OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY: The "OT" bit references historical, literary, cultural issues (the particulars), the "theology" bit references the Big Picture (and why it matters). These two poles are expressed in the title. This blog concerns everything in between.
Justin Taylor of Between the Two Worldshas pointed out that one can now access audio and video resources from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia for free. You need to register first, but it looks as if it may be worth it. Justin lists the following names that may be of interest.
E.J. Young Cornelius Van Til John Murray Edmund Clowney Sinclair Ferguson Richard Gaffin Vern Poythress Darryl Hart Willia Edgar David Powlison
Two names he hasn't mentioned are the renowned Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, who has spoken 14 times there, and a Tim Keller, who is an incredibly gifted preacher (he preached what has been for me one of the best sermon series ever, also available for free download).
Chris Tilling has shared with us the impact that listening to a Brueggemann lecture on a bus one day had on his theological development. In the comments, links are provided for the Totally Unofficial Walter Brueggemann Page, a great site full of useful links (Brueggemann has even written a few blog posts in his time!). I particularly appreciate blah blah blah's making us aware of a series of online audio material held at a Presbyterian church, in which Brueggemann takes us through the major parts of the Old Testament.
I was a major Brueggemann fan for about three years, from when I read him as part of a post-modern/N.T. Wright circle in Paris to when I started reading Childs last August. There was so much that excited me about these new approaches, especially as they helped me respond to questions that arose in my cultural anthropology degree which conservative Evangelicals were not able to answer. And yet, as always, with each inch that my horizen shifted in one direction, gaps started appearing in another corner. Those gaps remained unsolved until I started seriously trying to figure out Childs, who is the first scholar I have come accross who has dealt with the issue of theological exegesis so comprehensively. I haven't figured out all the answers (of course!), but I feel a Childsian "canonical approach" is so much more substantial than Brueggemann's post-modern approach. The fact that Brueggemann has misrepresented Childs in a number of publications doesn't do much to win my sympathy (but then again, who hasn't done that concerning Childs?).
I've dealt fairly intensively with the Childs vs Brueggemann question over the past year, particularly in dialogue with Stephen, a keen Brueggemanian, and have collected my posts together here.
Update: Those interested in free online audio introductions to the Old Testament, I'd highly recommend the detailed one given by Christine Hayes at Yales University, available on iTunes. I comment on and link to it here, with an additional comment here.
Update 2: Thanks againt to becoming Peresh for another link to a sermon by Brueggemann on Isaiah and the mission of the Church. There are also a number of other sermons by, e.g., Brian McClaren and Steve Chalke (the only other names I recognise). When will I have time to listen to all this?!
In response to a post on an Australian psalmic-pop group, Esteban and Richard have called my attention to two other styles of appropriating the Psalms: Reformed Presbyterian Psalm singing
and Anglican plain song:
(Richard has also posted audio clips of Psalms 8, 90 and 100 [their source is here]).
I've been looking for ways to appropriate the Psalms in my own devotional life. They are practically non-existent, as far as the Free Churches that I know go. The one I'm at now is an exception, in that we read a Psalm about once a month.
Luckily, a Gregorian chant fanatic at the Protestant faculty here in Bonn has led a course on the subject over the past two semesters. I only had time to visit 3/4 of the first and the singing of the Divine Office to round of the second and I've since become a major fan. I'm not sure what it is, but that monotone somehow helps carry me through the endless text. I feel like I'm floating, observing the content of the Psalm from above. It's as if the "music" creates a space in which I can be alone with the Psalm. This was brought home to me as we chanted a particularly bloodthirsty psalm. On the one hand, the aesthetic of the chapel with the mellow candels, chilled atmosphere and gentle chant didn't gel well with a text about destroying our enemies and grinding their bones into dust. On the other hand, from that "chanting state," I was able to look down from above,as it were, and oberserve what was going on in a different dimension of realty.
