A few days ago, I received—unsolicited—a copy of Bruce Waltke’s new Old Testament Theology (Amazon.com does not at this very moment list the book, despite the link to Amazon from the Zondervan web page). I had unexpectedly had a few minutes to spare last night, so I decided to dip into the volume. I read about the first eight pages or so of chapter 1, “The Basics of Old Testament Theology.” Based on those pages, I think I’m going to have a lot to disagree with in this book. For example, on p. 31, Waltke writes:

Resting on the logic that one does not need to prove the “rightness” of presuppositions (for they would no longer constitute presuppositions) but only their “reasonableness” …

No, really. He writes that. “I don’t have to justify my presuppositions, because then they wouldn’t be presuppositions any more.” I should think that moving one’s presuppositions from presuppositions to justified claims should be a desideratum, but Waltke instead uses semantics as an escape hatch.

Or again, on p. 32:

… it is wrongheaded of the historicists to seek to penetrate to the historical event beyond the biblical text, for the events cannot be known apart from the texts that form the canon.

It’s just possible that Waltke is trying to get at a fairly subtle point in the paragraph that contains this quotation, but the quotation itself is maddening. “Don’t bother seeking the historical facts; just read the text” is obscurantist enough, but to make an epistemic claim that one cannot reconstruct historical events in ancient Israel or in Roman-era Palestine apart from the Bible is pretty much ridiculous. Maybe when Waltke writes the word “known” in this context he is talking in some quasi-mystical way about penetrating to the “real meaning” of the events, but the actual sentence makes it sound like you can’t know anything about Mesha’s conflict with the kings of Israel and Judah apart from 2 Kings; Mesha’s own (propogandistic) account, inscribed on the Mesha stele, is apparently deemed irrelevant. Or maybe he just means irrelevant to the theological task, though I’m not quite sure I’d agree even with that. Perhaps I’ll understand Waltke’s assertion better when I get to chapter 4, which the larger paragraph cross-references twice.

One more. On the matter of textual criticism and the difficulty of establishing the existence of—let alone identifying or reconstructing—a pristine “original” of any of our biblica texts, Waltke writes (p. 33, n. 15):

Roger Beckwith … plausibly speaks of multiple texts instead of an original text, but this point of view unnecessarily leaves exegetes and biblical theology without a firm foundation.

Did you catch that? The view that we shouldn’t speak about a single pristine Ur-text, but of multiple texts (go investigate the textual history of the book of Jeremiah if you need to see evidence in favor of this view), is “plausible,” but it’s inconvenient and doesn’t meet the felt need for a “firm foundation,” and—here’s the kicker—may therefore be discarded. Sorry, but “S has undesirable effect E” (or “S does not have desirable effect E,” as the speaker defines un/desirability) does not logically entail “S is false.”

I only just learned from Richard Beck that one of my other college friends, Matt Ritchie, has been blogging for a long time. The web is a big place, and a small world, all at once.

Anyway Matt recently posted on chance, coincidence, and the providence of God—a post prompted by reading the book of Esther. I commend the whole post to you, but I would like to highlight this paragraph:

Is there also a danger in this line of thought? What about seemingly bad, random things? Is God deserving of equal credit for those as well? If God is responsible for one person getting a great parking space for a day of shopping at the mall, should we also credit God with a fatal tire-failure, which kills an infant and three children on a nearby freeway?

Once upon a time, Rene and I were driving from Dallas to Abilene in a Nissan station wagon that had once been nice but was at that time sorely in need of euthenasia. Along the way, the timing belt snapped, which of course meant that the engine died and we coasted to a stop. Later, as I was telling one of my professors, André Resner, about the experience, I put it this way: “Providentially, we were only a mile from my grandparent’s house” (which, interestingly enough, is in Eastland, only fifteen miles or so from Matt’s childhood home in Cisco). André responded, “How far away would you have to have been for it not to be providential?”

