Mishna as revelation

“When we say say a blessing before and after we read the Torah in the synagogue, we say ... נתֵן הַתּוֹרה—who gives the Torah—meaning here and now. By our presence we receive the Torah, here and now. This book [i.e. Neusner's] is meant to help you receive and accept, make use of, the Torah in the concrete and everyday world you know: It is not about the past and in no way concerns a book which came down to us from a particular place or time in history. It is about God's revelation which God gives day by day, and which, as I said, we receive day by day. If Mishnah is not that, if Mishnah merely is a work out of “Jewish history,” then Mishnah is not worth your time and attention. For what makes all the effort required to master this difficult book worthwhile is not that it is a monument to a dead past, but that it is an urgent challenge to the living present, to you and me” (Jacob Neusner, Learn Mishnah, Preface).

I find his belief in the ongoing, living dimension of torah as revelation interesting. I wonder how this relates to Barth's understanding of "the three times of the Word"?

This focus on the text as guide for the present, as a kind of pragmatic manual perhaps, carries a different nuance to the Christian approach to the text. Bob MacDonald summarizes it nicely:

Torah is not text but engagement with the one to who the text points. The medium is neither the messenger nor the source of the message.

Though see my qualification of this here.

Update: I've just noticed that Kevin Edgecomb of Biblicalia has been posting an incredibly detailed review of Neusner's theology of the oral torah. If I ever find the time to study Judaism in detail, I think I will simply get hold of all of Neusner's works and read them through. There's a lot to be said for choosing one scholar as an orientation point for grappling with a complex subject.

P.S. Neusner was Childs' roomate for a while in Yale, I believe, and had an impact on Childs' understanding of Judaism.

My take on "verbal revelation"

I recently quoted James Smart, who claims that

revelation is in the text itself, in the words ... It is through these words and no others that God intends to speak to us, and, when he does, we know that there is no other kind of inspiration than verbal inspiration.

Criticisms were made in the comments. Particularly insightful were those of Bob Macdonald:

Torah is not text but engagement with the one to who the text points. The medium is neither the messenger nor the source of the message (emphasis mine).

I agree with both points of view. They don't contradict each other, rather, they are pointing to two different dimensions of the issue. Smart's comment refers to the place where revelation is accessed now, whereas Bob's comment refers to the revelation itself. Revelation itself is, as Barth put it, the reality of God-with-us (Immanuel), and this is hardly a text but a living reality.

Nevertheless, what does it mean to say that “God is with us”? What is the nature of this reality? Our dogmatic assumptions must shape our approach to the text.

In the Bible, God's self revelation is seen as progressive (Exodus 6:3). The “one to whom the text points” is a profound being (Andrew Louth puts it eloquently here), one that needs to be sought. He certainly reveals himself suddenly and without expectation—and still does!—but he also hides himself and wishes to be found. In the Old Testament he is to be sought at specific places: cultic centres and ultimately the temple. He also reveals himself through the laws of the universe (the burden of Wisdom literature), through his written Torah, through the example and teaching of elders, priests, and parents. Within this universe, text is at least one medium of revelation.

Within this unfolding story of the Bible, however, we see that texts take on more and more significance. Moses receives his revelation directly from God, but he writes it down and the text becomes the vehicle of ongoing revelation and guidance (see my post, God, Moses, and Scripture). According to Jer 36, Jeremiah has his prophecies written on a scroll which survives to speak to new generations. C. Seitz summarises the implications of this chapter as follows:

the chapter tells of the victory of the Word of God. The king can kill prophets who speak God's word (see Jer 25:23); he can debar God's spokesman from the temple (Jer 36:5); he can callously burn God's word in a brazier until the entire thing is consumed (Jer 36:23). But the prophet lives to speak the word anew, and the scroll is recomposed (Jer 36:32). And more to the point: the new scroll will outlive the divine spokesman and the evil generation headed by Jehoiakim. In the end, God's word cannot be thwarted (ZAW 101:1, 1989, p. 14).

