A LITTLE BOOK FOR NEW HISTORIANS

(Robert) Tracy McKenzie is Arthur F. Holmes Chair of Faith and Learning along with being a professor of history at Wheaton College. He is the author of several books. His book, The First Thanksgiving, was the subject of a previous interview here:

Tracy’s latest book is the short, but long on wisdom, A Little Book for New Historians.

David George Moore conducted this interview. Some of Dave’s teaching and interview videos can be found at www.mooreengaging.com.

Moore: What was the impetus for writing this book?

McKenzie: Intervarsity Press approached me some years ago about contributing to a prospective series, now well under way, designed to provide brief introductions to academic disciplines from a Christian perspective. Each book in the IVP series is titled “A Little Book for New _____” with titles already out for new scientists, philosophers, theologians, and now historians, among others. The expectation is that the series will primarily find an audience in Christian college classrooms, but I believe that the book can be useful and accessible to anyone who wants to think “Christianly” about the past. That’s my heart’s desire, at least.

Moore: Enrollment steadily decreases of students with majors in the humanities. What do you think are some of the most significant reasons why, what can be done about it?

McKenzie: The conventional answer is that the economy drives such patterns above all else, with the recession that began in 2008 discouraging college students (and their parents) away from “soft” academic disciplines that don’t seem to guarantee immediate lucrative employment after graduation. I think there’s a lot to that. There’s also been a concerted emphasis at the K-12 level on STEM disciplines, predating the recession, that reinforces the narrative that the humanities are a poor investment. I am reflexively suspicious of simple answers, however, and I suspect that there are multiple other variables at play as well.

What to do about it? The common response in humanities departments is to challenge the widespread perception that humanities grads all end up as baristas, to make the case that rigorous liberal arts programs actually inculcate a variety of analytical, persuasive, and communication skills that equip students to flourish in a broad range of occupational contexts. A common argument is to look at post-graduation income patterns and to observe that humanities grads start out at lower incomes but that they “catch up” within a few years. While this appears to be true, I am always uneasy in making such arguments, because at bottom they tacitly accept the cultural assumption that the only education worth paying for is vocational education. This is why I insist on telling every prospective student who visits Wheaton—and the parents who often accompanying them—that while rigorous training in the humanities can actually prepare them for a broad range of career paths, there are even greater goals to aspire to, namely to learn how to pursue wisdom to the glory of God, the love of our neighbor, and the edification of our souls.

Moore: Does being a Christian have much of a bearing on how you understand and teach history?

McKenzie: It doesn’t automatically. Almost every academic historian in the United States has been trained in a secular graduate program, and one of the things that the Academy does well is to teach its citizens to compartmentalize religious beliefs that would threaten the reigning materialist orthodoxy. It’s a “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment in which students and professors are supposed to bracket their religious convictions, reserving them for a portion of their lives that is safely sealed off from their academic vocations. When we begin really to take seriously the scriptural command to “take every thought captive to obedience to Christ,” however, the compartmentalization that the Academy demands becomes profoundly frustrating and dispiriting. That was my experience, in any case. To answer your question, I would say that being a Christian should affect how I understand and teach history. God has created us as historical beings who live in time, with all that that means. He has implanted in us a historical faith, and he has bound us to the past by engrafting us into a historical church. I believe that when we approach the study of the past with humility and awe, recognizing the past as a sphere that God has ordained and prompted by biblical dictates and principles, the study of history can become both an act of obedience and an expression of worship.

Moore: You write that history “involves a conversation in the present about the past” but at its best “a conversation in the present with the past.” (Italics yours) What is the difference?

