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(More customer reviews)The author of these thirty-two short chapters begins and ends with the assumption that problems we experience with the Old Testament are our problem, not the Bible's. This subordinating of the Bible reader to the well-weathered book he holds in his hand opens doors, not to forced harmonisations of problematic passages, but to fresh reappraisal of difficult texts on their own terms.
A clue to the author's approach to preaching is found at the start, for in between her introduction and the difficult texts she selects from 'Narratives and Law', 'Writings', and 'Prophets and Lamentations' comes a first chapter entitled 'The Holy One of God'. It contains the programmatic statement that the essential thing to be said about great preachers is that they 'talk mostly about God and not about human problems'. This statement then gives way to some of Achtemeier's own 'talk about God'. This comes in the form of a brief definition of and apology for the God of the Old Testament, who turns out to be somewhat different than the nasty-minded death-dealer of some popular belief. The Holy One of Israel is, in the end, the God who saves. Here, Achtemeier is framing the more atomistic discussions of particular texts which follow in a meta-narrative that will provide sense to and context to each one of them.
Having prepared the frame, Achtemeier plunges into her chosen texts, beginning with 'He shall rule over you', of Genesis 3.16. This first example is instructive for her approach to other texts. Each chapter has two parts, 'Plumbing the Text' and 'Shaping the Sermon'. This pattern becomes helpfully familiar to the reader as one moves through the book. It signals the author's methodology for moving from text to sermon. For Achtemeier, one begins with the text, allowing it to define and address its own concerns.
Her two-part presentation works like this: first, she locates the difficulty within its context, which by itself dissolves some of its scandal ('That such domination over the female was not the Creator God's intention in the beginning is clear from Gen. 2.') Second, she engages with her supposed audience, bringing contemporary issues under the light of the biblical text she analyses. Following this, she sometimes ventures outside the 'Plumbing/Shaping' format and into New Testament passages which attend to the same issues raised by her Old Testament text. Occasionally, she has recourse to moderately critical stances which illustrate how scholars deal with matters that she treats in this book at an intentionally more popular level. In the case of Genesis 3 and gender roles, she offers that the Pastoral Epistles are 'recognized by all but conservative scholars to be Pauline pseudepigrapha' and are concerned with intensely local issues. Achtemeier allows herself to be understood to mean, though she does not explicitly say so, that a pseudepigraphic New Testament text is less determinative for modern readers than an authentically Pauline one might have been. However, she has no time to parse the details of her occasionally broad-brush sketchings of the critical landscape. It is not her intention to do so, and readers who expect more on this count will be disappointed.
Her main point is usually contextual. If apostolic instruction in the Pastoral Epistles appears to contradict this point, further information will help lower the profile of that tension. The local leaders behind the rudely subordinationist texts in I-II Timothy and Titus were dealing with women who had been seduced by Gnostic heretics. Those shepherds would certainly not want such individuals teaching in the church. What is more, they were no hardened misogynists, for 'we also would not!'.
In this way, Achtemeier weaves text and context into a whole which adds greater depth to each and repeatedly draws the reader and his generation into the picture. If this also resolves some of the perceived difficulty of the text itself, then that passage has become more amenable to productive preaching. This the objective of her book.
An example in addition to Genesis 3 is suggestive. If there is a text with more a more compelling history in Jewish and Christian reflection than Genesis 22, is difficult to say which one that might be. The Akedah, or 'Binding of Isaac' is rich with pathos and ripe for dissent. The divine request for human sacrifice, the willingness of a father to murder (or 'offer', as the text might prefer to say it) his own son, and the absence of Sarah at such a family-shaping moment practically beg for comment and/or complaint.
Achtemeier is methodologically explicit in a way that will endear her to her more cautious readers and disillusion those who would deconstruct a text along just such seams and silences: 'We should not speculate about what the text does not say.' She also draws her reader into the passages rather remote personae: 'In short, Abraham and Sarah are spasmodic believers, who do a lot of questioning of God, as we ourselves often do.' There is also a reserved theological and pastoral reflection: 'We must not think, however, that God's test of our trust is behind every single affliction that we suffer. In the Scriptures, God tests his servants when his purpose is at stake.' And then once more, Achtemeier follows the resonances that make up what theologians with some hesitation still call 'typology' into the New Testament. Her phrasing alludes to her prior discussion of the Genesis text's intimacies and echoes the cadence of the Hebrew narrative itself: 'Surely, in the story of Jesus we have the picture of a Father and a Son, a Son and Father, going both of them together to Moriah.'
The collecting and explanation of difficult biblical texts constitutes a genre, of which this book is just one exemplar. One thinks, for example, of the various entries of Walter Kaiser, Jr., who must certainly be the modern dean of the discipline and the master of making the rough places smooth. Practitioners of the task sometimes employ assumptions and methodologies that are more conservative than those of Achtemeier, as do both Kaiser and Gleason Archer. It is essentially a commitment to the Bible's coherence that generates a concern to explain its difficulties. The result is that this genre has little representation on the more critical extreme of the interpretative spectrum.
Reading through Elizabeth Achtemeier's PREACHING HARD TEXTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, this reviewer is left with two unfulfilled wishes. First, to converse with her, for her hints and allusions leave so much unsaid, yet her turn of a phrase leaves this reviewer with no doubt regarding her mastery of the critical discussion surrounding her chosen texts, a conversation that she summarises but will not detail. Second, to hear her preach, for her sections on 'Forming the Sermon' are evocative of real sermons well preached and of a sensitivity to the soul of her listener, now turned reader. Sadly, neither of these options is possible, for Dr. Achtemeier died during the preparation of this review.
For those wishing quick resolution of biblical difficulties, this book will disappoint, as it must. But for those wishing that their reading of those texts knew further depth and texture, as for those wanting to know how to nudge a fascinating biblical text in the direction of productive proclamation, it will be a treasure. It is not, one hastens to say, a treasure of secret manoeuvres for cutting the Gordian knot, but rather an inventory of models for preaching through, in spite of, and sometimes by means of the very difficulties which the Bible unsparingly presents us.
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