Evangelism in Auburn NSW

While my colleagues are in Kiwiland, I took a trip there myself at the local cinema last night. Prince Caspian is a wonderful tale (did you know filming started in Auckland in 2007), and I enjoyed it all in the comfort of my local cinema in Auburn NSW. It was interesting savouring the Golden Lion and his disciples in a strongly Muslim context.
The film was warmly appreciated by the audience who applauded at the end (the first time I have heard that for years) but I wonder how many there had a clue about the allegorical/Christian meaning.
Lewis claimed that his tale was about "the restoration of true religion after a corruption". But in a multi-faith context the average reader/viewer might question Lewis' vision as to which religion is the true one any way. To put it another way, I sense the Narnian genre of evangelism loses traction where there is no common memory of true faith. Sadly (for this artform's impact) that world is not our world anymore.
Our gospelling needs to be a tad more explicit - but hey Caspian and co. still warmed my Christian heart.
Thanks Pussycat, Prince and Pevensies!

SBL Wednesday

We've reached Wednesday evening in Auckland. This morning saw two papers by people with PTC connections. Peter Lau who started a PhD with us before moving the the slightly larger and more prestigious University of Sydney presented on the presentation of Boaz in Ruth and Rochelle Gilmour, who is teaching Hebrew this year, looked at the rhetorical strategy in 1 Samuel 9 in which Saul seems to take so long to actually meet Samuel. She showed the devices used to raise tension and that it is quite possible to make sense of the final form of the text without resorting to textual history explanations. It stretched my Hebrew but was very enjoyable.

At least one person was interested in Peter Lockwood's paper, and I liked it, so here is a little more on"Genocidal warfare in the book of Joshua: Does the implied author have qualms of conscience?" Peter argued that the book is written to encourage Israel to courageous Torah-keeping in the 6th and 7th centuries and so is not aimed at calling the reader to enter holy war. Israel are presented has having a legal right to the land as an inheritance (1:3, 6,11; 11:23; 21:43-45) and the conquest is a kind of Jubilee in which all land reverts to its proper owner (Josh 6 uses the term yovel, the word for jubilee and rams horn stressing the parallel between the feast of Jubilee and the conquest). Israel’s right to the land is not based on their greatness but on the Lord’s promise (Dt 7:7; 8:7-18; 9:4). He also pointed to various factors which make the Joshua conquest less ethically troubling. For example the contrast between Rahab and Achan undermines any claims that Yahweh is a national god who will always fight for Israel. This is reinforced by Joshua’s encounter with the commander of the Lord’s armies in Joshua 5 where Joshua asks “Are you for us or for our enemies?” and the answer is “No” and then “but I have now come as commander of the army of the LORD”. Peter also pointed to the presentation of the sin of the Canaanites in the Deuteronomic history and the presentation of the Canaanites as the aggressors and that Israel’s first widespread military action was to assist the Gibeonites. The Canaanites are presented as corrupt and corrupting (Jsh 23:7-16; 24:19-20) This all presents the conquest in a different light to the way it may be seen in a superficial reading, though I was not convinced that it shows the narrator was troubled by the conquest.

SBL in Auckland - Tuesday lunch

Several of us are at SBL International conference in Auckland this week. If has been good fun so far. There are heaps of Aussies here (the majority of delegates I'd guess) and lots of people various ones of us know from different places. Like all conferences of this sort some papers are better and more stimulating than others.

My favourites so far have been a paper by Mervyn Duffy on the place of language in Eden, and one by Peter Lockwood from the Lutheran College in Adelaide arguing that the narrator of Judges in sensitive to some of the ethical problems of the conquest and builds a case to "qualify, modify and justify" the violence of his account. Mervyn's paper was stimulated by a claim by the modern Catholic theologian Chauvet that Augustine and Aquinas suggest that there is no place for language in the garden of Eden. Chauvet sees this as an example the classical metaphysics (or onto-theology) of the tradition and he opposes this with a view which see reality as constituted by language all the way down. Mervyn was arguing that the tradition has a stronger place for language than Chauvet allows. He pointed to some material in both Augustine and Aquinas which go some way to demonstrating this, though I was not convinced that their Neoplatonism does not have more of an effect on their views. 

I'll try to mention a few other papers later today, but now I am off to do my own paper on Pannenberg.