AAR is publishing a series of reflections on online teaching. I’m one of the first contributors. You can find my entry here:
Using Students’ Comfort with Video-based Social Media in a Mixed High School Class
Check out the rest of the entries here.
Pete Enns discusses the Book of Job
Every time I teach the Book of Job (I do this to close my class on the Hebrew Bible), it inches closer and closer to being my favorite book of the Hebrew Bible (if not the Bible—Christian Bible—as a whole). Pete Enns has a wonderful discussion that I’d highly recommend as I continue to believe that the theology of the Book of Job is some of the best theology (by poking at bad theology). Listen here: Episode 133 – The Book of Job.
Articles of interest: G.A. Yee, Thinking Intersectionally
I’m going to try to make a habit of writing a few short notes on articles I read that may be interesting to the five or six of you who frequent this blog. These are not reviews. More like recommendations with some key take-aways. I begin with Gale A. Yee’s “Thinking Intersectionally: Gender, Race, Class, and Etceteras of Our Discipline”, JBL 139.1 (2020): 7-26. This article is Yee’s 2019 Presidential Address ‘as the first Asian American and the first woman of color to be elected president of the Society of Biblical Literature’ (p. 7).
What’s the focus?
The focus is on the importance of intersectionality to the field of Biblical Studies. In short, we should recognize different forms of identity—’Race, class, gender, age, ability, nation, ethnicity, and similar categories of analysis’—and how they interact or intersect with one another. Yee applies this to both the discipline of Biblical Studies and the specific passage of 2 Kings 4.1-7.
What did I learn?
A lot. But here are some key takeaways:
- Intersectionality is a “justice-oriented approach” (quoting Vivian May) that ‘grew out of movements with a social justice agenda such as those focused on civil rights and women’s rights’ (p. 12).
- We must recognize that the alternative to intersectionality risks ignoring the real-life threats to people. For example, Yee talks about how this phrase ‘intersectionality’ was coined by African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw to address legal matters. In case of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, GM, who hadn’t been hiring Black women, GM argued that they weren’t bias against Black women because they had hired Black men. If the sole focus was of antidiscrimination law’ was race, then GM could be cleared. Likewise, if sex, GM could be cleared because they hired white women. But if an intersectional lens is used, it’s apparent that GM’s discrimination was against Black women, specifically (p. 10).
- Whiteness must be a racial category. Too often, whiteness has been set as the ‘universal’ while everything else is ‘a culturally constructed ethnic identity’. But Whiteness is also ‘a culturally constructed ethnic identity’, not a ‘universal’ (p. 13). Pragmatically speaking, we can see this in various articles, books, and commentaries that might just be ‘about the Bible’ if it’s a white, male scholar but if it’s a Black, woman scholar, suddenly it’s an intentional departure from the norm, a niche hermeneutic, but not ‘straight exegesis’. This is misleading, at best.
- Yee introduces four ‘domains of power’: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal. Structural = ‘institutional…legal, economic, educational, and how they reproduce the subordination of peoples over time’ (p. 14). Disciplinary = ‘ideas and practices that characterize hierarchies…legal, criminal, and the police and military’ (pp. 14-15). Hegemonic = ‘ideas, symbols, and ideologies that shape consciousness’ (p. 15). Interpersonal = ‘interactions of people at the day-to-day microlevels of social organization’ (p. 15). Because of these four domains, a person could be the oppressed in one situation (say for gender or sexuality) and oppressive in another (say economically).
- Acknowledging these realities will expand our reading of texts. Yee examines 1 Kings 4.1-7 focusing on a variety of social dynamics related to the woman in the story who is a widow: gender, economic, legal, etc. We can miss a lot of presumptions in a text if we’re not intentional. As Yee writes, intersectionality ‘encourages us to think beyond the familiar (and perhaps more entrenched) boundaries of biblical studies to expose the diverse power relations of oppression and uncover subjugated voices that were previously invisible and unheard’ (p. 26).
