Confessions of A Commentary Kid

There was a point in my college career when I started to seriously geek out about commentaries. Every serious student at a Christian college needed to pick the commentary series they would defend in a fight to the death. Mine was the NIV Application Commentary. Scholars I respected like Tremper Longman III, Douglas Moo, Darrell Bock, Peter Enns and Scot McKnight wrote some of the commentaries in the series.  Enns and McKnight especially put me over the edge into giddiness.  It was my go-to commentary series. I would sit near it in the library, ready to reference it at a moment’s notice. It was well put together in general, but I especially liked that commentary series because it was more thematic than word by word reading of the text.

For the word by word reading of the text we were assigned the Bible Knowledge Commentary. That is a commentary I would not wish upon anyone. It was assigned reading for some of my classes, and I would dread to read from bold phrase to bold phrase about Greek conjugations and parsing and (insert Charlie Brown’s teacher’s wah-wah voice).

There is a new commentary series put out by IVP called the Resonate Series and I…ahem…resonate with it. This is a commentary series that takes a more contextual approach than even the NIV Application Commentary did. It is absolutely not bogged down in the tweed scholar-speak of pale Bible scholars who never see the light of day.

I was given the opportunity to review the newly published Matthew commentary in the Resonate Series. The Matthew commentary was written by Matt Woodley, author of The Folly of Prayer (my review). Woodley does a great job of commenting on the text, which I think is what a commentary should actually do. With all of the etymological and scholarly jargon removed and a format that moves section-by-section and not verse-by-verse or word-by-word, the Resonate Series offers the reader an actual interpretation of the text in contextualized terms. This means that the commenter, in this case Woodley, is showing how the text can actually be applied to daily life and spiritual practice.

Woodley does a great job of this. In what other commentary passage on Matthew 17 would you have a parable by Kierkegaard and a story about the highs and lows of a worship experience while in Mexico? By offering this type of relatable context, Woodley is able to flesh out the deeper meaning of the story and how it applies to the reader and the Christian community, as he does in his description of the tension he experienced in Mexico:

The noise and squalor of downtown Cabo didn’t match the lyrics of “What a Wonderful World.” Instead I heard a clanging song of drunkennes, pain and lust.
But as the church of Jesus Christ we will train our ears and our eyes to hear and see both songs: songs of Christ’s glory and songs of the world’s brokenness. (180)

All this in a discussion of the Transfiguration.

While at first glance someone might say that this is actually not what a commentary is supposed to be. A modern commentary is supposed to narrow the reader’s focus on the text so that an explicit truth can be presented in a proposition. This is not, however, like many of the ancient commentaries or Reformation commentaries of the church were written. There is a big difference between Augustine’s commentary on Genesis in Confessions, Matthew Arnold’s commentary on Genesis and the Bible Knowledge Commentary’s word-by-word delineation of Genesis. At some point between Arnold and the BKC Protestant scholars lost their way. So, it is refreshing to see a commentary series that goes back to the roots of the Christian and Protestant traditions of commentary writing to offer up a text that with human words tries to express the depth and mystery of the divine Word.

Book Information

The Gospel of Matthew: God with Us
Matt Woodley
InterVarsity Press
$12.16 (Amazon)

Guest Post: Looking at Lamentations, Part 2

Benj continues his look at Lamentations  from part 1 by exploring suffering, sin, pain and the problem of evil in part 2 of his essay…

What is a book of protest doing in the Bible?  Let me offer a suggestion—not an easy answer, but perhaps the beginning of some answer.

In an article entitled, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” Walter Brueggemann talks about the deficiencies that result in the life of the church when laments—like the book of Lamentations, or the psalms of lament—are marginalized in liturgy and interpretation.[1]  He argues that laments provide a sense of genuine covenantal interaction between God and human beings: “Where lament is absent, covenant comes into being only as a celebration of joy and well-being….The greater party (God) is surrounded by subjects who are always ‘yes men and women’ from whom ‘never is heard a discouraging word.’”  He wonders: what kind of relationship would we have with God, if we could never bring to him our complaints, our anger, our pain?  Certainly not a genuinely personal relationship.

