It’s hard to adjust to the prospect of leaving Glasgow behind, when it has been such a welcoming home to us,
even though it means we’re going to Oxford, where we’re already being welcomed, and I’m bring put to satisfying work.
Apparently there are many university murders in both locations. We promise to be on the lookout for crazed professional rivals, nefarious gangsters, psychopathic stalkers, religious fanatics, and general malefactors.
If you had been waiting impatiently for a fresh analysis of the syntax of the Epistle of James, you can satisfy your hunger now with my long-gestating contribution to the Baylor “Handbooks to the Greek Text” series.
is now shipping. Everyone who doubted that I actually was writing a book about James (seriously, when I started, James was still a recent addition to the New Testament canon) can prove to themselves that it”s real by ordering a copy or two. It makes great beach reading (if you have some Greek and are curious about how the bits of James go together). It doesn’t cover as much as does Dale Allison’s 800-page alternative, recently released in the ICC series, but it’s a lot less expensive.
It’s a blog, not a through-composed book or essay, so I can jump from topic to topic if I want to!
What is our investment in identifying our work as “exegesis” rather than less exotic words such as “interpretation”? If the word “exegesis” we’re extirpated from English usage, we wouldn’t miss much (and we would be protected from tedious preachers’ insistence on throwing the word into sermons altogether too often). At the same time, biblical scholars do seem to read and study the Bible differently from the way that literary scholars, for instance, study Austen or Morrison. But then, scholars do devote concentrated, word-by-word attention to Joyce, Eliot, and Dickinson; what accounts for the differences, and what can we learn from the ways that readers study the texts they do?
First, it is not irrelevant to note that the works of any modestly prolific novelist outstrip the Bible in sheer volume by a considerable margin. It would be impractical for a literature scholar to make his way through Silas Marner in the degree of detail that I’ve just dedicated to the Epistle of James (and my own comments on James are dwarfed by Dale Allison’s 800-page commentary). Life is too short, and the results probably not interesting enough, to warrant diagramming every sentence, parsing every verb, considering every possible nuance in every construction, in a single long novel — let alone in the corpus of an author. (Saying that I specialise in the Epistle of James is — by scope — a bit like saying that I specialise in Chapter 1.XIX of Tristram Shandy). Length itself is one reason readers of other bodies of literature don’t treat their subjects in the same way that biblical scholars treat theirs.
That point can be underscored by the fact that interpreters of poetry — usually or often, shorter units of literature — do tend to devote the sort of focused, intense attention to every aspect of their texts. While relatively little of the Bible is customarily identified as “poetry,” the example of poetry-interpretation diminishes to some extent the distinctiveness of biblical interpretation.
Moreover, particular works of prose literature — say, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake — also elicit word-by-word analysis. This may be due in part to Joyce’s having the Bible (and the Odyssey and the Code of Canon Law) as models; all of these precursor texts have elicited exegetical commentary over the ages. At any rate, it suffices for now to note that some long prose works seem to warrant detailed technical analysis even though those stand out as atypical.
Let’s consider biblical exegesis as part of a spectrum of scholarly attention that runs from, say, Kane and Abel (a popular best seller to which few people would dedicate much study) to the Torah (which has been studied letter-by-letter for thousands of years). It’s hard to find good examples at the “plain” end of the spectrum, since once a work has become very popular, it tends to attract certain sorts of critical attention willy-nilly; still, particular works of popular literature will fall further along the spectrum than others (there is more critical attention to Harry Potter than to Jonathan Livingston Seagull). Most “serious” literature would fall toward the middle of the spectrum: studied for style, themes, characters, and various general characteristics of the work as a whole, but less so for the individual sentences and words. Poetry — characterised by intense focus and, generally, more brevity than novels — will be studied more closely than novels; one reads “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” differently than Moby-Dick. Biblical scholarship of the technical, academic sort lies in the neighbourhood of poetry, of Joyce’s longer prose works, and the intense interpretation of Torah.
These neighbours are not obviously related to the Bible by style or genre (well, apart from the Torah, obviously). Matthew’s Gospel isn’t a poem, nor the sort of enigmatic prose of Finnegan’s Wake. Why do we read some texts this way, while others (say, Robinson Crusoe) we read differently? Are there intrinsic qualities of the text that compel, or elicit, certain kinds of attention? Is there an ethics of interpretation that regulates kin of interpretive attention?
