Recently I participated in the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) in Providence, RI and the annual meetings of the Institute of Biblical Research (IBR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Boston. Here is my roundup of events.
ETS
The ETS voted unanimously in favor of a new bylaw that makes provision for a new executive director to be hired, a much-needed development in light of the rapid growth of the society over the past couple decades. A motion to change the doctrinal base of the society and to replace it with an 11-point doctrinal statement was roundly defeated. In other business, Clinton Arnold of Talbot Seminary was elected Vice President of ETS, putting him on track to become ETS president in due course.
The four plenary addresses dealt with the main theme of the conference, “Text and Canon.” I was unable to attend the OT papers by Peter Gentry and Stephen Dempster on the OT text and canon, respectively (though I heard excellent reports). I did hear the NT papers by Dan Wallace and Charles Hill. Dan Wallace’s presentation was very clear and practical, calling for more evangelicals to help with the unfinished work of textual criticism. Charles Hill’s lecture on the NT canon was thoroughly evangelical in its outlook, taking its cue from the NT teaching and from a narrowly constrained definition of the word “apostle” in the NT. Over against the view that the canon was only finalized in the 4th century of the Christian era, Hill argued that the idea of the NT canon was already implicit in the Hebrew Scriptures and the new covenant established by Jesus. I hope to include the four plenary addresses in the March issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society; they may also be published in a separate edited volume at a later point.
I also listened to a paper on eternal life in John’s Gospel by John Dennis and attended the session by my wife Margaret. Margaret’s paper was on Jesus and feminism, presenting case studies on radical and reformist feminist views of Jesus’ approach to women. The paper was based on her new book with Crossway, Jesus and the Feminists. I also heard good things about Eckhard Schnabel’s review of Mark Strauss’s Four Portraits, One Jesus (Zondervan) and obtained a copy of the review, though was not able to attend the session.
ETS president Hassell Bullock delivered a fine presidential address at Thursday’s banquet entitled “Wisdom, the ‘Amen’ of Torah,” in which he explored the interrelationships of major themes in OT theology. The address will appear in the March issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society.
Overall, it appeared that attendance was down at ETS this year owing to the economic crisis, the location of the conference (an hour’s distance from the SBL meeting in Boston), and possibly other factors.
IBR
The IBR meeting featured papers by Joel Green (Luke-Acts as conversionist narrative; I did not hear this paper) and by Doug Moo on “new creation” theology in Paul, among others. Doug Moo’s presentation was thorough and judicious, as one has come to expect from this leading Pauline scholar. In IBR business, it was decided to move to quarterly publication of the journal, Bulletin of Biblical Research.
SBL
The John, Jesus, and History section of SBL featured a review session of three new books on John’s Gospel by Paul Anderson, Moody Smith, and Richard Bauckham. The session included three reviews of these books by Judith Lieu (Lady Margaret professor of NT at Cambridge University), Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt), and myself; responses by the three authors; and a half-hour Q & A with questions from the floor. Read my presentation.
On the whole, Bauckham’s work (viewing the Gospels as eyewitness testimony) was the best received. It was judged that Anderson’s work is rather idiosyncratic and steeped in a historical-critical “quest” mentality. His proposal of John engaging in a dialectical mode of theology received mixed reviews. Moody Smith spoke of a “conversion experience” when reading Lou Martyn’s History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, yet he backed away from a two-level hermeneutic and professed belief in the primacy of Jesus’ story.
In my review of Bauckham, I noted my essential agreement with his thesis that John’s Gospel represents eyewitness testimony but challenged his opposition to apostolic authorship. In his response, Bauckham said we had to agree to disagree on the latter point. He did not respond to my critique of his treatment of the internal evidence and seemed to base his view more on the intuition that it was unlikely that both Mark (via Peter) and John came from the circle of the Twelve since they differ in so many respects. Yet later in the discussion, he himself suggested other possible reasons for the difference between Mark and John: Mark’s reporting vs. John’s reflecting, and John’s selectivity and greater narrative development of fewer miracles.
Another interesting session was devoted to the impact of R. Alan Culpepper’s The Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (1983). Presenters included Tom Thatcher and Colleen Conway, among others, and Alan Culpepper himself offered a broad and helpful response.
The SBL meeting was smaller this year, since the American Academy of Religion did not meet jointly with SBL. This made lodging easier and the book displays less crowded. New publications of note are listed in my blog “Best of 2008.” On Sunday, I worshiped at Park Street Church in downtown Boston and enjoyed hearing an excellent sermon by Pastor Gordon Hugenberger.
In Other News
At the CBMW (Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood) lunch, Bruce Ware delivered a warm-hearted address on the continuing need to engage the gender-related issues from a biblical perspective, and JBWM editor Denny Burk gave a brief address as well and issued a call for contributions to that journal.
In various Zondervan-related meetings, I heard the new president of Zondervan, Moe Girkins, speak and share her vision for the leading Christian publishing company. She has major experience in turning around billion-dollar companies and is currently halfway through a Master of Divinity at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Moe brings to the Christian publishing industry a freshness of vision and an emphasis on multi-media. She also urged closer cooperation among Christian publishers. Zondervan also convened the contributors to the new Biblical Theology of the New Testament (BTNT) series of which I am the general editor. These include Darrell Bock, Doug Moo, Mike Wilkins, David Garland, George Guthrie, Alan Bandy, and Tom Schreiner (Tom was unable to attend). My Theology of John is slated to appear next fall.
Preparations are also underway for the publication of The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament, with B & H, in the fall of 2009. If you are teaching courses on NT Survey or Introduction and would like to receive a complimentary copy of the book when it becomes available, please send me an e-mail at akostenberger@sebts.edu, and I will see what I can do.
Other publishing projects are a 2d edition of God, Marriage & Family (Crossway), a hermeneutics text entitled Invitation to Biblical Interpretation (Kregel; Invitation series), and a book on orthodoxy and heresy (co-authored with Mike Kruger; Crossway).
That’s it! If you attended the meetings, please feel free to share any additional reflections you might have.