McKenzie: At the outset of the Little Book I do my best to drive home the basic truth that history is not synonymous with the past, that in fact the difference between the two is vast. Then, rather than offer them a propositional definition of “history,” I choose instead to develop a series of metaphors to inform their thinking about what is history is, why it is important, and how they might learn to think historically themselves. One of those metaphors is conversation. At the most basic level, in juxtaposing conversation about the past and with the past, I am simply trying to help students think about the difference between primary and secondary historical sources. We enter into conversation about the past when we engage secondary sources. We enter into conversation with the past through the study of primary sources. At a deeper level, I also want to challenge students to seek transformative knowledge, and in this respect I also find the about/with distinction helpful. In contrast to conversing about the past, conversing with the past connotes a level of intimacy and immediacy and raises the possibility that in conversing with we might actually learn from. One of my favorite quotes, which I include on the syllabus for every course that I teach, is David Harlan’s observation that, at its best, the study of history can be “a conversation with the dead about what we should value and how we should live.”

Moore: Most Americans, and yes, this would include most American Christians (!) live in echo chambers. It is reflected in a variety of ways like only watching one cable news network. How does the study of history help us to better scrutinize the problems with our comfortable echo chambers?

McKenzie: Echo chambers are an obstacle to the examined life, or in scriptural terms, they make it impossible to “take every thought captive.” The reason for this is simple: We rarely think deeply about questions that we consider settled. Why should we? If we don’t know personally a single intelligent, well-meaning person who disagrees with us on an issue, it becomes all too easy to conclude that all other perspectives are either the product of ignorance or malevolence; those who disagree with us must be either stupid or evil. This is deathly to the life of the mind.

But echo chambers aren’t defined solely by which cable news network you watch, and they’re not limited exclusively to ghettos of red or blue voters. Areas in which there is agreement across the political divide can assume a sort of “givenness” as well, leading to the unspoken assumption that the current way of seeing things is the only plausible way. Nearly eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis predicted that among the things that would shock future generations about the 1940s, that would cause future historians to marvel how any intelligent people could believe such a thing or act in such a way, would include values on which Hitler and Roosevelt were agreed. The study of history helps us to see the values and assumptions of our own moment that are so ubiquitous that we neither see them nor scrutinize them. To cite just one example, contemporary American culture is supremely individualistic as compared to the 18^th century, but because that value is so nearly universal today, it becomes invisible to us until we engage with a time when the predominant values were starkly different.

Moore: I am grateful that you touched on the need for scholars to demonstrate, especially in their own lives, that disciplines like history should have a “so what?” component. Would you unpack a bit why you included that particular need?

McKenzie: Academic historians typically define the “significance” of our scholarship first and foremost in terms of its historiographical contribution, by which we mean how it either expands on, modifies, or challenges what other academic historians have said on the subject. What is missing from this definition is any concern about whether individuals outside the Academy have read, understood, and benefited in any significant way from our labors. If anything, historians whose readership becomes too large run the risk of no longer being taken seriously by their peers. As a Christian, this bugs me. When the early Reformers first began to write about vocation, one thing they quickly agreed on is that vocation is intertwined with the call not only to love God but also to love neighbor. They took for granted that every legitimate vocation, albeit in different ways, must serve the common good. And so in the Little Book I challenge readers to insist on a “so what” answer that is not first and foremost historiographical. It’s entirely appropriate when students conduct research to determine what previous historians have concluded on a given subject, I just don’t want them to stop there. Invariably, they will begin by exploring what happened in the past and why, but I also them to meditate on the meaning of what they are learning, to learn to wrestle with the significance of the knowledge that they’re acquiring to the present. When they conduct their own research, I want them to remember that they are listening to the dead in order to speak to the living, or more precisely, to be a blessing to them.

Moore: What are a few things you would like readers to take away from your book?

McKenzie: One of the things that I consciously tried to do is to tear down the barrier that academic historians too often erect between the Academy and the larger society by insisting that “history” is something that only trained historians do. I argue instead, as Margaret Macmillan put it, that “History is something we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it.” We are all unavoidably historians, in that we necessarily draw from the past to understand the present and address the future. God has created us as historical beings. But this doesn’t mean that we are naturally good at historical thinking. Another hope that I have is that readers would get a glimpse of how the systematic development of historical habits of mind can enrich their lives. I believe that any academic pursuit worthy of being labeled “educational” should change us in three ways: in what we know, in how we think, and in who we are. Perhaps my highest hope for the Little Book is that it would convince readers that the study of history can be genuinely transformative.