[Again, more to come]
Margaret and I were ambling into the office this morning, talking about her book Our Only Hope: More Than We Can Ask or Imagine (forthcoming from Pickwick Press, autumn 2013), when one of us casually referred to ‘books in print.’ Since we both have worked in bookstores and libraries at times, we shared a particular memory that will seem peculiar to young folks these days.
To wit: Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a book published every year whose title was Books In Print (it still is printed, evidently, though I can hardly imagine who would buy it now). It included what it said on the cover — the publication information for every book in the USA whose publisher had print copies available. If you wanted to track down a book for library use, or to order a copy of your own, you would go to Books In Print, find it by title or author, write down the publication information, and convey that data to a librarian or bookseller.
It was, as you may imagine, an unwieldy fat volume, with supplements published at regular intervals, but before digital databases and the Internet and Amazon, this was how we located copies of the books we wanted to read and buy. Nowadays the prospect of a print book which lists every book available defies imagination. Practically everything is in print one way or another; how would one encompass all the books from all the publishing entities in one book? The idea of having to go someplace and look something up in Books In Print (regular people didn’t ordinarily own copies, in my experience) rather than just looking at Amazon or WorldCat seems bizarre. And writing down publication data and carrying it, or mailing it, to the person from whom you wanted a copy….
Yet this was how your parents or grandparents used to deal with book acquisitions in the pre-Net world. Sometimes I’m amazed that we read as much as we did — but then, we weren’t distracted by Facebook.
This hasn’t been much of a year for blogging for me — mostly just sermons and apologies for not blogging more. This is due partly to persistent problems with the backend software and perhaps my server company, but mostly to my falling out of the habit of blogging. Work was beastly this past year (not my lovely, brilliant, delightful students, nor my diligent, cooperative, supportive colleagues, but the workload and the alignment of omens about the future), I had hard writing to do just for work and administrative purposes, and I don’t like moaning about my working conditions. So if I got to the end of a day tired of extracting words from my brain, and frustrated by developments at work, I wasn’t inclined to write anything particular in a blog.
A while back, though, Stephanie Booth — one of the longtime regulars in Joi Ito’s IRC channel — challenged a number of us old-timers to renew our participation in blogging. She proposed a “Back To Blogging” movement, and in light of the increasing Matrix-isation of Facebook and Google users, her call to arms stuck in my imagination. I missed the ten days she specified. Whoops. But I Christopher Roussel have has ironed out a couple of wrinkles in my WordPress installation, and everything seems to be working today, so maybe I’ll give this “blogging” phenomenon another go. After more than eleven years (for me), maybe it’ll really catch on.
[As part of writing out a book on exegetical method — the approaches, the how-to parts, the consequences parts, and so on — I’m beginning with some introductory writing on the subject. This will probably grow into a first chapter, perhaps with my earlier posts on “What Makes Exegesis Difficult?” At any rate, this is what I think, not my fully researched and documented formal conclusions.]
“Exegetical method” sounds as though it should be straightforward. Do this, then this, remember that, and poof! That’s exegesis. To a certain extent, I imagine that students expect that as well; they have learned to make scrambled eggs, to knit scarves, to pitch a tent, to drive an auto. Now, teach us the method for producing exegesis. Likewise, non-practitioners may imagine that appropriate method lies behind our confidently announced interpretations. Merely indicating the topic suggests that there is a thing called exegetical method, that it lies behind the process of what can rightly be called “exegesis,” and that somebody who cares to practice exegesis should learn the method, and then be equipped to deliver the goods.
Many books about exegesis and method underscore this premise by setting out a series of steps for conducting exegesis. The number and order of these steps vary, but they express the sense that by doing identifiable things in an appropriate process, the results will be — if not always correct or even sound — at least exegetical. Student preachers and adult ed leaders very often refer to “my exegesis of X or Y” (even some experienced leaders do so), with the attendant connotation of interpretive authority. They have performed the steps they were taught, and have arrived at this interpretive result. That’s exegesis.
At the same time, some voices have called this model into question. In lectures at Yale Divinity School, Brevard Childs occasionally referred to “the thirty-three exegetical steps for beating a text into a pulp.” And obviously, not every student who follows the thirty-three, or ten, or twelve, or sixteen steps does so successfully; some students receive high marks, others low marks. If a student receives a low mark, but follows all the designated steps, has she still practiced warranted, authoritative “exegesis”? What is the difference between “good exegesis,” “bad exegesis,” and “not exegesis”?