Stanley Spencer’s ‘Christ in the Wilderness’
I’m listening to a lecture (‘Consuming Creatures: The Christian Ethics of Eating Animals) by David Clough through Facebook Live right now. He has mentioned two things that caught my attention. The first is an interpretation of Mark 1.13, which contains the statement that ‘He [Christ] was with the wild animals…’ Clough suggested that this refers to Isaiah 11.1 -9’s Peaceable Kingdom. I had never understood that line, and I’ll have to think about this more, but it’s a marvelous reading that would really impact how I hear Mark 1.14-15, where Jesus (following the arrest of John the Baptist) goes into Galilee ‘proclaiming the good news of God’ which contains the claim ‘The kingdom of God has come near.’
The second is the art series by Stanley Spencer, ‘Christ in the Wilderness’, which may be inspired by Mark 1.13. It’s a beautiful series. And according to Clough, Spencer depicts the animals mentioned in Jesus’ sermons, imagining that he encountered them in the wilderness. Here are some samples:
Reading the Bible Digitally 2.0
Last December, I shared a new project I was introducing to my students called ‘Reading the Bible Digitally’. It’s the last exercise for students who take my class, ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’ (formerly ‘Old Testament’). I wrote a blog post about it here: ‘Guiding students toward a critical use of Internet resources’.
Well, I have a new, updated version of this project with help from my friend and colleague, Fr. Nate Bostian, who developed the ‘C.L.E.A.R.’ rubric used at the end. Also, since my creation of this project, I found Crash Course’s ‘Navigating Digital Information’ series, which is really helpful. Here’s version 2.0:
The updates don’t change the goal: ‘to teach my students to think critically about the Internet resources they use.’ These students may take another class with me. They may take my class ‘The Christian Scriptures’ giving them access to the Bible again. But at some point, they’ll be on their own, and except for the few who major in religious studies, they’ll rely on the Internet for information about the Bible. I hope this project provides them with some tools to make them discerning readers and researchers.
Recently read: Smith-Christopher’s ‘A Biblical Theology of Exile’
Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (OBT; Fortress Press, 2002).
‘Biblical Theology’ is a quirky discipline. I’ve seen it abused by E/evangelical theologians who try to bend parts of the Bible to fit nicely with others parts of the Bible when the fit is clearly forced. But when an author engages the Bible’s internal ‘conversation’ while doing ‘Biblical Theology’, that’s something I can support. In fact, I teach my classes ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’ and ‘The Christian Scriptures’ from this approach. And it’s something I’ve seen a related book, David M. Carr’s Holy Resilience, do quite nicely.
Let me begin with where the book was tricky for me. The advocacy of ‘diasporic theology’, or a ‘theology of exile’, is a worthy discipline. My problem is with the voices that have been front-and-center. And they’re voices I admire: Stanley Hauerwas and Walter Brueggemann are the two primary examples. These two stand out in the first chapter, ‘Biblical Theology: On Matters of Methodology’, and the last chapter, ‘Toward a Diaspora Christian Theology: The Theology of Tobit and Daniel Revisited’. I’m not saying that Smith-Christopher centers them. I’m just saying they stand out to me. And I acknowledge that this book is almost twenty years old so I’m saying this from the perspective of the reader. The greatest evidence of the role of time is the positive presentation of John Howard Yoder. Yoder’s legacy has been damaged over the past several years as we’ve learned more about his treatment of women. So, I say all that to say this: as I read this book it had me asking myself what theologians and scholars of color, theologians and scholars from womanist, and feminist, and LGBTQI perspectives, do I need to be reading, if I really want to ponder a diasporic theology, a ‘theology of exile’.
Smith-Christopher recognized this danger when he wrote the book. He quotes Caren Kaplan in warning of ‘a temporarily faddish “tourist” theology’ (p. 196). A theology where we try on diaspora and exile as a philosophical concept while ignoring the real, terrestrial diasporic and exilic experiences of people all over the world. In the age of increasing populations of people who are refugees, this seems to me to be very important.
Also, I wondered about the sort of post-politics approach advocated here. Even my local Mennonite friends seem to be more politically active, in the commonly held sense (voter registration; fighting for policy change) than this book supports. I need to see what the author says now that we are living through the ‘age of Tr*mp’.
