SECSOR: Day One

The 2010 meeting of the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion (SECSOR) began tonight. Attendance appears to be down quite a bit from last year, if memory serves. This time last year wasn't exactly plush, economically speaking, so I'm not sure the economy is the main factor at play here. But maybe it is. Or maybe tomorrow will be different. I dunno.

Anyway, I attended tonight's "New Testament I" session, which featured three rather interesting papers (the fourth, "Gossiping Jesus Into Being: The Oral Processing of a Social Personage in the Gospels" [John Daniels, Flagler College] was, unfortunately cancelled).

• The first paper, "Eschatology and Soteriology in 1 Peter" (Alexander Stewart, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary), examined the "now" and "not yet" aspects of the language of salvation in 1 Peter. The paper doesn't exactly break new ground; Stewart acknowledged that he was taking aim at a more popular-level conception of salvation in "the American church." And his focus, as is often the case in discussions of "now" and "not yet," was on the relation between the present and the future. As I mentioned to him in a conversation after the session, however, the question that interests me is the relation (and the distinction!) between the present and the past! That is, if the "new age" is supposed to be different from the "present age"—with its suffering, injustice, etc.—and if early Christians believed that Jesus' death and resurrection inaugurated the new age, what's changed? I still don't think Stewart has addressed the question, though he emphasized conversion (and, I think, the inclusion of gentiles among God's chosen people) as the difference. Something still seems missing to me, but I enjoyed the way Stewart's paper framed the question for me (albeit indirectly).


• The second paper, "Neglected Considerations in Understanding the Structure of the Book of Revelation" (Kevin Larsen, Mid-Atlantic Christian University), raised questions about Revelation's structure (sequential or cyclical) and, relatedly, its genre. Larsen—whose training is in the gospels and who acknowledged at the start his novice status among the apocalypses—reads Revelation salvation-historically, with Jesus and his climactic role in the story of salvation not figuring into Revelation's narrative until chapter 12. There were a number of interesting observations, I thought, but then again I, too, know very little about John's apocalypse. What I appreciated most, however, was Larsen's insistence that Revelation, as a text, spoke to and was written for real first-century CE people. This is a truism among NT scholars, but with Revelation in particular the temptation to read the text as written for (and about!) later Christians too easily leads interpretation astray.


• The third paper, "One Saturday in Capernaum: Mark's Gentile Appropriation of the Sabbath" (Ricky Shinall, Vanderbilt University), discussed gentile [mis]understandings of Jewish Sabbath observances and then read Mark's portrayal of Jesus healing and teaching in the Capernaum synagogue on the Sabbath. In Shinall's reading, Mark has little knowledge of or use for Jewish Sabbath observance, except that Sabbath does present a useful occasion for teaching and healing. So, unlike the superstitious Jews (in Mark's perspective, not Shinall's), Jesus is uninhibited in his Sabbath observance and, just as importantly, isn't lazy. Shinall closed by suggesting Mark's misunderstanding of Jewish Sabbath observance supports a Roman rather than Palestinian provenance for the gospel. Unfortunately, there were too many other ways to read the evidence (e.g., whereas gentiles mistakenly thought Jews fasted on the Sabbath, Mark has Simon's mother-in-law serve Jesus and his companions after Jesus healed her fever [Mark 1.31]), though presumably, outside the confines of a 25-minute paper, Shinall addresses this (I would prefer to locate the Sabbath controversies within an inter-Jewish framework; Shinall cited E. P. Sanders and J. P. Meier to explain his preference for a gentile framework).

I missed the presidential addresses, which was too bad given that Jodi Magness presented what I presume was an interesting paper: "Truth and Fiction: The Talpiyot Tomb in Context." The reception afterward (which I did not miss, of course) was perhaps the best-supplied SBL reception I've ever seen. I had the pineapple and some grapes, but there was sushi, various dips, and many other selections. I was thoroughly impressed.

That's it for Day One. I'm looking forward to tomorrow; I'll let you know how it goes. If you'd like to see the program, it's available online on SECSOR's website.