In his new book, How New is the New Testament?, Don Hagner carries on the good fun at Fuller Seminary in responding kindly to John Goldingay’s Do We Need the New Testament? Hagner says this about the famous saying of Jesus, which reads:

Matthew 13:51-52: Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

Hagner comments:

“Matthew’s Gospel is above all the announcement of something dramatically new, and it is no accident that he refers to what is new first and emphatically. New and old are both important to Matthew, but it is the new that captivates him, and it is above all the new that he writes about in his Gospel” (p. 9).

What happens, all this is leading us to ask, to teaching Old Testament if these New-Thematizers have their way? What happens, as well, to homiletics? What happens to NT exegesis? Can we read the Bible as the apostles read the Bible?

The bottom of this issue is continuity between the testaments (Goldingay, new perspective) or discontinuity (Hagner, old and apocalyptic perspectives). And not all new and new fit on that scale that simply. But, we’ll start there because that’s where Hagner more or less begins.

It is evident that the issue here is not merely sociological but also soteriological and thus an issue of universal significance, for both Jews and Gentiles. The law had only a temporary role to play in the pursuit of righteousness, and that role has come to an end with the coming of Christ. As in so much of what the NT has to say, a key turning point has now been reached in the history of salvation. We are in a new situation…. ‘he radical difference in the new situation is the dynamic by which righteous living is now possible, namely, the empowering of the Holy Spirit, which so characterizes the remarkable newness that arrives with the coming of the Christ. The Holy Spirit thus accomplishes what the law could not (4).

It doesn’t take long for Hagner to enter the fray with some sword flashing:

The balance between covenant grace and works of the law was lost in postexilic Israel. The experience of the exile understandably drove the Jews to observance of the law with a renewed dedication and energy. The result appears to have been a legalism that became dominant and all but obscured the reality of covenant grace. Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising to discover that many or even most Jews of Paul’s day were de facto legalists, in contradiction to a proper understanding of covenant grace. Paul is not necessarily arguing against straw men, as many scholars claim (5).

What now to make of Jesus’ words about rewards? Paul’s statements about rewards and works? John’s relentless requirement to be obedient? Are they all legalists, too? I’ll move on…

Hagner disagrees strenuously with the Paul-within-Judaism crowd of scholars (M Nanos, M Zetterholm, P Eisenbaum, etc).

The so-called “historical” readings of the Paul-within-Judaism scholars can often make sense of the Pauline texts only by means of a tortuous exegesis (9)…. The advocates of the Paul-within-Judaism perspective give insufficient consideration to the complexity of reality. They confront their readers with a kind of rigid either/or mentality that fails to allow tensions, nuances, and subtleties in Paul’s affirmations. There is often a sense in which both sides of an either/or can be true and when it is necessary to conclude both/and. This is especially so in the present case, where we are dealing with the genealogical relationship of promise and fulfillment, the new flower growing out of the old seed (10).

Here, on p. 11, Hagner gives a precis of his fuller argument:

Paul’s Christianity is fulfilled Judaism. It therefore is incorrect to say that Paul left Judaism for Christianity. For Paul, Christianity is the goal of Judaism. But Paul’s fulfilled Judaism is not adequately described as simply one Jewish sect among others. Far from being one form of Judaism among other equally acceptable forms, Christianity for Paul has an absolute character as the expression of the true Judaism of the end time, an eschatologically fulfilled Judaism. “What God was creating through Paul’s mission was not another form of ‘Judaism,’ but something different and new” [citing John Barclay].

The emphasis of Hagner is on what is new and on discontinuity, but it’s not because he denies continuity. His is not an apocalyptic approach but a newness emphasis in the dialectic of new and old, discontinuity and continuity.