Indeed, Seitz sees a parallel between Jeremiah's scribe Baruch and Moses's successor Joshua:

just as Joshua brough new tables of the tôrāh to a new generation in a new day, so too the scribe Baruch symbolizes the survival of a new scroll from the prophet Jeremiah which will address a new generation of faith “in all the places to which (it) may go” (Jer 45:5) (p. 18).

He concludes that in Jer 45

we see a foreshadowing of the movement of prophecy into a new mode, as clarified in a later rabbinic dictum: “Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise” (B. Bathra 12a).

We need to add to this our growing understanding of the nature of Biblical tradition itself, which went through a process of textualization or “inscripturation.” We see this in particular in the case of the “Book of the Twelve.” The “reality of revelation” within time and space to particular prophets is one thing, but within the context of God's economy of salvation it seems that the witness to this original Word has been enriched and expanded so that its true dimensions, understood with the advantage of hindsight (e.g. exilic redaction), find literary (“verbal”) expression in the final form of the text.

This is the conclusion of a scholar not known for his commitment to “synchronic” reading: Jörg Jeremias. See his comments on the literary (though not "historical" - in the narrow sense of the word) interrelation of Hosea and Amos:

The book of Amos very probably never existed without Am 7:10-17, and 7:10-17 very probably never existed without its hermeneutical key in Am 7:9. this verse urges the reader not to perceive Amos as an isolated prophet but to relate his message to the message of Hosea. They are to be seen as two messengers with one common message … .

The curiosity of the modern historian about the specific and singular elements in one prophet was quite alien to the traditionists. They did not want the words of either Hosea or Amos to be read with historical interest for a distant past but with a current interest in their words as a help for present problems. They were asking about the one message of God by two messengers (but without creating something like Tatian's harmony of the gospels). … (1996: 181, 182-183)

(I've posted a similar quote by Jermias in German, in Canon and the essence of prophecy)

This is simply a brilliant way to express the key concern of Childs' canonical approach. See also my thread on New Testament scholar Paul Minear, who holds that the Bible's view of “reality” should challenge that of the historian's - with hermeneutical implications.

Quote of the day: Verbal revelation

The revelation is in the text itself, in the words that confront us there in all their strangeness, and not in a history or a personal biography or an event that we reconstruct by means of the text. The event of revelation is available to us only through the text of Scripture interpreted in the context of the church. It is through these words and no others that God intends to speak to us, and, when he does, we know that there is no other kind of inspiration than verbal inspiration. Far from implying any divinizing of the words of Scripture, verbal inspiration understood in its Biblical sense takes the words of the text with full seriousness as the words of real men, spoken or written in a concrete human situation, and yet at the same time words in which God ever afresh reveals himself to me. [*]

What do people think of this? Is it justified? What are the alternatives?

[*]James Smart, Interpretation of Scripture, 195-196; cited in Stephen B. Chapman, "Reclaiming Inspiration for the Bible," 200.

Quote of the day: Some Rabbinic logic

I randomly opened Neusner's translation of the Mishna today, and came across the following quote. I don't want to make any kind of statement by posting it, I just wanted to record it as an interesting example of rabbinic logic. And as a reminder of how foreign that world is to me.

4:7 A. They asked sages in Rome, "If [God] is not in favor of idolatry, why does he not wipe it away?"

B. They said to them, "If people worshipped something of which the world had no need, he certainly would wipe it away.

C. "But lo, people worship the sun, moon, stars, and planets.

D. "Now do you think he is going to wipe out his world because of idiots?"

E. They said to them, "If so, let him destroy something of which the world has no need, and leave something which the world needs!"

F. They said to them, "Then we should strengthen the hands of those who worship these [which would not be destroyed], for then they would say, 'Now you know full well that they are gods, for lo, they were not wiped out!'"

Now I think about it, I have made an attempt to find parallels between Jewish and Christian thought in my post on The Talmud on "costly grace."