I now do it everyday on my own and have managed to stick to it far more consistently than other projects I've tried ... so far. I find that it provides an especially healthy corrective to my otherwise intellectualized engagement with the text, which tends to rush over stuff that one normally thinks "one already understands." It also holds me back from my usual rush to extend my knowledge by reading more and more rather than reading deeper and deeper, which requires far more patience and a special disposition. Oh, and the last benefit of Gregorian chanting, it simply helps me remember the text better. I need less and less read the text and recite everything by heart, which also has the advantage that I can do it wherever I want.
Sister Macrina, of the interesting patristic blogA Vow of Conversation (for a brief overview see here) has linked to an awesome audio resource: public domain audio books for people with Catholic tastes. Volumes of St John of the Cross, St. Catherine of Sienna, Thomas a Kempis, Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, Pope St. Gregory the Great ... The list goes on!
Such things are ideal for people like me who want to get their teeth into some raw material but don't have the time or energy to read books not related to their immediate concerns. For simple audio books I find I can listen while jogging in the mornings, but it's not quite the same as samba. If you happen to have a wife who insists on spending copious amounts of time on the beach, then they can also be a great way for giving your eyes a break, allowing you to take in information in a comfortable position (i.e. lying on your back instead of leaning on one arm or holding the book in the air, while being blinded by the sunlight and trying to ignore unwelcome sand stuck in various crevices), and while away the time.
I just got a e-mail from i-Tunes advertising their latest free products. Go here for a free audio-book of Aristotle's Physics, here for an elementary Greek course from Concordia Seminary, here for some random talks on Greek philosophy and culture, or here for a more Roman slant. A lecture series analysing Virgil's Aeneid is here, the history of the Roman empire is here and finally a video series looking at Roman art in the Louvre here.
I've managed to work my way through two i-Tunes lecture series so far. The first was an introduction to the Old Testament by Christine Hayes of Yale Divinity School, the second was the relationship between theology and philosophy in the modern period by a very conservative historian from Reformed Theological Seminary.
I've never been a gadget freak, but i-Tunes is worth getting for these kinds of resources alone!
From the little I've read of Kugel I've not been impressed. He made a lame critique of Christian confessional scholarship which I posted here, followed by my own critical response here and a suggestion here that a canonical approach could fill the gap a New York Times reviewer felt was left gaping.
Nevertheless, he seems to be popular amongst those wishing to embrace both modernity and Jewish orthodoxy so he will be an important dialogue partner for the future. I intend to listen to the interview at some point, whenever I can fit him around the mountain of other audio material I'm collecting (e.g. here).
I am delighted that John Poirier recently pointed out this brilliant resource:
There are three videos per scholar, each an hour and a half long, free for your indulgence here.
Chris Seitz is one of the most creative thinkers in biblical studies as well as Childs' greatest interpreter. James Dunn and N.T. Wright need no introducing (unless you're on the theological faculty at the University of Bonn).
Having said that, this doesn't top Chris Tilling's awesome audio selection here.
A while back I linked to the website of Yale Divinity School, where you can download both audio and video recordings of a brilliant introductory course to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (hat tip to Deane). I've pretty much made my way through the 24 hours of material and I have to say that I find it very well done. Christine Hayes is extremely articulate and engaging; at the end of each lecture I find myself itching to hear more. It's worth noting the very Jewish tone of the presentation: Hayes is herself from the field of Talmudic studies, the translation and study Bible she uses are Jewish, and the majority of the scholars she calls on are Jewish (Kaufmann, Levenson, Greenberg, Weinfeld).
I found the opening lectures on the Pentateuch the most rewarding. The sections on the histories was pretty much standard historical critical fare, along with her treatment of the prophets. I am disappointed by the underlying aggression to the apparent "distortions" of later Christian tradition (e.g. she's happy to point out the mistranslation of parthenos in Isaiah, but then, a few minutes later, fails to point out how Isaiah' wrestling with the problem of sin and forgiveness are taken up in the New Testament. References to the New Testament are consistently negative). I'm also disappointed by the way that Childs does not even get a mention, despite the fact that his entire career was spent at Yale and that she mentions in the course outline that she's interested in "canonical approaches." It only gets a first mention in lecture 21, and there it seems to be using the term in the way that Sanders used it. This is fair enough, but given Yale's post-liberal heritage I'd have thought that she would have at least pointed out the interpretative options.
