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This is the place to comment on my papers. Choose a paper (preferable one you've read) and let me know what your thoughts are.

1. Liberation Theologies

1.1 Keith Graber Miller's response to "Native American Theology"

This paper was helpful for me in better understanding this part of Tinker's project, and it makes me want to read the book. From what I see here, your critique is valid, and it raises the question of audience: for whom is this text written? And if you're trying to speak to Native Christians, why not redeem Jesus? If you don't want to, then simply stand outside/beyond the Christian tradition.

So...this paper is comically and thoughtfully written, with just enough footnote humor to give it a light touch. I like that.

Grade: 146/150 (but one day late, so 134/150)

2. History of Christianity in Africa

3. Colonial and Revolutionary America

4. History of Mennonites in America

4.1 Ted Koontz's response to "Mennonites...Advocacy"

I finally read your paper and learned a lot! (Or learned again things I had known, but had forgotten.) Thanks.

I think you did a good job here. The only place I might wonder about is your comment that it would be misleading to think that invitations to return to California (or to do further work on this) were not forthcoming. You refer then to the Minority Ministries Council and the Concilio. It is certainly true that these groups both initiated the action that was taken, and pressed for further action. But I think the idea was that we should be invited by MB and GC folks in California who were the folks involved in this dispute, and these organizations were MC (not GC or MB) and they were "Eastern." They were also seen very much as outsiders in California.

Thanks again for your fine work on this!

5. Jesus and the Gospels

6. Hebrew Scripture: Prophets

6.1 Paul Keim's response to "Heschel"

You do well to consult two good reviews of H in preparing your paper. This provides a broader field of vision into the theme under discussion than that presented (tendentiously) by the author. It may also provide at a glance a sense of what the particular strengths and shortcomings of the author’s approach are, allowing one to test one’s own impressions and conclusions against others. However one must also be sensitive to the prejudices of the reviewer. This can sometimes be more difficult than the challenge of assessing the presuppositions of the author, since reviews are typically short and provide very little context within which one might make such judgments. One example might be the exemplary confession by McKenzie that H’s rejection of the term “self-revelation” for the inspiration of the prophets is of more than passing significance for him since he himself has used this term to refer to prophetic inspiration in a prior publication. You make reference to this criticism on p. 7 of your paper. I say “exemplary” because scholars do not always identify such causes in their analysis of competing interpretations. Thus reviewers, as well as authors, must be read critically. The challenge is using reviews and responses to help one test and strengthen one’s own views based on independent reading.

You do an excellent job of summarizing the content of the book and bringing the focus on the central themes of H’s study of the prophets. It is really in part 2 of the book, as you point out, that H develops his views on divine pathos and divine wrath. In taking the personhood of God seriously as it is reflected in the prophetic oracles and elsewhere in the Bible, H develops a theology that challenges conventional images. At the heart of H’s theology is the relationship between God and humanity. In order for this to be possible, God cannot be reduced to the divine mind of the philosophers, or the unchanging sovereign of orthodox Christian confessions. God must be changing in response to human action, susceptible to feelings of love and compassion, but also of anger and anguish. This not only opens the door to a new understanding of prophetic passion, but also creates theological difficulties that do not seem reconcilable.

In presenting his defense of divine pathos, H is also challenging the anthropology of the Greek philosophers which understood reason to be primary and emotions as secondary. This seems to anticipate an emerging transformation in our understanding of human consciousness that H anticipates, namely that emotion and reason are aspects of varied intelligences that contribute equally to our essential nature as human beings.

One of the theological problems with H’s understanding of pathos that you identify is the way the wrath of God is interpreted as a pedagogical tool. In this respect of course H can find support in the oracles of the prophets themselves. But are we to accept this as a sufficient understanding of misfortune, tragedy and trauma? H seems positively deuteronomic at points, in that all human suffering is putatively traceable to sin and guilt, even that of innocents. Certainly such a notion would not have satisfied Ezekiel (whom H spends very little time discussing), who challenges the conventional notion that (innocent) children are responsible for the sins of their parents (Ez 18). It was also rejected by many Jews in the face of the horrors of the holocaust. I know of no more profound articulation of this latter than Elie Wiesel’s “Night.”

