405 - Some of My Favorites

Some of My Favorites
By Eugene H. Peterson

THE first Bible that I chose for myself was a Scofield Reference Bible, purchased with my own money when I was thirteen years old. It was bound in Morocco leather and printed on fine India paper. It cost $10.95, a healthy sum in 1946. I had determined to get it when I heard an adult whom I respected say that this particular Bible was indispensable for understanding Scripture. My first chosen Bible was also my first commentary on the Bible.

Ten years later I rejected, sometimes vehemently, nearly everything that Scofield wrote about the various books of the Bible, and I resented the intrusion of his headings and outlines into the text. But however thoroughly I came to quarrel with the man, I do not quarrel with his gift to me of a lifelong love of commentaries.

I read commentaries the way some people read novels, from beginning to end, skipping nothing. I admit that they are weak in plot and character development, but their devout attention to words and syntax keeps me turning the pages. Plot and character-the plot of salvation, the character of the Messiah-are everywhere implicit in a commentary and persistently assert their presence even when unmentioned through scores, even hundreds, of pages. The power of these ancient nouns and verbs century after century to call forth intelligent discourse from learned men and women continues to be a staggering wonder to me.

Among those of us for whom Scripture is a vocational passion, reading commentaries has always seemed to me analagous to the gathering of football fans in the local bar, replaying in endless detail the game they have just watched, arguing (maybe even fighting) over observations and opinions, and lacing the discourse with gossip about the players. The level of knowledge evident in these boozy colloquies is impressive. These fans have watched the game for years; the players are household names to them; they know the fine print in the rule book and pick up every nuance on the field. And they care immensely about what happens in the game. Their seemingly endless commentary is evidence of how much they care. Like them, what I relish in commentary is not bare information but conversation with knowledgeable and experienced friends probing, observing, questioning the biblical text. Absorbed by this plot that stretches grandly from Genesis to Revelation, captured by the messianic presence that in death and resurrection saves us one and all, there is much to notice, much to talk over.

Eugene H. Peterson is the minister of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland. He is the author of Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work (1980), A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (1980), Earth and Altar (1985), and Working the Angles.- The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (1987). His article, "Annie Dillard: With Her Eyes Open," which the author said was the best piece she had seen on her writing, appeared in the July 1986 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

406 - Some of My Favorites

George Herbert, the sixteenth century "country parson," used to refer to the commentary as his plough. I like that. He regularly ploughed the biblical text with a commentary. Heavily trafficked by sermon and lecture, the biblical text is liable to a certain hardening into cliche; it then requires loosening up by a plough commentary so that seeds can penetrate and sprout again.

In my roomful of commentaries, five have a distinguished place for me. I make no claims for them as being the best, but in various ways they have become personal beyond the others: George Adam Smith on Isaiah, John Calvin on the Psalms, Gerhard von Rad on Genesis, Austin Farrer on The Revelation, and Karl Barth on Romans.

I

After my early adolescent fling with Scofield, my first adult love-affair with a biblical commentary was George Adam Smith's Isaiah (1889). As a young pastor, I had been given an old copy of the two-volume work. It sat unopened on the bookshelf in my study for a couple of years. One Advent, I was preparing a sermon on Isaiah 1:18: "Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool." It had been one of the most frequently preached texts in the church of my childhood and youth. All those sermons were now blurred into one sermon, and not a very good one at that. My mind was stuck in the hackneyed ruts of those memories. In an attempt to fuel my homiletical engines and get unstuck, I pulled the commentary off the shelf. I started reading at Isaiah 1: 18, and then read on and on, far past my text. This was no bucket of coal to fuel the steam engine of my sermon-making, this was itself a fire. This was a book in its own right, a real book. I realized that commentaries, some of them at least, were a genre in their own right, worthy of an honored place alongside novels and biographies, poems and plays.

George Adam Smith was pastor of Queen's Cross Free Church in Aberdeen when he wrote his Isaiah. While there, he integrated a powerful preaching ministry with pastoral work and academic pioneer-ing. These were the days of the new criticism in biblical studies which regularly polarized the church into an obscurantist pietism, on the one hand, and an arrogant intellectualism, on the other. But Smith demon-strated that polarization was not inevitable. In that context, this commentary is a brilliant achievement, fiercely honest intellectually, and passionately evangelical spiritually.

