Book Write-Up: Songs of a Suffering King

J.V. Fesko.  Songs of a Suffering King: The Grand Christ Hymn of Psalms 1-8.  Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014.

J.V. Fesko is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and he is the academic dean at Westminster Seminary California, where he also teaches systematic theology.  In Songs of a Suffering King, Fesko maintains that Jesus Christ is the central figure in Psalms 1-8.

Fesko successfully demonstrates that the New Testament either treats a number of passages in the Psalms as Christ’s words, or applies passages in the Psalms to Christ’s work.  Consequently, Fesko holds that Psalm 1-8 concerns Christ’s faithful obedience to God the Father, Christ’s exaltation, and Christ’s suffering.

At the same time, Fesko believes that some of Psalms 1-8 concern David and his sufferings.  For one, Fesko claims that David was a type or a foreshadowing of Christ.  Second, Fesko thinks that David trusted in God’s promise of a coming Messiah and relied on God’s mercy rather than his own good works to receive God’s approval.

Putting the Psalms in the mouth of Jesus Christ and treating them as Jesus’ words can pose challenges.  What about the passages in which the Psalmist claims that he has sinned, something that Christian Christology says that Jesus did not do?  What about the passages in which the Psalmist appears to wish harm on his enemies?  Does that contradict the attitude of Jesus, who preached love for enemies and asked his Father to forgive those who were putting him to death?

On the other hand, treating the Psalms as the words of David can pose its own challenges to evangelical Christianity.  While Fesko depicts David as one who threw himself on the mercy of God and did not trust in his own inadequate righteousness to earn God’s approval, there are passages in which the Psalmist actually presents himself as righteous and thinks that God rewarded him for that (see Psalm 18:19-26).

I respect Fesko’s project because he is correct to note that the New Testament treats many words of the Psalms as the words of Christ.  I also respect Fesko for the times when he attempted to wrestle with hard questions, such as whether Christ would endorse the desire for retribution in the Psalms, or encourage believers to have that sort of attitude.  Even if some of Fesko’s solutions are a bit muddled, he offers decent practical insights (i.e., one should not pray against specific individuals but should hope for their repentance).

My main problem with Fesko’s book is that he applies some parts of Psalms 1-8 to David, and other parts to Jesus, and I think that is rather arbitrary.  If Fesko wanted to argue that Psalms 1-8 were originally about David but foreshadowed Christ, that would be one thing.  But, even though he goes that route, on some level, he seems to apply some things to David rather than to Christ.  My guess is that this is because he believes that some parts of Psalms 1-8 cannot apply to Christ: Why would Christ need to throw himself on God’s mercy, for example, when Christ has never sinned?  In my opinion, Fesko should have been more explicit in laying out a methodology of what he was applying to David alone, and what he was applying to Christ.

I received this book from the publisher through Cross Focused Reviews in exchange for an honest review.

Left Behind and Church

Someone at church was encouraging us to go see the new Left Behind movie, starring Nicholas Cage.  Left Behind is a series of books written by Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins about the end times.  I told the pastor that I thought Presbyterians had a different take on the rapture!  He said that they do, overall, but that people in Presbyterian churches have different opinions.

I suppose that I am the sort of person who should not like the Left Behind series.  I am not exactly a conservative Christian.  I have an academic background, and a number of liberal and even conservative Christian academics tend to look down their noses on the Left Behind series.

But I actually enjoyed the series.  At least the books that I read.  Specifically the first two.  During my childhood, I somewhat gravitated towards Bircher conspiracy books and prophetic speculations.  Maybe that stuff appealed to the same part of me that enjoys science fiction, fantasy, or Stephen King books.

Like I said, I enjoyed the first two books of the Left Behind series.  Later, some of the technicalities in them made me lose interest.  But I did listen to an audio drama of all of the books, and it was awesome.  One chilling scene is when Hattie Durham—who through much of the series is a very shallow woman—-takes a bold prophetic stance against the Antichrist, and the false prophet consumes her with fire after saying, “You shall feel the wrath of your lord and god!”

My pastor told me that the next Bible study will be about Revelation.  I’m reluctant to go.  It is one thing for me to read this stuff on my own, where I have the freedom to make up my own mind about what to believe.  It is another thing for me to be in a group, where there is social pressure for me to fit in and go with the crowd.  Plus, talking about the end-times can lead to talking about politics and bashing liberals, which I don’t really want to spend my Thursday nights hearing.