André’s question from long ago, along with Matt’s questions from the other day, are just some of the pertinent questions that swirl around the issue of God’s control over the world, and divine (mis?)management of the cosmos. For some reason that I still find difficult to fathom, Christians of my acquaintance seem to find comfort in the face of misfortune (from minor annoyances to genuine tragedies) by affirming that “God is in control.” Yet if God really is in control, then that means that God “controlled” whatever misfortune prompted the affirmation in the first place. Although it may be bad form, I’ll quote myself, from a post in the wake of the recent Virginia Tech shootings:

On the afternoon of the shooting, I heard a brief snippet of one of those “human interest” interviews with a parent whose son had stayed home from his Virginia Tech classes that day because he was ill. His mother made a comment very close to (though I cannot quote it exactly), “God was protecting him today.” Obviously this is a pious sentiment, and I am undoubtedly a rank fiend for subjecting this woman’s on-camera remark to critical theological scrutiny, yet I cannot let this statement lie without comment. I object to this mother’s sentiment because it clearly implies that God was not protecting the victims of the shooting—which in turn implies that, for some reason, God cared more about this woman’s son than about the other women’s sons and daughters who were gunned down. I cannot disprove this conclusion, but I find it horrifying to think that God selectively protected this one individual and failed or declined to do so for the others involved.

The pious sentiment that “God is in control” is actually a problem for monotheism. The prophetic voice reflected in Isaiah 40–55 (”Deutero-Isaiah,” if you will) has no problem ascribing both weal and woe to the same God:

I form light and create darkness,

I make weal and create woe;

I the LORD do all these things.

Yet many generations of those devoted to Deutero-Isaiah’s God have not felt comfortable affirming Deutero-Isaiah’s radical monotheism. The whole concept of “the devil” may have come into existence (possibly with some influence from Persian dualism) partly as a way to “offload” darkness and woe from a benevolent God onto a maleficent cosmic enemy. (Yes, I realize that this statement is woefully oversimplified.)

Within the Tanakh, I have long been intrigued by Qoheleth’s affirmation of terrestrial, if not cosmic, randomness (which would play some degree of havoc with the idea that “The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is the LORD’S alone” (Prov 16:33 NRSV; or perhaps you prefer the gamer’s translation, “We throw the dice, but the LORD determines how they fall”):

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them. (Eccl 9:11-12 NRSV)

If I understand Qoheleth rightly (a big “if,” to be sure), Qoheleth infers that, no matter how much he might not like this randomness, that it is part of God’s design for the world: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them” (Eccl 7:14). This really does not take us that far from Deutero-Isaiah, at least in terms of moral comfort. Qoheleth seems to think that God built an “X-factor” (no, not that X-Factor, and not that X-Factor either, and not that X-Factor—okay, so it was a poor word choice) into the very fabric of the universe, and this randomness explains calamities. Deutero-Isaiah seems to envision God as more hands-on in crafting calamities. I’m not sure which is less theologically troubling.

Perhaps there are other ways to think through random calamities. Of course, atheists don’t have this problem, since a purely rationalistic approach to life can accept chance occurrences without having to explain (away) divine beneficence, maleficence, or apathy. Yet I don’t consider atheism a good option, and certainly a desire to solve the “problem of evil” is a poor reason to opt for atheism. Within a broadly theistic frame, process theology can also offer an alternate way of thinking about randomness; to put it in a way that is unfair to process thinkers everywhere, perhaps random calamities happen because God didn’t know they were coming, or anticipated them but couldn’t do anything about it. Open theism (with which I have some significant sympathies) leads to similar thoughts.

I’d like to propose yet another perspective, which no doubt others have thought about previously. Classical theology, process theology, open theism, and Qoheleth could all potentially converge if we were to view divine activity in the world through the lens of kenosis or “self-emptying.” We normally think about kenosis in connection with Christology (see Philippians 2:5-11 for the classic New Testament statement on kenosis; the first line of Phil 2:7, ἀλλὰ ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν, gives us the term itself) and attempts to explain the ramifications of the classical doctrine of divine incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, and this is inevitably linked with Trinitarian speculations. Nevertheless, it seems to me possible to leave much of that aside and ask whether kenosis might also help us make sense of random calamities—and, for that matter, random serendipities. I have not read or thought a lot about this, and perhaps it is already a well-established line of inquiry in theology that I just don’t know about (I’m a text guy, after all). Nevertheless, it seems to me that if God approaches “superintendence” of the cosmos from the standpoint of kenosis, then things like natural evil and free will start to make a lot more sense. And, I admit, I am more comfortable (not a good criterion for theological affirmation!) with the idea that God kenotically cedes control over the interaction between nails and tires (to return to Matt’s scenario) than that God maleficently punctures tires.