Consider some folks in Scripture who had intensely personal relationships with God.  In many circumstances, these relationships were adversarial.  God appeared to Jacob several times, including a bizarre meeting in which God wrestled with Jacob all night long, and Jacob was winning before God cheated.  Moses argued with God about serving him, and then blamed God for giving him such a stubborn people to take care of.  Elijah was suicidal and begged God to take his life.  Even Jesus himself, the second Person of the Trinity, asked his heavenly Father in a moment of anguish and pain to take away the task he had given him.

I think anyone who has walked with God along the difficult road of life knows what it means to feel protest or complaint.  Some of us have suffered much, some have suffered not as much, but we all suffer.  My parents have gotten divorced in the last few years, and I’ve watched several family members die without Christ, and others walk away from the faith.  My wife’s parents watched her cling to life as a toddler when cancer nearly took her life.  She survived, but their friends’ child did not.

And suffering is not proportional to sin.  Wasn’t Corrie a sinner just like the other child?  I’ve suffered some for my own sins, but my sufferings are nothing compared to the sufferings of others who are much more godly than I am.  But in all these sufferings, God invites us to call on him, as innocent sufferers in some situations, and as penitent sinners in others.

§

Allow me summarize a few things we can gain from pondering Lamentations.  First of all, it’s OK to complain to God, even vigorously and emotionally.  Now, let me immediately qualify this assertion.  In one sense, it’s not right for us to make demands of God.  He is the Creator; we are his creation, and he doesn’t owe us anything.  He could require of us eternal toil, in exchange for nothing, and he would be perfectly within his divine prerogative.

But God has revealed himself in Scripture.  He’s shown us that certain actions are unjust, and we are right to protest when such things occur.  We should never hesitate as Christians to speak out against injustices in the world.  God has also revealed himself through special covenants with his people, and it’s absolutely right for us to appeal to God’s faithfulness to his promises.  Even though we don’t deserve God’s grace, he has promised it to us, through Abraham, through David, through the promises to Israel and the prophets—and now in Christ Jesus his Son.  When we pray, we pray “In Jesus’ name”—invoking God’s promises and holding him to them.

God didn’t have to make us his daughters and sons, but he has—and now we can call to our Father in distress.  As we experience weariness and pain in a sin-marred world, God shares our weariness and our anger, and when we protest sin and injustice, and appeal to his covenant—we are behaving as his faithful children.

A second thing we learn from Lamentations is that God hates sin.  Sin is the cause of suffering and death in this world.  Suffering is not always “evenly” distributed according to our ideas of fairness—the wicked often prosper, and little children suffer and die.  But ultimately we all suffer death and pain because we all as the human race sinned in Adam.  Sin makes us all worthy of punishment, and we all would suffer the wrath of God forever, if not for God’s own intervention.

And that brings us to my third point.  There is no easy answer to the problem of evil—but God has given us his answer in Jesus Christ.

Bart Ehrman, a famous New Testament scholar, used to call himself an evangelical Christian: he went to Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and later studied at Princeton Seminary while pastoring evangelical churches.  He now no longer believes in the God of the Bible, and calls himself an agnostic.  He’s recently written a book called, “God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer.”  Philosophically and emotionally, Ehrman struggles with the question of theodicy: how God can be both good and omnipotent, given the existence of suffering and evil in the world.

Dr. Ehrman is a world-renown expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and he has written definitive works on Greek textual criticism.  But Ehrman didn’t lose his faith because of variants in the New Testament texts—he lost it because of the issue of suffering, sin and pain.  He feels that the Bible gives several different answers to this question—some of which I’ve suggested here—and he finds all of these explanations unsatisfactory in some way.

Let me suggest finally that Lamentations, and other laments in the Bible, point us forward to an answer to the questions of evil and God’s justice.  That answer is this: I don’t know the ultimate answer to the problem of evil; but I trust the God who does.  I trust the God who made himself a man, looked evil straight in the eye and said, “Do your worst,” taking all the pain, suffering, death and misery upon himself.  Murders, tortures, rapes, the anguish of losing a child, the pain of rejection—Jesus experienced all this.  Even if I can’t truly fathom how a loving God can permit evil to exist, I can trust that he has experienced it all.  When the prophet says, “Our griefs he himself bore”—that is profound: he didn’t destroy our griefs, he took them upon himself.  God’s justice, his faithfulness to his promises, his love, and his sovereignty—are all proven at the cross.

