well not be defined as purely “theological,” but are pertinent nonetheless. The Psalms, for example, are full of emotion and pathos that we all can relate to, not least of all college age students. Any number of wisdom psalms and the Book of Proverbs itself, while couched within “god language,” are espousing a way of life that most of us would still value, even if we do not call on the LORD. That similarity will allow discussion of the concept of “the fear of the LORD.”

The Problem of Miracles

Perhaps the most difficult passages of all for us to teach are not, however, the assertions of God’s might and law or the horrible tales of murder and rape, but are the accounts of the miraculous. I try to walk the fine line between appearing to espouse the plagues, the manna, and the miraculous births as “the Gospel truth” and rejecting them as fantasies and so much nonsense. I find neither extreme to be pedagogically useful. This via media does not, however, mean that I look for or teach naturalistic explanations for what the Bible clearly depicts as miraculous. That is certainly one possible interpretation that is included in our discussion, but I do not redefine “miracle” in such a way that it no longer means what the primary definition of the word clearly is.

The New Oxford American English Dictionary defines miracle as “an event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature and is regarded as an act of God.” The biblical authors, whether Tanakh or New Testament, clearly know that these things that they are reporting do not usually happen. That is the whole point of a miracle! The very fact that such accounts are in the text speaks volumes about the fundamental beliefs of the authors.

Still, some scholars feel they are doing justice to the text and modern sensibilities to “rationalize” the miracles such as those who explain the plagues of Exodus as natural phenomena or the feeding of the thousands as actually acts of shame and charity. Others attribute genuine malice to the author, asserting that he invented the accounts of the miracle to justify a particular action, teaching, or tradition (usually, of course, something that the modern scholar rejects). In rationalizing away the historicity of the miracles such scholars are removing an essential element of the text and context.

When I teach such passages I again start from the historical-theological perspective and point out to my students that the authors did indeed know that such events did not occur in the natural order of things and yet (at least we can be certain in many cases) the authors believed that they had occurred and they believed that they occurred through the intervention of God. The origins of these stories are lost to us and it is impossible to reconstruct what may or may not have happened. (Although we do discuss the various possibilities.) So the next step is to ask how these stories functioned in the narrative and the life of the community. It is clear that many others at the time and since believed that these miracles occurred, “perhaps some of you in this room,” I always point out, and that is significant. Here we can assess the literary, social, theological, and historical impact of these particular narratives. Because at some point we can and should get past the question of whether or not something actually happened and acknowledge the effect of people believing that they occurred.

A prime example of this is the account of the Ten Plagues. The order, nature, and character of the plagues are themselves a commentary on YHWH’s victory over Egypt and their gods. I find it important to point out that this does not presuppose that the Israelites did not believe in the Egyptian deities, but that they believed their God was stronger, even on their home turf, than their gods. The power of this story of liberation continues to suffuse Judaism to this day and serves as one of the primary metaphors for interpreting the purpose of Jesus’ death/resurrection and Christian baptism. The import of the story is thus not reliant upon the “historicity” of the events, yet neither am I compelled to dispel a student’s conviction of their veracity.

Conclusion

The biblical texts are fundamentally theological and we ignore that to the detriment of our student’s education. The various historical critical methods that most of us were trained in and come to rely upon are still valuable. This approach to the texts should, in fact, lead to their employ. (I should note that Gottwald has outlined and demonstrated a similar approach of integrating all of these various concerns, including theological, in his Introduction. I find, however, that his organization of the textbook and insistence upon certain hypothetical reconstructions makes it far too cumbersome for use in an introductory, undergraduate class.) Once we have mined the text for as original a meaning as we can discover, we can then bring these other resources to bear as we trace textual and hermeneutical history of the text. It is then important to take the time, even if only briefly, to present other readings of the text. The student will then have an historical perspective to judge the development and adaptation of the text to meet later needs, themselves often theological.

[So my approach is somewhat like WC Smith not in that we need to begin with a history of the formation of canon, how the Bible became scripture, but in that I present the Bible and attempt to have my students glimpse it as, to use Smith’s words, “not merely as a set of ancient documents or even as a first- and second-century product but as a third-century and twelfth-century and nineteenth-century and contemporary agent” (p. 134).]

In many ways I am sure that I have not said anything new, certainly not to any of us in this room. Yet at the same time I believe there is a reticence for those of us teaching in a secular context to address the theology of these texts perhaps for fear that we will be perceived as doing theology. In our effort to show parallels with other ancient Near Eastern texts, provide feminist readings that cut across the text, and liberate the text from its patriarchal moorings I think we often miss and therefore fail to convey to our students, the fundamental power that these words had for their original audience. Once we have caught a glimpse of that original vision we can then more profitably see how others have read them. After all, God may not be in the classroom, but he may be in the Text.

 

Where do we go from here? Remembering the past, transforming the future

As I write this it is Thursday morning, November 10, 2011, six days after the Attorney General released the presentment in the Sandusky case and less than a day since President Spanier and Coach Paterno have been removed from their positions. These last days have filled us all with an incredible array of emotions that have been at times overwhelming. As a community we are grieving; we are grieving many things.

