Biblical Jazz

Each year I have taught Genesis I have walked through Phylis Trible’s reading of chapters 2 and 3. Julia O’Brien makes some interesting observations in her blog. What has changed since Trible? What has not?

Amy Frykholm, a frequent contributor Christian Century, tells us what is on her shelf. This time she treats us to a glimpse of Psalms by John Hermanson.  This collection of psalms and music is compelling. Her piece is well worth your time.

Ken Auletta has written a new book on Google. He has provided a digest of 10 things Google has taught us. I wonder how these apply to theological education. Below you will find my quick observations but I would like to hear from you about how these may inform theological education.

1. Passion wins. His first lesson is passion wins. One should ask can we determine metrics to assess the institutional passion and the object of that passion for seminaries, rabbinical schools and divinity schools( Association of Theological Schools members)? Many of us who work in theological education can name schools that embody passion and a longer list of schools that do not.
2. Focus is required. While focused passion is well and good. Google provides a remarkably complex model of such a phenomenon. For Google is on the one hand a search engine but on the other hand it is innovation engine with search, communication and collaboration entities as well. Today’s theological administrator and educator must assiduously discern what focused passion looks like in institutions today. It is too easy to demise new forms of delivery of education as off mission or not part of our focus but it is unrealistic for a small to moderate size school to compete head to head with a wealthy and large research university divinity school.
3. Vision is required too. The Google vision “don’t do evil” is part of the vision but Auletta implies that a sense of the wisdom of crowds is another part of the Google vision. This prompts me to wonder if one could write a book on the 10 things that open source computing has taught us.
4. A team culture is vital. Here we have stumbled on one of the biggest open secrets in higher education; faculties are not teams unless they decide to become one.  More often than not a seminary faculty is  a group of people who have in common a person who signs the check. There are more silos in higher education than the Midwestern plain. When the philosophers of the twentieth century the Frankfort school talked about higher education as part of the culture factory they understood the aversion to team culture.
5. Treat engineers as kings. This one may be difficult to translate. Who are the engineers in theological education? Could this mean treat gifted teachers as kings or well published scholars, folks that are both? Whether it is Google, Dreamworks, or Pixar each of these companies knows that they live or die on the intellectual capital of its members. Seminaries not so much. Our challenge is to translate this learning and then put it into practice.
6. Treat the customer like a king. This means student centered education. Seminaries are often caught between administrators that know the future of the seminary requires student centered learning and faculties that enjoy faculty centered teaching. I would guess that the seminaries with the highest affirmation from graduates could give other schools clues about the best practices in treating the student like a king.
7. Every company is a frenemy. More often than not this is a reality of theological education that we do not talk about. Though it may be more of a reality for a small to moderate size school than a well endowed research university divinity school. The growing number of distance education programs will bring this issue into increased focus in theological education.  The largest seminaries in North American can now come into almost any persons home and provide a robust theological education. Such a reality rearranged the terrain of theological education in a fundamental way.
8. Don’t ignore the human factor. The personalities and politics remain not matter how well the other items mentioned are handled. The savvy theological educator and administrator must address these realities, even if the institutional denial mechanisms are in fine working order.
9. There are no certitudes. In other words, things change. The terrain of American Protestantism is more like quicksand or swamp than the tectonic plates of California. Things do change. Mistakes will be made. However, theological education must learn to not only train persons for learning organizations but become one as well.
10. “Life is long but time is short. So said Eric Schmidt one of the founders of Google. Providence is alive and well. Life has a way of finding its own way. Nonetheless, providence should not promote sloth. For time is short for us to get our work done.

Today in class someone tested the assumption that biblical scholars are people of faith that is to say Jewish or Christian. Already in 1995 Philip R. Davies posed the question Whose Bible is it Anyway? Jacques Berlinblau approaches a similar issue in his book The Secular Bible: Why Nonbeleivers Must Take Religion Seriously. Where Davies published with the cutting edge Sheffield press Berlinblau published his material in the more mainstreamed Cambridge Press. .The non-confessional reading of biblical material is becoming more prevalent each day. Each of these books is well written and thought provoking. I think it would be well worth a rising.