All in all it's well worth a listen. For those on a time budget, two lectures are particularly worth listening to:
The Priestly Legacy: Cult and Sacrifice, Purity and Holiness in Leviticus and Numbers (no#9; I was surprised to hear that she distinguishes between moral and cultic purity)
Biblical Law: The Three Legal Corpora of JE (Exodus), P (Leviticus and Numbers) and D (Deuteronomy) (no#10; beautiful outline of main emphases and its ancient context).
Ever wanted to hear the delightfully Swiss-tainted voice of Karl Barth? Well, have a listen to a brief excerpt from his 1962 lecture in Princeton here.
When I first heard of this I was pretty cynical. There's something sinister about marketing a product by referring to it as 'God breathed'. Not that God can't use things like this, but the line between God's work and human manipulation of it is pretty thin.
Having said that, I was impressed with this video clip presentation. The audio Bible cast is impressive and I found the crucifixion clip very moving. Check it out (the trailer is ten minutes long).
You can listen to excerpts for free on the right hand of the website here. What I find particularly interesting is the juxtaposition of Old Testament prophecies and their New Testament fulfilment. Although straight forward narratives such as the gospels are pretty easy to listen to, I wonder how successful the recordings of the Prophets are? Commentators have struggled throughout history to make head or tail of Isaiah. Luther may well have had Isaiah in mind when he commented:
"The prophets have a queer way of talking, like people who, instead of proceeding in an orderly manner, ramble off from one thing to the next, so that you cannot make head or tail of them or see what they are getting at."
I wonder if the atmospheric music, passionate reading and dramatized characters will help ease the complexity?
get to know an entirely different theological culture which has deeply influenced biblical academia since the 19th century (I mean, of course, the culture of 'higher criticism'). Last year I hung out with the Protestants (the faculties are denominationally ordered here, unlike in England, where we're all thrown into the same class room), this year I'm going to hang out with Catholics, who look far more interesting (L. Hossfeld runs the OT department. He's worked closely with Zenger on the Psalms and is interested in synchronic approaches to the Bible).
The two seminars I've decided to visit are "Die PsalmenimNeuen Testament" ("The Psalms in the New Testament") and "DasAlte Testament und seine TransparenzaufChristushin" ("The Old Testament and its Transparency to Christ"). The second looks especially interesting, given the intellectual climate found in Bonn and the nature of my doctorate, which has something to do with reading the Old Testament as the Word of God.
So much for personal details. Iyov has started a thread on Bible translation and has posted an interesting link to a tribute to Derrida, found on the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) website. It's worth a read if you think postmodernism is about believing what you want to believe. Here's an interesting quote from the article:
"Derrida, who never once associated himself with the much-abused term "postmodern," tended to regard newness with suspicion. Newness is too prone to make a straw man of "old"-ness, and to demolish old world orders to make new ones (often with catastrophic results). Commenting on Jesus's saying about new wineskins and new cloth (Matt. 9.14-17; Mk 2.18-22; Lk 5.33-39), he recommended a more humble, less apocalyptic form of "newness." Newness should be aware that it is always repatching and reweaving old cloth. "
Attached at the end of the article is a fascinating audio recording (mp3) of a public dialogue with Derrida at 2002 SBL Annual Meeting: "On Religion: An Interview With Jacques Derrida". He's asked questions by Yvonne Sherwood, John D. Caputo, and Kevin Hart, on topics to do with prayer, the relationship of deconstruction to Christianity and, my favorite, his interpretation of two midrashimfound in Genesis Rabba.
Tomorrow I'll continue the "in accordance with scripture" sub-thread.
Justin Taylor of Between the Two Worlds has pointed out that one can now access audio and video resources from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia for free. You need to register first, but it looks as if it may be worth it. Justin lists the following names that may be of interest.
