Seminary Without Walls

This post was submitted by Mary Miller, Director of Making Connections Initiative

James Weldon Johnson, the poet who wrote the words of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (Covenant Hymnal No. 732), was imbued with eclectic talents. Songwriter, diplomat, poet, novelist, journalist, teacher, civil rights leader, he was one of the prime movers in the Harlem Renaissance. Preachers know well his record of negro sermons from the turn of the last century in the collection, “God’s Trombones’, with its popular “The Creation”. Also in the collection is a wonderful essay on the tradition of pastoral prayer before the sermon. Less well known, but moving is his poem honoring the ministry of music in those who inspired him in “O Black and Unknown Bards”.

Johnson tells of the genesis of the hymn known now as “The Black National Anthem”:

“A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamund Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher made mimeograohed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.

Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.

The lines of this song repay me in elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.”

Klyne Snodgrass, Paul W. Brandel Professor of New Testament Studies at NPTS, is the author of this post

Conflict always creates interest and never more so than when it is between good friends. I do not like conflict, but I must confess it is often quite instructive. Two recent incidents brought that home to me in new ways. One involved my class on Romans, and the other involved two scholars at one of the sessions of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Boston the week before Thanksgiving.

My Romans class was dealing with Romans 7, a passage heavily debated by New Testament scholars as to whether it speaks of Paul’s preconversion experience, his postconversion experience, or whether it is not about Paul at all but about humanity in general or even about Israel. Among the three of us who teach New Testament here at North Park there are three different positions. I am not sure which position Jay Phelan, our president, holds, for he is also a New Testament scholar. On the night in question one of my New Testament colleagues, Max Lee, came to class, and he and I had a conversation about the issues. I was surprised how informative it was for students to watch us converse. Max and I will remain good friends, even if neither of us convinces the other.

The conversation in the Romans class pales in comparison to a conflict at the Society of Biblical Literature between Richard Hays and Tom Wright, who are very close friends and very close theologically. Richard had edited a collection of about eighteen essays with Beverly Gaventa. The essays were written by a group of biblical scholars, historians, and theologians who met twice a year for three and a half years to discuss the identity of Jesus. The resulting book Seeking the Identity of Jesus (Eerdmans, 2008) is a significant discussion. In fact, both Scot McKnight at North Park University and I had written blurbs that were published on the back of the book, both of us emphasizing that these essays were important and should be read. The session was discussing this book. Tom Wright thought the book was awful—that is not his word, but it sums up the idea. Tom complained publically that he did not know what Scot and I were thinking. Richard responded that he felt Tom’s words were not a response but a smear campaign. Remember, these guys are good friends. I e-mailed both later and know that they are continuing in pretty constant dialogue trying to sort out the issues. They are still friends. I think one main point of difference is the way Tom thinks history should be done and his refusal to give any privilege to creed and canon, two items under consideration in the book. Tom is so involved in discussion with people like John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar that he wants to strip himself of anything but “pure” history, i.e., to do history better than Crossan and the Jesus Seminar (which I do not think is hard to do!) and to beat them at their own game. He sees red at anything that would privilege canon and creed, even though he very much agrees with both in the end. Some of the essays in the book point out, rightly I think, that it is necessary not merely to ask who Jesus was, but who he is and what his impact was. Can you know his identity without asking those two questions? I think not.

One important point in all this is the way we deal with our disagreements. Can we disagree without sacrificing the character of the gospel in the way we act and talk and without sacrificing our friendships? The answer is yes.

photo taken from ECC official website

Philip Anderson, Professor of Church History at NPTS, was honored by the Swedish government.  The King of Sweden bestowed upon Professor Anderson the insignia of the Royal Order of the Polar Star.  Professor Andersen’s scholarly contributions and his work in “promoting Swedish relations with North America” earned him this prestigious award which is usually reserved for members of the royal family of Sweden or foreign nationals.  Read the full story on the Evangelical Covenant Church website.

Bob Hubbard is Professor of Biblical Literature at North Park Theological Seminary. His commentary on Joshua (Zondervan) will appear in April, 2009.

As a Christian, I don’t think that I’ll ever be comfortable with all the killing in the book of Joshua. At least, that’s one of the conclusions I drew after recently finishing a commentary on the book of Joshua. This blog—the first one I’ve ever written, by the way—gives me a chance to articulate some of my thinking on the thorny problem of violence in Joshua. If past experience is any guide, some of my reflections may draw fire like a duck flying through a blind of waiting hunters.

