Faculty Books: Reviewed

Recent publications by Austin Seminary professors

2 Kings (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 12), written by Song-Mi Suzie Park, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Austin Seminary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019; 408 pages; $39.95.

Reviewed by Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and Chair of the Theology Department at Saint Anselm College (Manchester, New Hampshire).

Biblical commentaries are a significant research genre in biblical studies, offering a verse-by-verse (or sectional) analysis of individual books of the Bible. In the last fifty years, this genre experienced significant developments in format and focus; 1 however, these have been mostly to provide information about “the world behind” (i.e., literary and historical background) and “the world of” (i.e., original context of) the biblical text. The Wisdom Commentary (WC) series is a groundbreaking project that is incorporating traditional as well as new methods and approaches to address also “the world in front of the text” 2 (i.e., new ways the text proves meaningful in the light of our modern context) while remaining faithful “to the ancient text and its earliest audiences.” 3 The WC is a multi-volume series (58 volumes) providing the best of current feminist biblical scholarship to aid preachers, teachers, scholars, students, and all readers “in their advancement toward God’s vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all” (https://litpress.org/ wisdom-commentary-series). It adopts a feminist lens as it engages the Bible in its totality, tackling issues in the text related to gender, sexual identity, class, race, ethnicity, religion, physical ability, etc., so that troubling texts do not perpetuate unjust practices, mindsets, and interpretations. Because of this considered focus, the Wisdom Commentary series is a vital contribution for the 21st-century church, society, and world.

Dr. Park contributed to the Wisdom Commentary series with her study of 2 Kings. This book in the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible provides an account of ancient Israel’s divided monarchy period from the 8th to the 6th century B.C.E. The stories in 2 Kings are focused initially on the activity of the prophet Elisha in the Northern Kingdom of Israel (2 Kings 1-13), and then, it transitions to the accounts related to the last monarchs of the Southern Kingdom of Judah and into the Babylonian Exile. Dr. Park structures her commentary based on the twenty-five chapters of 2 Kings. Her commentary is done chapter by chapter, except on a few occasions where the content required longer sections. One important feature of the Wisdom Commentary series is that it provides an enhanced diversity of interpretation by including brief essays of “Contributing Voices” remarking upon various passages that reflect a diversity of perspectives in the interpretation of select passages. Park’s volume includes contributing voices on topics such as “Girls and Sexual Abuse in the Ancient Near East” by Carolyn Pressler (44), “The Powerful Israelite Slave Girl” by Julie Parker (63), “Jezebel as the Other” by Judith McKinlay (113), “The Naming of the Queen Mother” by Ginny Brewer-Boydston (159-60), “A Postcolonial Reading of Empire in 2 Kings” by Gregory Cuéllar (211), and “The Forgotten Female Prophets of the Hebrew Bible” by Wilda Gafney (290-91).

In addition to her careful and thorough analysis of 2 Kings, Dr. Park offers two outstanding contributions to the Wisdom Commentary series. The first includes the insights emerging out of her social location as a 1.5 generation Korean American female scholar of the Hebrew Bible. She says that this upbringing has made her “especially sensitive to issues pertaining to women and to those whom society regards as unimportant and marginal” (xlv). This particular lens, combined with her expertise in the ancient Near Eastern world (especially regarding gendered language of warfare), brings to light numerous and diverse cases of power imbalances (not just regarding gender) that have gone unnoticed in other commentaries.

Second, Dr. Park offers a thesis regarding 2 Kings as a whole. This is not only an innovation in the genre of biblical commentaries, but it is an important contribution to the field of biblical studies. Dr. Park convincingly demonstrates that while the main narrative of 2 Kings “proclaims the masculinity and prowess of YHWH, it also simultaneously deconstructs and upends this assertion at the conclusion of the book when it describes Israel and Judah’s destruction by foreign nations” (xlii-xliii). Park’s commentary on 2 Kings is an important new resource for scholars, pastors, and lay readers. Park and the fifteen “Contributing Voices” offer cogent, fresh, and salient readings of 2 Kings, and make an invaluable contribution to 21st-century biblical scholarship.

NOTES

1. See Elmer Martens, “Commentary Changes in Format and Focus: An Overview,” in The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), 54-80.

2. For an explanation of the connection between feminist inquiry and biblical interpretation, see Ahida E. Pilarski, “The Past and Future of Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics,” BTB 41 (2011): 16-23.

