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Index of Library Notes.
Click for How to use the Library.
Click for Notes 09-10-2008: 'The Resurrection of Jesus: Crossan and Wright in Dialogue' by Crossan and Wright.
Click for Notes 07-20-2008: 'God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now' by John Dominic Crossan.
Click for Notes 05-30-2008: 'Jesus for the Non-Religious' by Bishop John Shelby Spong.
Click for Notes 04-17-2008: 'David and Solomon' by Finkelstein and Silberman.
Click for Notes 03-07-2008: Dever, and Finklestein, on the Origins of Ancient Isreal.
Click for Notes 01-13-2008: 'Who wrote the Bible?' by Richard Elliott Friedman.
Click for Notes 11-15-2007: 'A History of the Development of Doctrine' by Jaroslav Pelikan.
Click for Notes 10-16-2007: 'The Whimsical Christian' by Dorothy Sayers.
Click for Notes 09-07-2007: 'Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time' by Marcus Borg.
Click for Notes 08-11-2007: 'The Rapture Exposed' by Barbara R. Rossing.
Click for Notes 07-11-2007: 'The Bible for Today’s Church' Series.
Click for Notes 06-24-2007: Welcome to the Library.
Library Notes September 10th, 2008.
'The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue' is one of the newer books in our library.
It features a discussion between the generally 'conservative' scholar N.T. Wright, Episcopal Bishop of Durham,
and the generally 'liberal' scholar John Dominic Crossan, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar.
This book centers on a debate, between two well-known biblical scholars, about whether the physical resurrection of Jesus actually happened.
Wright argues that the resurrection was a literal, historical event, while Crossan disagrees.
The discussion between Crossan and Wright is an account from a live forum arranged by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
The forum setting allowed Crossan and Wright not only to state their own positions, but to discuss them with each other.
They treated each other with dignity and respect, but did not hesitate to make clear their profound differences.
(N.T. Wright has also been in dialogue with Marcus Borg, another member of the Jesus Seminar.)
I found it very interesting to see just how their positions held up in a conversation.
The book is also a 'short cut' way to judge the various arguments for yourself,
since both Wright's 'The Resurrection of the Son of God'
and Crossan's 'The Historical Jesus' are quite long, and full of scholarly details.
In addition to the account of the debate, there is:
- a summary of biblical scholarship over the last two hundred years on the topic of the physical resurrection,
- and essays on the subject of the debate:
- Craig Evans writes about Crossan and Wright and their differing views,
- Gary Haberman writes on theological trends,
- Alan Segal presents 'liberal' historical-critical views on whether the resurrection can be verified,
- William Lane Craig presents the more 'conservative' arguments,
- several others contribute as well.
The book is edited by Robert B. Stewart, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary,
where he directs the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Program.
I recommend this book. Fuad Saba
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Library Notes July 20th, 2008.
I am pleased to announce the addition to our Library of the following volumes, all of which I recommend for your reading and nourishment:
The Birth of Christianity : Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus, by John Dominic Crossan;
The Challenge of Jesus, by N.T. Wright;
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins;
Paul in Asia Minor: The Life and Letters of Paul, by Pheme Perkins;
Challenge of Diversity: The Witness of Paul and the Gospels, by David Rhoads;
The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan And N.T. Wright in Dialogue, by Robert B. Stewart, et al;
This Far by Grace: A Bishop's Journey Through Questions of Homosexuality, by: J. Neil Alexander;
God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, by John Dominic Crossan;
Paul, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Early Church, by James W. Aageson;
The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity 200-1000 AD, by Peter Brown;
The Gospel according to St. John, by C. K. Barrett.
This month’s review is of 'God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now' by John Dominic Crossan.
Crossan asks: have those who resort to violence as a means of change succeeded in their quest for Empire?
Or has nonviolence been more effective in bringing about lasting change?
He proposes that the solution is not in violence but in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.
He compares Jesus and John the Baptist, stating:
"Jesus differed precisely from John in emphasizing not the future-presence
but the already-presence of God's Kingdom as the Great Divine Cleanup of the world."
Christ saw the Kingdom as a present and active reality.
Crossan compares "God's radicality" to "civilization's normalcy."
The latter consists of empire after empire promising Peace through Victory, with violence being the normalcy to which civilization accustoms us.
God's radicality, on the other hand, is the clear and present Kingdom brought by the Jesus who lived 2000 years ago.