Christianity is not other than Judaism: it is the fulfillment of Judaism. The early church was at first entirely Jewish; although it remained a sect within Judaism for a very short time, Christianity is to be understood as a fulfilled Judaism and can be described as a Judaism coming to its divinely intended goal: the accomplishment of salvation through the Messiah’s death and the full inclusion of believing Gentiles in the people of God (20).

What most do not recognize about this debate today is pluralism, which drives many to avoid speaking of discontinuity and fulfillment.

In the next chapter of The Lost World of Scripture John Walton and D. Brent Sandy emphasize the oral origins of the New Testament. The written text preserved for us is essential for the church today. Neither John Walton nor Brent Sandy deny this. The recorded witness of the early church and the eyewitnesses to the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are authoritative for the church. They guide our understanding of orthodox Christian faith. But the form the written texts take reflect their origin in an oral culture where memories were first preserved as oral tradition and only later written down.

Brent and John summarize key points (pp. 244-245)  (1) The earliest records of the life and ministry of Jesus were oral; (2) The oral texts of the gospel were the foundation of the early church;  (3) Oral texts were foundational for the written Gospels; and (4) Many of the variants among the Gospel records arc best accounted for by frequent retellings of the oral texts.

Even the letters of Paul likely originated in the context of his oral preaching and teaching and in community with his fellow travelers and coworkers. They carry Paul’s authority as an apostle, but may do so as compositions from others as coauthors. Brent and John point out that several of the letters indicate that they come from one or more people. 1 Corinthians starts Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes. (1:1). This may indicate that Sosthenes was not merely a travelling companion – but contributed actively to the formation of the letter. In general companions are acknowledged through greetings at the end of the letter, not in the initial salutation. (1 Corinthians ends with such greetings from Aquila, Priscilla and all the brothers and sisters.) Galatians is not as specific but also indicates the letter is from Paul and those with him. Although Brent and John don’t want to be dogmatic about possible contributions of Paul’s fellow travelers or scribes, they point out that it is also unwise to exclude them from the composition process. The possibility of multiple contributors does not undermine the authority of the letters or the work of the Holy Spirit in guiding the composition and preservation.

The major point that John and Brent make is that modern emphasis on texts and authorship has led us to misunderstand the nature of the formation of the New Testament and the cultural influences that shaped the text we have. Source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism all emphasize written documents and texts. Most arguments for the existence of Q, L, and M arise from specific assumptions about the importance of written texts. Fundamentalist views of inspiration also emphasize modern forms for written compositions and compilations (John and Brent don’t put it exactly like this – but it seems evident to me). We are embedded in a literary culture such that both skeptical and confessional readers of scripture start with expectations that would have been foreign to the first and second century church.

Imposing literary expectations developed over the last half millennia on the early church would be comparable to imposing expectations from the age of the internet on scholarly activity of the 1800’s (or even 1900’s). It is incumbent on us as later readers to endeavor to look through first century eyes. We cannot expect them to conform to 21^st century expectation.

Brent and John conclude:

Understanding the composition of the New Testament in the context of orality is an almost impossible undertaking for modern Western minds. Not only is evidence limited regarding specific phases of the process, but it’s also difficult to peel off centuries of layers of textuality and contemplate a world of wheelless automobiles and textless texts. (p. 250)

The Holy Spirit guided the church in the formation of the New Testament, but not necessarily in the manner we, in our day and age, would assume or expect. Nonetheless the message comes through.

The early church may not have realized the extent to which they were under divine guidance and authority as they recounted oral texts of the gospel night after night, as they preached the gospel from city to city and as they recorded divine truth in written Gospels and letters to churches, But from God’s perspective, there was a sense that they were doing even greater works than Jesus himself. When their oral texts became written texts, we can infer that the same revelational deposit and matrix of theological beliefs applied to the written forms.

… Both [oral and written texts] were reliable representations of divine truth, and the early scribes making copies of manuscripts felt free to draw from oral and written traditions. (p. 251)

Bottom line: Many of the so-called “problems” (discrepancies in detail) in the New Testament are not problems at all – but issues created by erroneous expectations of Bible we have before us.