The process of blogging should provide an opportunity for thoughtful consideration as well as data gathering and social networking. This morning I was reading my favorite blogs. These now include Theolog. This is an aggregate blog, that is to say it brings together blog entries by a number of people who make them available to the Christian Century magazine. In fact it is called the blog of the Christian Century. I was hurrying because as usual there is more to do today than I have time or energy to get done. Then I read Megan E. Cox blog post “Gifts and circumstances” and it centered me and calmed my spirit. I would recommend the blog post and the site for rich conversations and reflections.

There are biblical scholars who blog. Many of them share information back and forth through a group called bibliobloggers. When you get to the Society of Biblical Literature website you will see that Bibliobloggers are now an SBL Partner. The news release from SBL answers a number of questions. It is clear that SBL continues to explore new ways to help scholars who want to have biblical studies continue to function as an intellectual force in society.

The prophecy described in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was rooted in religious experience; it was a type of mantic wisdom. Further, this form of mantic wisdom provided an epistemological strategy for humans to find out from God the source of human destiny. The world of the Bible does not so much describe the Sybil or Delphic oracle but rather a combination of divination and prophecy.  Biblical prophecy was a resource for that community to know what to do. What would God have us do was answered by the prophet and the wise person. Some have argued that he Hebrew prophets were largely spirit mediums.

The questions what are we to do persists. The wrist bands WWJD what would Jesus do are not as popular as they once were, what is, that is why they call it popular culture. Popular and transient both drink from the same stream. A Baylor University  student, TJ,  wrote an interesting blog post “Ancient Thoughts with a Modern Twist.”  TJ raises the question about the contemporary oracle. Could it be that the ancient oracle has been replaced by Google. Jeff Jarvis author of What Would Google Do? would agree.  John Battelle in his book The Search, argues that Google has shaped the nightmare of today’s economy.

I serve on the Committee for Interchurch Relations for the Church of the Brethren. I also teach at Truett Theological Seminary. These contexts prompted me to ask about ecumenics. I posted the question on Twitter and Facebook: How do you see the future of the ecumenical movement. I will try to pull together what I heard. It was interesting that Stewart Hoover observed that during “his career denominational religion has been a consistent narrative of contraction.” The contraction fuels a different sort of ecumenical dialog.

Paul Andresen observed “It sounds like you (that is me) are asking what condition its condition is in. “ He later  suggest that “We are the sheep of different folds and as long as there are people and  our sinful (going toward the errant angle, not the evil angle) understandings there will continue to be different folds, and that’s not bad.”

James J. Gorrell  gave the most optimistic assessment arguing that  groups are “growing and becoming more intertwined to the point that there is one religion.” I am not sure that I have that level of optimism or share a perception of growing coalescence.

Jim Beckwith helped me think in a new way, in almost the way the George Lindbeck in his work on the Nature of Doctrine highlighted many years ago. He said, “I’m trying this response on for size: learning to speak with each other’s language so that we get a feel for other’s perspectives, even though we never lose our sense of identity with our mother tongue.”

David Hendricks: Good question! I imagine it depends where you live. Many places there seems to be lots of cooperation on a local level, but financial pressures seem to call for cutbacks on the national and international level. A few years ago when I was in Europe I was very encouraged by the degree of interaction I saw in Geneva at the WCC and also at Taize.

Bob Bowman gave the most historical response. “It (the ecumenical movement) grew out of an era when the major tensions were between denominations. That doesn’t seem to be where the fracture lines fall in this day.”

All of these observations from Gorrell’s optimism to Beckwith’s cultural linguistic metaphor to Bowman and Hoover’s observations that the era has turned all seem to invite a different sort of conversations. Next week noted theologian Lamin Sanneh will speak at Truett Theological Seminary maybe that will be a venue for more reflection on the future of ecumenics and denominations.