§

After the destruction of the temple, the people of Israel had to discover new ways to conceive of YHWH’s presence with them—especially through Scripture and prayer, rather than through worship in a special location.  You could say that this catastrophe drove Israel out into the world and forced them to rely on YHWH in different ways from how they had previously.

We as the church, experiencing suffering and persecution to varying degrees, are pressed to rely on YHWH God in a difficult and hostile world.  We experience exile and wandering.  Jesus is Lord of this world, but his rule has not yet been extended “from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth,” as the Psalmist says.  Lamentations gives us permission, and even requires us, to call upon our God, who sustains us in our exile.  We call upon him in faith, every day, praising him for who he is and what he has done for us, but also in times of desperation, when there seems to be no hope, and all we have to cling to is his promise.

________________________________

[1] Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” JSOT 36 (1986): 57-71.

Guest Post: Looking at Lamentations, Part 1

Today’s post is by Benjamin Giffone. This is part 1 of his thought-provoking essay on Lamentations.

It’s an honor to be a guest at Everyday Liturgy.  I am a postgraduate student in Old Testament at the University of Stellenbosch, and right now I’m in the middle of my thesis on the book of Lamentations.  When I tell people that I’m studying Lamentations, they say, “Oh”—and then move on to some other topic.  It’s unsaid, but I know they’re thinking: “Why in the world would you study such a depressing book?”

But I think there’s a lot to be gained from studying Lamentations—more than just an interesting dissertation.  Difficult books like Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes, and Job, and the psalms of lament—these are all treasures of God’s Word that the modern Western church has largely neglected, or at least undervalued.

Over the last two years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching the historical background of Lamentations, as well as the ways in which Lamentations has been interpreted in Jewish and Christian communities through the centuries.  In this two part essay, I propose some ways in which Lamentations can enrich the liturgy and life of the church.

§

If we had to choose one event in the Old Testament that we would say is the most important, the most historically and theologically crucial moment in Israel’s history, I think the destruction of the Jerusalem temple would win the contest.  At that moment, all of God’s promises to Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Israel, were all thrown into doubt.  YHWH had abandoned his temple and allowed it to be desecrated by enemies.  The Davidic king was taken into exile, never to be heard from again.  Many people were killed or starved; those who survived fled to Egypt, or lived in slavery in the smoldering ruins of Judah.  Everything they’d ever known was gone, and everything they’d believed in was now called into question.

Lamentations is a set of five poems that commemorate and reflect upon this terrible catastrophe.  Amidst the descriptions of horrors almost too terrible to speak about, and the expression of shock, pain, anger and despair, these poems ask whether it’s possible to make sense of it all.

Sometimes the poets place the blame on the nation of Judah for its many sins:

Her adversaries have become the head; her enemies prosper.
For YHWH has afflicted her because of her many transgressions;
Her children have gone, captive before the foe. (1:5)

Jerusalem sinned greatly; therefore she became unclean. (1:8a)

In other passages the poets blame the enemies, the Babylonians who invaded Judah:

The adversary has stretched out his hand over all her precious things;
For she saw the nations enter her sanctuary,
Of which you commanded that they must never enter your assembly. (1:10)

The last two verses of chapter 4 even blame Judah’s cousins, the Edomites, who supported the Babylonian invasion rather than lending aid to their distant relatives:

Exult and be glad, Daughter of Edom, you who live in the land of Uz.
To you also the cup will pass; you will be drunk and stripped naked.
Your punishment will end, Daughter of Zion; he will not prolong your exile.
He will attend to your sin, Daughter of Edom, and expose your sin. (4:21-22)

But most often, Lamentations places the blame squarely on YHWH’s shoulders.  Consider chapter 2, starting in verse 1:

How the Lord in his anger has beclouded the daughter of Zion!
He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel;
he has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.

The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob;
in his wrath he has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
he has struck down to the ground in dishonor the kingdom and its rulers.

He has cut down in fierce anger all the horn of Israel;
he has withdrawn from them his right hand in the face of the enemy;
he has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob, consuming all around.