How do we impose our expectations on Scripture?

How do we best listen to the message of the New Testament?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

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“Some Christians,” David Steinmetz observes, “have become concerned about the use of inclusive language in public worship. The traditional reference to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with its strongly patriarchal overtones, has troubled Christians who feel that more neutral language should be used in the church’s confessions and acts of public worship.”

In the essay on inclusive language and the Trinity in his book of essays, Taking the Long View: Christian Theology in Historical Perspective, Steinmetz both examines if the Gloria is an adequate replacement and then examines the history of Trinitarian theology.

One of the less radical proposals is embodied in a new version of the “Gloria Patria,” which has been adopted by some congregations. The words run as follows:

Glory be to our Creator,
Praise to our Redeemer,
Lord Glory be to our Sustainer,
Ever three and ever one,
As it was in the beginning,
Ever shall be, amen.

The intention for such a re-examination of terms to use in public worship, Steinmetz says, is good and clear.

On the face of it, there seems to be nothing objectionable in this formulation. It is certainly appropriate in every generation for Christians to praise the activity of God as creator, redeemer, and sustainer. It is also appropriate for Christian congregations to try to find ways to use inclusive language in worship as long as the substance of the Christian faith can be preserved. Women have suffered from discrimination and repression in Western culture, not least at the hands of Christian churches. The use of more inclusive language is one way the church can repent of its sins and begin to lead a godly, righteous, and holy life.

Intentions here don’t match the theological need for Trinitarian theology.

The difficulty with this “Gloria” is that it is put forward as a trinitarian confession (“ever three and ever one”), when it is nothing of the kind. The doctrine of the Trinity is not merely the teaching that God is three in his historical self-revelation to us, while remaining one God, but that in the mystery of the unity of his inner life God is three to himself as well. It is an affirmation of the nature of unconditioned reality and not merely about the nature of revelation. Trinity is, like predestination, a doctrine that does not make complete sense in itself but does make luminous sense of other things.

The terms, in fact, are not Trinitarian terms at all. They refer to what God did and not Who God is.

“Creator,” “redeemer,” and “sustainer” refer to historical operations of God. To affirm that one God acted in these three roles is at best subtrinitarian and at worst a repetition of the old Sabellian heresy. Furthermore, if “creator” is looked upon as an exact replacement for “Father,” “redeemer” for “Son,” and “sustainer” for “Holy Spirit,” then both too much and too little is claimed for each person of the Trinity. If the Father is only creator and not redeemer and sustainer, if the Son is only redeemer and not creator and sustainer, if the Holy Spirit is only sustainer and not creator and redeemer, then the Bible becomes unintelligible. … You can see rather quickly why the church adopted the theological principle that the works of God ad extra, that is, directed outside himself, are indivisible. [That is, inseparable operations.]

He lets up just enough to say intentions are good but the result is worse.

Very probably the intention is to save the trinitarian formulation, while removing nothing more than the offending noninclusive language. Unfortunately, the results do not match the good intentions. It is clear, in other words, that if we are going to revise our language of worship, we have to pick up the debate where it left off and not proceed as though such a debate never took place.

Come back tomorrow for part two on this chapter.

Would you like to deepen your ability to teach, preach, and write for your church context? Do you have a desire to take your church into the rich perspective of the New Testament?

Join me and my new colleague, Pastor Professor Dennis Edwards, for this innovative master’s degree in contextual and pastoral theology and exegesis. Dennis is the author of a commentary on 1 Peter.

This Fall Dennis Edwards and I are launching our third innovative Master of Arts in New Testament degree (MANT) at Northern Seminary that will provide grounding in the theology that emerges from the first century context of the New Testament writings.

Location is no longer an obstacle to take part in this cutting edge program. We will come to you.

Northern Seminary has successfully launched a live streaming option for a few select Masters programs. The MANT is one of those programs.

If you call Chicagoland home, join us in person for class. Live further away? Login and stream the class live from wherever you are. This new technology enables you to interact with our premier faculty and engage in Northern’s vibrant classroom experience while staying invested in your current ministry context.

