Why this book? For me? -I've been finding myself wanting to wrestle more and more with the interface between scholarly questions and devotional reception of scripture. Walter Moberly has a reputation which suggests he could be a helpful thought provoker and angle-giver. I've not previously read much of his work, so I also felt that this might help me to orient to his oeuvre and suss out whether more acquaintance could be good.
What this book does is to consider the challenges that we face in commending the Bible to our contemporary cultures. Obviously, this isn't quite meeting what I mentioned I'm looking to wrestle with, but it is adjacent-enough to be helpful to me. It also has the advantage of coming at the issue through the pathway of attentiveness to culture and mission which lie in my background. It does deal with the reception of texts and as part of that there is relevance to the devotional reception while making use of scholarly insights, approaches and techniques.
One of the interesting things that Moberly does is to cross-reference specifically, as a kind of case study, Daniel 7 with the chapter 1 of the Aeneid. I feel embarrassed to say that I'd never known about the Aeneid, -I'd heard of it but had no idea what it was or where it fitted in Roman history and culture. I have to say that it was really helpful for me to do the compare and contrast that Moberly does with it. It was interesting to get some insight into the way that Roman empire Christians appreciated, made use of and critiqued the Aeneid. I was glad of the insight that gives into their strategies for reading texts which carry across to using scripture.
It was helpful also to be walked through the likely composition drivers of the Aeneid as well as to get insight into why it would have been received by imperial Romans as a kind of divine oracle which bolstered and underpinned the imperial mythology and solidified a sense of destiny and participation in divine design. This was helpfully compared and contrasted with the same sort of examination of Daniel 7. The contrasts were helpful as the similarities. I also found it useful to be reminded of the multivalency of such texts, that they could/can become unmoored from their original purpose and gain a wider reception which can be disclosive.
For me too this helped to consolidate thoughts and reflections about the way that apocalyptic language and imagery works and gives a useful handle on why we really do need to understand it and be able to use it so that we don't fall into the kinds of 'dating the signs of the end' we see with Schofield, the JWs, Adventists and others.
What this careful work does also is builds a basis on which to be able to commend the Bible for spiritual use to intelligent and 'disenchanted' readers. For me this is important as I am increasingly thinking about the formation needs of those adults who are new to the Christian faith and considering what it is that we need to do with them to help them to develop service-able habits of mind, perspective, approach and routine. I think that this book gives insights and approaches that could help in that task.
I was interested to see Moberly take an approach I've seen used in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics where the main text is interposed with more in depth comment -excursuses- in a different typeface. This was done with the suggestion by Moberly that if the reader didn't want to go into the detail, then they could easily identify what to skip over. The only problem for me with that was on my e-reader, it was quite hard to get the small text to be a reasonable size for easy reading without having huge main text.
I quite liked the excursus on how to present dating 'AD and BC'. There's a handy little description of how we got "AD" and "BC" (and he shares my puzzlement at why one set of initials refers to a Latin phrase and one to an English phrase -why wouldn't you be consistent: AC and BC, for example). And I like his alternative to the CE and BCE -using an up arrow symbol for numbers rising (ie CE/AD) and a down-arrow for numbers falling (ie BC/BCE). Personally I think we should give that a go, but I also doubt it'll catch on, unfortunately.
So, I commend this book to you if it looks at all interesting and resonant for you.
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| Note: This review was given of the book which was supplied free for the purposes of review. Nothing but an honest review was asked; no inducements to make it a favourable review were offered. |
