My 10 Best Books of 2010

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope 2010 was a good one for you. Either way, we now have one of those psychological new beginnings. So make the most of it.

I took a couple of graduate courses in history last year. So, many of the books I read came from an assigned list. The first course I took focused on the Holocaust. The other one dealt with the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis. Every once in a while I had the chance to pick up something that wasn't required reading. Anyway, listed in the order I read them (and highly rated because I just like them) here are "My 10 Best Books of 2010."

1. Hiding in the Spotlight, Greg Dawson.

A true Holocaust survival story that reads like a Dickens novel. The author is the son and nephew of the two main characters. He's also a seasoned journalist. This book is beautifully and tenderly written.

2. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, Raymond Carver.

I'd love to write half as well as the great Raymond Carver did. I can't stop reading his stuff. He wasn't afraid to tell sad, gritty stories generated by his own hard experiences.

3. Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, Saul Friedlander.

First published in 1997, this book has gone on to establish itself as a major contribution to Holocaust studies. For Volume II, which covers the years of the War, 1939-1945, Friedlander won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

4. Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcomb Gladwell.

An easy reading book about how personal success is a matter of background and sustained effort. Gladwell says that both are highly significant.

5. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Tribe in American History, S. C. Gwynne.

Wow. It's like David McCullough wrote a book about the Comanches. It's that good. Well-researched, superbly-written, this one is an armchair historian's dream come true.

6. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, John Lewis Gaddis.

A series of eight lectures by a Yale history professor. Gaddis responds to questions like, What do historians do? Why? And what is the value of their work?

7. Restoration Roots: The Scottish Origins of the American Restoration Movement, Lynn McMillon.

The subtitle says it all. This is a popular edition of McMillon's doctoral dissertation completed at Baylor University in 1972. It overviews the impact of Scottish religious leaders like John Glas, Robert Sandeman, and James and Robert Haldane on the subsequent American Restoration Movement (also known as the Stone-Campbell Movement).

8. The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis, Sheldon M. Stern.

From 1977 to 1999, Stern was Historian at the JFK Presidential Library. He was almost certainly one of the first to ever hear the tapes made at the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. From his transcripts of those tapes, he narrates the episode and provides a historical framework.

9. The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, Garry Wills.

Wills, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and historian, serves up an analysis of the Kennedy clan. Sometimes sympathetic, often scathing, this book was written not long after Ted Kennedy's unsuccessful bid to gain the Democrat's nomination for President in 1980.

10. Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire.

Born in Havana in 1950, Eire was a grade-schooler during the Castro revolution. These days he teaches religious history at Yale. In this memoir from his early years, the author brings together his childhood fun and fears, theology, and a deep, dreamy wonder about what might have been.

So, what were some of the better things you read in 2010? Has anyone else read the titles (or authors) I've listed here? What's on your reading agenda for 2011?

Resources for Historians of the Holocaust

This semester I'm part of a graduate seminar at West Texas A&M University. The course, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Morrow Clark, is focused on the Holocaust.

Over the past few months, I've done a good bit of reading in the secondary literature on the subject. I've also spent a few hours identifying Web resources for those interested in exploring one of the most significant and defining events of the 20th century. Here's the best of the best of what I've discovered so far:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This nicely-done site is immense, yet easy-to-use. It includes a Holocaust encyclopedia, videos and photographs, transcripts of first-person accounts, lots of information about exhibits and events at the Museum located in Washington, D.C., and links to all sorts of related pages and sites.

Yad Vashem
The name of this museum located in Jerusalem comes from the Hebrew text of Isaiah 56:5, "And to them I will give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name . . . that shall not be cut off." Their site includes links to photo archives, podcasts, video lectures, a names database, and much more. First-rate.

Nazi Propaganda Archive
This site was put together by Professor Randall L. Bytwerk who teaches at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Bytwerk has written extensively on the subject of Nazi and East German propaganda. His site contains a wide array of translated texts as well as visual materials (posters, book covers and drawings, etc.) that give one a feel for the kinds of words and images that were common in Nazi Germany. Some, like Julius Streicher's anti-Semitic children's book, are downright chilling.

A video about every book of the Bible

That's the tagline for a website I just came across. Apparently, the project is being done by scholars at the University of Nottingham. So far, I've watched only a few of the videos. My reviews would be mixed. It's an interesting idea, though. Check it out. The name of the site is Bibledex.

Hitler's Willing Executioners, by D. J. Goldhagen: An Overview

In Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, first published in 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen sets out to understand "the actions and mind-set of the tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who . . . became genocidal killers" (p. 4). He begins with a premise that seems obvious enough: to explain why and how the Holocaust occurred, one must explore "the question of what impelled the perpetrators of the Holocaust to kill" (5). He claims that, in the vast literature on the the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, comparatively little has been written on this central question, a neglect he intends to remedy.

