Iain Provan on Higher Critics

From Iain Provan’s excellent 1 & 2 Kings commentary:

It is not entirely clear why we should dig the great ditch between biblical Israel and historical Israel that the newer historians demand. It is, after all, the case that all historiography, whether ancient or modern, has a story-like quality—that all writing or speaking about the past involves turning happenings and people into events and characters. All historiography is also in some sense ideological literature. That is, any story about the past involves selection and interpretation by authors intent on persuading their readership in some way. This does not mean that the historiographical texts are in general incapable of speaking truly about the past. The historians in question clearly believe that some stories about Israel’s past are indeed true. They believe this, for example, of many of the modern stories about it—the stories told by archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and the rest. We assume, in addition, that they wish us to regard their own books as true accounts of Israel’s past—and not, for example, as cleverly constructed fictions. There is evidently no difficulty in principle, then, about historiographical texts referring truly to the past. It seems that a decision has simply been made that the biblical witness to Israel’s past, in particular, is to be margnialized. A selective skepticism is at work here. The biblical stories about Israel, on the one hand, are approached with the maximum degree of suspicion in regard to the extent in which they truly reflect what happened. There is, on the other hand, a touching degree of (sometimes quite uncritical) faith displayed when it comes to modern narratives about this same entity. Confessionalism of a religious sort is attacked in the name of critical enquiry and objectivity, but the noisy ejection of religious commitment through the front door of the scholarly house is only a cover for the quieter smuggling in (whether conscious or unconscious) of a quite different form of commitment through the rear.

Man, I love 1) conservative commentaries that 2) forthrightly—but deftly and with erudition—criticize theological liberalism by 3) revealing that it is not at all objective and evenhanded but is instead run according to its own virulent ideology.

As we say at BJU Press, affection drives cognition. Only the fear of the Lord can bring true wisdom, even about historiography.

Automatic Screenshot Uploads to Dropbox Public Folder

For the extreme nerds who, like me, often feel frustrated with the limited screenshot capabilities of Windows 7, long for their Macs whenever they need to take screenshots, and are huge Dropbox fans:

This guy has done us all a good service.

It Gets Better

One of my favorite teachers in college (who I think was my wife’s only teacher in college, she took so many of his classes) told a story that I have thought about many times.

It seems an older single missionary lady somehow revealed to her superiors that she had stopped reading the Bible.

Why?, they asked.

Well, she said, she’d already read it many times. She knew what happened in the end (and in the middle, and in the beginning). She didn’t see why she had to keep dragging her eyes across the pages.

I don’t remember what happened in the end. But that part of the story stuck with me because, I think, I was afraid that might happen—or was happening—to me.

But I want to praise the Lord that so far it has not happened. I can say to (regenerated) college students that if you pray for grace, stick with it, take sermon notes, make at least a half-hearted attempt to listen in Bible class, resolve to pray and read your Bible, repent for not doing it, try again, read good Christian books, get a little older, have a few more experiences in life and ministry, and find Christian friends who seem to be ahead of you spiritually—in short, if you do what I did—your Bible reading will get richer.

I am experiencing this right now as I work my way through the narrative portions of the Old Testament and write about them for a dozen or so eighth-graders I’ll never meet. (That’s right; my Bible textbook readership is exponentially larger than my blog readership.)

Ezekiel 16, for example, hit me with incredible power a few weeks ago when I read it for the first time in several years. Why? Because the hermeneutical spiral had spun around a few times in my head and heart since my last reading. Enmeshed as I was among the trees, a sudden view of the forest was breathtaking.

Keep going. By God’s grace, keep going.

Audio Book Advice from a Pro

I have pretty limited exposure to Christian Audio. I download their free mp3s but I find the website difficult to search. I am not sure how the mp3 format works out for long books—I downloaded Bonhoeffer but it is 33 mp3s and my player tends to shuffle the track order. Also despite the $4.95 per credit books often require multiple credits.