It was while reading and rereading Smith's Isaiah that I cultivated a palate for Victorian commentators. Through the last half of the last century and edging into the twentieth, in a remarkable number of pulpits and lecterns there was a confluence of new learning (archaeology, philology, historiography) in parish and school settings where the old traditions of prayer and preaching were still flourishingly alive. For a few decades, the new learning and the robust traditions were bedfellows-

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not without occasional quarrels to be sure, but for the most part working in creative intimacy. There has been nothing quite like it on a large scale since.

II

C. S. Lewis once remarked that no one had ever made a mug of tea large enough or written a novel long enough to satisfy him. I feel that way about coffee and commentaries. No one ever made a cup of coffee large enough or a commentary long enough to suit me. Except for Calvin. Calvin on the Psalms. Five volumes of leisurely commentary on the Psalms (1563). Satisfactory. Reading his five-volume commentary on the Psalms is like standing on an ocean beach with the waves rolling in repetitively and endlessly. The long roll of surf, the sameness of the sand, the slow but sure movement of tides has a gentling influence on the human spirit. But in that vast and mostly predictable context there is also endless newness: shells and birds, sound and light, clouds and spray in constantly shifting combinations.

Not long after I was out of graduate school, stuffed to the gills with Semitic lore, I received the enviable assignment of writing a commentary on the Psalms. I couldn't believe my good fortune. A new publisher was launching a new series and, happening to be standing in the right place at the right time, I got in on it. As it turned out, the publisher went broke and nothing came of it, but not before I had logged in two years of exegetical work on the Psalms. I began by reading as many commentaries as I could manage, and I started with Calvin. After a few months at this, I realized that virtually every other commentator had also started with Calvin, for Calvin kept turning up in book after book. Mostly his influence was unacknowledged. I don't know if the wholesale use of Calvin was deliberate plagiarism or whether he had been assimilated so thoroughly that the quotations, near-quotations, and allusions were unconscious. What was absolutely clear, though, was his unavoidable influence.

In the process, I developed considerable appreciation for his exegetical acumen. The contemporary commentators bad more knowledge of Hebrew in their little fingers than Calvin did in his whole body, yet time after time Calvin made exegetical judgments that are confirmed by this century's scholarship but that for him could only have been based on guesses. Brevard Childs contends that this precision is without parallel in Psalms commentators. Calvin tells us bow deeply be identified with the psalmists in their circumstances and prayers, finding his life anatomized in detail by them. Perhaps it was because he was so ardently praying the Psalms, and not merely studying them, that he achieved such a high degree of accuracy in the obscure places.

III

I met Gerhard von Rad only once and that briefly. I was a guest at "The Symposium," a book club in Princeton that conducted a monthly

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dinner meeting at the old Princeton Inn. That evening, Gerhard von Rad, on a visit from Germany, was also a guest, invited by his longtime friend, Professor Otto Piper of Princeton Seminary. Piper introduced Professor von Rad and asked him to say a few words to us. The room was dimly fit and I was about thirty feet away. He stood and spoke. I remember him as tall and craggy, an alpine figure. He talked for probably no more than two or three minutes, but the impression on me was powerful. There was no small talk, none of the pleasantries one comes to expect on such occasions. Without preamble, he started talking about Abraham. I don't recall the content of his remarks but remember the repetition of the words "mystery," "darkness ... .. faith," and "prayer." Speaking from a shadowed part of that room, for a few moments Abraham was present for me in the person of von Rad, a real presence out of the centuries, out of the shadows, the vibrations of faith, and the energies of prayer.

Years earlier in seminary, my Hebrew professor told me that German was the most important Semitic language, so I set out to learn it. Von Rad's Der Heilige Krieg im alten Israel was the first book that I read all the way through in German. In the process, Hebrew and German got fused for me in the person of von Rad. Now, looking at him and listening to him, all the complexities and difficulties of the two languages distilled into something distinctly spiritual, something Abrahamic, something mystic.

When I arrived home after the Princeton meeting, the first thing I did was purchase von Rad's commentary on Genesis (1956). On page after page I found confirmation of my first impressions of the commentator: strong, spare, ascetic, mystic. In and behind the sinewy scholarship, I was conscious of urgency and faith. Lives were at stake here. Every sentence counted. Theology was wedded to philology. I learned later that the commentary had gotten its start many years earlier in 1944 when he expounded the book of Genesis daily to his fellow inmates at a prisoner of war camp in Bad Kreusnach. This was a book authenticated in adversity and pastoral care.

