IVP - Addenda & Errata - March 2009 Archives

Quiet! Expert Thinking

I like Nicholas Kristof’s column on “Learning How to Think” in the NYT today (3/26/09). It’s about “experts” and their track record for, well, getting things wrong. Referring to Philip Tetlock’s research as reported in his book Expert Political Judgment (2005), Kristof sums it up by saying, “The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses—the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.” That confirms my intuitions about the current economic expertise being served up by the media. And here I thought it was just my cynicism at work.

But what caught my attention was this:

Beware the Academic Joke

Somewhere I’ve heard Tom Wright tell the joke about the scholar who was in the habit of writing nasty critical reviews of the work of his academic colleagues at home and abroad. Then he started attending academic conferences and actually meeting some of these folks. Lo and behold, he found that he liked them. . . . So he made a very difficult choice. He decided to quit going to conferences.

Now to me that joke is hilarious. I smile every time I think of it. “So he quit going to conferences!” I can barely say the punch line without cracking up! But I’ve told that joke to a few nonacademic friends, and they don’t seem to think it’s funny at all. They look at me with that strained sort of okay-I’ll-feign-a-laugh look, but I can tell they’re wondering just what kind of bristling, asocial people I hang out with.

Packer By Name

As Jim Packer has said about his own writing, “Packer by name. Packer by trade.” He can put a lot into a very few words. The quotable Packer was certainly in his usual fine form at Christian Book Expo in Dallas last week. Here are just a few:

“Karl Barth is an eccentric evangelical not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as some would make him out to be.”

“I read and reread C. S. Lewis. My esteem for him goes up and up.”

“Ethics and reading a menu have much in common. Never let the good be the enemy of the best.”

Reflecting on the head injury he received as a seven-year-old when a truck hit him requiring portions of skull bone to be removed,

“I know better than most when I say, ‘I need that like a hole in the head.’”

And the Winner Is . . .

Last night (March 19) the annual Christian Book Award winners were announced by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA). In the Bible Reference & Study category the winner was our Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings, edited by Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns.

We offer our hearty congratulations to the editors as well as to the numerous contributors who put time, scholarship and energy into making this volume a success!

Other volumes in this series (often called the “Black Dictionaries” for their distinctive covers) that have won this award (when it was called the Gold Medallion Award and there was a wider range of categories) are

Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall, editors (1993 winner)

Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, Gerald F. Hawthorne, Ralph P. Martin, Daniel G. Reid, editors (1994 winner)

Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments, Ralph P. Martin, Peter H. Davids, editors (1998 winner)

Dictionary of New Testament Background, Craig A. Evans, Stanley E. Porter, editors (2001 winner)

The Wisdom (and Wit) of Richard John Neuhaus

A couple days ago I received my copy of First Things (April 2009). The theme is “Richard John Neuhaus In Memoriam” (as most readers probably know, he died recently). There are twenty-five pieces from friends and colleagues of RJN (names like Berger, Elshtain, Gerson, Novak, Packer, Weigel and Wilken). It’s a must read for anyone who knew or followed this remarkable man. Plus there are some great photos! Ever since its inception I’ve been a devoted subscriber and reader of First Things. Which also means that for years, as soon as I’ve received my copy of FT, I’ve dropped everything to turn to RJN’s “While We’re At It” at the back of the mag. Agree or disagree with him, it was a wonderful read. Others I know have admitted the same habit. Who will fill that void in our lives?

Reading through the remembrances, I gleaned some great RJN sayings, several of them concentrated in Ramesh Ponnuru’s piece.

The Pauline Strip, Metaphorically Speaking

I told myself I wasn’t going to do this. But after spending much time lately memorizing the Greek text of Colossians, I’ve got an itch to make an exegetical point. I spent a good deal of time and some ink on this in my dissertation (“The Christus Victor Motif in Paul’s Theology”) some twenty-seven (yikes!) years ago. And since then commentator after contemporary commentator has disappointed me here. The nub of the issue is the interpretation of apekdyomai in Colossians 2:15, where it appears in the form apekdysamenos (aorist middle participle, masculine singular nominative) in reference to an action performed (I will argue) by Christ on the cross.

Time after time you will find interpreters saying this speaks of God’s “disarming” the powers. In other words, they are reading it as a verb that is middle in form but active in meaning (which is legitimate—this happens in Greek). Now admittedly, part of their problem is that they perceive (from preceding verses) the subject to be God rather than Christ. There is an admirable consistency, if inflexibility, in this judgment.

The Great Festschrift Makeover

The Festschrift is a peculiarly academic genre. As most readers of this blog are likely to know, it’s a celebratory publication in honor of a scholar, usually presented on or near their retirement (age sixty-five seems to be a classic Festschrift moment). In a Festschrift, academic peers and students honor a scholar by writing him some cracking-good essays on a topic close to his scholarly heart. At least that’s the idea.

Interpreting Paul with Ambrosiaster

Several years ago I gave a paper on 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9 at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. I argued that a favored modern (and evangelical) reading of 1:9, “separation from the presence of God,” was faulty and we should understand the text to be saying that “eternal destruction” will proceed from the presence of God. In other words, our modern translations have filled a perceived gap in the Greek that, in my reading of the text, isn’t there. (The Greek is hoitines dikēn tisousin olethron aiōnion apo prosōpou tou kyriou kai apo tēs doxēs tēs ischyos autou; literally, “they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction from [the] face/presence of the Lord and from the glory of his strength”)

Well, we will soon begin to release volumes in our Ancient Christian Texts (ACT), a series of translations of full patristic commentaries either that have not previously been published in English or whose English translations are seriously inadequate. The ACT is an outgrowth of our Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture project (now almost complete!). My colleague Jim Hoover is working on getting the first two volumes prepared for release: Ambrosiaster’s commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians and on Galatians-Philemon. Ambrosiaster, by the way, is the name assigned to a commentator of the late fourth century whose identity has been forgotten.