In order to understand such questions, and thereby to understand what subsequent entries will say about exegetical method, we ought to work toward an understanding of what people mean by “exegesis,” what people want exegesis for, and how we can reasonably expect to be understood when we (as practitioners of this craft) refer to our work as exegesis. No one benefits if we just state a stipulated definition that ordinary readers and listeners won’t recognise, and such artificial definitions increase the likelihood that we’ll be heard as making claims that differ from what we (in our stipulated sense of the term) would defend as what we really were up to. Similarly, if we ourselves are utterly convinced that we are doing something different from what any outsider can observe us to be doing, our definition of our practice may be defective. The more precisely we can name what we do, what that entails, how one could dispute or refute our claims, and why it matters, the more clear, open, honest, and reliable our public discourse will be.
Thus the question: what is exegetical method? The tradition of assigning series of steps that cumulatively lead to “exegesis” is honoured by time, by the authority of notable author-teachers who have promoted the idea, and by the apparent success of students who have learned exegesis by this way. Such warrants cannot lightly be dismissed. At the same time, some authorities (such as Childs) have called the tradition into question, and we can demonstrate certain drawbacks to both the premise and to its consequences among students who practice it.
[To be continued...]
I’m always a bit slow on the uptake, and especially as Margaret and I have been particularly distracted during the past ten days or so; though I saw my friends and students and all posting comments about their sermons for Trinity Sunday, I didn’t connect the dots that the “26 May” on the rota that said I was on duty to preach also meant that I too would be expected to have something to say about that holy mystery.
I had preached recently — a couple of weeks ago, at St Aidan’s (which reminds me I should get that sermon online too), so my homiletical habits weren’t too rusty. And although I have a lot of other things on my mind, this sermon seemed to come together pretty smoothly. As often, I needed to let the sermon settle and my imagination detach from it a bit before I could gather it into a conclusion, but that too came out all right when I needed it. (The sermon bit is below, in the ‘Continue reading’ link.)
Our home-front unsettledness continues for another few days. After that, I’m counting on being able to let out some very deep sighs and begin relaxing.
(I knew I kept this thing alive for a reason!)
Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational, inter alia) gives an assessment of his involvement with online education via MOOCs, from a PBS NewsHour segment. His experience tends to confirm my perspective about the role and future of MOOCs, so I was chuffed to hear from his quarter. Something he didn’t mention — that I brought up in a conversation with Kevin Werbach*? the other day — is that the very idea of a ‘course’ (defined in the terms necessitated by quantised, bureaucratic models) is itself alien to the online learning environment, which is more conducive to learner-led, associative, indefinite-duration endeavours.
I’ll bet that Ariely’s course is great, just as I would bet that Kevin’s online course is great. The cost of mounting such a course (especially one well-enough executed to compare with these) is, of course, non-trivial, and there are arguments and experiments to be made about the relative worth of a pound spent on a MOOC and a pound spent on making the most of an in-person educational venture — but online education isn’t going to vanish even if it’s prohibitively costly for many providers, so it may as well be done brilliantly by outstanding practitioners with deep-pocket support.
Last night, though, Tripp tagged me to comment on a HuffPo post by a former student of mine, Wayne Meisel. In response, I noted that Wayne has some good points, and some fairly serious mistakes.
I agree with Wayne that an intentional-community model makes a lot of sense for most seminaries; I used to suggest at Seabury that we should re-imagine the plant on a monastic model, with some residential brethren and some who come for formation, and whom we send out into the world. (I proposed renting a storefront in a particular neighbourhood which would serve as a satellite/lab for learning and serving in the hood.
I think Wayne is dead wrong about a topic on which I’ve been insisting all along: that seminaries should teach something other than theology (and its allied disciplines). I’ll begin listening to that one when someone suggests that a med school teach theology, or that a law school teach pharmacology. The implicit assumption is that theological understanding doesn’t matter that much, or that it comes automatically. “Their courses left something to be desired in terms of leadership training and skill development”? I don’t remember any courses at PTS that advertised themselves as leadership training. PTS is a theological seminary, one of the best in the world at teaching students deeply to understand the Bible and the theological tradition and the best practices in their ministerial vocation. ‘Leadership training’ is not irrelevant to that, but it’s no more central than it is in very many other fields, and is surely less important that, hmmmm, knowing what you’re doing as a Christian minister.