The Kingdom is based on mutuality among all peoples.
It is manifested in healing the sick, dining with those you heal, and announcing that the Kingdom is present in that mutuality.
There are no divisions, classes, genders, and no basis whatsoever to assign superiority and inferiority.
Fuad Saba
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Library Notes May 30th, 2008.
Bishop John Shelby Spong has written many thought-provoking books.
'Jesus for the Non-Religious' integrates threads of prior writings, and provides a good overview of his recent work.
Spong’s inspiration for the book is the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his desire for a 'religionless Christianity'.
According to Bonhoeffer, the church has failed in its mission to the modern world because it was not able to separate the message of Christ from religious trappings.
The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge.
Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance.
The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt.
This signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ.
It only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center.
The purpose of Bonhoeffer’s non-religious interpretation was to allow the gospel to address humans in a secular age, and to do so without them having to become ‘religious’.
Bonhoeffer felt that this interpretation was actually most in line with the gospel of the flesh-and-blood Lord.
Religionless Christianity did not need to presuppose humanity’s wickedness to be relevant;
rather, it met humans at the center of their lives, both in their joys and in their sufferings.
Spong’s book works through the OT and NT myths, and the development of the gospel stories and creedal evolution,
and begins to give us a glimpse of who Jesus was before gospels were written, creeds formed or doctrines developed.
Spong contends that if we are willing to journey to this place with openness, we can be assured that Jesus will look very different.
As Marcus Borg stated, we might "see Jesus again for the first time" through this process.
I recommend this book, it will be in our Library by July 1st. Fuad Saba
Check How to use the Library (below).
Library Notes April 17th, 2008.
This month I review a new book in our library, 'David and Solomon' by
Finkelstein and Silberman,
(the authors of The Bible Unearthed, reviewed below on March 7th).
The biblical figures of David ( shepherd, warrior, and divinely protected king ),
and of his son Solomon ( great builder, wise judge, and serene ruler of a vast empire )
have become timeless models of righteous leadership and of God's sanction.
The authors follow these biblical narratives, and then try to combine them with
archaeology and with extra-biblical textual evidence.
They note that the absence of contemporary confirmation from outside the Bible
is no reason to believe that these two characters did not actually exist.
Rather, the biblical stories form the basis for a legend tradition in which the Davidic legacy gradually transforms "from a down-to-earth sociopolitical
program into the symbols of a transcendent religious faith that would spread
throughout the world."
They contend that the archaeological discoveries of recent decades have shown
"how far from the glamorous scriptural portraits the actual world of David and Solomon was."
Although it is likely that David and Solomon were actual historical characters,
they were very different from their scriptural portraits.
Finkelstein and Silberman offer evidence it is unlikely that David ever
conquered land more than two days' march from the heartland of Judah, and that
Solomon's Jerusalem was "neither extensive nor impressive."
Their point is to show how the legends of David and Solomon developed, and how
they came to shape Western religious and political traditions in important ways.
See you next time, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
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Library Notes March 7th, 2008.
This is a review of two books about the Origins of Ancient Israel:
- Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? by William Dever
- The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman.
which will be in our Library by April 1st.
Both books explore the continuing controversies regarding the true origins of ancient Israel,
and present their interpretation of archaeological evidence for assessing the historicity of the well-known Old Testament stories.
They reach different conclusions.
In his search for the actual circumstances of Israel's emergence in Canaan,
Dever reevaluates the Exodus-Conquest traditions in the books of Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, and 1 & 2 Samuel.
According to Dever, the authentic ancestors of the "Israelite peoples" were most likely Canaanites,
together with some pastoral nomads and small groups of Semitic slaves escaping from Egypt who,
through the long cultural and socioeconomic struggles recounted in the book of Judges,
managed to forge a new agrarian, communitarian, and monotheistic society.
Dever rejects both the revisionists who characterize biblical literature as "pious propaganda",
and the conservatives who are convinced it is all factual.
Attempting to break through this impasse, Dever draws on thirty years of archaeological fieldwork in the Near East,
amassing a wide range of evidence for his own view of the development of Israelite history.
He applies archaeology, history, mythology, scripture and tradition on the people he calls the proto-Israelites,
the forebears of the nation in ancient Canaan we have come to know as Israel of the Iron Age through Roman times.
