The last few weeks have seen a string of events that have left me frustrated.  Things have simply not been going in my favor (not that they always did before, mind you; perhaps Deuteronomistic theology is at work and I should inspect my life to check my adherence to Torah . . . let’s just hope I at least come out unlike Manasseh!).  Here’s a bit of what’s been going on . . .

-Two weeks ago we were accidentally locked out of our house.  Of course, we called a locksmith, assured it would take no time at all to pick the lock.  Well, four hours later (outside with a tired 2 yr old, mind you), three locksmith companies, and five locksmiths later we got in our house . . . through a window.  Sigh.

-This past weekend my wife and I set out to replace our leaky kitchen faucet.  Upon taking the faucet off we attempted to remove the handles to clean out any debris.  The handles, however, were stuck, so in our wisdom we hammered them off with a hammer.  That broke our old faucet.  So we went to Home Depot to buy a new faucet.  Upon returning home we finished disconnecting the old one from the wall, only to reveal that one of the attached pipes was so brittle that the threading part broke off.  We could hook the new sink up, but we had no pressure at all, and the leak was now coming out of the wall.  We called a plumber and was told a simple house call would be $150 on the weekend.  So after a day with no water (we obviously had to shut the water off at the street to keep it from shooting out of the wall in the kitchen) we finally found a plumber whose house call on the weekends was not so exorbitant.  Two hours later and $300 later we have a new faucet that doesn’t drip . . . but I’d rather have a mildly drippy faucet and $300 in my pocket.

-Today daycare called and said my son was pushed by another child, resulting in a huge bump and scrape on his forehead and some scraping around one of his eyes.  He seems fine, but I don’t have a lot of patience or tolerance (none, actually) for things happening to my son.  He has also recently been getting bitten by a certain child at daycare.  He came up to me a little bit ago and said he had an “owie” on his head, and then he said “daddy kiss it.”  Children are such a blessing.  And there is no better feeling than being able to make your child feel better.

There are some other things, but these are three biggies . . . leaving me . . . frustrated.

In other news, Jesus is coming back!  No, seriously, my thanks to Kevin Scull for naming this post of mine his “Paul Post of the Week.”  Really, I’m flattered.  I’m curious, Kevin, where you suggest I put this on my CV (wink). 

Actually, I am quite surprised . . . if there is one ‘award’ I would never expect to win it would be something dealing with Paul.

Recently Notre Dame held a conference entitled “My Ways are Not Your Ways: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible.”  Regular readers of this blog will be well aware that this topic is right up the alley.  Actually, it defines a large bit of my research interests.  In talking with my former Duke professor James Crenshaw, he made me aware that these papers are planned to be published with Oxford University Press, and so I set myself up to have to wait until their publication.  Now, however, I am glad I will no longer have to wait but can rather hear and watch the conference proceedings from the comfort of my office!

HERE is the link to the videos.

The schedule:

Thursday, September 10, 2009:

Mike Rea: Welcome and Introduction
Louise Antony: Does God Love Us?

Friday, September 11, 2009:

Edwin Curley: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
Evan Fales: Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ
John Hare: Animal Sacrifices
Mark C. Murphy: God Beyond Justice
Eleonore Stump: The Problem of Evil and the History of Peoples: Think Amalek

Saturday, September 12, 2009:

Richard Swinburne: What does the Old Testament Mean?
Nicholas Wolterstorff: Reading Joshua
Gary Anderson: What about the Canaanites?
Christopher Seitz: Canon and Conquest: The Character of the God of the Hebrew Bible
Concluding Remarks: Howard Wettstein
Panel Discussion: Gary Anderson, Paul Draper, Daniel Howard-Snyder

(my sincerest thanks to Dr. Claude Mariottini for making me aware of this resource).

I found the following video via Art Boulet and thought it was hilarious; hence, I share it all now with you.  Living the OT?  An interesting concept, indeed. 

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times . . . we need to ride camels to work.  They are far more fuel efficient.  Plus, heck, how cool would it be to have a parking spot for your camel?  C’mon, really.  You know you want to! (Hmmm, maybe that’s only for the tenured folk?)

And good to see Dr. Walton “making it rain” in class.  I can only bring about plagues in class.  Yeah . . . well, my students like to call them “tests” (wink).

This week my introductory Scriptures course reached the New Testament.  After a brief intro to the NT and then a more thorough discussion of the Synoptic Problem, I paused to ask them a question: “who is Jesus?”  I solicited any adjective that came to their mind, especially dealing with Jesus’ appearance.  I received what I expected.

Bearded.  Long hair.  Blue eyes.  Handsome.  Strong.  White.