3. Barbara Reid, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Song-Mi Suzie Park, 2 Kings; Wisdom Commentary, vol. 12 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), xix.

Reasonable Faith for a Post- Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics, written by William Greenway, Professor of Philosophical Theology, Austin Seminary. Cascade Books, 2020; 284 pages; $28 (paper).

Reviewed by Jeannie Corbitt, The Monie Pastoral Resident at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas.

William Greenway’s remarkable ability to lift the veil— to perceptively recognize and powerfully name obscured realities—is on full display in his most recent book, Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age.

Here is an example. In the face of widespread suspicion of religion as a mechanism of oppression and a common understanding of different faith traditions as incommensurable, even opposing, entities, Greenway names a simple truth: “no historic faith tradition says despise your neighbors, kick the downtrodden, exploit the weak, think and act only for you and yours, abuse creation” (19).

It is a stunning observation. All the more stunning, Greenway would agree, for its obviousness. Here is a clear, far-reaching ethical consensus: we ought not exploit the weak. Here is a rich resource for the global uniting of people of faith against the many unjust structures that promote or implicitly require exploiting the poor. Yet the consensus remains, to so many, obscured. When studying religious traditions, even people of faith are far more likely to dissect differences among the traditions than learn to name, let alone act upon, this profound moral consensus. Though this assertion is a side comment to his overall purposes, in what it achieves we see in microcosm the overall trajectory of Greenway’s book: Unveil a reality manifestly present yet strangely hidden. Interrogate and explicate the how and why of its hiddenness (i.e. ask, who benefits from obscuring a global faith consensus about not exploiting the weak? How has the consensus been so effectively obscured?). Elucidate how the reality, once unveiled, offers us a significant and hopeful path forward in these fraught times.

The central reality, manifestly present yet strangely hidden, that Greenway masterfully unveils in his book is that of agape. Adapting Emmanuel Levinas, Greenway defines agape as the reality of having been seized in and by love for others. Agape is not “from us,” that is, “is not a product of any decision on our part,” though we might “harden our hearts” to agape (17). Rather, agape is God, “insofar as God is love” (18). In light of agape, the moral consensus alluded to above is revealed to be no happy coincidence. The shared ethical concerns of the historic faith traditions (along with those of spiritually sensitive people from all walks of life and belief, including secular) are shared precisely because they are born out of the same experience of being seized by passionate concern for others.

For people of faith, my brief description risks painting agape as “God Lite,” so it is important to say that Greenway is not at all interested in reducing God to an experience. He writes that God of course “may be more than agape … may be personal,” for example, “may be triune” (18). His interest is rather in naming as real (rather than a matter of mere conditioning or taste) our responses of horror at another’s suffering and our responses of joy at another’s delight. For in awakening to the realness of agape, humanity can begin to acknowledge and act out of our remarkable spiritual and ethical common ground. In doing so, we can start to heal the “devastating fracture … between the predominant social and political forces shaping global civilization, on the one hand, and globally shared affirmation of what is good and loving, on the other” (20).

A truly beautiful aspect of this book is that it is morally integrated in the theory it advances and its treatment of others as the theory is advanced. Greenway’s belief in a love that seizes all people for all others is evident in his treatment of the scholars he engages—Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams. Greenway is sensitive to contexts and careful never to converse with caricatures. Most beautifully of all, he sees the secular scholars whose postmodern deconstructionism undermines the very ethical concerns they so clearly hold, as the “surprised sheep” of Matthew 25 (205). That is, he recognizes them as people who have lived in surrender to having been seized by concern for others, even if they could not name the reality that seized them. They have fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, visited the sick; unknowingly, they have done so to God. Thus, of some of the very scholars others would label as his intellectual opponents, Greenway says, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.

In this way, the book is not at all “ammunition” for people of faith to “beat” opponents or even to “prove” God. Even as he challenges secular thinkers to recognize assumed materialism and outright rejection of faith as a subjective and sectarian position, Greenway also challenges people of faith to hold their own convictions differently. For awakening to agape reminds us that our faith, much more than being about personal salvation or even right doctrine, is about living in surrender to having been seized by concern for others. This is as hopeful as it is hard. As Greenway reminds us, “insofar as people since the creation of the world have not hardened their hearts … in times of wonder and times of horror ... but have … been seized in and by love for every creature of every kind, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have indeed been understood and seen through all God has made” (193).

Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry, edited by David Franklin White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education and Professor of Methodist Studies, Austin Seminary, and Sarah F. Farmer. Wesley's Foundery Books, 2020; 284 pages; $24.99 (paper).