The curriculum, though, looks pretty good.  The lady teaching it has a master’s from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, so she knows her Bible well, and she probably avoids a lot of the craziness that surrounds the interpretation of the Book of Revelation.  Moreover, I look at the endorsements, and there are progressive Christian names there.  The names of people who would probably be accused of being apostates of the end-times by some people in the group, if they were familiar with these figures and what the figures believe.

II Chronicles 1

In II Chronicles 1, God asks Solomon at Gibeon what he wants God to give to him.  Solomon responds in v 10 (KJV): “Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great?”

This stood out to me for a couple reasons:

1.  I have read more than one scholar say that Solomon’s wisdom functions differently in Chronicles than it does in I Kings.  In I Kings, Solomon wants wisdom to judge the people, and that wisdom is put on display when Solomon judges between the two prostitutes who are each claiming that a baby is their own.  In Chronicles, however, we see none of that, and Solomon’s wisdom is specifically for the construction of the Temple.

I would say that Solomon in II Chronicles 1 wants wisdom so that he can judge the people, just like Solomon does in I Kings.  At the same time, I do not dismiss the scholarly argument that Solomon’s wisdom in Chronicles functions primarily for the construction of the Temple.  The Chronicler focuses on that, and Solomon’s father, King David, says in I Chronicles 29:1: “Solomon my son, whom alone God hath chosen, is yet young and tender, and the work is great: for the palace is not for man, but for the LORD God” (KJV).  From what David says, one can see that Solomon needs help and wisdom for the great task of constructing the Temple!

2.  Solomon says that he needs wisdom so that he can go out and come in before the people.  The phrase “go out and come in” stood out to me.  I had assumed that it meant going out and coming in for war.  But why would Solomon go out and come in for war?  The Chronicler says more than once that Solomon is a man of peace, whereas Solomon’s father David was a man of war.  That is why Solomon gets to build the Temple, while David did not.

Raymond Dillard in the Word Biblical Commentary believes that the phrase “is ordinarily used in a military sense of leading an army (I Chr 11:2; I Sam 18:13, 16),” but that, in the case of Solomon, a “man of peace” according to the Chronicler, it “refers to adequate civil government.”  As far as I can see, Dillard does not defend the idea that going out and coming in can have a broader meaning than leading an army.

I would say, though, that the phrase can have a broader meaning.  I think of the blessing in Deuteronomy 28:6: Blessed shall you be when you go in and come out.  The HarperCollins Study Bible interprets that to mean whatever a person does, citing Deuteronomy 31:2 and Psalm 121:8.  May God bless you as you live life!  I cannot prove that these passages do not pertain to battles, but it is plausible to me that they are broader in scope.

Solomon in II Chronicles 1:10 is probably saying that he needs God’s help to conduct himself as king.

UPDATE: Tobit 5:18 uses the expression of going in and out in a non-military context.  "And his mother began to weep, and said to Tobit, 'Why is it that you have sent my child away?  Is he not the staff of our hand as he goes in and out before us?...'"  (NRSV).  

Finishing Christine Hayes' Lectures, and Abraham's Seed Blessing the Nations

Yesterday, I finished watching Professor Christine Hayes' lectures for her Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) class at Yale University.  Yale offers her lectures online, and you can also find them on Youtube.  Next, I will watch Yale Professor Dale Martin's lectures for his "Introduction to the New Testament History and Literature" class.

I decided to do this because I am applying for some online adjunct teaching jobs in religion, and I was wondering how exactly I would go about teaching an intro to Hebrew Bible or intro to New Testament class.  I'm at the point where I have read so many different perspectives, and I continue to read so many different perspectives.  It's easy, once that happens, to get lost in the trees and to miss the forest (if there even is a forest).  What exactly would I want my students to learn about the Hebrew Bible or New Testament?  And can I even open my mouth and speak a proposition, when I am aware of scholars who would disagree with that proposition? 

