Ballard & Pritchard - Practical Theology in Action

The reading list said "an excellent guide to the fundamental task of theological reflection". Hmmmm...

The first thing that annoyed me about the book was the way that it read like all that social sciences stuff and educational psychology I read during my teacher training.

As a physicist, I like to understand things using models - simplified versions of reality that might or might not bear any resemblence to what is actually going on, but which produce much the same answers. I have a very arrogant and hideously unfair model of how social-sciencey types work. Here is it...

When people don't understand something properly, we (as a group) have a tendancy to come up with lots of theories. What this will actually consist of in practice is usually lots of individual people having their own flawed ideas and insisting strongly on them. Because the ideas work, at least in part (like all convincing lies), there are some things about them that are valid and true. The people who push those ideas are quite often, but not always, arrogant.

But there are other people too in the "interpretative community". Usually these are the ones who aren't quite arrogant enough to insist that their own way is the only truth, but also aren't imaginative enough to think of a better explanation and aren't discerning enough to realise that all the other ideas are partly true and partly false rather than just true in some nebulous post-modern sense. On the other hand, they are well-read enough to be able to regurgitate half a dozen contradictory views on any given topic and believe all of them. In my (arrogantly conceived) little conceptual universe, it's people like those who write books like this one.

So this book spends a large portion of its length, mainly at the beginning and end, merrily prancing through all kinds of ideas - all with something slight to commend them and all either hopelessly arrogant, stupid or naive. Some of the ideas say that it's very important to realise that some of the ideas we're sampling from all over the place might not be Christian. Sometimes they remember that, sometimes they don't, never do they apply it to their owm methodology, even when their failure to do so means they end up denying the uniqueness of Christ (2nd ed, p154).

There's also an annoying flawed-ness to many of the arguments and appallingly naive stereotyping of more conversative arguments. Here's an example (the one which ends up implicitly denying the uniqueness of Christ).

There were, not unexpectedly, some, though only one or two who took an 'exclusivist' position, claiming that Christianity was the only true religion. It was certainly an attitude found strongly in the independent evangelical congregation and, in a pragmatic, less doctrinaire way, in the black-led church. Not was it a stance... that should be lightly dismissed. Christianity had always made universal claims for Christ as the revelation of God. But it had not, until the emergence of what has been called Christendom, been absolutely exclusivist, assuming, in the West at least, no salvation outside the Church. Rather, there had always been a strong strand that had recognised truth and wisdom in religious and philosophic traditions other than its own.

That is wrong, naive and stupid. It assumes that if I recognise a non-Christian to be right on anything, I must think they're going to heaven. I recognise that a lot of physics, even the majority, has been figured out well by non-Christians using the brains that God gave them. Does that mean that I think they're somehow saved? No.

Quite often, the chapters are full of annoying waffle and comparing different wrong views, concluding that they are all correct and then summing it up in something mind-numbingly obvious that I'd have been happy starting with as an assumption.

Take, for example, the Pastoral Cycle, which is the key idea in the book. It's quite sensible actually - the idea is that if you want to know how to respond to something, you look at the situation, look at the priniciples involved, think about it, do something about it, then reflect on whether or not it worked. It's not exactly rocket science, even though rocket science is easy. (It's rocket engineering that's difficult).

Now the book does spend quite a while explaining it and applying it usefully to, for example, learning from placements at theological college. That was far and away the best bit of the book.

Personally, I think the Pastoral Cycle is incredibly obvious and what I'd have done anyway without thinking about it. But sometimes it's useful to have the obvious spelled out. It's just a shame that the rest of the book is such utter rubbish.

Paul McKechnie - The First Christian Centuries

This is a book basically covering Church history from Pentecost (circa AD 33) to Constantine making Christianity legal in AD 313.

McKechnie is generally coming from a background that I agree with - he says the New Testament is a good source for early church history, though he argues his case well rather than just assuming it.

McKechnie pays particular attention to the dating of the New Testament, the relationship between the Church and various heretical sects and other groups, as well as the role of women in the early church (which was jolly interesting). Where there's a debate on something, of course, he outlines the main positions and states and explains his own view, which I usually found persuasive.

I guess the area I'd most like to see strengthened in this book is the theology. Not that it's dodgy - just that there's not much of it and I'd have been interested in some of the theological discussions and relationships between groups, etc.

As fairly basic (250-odd pages) introductions go, it seems informative and very good. There are certainly issues I'd like to know more about, but at least I now know what the issues are and have a better general picture.

Stambaugh & Balch - The New Testament in Its Social Environment

Another book on New Testament background...

This basically reads like a non-narrative history textbook, which is probably because it is. It seeks to describe the social, political and economic structures of the Eastern Roman Empire between about 300BC and 100AD, with particular attention to the situation in Palestine.

And they're pretty good at that. Where they get ropey is when they try dealing with the gospels or letters and getting theology or history out of them. They don't seem to be especially good at dealing with subtlety, and would be better sticking with ancient history.

Generally pretty interesting on the historical background front.