IV

I grew up in a church that read and interpreted Scripture with imagination. Learning was not greatly prized but imagination was given free rein. Education was, in fact, suspect, a compensation, I was told, for failure to believe in the power of God to be "his own interpreter" through the immediate outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But the telling of stories, the invention of allegories, the uncovering of the "deeper meanings"these were held in high repute,

When I, not heeding the warnings of my pious friends, went far away to be schooled in theology and the Scriptures, these valuations were reversed. Imagination was treated condescendingly; the rational and critical intelligence was honored. Unthinkingly, I accepted the thinking of my teachers.

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By the time I learned of the hermeneutic polarization in the early church between Antioch and Alexandria, I was firmly in the Antiochene camp, heaping abuse on the Alexandrines. The Antioch interpreters were sober, historically grounded, as meticulous with the text as a watchmaker. The Alexandria interpreters were wildly extravagant, bouncing off the text like a gymnast off a trampoline. I was being carefully trained in criticism and grammar, learning to be responsible and rational before the biblical text. My position was confirmed by what I learned in church history as I discovered the havoc wrought among the faithful through the centuries by preachers and teachers whose feverish zeal used the Bible, as Ellen Goodman once said, as if it were a Rorschach test rather than a religious text, reading more into the ink than they read out of it.

And then I came across the work of Austin Farrer and realized that there was still a case to be made for Alexandria. Imagination cannot be banished from the hermeneutical task. Poetry is a biblical mode. Story is a Gospel genre. Farrer, Warden of Keble College, Oxford and a scholar in New Testament and philosophy, was a disciplined thinker and knowledgeable exegete who was at the same time extravagantly imaginative. As I read Farrer on the Gospels and the Apocalypse, I found myself at home again in the colorful world of my childhood and youth, playful in the analogical, delighting in the anagogical, but with one large difference-this was an imagination informed by and submissively disciplined to every grammatical insight and historical datum available. In his commentary on The Revelation of St. John (1964), he is at his best, wonderfully showing the "right brain" and "left brain" together in courteous discourse, the fierce Antiochene wolf and the playful Alexandrine lamb lying down in peace on the holy mountain.

V

Barth wrote his commentary on Romans (1921) while he was pastor of a small congregation in the Swiss village of Safenwil. I read it when I was pastor of a small congregation in Maryland. I was trying to learn how to be a pastor in a territory bordered on one side by a believing (or semi-believing) congregation, on another side by an indifferent (and occasionally scornful) world, and on the third side by the biblical text which I had promised to faithfully preach and teach.

I was most at ease with the biblical text. When I had it all to myself, it was almost simple. But when I realized that as a pastor I would never again have it all to myself, that I was now exposed on the two other fronts of church and world, I knew that I was in over my head and needed help. The textual front required intelligence and attention, but I was used to that and enjoyed it. The congregational front was a surprise. These people were my friends and allies, but they were constantly interpreting my interpretations through filters of self-interest. I found that the Scriptures I was preaching and teaching were being rewritten, unconsciously but constantly, in the minds of my parishioners to give

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sanction to behaviors and values that, more often than not it seemed to me, were in the service of the American way (in which indulgent consumerism was conspicuous) rather than the way of the cross (where sacrifical love was prominent). The large Sinai and fresh Galilee proclamations that I made on Sundays were coming back to me on weekdays in the reporting that people unconsciously provide in their confidences and small talk as stale bromides and puny moralisms. I had, it seemed, a vigorous cottage industry in miniaturization thriving in my congregation. Meanwhile, on the third front the indifference of the world to what I was grandly calling the Kingdom of God put into question the validity of the whole enterprise-if I could be ignored so blithely and totally, could I be doing anything of significance?

Barth helped me on every front in his commentary on Romans. He dove into the text, into these living waters, with abandon. He is such an exuberant exegete! It hardly mattered, I sometimes felt, whether he was right or wrong on a specific point; he was so patiently passionate with the text that it was at least safe from pedantry, a terrible fate. On the second front, the congregational, on page after page I found him disentangling gospel spirituality from cultural religion, commending the former and rejecting the latter. All the subtle seductions to "another gospel" that I was noticing around me, Barth had also but more discerningly noticed. How much well-meaning religious nonsense he saved me from! As for the world, Barth was immensely knowledgeable but quietly unintimidated. He knew politics and labor and prisons; but he believed in prayer and Scripture and the cross of Christ. Every re-reading of Barth's Romans makes me less timid on the world front. Nobody in this century has done this better for me than Karl Barth.