Home : The Voice : December 2002  

Readings

by Rick Dietrich

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE,
AND ESPECIALLY HOW?

Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Fortress Press, 2002).

My Columbia Seminary colleagues in Old Testament are excited about Daniel Smith- Christopher’s A Biblical Theology of Exile, excited enough to convince me to read it, too. Now, I’m excited by the book, though probably for different reasons.

Most of us are curious about what other people do. It’s a common question, when we’re introduced: “And what do you do?” We’re also curious about how people do what they do. “That must be interesting,” we say, inviting them to tell us more about it. This curiosity is a staple of the novel, of newspaper and magazine features, of television — it’s why I watch CSI: Miami.

It’s a long way from CSI: Miami to Old Testament scholarship. If, however, we are part of the church served by what these scholars do, shouldn’t we be interested? What Daniel Smith-Christopher has to say about the Exile may not grab us immediately, but it is part of a conversation among the men and women who teach the ministers who preach to us.

Smith-Christopher argues that the church itself has entered a time of exile: it is no longer at the center of things; it lacks the ear of the powerful it once had. This is a good thing, he believes, but only if the church takes the trouble to understand what it means to be in exile and thinks seriously about how people in exile remain faithful. The biblical stories of exile, and other biblical material from the exilic period can help us with these tasks: Ezra and Nehemiah, Ezekiel and Lamentations, Jonah and the later Isaiah passages, Ecclesiastes and Danielamong many other texts. (One of the surprises for this nonscholar is how much of the Hebrew Scriptures scholars now assign to the exilic and post-exilic periods.)

The interpretation and application of these biblical texts constitute the what of what Smith-Christopher does. But, of more interest—to me at least—is how he goes about doing it. One of the things I like about the book, published by Fortress Press, is that the footnotes are really footnotes; they’re right there handy at the bottom of the page. But I miss a bibliography at the end. You have to search the footnotes, then, if you want to preview, or review, Smith-Christopher’s secondary sources. Many of these are what the non-scholar might expect, books and articles like: Rodney Werline’s Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism: The Development of a Religious Institution, or Gary Knoppers’ “Prayer and Propaganda: Solomon’s Dedication of the Temple and the Deuteronomist’s Program” in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly. But many are unexpected: Reconstructing Lives, Recapturing Meaning: Refugee Identity, Gender and Culture Change, R. M. Krulfeld and L.A. Camino, editors, for example, or Lucia Ann McSpadden’s essay, “Negotiating Masculinity in the Reconstruction of Social Space: Eritrean and Ethiopian Refugees in the United States and Sweden” in another book, Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice.

Smith-Christopher’s method, in other words-at least as I understand it-involves mining the work of other disciplines, particularly sociology, anthropology, and “refugee studies,” for the material to grind the lenses through which he will read Scripture. What will we find if we look at the Exile through these disciplines? Will we see something new? Will we find something helpful?

We will see something new. Whether or not it is helpful probably depends, at least in part, on whether the lenses he chooses fit our prescription. Do we find the social sciences helpful or confusing, in this example? Do we tend to agree or disagree with the ideology of the social scientists Smith- Christopher reads? Do we like the idea that people are doing “refugee studies,” or do we mistrust disciplines that end in the word “studies”? Did we major in psychology, or do we gather some pleasure when we read that even such established social sciences as sociology, anthropology, and psychology are now being questioned by chemists, biologists, geologists, and others wondering aloud if they are sciences at all or only ways of proving the bias of the “researcher”?

Of course, sociologists and psychologists have argued, every researcher has a bias. Every reading of Scripture is biased, my Old Testament colleagues might add: the work of the biblical scholar is always partial and ongoing. Commentary is commentary, from this book in which the author is as honest as he can be about lenses he’s grinding to the footnotes, even the section titles in your New King James Study Bible.

We may wish to live in a more certain world, but we don’t. Not yet.