I noticed that Nijay Gupta (and based on his post, Michael Bird) is writing a retrospective overview of his publications. As part of a motivation for me to apply myself to writing more, again, I’m taking their cue to reflect on my own books and their background.
My first book (written) is, as so often for recent graduates, a refinement of my doctoral thesis at Duke. I wrote most of the thesis while I was in residence at Durham, but after a year I had to take a job to support Margaret and the boys, so during my first year of full-time teaching I would take a day or so a week to stay overnight in my office at Eckerd College to hammer out the last chapters of my thesis. Finished in 1991, I set about seeking a publisher. In those days there were fewer theological presses, especially for lightly-converted dissertations, so I turned first to the obvious place, the SBL Dissertation Series (the clue is in the name).
But the SBL Dissertation Series turned me down; after that, I don’t remember whether I submitted it to any other presses. There were some mills that would publish anything they could sell to a library, but I had hoped for at least a modicum of selectivity in my first publisher. The rejection by a dissertation series disappointed me significantly, since the SBLDS should, in principle, have been the easiest place for me to place my thesis: that was the series’s raison d’être. If it didn’t fit the Dissertation Series, how likely was it that a university press or a commercial publisher would want it? I knew it fell outside the bounds of what most presses were taking in the early 90s — biblical theology was passé, postmodern thought was not yet marketable, questioning the prevalence of historical criticism’s paramount role marked one as a minor troublemaker — and I felt uneasy about my prospects.
At the time Charles Mabee was editing the American Biblical Hermeneutics series for Mercer University Press; he also chaired the Hermeneutics section of the SBL Southeast Region, where I gave a couple of papers that he liked. After one session, I described my thesis to him and asked whether he thought it might fit in his series. Charles — very different as we are — encouraged me enthusiastically, so I submitted my ms to Mercer, and they accepted it. I needed to translate all the French and German that I’d left in the thesis (partly to make it explicit that I could read the languages, partly to avoid quibbles with my committee over better or worse translations, and possibly to avoid making it easier for them to question my reading). I wanted to make more gentle my disagreement with Leander Keck, a brilliant scholar who had shown a graciously kind interest in my studies and my work, which I had expressed more poointedly in my thesis with a view to making clear the contours of my argument. On the whole, though, it was an easy transition, and >Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects was published in 1995 as 11th book in the series of Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics.
The argument of the book and thesis is, simply, that the felt problem with ‘biblical theology’/‘New Testament Theology’ at that historical moment (I feel very old to referring to my thirties as ‘at that historical moment’) could be ascribed to the contradictory aims of observing rigorously historical criteria (often in the name of ‘reality’) as the paramount criterion while simultaneously delivering satisfactorily theological conclusions. Scholars treated this as a matter of necessity, of the nature of New Testament theology, as self-evidently integral to responsible scholarship. I proposed, contrariwise, that there is no ‘nature’ of New Testament theology, that many of the supposed bedrock arguments in support of this model were either intrinsically flawed or derived their authority not from nature or necessity but from the cultural assumptions typical of modernity. The scholars could more readily attain their goals scholars I discussed took modernity to provide the necessity for their imperatives, while I noted that modernity constitutes only one possible array of cultural forces, and that readers who want a more theological New Testament theology should simply prepare to part ways to some extent with the cultural imperatives of modernity and identify other criteria for the soundness of their interpretations.
For various reasons, including my involvement in other projects on postmodern biblical interpretation, some readers took my argument to mean something along the line that everyone should be postmodern and not give a fig about truth or history, only being witty and confounding their neighbours. This serves mostly to confirm my argument that once you write something, however clearly, people will make of it what they will, and you just have to live with that. I admire arguments in behalf of postmodern thought where they help me puzzle out the peculiarities of the discursive worlds I inhabit, and I find those arguments tedious to the extent that they amount to casual denunciations of the ‘Words have menaings, cos you think it’s wrong to use [fillin an expletive or racial or sexual slur].’ Bore me.
So it’s not an argument for postmodern New Testament theology, or even against modern New Testament theology, so much as it’s an argument against trying to square the circle of seeking an austerely historical, richly theological New Testament theology.Prove me wrong by showing an example of a New Testament theology that historians can enthusiastically adopt without committing themselves to Christian sympathies, or a profoundly theological NT theology which rests squarely on indisputably sound historical pillars.
As a relatively small university press, MUP wasn’t in a position to promote the book. People who knew about it received it more or less positively, and it got some distinctly enthusiastic reviews. Still, it didn’t make a splash. As far as I can tell, more people knew about me from my conference papers and book reviews than from Making Sense. Still it said what I wanted to and it reached some niche audiences (I believe that David Aune used it in his classes at Notre Dame, and Keikki Räisänen — whom I criticise in the , and helped get my job at Princeton Seminary, all things for which I’m tremendously grateful. It stands up over the years; you can see, for instance, that Joel GReen’s Practicing Theological Interpretation invokes many of the same arguments, though without citing me (and although he knew my work as a reviewer; Baker Academic asked me to blurb it, though my blurb doesn’t appear on Amaon’s list of endorsements — check the back cover, though). And Making Sense has continued to sell in infinitesimal numbers.