Goldhagen, a historian and political scientist at Harvard, emphasizes that it is too simple to say that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Hitler and other Nazi leaders. By definition, all leaders have followers; and without the tens of thousands who willingly followed, the Holocaust would never have occurred. So exactly who were those followers, and what made them tick? Specifically, what were the motivations that led them to not merely execute, but to demean and torture and slaughter, as many Jews as they could? The author reports that in the majority of the previous interpretations of the Holocaust, the motivations of the perpetrators of genocide have been explained along the following lines:

A. They were coerced by the threat of severe punishment or even death.

B. They were blindly following Adolf Hitler, their popular, charismatic leader. Another example of this type of obedience explanation says that people generally obey authority. They are even more likely to obey state authority, and this would be as true of Germans as anyone.

C. They were subjected to high levels of social pressure and expectation.

D. They were petty, callous bureaucrats who were out to make careers and to provide for themselves and their families.

E. Because the Holocaust was carried out by a series of acts that involved different people doing different things, the responsibility for such inhumanity was dispersed. According to this explanation, very few of the thousands of perpetrators, therefore, accepted that they were killing millions of Jews. Under these circumstances, they found it relatively easy to shift the blame.

Goldhagen says that these explanations or rationalizations are mostly, if not entirely, untrue. The fact is, millions of ordinary Germans knew exactly what the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Problem" was. Perhaps as many as 100,000 or more of these people became willing, responsible perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Coupled with this thesis is Goldhagen’s assertion that most of the previous interpreters of the Holocaust have not rightly understood the depth and the character of the antisemitism that motivated its perpetrators. Too often, he says, people have imagined that most Germans living under the Nazi regime were basically like most everyone else. They weren’t. Using anecdotes and statistics from primary sources, Goldhagen paints a portrait of Holocaust perpetrators who had very little of what might be called special exposure to Nazi propaganda. Nor were they a group of young, impressionable, hand-selected, highly-trained soldiers. Only small percentages of them were “SS men” or members of the Nazi party. Instead, the perpetrators were typical Germans, animated by what the author calls an "eliminationist antisemitism," a particular type that led the perpetrators of the Holocaust "to conclude that Jews ought to die" (14, original emphasis).

As Goldhagen attempts to demonstrate, this most-radical and hateful sort of antisemitism pervaded German society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And that, he says, is how and why the Holocaust occurred.

Old Testament Scholarship and Christianity Today Magazine: Getting Started

In three recent posts, I traced out the early history of evangelical Christianity in the United States:

The first post describes The Beginning and Rise of the American Fundamentalist Movement. Fundamentalism was partly a reaction. It was opposed to the advance of theological liberalism in the U.S. during the decades following the Civil War. (To get a taste of popular liberalism at the beginning of the 20th century, see this short article on how the book of Genesis should be taught in Sunday school. Note especially the last sentence). Another way of looking at Fundamentalism sees it as an effort to maintain the tenets and culture of early nineteenth-century conservative Protestantism.

The second post tells the story of Fundamentalist Defeat and Reaction. The 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee was a terrible blow to the public image of Fundamentalism. In the years following the trial, conservatives in America reacted in three distinct ways. The most progressive response (and, in time, the most successful) was what came to be known as evangelical Christianity.

The third post spotlights The Beginnings of American Evangelicalism, represented by what turned out to be two very effective institutions: Fuller Theological Seminary and Christianity Today magazine.

So that's where we've been. Going forward, I want to use Christianity Today (sometimes abbreviated CT) as a scope through which we can view evangelical response to scholarship in general and especially to the field of Old Testament studies. The goal is to arrive at a better understanding of what is distinctive about American Evangelicalism, especially its attitudes toward the Bible and modern scholarship.

At the outset, it is important to note that from the earliest times of their discernible identity, American evangelicals have held to the traditional understandings of Scripture which they had inherited from their fundamentalist forebears. This is not to say that the evangelical view was pre-critical. In other words, fundamentalist biblical scholarship never attempted to retreat to the time before the Enlightenment. Even a fundamentalist text like Gleason L. Archer’s, Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press, 1974), is a completely modern piece of work. So it is not the case that these “anti-modernists” called fundamentalists were not themselves modern. Rather, within the huge circle of modernity, both fundamentalists and their liberal or modernist counterparts had different sets of values. And those differents sets of values sent them down different pathways.

To someone who knows a bit about modern Old Testament scholarship, it comes as no surprise that the O.T. question taken up most often in the pages of CT centers on the unity, authorship, and date of the Torah, or Pentateuch. The second most-common question is the unity and date of the book of Isaiah. Running a distant third is the question of the date and interpretation of the book of Daniel. So, in the observations that follow, most of the material reviewed will deal with the Pentateuch. Questions regarding Isaiah will also get some attention.