I've taken or audited intro classes in the past.  Each teacher has his or her own focus.  But I have noticed some commonalities.  In intro to Hebrew Bible classes, you usually have a section on the Pentateuch, a section on the historical writings, a section on the wisdom writings, a section on Psalms, a section on the prophets, and a section on apocalyptic literature.  In the New Testament, you have a section on the Gospels, a section on Paul, a section on deutero-Pauline writings (if you believe Paul didn't write certain letters), and a section on Revelation (maybe also one on James, Jude, and I-II Peter).  These sections can take several days----for example, there is a lot to cover about the Pentateuch: creation stories, source criticism, whether the Exodus and Conquest happened, the purity laws, the Deuteronomist, etc.  And, of course, one would need an introductory section to set the stage for the rest of the course.

I thought Christine Hayes did a good job in presenting the highlights of issues in Hebrew Bible scholarship, while informing students that there are scholars out there who disagree.  Her presentation was good on the introductory level, and yet it was quite meaty. 

There was something in particular that Christine Hayes said that stood out to me, though.  In one lecture, she said that, in Genesis, God gets tired of dealing with all of humanity and decides to work with one group, Israel.  That happens when God chooses Abraham.  That stood out to me because I had just read T. Desmond Alexander's From Paradise to the Promised Land, which is an evangelical work about the Pentateuch, and Alexander stresses that God intended to bless the nations through Abraham's seed, the Messiah.  Christians emphasize the part of God's promise to Abraham that said that Abraham's seed would bring blessings to the nations because that coincides with aspects of their belief system----that God loves the Gentiles, too.  I have wondered, though, if they place more emphasis on this theme of Abraham blessing the nations than Genesis or the Hebrew Bible itself does, and if they are actually interpreting that theme differently from how it was originally intended to be understood.  Throughout the Hebrew Bible, there is a salient theme of God blessing the nations, but God also has a close, special relationship with Israel.  I think that one can legitimately question whether God in the Hebrew Bible chooses Israel as a means to the end----to restore creation, or to bring the nations to God----even though that is part of the plan. 

Book Write-Up: Introduction to Modern Theology

John E. Wilson.  Introduction to Modern Theology: Trajectories in the German Tradition.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

I got this book from Christian Book Distributors for a low price.  It is about Christian theology in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  Although its subtitle is “Trajectories in the German Tradition,” and it has a chapter about Christianity in Germany in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, it does not limit itself to Germany.  Actually, it has a section about Martin Luther King, Jr.!  But the book is largely about the impact of German theology, which was quite significant, and which many theologians, even those outside of Germany, have seen a need to address.

In terms of lucidity, I would probably recommend that readers consult William Placher’s Introduction to Christian Theology if they are seeking a clear summary of a theologian’s thought.  Still, I would not say that Wilson’s book is superfluous, not by a long shot.  Wilson’s book not only talks about well-known theologians (i.e., Barth, Tillich), but also a number of lesser known ones.  Wilson’s book has breadth and also depth.  Something that made the book difficult for me to read was that it threw a lot of information and theological figures at me.  While that may not make for easy reading, however, it can be helpful to students, scholars, or people who have the time to sit down and really hammer out and digest what theologians were trying to say.

Although Wilson’s book had depth, I did often get the feeling that theologians were rendering simple concepts into complicated language.  Many of them were addressing such issues as the problem of human selfishness, or the thirst for something greater or fulfilling.  I can read about that in popular Christian books, without the complicated language.  There was also the desire to find something (or someone) absolute amidst the fluctuation of history and culture.  While I have encountered such issues in other books, I did learn from Wilson’s book about problems with which many theologians wrestled that did not occur to me: how can humans, or God, be free in a world of cause and effect?  Some believe that God is the one who provides that freedom.

A question that I often had in reading this book concerned the basis for which theologians were making their claims—-such as the claim, for example, that there is a God, or an Absolute.  What was the foundation or evidence for what they were saying?  Is it religious experience?  Observations about the way that the world seems to work?  A sense that humans have needs, and that Christianity offers answers that appear to make sense?  None of these things is necessarily an iron-clad foundation—-the data can probably be interpreted differently, meaning the data by themselves do not point in one unambiguous direction or obviously demonstrate the truth of what the theologians are saying—-and yet there is a rhyme of reason to such attempts at a foundation.  Speaking personally, though, I have long struggled with liberal theology, or (more accurately) theology that is not fundamentalist, for, while I thought that it effectively discredited fundamentalist approaches to Scripture as reliable, I wondered on what basis liberal theologians were making their own truth-claims.  They seemed to believe in parts of the Bible, even as they showed that the Bible is not inerrant in every detail.  On what basis were they believing some parts of the Bible, and not others?  Were they embracing the parts that just sounded good to them?  Certainly they would need a better foundation than that—-I was usually challenged to come up with a better foundation for my beliefs!