Courses will be held mostly on Mondays.

Any kind of Christian ministry in North America requires both preparation and experience, so an increasing number of ministers are deeply involved in the experience dimension and finding it nearly impossible to attend seminary full-time. A seminary curriculum focuses on the scope of the minister’s calling, from biblical and theological to practical and homiletical studies, but not all ministers need as intense preparation for each facet of ministry. Some focus on teaching while others focus on the more personal and formative dimensions of ministry.

The new MA cohort in New Testament (MANT), beginning Fall/Summer 2018, seeks to provide for ministers who need it an in-depth exposure to New Testament studies with additional study in Old Testament, church history and theology.

Hence, we seek to work alongside those who are called to preaching and teaching ministries in the church.

We already have students who are enrolled and I’m excited already about the questions they are asking and the depth of their interest in becoming teachers in the church.

There will be a strong emphasis on writing toward publications.

Monday late morning sessions will include free tutorials in the Greek New Testament.

Class will be held one day a week — either late afternoon or evening.

Because of the formative role of the context of the authors and their writings, the story at work in Judaism and earliest Christianity, and the theology that emerges out of these two elements, we will focus on the hermeneutics of doing NT Theology. Hence, we will have a course on studying the context of representative books in the NT, a course on the story at work in Judaism and representative books, and two courses on how the theology of the NT authors emerges out of those two contexts. The focus then is on the hermeneutics of NT theology in context and mission. We will, obviously, give significant attention to the apostle Paul since his books not only feature prominently in the NT, but his theology has shaped the church’s mission.

The MANT has another focus: Ever since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls there has been a renewed interest not only in Jewish texts but also a greater concern to understand both Jesus and Paul in their Jewish contexts. The rise of what is often called “the new perspective” has shed wonderful light on both Jesus and Paul, but a major problem remains: the lack of translating the best of that scholarship into church life and into lay categories. The MANT will focus on that very task: taking the best of scholarship and making it accessible and relevant to local church life.

But this might be the most unique feature of the new MA in NT at Northern: each student will become a research assistant as I will become the research advisor for each student as we work together toward publications. Hence, a  central element of this degree will be a focus on writing for the church.

In 2017-2018 three of our students signed contracts for publications.

The program is affordable (based around low monthly payments), local (drive in only one day a week for classes), and communal (join a community of missionary-theologians).

This program, and others like it, are changing the face of seminary training. I am happy Northern is at the vanguard of this kind of innovative preparation for those called into preaching and teaching ministries.

If you are interested in the program or have any questions about the MANT degree at Northern please email me at smcknight@faculty.seminary.edu. You can also learn more about the program at Northern’s website or previous blog posts (Unique Cohort, New Testament at Northern, MANT at Northern)

I am so excited to be able (finally) to announce this great great news, a colleague in the New Testament department at Northern!

Lisle, Ill.— March 18, 2018 — As part of Northern Seminary’s continuing expansion, veteran pastor/author/church planter Rev. Dr. Dennis R. Edwards will join the faculty in Fall 2018 as Associate Professor of New Testament.

Dennis is a prominent Evangelical Covenant pastor, most recently serving in Minneapolis. A native of Queens, New York, he has pastored in major metro areas including New York City and Washington, D.C.

“Dennis brings a pastor’s heart and a scholar’s mind to the significant work of theological education. I’m thrilled our students are going to have the opportunity to learn from someone who understands the daily rigors of pastoral life and the important work of biblical preaching and teaching,” said Northern’s President and Professor of Pastoral Theology and Preaching Bill Shiell.

New Testament students will benefit from his fresh perspective. According to Scot McKnight, Julius R. Mantey Chair of New Testament, “Dennis brings nearly 30 years of pastoral experience, a PhD in New Testament where he specialized in the letter of James, a splendid commentary on 1 Peter in the Story of God Bible Commentary, and the gift of prophetic teaching. Northern is not simply adding a new professor but leaping into a new order of seminary education.”

