Bit of a Reviewy-Type State of Mind, Yes.
Yes, ladies and jellyspoons, Ink and Penwipers today brings you a progress report on the reading of the
New Church Teaching Series as part of my self-inflicted confirmation curriculum. [Obligatory digression: In my stint as a teacher I found the most
creative spellings of the word "curriculum" in my students' essays, and it never failed to make me snicker, because I'm mean that way. Well,
you try reading the word "crickulum" with a straight face.]
Anyway. As I said in my previous post on the subject, I'm quite impressed so far with the series as a whole, but now that I'm about four books in I want to say a few things.
The first book,
The Anglican Vision, written by series editor James E. Griffiss, decently does justice to the need for introducing newcomers to the usages and uniquenesses of the Episcopal Church/Anglican Communion. It's an overview book, so it makes no claims to instruct the reader in Anglican history or practice beyond outlining some of the major points of both. The only problem with an overview book is that it tends to make only a tenuous, nebulous connection with the reader, so that unless they already have some fairly sturdy conceptual work done on the subject, I fear they might get a bit...well, bored. But perhaps it's the other way around, because I did have some conceptual work done on "the Anglican vision", and I found myself desultorily staring for minutes at the same paragraph a number of times. The other difficulty about this book I will mention a bit later, as it appears elsewhere in the series.
The next book,
Opening the Bible by Roger Ferlo, was immediately engaging, cohesively detailed, and unassuming in its purpose. I'd read a couple of pages before I looked at the author bio and realized the man was an English professor before becoming a priest...ahh, so that's why. I expect that my immediate positive response to this book reflects how accustomed I am to the English major's style*; but then again I think there's a reason why the English major's style is appealing. As Jessica commented to me, contemporary scholarship, when not loaded with jargon and ideological faff, relies heavily on conversational and narrative styles of rhetoric to carry its weight, and English majors, of the generality of humanities scholars, tend to do the best job of using that style to make their logical and ideological content accessible to the reader. (For all you out there who are not English people and may take umbrage, I hasten to say that English people tend to be the guiltiest of writing the aforementioned jargon and ideological faff, so it's six of one, half-dozen of the other.) Ferlo's aim, of course, lends itself to the style -- that is, he wants to introduce the reader to the Bible as if it were an entirely foreign object, and show by a few potent examples how to set about reading it responsibly. Though I've been steeped in Scripture all my life, I learned quite a lot from this little book about how to read the Bible, not the least of which is the value of not taking its complexity for granted. A respect for the Bible and its power permeates this text, even when Ferlo is saying some quite radical (that is, scholarly) things about textual criticism. My only quibble with his attitude is the heavy reliance on Jewish traditions of reading and discussing -- or I should say, the ease with which he assumes that the reader will have no difficulty assimilating these traditions as things that shed light on Christian Bible study and exegesis. Because of my personal experience with Judaism,
I have no difficulty understanding what he's talking about and why it relates, but I'm not so sure that people coming from my background (which is not so much anti- as a-semitical) would do the same. I have a suspicion that some people reading Ferlo's book might say something like, "Why the hell's he mentioning Jews so much?
We're not Jews!" Of course, my sympathies are much more with Ferlo than with such a reader (after all, I'm quite avid to see Christians discover and acknowledge what they owe to Judaism and its traditions), but I expect that the teacher or discussion leader using this book in an adult confirmation class would have to do some extra preparation to address this issue. Then again, I may be making a mountain out of a molehill. I am, after all, learning out of this book rather than teaching out of it. Ferlo ends the book with a fervent affirmation that to read the Bible and to read Scripture are two different things -- that is, after all the work one does of making something out of the Book, one must then let the Book make something out of us.
The next book in the series,
Engaging the Word by Michael Johnston, was meant to take up where Ferlo left off. Unfortunately, it started to annoy me about five pages in. Here I encountered in full irritating force the sort of irresponsibly narrative rhetoric that merely slowed me down while reading Griffiss's overview. What made it worse was that the book's purpose is not to overview anything but to teach the reader something about exegesis. Instead, the book taught me what Johnston's grandiose pet theories are, and provided some seriously wacked-out interpretations of certain passages. I'm thinking here especially of the story of the Gerasene demoniac, and how in Johnston's hands it is mainly a story about Jewish/colonial responses to Roman oppression. It's not primarily, or according to one of the scholars he quotes, even at all, a story about a demoniac that Jesus cures when he shows up in Gerasa. This bit occurred in the chapter about the book of Mark, which according to Johnston is consciously a grass-roots political narrative aimed at the themes of bondage-breaking and concept-shattering. Johnston's introduction to the chapter ended with a sort of grinning assurance that although I might not agree with the readings he proposes, I will certainly find them interesting. Well, I
would have, but then I started reading the chapter. I'll listen to liberal scholarly readings all day long**, even if they make me mad, as long as they're responsibly done. As it was, I quit this book after encountering the chapter about the Jesus Seminar. The thing is, for all Johnston's assurances to me that the Scriptures were conduits of the numinous and the holy, I did not find myself believing in his respect for the Book after reading his work; whereas although Roger Ferlo never even said anything explicit about the Scriptures being conduits of the numinous and holy until the very end of his book, I was convinced of his respect for the Scriptures even (and especially) while he was saying some very liberal things about it, things far more "radical" than an unbalanced reading of the gospel of Mark -- like the issue of the Septuagint's and the Masoretic Text's different renderings of Isaiah's prophecy regarding the Virgin Birth.
So there. Phew. Glad I got that off my chest.
I am now reading
Opening the Prayer Book by Jeffrey Lee, and though he's not an English major, I appreciate his handling so far of the topic. I'll say more later when I've finished it.
I must add that although I've suffered a few difficulties with the series so far, I have not so far had to deal with Thoroughly Bad Writing in any of it; even Johnston's book (much as it annoyed me) evidences a clear understanding of how to handle the language, and all of it is fairly representative of contemporary scholarship in the humanities -- that is, intelligent people who can write, handling their topic with a certain level of understanding. Religiously, I think the books will do for me, taken all together, what they were written to do -- give me an understanding of the church I'm coming into, with all its complexities and richnesses. So on the whole I'm still quite pleased with my reading.
My Inner Eye tells me that my next post will be something completely frivolous.
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*Of course, quoting Stephen Greenblatt is bound to give me a happy whether the author is an English person or not.
**I'll even
make liberal scholarly readings if they happen to be up my alley, all day long.