I would like to say four more things:

1.  One thing I learned from Wilson’s book: I do not understand Kant as well as I thought I did.  And this was after reading stuff about Kant, including a lengthy biography!  What I understood Kant to be saying was that there is a difference between how things appear to us and how those things really are.  There is the thing in itself, and there is how we see that thing, and the two are not necessarily the same.  I thought that the thing in itself was the object, but Wilson was associating it with the noumena.  My understanding from Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief is that the noumena are not objects on earth but are metaphysical: Plantinga (as I understood him) was arguing against the claim that Kant excluded the possibility of knowing God by saying that Kant himself believed in metaphysical realities, the noumena.  Wilson said that, for Kant, the thing is itself has an impact on our perception.  What exactly does that mean, especially if the thing in itself has to do with the noumena?  Are the noumena like Plato’s forms—-concepts that things on earth merely reflect—-and Kant is saying that we can understand things on earth, on some level, because we have some understanding of the noumena, metaphysical realities, or forms that things on earth reflect?

2.  There was some debate in the book about the importance or relevance of the historical Jesus to theology.  Bultmann appeared to be saying that it was not particularly relevant: Christians encounter the Christ of faith, and that is valid even if historical-critics can nitpick the Gospels (as Bultmann did).  What went through my mind was, “Okay, then does the Bible have any use for Christians?”  Paul Tillich said that we should go with how Jesus is presented in the Gospels, but that made me ask: “What if the Gospels’ portraits of Jesus are not historically accurate?  Is Tillich ignoring critical scholarship?  Or does he think that it hits the main points of what Jesus was about, and we can go with that?”  Some embraced the historical Jesus, seeing him as in touch with the divine and unattached to the world out of a belief that the end was near—-a belief that did not turn out to be true, but which led Jesus to live an admirable spiritual life.  There was also Pennenberg, who dismissed arguments that Jesus’ disciples merely saw a hallucination when they beheld the risen Jesus, and yet maintained that the only solid evidence for Jesus’ resurrection will be when we ourselves are raised from the dead!  I guess I can ask how that helps us now, but I do admire Pannenberg’s honesty!

3.     I liked what Wilson said on page 53 about Hegel’s thought: “History is the ‘work’ of the Spirit: in and through the struggles of human life, Spirit is driven to find solutions to the problems of alienation, of ‘otherness.’  Its suffering of history’s real contradictions forces it to hard, difficult work.”

4.  I also appreciated the discussion of anonymous Christianity on page 270—-that God can be near an atheist who does not believe in him, or that an atheist by embracing self-sacrifice shows his knowledge of the Christian truth, even if he does not explicitly confess it or recognize it within a Christian context.

This is a book that I read all the way through, but I could not exhaust it in one reading alone.  Maybe I will reread it someday.  I probably will consult it as a reference.

Book Write-Up: The Daring Heart of David Livingstone

Jay Milbrandt.  The Daring Heart of David Livingstone: Exile, African Slavery, and the Publicity Stunt that Saved Millions.  Nashville: Nelson Books (An Imprint of Thomas Nelson), 2014.

David Livingstone was a nineteenth century English explorer and missionary.  The Daring Heart of David Livingstone is about his stand against slavery and the slave trade, as well as his desire to find the source of the Nile.  (And, according to Milbrandt, the question of what the Nile’s source is remains unresolved.)

The book was excellent whenever it discussed Livingstone’s personal background, his personality, his family, his faith, and his attempts to navigate his opposition to slavery within sensitive political waters.  Livingstone sought economic alternatives to slavery, such as establishing a colony in Africa from which England would receive cotton, allowing England to get cotton from another source besides the slave labor of the American South.  Livingstone also tried to dissuade Africans from participating in the slave trade, while learning of their reasons for doing so, and he contended against “slavers” who captured people as slaves.