In one sense, my discomfort with Joshua may be a good sign. Its roots may go back to the influence of the ethic of nonviolence taught and modeled by Jesus on my own attitude toward violence. It may also reflect how much Jesus has formed my perception of the character of God as loving. Conversations on Joshua with people in churches and with students in classes reflect similar shaping—and similar moral queasiness at the thought of God mandating the annihilation of the Canaanites.

On the other hand, I confess some second thoughts on that conclusion. The fact is that the Bible clearly claims that God in fact ordered such a policy. Further, theologically I affirm, with Psalm 24:1, that “the earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” I accept without qualms the claim of Psalm 104:29 that God may occasionally terrify people and deprive them of breath. Frankly, in my view such verses imply that, as Creator, God owns all lands and all their populations and, hence, can do with lands and peoples as he pleases. I don’t like the idea—and neither do most people with whom I’ve discussed it—but the Bible seems unapologetic about reporting that God, for his own purposes, takes human life. It affirms that he even has the right to do so.

There’s something about Christian objections to God’s annihilation policy that also troubles me. Such objections seem to reflect our embarrassment over God’s violent actions, as if in so doing God had somehow misbehaved and offended us. In my ears, they remind me of a parent unhappy with a child for getting in a fist fight on the playground. I sense behind them some standard—some “Thou shalt not”—to which we expect God to conform and by which we feel justified in judging his “violations.” My hunch is that lurking behind such oft-voiced indignation stands our common human urge to play God. In other words, implicitly it claims, “Were we in charge, we’d do things differently, if not better.”

My study of Joshua has also led me to one other conclusion on the matter. The survival of Rahab and the Gibeonites attest that the annihilation policy was not an absolute one. In fact, literarily Joshua contrasts their receptive dealings with Israel with those of the kings who rally troops to annihilate Israel. As several scholars note, the book emphasizes that Israel rightly reciprocated such receptivity, whereas the rebellious kings were rightly routed. The book itself says such exceptions are “OK” in God’s eyes.

Further thoughts on this thorny subject must await another occasion. But for the record, let me state categorically where I stand on violence: I’m against it.

Bob Hubbard

This post was contributed by Paul Koptak, Paul and Bernice Brandle Prof. of Communications and Biblical Interpretation

Last year, students in the Biblical Preaching seminar discovered that there is much more to the Joseph story than a boy and his dreams. The course is based on the assumption that Genesis 37-50, the longest narrative in the Bible, is an example of biblical storytelling at its best, and that we learn to preach narrative texts by first learning how to read them. Students used the translation by E. Fox in The Five Books of Moses (The Schocken Bible, vol. 1. Schocken, 1995), and J. P. Fokkelman’s Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (WJKP, 1999) to look more closely at the use of narrative frames, key words and repetition to form questions that directed their research.

About half the class sessions were then given to sharing the questions and discoveries class members had written on their copies of the Genesis text or in their weekly journals. We had some lively and engaged discussions as the story came alive before our eyes and in our hearing. Class members were divided (as readers always are) on whether they liked Joseph, the “Lord of the Dreams” or did not. We went on to talk about issues of grace at work in flawed persons and troubled families.

We also talked about the move in the last few decades toward “narrative preaching,” reviewing its strengths (increased interest, emotional engagement, strategic use of indirection) and its shortcomings (ambiguity, lack of focus, and individualism, especially when it is overused). The class read and discussed Doug Lipman’s Improving Your Storytelling: Beyond the Basics for All Who Tell Stories in Work or Play, (August House, 1999. By the way Lipman’s website is worth a look along with his many seminars, one developed just for preachers). Students then took turns retelling one of the stories from Genesis 12-36, drawing out insights they had discovered in their reading and using Lipman’s suggestions for the telling.

Two books on preaching that we read had their strengths and shortcomings too: Steven D. Mathewson, The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative, (Baker, 2002), summarizes for evangelicals what the mainline churches have been doing for a while, and John W. Wright, Telling God’s Story: Narrative Preaching for Christian Formation (InterVarsity Press, 2007) insists that narrative preaching tell the whole biblical story of God’s calling forth a people for God’s purposes and glory. Each presented a welcome challenge to self-centered connections between the biblical narrative and “my story,” but the sermon examples did not always make a strong connection with either the text or the hearers.

So we made more progress in learning to read than in developing a method we could recommend for storytelling and preaching. Still, I remain confident that solid work with the first phase will inspire new and fresh ways to preach the story. I know I heard some very good sermons.

Paul Koptak