Oct 30

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

Oct 27
Photo taken from Evangelical Covenent Church website

Photo taken from Evangelical Covenant Church website

The seminary community is glad to have Rev. Gary Walter, President of the Evangelical Covenant Church, lead us in chapel on Thursday, October 30, 2008 at Isaacson Chapel in Nyvall Hall.  Gary will preach on select verses of James.  If you are in the area, join us!  There’s even a coffee hour afterward!

Oct 20

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

Oct 16

Many NPTS faculty contribute to blogs other than Seminary Without Walls.  In an effort to share information and increase dialogue please take a look at http://www.theolog.org/blog and http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/blog/

Brent Laytham and Michelle Clifton-Soderstrom are contributors to Theolog and Velda Love and Soong-Chan Rah are contributors to Christianity Today.  Feel free to make a comment on Seminary Without Walls about a post you read on either of the above mentioned blogs and vice versa. We will continue to post links to other faculty blogs or blogs to which our faculty contribute.  In addition, please feel free to leave a post about any blogs that you think would be of interest to the Covenant community.

Oct 2

Brent Laytham, Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at NPTS, is the author of this post which was originally posted in Theolog, http://www.theolog.org/blog

Decalogue Discipleship
Exodus 20:1-20

By Brent Laytham

No preacher should miss this week’s opportunity to preach on the Ten Commandments.

The Ten Commandments just won’t go away. Though Israel misplaced the tablets of stone long ago, the Jews never forgot their decisive encounter with the living God at the foot of Mount Sinai. They heard God speak the words that were meant to forever shape their common life. But as Paul later told the church at Corinth, their story reminds us that hearing doesn’t guarantee doing—that observing the commandments is not something we do with our eyes but with our actions (see 1 Corinthians 10).

• I have a friend who preached a ten sermon series on the Decalogue this summer. His intentionality contrasts with a profound amnesia about the Ten Commandments in much Christian worship. Whereas it was once common to rehearse them as part of weekly Sunday worship, they have now all but disappeared from not only our worship, but from our consciousness. It is important to note that the original, canonical context for the commandments is worship (see Exodus 19), and that rightly practiced, these commandments ground our worship in the living God and guard our worship against every false god. A story to illustrate: a few years ago I called my denomination’s bookstore to order a book. The person who answered the phone said, “Hello, would you like to order patriotic worship bulletins or flags today?” “No, and don’t get me started,” I replied. What I should have said is “No, as a Christian I am forbidden by the Ten Commandments to worship falsely.”

• Don’t hear my suggestion that we reclaim the Decalogue as more strident calling for commandment displays in schools and courthouses, or another nostalgic rant about America declining because we’ve lost sight of the commandments. I did suggest once, tongue in cheek, that “Coveting begins with television rather than kindergarten teachers; it flourishes at the mall more than the school. Let the Ten Commandments be engraved over the entrance to Wal-Mart, let them be read aloud at next year’s Super Bowl halftime.” In fact, Israel lost sight of the commandments pretty quickly. Sure, God inscribed them on tablets of stone, but almost immediately had Moses hide them in the ark of the covenant, never to be viewed again. Israel was supposed to keep the tablets well-hidden because Israel was supposed to keep the commandments in plain sight. That is, they were to live out these commandments in such a public, visible, obvious way that the world would sit up and take notice. The appropriate display of the Decalogue is not a plaque on a wall, nor a replica out front, but the faithful people of God.

• The key for any preacher is to find the gospel in the text, and that can be tricky if the text is a list of laws that we are most prone to take as constraints or limits. After all, eight of these ten words are “no” or “don’t.”Yet in the end and on the whole they articulate God’s active, saving “yes,” the same “Yes” that takes flesh in Christ and takes form in faithful ministry (see 2 Corinthians 1:19-20).

One place I find gospel in this text is by considering how Jews number the commandments. Some Christians will be vaguely aware that Catholics and Lutherans count commandments differently from Presbyterians and Methodists; the former see the first commandment running from “no other gods” to “make no idols,” whereas the latter count “no idols” as commandment number two.

Less well known is the fact that Jews count “no other gods” as the second commandment. The first commandment in Jewish tradition is “I am the Lord your God.” Let’s parse the grammar of that for a moment: grammatically, commands and laws have the imperative form. But “I am your God” is not an imperative; there is no rule to keep or action to do. It is an indicative, an announcement: gospel news for a people desperate to hear it. It is a creative word that speaks into reality a new existence: I am your God and you are my people. This reorients the grammar of the Decalogue, for it means that the one who keeps the first commandment—on which all the other commandments rest—is the faithful One of Israel. The other nine commands for Jews—all imperative in form, all engaging Israel’s active response to divine initiative—simply shape a life of gratitude, a life poured out in grateful response to the gospel announcement that precedes: I am your God.

Brent Laytham is the Coordinator of The Ekklesia Project, a network of Christian friendship committed to renewing faithful discipleship and recovering the unity of Christ’s church. See their online lectionary resource.