Finkelstein and Silberman present to a general audience the results of recent research,
which contends that while the Bible is the most important piece of Western literature,
serving concrete religious, cultural and political purposes,
many of the accounts recorded in the Old Testament are not accurate historically.
Finkelstein and Silberman do not aim to undermine the Bible's import,
but to demonstrate why it became the basic document for a distinct religious community under particular political circumstances.
In many cases, the Old Testament account is, according to the authors,
neither historical truth, nor literary fiction,
but a powerful expression of memory and hope constructed to serve particular religious purposes,
at a time when religion was not distinguished from politics.
Along with their revision of the biblical account of history,
Finkelstein and Silberman attempt to explain the origins of the Hebrew Bible,
suggesting that the composition of much of it can be tied to the religious agenda of King Josiah of Judah, during the late 7th century BCE.
If you are interested in surveying recent historical and archaeological scholarship about the Old Testament,
these books can serve as good introductions.
See you next time, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
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Library Notes January 13th, 2008.
I recently finished a very readable short book entitled 'Who wrote the Bible?' by Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego.
The book focuses on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, from Genesis to Deuteronomy. Historically known as the 'five books of Moses', the Pentateuch has been the subject of much analysis and scholarship for many hundreds of years, especially since the beginning of the Reformation.
But the real breakthroughs came in the nineteenth century, beginning with the work of Julius Wellhausen, who expanded and synthesized much of the scholarship that has become known as the 'documentary hypothesis."
The hypothesis states that the Pentateuch was the work of several writers, including 'J', the Yahwist writer; 'E', the Elohist writer; 'P', the priestly writer; and 'Dtr1' and 'Dtr2', the two Deuteronomist writers. The first two are distinguished by how the deity was identified: YHWH by the Yahwist, and El or Elohim by the Elohist.
The Deuteronomists are identified by their differing stylistic traits, while "P" emphasized priestly genealogies, holiness codes and ritual.
Further scholarship over the years has uncovered the hands of one or more Redactors who combined all of these sources into the books we know as the Pentateuch.
The documentary hypothesis opposes the traditional view of Moses' authorship.
Friedman contends the books are historical accounts recorded by scribes, probably court priests, of their respective kingdoms. Friedman uses various highlighting techniques to demonstrate variances in the text style or content.
Setting his thesis within a well-defined chronology, Friedman shows how the various authors had previous material to draw on in producing their own accounts. What we now have is the cumulative work of these authors.
This situation explains many of the inconsistencies, since Judaic scribes had different sources than those in Israel. They also, apparently, had different agendas to follow. For example, there are inconsistencies in how Moses and Aaron are presented. Friedman lists other differences, with their probable origins.
The fundamental issue rests on the division of the Hebrew-speaking peoples into the "dual kingdoms" of Israel and Judah. The result was the compilation of two "histories" with different styles and priorities. Each had a different focus and approach to what was meaningful.
The later confusion resulted when this pair of accounts was amalgamated into a single document and promulgated as "the" book.
Friedman emphasizes that this didn't invalidate the histories; it simply means that the reader needs to understand they are a parallel set of accounts.
Although there are many books on the documentary hypothesis, which is now widely accepted in biblical scholarship, I found Friedman’s book to be one of the most readable. It shies away from academic language, uses relatively few notes, and takes a detective-story approach to unraveling the mystery of the Pentateuch’s authorship.
Friedman keeps to a very narrow, but clearly defined, path in assessing biblical origins. He goes to some effort to restrict his thesis to identifying authors and their likely locations.
Contentions over inconsistencies in the bible have raged for centuries. Scholars in the Middle Ages, he reminds us, readily noted how styles varied, accounts were duplicated and traditions conflicted.
With a keen analytical eye enhanced by long experience and good scholarship, he teases a coherent picture from this confusing collection of tales. Although not all the material here is original - and how could it be? - Friedman's assemblage is soundly researched, very ably organized and presented.
This book will be in our Library by February 1st. I highly recommend it!
See you next time, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
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Library Notes November 15th, 2007:
This month’s column is about a five-volume set of books recently contributed to our library at St. John’s.
The name of the series is The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.
The author is Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University.
The work has been hailed as the most scholarly and readable of all the history of doctrine books about the early Church.
Pelikan's style is concise, but also detailed, in that every page provides references for every important item.