The book is quite detailed about Livingstone’s nautical adventures, some of which I found interesting, and some of which I did not.  Moreover, Milbrandt seemed to presume some background knowledge of Livingstone on the part of the reader.  In my opinion, Milbrandt would have done well to state briefly in the preface what exactly Livingstone did in opposing slavery, so that readers would not get lost in the details later in the book.  Milbrandt also should have included brief biographical information about Livingstone at the beginning of the book, to inform readers uninformed about who Livingstone was, and to allow readers to get to know Livingstone better.

Milbrandt includes discussion questions in the back of the book.  Some of them relate to the application of Christianity.  Some of them may require more historical knowledge in order for some readers to answer them (i.e., a question about whether an alternative approach to banning maritime slave shipping should have been taken in trying to end the slave trade, since the ban “arguably made the slave trade more dangerous and violent along the Kisiju Road…”).  My favorite question was, “Was Livingstone a bad leader, or a good leader with bad people skills?”

People with an interest in and knowledge about Livingstone may find this book helpful.  Those without as much background knowledge about him can still be edified by the book, since it is about a man who thought he had failed yet actually did not.  But the latter category of readers may finish the book feeling unsatisfied, in areas.

Note: I received a complimentary review copy of this book through the BookLook Bloggers (http://booklookbloggers.com/) book review bloggers program.  The program does not require for my review to be positive, and my review reflects my honest reaction to the book.

Movie Write-Up: Frozen

We watched Frozen last night.  I actually watched it twice.  Frozen is a 2013 Walt Disney movie about a queen named Elsa who goes off into solitude after people learn about her magical powers—-powers of making ice and snow.  Elsa inadvertently causes a snow storm in her land, so her sister Anna, accompanied by Kristoff, his reindeer Sven, and Olaf the little snowman, go in search of her.  But Anna is not just looking for her sister to stop the snow storm.  She loves her sister, and she is saddened that her sister has shut her out for most of their life.  The reason that Elsa has been doing so, however, is that Elsa as a child accidentally injured Anna with her ice-powers, and Elsa does not want to hurt Anna (or anyone else) ever again.  While Anna and Elsa have such a rapport on the rare occasions that they do get to spend time together, Elsa consigns herself to isolation.

I thought that it would be a good idea for us to watch this movie right now because the TV series Once Upon a Time is focusing on Frozen this season.  I have been familiar with most of the characters in Once Upon a Time on account of Disney movies or Grimm’s fairy tales.  Consequently, when they have been introduced into the series, my reaction was, “Hey, it’s that character!”  I did not have as much familiarity with Frozen, though.  Although I had read the wikipedia summary of what the movie is about, reading about a movie and actually watching and experiencing it are two different things.  Doing the latter, I get to know the characters better.

I enjoyed Frozen.  I liked all of the characters, including Olaf, whom I thought would annoy me.  A major disappointment to me, however, is that Prince Hans—-a prince from another country who was engaged to Princess Anna—-turned out to be a bad guy.  Of course, having read the wikipedia entry, and having seen the reference to Hans and his twelve angry brothers in Once Upon a Time, I knew before watching the movie that he would turn out to be bad.  But the problem was that I really liked him throughout much of the movie.  He seemed so good—-he was a bit socially awkward, he cared for his horse, he served the inhabitants of Arendelle when Anna was off looking for Elsa, and he ordered his men not to harm Elsa when they came to her ice-palace.  Who would have suspected that this was all an act—-that he had designs on the throne of Arendelle and had plans to kill Elsa?

Except for “Let It Go,” the music at first was a turn-off to me, but I appreciated it a lot more the second time that I watched the movie.  “Do You Want to Build a Snowman,” which Anna sang outside of Elsa’s door in asking Elsa to come out and play, was so sad because it captured Anna’s loneliness and desire to be with her sister Elsa.  There was also a beautiful song about how Elsa did not have to figure things out alone because her sister was there for her.  And the song that the rock-trolls sang when they were trying to get Kristoff (whom they took in and raised) and Anna married—-“He’s a fixer-upper”—-was cool because it was about how Kristoff had rough edges (i.e., he was socially awkward, a loner who liked his reindeer more than people, and had a smell), yet love could bring out the best in him, and anyone.

I’m glad I watched this movie, both because it will provide me context for this season’s Once Upon a Time, and also because it had a sweet story.