The third conference I attended was SBL (Society of Biblical Literature), which meets concurrently with AAR (American Academy of Religion). This is a very broad ranging conference with thousands of people attending from a variety of religions, primarily Christian but also Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu, with a few atheists thrown in for good measure. There are such sessions as Buddhist Philosophy Group, African Biblical Hermeneutics, Greek Bible, LGBT/Queer Hermeneutics, Q, Mormon Studies Consultation, Book of Acts, Use of Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, and Gender, Sexuality, and the Bible: Inter-Species Sex and Other Relations.

The first session I went to was Warfare in Ancient Israel. My introduction to SBL was immediate as the first speaker got up and almost immediately said just war was inhuman, monstrous, and satanic and that Yahweh was psychotic because he acted in the human realm on the belief that it was the battle ground of a cosmic struggle against an evil god, a cosmic struggle which actually does not exist. The second speaker then got up and started talking about how monotheism is inherently violent and the only way past it is to reject it, which led him to secular humanism. Welcome to SBL!

The first speaker, J. Harold Ellens, argued strongly against any idea of just war theory and rejected the biblical god. What was needed was a new conception of God, as the loving and nonviolent god. The biblical model of war is “obscene”. One point he made was that war works best when it dehumanizes the enemy, such as the derogatory nicknames given to the enemy (Japs, Huns, etc.). When this kind of dehumanizing is removed, war is then less effective.  His solution? National models that absorb insults instead of using violence, and more statesmen than politicians. But when nations do have to go to war as a necessary evil, then they need to be on a crusade. They should seek to terminate oppression, and as Clausewitz said war is only ethical when it is total war and the very will to fight of the enemy is targeted. Ellens gave several commendable examples, one of which is Sherman’s march to the sea. As one of the questions afterwards noted, there is quite the contrast between the beginning and end of this presentation by Ellens.

The second paper at the SBL war session was by Hector Avalos, a secular humanist who is also a professor of religious studies (at Iowa State University). He argued against two current approaches to religious violence. One is essentialism (as Ellens had just argued for). This view says that religion in its pure form is not violent, but only a deviant or fundamentalist form. Avalos argued against it by saying that the “true view” is unverifiable and a faith based view, so it is not acceptable. This desire for verifiability was the key weapon in his arsenal and got used on a variety of occasions, showing that he was apparently a logical positivist: the only things that exist are those that can be proved by reason. The other view to explain religious violence is anti-colonialism: the colonized are fighting back against those who colonized them. But Avalos pointed out that Islam colonized the west before the west colonized Islam, and hence this colonial explanation does not work in all cases. So Avalos’ proposal is scarcity: all conflict is caused by scarcity of something. This is certainly nothing new and fairly obviously explains most wars. But his contribution is to use the idea to explain religious conflict: religion creates scarcities and hence creates war. It creates scarcities in the following ways: Scripture (not all writing is inspired), sacred space (one geographical location more important because of religious reason), election (one group or person more special), and salvation (not all are saved). Or for another way of looking at it, verifiability is scarce, so violence is resorted to in order to determine solution. He then discussed five ways to deal with violent ancient texts: accept, reject, relativize, reinterpret, and allegorize. He rejects all of these because they are unverifiable and not subject to reason. His solution? Make the scarce plentiful: give everyone water, for example. He did not explain how this would work in religion, but presumably it would mean that we should make plentiful the scarce by removing any kind of scarcity: either make all divine (make all ground sacred, make everyone saved, make every writing inspired) or remove the idea of religion altogether, which is the route he has taken personally. During the question and answer time he said that verifiability is the key: if the problem is water shortage, we can verify that there is a water shortage. But if it is salvation, we cannot verify that, so we might be fighting over something that does not exist. One question posed to him he did not answer well: what if there is a scarcity that should be present, such as the scarcity of A’s in a class? Should the teacher just give all A’s? He simply said that the teacher would need to discuss that with his student, a virtual non-answer.

The third and fifth papers of the SBL war session were not as helpful, so I will not discuss them here, but I will talk about the fourth. This was entitled “Allegorical Interpretation of the Ban and the Plain Sense of the Text: Reading the Herem Law for Ethics” and given by Jerome Creach. He sought to read the herem laws theologically, i.e., through a theological lens. He ended up following Moberly’s reading of the herem laws, who read them in light of the Shema. Moberly argues that the herem laws were metaphorical laws to show how one is to love Yahweh with all of one’s heart. These nations are not the actual nations, but are representative for various internal evil tendencies. The Rahab and Gibeonite stories are indicative of this, as they are not exterminated. The other panelists were not impressed with Creach, and all of them said that we should not try to play exegetical games with the text, but instead recognize its inherent violence and deal with them as they are. Deal with them for most of the panelists mean reject the text.

The second session I went to at SBL was dramatically different from the first. This was the “Theological Hermeneutics of Christian Scripture.” The specific topic under discussion was “Christ in/and the Old Testament”. It was moderated by Christopher Seitz and consisted of ten minute presentation by Kathryn Greene-Mccreight (St John's Episcopal Church), Robert Wall (Seattle Pacific University), John Goldingay (Fuller Theological Seminary), Christopher Wright (Langham Partnership International), and Murray Rae (University of Otago) followed by forty five minutes of discussion. In my opinion the presentations themselves were not that interesting, as the panelists simply repeated key basic ideas from their work, and ten minutes was not enough time to give much that was interesting. But when the questions started coming in the discussion became much more interesting. There was a fairly strong divide on the panel between those more in tune with theological interpretation of Scripture (Seitz, Greene-Mccreight, Wall, and Rae) and those opposed (Goldingay and Wright).

There seemed to be two main issues getting discussed. One was a metaphor that had been made by Wright in his presentation. He said that when he was on a train to Edinburgh, he was heading towards Edinburgh but the scenery was not Edinburgh. Similarly, while the OT is christotelic, heading towards Christ, Christ is not found in every OT text. When one looks back, the scenery makes sense as going towards Edinburgh, but that is only a small glimpse and only in hindsight. In response, Murray noted that the voice of Jesus is waiting for us Edinburgh and we shouldn’t be too concerned about the scenery, and Greene-Mccreight said that we are in Edinburgh, not on the train anymore. Wright later said that we need to read the OT not just in light of the Gospel but also in light of Revelation: The first advent is not the end of the story. So, in a sense, (my spin here) we are in not Edinburgh yet, but we passed a key via point on the way to Edinburgh. There was discussion about how to preach OT stories, with Goldingay and Wright wanting us to focus on what God was saying through those texts to the Israelites, while the other panelist wanted to see more of a Christocentric perspective. Wright noted that Luke 24 says that Jesus began with the Scriptures, not himself, when he talked with his disciples.

The other major topic was the role of the rule of faith. Goldingay bluntly stated that “the rule of faith is a disaster”. No beating around the bush here! He didn’t explicate much what he meant, but it seems that he didn’t want later meaings being read as the meaning of the earlier text. He explicitly said he wanted to stay with the meaning/significance bifurcation, not what the text means today. Seitz said that we should get rid of the terminology of the rule of faith since all it does is cause confusion and that in his ears the rule of faith does not mean creed. Greene-Mccreight said that the rule of faith was useful for ruling out false interpretations like Mormonism, which is a mistake (after saying this she apparently realized she was at SBL and one does not say things like this at SBL and so backtracked a little bit to tone down her rejection of Mormonism). All in all, this was a fascinating discussion and I only wish that all the SBL sessions could be so interesting.