QOTD: Bonhoeffer

I have a mild interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), a very fascinating person within modern Christian history. I can't say I know a whole lot right now as I've just begun to scratch the surface in terms of his life, thought, and writings (plus this is just a side hobby, I'm not sure if this contributes anything to my studies as a NT PhD student... still interesting though.) I have read a couple biographies about him (here and here) and that was very helpful in introducing me to Bonhoeffer beyond my initial exposure in college to his famous book, Nachfolge (Eng.: The Cost of Discipleship). I find him so interesting given his impeccable educational background (Bonhoeffer earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin, studying under the likes of people such as Adolf von Harnack) along with his familiarity with Karl Barth, that provided for him a kind of balance between liberal theology and the more "conservative" thought that lie within dogmatics. All this of course is all mixed up with his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler, which is yet another fascinating part of Bonhoeffer's legacy.

I recently picked up his Letters and Papers from Prison (DBWE, vol. 8) and today I came across his letter sent to his parents on Easter Sunday, about 70 years ago (marked Apr. 25, 1943). As Easter 2013 is approaching this Sunday, I thought it appropriate to quote just a few lines from this letter:

My dear Parents,

Today ten days have finally passed, and I am allowed to write to you once again. I would really like to let you know that I am celebrating a happy Easter here. What is so liberating about Good Friday and Easter is the fact that our thoughts are pulled far beyond our personal circumstances to the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and indeed everything that happens, and this gives us great hope. Since yesterday it has become wonderfully quiet throughout the building. One could hear many people call out "Happy Easter" to each other, and, without envy, one wishes that everyone who carries out their difficult duty in here be granted the fulfillment of that wish. In the silence I now also hear your Easter greetings as you are gathered together today with my brothers and sisters and are thinking of me...

I continue to be well, I am healthy, permitted to be outside for a half hour every day; and now that I am again allowed to smoke, I sometimes even forget briefly where I actually am! I am treated well and read a lot, besides the newspaper and novels especially the Bible. I don't yet have the concentration to work properly. However, during this Holy Week I was finally able to intensively study a section of the Passion Narrative, Jesus's high priestly prayer, in which I have had a long-standing strong interest as you know. I even managed to do an exegesis of several chapters of Paul's ethics for myself. This was very important for me. Thus I must still be very grateful...

Surprisingly, the days are passing by quickly in here. It seems incredible to me that I have already been here for three weeks. I enjoy going to bed at 8:00 p.m. -- supper is at 4:00 p.m.! -- and I look forward to my dreams. In the past I never knew what a delightful gift they are. I dream every night, and they are always pleasant. Until I fall asleep, I recite the verse I memorized during the day. Then at six in the morning, I enjoy reading psalms and hymns, thinking of you, and knowing that you are thinking of me too...

And now farewell. Please forgive all the worries I am causing you! Greet all my brothers and sisters and their children. Yours with all my heart, full of gratitude and love,

--Dietrich

Rudolf Bultmann

One of my hobbies is reading biographies and it just so happened that I came across a recently translated biography¹ of a NT scholar from the early 20th century, so in this particular case, I get to double-dip in terms of my interest in NT studies but also my hobby in reading biographies. The person I am talking about is none other than Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). He is arguably the most influential NT scholar of the 20th century; among others he has published books on the development of the synoptic tradition (rigorously applying form-criticism),² theology of the NT,³ and a commentary on the Gospel of John,⁴ that still remain as important books for students of NT studies. I have worked through some of his commentary for a paper I wrote a while ago for a seminar on John, and while I sort of understood his well-known program of 'demythologizing' and his pioneering work in form-criticism, the biography does a good job filling out the portrait of a real human being who wrestled hard with questions posed by the text and the experiences of a person living in the world. Though keep in mind, much of what he has written and reacting against are issues that were at the foreground spurred on by the pains of modernity during the early-mid 20th century, but I think his writings are still interesting nonetheless. I will just quote one little snippet of something he wrote:

"The object of theology is God, and the reproach to liberal theology is that it has dealt not with God, but with human beings. God signifies the radical negation and cancellation of the human being; theology whose object is God, can on this account have only the λογος του σταυρου [message of the cross] as its content; but this is a σκανδαλον [stumbling-block] for the human being. Accordingly, the accusation against liberal theology is that it has sought to evade this σκανδαλον or to soften it."⁵

I'm only about 1/3 done (the biography is 536 pages!) but so far the book has done a great job opening up the mind and world of this fascinating figure of the early 20th century.

---

1 Konrad Hammann, Rudolf Bultmann: A Biography (trans. Philip E. Devenish; Salem, Or.: Polebridge Press, 2013).^↩
2 Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition.^↩
3 Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament.^↩
4 Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary.^↩
5 Rudolf Bultmann, "Die liberale Theologie," GuV, vol. 1, 2.^↩

Say it ain't so!

Google Reader is coming to an end! It has been my go-to website to read all the blogs I subscribe to as an RSS-feed reader... What other programs are out there that are worth using??

HELP.