John and Revelation: more thoughts from Carter

This is just something I want to remind myself to think about later, but—as always—I would also be interested in comments from the gallery. I'm in the middle of Warren Carter's argument that John's gospel employs a "rhetoric of distance" in critique of the Christian community in Ephesus (and anywhere else, for that matter) that has grown too comfortable with Rome and Roman imperialism. This is dramatically different, I think, then the standard approach to reading John, in which the audience is typically read as experiencing persecution, whether from the synagogue or from Rome. Not so, says Carter; John targets Christians who have learned to participate in civic and imperial life despite their devotion to Jesus.

In his discussion of the gospel's genre, he draws some links between John and Revelation. Now, as I pointed out earlier, Carter suggests that Revelation, too, is written to over-accommodated Christians in Asia, so the similarities between these two texts perhaps isn't very surprising. And I'm still interested in this reading of Revelation. But as I think about it now it seems to me that persecution at least has something to do with Revelation, even if "persecution" doesn't aptly describe the entire generative context of that book. Inasmuch, then, as persecution is even partly a motivating factor in Revelation's composition, do thematic, generic, and theological links between Revelation and John suggest that persecution similarly explains some, if not all, of the gospel's features?

Warren Carter on Revelation

I was surprised by this discussion of Revelation (admittedly, in the context of a book on John, in a chapter on the synagogue in first-century Asia Minor, a province of the Roman Empire). Carter says:

Recent scholarship on Revelation argues, from an examination of life in imperial Asia and of the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2–3, that this text addressed not situations of persecution as previously thought, but situations of what the author regards as overaccommodation and compromise with Roman imperial society. The author challenges the overaccommodated lifestyle of the majority in the churches, urging them to discern the (demonic!) nature of the empire and to distance themselves from societal participation. In the words of 18:4, they are to "come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues" (NRSV). Revelation reveals that Rome, a "dwelling place of demons" (18:2), is already under God's judgment (Rev 6), asserts the devilish nature of Rome's empire and imperial worship (Rev 12–13), exposes its political power and economic greed (Rev 18), envisions God's supreme rule even now and in the future (Rev 4–5; 22), and anticipates Rome's imminent and final demise in the establishment of God's purposes by Jesus, the Lamb slaughtered by Rome but raised by God's power (Rev 18–22). In the meantime, the author urges the seven churches to distance themselves from imperial society. (John and Empire, 39)

Earlier this year I read through a Greek text of Revelation and began thinking I'd like to spend some time doing research at the back of the canon. As of now I haven't, so this strangest, perhaps, of NT books is well beyond my area of expertise.

Even so, I think when we read Revelation as a text about "the end of the world," this book loses the ability to say anything about our lives in the world, here and now, except indirectly and by implication. Maybe this isn't an inevitable consequence, but I think all the futuristic, apocalyptic (in the Jerry Jenkins/Tim LaHaye sense) perspectives have obscured the ways that Revelation is relevant to the twenty-first century church more broadly. I have been known to say that the main thrust of Revelation was that, in the end, Jesus wins, and you really want to be on his team. But does Revelation have more—maybe even significantly more—to say to us now?

Until Carter I had only ever heard people talk about Revelation as a text written to churches in the context of rather extreme persecution (John is, after all, exiled on Patmos!). But the idea that the church has identified itself too closely with the empire, rather than is experiencing persecution at her hands, turns at least some of that thinking on its head. Perhaps much of the apocalyptic imagery driving John's visions isn't directed at a violent empire whose machinations have hurt and endangered a growing and yet increasingly marginal Jewish movement. Perhaps that imagery, instead, is directed at a pagan empire with whom the early followers of Jesus had learned to negotiate and co-exist. Certainly I would think being able to get along is a good thing, but at what cost? Had the church then—and has the church now—given up or simply forgotten its core identity for the sake of getting along?

It's too early for me to say I'm convinced. But the possibility is intriguing. Consider this: In an age when the church has become very comfortable with the centers of power—whether hosting presidential debates and praying at presidential inaugurations, or sustaining massive consumer industries and spending billions in marketing, or identifying with the burgeoning environmentalist market that looks to be the next source of global wealth redistribution, or whatever—perhaps Revelation can reorient us to being faithful participants and prophetic voices in the marketplaces (commercial, political, and otherwise). Perhaps Revelation can show us again how not to legitimate this world's power structures but rather to demonstrate their pallor in the light of God's glorious power.