The Rambam on midrashic exegesis

David Guttmann of Believing is Knowing has posted an interesting discussion of the nature of midrash from the Rambam's perspective in his post: The Relationship Between Midrashic Exegesis and the Written Text. Here's an interesting quote by the Rambam:

As regards the four species [the branches of the palm tree, the citron, the myrtle, and the willows of the brook], our Sages gave a reason for their use by way of Midrashim, the method of which is well known to those who understand their discourse. They use the text of the Bible only as a kind of poetical language [for their own ideas], and do not intend thereby to give an interpretation of the text. Accordingly, with regard to the Midrashim, people are divided into two classes. For some think that, the Midrash contains the real explanation of the text, whilst others, finding that it cannot be reconciled with the words quoted, reject and ridicule it. The former struggle and fight to prove and to confirm such interpretations according to their opinion, and to keep them as the real meaning of the text; they consider them in the same light as traditional laws.

Check out the whole thing.

For a related post, see my attempt to distinguish between Christian and Jewish appropriations of the Law of Moses.

Barth's son wrote an Old Testament introduction/theology

How bizarre. This should be exquisitely interesting to me as a major thesis of mine is that Childs' canonical approach cannot be understood without a theology of something like Karl Barth's "three times of the word" (Das Wort Gottes in seiner dreifachen Gestalt).

Interestingly, the book was originally written in Indonesian, where Christoph Barth was working as a missionary. It is apparently still the standard work there and reflects the concerns of this struggling minority.

According to reviews, it bears many similarities to von Rad's Old Testament Theology. I wonder what his father would have thought? I'm reminded of one of Brevard Childs' anecdotes about visiting a lecture by von Rad where Karl Barth was sat near to him:

There was always a sort of tension, even in those years, between those studying the Bible and Barth. I remember one incident in 1952 when Gerhard von Rad gave a lecture in Basel on the "Typological Exegesis of the Old Testament". I happened to be sitting rather near to Barth, and I was interested in his reaction. For me von Rad's lecture was simply glorious, crystal clear and exciting. When he finished, Barth turned around in a half sleepy way to the person next to him and said: "I don't quite get it". This seemed to me an appalling response, and I felt like saying, "Herr Prof., let me explain it all to you". Fortunately, I restrained the impulse. Yet in the years that have passed, and the more I have studied von Rad's lecture, the more I began to understand why Barth found problems, and why it wasn't as clear as I once had thought" (lecture at Yale, 1969).

You can read large portions of the book on Google Books.

F. Watson on reading and re-reading the Old Testament

The following is an eloquent quote by Francis Watson in response to Christopher Seitz's rather stinging critique of his Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (which I haven't read yet). I have to say, I find the exchange in the Scottish Journal of Theology rather odd, as Watson's response seems to simply affirm all of Seitz's points and claims that they were there all along. It seemed fairly Childsian to me, though Seitz's summary of Watson's take on Childs would have led me to think otherwise. Watson makes one comment on von Rad which I would critique, but that is for another post.

Here's a quote I like:

Despite its one-sidedness, the 'discrete witness' model is a serious attempt to articulate an important element in the phenomenon of the Christian canon. As the Lucan Emmaus Road story shows, the Christian reading of Jewish scripture as 'Old Testament' is a re-reading of a scripture that is already read and known, in the light of the completed event of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. (The story also shows that the risen Jesus cannot be recognized as such except on the basis of a scripture re-read as testimony to the suffering and vindication of the Christ; so there is no question of any one-way, undialectical movement from the New Testament to the Old.) In the light of Easter Day, the law and the prophets can be seen as preparing the way for what has now come to pass. But this only becomes apparent retrospectively: the prophets themselves had only the haziest knowledge of the future event to which, for Christian hindsight, they bore witness (1 Pet.1.10-12). Christian Old Testament interpretation is therefore a re-reading, a second reading that clarifies and re-orders the first reading. A re-read text (a novel, for example) is a text read in the light of a prior knowledge of the whole - a knowledge as yet unavailable to the first-time reader. The second reading does not simply repeat the first reading, but neither does it erase it; it preserves within itself the knowledge that, although the end or goal is now known, that was not the case at first. Old Testament texts should therefore initially be interpreted within a pruely Old Testament context, with distinctively Christian concerns temporarily bracketed out. The 'discrete witness' that emerges in this way is only a preliminary and provisional witness whose scope will be clarified and expanded by the second, explicitly Christian reading. But the initial preliminary and provisional witness remains an indispensable foundation for the re-reading. (220-230)

I couldn't agree more, and neither could Brevard Childs (the jab about the "discrete witness" of the Old Testament is aimed at Childs). This review was written in 1999, so perhaps Watson has changed his mind now, having read Childs' later work and articles. Though having said that, there is nothing here that isn't already in his Biblical Theology ...