My guess is that most of the people who frequent this blog cut their higher-critical teeth studying the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch and the unity of the book of Isaiah. These were considered to be big issues, questions that were raised by modern Old Testament scholarship, and that had to be answered. Such were the beliefs of early neo-evangelicals.

American Evangelicalism and Old Testament Scholarship

[T]he evangelical position is pledged to a scientific scholarship operating within the circle of Christian faith. No obscurantist methodology is available to the evangelical to enable him to interpret Scripture. . . . Evangelicals may be flayed for not facing up to modern criticism [i.e., modern analysis of the Bible] or for not making a significant contribution to it. They may be accused of harboring too large a population of obscurantists. But the thesis here propounded is undamaged: The pattern of the Reformers states that when divine certainties end, the only safe guide is the finest of scientific scholarship exercised in humility before God.

Bernard Ramm, "Are We Obscurantists?" Christianity Today 1 (February 18, 1957), p. 15.

No, it's not exactly an epigram. But the foregoing is my lead in, let's call it, for a paper that I'm planning to publish in segments here at Frankly Speaking. My working title at this point is (drum roll, please), . . . "American Evangelicalism and Old Testament Scholarship, 1956-2006."

The project goes back to a good bit of research I did just a few years ago. I've had some more time to think about it since then, and I'm ready now to pick up where I left off.

I may wind up submitting this work to a refereed journal. (Always think of men wearing striped shirts when I say that). Or I may hold on to it and save it for a future dissertation or book or all of the above. So I'll be glad to hear anything constructive you might have to say about its content, style, significance, whatever. One reason I've chosen to blog this material first is so that I can receive helpful feedback before going to press rather than after.

My plan is to follow three steps: First, I want to describe the influences, events, and personalities that led to the establishment of Christianity Today magazine.

Second, I'll overview the contents of the magazine from its inception until 2006, especially as it takes up and deals with contemporary Old Testament scholarship.

Third, I will offer a couple of provisional conclusions regarding the identity of, and apparent changes within, American evangelical scholarship (and evangelicalism in general) during that period of time.

One of my main conclusions will be that, during the last half century, what I've decided to call the "intellectual middle class" of American evangelicalism, which was once quite strong, has all but vanished. Ironically, this has happened during the same era when the academic achievements of the best American evangelical scholars have grown more and more impressive.

It might even be possible to identify lines between what I'm describing and the apparent loss of vitality within evangelical circles coming into the twenty-first century. At any rate, I want the study to do more than simply offer description. I want it to also provide some analysis, and to show how the recent past has shaped the current scene. It might even provide at least part of the map that would indicate where the American evangelical movement should go from where it is now.

A is for Abductive, B is for Balderdash

It's not too often that you read "Hogwash!" in a scholarly book review. But that's exactly one of the comments that Tim Sensing, a professor at Abilene Christian University, makes in his review of the book A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church, by Leonard Sweet, Brian McLaren, and Jerry Haselmayer. Sensing's review appears in the most recent issue of Restoration Quarterly (Volume 51, Fourth Quarter 2009, pp. 251-253), and it serves as a model of one of the functions of good scholarship: to drive out bad scholarship.

According to Sensing, A is for Abductive is a dictionary type book that "advertises itself as a primer for people desiring to discern the thought processes of churches that are responding to postmodern culture." The book includes entries like "I is for Icon." But Sensing doesn't have to go beyond the very first entry, "A is for Abductive Method," to find what he calls "enough fodder" for his review. In that first entry, the authors cite the work of philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, and advocate an approach to preaching that, instead of analyzing, looks to create an image or compose an experience. Sounds sexy, doesn't it?

But as Sensing points out, not only are the authors guilty of mere assertion, they apparently didn't bother to read the work of C. S. Pierce: you know, the work that supposedly provides the theoretical foundation for what they're saying. They do cite a 1970 dissertation dealing with Pierce's theory. So Sensing read the dissertation and compared it to A is for Abductive. What he found was "no basis for associating Pierce's understanding of the logic of scientific discovery to the abductive method presented by the authors." In short, Sweet, McLaren and Haselmayer have completely misappropriated C. S. Pierce, and are, at least in this case, patently guilty of a name-dropping sort of pseudo scholarship.

Meanwhile, Sensing points out, all of the sudden everyone's getting all "abductive." For example, a recent article by Paul Windsor, "A Space to Occupy: Creating a Missional Model for Preaching," (Stimulus, Vol. 13, no 1 [2005]: 20-25) cites A is for Abductive as though it were a genuine authority.