I know that some readers may find this kenotic notion repugnant because of their high view of divine sovereignty. To these readers I would simply respond that we have only two choices. Either God always gets what God wants—an affirmation that the biblical witness, at least, does not support—or God does not always get what God wants. If the latter choice, with which many biblical writers would agree, is true, then we have before us the theological task of explaining why a “sovereign” God does not always get what God wants. In my (admittedly inchoate) judgment, kenosis may provide a substantial answer to this provocative question.

One of the things that suffered from my overloaded fall semester was iTanakh. I was simply not able to keep up with appropriate updates. However, during November and December, I did put on a push to incorporate some new links into the site. In November and December 2006, iTanakh added links in the following categories:

Context > History > Israel, Judah, and Yehud
Languages > Hebrew > Terms
Methods
Methods > Feminist Criticism
Methods > Game Theory
Methods > Historical-Critical Method
Methods > Historiography
Methods > Narrative Criticism/Narratology
Methods > Source Criticism
Methods > Speech Act Theory
Methods > Theology
Texts > Tanakh
Texts > Tanakh > Torah/Pentateuch
Texts > Tanakh > Torah/Pentateuch > Genesis
Texts > Tanakh > Torah/Pentateuch > Exodus
Texts > Tanakh > Torah/Pentateuch > Leviticus
Texts > Tanakh > Torah/Pentateuch > Numbers
Texts > Tanakh > Former Prophets > Joshua
Texts > Tanakh > Former Prophets > Kings
Texts > Tanakh > Latter Prophets > Isaiah
Texts > Tanakh > Latter Prophets > Jeremiah
Texts > Tanakh > Latter Prophets > Micah
Texts > Tanakh > Latter Prophets > Zechariah
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Psalms
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Job
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Song of Songs
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Daniel
Texts > Tanakh > Writings > Chronicles
Topics > Death
Topics > God
Topics > Purity
Topics > Sacrifice
Topics > Scripture
Topics > Temple

While I haven’t gotten past chapter 1 of The God Delusion in my own review (really more of a “reading diary”), I’ll jump the gun and tell you (if you don’t know already) that Dawkins makes occasional reference to the writings of well-known theologian Richard Swinburne. Dawkins’s web site now carries the text of a response by Swinburne to Dawkins’s challenges. (The response is also available from Swinburne’s web site as a PDF.) I may refer to Swinburne’s responses when I get to that point in my own chronicle of reading The God Delusion.

On his Biblische Ausbildung blog, Stephen Cook is up to part 8 of a series on death, dying, and afterlife in ancient Yahwism. Stephen has used biblical texts and anthropological models to elucidate this fascinating aspect of ancient Israelite and Judean religion. If you haven’t been reading this series, the easiest thing to do is follow my link to part 8, then use Stephen’s own links to backtrack through the series to part 1. I highly recommend it; there may be bits and pieces from which I might demur, but it’s really great work, clearly communicated.

Last night on CBS, Brian Rohrbaugh—whose son was killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings—had this to say about yesterday’s shootings at the Amish schoolhouse in Paradise, Pennsylvania:

This country is in a moral free-fall. For over two generations, the public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value.

In short, and with apologies to Flip Wilson, “Darwin made him do it.”

Of course, Rohrbaugh’s flippant accusation is nonsense. Reed Cartwright and Ed Brayton have already pointed out some of the reasons why. Ed’s post is particularly important, as it completely demolishes the link that Rohrbaugh proposes between evolution and violence:

Survey after survey shows that the rates of acceptance of evolution are far, far lower in the US than in any other modern industrialized nation in the world. They also show that the rates of religious belief in the US are far higher, including belief in eternal punishment for our sins on earth. Yet the US has the highest rates of virtually every negative measurement - murder, rape and virtually all violent crime, not to mention teen pregnancy (our rate is double that of any European nation, and a full seven times higher than the Netherlands).

In addition to what Reed and Ed have written, I would like to add a couple of additional random musings.

