Out and About

For a while, events were popping along like corn. Fortunately it has been a bit quieter lately. In October, Runar Eldebo of Lidingö Seminary in Sweden came to town to present a stimulating series of seminars, “God in Modern Society,” at Community Covenant Church in Minneapolis. The only thing that matched the quality of Runar' s presentation was the hospitality of the people of Community Covenant, including in particular, the food they provided. Such soup, and what great pies!

Then came Dr. Phil Anderson of North Park Seminary to Bethlehem Covenant in Minneapolis. The seminar Phil presented was entitled “What Does It Mean To Be a Covenant Church?” Those of you who know that Dr. Anderson teaches Church History at North Park probably know what an excellent, though unassuming, teacher and person he is. Once again, he demonstrated the quality of his scholarship and his sensitivity to people both past and present. Then came the third annual Gustafson Lecture series at United Theological Seminary. I was not able to attend the lectures but was able to enlist Dr. Henry Gustafson himself to comment on them for us. I suspect it must be awkward for a person to have to sit still while others lecture on the Bible in your honor. And this, when you have been and continue to be a life-long student and teacher of the New Testament. To remedy this, Pietisten is pleased to be a vehicle for giving Henry a voice.

Then United Seminary hosted a Trost Lecture sponsored by St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in St. Paul. The speaker was none other than Dr. Gabriel Fackre, one of my professors at Andover Newton Theological School. He presented the thesis “The Coming Renaissance in Systematic Theology.”

In addition to this, the copy editor and I drove to Chicago for North Park Homecoming. I took in the Hall of Fame Dinner, the last half of the Philosophy Academy Meeting, and the NPC-Wheaton football game. We had a great time in spite of a Vikings loss, and I peddled a lot of Pietistens.

In the total scale of time and space and in terms of what is important, an awful lot of people are completely unaware of these events. Some might call the presidential election to attention, or the war in Yugoslavia, or the U.S.-led U.N. entry into Somalia. Such matters are of great importance, too, but there are plenty of others to cover those beats. — PJ

The Gustafson Lectures, October 5 and 6.

Dr. Mary Ann Tolbert, professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, delivered the Gustafson Lectures at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. The lectures were entitled “Reading and Difference: Studies in The Gospel of Mark.”

As the title suggests, a two-fold concern was evident in both lectures. “Reading and Difference” points to the first of these. The concern was to show the role of the reader in determining the meaning of a text. Reading was defined as “a process of making meaning.” And different readers find (make) different meanings. These different meanings are the product of numerous factors — factors such as the times, the cultures, and the experiences of the various readers.

For a particular meaning to become authoritative for a community it needs to have been arrived at by methods which conform to the standards or “rules of discourse” that are approved by the community’s culture. Yet, even so, within those com & munities where such standards are accepted and experiences are shared, contradictory readings are encountered. The multiple interpretations of the ending of Mark’s Gospel are a case in point. Tolbert warns against claiming divine authority for any of them. For no reading of a text is perfectly neutral or unbiased. Hence, interpreters, preachers, teachers, et al. alike, must, on the one hand, avoid any “power use” of their interpretations and, on the other, always be ready to listen to the readings and insights of others. With a little help from First John she urges readers not to accept every reading, but to test the readings to see if they are for the welfare of this world.

Tolbert’s colors as an academician come through loud and clear at this point. The importance of reading with empathy and faith — more subjective requirements for understanding — were not discussed.

The other part of Professor Tolbert’s two-fold purpose was to demonstrate the relevance of this factor of difference for the reading of Mark. How would the first readers or hearers of that Gospel have experienced it as compared to readers and hearers today? Just how people today read and experience Mark was never directly addressed by Professor Tolbert, but the discussion of the likely approach of the Gospel’s first readers was helpful, illuminating, and provocative.

How would ancient readers have responded to the Gospel of Mark? In responding to this question, Ms. Tolbert finds help by considering the literary characteristics of the ancient popular Greek novel. Though the gospel of Mark does not belong to that literary genre, she has found in it many of the same “stylistic patterns, techniques, and strategies.” Like them the Gospel “blends historiography, drama, and epic;” it uses “summaries, foreshadowings, and repetitions;” early on in the Gospel it provides the reader with a “plot synopsis;” its interest is not so much in telling what happened, but in how and why something happened.