I LOVE Audible. I joined last May and I later upgraded to Platinum Monthly which gives me two credits per month for $22.95. I have listened to…

• 1776
• The Glorious Cause
• Battle Cry of Freedom
• The Confessions of Saint Augustine
• Six Days of War
• C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy
• God in the Dock
• Mere Christianity
• Orthodoxy
• The Man Who was Thursday
• The Professor and the Madman
• Destiny of the Republic
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes
• Krakatoa
• The American Civil War
• The Big Three in Economics
• To End All Wars
• The Pilgrim’s Regress
• The Weight of Glory
• Til We Have faces
• Knowing God
• Revolutionaries
• Augustus
• A Tale of Two Cities
• Moby Dick
• Treasure Island
• and more.

I will try to list the pros and cons from my viewpoint:

Pros:

1. I have very little time to read and lots of time in the car, 10–12 hours per week.
2. I am a slow reader.
3. I have very broad interests—theology, history, economics, science, classics, etc. Audible has many selections in almost everything that interests me. I have 170 titles in my library (including multiple parts of a book) and 156 titles in my wish list with no end in sight.
4. Audible allows me to “catch-up” on the classics which I would not likely take the time to read.
5. I have most of C.S. Lewis’s books which I have listened to repeatedly with much profit.
6. It was very helpful having a good reader pronounce all the names in Six Days of War.
7. Audible files are superior to mp3s (I think).
8. The entire Modern Scholar series is available (with PDFs).

Cons:

1. I listen to fewer sermons.
2. Most books I would probably be content to listen to once or twice—is it really cost effective?
3. I don’t know what happens if I cancel my membership—I guess I would retain my downloads on my PC but be out of luck if anything happened to them.
4. I often buy hard copies for $4 and spend more on audiobooks—though I do actually get to listen to them.

Tip:

Wait for the $4.99 sales—they come around 2-3 times a year and are a far bigger value than any of their other schemes. With this in view, the Platinum monthly is probably not worth it.

Review: The Psalms as Christian Worship: An Historical Commentary

The Psalms as Christian Worship: An Historical Commentary by Bruce K. Waltke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a unique commentary, and not just among volumes on the Psalms. It’s refreshing to read an erudite volume with careful grammatical-historical exegesis and a (faithful) eye on theology.

This commentary also has an eye on the history of exegesis, and that’s why it has a double authorship. (Triple, actually: Erika Moore wrote a chapter on Second-Temple Jewish responses to the Psalms.) Major author Bruce Waltke is, of course, an exegete and theologian, and he confesses himself unqualified to write much on patristics. So James Houston of Regent College was enlisted to provide the “church’s voice of response.” He contributed the many pages of “reception history,” basically a chronological survey of how major church fathers and medieval and Reformation figures understood the psalms at issue.

The psalms at issue are as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 15, 16, 19, 22, 23, 51, 110, 139. They were chosen for their representative status.

The book’s substantial introduction, uncharacteristically for a scholarly commentary, starts with declarations about things the authors deplore—and those things boil down to liberal and postmodern treatments of Scripture:

We deplore the confessional reductionism in much contemporary Biblical scholarship, which overlooks two thousand years of Christian devotion and orthodoxy or “right worship,” in the use of the Book of Psalms. It ignores the historical continuity of tradition in the communion of saints. It is like studying the activities of a seaport, and yet ignoring the existence of its hinterland. Such liberal scholarship is expressive of the skeptical culture of “postmodernism,” which rejects all “absolutes” and denies “truth claims.” It reinterprets “the historical” as a series of events subjectively selected according to the interest of the investigator, with no sense of a divinely ordered past or of any sovereign guidance and providence. (pp. 2–3)

We also deplore the lack of authentic exegesis in the use of the psalms, as well as the lack of Christian commitment and orthodoxy in much contemporary Biblical scholarship. (p. 4)

The authors follow up with a comment that “the text’s divine Author and his meaning in the text cannot be truly known or understood without a spiritual commitment to him.” (p. 4)

And this was choice:

The allegorical approach of [early] Christian commentators cannot be used to defend postmodern interpretation, which gives priority to the reader’s response to the text, not to the author’s intention. To be sure, both the “allegorizers” and postmoderns impose meanings on a text not intended by the author, but postmoderns bastardize the Christian commentator’s allegorical method. The church’s commentators allegorized the text, but they were orthodox, pastoral, and above all Christ-centered, whereas postmoderns are, for the most part, apostate, anthropocentric, and self-serving, and so deconstruct the author’s intention to foist their own political and/or social agenda on Scripture to validate their elitism, while accusing the Biblical writers of doing the same thing.