In looking at Second Isaiah with a view to testing the ideas of H, you mention the reference in Is 48:9-11 that God’s anger is deferred “for his name’s sake” and “for the sake of his praise.” You then pose an interesting either-or of interpretation: either that God needs our praise as H asserts; or that God is selfish and “simply delights in being worshiped for no other reason than his own pleasure” (p. 11). Now this caught my attention in part because I was recently reading remarks made by Alfred North Whitehead, who though trained in Math and later a teacher of philosophy, was actually quite well read in theology. He admired Jesus and disdained Paul. But his take on aspects of the theology of the Hebrew Bible is quite provocative. His remarks are of course tendentious, but interesting (and I will quote at length to give the context):

I quote this to raise the idea of anthropomorphism. All of our God-talk must of necessity be in some sense anthropomorphic. One can even write histories of various deities tracing the development of the theological ideas that animate the characterization. Clearly there has been development in the characterization of Yahweh within the pages of the Bible. One can also read the very interesting history of Yahweh against the background of Canaanite and ANE religion (the title is something like “The Early History of God”). So insofar as we accept the theological reductionism of H, as you mention earlier in the paper (“he establishes a sort of generic prophet which he describes and defends,” p. 2), how are we to differentiate the characterization of God which H calls pathos from an essentially anthropomorphic projection by our generic prophet? This is somewhat parallel to the question of inspiration and prophetic experience, perhaps.

I am playing devil’s advocate here a bit, but only because I think you are getting at some significant theological questions here. Your basic affirmation of the personhood and relationality of God as presented in H stands, it seems to me. But it is the beginning of a path of theological inquiry that has even deeper treasures to offer up. Thanks for an engaging paper.

Grade: 19/20

6.2 Paul Keim's response to "Brueggemann"

You have a very interesting take on Brueggemann. I’m glad you took a critical attitude. Often the response to B is enthusiastic acceptance of his inspirational style. You take seriously what B identifies from the very beginning as his approach for this book, the purpose for which these essays were first written, and the intended audience. In the updated edition if anything his encouragement to activism is sharpened.

We would probably classify this work as expository rather than historical-critical. But I don’t think it is in this sense that one can distinguish The Prophetic Imagination from Heschel’s The Prophets, as you imply. You noted in your H paper McKenzie’s criticism that in some parts of The Prophets H’s style (d)evolves into a homiletic. You also acknowledge that part 1 does not represent a systematic approach to the prophets, but seems to assume a kind of generic prophetic experience that is then illustrated with selected texts.

The irony here is that in general B’s status as a historical-critical biblical scholar of the first rank far outpaces that of Heschel. This is not just true because of the essentially Protestant origins of historical study of the Bible, with residual Catholic and Jewish biases. It was also true that many of H’s Jewish colleagues felt his methodology was suspect. Both are/were scholars of impeccable credentials, but within different frames of reference. Both connect their biblical studies and the ethos that guides their lives in striking ways that depart from the conventional practices of the traditions they represent. Comparing these two writers then, and especially these two books is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. The most important factor for the purposes of this assignment is that you recognize the stated purpose of B’s book and do not confuse it with an exegetical and systematic of the imagination of the prophets.

B’s book is exposition is nevertheless informed by deep familiarity with the text and history of the Bible. This is another point to be made. To a certain extent B has earned the right to come to the text with questions arising out of the contemporary situation and apply these to the text of the Bible. Not that his agenda could not influence his interpretation. It could and undoubtedly does. He clearly overstates the salient features of the royal consciousness and highlights those aspects of the Solomonic tradition that are otherwise obscured or neglected in light of his elevated status in the Davidic tradition. And so one must read, as you do here, with a critical eye. But the point I want to make is that it is not the same kind of critical orientation than one might require in cases where the expositor is much less familiar with the text and history of the Bible. A “systematic in-depth biblical study” of the prophets that you express greater interest in, would indeed start with the text and attempt to account for a fuller treatment of all the extant material. It would also be much less evident if, or to what extent, these same texts are relevant at all to contemporary ministry.

Grade: 18/20

6.3 Paul Keim's response to "Ezekiel"

I am very happy to see you take this topic on, and especially for the reasons you state. Our values unavoidably shape the way we see the world. In order to avoid the worst pitfalls of the blind spots inherent in any worldview, we must have ways of episodically (cross cultural experiences like SST!) and methodologically repositioning ourselves to see through the eyes and experience of others. It represents no inherent weakness of a pacifist commitment to engage those experiences, those traditions, and especially those parts of the Bible that do not seem compatible with our understandings of who God is and what God requires of us.