First and foremost, we grieve for the victims of abuse and their families. As a father of young children, I felt revulsion and horror as I read the presentment. The possibility that any of us in any way might have contributed to such acts is devastating. I continue to pray for the victims and their families even as we wait for the justice system to take its course. The Board of Trustees has announced that a Special Committee will be formed to not only investigate what has happened in the past but also to ensure that it never happens again.

We also grieve for ourselves. The idea that someone in our community could have perpetrated such acts overwhelms us. People who have successfully led our community for decades are no longer present. It is understandable that we feel loss and disbelief.

We are saddened by the way in which the world now seems to view Penn State. We have been “Penn State Proud” of our institution, our integrity, and our honor. Now, we are forced to ask ourselves if all of that may be lost. Last month a 99-year-old distinguished alumnus of Penn State was addressing a group of Schreyer Scholars and concluded his remarks with the following prescient comment: “You will spend your whole life building your reputation, but it can take only a moment for it to be destroyed.”

So now we come together to grieve, to apologize, to investigate ourselves, to heal, and to build a future that is better for not just the Nittany Nation, but all nations.

Penn State remains what it has always been: an amazing institution with tremendous foundations in honest and integrity. We are more than any single individual or small group. We are thousands of faculty and staff, tens of thousands of students, and hundreds of thousands of alumni.

We need only think of THON, not just to be proud of Penn State, but to see the path forward. The Four Diamonds Fund was started in 1977 through the tragic loss of one couple’s child to cancer. Charles and Irma Millard used their loss to inspire them and others to raise awareness and support of pediatric cancer. In the years since combining with the Penn State Dance Marathon, tens of millions of dollars have been raised. A tragedy has become an agent of healing and Penn Staters have made that possible.

There is a long road ahead for our community and it will be difficult, but I am confident in our future. Already our students are seeking to make this tragic situation one of hope. Blue is not only one of the colors of Penn State, but also the symbol for the campaign to stop child abuse. They are calling for Saturday’s game to be a “Blue Out,” not simply as a sign of support of the university, but more importantly a statement to the innocents who have been harmed.

This is why I have hope, confidence and pride in Penn State.

 

Footnote or "fingernote" either way this MS has it right.

Can we all agree that endnotes are simply awful? They are annoying at best and, when reading electronic texts that are not hyperlinked, downright damnable.¹ Footnotes, on the other hand, are convenient, easy to read and do little to interrupt the flow of the argument. I believe we should stand up for our rights and demand that publishers only use footnotes. Are you with me? Huzzah!

 

1. This is in no way a criticism of a computer product with an unfortunate name.

When there is a statue of you outside of your "office" I think you can assume you have tenure.

Sean Caroll, “a Cal Tech physicist denied tenure a few years back at Chicago” wrote a guide: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine. His field is not mine (or likely that of those reading this blog) but you should read his whole post because it has very relevant material and suggestions. I will provide just a couple here, with a few comments of my own. The first few points are obvious, well, should be, for example, “Do good work.”

• Be prolific and reliable. No, tenure is not given or denied simply on the basis of how many papers you write. But… it doesn’t hurt. More importantly, if there is some standard of productivity in your field, try to maintain it all the time. Don’t have “a bad year.” Because if you have one bad year, who knows how many bad years you’ll have in the future?

More specifically, know what is expected by your department and college. A good chair or head should sit all their junior faculty down and make it very clear what they need to make tenure in that department. If they don’t, go and ask them. We are required to give our students a syllabus why shouldn’t departments do the same for their faculty? They should.

• Don’t be too well known outside the field. I hate to say this, but the evidence is there: if you have too high of a public profile, people look at you suspiciously. Actual quote: “I’m glad we didn’t hire Dr. X; he spends too much time in the New York Times and not enough time in the lab.” And that’s the point — it’s not that people are jealous that you are popular, it’s that they are suspicious you care about publicity more than you do about research. Remember the Overriding Principle.

This, as with many of his comments, is what I would call a culture question. In line with my comments above, meet regularly with your department chair or head and find out what is and is not acceptable in your department.

• Don’t write a book. This follows partly from the above; if you’re contemplating writing a popular book, and aren’t sure whether it will negatively impact your chance of getting tenure, you’re probably too far gone for this list to even help you. But it’s worth a separate bullet point because even textbooks are beyond the pale. (Probably the worst thing I personally did was to write Spacetime and Geometry.) You might think that a long volume filled with equations that provides a real service to the community would help your case. It won’t; it will hurt it. Why? Because while you were writing that book, you weren’t doing research. Catching on? (Obviously I’m writing from a field where research is conveyed solely through papers, not books; if you’re in a field where the serious research is contained within scholarly books, then by all means write all the scholarly books you can.)

And his caveat applies to us. In my two institutions I have had great departmental leaders who clearly articulated the expectations and they were the same (regarding scholarly publication): 6 articles in respected peer review journals and one book (not your doctorate warmed over!).