HT: Google Blog

Read and watch

I wanted to give a heads-up to all my readers to a book and a lecture published/released recently by one of my teachers, Luke Timothy Johnson. He's been a terrific mentor thus far and every time I get to learn from him has been a real treat in scholarship, laughter, and collegiality. For others who are interested in his work, there's a couple things I want to mention.

First, check out this book, fresh off the press:

This is a collection of 35 essays that Luke has published over the decades of his amazing career divided into five categories that show just how widely he has worked in NT studies: (1) Jesus and the Gospels; (2) Luke-Acts; (3) Paul; (4) Other NT Compositions; and (5)  Issues in Christian Origins.

Unfortunately, Brill volumes are wonderful but also extremely pricy (their website lists this volume at an amazingly low... $297). Though if you have access to a good library, I'm sure they will purchase this book in the very near future, as it just came out.

Second, one of the chapters in the book is titled, "Jesus among the Philosophers," which is a paper he presented at a conference at Yale on happiness. And recently, Luke also gave that talk here at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University:

The video-clip length is about 50-minutes and it is well worth watching.

Get to know Thomas and the Synoptics.

If you're interested in that fascinating book called the Gospel of Thomas, there is one book fresh off the press (not even 6 months old) that might interest you from one of my teachers at Duke University, Mark Goodacre (see his blog here), titled, Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas's Familiarity with the Synoptics. I'm very happy to see this out in print as it was a book that was in its final stages when I took a course with Mark in my last year at Duke on the Greek Non-Canonical Gospels; he even let us read a chapter of the book that pertained to what we were discussing in class and it was great fun looking at the Greek fragments of Thomas that we currently have available. Check out the very chic cover:

I recently borrowed this book from Emory library and have been slowly reading it for leisure when I have some time to spare, and so far, I think it's vintage Goodacre. He is superb at doing careful analysis with various synopses which is a tool so often ignored in studies like this that compare two (or more) texts that are possibly related to each other literarily. I hope he's glad to know that I even recently used his method of using a colored synopsis when comparing Synoptic texts. I am TA-ing a class in the Candler School of Theology for their second semester NT interpretation class and as they are focusing right now on Luke 22:15-20, I hope it was helpful to the students to see a colored synopsis of Matt 26:26-29 // Mark 14:22-25 // Luke 22:15-20 to see what's happening in Luke at least from a redaction-critical standpoint. 

Eerdmans Publishing also released a video yesterday interviewing Mark about Thomas and his book. Check it out!



Now that you got that wonderful 8-minute introduction, what are you waiting for? Go purchase this book from Eerdmans (here) or even Amazon if that's your thing (here).

JSPL 2.2

The Fall 2012 issue of the Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters is out (though the website is not yet updated to reflect this latest issue), and I'm proud to say that my first peer-reviewed article has been published in this issue! It has been a long process of revising, editing, and waiting to get my first publication out there, and I hope that this is just the first of many more adventures in the world of academia. The article is a revised edition of a paper I wrote for a Galatians seminar I took with Susan Eastman. She was very encouraging about submitting the paper for publication, and given that I was unfamiliar with the whole process, her guidance was without doubt one of the reasons why I have been able to get this article published. The main textbook assigned for her course was J. Louis Martyn's Anchor Bible commentary on Galatians so it was a real treat to have him join us for our final session of our graduate seminar to talk about his thoughts on Paul. Having taken a course with both Susan Eastman and Douglas Campbell, I found myself quite amiable to the "apocalyptic reading" of Paul, and consequently, this journal article demonstrates their influence on my own reading of Paul.

The title of the article is "'It Has Been Brought to Completion': Leviticus 19:18 as Christological Witness in Galatians 5:14," JSPL 2.2 (2012): 115-132. In this article, I argue that the citation of Lev 19:18 in Gal 5:14 is not a one-to-one type correspondence in which the Galatians were supposed to obey the love-command found in Lev 19:18, but instead the quotation functions to resonate with the larger context of Lev 18-26 broadly, as a witness to the love demonstrated in the person of Jesus Christ.

I haven't been able to check whether my library has the hardcopy out yet, but if you get a chance to read it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the article.

79 Years Ago

I recently borrowed from the library a newly published book, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Isabel Best (she is part of the DBWE team, and herself involved in translations of volumes 8, 12, and 13 of Bonhoeffer's Works). One of the sermons was preached by Bonhoeffer in London on December 17, 1933, exactly 79 years ago. Especially in light of the recent tragedy at Newtown, CT, I thought an excerpt of this sermon would be fitting for this Christmas season.

Bonhoeffer preached on Luke 1:46-55:

And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”

"My Spirit Rejoices"

The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is also the most passionate, the wildest, and one might almost say the most revolutionary Advent hymn that has ever been sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary as we often see her portrayed in paintings. The Mary who is speaking here is passionate, carried away, proud, enthusiastic. There is none of the sweet, wistful, or even playful tone of many of our Christmas carols, but instead a hard, strong, relentless hymn about the toppling of thrones and the humiliation of the lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind. This is the sound of the prophetic women of the Old Testament - Deborah, Judith, Miriam - coming to life in the mouth of Mary. Mary, who was seized by the power of the Holy Spirit, who humbly and obediently lets it be done unto her as the Spirit commands her, who lets the Spirit blow where it wills [John 3:8] - she speaks, by the power of this Spirit, about God's coming into the world, about the Advent of Jesus Christ.