Earlier this month I wondered about the role of the biblical theologian as a public intellectual.  I crowd sourced the topic through Facebook. First I want to present a little discussion on the definitions. Public intellectual is one who interprets her/his research for public consumption. One wonders how the scholar and the public intellectual fit together. I wondered and continue to wonder how the identity of the scholar and the public intellectual overlap.

Rolf A. Jacobson “I don’t think public intellectuals wear cowboy hats.”

Beth Tanner has already taught a course on the topic. She said “I actually have a whole class on it.  I teach the senior seminar in Public Theology.  Let me know your email and I can send you the syllabus and tell you about some of the things we have done.”

Kent Richards retired professor and executive director of the Society of Biblical Literature had some interesting observations about biblical scholars as public intellectuals.

“Very interesting comments above, thanks.  First, reflecting on the frequently stated concerns about “public theologians.”  Many us bemoan the fact that we have few colleagues who fit that role.  Figures like R. Niebuhr are not common (but they weren’t then!).  Others say that there have been few biblical “types” who have ever filled that role.  I wonder if we need to think about the role of the Internet.  Are we doing a better job there?  Maybe not.

Second, developing “new” habits that I was told about 40 years ago and which I have continued might be a starting point.  Read and reflect on regularly (every week) political opinions in a wide range of perspectives, not just the ones we like.  Place those thoughts in the context of our religious and theological readings.  This practice can get us into an internal dialogue that might lead to public expressions, not to mention create a more knowledgeable base.”

His idea of “new habits” is well worth pursuing.

Judye Pistiole a Presbyterian pastor wrote “i write a column every other week for the local newspaper. got the publisher to agree I could write about anything I wanted and say whatever I wanted. so sometimes i just write funny stuff and sometimes i engage the topics that i think need to be thought about. last week talked about our moral obligation as Christians to care for the sick. the week before it was humor about being a foodie.”

Lisa Knaggs a Presbyterian activist based in Austin Texas remarks. “glad you’re thinking about this- maybe if more pastors were allowed to get out of church and into the community (I think of Chuck Meyer, former chaplain at St. David’s hospital in Austin) then their lives are more engaged in public experience and therefore naturally, dialog…”

Jim Hardenbrook Church of the Brethren pastor and former moderator of the Church of the Brethren “I believe that is what Eugene Peterson calls for in most of his books about the pastorate.  How do you define “public intellectual”?”

Larry Grim commented “One hopes, for at least 20 minutes every Sunday morning! But seriously, I don’t think that ideal (unfortunately) as widespread as it once was — what about Bonhoeffer?”

I am trying to figure out why I have a visceral response to bible lower case instead of the proper Bible. We capitalize the word God because it is a proper noun. I thought it was capitalized because it was a reference to the deity.  If that reasoning would have proven true then Bible and Scripture would be capitalized by virtue of their function as an extension of God. Instead it seems that one could argue that Bible, Scripture receive capitalization because they too are proper nouns. The SBL Handbook of Style makes the point that “the name of a genre in not capitalized.” (4.4.5 p.19) So I would argue for the capitalization of the word Bible for three reasons, first it is an extension to the Godhead. Yes that is a confessional reason, but I like it nonetheless. Second it is a proper noun. Third in most cases it is not used generically in seminary writings such as term papers and the like.  So this is why I wince when students write bible when they should write Bible.

This semester we have been looking for models of blogging and podcasts.  Christian Century has created an aggregated blog, ccblogs namely a blog that syndicates the entries of other blogs.

This morning the thought came to me what about Carol’s podcast God Complex. Carol is the author of Tribal Church. The God Complex radio blog accompanies the podcast. I knew Carol as a student at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary before she was a pastor and author. Carol is part of the ccblogs network where she continues to explore church and technology.