The Amish schoolhouse killer, Charles Carl Roberts IV, had a history of sexually molesting minors within his family. According to news reports, he told police that for the last two years he had been dreaming about committing similar crimes again. And far from having “replaced God with evolution,” as Rohrbaugh would have it, Roberts told police that he was angry with God over the death of his baby daughter nine years ago.

Clearly, Roberts was a deeply disturbed individual (to put it mildly). But it wasn’t evolution that disturbed him. If anything, his theology might have benefited from some evolutionary thinking; Charles Darwin, at any rate, found theological comfort in evolution because the operation of the world in accord with natural laws seemed to him to insulate God from charges of arbitrary cruelty in matters like predation and infant mortality. If Roberts had seen his daughter’s death as a result of the normal operation of natural processes, rather than as an act of God, perhaps that “pressure valve” might have relieved some of the internal forces that led to yesterday’s horrific act of violence. Perhaps not. But it is absolutely clear that those internal forces were not pushed to the boiling point by “replacing God with evolution.”

And with regard to Mr. Rohrbaugh: with all due consideration, sympathy, and regret for his own suffering and his son’s death, losing a child to a violent crime does not make you an expert on, or self-evidently right about, the social factors that contribute to violent crime. CBS should know better—but I guess sociologists and psychologists who actually know the data don’t command as much pathos.

Time magazine’s cover story this week is emblazoned with the headline, “Does God want you to be rich?” CNN.com has a summary of the story, but the full story is accessible only to Time subscribers, so I don’t know what it says. Apparently it does include a healthy does of criticism for the “prosperity gospel,” judging by the CNN.com summary, including this gem from Rick Warren:

This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? … There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?

Let’s be honest: by Southern California standards, I wouldn’t exactly call myself “prosperous,” but by worldwide standards, I’m rolling in dough (though less so than some recent alumni who were my students and graduated with business degrees). However, I reject any notion that wealth is a sign of God’s special favor for some individual over against other individuals who are less prosperous. There’s a reason why the “health and wealth” gospel plays in middle- and upper-class America and not in, say, Darfur.

There’s a fine line between giving God credit for the good things that happened to you and claiming that God shows favoritism to you, and there’s an awfully thick line between conducting your business in a fashion compatible with Christian values and doing whatever it takes to get wealthy with a veneer of religious justification.

I got up early this morning fully intending to attend the Divinity in Ancient Israel seminar at which Kathleen O’Connor’s paper on Jeremiah would be discussed, but I also woke up with an incipient migraine and decided to take some Excedrin and sleep it off instead. That was before the fire alarms went off, which didn’t help my headache.

By 11:00 AM, though, my headache was mostly under control, so I went to hear Mark S. Smith’s presentation “Lost in Translation: World Theologies and ‘Monotheism’ in the Eastern Mediterranean between the Late Bronze Age and Late Antiquity.” That mouthful of a title points to Mark’s interest in describing “international theology” as reflected in selected ancient Near Eastern texts. Mark was reacting in part to Jan Assman’s “attack” on “the Mosaic distinction” (exclusivistic monotheism) over against the “translation” of divinity across other cultures in the ancient Near East, w hich Assman characterizes as “tolerance.” Mark provided a number of textual examples that testify to “translatability of divinity” across cultures in the ancient Near East. In some cases, that “translatability” merely involves recognizing another culture’s gods as actual, legitimate gods more or less on a par with one’s own national gods; in others, it involves explicit or implict claims that one’s own gods are also revered, albeit under different names and perhaps unawares, by folk from other cultures. Mark argued that some biblical texts reflect an older tradition of such “translatabilty” with Israel. For example, Judges 11 only makes sense if the author can presume that Jephthah recognizes Chemosh as a real deity with actual power and a designated sphere of influence. On the other hand, Mark showed that some biblical texts explicitly reject such translatability; but then again, in so doing, they show that what they reject was previously considered a live possibility within their cultural milieu.