His training is broad and extensive. Dennis holds an M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and has done post-graduate studies in Theology at Fordham University. He holds a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and has been on the adjunct faculty of Bethel Seminary, North Park Seminary, and St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute (where he was a distinguished lecturer). He has pastored in urban settings and is committed to racial justice and compassionate ministries.

Dennis is eager to begin this new chapter of ministry. “It’s with excitement that I anticipate joining the Northern Seminary community on a full time basis. I am honored to bring my education, experience, and curiosity to the Northern team. Northern Seminary is an environment where the interchange of ideas and the sharing of experiences in the service of Jesus Christ leads to the formation of people who will make a lasting impact for good in the world.”

David Fitch, Betty R. Lindner Chair of Evangelical Theology, adds, “Dennis Edwards typifies what a Northern Seminary professor is: a premier biblical scholar, an experienced pastor/church planter and a national leader engaging the social moral issues facing the church today. I’m so glad to welcome Dennis to the faculty of Northern Seminary.”

Dennis and his wife Susan have established a loving family including their four children. Previously ordained in the Mennonite Church, and now the Evangelical Covenant Church, Dennis has been Senior Pastor of the Sanctuary in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Northern Seminary was founded in 1913 and continues to offer an educational context that is international, interracial, and intercultural. The Seminary educates students to lead the church and engage the world.

I’m starting a series today for post seminary reading. A pastor recently wrote me and asked about what to read now that he is pastoring. He expressed an interest in intellectual challenges for the pastor and for continuing education.

I thought five books would be a good number but there’s one problem: perhaps the pastor read one of these books in seminary, so I’ll add a sixth.

My specialty is New Testament studies so I will begin there. These are in my estimation seminal books for the field in which they were written and books that will also challenge the pastor in different ways. They may not provide a new sermon but they will give sermons new depth.

E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism or Judaism: Practice and Belief. The first book created the new perspective on Paul and the second put into words what Sanders thought Judaism at the time of Jesus and Paul was like.

Klyne Snodgrass, Stories with Intent. The single most important study on the parables of Jesus available today and one packed with valuable insights for sermons.

Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph. If you want to get to the heart of the Roman empire, read Beard; if you want to know its dominant ethos for imperialism, here’s the place to start.

J. Barclay, Paul and the Gift. Second only to Sanders in significant studies for Paul in my career.

Michael Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly. I grew up in the worst possible forms of reading Revelation; Revelation, if it is anything, is a book about political theology. Gorman expounds it beautifully.

Brian Blount, Then the Whisper Put on Flesh. Thiselton writes about socio-pragmatic readings and Blount’s book epitomizes a liberation angle on NT ethics.

N.T. Wright’s big book on Jesus called Jesus and the Victory of God was turned into a more accessible book when he wrote The Challenge of Jesus and then later Simply Jesus, so when he wrote Paul and the Faithfulness of God many of us expected something similar: The Challenge of Paul or a Simply Paul. But that’s not what he’s done. His newest (and soon to be released) book is called Paul: A Biography and it is not an accessible version of Paul and the Faithfulness of God but something altogether different: a biography.

Here we go again with another adventure through the mind of NT Wright about the mind of Paul in the world of Paul.

Here’s an opener:

An energetic and talkative man, not much to look at and from a despised race, went about from city to city talking about the One God and his “son’* Jesus, setting up small communities of people who accepted what he said and then writing letters to them, letters whose explosive charge is as fresh today as when they were first dictated. Paul might dispute the suggestion that he himself changed the world; Jesus, he would have said, had already done that. But what he said about Jesus, and about God, the world, and what it meant to be genuinely human, was creative and compelling—and controversial, in his own day and ever after. Nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Tom is always asking the bigger questions, the central questions, and these are two of them:

This raises a set of questions for any historian or would-be biographer. How did it happen? What did this busy little man have that other people didn’t? What did he think he was doing, and why was he doing it?

Why did all that change? What exactly happened on the road to Damascus?