But on to the positives, because this was a great book. Let me tell you where my thinking was challenged most rather than giving an overview of a book that’s been available for a while:
- How I depict the Persians: I’ve tended to play the Persians off against the Assyrians and Babylonians as the ‘more tolerant’ of the empires, and this is generally true, but chapter 2, ‘Violence and Exegesis: The History of Exile’, especially pp. 34-44 where the Persians are discussed in relation to Ezra and Nehemiah, made me realize that ‘more tolerant’ shouldn’t soften the criticism of the imperialist ideology of the Persians.
- How Ezekiel and Jeremiah experienced trauma: The above book by Carr opened my eyes to the role of traumatic experiences in shaping the Bible we have today. Smith-Christopher expanded my thinking on this matter as he discussed how the Books of Lamentations and Ezekiel display the trauma of exile. When we think of the Bible, we need to be careful not to read it through the lens of Christian triumphalism. What has dawned on me over the years is that ‘reading from belo w’ usually leads a person to reading the Bible more clearly.
- Jonah’s ‘universalizing’ message: Almost a decade ago, I wondered aloud on an old blog why the Apostle Paul’s letters never reference the Book of Jonah. I’m glad to see that my understanding of Jonah, which is what led me to ponder how perfectly it could fit with Paul’s Gospel, isn’t mine alone. Smith-Christopher sees the Book of Jonah as this author’s attempt at depicting ‘Isaiah’s “light to the nations”‘ in narrative form (see pp. 132-133).
- Ezra may not have been less a bigot and more an advocate for his minority culture within an empire: When I read the Book of Ezra, I’m bothered by his command for the Jewish men to divorce their non-Jewish women. It sounds bigoted and sectarian. But Smith-Christopher proposes we might want to at least consider Ezra from a different angle. He writes (p. 198), ‘If one speaks, for example, to Native Americans in the United States about adoption of Native children by non-Native families, one quickly finds oneself in the presence of Ezra-like concerns that allow us to appreciate what it means to worry about the very existence and viability of cultural survival.’
There’s so much more I could say but I think this suffices. If you’re interested in how the Babylonian Exile and Jewish Diaspora impacted the shape of the Bible and it’s message, this is an excellent book. Several weeks ago, Erica Mongé-Greer (see my interviews with her on ‘Creation Mythologies’ and ‘Flood Mythologies’) recommended this book to me. So, thank you, Erica! It was a great read.
Divine command theory and Hosea’s actions
I had my students write short ‘essays’ in response to a prompt based on one of their recent homework assignments. They can choose the one with which they’re most comfortable. Here’s one of those prompts:
‘In Homework #18, you learned about the content and message of the Book of Hosea. If you choose this prompt, you’ll need to tell me the following information in a minimum of 6 sentences: (1) Do you think it was moral or immoral for Hosea to marry a sex-worker (prostitute) knowing what she would do to him and their family? (Explain why.) (2) Do you think it was moral or immoral for Hosea to give his children the names he gave them? (Explain why.) (3) Does the fact that these actions are presented as obedient responses to divine commands change how you interpret them? (In other words, if Hosea did these things without being commanded by God would that change their morality?)’
When they learned about Hosea, they learned how Yahweh God had told Hosea that his marriage and the birth of his children would be overshadowed by Gomer’s occupation, and Hosea was commanded to give his children some degrading names (e.g., Lo-ammi, ‘not my people’), yet Hosea’s often justified because ‘God said’ to do it (divine command theory).
Among the responses, there’s been a desire to say that this is an exception to a general rule, because/if God commanded it. But the ‘why?’ has been harder for them to articulate. One response (that needed to be unpacked more) was the ‘greater good’ defense. God commanded these seemingly problematic actions because Hosea’s sacrificial life contributed to the greater good for others.
While rare, there were those who pushed back against the question. One student wrote, ‘Speaking broadly, marrying a sex worker is perfectly moral.’ His problem was with Hosea marrying Gomer knowing the consequences of this decision. This student wrote, ‘…intentionally bringing his children into a broken home just to make examples of them was an immoral decision.’ But it was his final argument that I found fascinating: ‘if Hosea had done these things without God’s requesting of them, then I actually believe it would be more moral. After all, Hosea only knew for sure that his wife was going to leave him because an omniscient deity told him so. If he did not have Yahweh’s foresight on his side, then absolutely none of what he did would have been immoral — only unfortunate.’