Reviewed by Kenda Creasy Dean, The Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary.

Ask pastors and parents: Why youth ministry? and you’ll get a range of answers, most of them focused on what teenagers need: they need religious instruction and divine encounters, safe passage into adulthood, healthy activities, wholesome friends, caring adults. Youth need to learn to serve others, to care for those who suffer or are unlovely; they need to know they belong in the church, and learn skills that help them participate and maybe even lead in it. Teenagers need a community that will counter the daily humiliations of being an adolescent, a place where they know they are loved and enough. They need to hear that they belong to a bigger story—to God’s story—and that God has a unique and important role for them to play in it.

No youth leader would argue these benefits—but few would say these are the reasons they do youth ministry. Ask youth leaders why they spend countless (usually unpaid) hours hanging out with other people’s kids, and most will say: “Because I love it.” For the uninitiated, it’s a perplexing answer: what about the late hours, laughable wages, abysmal ROI’s? What about the tragic struggles of teenagers: the tears and rage earned by rejection, abandonment, invisibility? What about the lack of accountability— you can’t make youth participate, you can’t punish them for forgetting their homework, you can’t schedule opposite their countless other priorities, and there are never enough volunteers for the lockin. And yet most youth ministers will say they love this work. They do it for joy.

Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry, edited by David F. White and Sarah F. Farmer, offers a provocative explanation for this phenomenon—and as a result it belongs on every pastor’s shelf. This readable, practical volume is the most comprehensive leadership resource to emerge from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture’s “Joy and Adolescent Faith and Flourishing Project,” a multi-year, multi-scholar research effort that was part of Miroslav Volf’s massive Joy and the Good Life Project (2015-2018). Under the direction of Harold “Skip” Masdack, longtime pastor and founding director of the Youth Ministry Institute at Yale Divinity School, scores of scholars, countless youth ministers, and an impressive array of theological luminaries lent their energy to answering two simple—and maddeningly slippery—questions: “What enhances joy for young people?" and "What blocks it?” (Full disclosure: like White and Farmer, I was among the multitudes enlisted to answer those questions.)

If we do youth ministry for joy, this book is our indispensable guide. Most chapters address specific practices or experiences that allow teenagers to experience divine joy: self-emptying, beauty, friendship, testimony, worship, forgiveness, to name a few. Like a prism, the book’s multiple authors bend the light on joy and youth ministry in many directions, and work from various theological starting points. Like most multiple-author books, there’s a certain jolt in moving from one pair of authors to the next—each chapter is written by a scholar/ practitioner team. But for me, the diversity of theological explanations of joy was one of the book’s chief delights. Diverse as they are, the authors are unanimous in their insistence that humans are made for joy, and that youth ministry must reclaim it both for the sake of young people and for the sake of the church. White and Farmer are intentional about highlighting biblical notions of joy, in which joy is the gift of a gracious Creator, and is not something youth can conjure up or “happens” to them by chance. Calling joy a “root metaphor” for youth ministry, White argues that reclaiming joy for youth ministry is crucial in light of modern secularism’s “disenchanted” worldview, which has “evacuated the world of such things as mystery, wonder, grace, and transcendence” (3). This worldview puts joy at risk, since it denies the possibility of ekstasis—an experience of transcendence, of being pulled beyond ourselves into something so expansive and so mysterious than we cannot comprehend it. We can only receive it with awe and thanksgiving. The million dollar question, of course, is why root youth ministry in joy at a time when so many young people are suffering so tremendously? This question is not lost on the authors of this book, who all admit that suffering is joy’s necessary companion. To be fair, thousands of years of Judeo-Christian thinking have not resolved the problem of human suffering either, and neither does this book, but it gave me a vocabulary that helps me avoid “cheap” conversations about joy with young people, whose immediate pain makes joy seem completely out-of-reach. Interestingly, the book’s first pages illustrate the twin paths of joy and suffering. A grieving youth minister, reeling over the recent death of his father, is chaperoning some ebullient middle high youth at a dance, who pull him into their circle in spite of himself. The youth don’t deny his suffering; they embrace it, and him, in their joyful dancing. Such is the nature of divine joy. God’s three persons are united in a perichoretic dance that embraces suffering but refuses to let suffering have the final word. Instead—suffering and all—we are pulled into the very heart of God, where there’s a dance in progress. Thanks be to God.