Pelikan’s interpretation of doctrine, which is shared by many scholars and clergy, is that doctrine developed over time,
and that what the apostles believed was less defined and cloudier than what the later Church believed.
For instance, the doctrine of original sin is rarely spoken of before Augustine,
and early creeds were less clear about the Son's full equality with the Father,
even though they called the Son "God."
While it may be troubling to some to see important doctrines develop over time,
as many Christians already know, the development and clarification of a doctrine does not make it less true.
Pelikan covers all of the major figures and controversies in the evolution of Christian doctrine, including orthodox and heretic arguments.
He explains why orthodox doctrine prevailed, geographically, politically, and philosophically.
For example, the chapter (in Volume One) on the Trinity focuses on the varying ways of interpreting the relationship of Jesus to the Father.
This includes the (heretical) doctrines of Modalism and Adoptianism, as well as Logos Theology and the Nicene Trinity.
Peter Brown and Sabine MacCormack, commenting on Volume 2 in the New York Review of Books, wrote:
"It is a pleasure to salute this masterpiece of exposition. . . .
The book flows like a great river, slipping easily past landscapes of the utmost diversity:
the great Christological controversies of the seventh century,
the debate on icons in the eighth and ninth,
attitudes to Jews, to Muslims,
to the dualistic heresies of the high Middle Ages,
to the post-Reformation churches of Western Europe. . . .
His book succeeds in being a study of the Eastern Christian religion as a whole."
The five volumes in the set are: Volume 1:
The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600); Volume 2:
The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700); Volume 3:
The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300); Volume 4:
Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700); Volume 5:
Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700.)
If you are interested in the development of Christian doctrine,
or just want to read up on a particular period of Church history,
you will be hard pressed to find a better source than Dr. Pelikan’s series.
See you next time, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
Check How to use the Library (below).
Library Notes October 16th, 2007:
This month’s book from our library, The Whimsical Christian by Dorothy Sayers, is a collection of 18 essays
(previously published as Christian Letters To a Post-Christian World ).
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English writer and scholar, born at Oxford in 1893, the only child of an Anglican clergyman.
She studied medieval literature at Oxford (Somerville College), being one of the first women to graduate (1915) from that university.
Although most people know Dorothy Sayers as an outstanding mystery writer, notably of the Peter Wimsey mysteries, not many people have discovered her writings on
theology, dogma, and ethics, which are equally charming and more consequential.
With the possible exception of C.S. Lewis, some of whose books are also found in our library (and who authored the Narnia series),
Dorothy Sayers is the wittiest and most logically satisfying Christian apologist of the 20th Century.
Like Lewis, Sayers has that uncanny ability to make complex theological arguments both accessible and reasonable.
The Whimsical Christian is a collection of some of Sayers' best essays on religious themes, among others:
the creative mind of God, the necessity of the incarnation, and why personal morality matters.
I urge those of you who love Dorothy Sayers the mystery writer to try Dorothy Sayers the essayist.
I promise you will enjoy the book and will see a new side to a special author.
If you already have read this book, you might want to seek out other similar collections of Christian essays (not necessarily in our library) such as
The Joyful Christian (C.S. Lewis), The Visionary Christian (more C S Lewis), The Martyred Christian (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
or The Newborn Christian (J.B. Phillips).
See you next time, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
Check How to use the Library (below).
Library Notes September 7th, 2007:
This month's column is about Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time,
which will be added to our library at St. John's by October 1st.
Borg, a professor at Oregon State University, is married to an Episcopal priest.
I met him shortly after this book was published, at an all-day seminar about his book.
He writes with sensitivity, honesty and spirituality about his quest.
Like so many others in the American Christian community, in early adulthood he found traditional and conservative beliefs about Jesus unsatisfying.
His personal hold on traditional Christian beliefs waned as he embraced a modern worldview and liberal religious scholarship.
He became a closet agnostic, then a closet atheist. Yet, Borg was always somehow drawn to keep searching.
This book is a record of his search, and a personal answer to the question "Who is this Jesus?"
Christian worship is a response to a worshiper's image of Jesus, and all images of Jesus fall short of his reality, in the same way that
all biographies and portraits fail to depict a whole person.
In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time Borg attempts to understand how popular images of Jesus connect Christians to their Savior,
and isolate them from him. He describes his own faith as an example of this.