See my related posts: Luke 24:13-35 and the dogmatics/exegesis relation and Reading in a revised frame of reference

Advent ist noch nicht Weihnachten!

The following was written by Margot Käßmann, Lutheran Bishop of Hannover. I fully agree (it seems to be a Dauerthema for her: see here).

Liebe Leserinnen und Leser,

freuen Sie sich auf dei Adventszeit? Oder fürchten Sie sich vor dem Rummel? Schon jetzt merken wir es - der Stress fängt an. Im Radio wird gefragt, ob wir die Geschenke schon haben, die Regale sind seit Anfang September voll mit Lebkuchenherzen und Weihnachtsmännern. Das ärgert mich alle Jahre wieder. Deshalb möchte ich Sie einladen: Lassen Sie uns gemeinsam Advent neu entdecken. In der christlichen Tradition ist der November die Zeit der Kunkelheit, da geht es um Volkstrauertag, Bußtag und Ewigkeitssonntag. Und danach freuen wir uns, wenn langsam aber sicher Licht in die Dunkelheit kommt. Ein Licht nach dem anderen läßt es hell werden. Das ist die Zeit des Wartens auf Jesus, der Licht in unsere Welt gebracht hat.
Ja, und wenn dann der Weihnachtsbaum leuchtet, dann ist es hell geworden, und wir hören die alten Worte: euch ist heute der Heiland geboren.
Ich bin kein Advents- und Weihnachtsmuffel, o nein. Ich kann mich jedes Jahr neu freuen, wenn Türchen geöffnet werden, Plätzchenduft durch's Haus zieht und die Fenster beleuchtet sind. Aber eben zur rechten Zeit! In der Bibel heißt es: Alles hat seine Zeit. Deshalb lassen Sie uns warten, Advent ist im Dezember. Lassen Sie uns Mut haben zum Warten, zur Frage nach Trauer, Buße und Tod im November - Ängste und Sorgen kännen wir nicht vorschnell überzuckern, das merken wir doch dieses Jahr ganz besonders. Und dann, im Dezember wünsche ich Ihnen eine gesegnete Adventszeit mit Backen, Geschenke kaufen und dem Anzünden der Lichter.
Dann hören wir wieder: Nun soll es werden Frieden auf Erden.

Margot Käßmann
evang.-luth. Landesbischöfin von Hannover

An ex-Orthodox Jew posts on Jesus

An ex-Orthodox Jew shares his thoughts over at Lubab No More. He obviously has a lot of respect for the guy, though given his reconstruction of the historical Jesus I'm not sure what his sources are. Here's an interesting comment:

Ironically, being raised an Orthodox Jew is quite possibly the best preparation in the world for understanding the Christian gospel. A Protestant Christian can read the New Testament and perhaps imagine to herself the religious philosophy Jesus sought to overthrow. An Orthodox Jew has lived it. (The other side of this irony, of course, is that you can't truly understand Rabbinic Judaism until you've read the gospels.)

I'll leave it to those more knowlegable in New Testament to respond, but do share your thoughts! Interestingly, here's the first comment by No One:

avraham abulfia [kabalist born in 1240] held he was a kind of proto type messiah called messiah son of joseph.this is scattered in his writtings.

The image above, taken from the post, is of Rabbi Hillel. The text he's expounding says: And you shall love your neighbour as yourself. This, of course, was part of what Jesus held to be the "golden rule" (Luke 10:27).

Update: This isn't directly relevant, but Freethinking Upstart has fascinating post on the distinction between (Jewish) orthodoxy and orthopraxy. This is of particular interest to me as a Christian, as in contrast to Jews, we don't ask: "he is a practising Christian," but "is he a believing Christian?" The former without the latter would be an oxymoron. On second thoughts, the latter without the former would also be an oxymoron (James 2:14).