It is also very interesting to note that, there being reason to believe, as you lay out very well, that the text of Ezekiel supports Heschel’s understanding of the wrath of God, that Heschel himself makes such scarce reference to Ezekiel in support. We might speculate on why that may be, but reviewers have remarked in general about this apparent neglect of Ezekiel in Heschel’s book on The Prophets.

I find the way you summarize H’s understanding of Pathos and its relation to the wrath of God to be on the mark. It also seems that you are able to make a case that the depictions of God’s anger and judgment in the oracles of Ezekiel fit the pattern that H lays out. Ezekiel’s repeated use of the recognition/acknowledgement formula highlights the cause and the goal of divine wrath. It is not arbitrary nor indiscriminate. Crucial in this part of your presentation is the reminder that God’s wrath is depicted in correlation with acts of deliverance and mercy. As you say, “God’s wrath is secondary and temporary, but His love is eternal and is the main focus of most biblical texts. To focus only on divine anger and not divine love is to severely misconstrue the importance of the two” (p. 8). Yes, and this is exactly the kind of prejudicial reading found in most Christian depictions of the Old Testament. This is reflected in popular sayings as well, such as the (admittedly entertaining though no less distorted) tongue-in-cheek depiction of corporal punishment: “When Bobby’s dad found out he went Old Testament on him.”

The nonfinality of divine wrath is also illustrated in references to the possibility of God’s anger being diverted or assuaged by repentance and prayer. Certainly there are prophetic oracles in which the inevitability of judgment is announced because of the grievous nature of the sin, or the refusal of the people to listen to the warnings of the prophets and repent. But here too, as you point out, oracles of judgment are almost always contextualized with reference to cause and motive, and juxtaposed with oracles of restoration and hope.

There are a number of inherent theological problems with this way of understanding misfortune, tragedy and trauma in the experience of the community of faith. As you mention, such depictions of divine wrath seem to push its inherent anthropomorphism beyond acceptable lengths. Given that a real and personal deity in real relationship with humanity, experiencing the love and the estrangement of any real relationship, there is a kind of pretension, as you say, “to assume that God is limited by humanity’s relational skills.” There is the additional problem, in Ezekiel, of the assertion that people are accountable only for their own sin, that repentance and forgiveness must also then be individual. This seems to fit later Christian understandings of salvation, but makes little sense out of the national trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile. Surely not everyone was equally culpable. Surely there were innocents that suffered. Could this complication perhaps be a reason why Heschel made relatively little reference to Ezekiel in his articulation of pathos and divine wrath?

You conclude the paper with some of the loose ends that are left when we engage this issue of divine wrath directly. It seems to take anthropomorphism too far. It poses problems for a pacifist theology. It does not fully or adequately explain the tragedy of the exile, any more than it could account for the Holocaust. I think one factor that you hint at in the paper which should be emphasized is the context in which Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets of the exile were writing. By all appearances Yahweh had been defeated. His temple was destroyed. His chosen people defeated and taken into exile. When this happens it is an inevitable corollary that the values and deity of a defeated people are discredited. Ezekiel is not just articulating a conventional theological assertion. He is defending an implicit and explicit (Ps 137!) assertion that the gods of Babylon had defeated Yahweh, that Yahweh had abandoned his people, and that true power was in the hands (and temples) of others. He defends against this assertion by exegeting the tragedy in a nonconventional way. The tragedy was God’s doing. The nations were the tools of God’s judgment. They too shall be judged. The purpose of their experience was to bring them back to trust in God. Eventually they will recognize the hand of God in it all.

I think it is important to understand this retrospective, hermeneutical character of this theologizing. It lays the groundwork for a people to accept that they do not need political sovereignty to have a future. They do not need prosperity and security to be reassured that God is concerned about them. That true power lies beyond the dictates of kings and officials no matter how successful they seem at the moment. All this seems to be leading to the insights of Jesus that produce a messianic community which attempts to live out this vision of being a reconciling community within the family of nations.

Thanks for an engaging paper. Keep pursuing those hard sayings.

Grade: 28/30

7. Human Stories

8. Not-So-Random Musings