In accord with these observations, Ms. Tolbert notes that the principle characters are introduced in the first three chapters: Jesus, the disciples, the supplicants for healing, and the religious leaders. Chapter four offers the “plot synopsis.” It is in the parable of the sower and its interpretation. This parable, called the key to all the parables (4:13), is about preaching and hearing the word. The sower (Jesus) sows the seed (preaches the word). The seed falls on four types of ground (the word is proclaimed to four different groups of people).

An ancient audience would have found in this parable a helpful explanation of the various groups surrounding Jesus. The hard ground was the religious leaders who, from chapters 3, 5, and on, were accusing Jesus of blasphemy and conspiring to destroy him. The rocky ground was the disciples who, like the disciple nicknamed “rock” (Peter), initially respond with enthusiasm but show little depth; and, when persecution comes, they run the other way. The ground that was seed also with weeds, i.e., with the cares and desires of this world, has not yet been identified. But when the story is told of the rich young man who, though concerned about eternal life, turns from Jesus because he cares more about his possessions, the reader knows this type. The fourth group, the good earth, was constituted by those anonymous persons who came to Jesus with faith and were made whole.

This plot synopsis, in memorable parable form, prepares the reader to understand throughout the Gospel why and how things happened as they did. The religious leaders, scribes, and Pharisees were more concerned about their own traditions than God’s law. The disciples were preoccupied with questions of personal greatness and honor rather than in living lives of service and self-sacrifice. Hence, the outlook for Jesus was bleak. One is hardly surprised to learn in the parable of the tenants — the only other allegorical parable in Mark — that the messengers of the landowner (God) are rejected and the son (Jesus) is killed. For indeed, the world is evil, and those who bring God’s word to it are apt to be rejected or worse. Yet there is good news. The divine response to the murder of God’s son is to wipe out the tenants who did the deed. The evil world will soon be destroyed, and those who are faithful to the end will be saved (Ch. 13).

The typological descriptions of the groups in the Gospel story show the readers what to avoid and what to emulate. The desires for power, glory, wealth, and position are denounced. These would lead one to reject the word that Jesus came to preach. It was not the rich and powerful, but the anonymous people who came to Jesus in faith and had their lives changed, who constituted the good earth. (The Gospel’s interest in these anonymous persons is evident from the fact that fully one third of the Gospel is devoted to the “mighty works” which Jesus did for them.)

Given this overall plot line, how would an ancient audience understand the ending of the Gospel (16:8)? “The women went out and said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” This is a statement of failure. Why such an ending to a gospel?

Professor Tolbert proposed approaching it from the perspective of ancient readers. They would have expected an author’s work to be more than an aesthetic experience. In a world where words were taken seriously, a writing was intended to be a “unit of force” and to effect some particular end. Because of Mark’s earlier presentation of the religious leaders, a reader would be neither surprised nor particularly angered by their treacherous behavior in the passion story. The description of the disciples’ abandonment of Jesus would have left one with much greater disappointment. Yet, even here the reader had been warned — the disciples were like “rocky ground.” Was there no one who would hang in there with Jesus?

When at the end of chapter 15 the women are introduced (for the first time in Mark), the reader’s hope comes alive. The women had not fled. They had watched the crucifixion. Would they be good earth? Their journey to the grave — was it to anoint a messiah king? or to anoint a corpse? He had said he would rise. Were the women believers? or unbelievers? The suspense ends, and the question is answered in the Gospel’s last line. The women fled from the messenger with the good news and said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. Once again “the seed had fallen on rocky ground.”

Why such an ending? It is because of what it does, says Tolbert. For when the women frustrate the reader's hope, a challenging question arises: Is there anyone else to fulfill that hope? Is there anyone else who, having seen something of Jesus’ life and death and having heard the good news of resurrection, will fulfill that hope? And the answer? Of course there is: the audience — the readers and hearers of the Gospel. For they know what the options are.

The early audience of Mark's Gospel were people from the urban masses who had found themselves threatened by famine, persecutions, and defections. They were ready for Mark's apocalyptic, anti-establishment message. That modern readers are also ready, Tolbert doubts. For, today, Christians are often people in power and like things the way they are. Accordingly, they are inclined to revise, reinterpret, or ignore this Gospel’s message. So emphatic were these observations that one sometimes wondered whether there was any “good news” in that Gospel for today's church. The stress placed on the futuristic and thoroughly apocalyptic character of the gospel seemed exclusive and muted the rich dimensions of the experiences of the anonymous people who were, and are, the good earth. Nonetheless, the lectures were a brilliant demonstration of a reader-oriented, literary analysis of the Gospel of Mark and, as such, have left many of us in her debt. — Henry Gustafson.