She, of course, knows better than anyone else what it means to wait for Christ's coming. Her waiting is different from that of any other human being. She expects him as his mother. He is closer to her than to anyone else. She knows the secret of his coming, knows about the Spirit, who has a part in it, about the Almighty God, who has performed this miracle. In her own body she is experiencing the wonderful ways of God with humankind: that God does not arrange matters to suit our opinions and views, does not follow the path that humans would like to prescribe. God's path is free and original beyond all our ability to understand or to prove.

There, where our understanding is outraged, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps its distance - that is exactly where God loves to be. There, though it confounds the understanding of sensible people, thought it irritates our nature and our piety, God wills to be, and none of us can forbid it. Only the humble believe and rejoice that God is so gloriously free, performing miracles where humanity despairs and glorifying that which is lowly and of no account. God "has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant." God in the midst of lowliness - that is the revolutionary, passionate word of Advent.

It begins with Mary herself, the carpenter's wife: as we would say, a poor working man's wife, unknown, not highly regarded by others; yet now, just as she is, unremarkable and lowly in the eyes of others, regarded by God and chosen to be mother of the Savior of the world. She was not chosen because of any human merit, not even for being, as she undoubtedly was, deeply devout, nor even for her humility or any other virtue, but entirely and uniquely because it is God's gracious will to love, to choose, to make great what is lowly, unremarkable, considered to be of little value. Mary, the tough, devout, ordinary working man's wife, living in her Old Testament faith and hoping in her Redeemer, becomes the mother of God. Christ, the poor son of a laborer from the East End of London, Christ is laid in a manger...

God is not ashamed of human lowliness but goes right into the middle of it, chooses someone as instrument, and performs the miracles right there where they are least expected. God draws near to the lowly, loving the lost, the unnoticed, the unremarkable, the excluded, the powerless, and the broken. What people say is lost, God says is found; what people say is "condemned," God says is "saved." What people say No! God says Yes! Where people turn their eyes away in indifference or arrogance, God gazes with a love that glows warmer there than anywhere else. Where people say something is despicable, God calls it blessed. When we come to a point in our lives where we are completely ashamed of ourselves and before God; when we believe that God especially now must be ashamed of us, and when we feel as far away from God as ever in all our lives - that is the moment in which God is closer to us than ever, wanting to break into our lives, wanting us to feel the presence of the holy and to grasp the miracle of God's love, God's nearness and grace...

When God chooses Mary as the instrument, when God decides to come in person into this world, in the manger in Bethlehem, this is not an idyllic family occasion but rather the beginning of a complete reversal, a new ordering of all things on this earth. If we want to be part of this event of Advent and Christmas, we cannot just sit there like a theater audience and enjoy all the lovely pictures. We ourselves will be caught up in this action, this reversal of all things; we will become actors on this stage. For this is a play in which each spectator has a part t o play, and we cannot hold back. What will our role be? Worshipful shepherds bending the knee, or kings bringing gifts? What story is being enacted when Mary becomes the mother of God, when God comes into the world in a lowly manger?

The judgment and redemption of the world - that is what is happening here. For it is the Christ Child in the manger himself who will bring that judgment and redemption. It is he who pushes away the great and mighty of this world, who topples the thrones of the powerful, who humbles the haughty, whose arm exercises power against all who are highly placed and strong, and whose mercy lifts up what was lowly and makes it great and glorious. So we cannot come to this manger in the same was as we would approach this cradle of any other child. Something will happen to each of us who decides to come to Christ's manger. Each of us will have been judged or redeemed before we go away. Each of us will either break down or come to know that God's mercy is turned toward us...

In eight days we will celebrate Christmas, for once really as the festival of Jesus Christ in our world. Before that, there is something we must clear up, something very important in our lives. We need to make clear to ourselves how, from now on, the light of the mangers, we are going to think about what is high and what is low in human life. Not that any of us are powerful persons, even if we would perhaps like to be and don't like to have that said to us. There are never more than a few very powerful people. But there are any more people with small amounts of power, petty power, who put it into play wherever they can and whose one thought is: keep climbing higher! God, however, thinks differently, namely, keep climbing down lower, down among the lowly and the inconspicuous, in self-forgetfulness, in not seeking to be looked at or well regarded or to be the highest. If we go this way, there we will meet God himself. Each of us lives among persons who are the so-called higher-ups and others who are the so-called lowly. Each of us knows someone who is lower in the order of things that we ourselves. Might this Christmas help us learn to see this point in a radically different way, to rethink it entirely, to know that if we want to find the way to God, we have to go, not up tot he heights, but really down tot he depths among the least of all, and that every life only wants to stay up high will come to a fearful end?...

Who among us will celebrate Christmas rightly? Who will finally lay down at the manger all power and honor, all high regard, vanity, arrogance, and self-will? Who will take their place among the lowly and let God alone be high? Who will see the glory of God in the lowliness of the child in the manger? Who will say with Mary: The Lord has looked with favor on my lowliness. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. Amen.