I then went through a variety of stereotypical images of just such a type of Jesus:

I then offered them some alternative images of Jesus:

BLACK JESUS

 

CHINESE JESUS

 

And thanks to Julia O’Brien, we even looked at a “ripped Jesus”:

And after reflecting upon these images for a while, I put up the ‘well-known’ reconstruction of a first-century Palestinian male from Popular Mechanics in 2002 . . . the ‘face’ of Jesus:

 

The response was fascinating.  After the initial shock, I asked students for their reflections.  I then concluded class by saying the following: “I want to press you all to read the gospels, the New Testament, as though it is talking about this guy (gesturing to the final picture above) rather than about this guy (gesturing to white Jesus).”  It was  a great exercise and really pressed them to think about the gospels, as much as is possible, as first-century Jews, not 21st century Christians.

What are your reactions to this approach?  To these images?

See HERE.  You can hear a whole host of lectures from scholars such as Walter Brueggemann, Ben Witherington, Richard Hays, Dale Allison, John Barclay, Charles Talbert, Eugene Petersen, Bruce Longenecker, NT Wright, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Jurgen Moltmann.  These are a wonderful resource for students and scholars alike.  I am, as you may suspect, listening to my friend Brueggemann at present.

This month saw some upward mobility again . . . to # 39, up 7 places from #46 last month.  Truth be told, I am simply relieved not to have fallen out of the top 50, given that my blogging time has been at a premium as I continue to write the dissertation to finish–which I will, and my advisor Bill Bellinger agrees–by the Spring 2010 semester.

So my thanks again, readers, for your time, energies, and thoughtfulness.  Keep commenting!

Last week I lectured on Job.  After the lecture, I posed the following questions to the class; we didn’t get past the first one.  It was a lively discussion, and my goal was to press the students to think beyond easy assumptions that “God only does the good” and really wrestle with the questions Job himself seems to be asking.  It is a book, I believe, that does not–indeed, should not–give way to easy conclusions or oversimplification.

1) Who is in the right?  Job?  God?  Why?

2) What does the book of Job reveal about God?

3) What “wisdom” is being communicated in Job?  How does this book fit into the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible?

4) Why do you think Job is in the canon?

How would you respond to any/all of these questions?  And yes, dear reader, I will offer my responses . . . in due time.

Click the following link (and scroll to the bottom of the page) for two segments, one from 1997 and another from 2007, of former Tonight Show host Jay Leno doing his famous “Jaywalking” segment, asking various people simple biblically-related questions.  The results, as you may expect, are less than stellar.

(unfortunately I cannot figure out how to post the videos directly in this thread; if anyone knows how, please do let me know).

In 1998 a volume was written with a veritable who’s who of Hebrew Bible studies taking part, all to honor Walter Brueggemann.  This volume, God in the Fray (Fortress Press, read my review HERE), concludes with a brief essay by Brueggemann himself as he reflects upon what he has tried to do in his OT theology.  I found this part particularly interesting:

“I have increasingly found thematic approaches to biblical theology wanting, not only because they are inescapably reductionist, but because they are characteristically boring and fail to communicate the open-ended vitality of the text.  It is for that reason that I decided, early on, to focus not on substantive themes but on verbal processes that allow for dynamism, contradiction, tension, ambiguity, and incongruity–all those habits that belong peculiarly to interactionism.  What I hope I have offered is an interactionist model of theological e xposition congruent with this believing community that is endlessly engaged with God, a God who is available for the extremities of praise and complaint, which are Israel’s characteristic modes of speech in this conflictual engagement.  The importance of this move from theme(s) to processes cannot be overstated for me, because the interactive process seems crucial both to the Subject of Old Testament theology and to the pluralistic, deprivileged context of our own work” (310).

AND

“The gains that I suggest are commensurate with what will surely emerge as points of contention and continued dispute. I do not imagine that I have been able to see things convincingly through to the end.  So I am glad to acknowledge at least four points where the argument is vulnerable, though other such points will surface in our discussion.  I regard these as vulnerable points because they propose fresh perspectives for which we lack adequate categories.  I incline to think that the vulnerability is only because things are not carried thorugh, not because they are wrongheaded.  It remains to be seen, of course, whether that judgment turns out to be acceptable to my colleagues” (313-314).

AND LASTLY, (almost as though he were anticipating Waltke) . . .

“There is now an important insistence . . . that Old Testament theology must be deeply and exclusively linked to the New Testament because, in Childs’s terms, the two testaments are ‘two witnesses to Jesus Christ.’ . . . A student of the Old Testament, however, cannot help but notice the disjucntion and disconnection from one testament to the other, so that the theological claims of the Old Testament do not obviously or readily or smoothly or without problem move to the New Testament.  Indeed, if we are to claim some kind of continuity–as any Christian reading surely must–it is a continuity that is deeply hidden and endlessly problematic.  For that reason, and given the intensely and consistently iconoclastic propensity of the Old Testament text, it may be suggested that the Old Testament stands as a critical principle over against any easy claims of New Testament faith, so that the God of Israel is not easily reduced to or encompassed by Christian claims.  After all of the adjustments from the faith of Israel to the faith of the church there is yet a deep ‘otherwise,’ which is uncontained and undomesticated, that must be acknolwedged” (317-318).

Thoughts?