Another student put ‘God in the dock’ if you will, writing, ‘Hosea’s actions were immoral because God’s actions were immoral.’ Now it wasn’t clarified if this means God’s command was immoral which pushed Hosea to do something immoral or if she meant that God’s actions toward Israel were immoral as modeled by Hosea’s actions toward Gomer.
It’s been interesting reading through these responses. Some students experience a real uneasiness with saying that God could be immoral or command something immoral while simultaneously struggling to articulate why an action that would otherwise be immoral (intentionally marrying someone who you know will blow up your family; giving your children derogatory names to make a point) is moral when God commands it.
Team Daniel or Team Esther
Yesterday, I paired the Books of Daniel and Esther. Both are post-exilic writings set in the exile/diaspora. Both feature Jews who have found their way into the royal courts of Babylon and/or Persia. Both address the question of how true one must remain to their Jewishness to show fidelity to their god. In the Book of Daniel, characters such as Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego don’t compromise. They are willing to die/suffer rather than break their dietary laws, or worship other gods, or even take a break from worshipping their god. Esther and Mordecai hide Esther’s Jewish identity which includes eating Persian foods, having sex and marrying a Gentile, and who knows what else. Mordecai might be a little more like Daniel and friends when he refuses to bow to Haman but overall the ethics of the Book of Esther are less black-and-white than the Book of Daniel.
I ended class by having my students get together in a Google Meet and record their discussion where they argued for either the quasi-deontological (or divine command) approach of the Book of Daniel or the more consequentialist approach of the Book of Esther. One of my student leaders begun the conversation by asking who was ‘Team Esther’ or ‘Team Daniel’. So far, as I watch/grade the recordings, team Esther is winning (though there were a few pro-Daniel students).
What’s fascinating is to observe their reasoning. Some students say they’d be like Daniel depending on the context though if the context was that your life was at risk, they’d be more like Esther. One student pointed out that Esther never explicitly said she wasn’t a Jew (though it could be argued many would have accused her of not living like one), so she didn’t technically lie about this.
Another topic that caught my ear was the difference between how God’s presence is narrated in Daniel contrast with Esther. Famously, God speaks to Daniel in dream and visions. He intervenes miraculously. Esther is ambiguous about God’s presence. God is never named or directly mentioned. Some of the key turning points suggest to some readers that God’s in the background but God is never mentioned. I think that’s key. For some students, if God was performing the deeds like we read in Daniel, sure, they’d adopt his approach, but life seems to be more Esther-ish: whatever we might say about divine activity, it’s not clear when and where God acts.
Reading While Black
Esau McCaulley, as Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, and ACNA priest, has a book titled Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation and an Exercise in Hope. It looks good and I intend on reading it. As a preview of his message, I want to point to his New York Times Opinion piece titled ‘What the Bible Has to Say About Black Anger’. He looks at lament and imprecatory psalms, including Psalm 137, which is one of the first passages from the Bible I have my students read in my class ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’.
Google Meeting the Bible Again for the First Time: Day 11 of Summer School
The final week of summer school begins today! Today, we juxtapose the ways the Books of Daniel and Esther respond to exile and occupation. The first has a major role for God, angels, and other forms of divine intervention; the latter never mentions God. The first consistently advocates for living faithfully even if it means losing your life; the latter is a mixed bag (begins with Esther being secretive; ends with Esther risking her life). The first has a male protagonist; the latter a female. I’m sure there are more interesting contrasts between these two post-exilic works set during in Babylonian and Persian Empires. They’re fun to teach together.
While I’m exhausted and ready for my summer break to begin, I’m also really glad I taught this course. The class has been great. And I’ve been able to test different approaches to teaching online, you know, just in case wave 2, or wave 1.2, of the pandemic wipes out in person instruction again.
The blog of Brian LePort 