After lunch, I went to the first twenty minutes or so of a session on “The Bible and Film.” Adaptations of biblical stories in film and animation, as well as manifestations of prominent biblical themes in popular culture (film and music, especially), are special interests of mine, so I thought I would really enjoy this session. The first paper, by Kim Paffenroth, sounded promising; how could I not like a presentation by somebody who wrote a book called Gospel of the Living Dead (Baylor University Press, 2006)? Well, I didn’t. In the first place, a lot of what Paffenroth talked about didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t seen the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead, which I haven’t. (Memo to me: Make sure you don’t make the same mistake in your SBL presentation on Dogma.) At first, it sounded like Paffenroth was going to make some interesting connections between Dawn of the Dead and biblical prophecy and apocalyptic, but ten or fifteen minutes in, the only point he seemed to have made was that Dawn of the Dead is a good movie because it ridicules homophobia. When fifteen or twenty minutes had passed and the only obvious connection to the Bible was that Paffenroth had mentioned prophecy and apocalyptic a couple of times, I slipped out and went back to the book display.

I didn’t attend the 8:00 lecture, which was focused on Johannine eschatology—not one of my primary interests. Instead, I went back to my dorm room and worked on some class materials for the fall semester.

The other night I listened to an interesting episode of the American Public Media radio program “Speaking of Faith.” The title of this episode was “Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin.” I encourage you to download and listen to the program. The show is not about understanding the science of evolution, but, as the subtitle says, understanding Darwin himself. Accordingly, the guest is James Moore co-author of the biography Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist.

The whole one-hour show is very much worth a listen, but here I want to mention just one of the things that intrigued me. According to Moore, Darwin thought that the theory of natural selection would serve as a kind of theodicy (although Moore did not use that term). This was not Darwin’s motive, of course, but he did seem to find some theological comfort in natural selection. By Moore’s account, Darwin was troubled by the idea, common in his day (and in some circles I don’t think it’s lost much ground) that God had predestined everything that takes place. Not only had God assigned individual people to specific “stations” and “lots” in life, but even if a fox ate a rabbit, it was widely thought that God had predetermined that that particular fox would eat that particular rabbit. In part as a result of his travels on the Beagle, which brought him into contact with people far removed from Britain, and perhaps in part stemming from his abhorrence of slavery, Darwin felt that a God who would predestine individual humans and animals for gruesome deaths was abnormally cruel. The thought that God had established natural laws, and created and superintended the world by means of those laws, however, proved comforting to Darwin. He thought that perhaps natural selection—as one instance of the operation of such natural laws—might defend God from charges of “predestinational cruelty.”

The topic seems to be a perennial biblioblog favorite: the relationship between events mentioned or described in biblical narrative and events that actually took place in the ancient Near East. Jim West recently took a swipe at a report out of Southwestern Seminary relative to the dig at Gezer, though I think you have to admit that the snipped Jim quoted makes an easy (maybe too easy?) target. Jim was also not too happy with a Baptist Press report on recent activity at Tel Gezer. Joe Cathey has responded to Jim’s posts (and makes a good point about Jim’s apparent double-standard as applied to Gath and Gezer). So far, the comments have actually been fairly predictable for anyone who has followed Jim’s and/or Joe’s blogs for any length of time.

One interesting development is that both Jim and Joe have applauded Duane Smith’s contribution to the conversation. That’s quite an accomplishment, Duane! I do, in all seriousness, recommend Duane’s post.

While I would like to comment more extensively on the debate by analyzing the press releases that triggered the most recent round of discussion, I am not really able to do so this afternoon. I will return to the issue, if time permits over the weekend or early next week. Let me just say for now that I think Jim and Joe are in some ways very nice correctives for one another. My own plea is that we should follow the evidence wherever it leads, whether that be in favor of affirming or denying the historical accuracy of this or that biblical narrative (and, by the way, I think such questions have to be approached on a cautious case-by-case basis; sweeping generalizations obscure important details). A naïve tendency to affirm the historical accuracy of biblical narratives despite contrary archaeological evidence is inappropriately uncritical, but so is a reactionary tendency to dismiss the historical accuracy of biblical narratives when they converge with archaeological evidence (and, just to dispel any ambiguity, I see more of the latter in Jim than I do of the former in Joe).

As time permits, I will go over and comment here on the Baptist Press and Southwestern Seminary reports to whatever extent they continue to pique my interest. For now, I leave you with the thought that denying that you need evidence and dismissing the available evidence are equally problematic.