• Choose your hobbies wisely. This is a bit more subjective, but I think there is some truth here. Even the highest-pressure departments in the world don’t think that faculty members can’t have any hobbies outside their work. But here is the paradox: you are better off if your hobbies are nothing like your work. Permissible hobbies include skydiving, playing guitar, or cooking. Suspicious hobbies include writing of any sort (novels, magazine articles, blogs), programming or web stuff, starting a business, etc. Why? Because there’s a feeling that this kind of activity represents time that could be spent on research. I don’t think blogging has quite the stigma it once did, although I have heard senior faculty members say they would never hire someone with a blog. But it’s a symptom of a willingness to spend your intellectual energies on something other than doing research.

And this, my friends, is why Mark Goodacre and I are presenting in a session coordinate by the SBL Student Advisory Board. In reality getting the job is not even half the battle. I suppose SBL does workshops on getting tenure (if they don’t, they should) but the major issues are often the same. I don’t think that blogging, being on facebook, twitter, etc. is actually going to harm your chances at a job or tenure. What you say on those sites may.

Underneath all of this is the unspoken (now to be written) assumption that you will compromise some of who you are and what you are interested in for the sake of getting tenure. Many will be unwilling to make that compromise. For me, it has not been a denial of my self or hiding “who I am,” rather simply a question of doing the work expected and required of me (not unlike a graduate program) and being savvy about my public engagement and interaction. So far so good…

HT: My Brother.

 

Andy Capp by Reg Smythe

It is tough to admit it but I am no longer the “younger generation.” Sure I use twitter, facebook, and often have the gadgets. Folks are saying that twitter and facebook are really for the old folks anyway so maybe that isn’t a sign of my hipness. But when it comes to education and preaching I think that we are very often in danger of altering the message rather than the means of delivery. When Paul said he became all things to all people (1 Cor. 9:22) he was not saying that he would alter the Gospel to meet a different audience’s perspective (if they didn’t like the idea of Christ’s death as an atoning sacrifice, for example, he did not say that it was merely an example of love). Rather he was saying that he would meet people where they were in the condition that they were in. The Bible must be translated into every languages and only some of them are verbal.

This is true for education as well. I certainly believe that we need to understand the nature and character of our students today and we should explore modes of delivery that will work best for our/their current context (which is not the same for everyone, we have commuters, adult learners, military, etc.). But our goals and the content should not necessarily change. The obvious exception to the content is, of course, where new knowledge is being developed; we need to stay up-to-date in our fields and incorporate new discoveries and theories into our courses. As much as I am glad to see folks using the iPad, for example, in English classes, I worry sometimes that in some people’s rush to incorporate the latest gadget they are not only potentially leaving some behind they are also running the risk of making the course about the tools rather than the subject.

In short, whatever modes and methods we use we need to keep our eyes on the “course objectives and learning outcomes,” even in the church.

 

The author — Andrew Chignell, a Wheaton alumnus who is associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University — has just published the article online, along with “the back story” about how the piece was killed.

From a quick read of Chignell’s article it looks very fair to me, so give that a glance. But to turn to the IHE article I wanted to make two points. The first is minor, but annoying. Throughout the entire piece, aside from when they are quoting Chignell, they consistently misspell the Wheaton President’s name as “Liftin” instead of the accurate “Litfin.” Is it that hard to get someone’s name right?

Finally, their title is more than a bit misleading. While I do not agree with some of the directions in which Litfin has taken Wheaton he is no shrinking violet. He and the college did not, and Chignell affirms this, try and kill the story. The decision was made by Christianity Today International’s president. As Litfin told IHE,

“Even if I had the ability to stifle the article, I would not have done so,” he said. “It goes against the grain of everything I believe.”

He added: “I disagree with the article, but I don’t think the article is something we need protection from.”

So this was not a story about academic freedom, as implied in the title (but I note their insertion of “and publishing), rather it is simply an editorial decision by a private publisher. I don’t agree with CT’s decision, it was petty, shortsighted, and unnecessary, but that is their right. No doubt IHE was trying to generate interest in a story that would otherwise have a rather small audience. Still, I think the title is misleading.

UPDATE: There is a great comment on the IHE thread by David Wright , Provost at Indiana Wesleyan University. Well worth reading.

 

Being the end of the month (or now the beginning of the new month) we have our monthly Biblical Studies Carnival and Top 50 blogs listing. Doug Chaplin aka clayboy did an excellent job with this month’s Carnival. This month I moved back into the Top 50 biblioblogs after a brief hiatus (not posting is an excellent way to drop down the ranks).

 

The present study explores the possibility of using variant readings of the Targum of the Prophets to get a better insight into the origin and history of Targum Jonathan. The focus is on two sorts of variant readings: the Tosefta Targums and the targumic quotations in rabbinic and medieval Jewish literature. The chapter on the Tosefta Targums concentrates on variants from the book of Samuel. The chapter on the targumic quotations includes quotations of all the Prophets in early Jewish literature. In the Appendix a full list is given of all quotations of Targums of the Prophets presently known. The book is useful for the study of the genesis of Targum Jonathan as well as for its later developments.

Congratulations to Dineke and Harry! This will be a great resource for all interested in targumic studies and exegetical traditions.