He writes about his own evolving ideas of who Jesus was, considers the scholarly and popular religious evolution of Jesus' public image,
and investigates the effects of "Historical Jesus" research on contemporary images of Jesus.
He gives the reader a simultaneously safe and unsettling new perspective on the peasant from Galilee:
"[T]he central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible," he writes.
"Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as
God, the risen, living Christ, or the Spirit.
And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition."
I hope that Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time will refresh and inform your faith in the way that it has for so many others.
I encourage you to check out the book and read it for yourself.
If you have a favorite (non-fiction) book which you would like to contribute to our library so that others can enjoy it, please let me know.
See you next month, and keep reading the Word! Fuad Saba
Check How to use the Library (below).
Library Notes August 11th, 2007:
There have been many books about the Rapture or the "Left Behind"; some are best-sellers. These are also hot topics on television and the internet.
How does this view of life compare to that of the early Christians?
I recently read a book by Barbara R. Rossing, who teaches New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.
Her book is called 'The Rapture Exposed - The message of hope in the Book of Revelation' (ISBN 0-8133-4314-3, in our Library by September 1st). Her book has two parts.
The first part explains the origins of today’s Rapture theology in a 'dispensationalist' world-view popularized 170 years ago, the interpretations of the Old Testament on which it is based,
and how the Rapture has become part of today’s vocabulary.
She also addresses the Rapture theology's effects on our society, particularly its religious, social, environmental and foreign policy consequences.
The second part of this book locates the Book of Revelation in its historical and theological context,
emphasizing its messages of hope, salvation, love and 'Lamb Power'.
Unlike the 'Left Behind' message about war, destruction, despair and alienation from God, Professor Rossing finds a different message in the Book of Revelation,
a life-affirming, hopeful, loving world in which no good thing is destroyed, and in which God loves the world He created.
I highly recommend this book. Fuad Saba.
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Library Notes July 11th, 2007:
This month I'd like to tell you about a series of paperback books which has been added to the St. John’s church library.
'The Church’s Teaching Series' is published by Seabury Press (affiliated with the Episcopal Church), and includes seven paperbacks:
1. Christian Believing; 2. The Bible for Today’s Church; 3. The Church in History; 4. Understanding the Faith of the Church;
5. Liturgy for Living; 6. The Christian Moral Vision; and 7. Living in the Spirit.
I'd like to highlight the second volume 'The Bible for Today’s Church'.
The authors take a very readable and logical approach through the following topics:
Why Read the Bible, How the Bible came to be, How the Bible has been interpreted, How the Bible is interpreted,
The Story of the Old Testament, The Story of the Apocrypha, The Story of the New Testament,
What the Bible teaches - Old Testament, What the Bible teaches - New Testament, and Ways we hear the Bible today.
The aim of the first chapters is to help the reader understand where the Bible came from and how it came to be: how the books were written, compiled, edited, and made it into the Canon.
The middle section of the book is an overview of the key Stories of the Old Testament and New Testament, which is helpful in setting the stage for the last chapters:
These focus (in the Old Testament) on a review of the actions of God in Israel’s history and her response to His actions,
and in the New Testament, on the meaning of the teachings of Jesus and Saint Paul, and the message of St. John.
The final chapter reviews how the Bible is used liturgically, in preaching, teaching, and devotions, and as a foundation for theological and moral thinking.
The volume is not a summary of the Bible, it is written to help us to read our Bible, so we can hear God speaking to us, through the stories.
I highly recommend 'The Bible for Today’s Church', and indeed all of the volumes in this Series. See you next month – and keep on reading the Word! Fuad Saba.
Check How to use the Library (below).
Welcome to the Library,June 24th, 2007:
In the last month 161 books have been cataloged, and also added to the shelves, with more to come.
Soon author-, title- and subject-card catalogues will be updated to help you search for books, but in the meantime you are welcome to search the shelves. Fuad Saba.
How to use the Library
If you select a book, please remove the circulation card from the pocket in the back,
write your name and phone on the card and leave the card in the basket on top of the card catalog.
When you return the book, please leave it on the horizontal area in front of the right-hand set of shelves.
I will return the book to the correct place on the shelves,
and will also strike through your name and phone with an indelible marker before replacing the circulation card into the book.
If you have any non-fiction books you would like to contribute to the library, please email me.
I will be glad to meet with you before or after services on Sunday to receive them from you.
For more information on the library please contact Fuad Saba.
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