Wright gets personal in this introduction, about his early years of learning to read Paul while still in school:

His letters existed for us in a kind of holy bubble, unaffected by the rough-and-tumble of everyday first-century life. This enabled us blithely to assume that when Paul said “justification,” he was talking about what theologians in the sixteenth century and preachers in the twentieth had been referring to by that term. It gave us license to suppose that when he called Jesus “son of God, he meant the “second person of the Trinity.” But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

And what he now still believes, but it’s all the same and different:

I hasten to add that I still see Paul’s letters as part of “holy scripture.” I still think that prayer and faith are vital, nonnegotiable parts of the attempt to understand them, just as I think that learning to play the piano for oneself is an important part of trying to understand Schubert’s Impromptus. But sooner or later, as the arguments go on and people try out this or that theory, as they start reading Paul in Greek and ask what this or that Greek term meant in the first century, they discover that the greatest commentators were standing on the shoulders of ancient historians and particularly lexicographers, and they come, by whatever route, to the questions of this book: who Paul really was, what he thought he was doing, why it “worked,” and, within that, what the nature of the transformation he underwent on the road to Damascus was.

As always, Wright’s concern is history and a historical perspective, a Paul in his own time:

Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about….

Second, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter.

Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered. The world he lived in was the world into which the gospel had burst, the world that the gospel was challenging, the world it would transform.

This will become a standard textbook on the life of Paul, mark my word.

From Atlantic Post:

“There is certainly a growing trend towards bi-vocational ministry in both mainline and evangelical churches,” says Kurt Fredrickson, a professor of pastoral ministry at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California.This trend dovetails with other recent developments that are troubling to many religious communities. Not only is church attendance in long-term decline, but financial giving by church members is at Depression-era lows. Meanwhile, seminary students are taking on ballooning debt for a career that may not exist by the time they graduate. This trend began before the Great Recession, and has only worsened since then.

Of the seminary students who graduated in 2011 with a Master of Divinity degree (the typical degree for a full-time pastor), more than 25 percent accrued more than $40,000 in educational debt, and five percent accumulated more than $80,000 in debt. Those lucky enough to get a full-time job as a pastor will join a profession whose median wage is $43,800, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.“Many denominations are concerned about the burden of student debt and how that impacts the vocational lives of clergy,” says Sharon Miller, interim co-director of the Center for the Study of Theological Education at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City.Miller says some denominations are addressing the problem by covering a student’s tuition in exchange for a promise to later work as a pastor in that denomination. Other denominations are helping clergy who minister in underserved areas (and who thus aren’t compensated all that well) pay off their student debt—“But these efforts are quite limited in scope, as denominations are financially stressed themselves,” she says.

This is why Northern Seminary has adopted an affordability plan:I’ve been teaching for 35 years and the best experiences I have had teaching have been the cohorts at Northern Seminary. The combination of a week-long intensive with an active Facebook cohort page along with trips abroad for 10plus days … the classes become a fellowship of friends, of fellow followers of Jesus, and a classroom joy that transcends ordinary classes.Think of joining us even this summer. We begin with a one-week intensive but then the classes during the school year can be on campus or in our innovative Northern Live alternative. Think about enrolling.And our affordability plan is an innovative approach that reduces the temptation to go into debt.

A whole new perspective. One night a week. From anywhere in the world.

Classes are held just once a week so you can still work in the church, have a job and spend time with your family.

Regardless if you are with us in person at our state of the art facilities or through our easily accessible Northern Live online platform, you get the opportunity to interact with our Faculty at Northern Seminary.

By studying the New Testament in a Jewish context, the life of Jesus, Paul, Peter and John — among other characters like Junia and Priscilla and Phoebe and Mary — are seen in a refreshingly new way. Class after class, you will feel your confidence rising as a competent minister of the gospel, built on a solid foundation of biblical understanding and application.

For more information, reach out to our admissions department or visit the website anytime at www.seminary.edu/mant/. Spots are filling up fast, so apply today!