He has bent his bow like an enemy, with his right hand set like a foe;
and he has killed all who were pleasant to the eye;
in the tent of the daughter of Zion he has poured out his fury like fire.

The Lord has become like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel;
he has swallowed up all its palaces; he has laid in ruins its strongholds,
and he has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

He has laid waste his booth like a garden, laid in ruins his meeting place;
YHWH has made Zion forget festival and Sabbath,
and in his fierce indignation has spurned king and priest.

And on and on…  YHWH’s barrage against Israel seems to have no end.  Even while acknowledging Israel’s sin, the poets ask whether YHWH has gone too far: “Look, O LORD, and see! With whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat  the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care? Should priest and prophet be killed  in the sanctuary of the Lord?”  (2:20)  At the heart of Lamentations is the question of theodicy: God’s justice in allowing (and even causing) human suffering.  Perhaps the leadership of Israel, or even the entire adult population could be held responsible—but the children?  Are they to blame?  Do they deserve to starve or be slaughtered?

This is a shocking charge to level against God himself.  Is it right to question God’s justice or his sovereignty?  Some people would even say that it is proof that the God of the Bible is not loving and good, and so we shouldn’t pretend that he is a god worth worshiping and obeying.

In responding to these charges against God, some interpreters have appealed to Lamentations 3:21-24 as an expression of trust in God’s loving faithfulness:

This I take to heart and therefore I have hope:
YHWH’s covenant love is never exhausted, nor does his compassion ever end.
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
“YHWH is my portion,” my soul says, “Therefore I will wait for him.”

Overall, chapter 3 is the most personal in Lamentations.  But these four verses are the only “hopeful” passage in the entire book!  Four short verses can’t possibly balance out the sheer volume of complaint, lament, appeal, protest that occurs in this book.  The very fact that a book of Scripture accuses YHWH of cruelty, and then devotes only four verses to his love and faithfulness, should give us pause.

And actually, the book ends without much hope.  For all the appeals and protests to YHWH, YHWH never speaks in the book of Lamentations.  The reader is left to wonder if that small seed of hope in 3:21-24 will ever bear fruit.  The book ends with this plea:

Restore us to yourself, YHWH, that we may return; renew our days as of old,
Unless you have utterly rejected us and are exceedingly angry with us. (5:21-22)

That last verse is so unbearable as an ending, that to this day when Lamentations is read in the Jewish synagogue, 5:21 is repeated one more time after 5:22 is read.  Is there any hope at all?  What more could YHWH do for Israel?  Will he bring more punishment, more pain, more suffering?

Benj continues his discussion tomorrow…

How Do You Teach the Bible to Children?

My good friend Evan has a post up reviewing Peter Enns’s new curriculum for 1st-4th graders: Telling God’s Story.  The curriculum looks fascinating, as it is not a rote model of learning but a dynamic, more critical thinking model of learning. It teaches the Bible as a story, not as a book of do’s and don’ts, which is very hard to do for young children.

Our first child is still young, and she is basically forced to listen to whatever passage we read after dinner. There will come a time though, when she will begin reading and listening—and then what?

How do you teach the Bible to your children?

The Book of Genesis, Illustrated

R. Crumb, one of the most influential illustrators working today, decided to take on a project that had not yet been attempted: to illustrate an entire book of the Bible. Most illustrators have worked with key moments of the Bible, but never taken an entire book and put it together in graphic novel format. Crumb does this down to the genealogies: everything is illustrated.

The use of Robert Alter’s translation of Genesis gives a freshness to Crumb’s work, for in a translation that is not really popular outside of academic circles the words catch you in ways you would simply gloss over the text in a familiar translation. The images are what grip you though, and they remind us of how joyous, chaotic, graceful, lewd, repulsive, grotesque, violent and beautiful the narrative of Genesis is. The plain, literal renderings Crumb provides are not an attempt to interpret the text through the lens of drawings, but instead to build a lavish tapestry of historical, religious, and cultural context around the text itself, something Crumb has done most admirably.

R. Crumb
The Book of Genesis, Illustrated
Norton
$16.47 (Amazon)

Tips For A Simple Church Name

If you are starting a church plant, call it…

That’s what we did.  Try to find the picture of me on the website.

If you are going to be in the North Jersey or New York City area let me know and I’ll give you directions and such.