Carl Savage and William Presnell do much the same thing in their book Narrative Research in Ministry: A Postmodern Research Approach for Faith Communities (Louisville: Wayne E. Oates Institute, 2008). Sensing notes that Savage and Presnell cite A is for Abductive "to make claims about narrative research methodology. Relying on the authors' pseudo-work leads them to assert that the essence of narrative as the primary voice of theological research in ministry is 'non-logical.'" (This is where Sensing has to say, "Hogwash!"). He closes with, "Those footnoting this work contribute to the dissemination of ignorance."

Upon reading this review, I was reminded that some of the best preachers I've ever known didn't know much about communication theory per se. But they did love the Lord. They modeled, imperfectly, what it means to live for Him. And they understood a few things about how to convict and persuade people, how to show them the hope that is found only in Christ Jesus and build them up in faith. Most of that know-how came as a result of their deep study of the Bible and a passion for preaching God's Word.

I know, to some ears that might sound a bit sappy, nostalgic, inadequate. I can only protest that maybe that's part of what's behind the loss of vitality in American church life today. There can be no doubt that major shifts are taking place in American thought and life. I don't understand much about that. What I do know is that nonsense masquerading as Christian scholarship or "the next big thing" isn't the answer. How 'bout you?

You Might Want to Read . . .

The November 2008 issue of the Gospel Advocate magazine features several articles on "The Emerging Church Movement." Evidently, when the Advocate, a Churches of Christ publication, sold all the paper copies of this one, they chose to temporarily post the feature articles on the Web. I haven't had the chance to read them yet. I suspect that they will mainly disapprove. But it should be interesting to hear the various takes.

Last spring, I did a few posts about the Ascension of Christ: a little complaining about how the biblical teaching has been overlooked, and then some of the teaching itself. More recently, Wade Hodges has published in New Wineskins magazine the best thing I've ever read on the topic. Take a look at the article Hail to the King!

A couple years ago, Restoration Quarterly published a very informative and challenging article by Evertt Huffard. Since then, RQ has begun to make some articles from their back issues available on the Web. I'm glad they chose to include this one by Huffard: "When Scholarship Goes South: Biblical Scholarship and Global Trends."

Teaching about the Documentary Hypothesis

The Old Testament class I teach is billed as a first-year college course. As such, it should overview the content of the Old Testament, plenty of material for a semester’s worth of study. And that’s why I thought long and hard before doing what I did last night.

A little background. Because the class meets at night, it’s an older group than I usually have. Many of the students are workaday professionals. Night time is their time to take a college course. The class includes a veteran preacher, a real estate agent, a physician, and a high school science teacher.

Because it’s made up of a lot of eager and accomplished people, I made the decision to introduce the class to the old “Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch.” If that’s an expression you haven’t seen before, you can read about it here.

There's much about the theory to criticize. But I do think it’s significant because it has been significant in modern study of the Old Testament, not to mention the entire field of biblical research. So last night I walked the class through the rise and development of the hypothesis, some of the basis for its appeal, and some of the problems it has.

Before getting into that, though, I told them about my apprehension and about my confidence in their ability and maturity. I also told them that this was the most significant topic in the field of Old Testament higher criticism, the only one we would really get into all semester. If they didn’t like this section or started to feel lost, they could be confident that we wouldn’t be doing anything like this again.

I was fairly well-prepared to teach the material. I used visuals on the screen as well as handouts. From what I could tell, it wasn’t too much.

I closed by saying that there are problems with the goals, origins, development and conclusions of the hypothesis (deep breath) and that a good case can be made for the tradition that Moses is author of the “Books of Moses.” At the same time, it’s fair to acknowledge that Moses may have used oral and/or written sources (especially in writing Genesis), and that the received Pentateuch seems to include some editorial comments that come from a much later time. A good example is found in Genesis 36:31, where, in a list of ancient Edomite kings, the text explains that this was “before any kings reigned in Israel.”

Now, I have a lot of questions.

One is, In Christian universities, Bible colleges, and seminaries, what are the professors saying these days about the Documentary Hypothesis? I’m curious about the state of its influence and any discussion of it. My suspicion is that, in the O.T. classes in more conservative schools, there’s still a unit on what the hypothesis is and why it’s wrong. The better-read teachers in such schools probably (and should) bring in the newer voice of narrative-critical study which demonstrates literary artistry across huge sections of the Torah.

Clearly, though, the hypothesis is still the working assumption of many Old Testament specialists today. Even the decidedly-evangelical Word Biblical Commentary series includes volumes that proceed on its premise! All that to say, it doesn’t seem quite dead.

I have to confess that although the history of how it developed intrigues me, the hypothesis itself seems like a literary version of Darwinism, hopeless and unconvincing. (Yes, I understand about the philosophical connections one can draw between Darwin and Wellhausen).

Anyway, what are your thoughts? Responses? Criticisms? I’m curious about what other students and teachers and searchers think.