Borg & Wright - The Meaning of Jesus

A very interesting book, this one... Marcus Borg (about as liberal as a Christian can get, if not more so) and NT Wright (fairly conservative) discuss who Jesus was/is, who he thought he was, what he did, etc

In general, Borg takes the line that Jesus was a man (but not God) who in some sense after his death became "the Christ of faith", and that most of the gospel accounts are actually metaphors written back into the life of Jesus by the early church. This includes basically most of his teaching, miracles, birth, resurrection, etc. Wright takes a much more normal line - that Jesus was the Messiah, claiming to bring about God's kingdom and the true return from exile, that he was born of a virgin, raised from the dead, etc. He doesn't exactly follow the standard evangelical line, but I'd agree with everything he said, even though sometimes there's more to say as well. But you can't talk exhaustively about Jesus in one non especially large book.

What I found most interesting about the book was the difference in approach taken by Borg and Wright. Borg's liberal position is the one that traditionally is seen as more "scientific", but time and again the only arguments he uses for his position are "I think that..." and "It looks suspect to me...". They're almost all subjective. By contrast, Wright's approach is heavily evidence-based, looking at how first century Jews would have understood what Jesus was doing, examining evidence for how oral tradition works, etc.

It's also interesting looking at Borg's presuppositions - some of them are fairly clear in what he writes. He presupposes, for example, that God doesn't or can't act in the world, as he cannot see any explanation for the Holocaust otherwise. But his argument then hinges upon Jesus as a mystic, who experienced God within the world. If God cannot or does not act in the world, we cannot experience him in the world. Borg's approach is logically inconsistent.

Another example would be Borg's assumption that if something has a metaphorical meaning as well as a literal meaning, it was probably written only because the metaphorical meaning was true, rather than both being true. So, for example, Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey fulfils promises about what God's king would do from hundreds of years before. So Borg seems to argue that the early Christians saw Jesus as God's king, so wrote that he had fulfilled this prophecy (even though he hadn't) as a way of pointing to his identity. Which does rather raise the question, as Wright points out, of how on earth they came to believe that Jesus was God's king if he didn't fulfil the prophecy.

Borg also makes strange assumptions which almost seem designed to reinforce his position. For example, he assumes that if three gospels carry very similar stories, that one of them was written first, that the other two copied the story and made up their extra details, only leaving one source. Which makes me wonder then how anything could ever be attested by more than one source...

In some circles, the controversy over this book was because Wright acknowledges that Borg is a Christian. I don't know Borg; Tom Wright does. I'm glad it's God making the call, not me.

All in all, an interesting read and a good introduction to the whole "historical Jesus" debate. Whether that debate is worth bothering with, except to refute the sceptics, is a different question altogether.

Gerd Theissen - The Shadow of the Galilean

Onto New Testament background now...

Imagine a liberal socialist theologian, of the kind who might write this about the Resurrection:

There can be no doubt about the subjective authenticity of the appearances tradition.

Imagine him writing a novel to introduce people to the idea of the quest for the historical Jesus and the background to the gospels.

This is that novel. It follows a character who is give the task of investigating Jesus (and some others) to see to what extent they pose a threat to the Romans.

As an introduction to the social background, it's pretty good. I think it assumes too much on a liberal and anti-miraculous front, too much in terms of the extent of socialist theory and too much in terms of which liberal theories of what actually happened were circulating that early.

It also has the advantage that it's short and easy to read...

Provan, Long & Longman - A Biblical History of Israel

Continuing in the reading stuff about the OT theme, this is a good attempt by three scholars to put together a Biblical history of Israel, interacting heavily with the Biblical text, modern criticism, archaeology and other ancient sources.

What stood out for me was their honesty. There's none of the "sweeping this under the mat" that you often find with other scholars. When the data seem inconclusive, they say so. When they don't understand something, they say so. If the archaeology supports the existence of a king called David in roughly the area of Judah, but doesn't tell us anything else about him, when he reigned, what he was like or whatever, they say so. They don't stretch the evidence beyond what it will cover and they do a pretty good job of avoiding inconsistency.

They start by discussing the "liberal critics" I read about last time, specifically the consistency of their reasons for accepting some bits of the Bible as historical but denying others. The basic conclusion seemed to be that there were two possible consistent positions for historians (without assuming infallibility) - either to doubt absolutely everything, which means you can't really know anything about history (or much else for that matter) - or to take the Biblical text as one "testimony" about the past, trust it conditionally, and see how it fits in with other pieces of evidence.

They then go through Old Testament history from Genesis 12 to Ezra and Nehemiah, discussing different interpretations of the text, which bit have been confirmed by archaeology or other texts, where it is more difficult to reconcile, etc. There's a lot of stuff on the background to the texts, and a lot of stuff on the nature of Old Testament narrative as literature, how to understand the theological themes, etc. It definitely made me think that I'm going to try and get hold of Provan's commentary on Kings if and when I preach through it.

All in all, I thought it was an excellent read and a very good treatment of the material. If I was going to be critical, I'd say some of the earlier sections assume a fair bit of technical vocabulary, but mostly (and especially in the historical sections) it is explained very well.

They say early on that they think it should be applied, but don't think that book is the place to do it. I think I agree, but with that level of understanding of the text, some hard work on application would be greatly appreciated. They also tend to ignore the typological themes in the text (i.e. the way it points forwards to Jesus and the Church and so on), which is again a weakness, but completely understandable since they're aiming to put together a history of Israel from the OT, not to apply it or explain why it's about Jesus.