And I can’t leave out this:

For the early Christians the Psalms were also the unique emotional handbook for personal use of what might be termed “psalmno-therapy”—only eclipsed by modern psychology and the more recent “pop culture” of popular praise songs with their wearisome repetitions, substituting emotional enthusiasm apart from sober reflection. As Jonathan Edwards pointed out in his masterpiece, the Religious Affections (1746), the gospel provides us with appropriately responsive emotions. (pp. 10–11)

Amen! It is refreshing to read a commentary that is full-throated in its conservative theological commitments—and in its spirituality. Commentaries ought to be a service to the church and an exercise in worship before they aim at any goals specifically limited to the academic community.

It will, however, take some academic training to follow the introduction. But those who can follow it should not miss it. It provides a great deal of wisdom for the interpreter of the Psalms. Houston gives a helpful history of interpretation in general, and Waltke offers a powerful evaluation of Historical Biblical Criticism.

I’m not saying much about the commentary itself; it almost goes without saying that Waltke’s exegesis is solidly helpful and that he provides a valuable “theology” section at the end of each treatment.

Two Quasi- Negatives (?):

I have just two mild criticisms:

1. I confess that I’m not yet sure of the value of the summaries of pre-critical exegesis that accompany each chapter. I read the material with that dutiful, “eat-your-vegetables” feeling. My interest picked up when significant names arose whose theology is still important to a low-church Protestant like me: Augustine, Luther, Calvin. And there’s no doubt that valid exegetical insights happened before the 16th century. But I’m afraid that overall, those surveys had the unintended effect of confirming me in my de facto dismissal of the fathers. In my busy life as a Bible teacher and preacher I simply don’t have time to read authors who don’t help me understand and apply the Bible text. I’m glad some people know what the fathers have to say. I know beta-carotene is good for me in appropriate dosages. But I expect a solid evangelical scholar to sift through the fathers a bit more and present only what will truly help likely readers.

I would be remiss, however, not to quote the authors’ counter-objection:

Pre-Reformation commentators who center on Christ with piety and passion are in fact more Biblical than academics who dispassionately and scientifically explain the text without considering its holistic context, including the New Testament, and without passion and devotion to Christ. The Christ-centered piety and devotion of commentators before the recovery of the plain sense should be treasured, not trashed. Although some of their interpretations seem to us to be ridiculous and silly, for the most part they stayed within the parameters of orthodoxy—that is to say, within the parameters of the apostolic traditions as they found later expression in the creeds of the early church, especially in the Nicene Creed. Nevertheless, they are to be faulted when they twisted the original author’s interpretation and represented it as the meaning of the text, justifying their ignoring of the author’s intention by claiming spiritual illumination of divine mysteries. (pp. 6-7)

One more thing: I suspect that many readers won’t read (or maybe remember) the helpful introduction to this commentary, where the authors clearly and persuasively condemn the fanciful and even “unorthodox” allegorizing of many church fathers. Many readers will just look up the psalm they’re working on. If they do that, they may get the impression that Houston was even-handed with fathers (like Origen) whose hermeneutical ideas were simply dangerous.

2. This is another unfair negative, but naturally it would be nice to see a few more psalms make the cut: 32, 37, 40, 73, even (can you imagine?) 119. But the book is already substantial, and for a unique commentary with this special focus on Christian worship picking the psalms it did makes good sense. A solid understanding of these psalms is a gateway to much of the rest of the psalter.

I picked up this volume because I had to write 1,000 words on the Psalms for eighth-graders. Needless to say, I won’t quote it directly. But it did definitely help me, particularly with ideas about David and his (“typico-prophetic,” these authors helpfully call it) kingship in the Psalms. This commentary does belong on your shelf.



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