And by the way — where do we see the vast benefits of leadership training courses on Wall Street and in US government? It appears that the US has a shortage of leadership from pillar to post; it’s not really fair to assail seminaries for the problem (and simply identifying one’s favourite leadership guru doesn’t solve anything; Peter Drucker can only teach in one place at a time).
Luther Seminary didn’t falter because it should have been teaching leadership training; it faltered because it overspent on buildings and managed money based on the expectation that a boom would continue (as has been the case with other financially-troubled seminaries). But Wayne doesn’t say, ‘Avoid imprudent expenditures,’ which would seem to me a much more apposite lesson.
Joint programmes make a lot of sense; a different model for formation and community life gets at a genuine problem; but the heart of the problem that no one talks about is committing to excellence in theological education. Anything else simply papers over a more significant problem: ‘We have these jazzy community houses and leadership training, but if you go to our theological seminary you won’t actually learn much about Jesus and God and worship’.
MOOCs do terrific work of a particular kind; conventional university instruction does terrific work of a particular kind; seminaries can do terrific work of a particular kind (especially if they remember to concentrate on their historic strengths). Foundation executives can do good work of a particular kind, too. I endorse The strengths or failures of specific cases in one or the other don’t imply that others should be more like X or less like Y — if you want to suss out the future of online education, of seminaries, of universities, or whatever, it’s utterly vital that you pay attention to strengths and weaknesses, of capacities and purposes, and work from there. Even my preferred suggestion of an excellence-focused, monastic-model theological seminary has very significant limitations on the scope of its applicability.
‘One size’, as the Waitresses reminded us in the theme to Square Pegs, ‘does not fit all.’
The end of teaching for the year is coming up on us, so my working days will be less oriented toward ‘what hitherto-unprepared lectures do I have to give this week?’ and more toward ‘what backlogged obligation can I clear away?’ This will make a considerable difference for the better, I promise.
I preached again this Sunday, this time at St Aidan’s in Clarkston, and I utterly omitted mention of it being Mothering Sunday (and almost avoided mention of Refreshment Sunday). This is not out of defiant despite of mothers, or my mother, or Margaret, or anything; I just followed the logic of the sermon as I was writing it out, and ‘mothers’ really didn’t enter the flow of the thing. No worries, though — we had plenty of matricentrism in the liturgy.
The text of the sermon below, and then I’m off to cobble together the slides for tomorrow’s lecture on theological interpretation.
I did pretty well at blogging through January, but February rolled through with an avalanche of lectures for which I didn’t have presentations prepared, along with two book manuscripts, a couple of lectures, and so on and so forth. February was a blogging washout.
But March is still young, and I preached this morning at St Mary’s, and I’ll be preaching next week at St Aidan’s, so maybe I can jump start this blog. We’ll see — but for now, here’s this morning’s sermon. (Video below, text in the ‘continue’ link.)
During the month-long Google-blackout, while Christopher was disinfecting my blog and reassembling it, I fell for a couple of music videos — one very safe for work, and the other unsafe for most workplaces, except perhaps in Glasgow.
First, They Might Be Giants’s ‘The Mesopotamians’ (for Madhavi) —
Margaret and I often begin our mornings singing “Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh” to one another.
Then I stumbled on Louie’s hip-hop anthem to the city we love here. The title itself probably tells you all you need to know in order to decide whether you want to watch and listen to‘(Glasgow) I F**kin’ Love You Mate’:
I posted them to my FB feed when they crossed my path, but now the links are here on my blog, where they belong. This helps set things in order.
For those keeping score at home, Margaret and I filed our applications for visa extension at the end of August, so we’re coming up on the end of our fifth month in Scotland without knowing our immigration status, with no expectation that we will hear for several months more. It’s an inconvenience for us — the Border Agency has our passports, so we can’t leave the country — and awkward for our family, whom we can’t foresee being able to visit.
Sorry, I meant to say ‘the wonderful Border Agency, our favourite government agency in the whole world’.
But we have friends who applied for their residency seven months ago and who haven’t heard; after his having been here as a regular worker for years, his job has come to its end, and he’s looking for a position, but is being turned away because (after all) he can’t prove that he’ll be granted leave to remain when the results come back from the Border Agency. And who would want to hire somebody, only to find out six weeks later that they’ll be deported? But in a grim catch-22, people who are here on a visa don’t have the right to unemployment benefits, so because he’s still waiting for visa approval he both (a) can’t get a job, and (b) can’t get benefits. Margaret and I aren’t in that position, but we can certainly sympathise.
