A.J. Culp

This monograph seeks to understand Deuteronomy as a key agent in shaping ancient Israel's identity through memory. The approach stands in contrast to the prevailing ones in biblical studies, which analyzes texts as products, not producers, of memory. By leveraging key areas of memory research, therefore, it seeks to illumine Deuteronomy's mnemonic function in Israel. Theologically, the study has significant implications for how we understand the monotheistic and aniconic worship envisioned in Deuteronomy.

The interest in wonder has been a welcome trend in theological education. Curiously, though, it has happened without much reference to the Bible's own witness on schooling. This essay seeks to address the gap, therefore, by looking at a key text in the study of Israelite education: the book of Proverbs. It does so is by locating wonder within Proverbs' vision of education. Since metaphors are central to this vision, the study especially considers the ones that are foundational. What it finds, though, is that the usual suspects—the 'way' and the father/son relationship—do not provide a truly governing metaphor for education. Instead, such a metaphor may be found in the idea of the 'house' and 'house-building'. Viewed through this lens, wonder takes on new significance. It becomes the animating spark that connects the two 'houses' of education: the 'house' of the father and the 'house' of God. If humans are to 'build' their homes like God built the cosmos, they must imitate Woman Wisdom; and the ideal portrait of Woman Wisdom, in Proverbs 8, characterises her chief attribute as wonder (vv 29-31). The governing ethos of wisdom education, therefore, is divine hospitality: God has made the world as our 'playhouse' and he invites us to learn through wonderment.

The world of the Old Testament is one many students see as a “strange land” (Rodd, 2001). For those who teach the Old Testament as scripture, this is a significant problem, for that land and its people are part of our faith story—something we need to identify with. The aim of this article, then, is to show how memory research might provide a way forward in helping students identify with scripture. Leveraging false memory research in particular, it is argued that by carefully embedding sensory features within storytelling we can facilitate a pseudo-experience, thereby helping students to “see” themselves in biblical events. This seeing, in turn, accomplishes meaningful and long-term identification, for it shifts students’ memory of biblical events from the perspective of an observer to that of a participant. The book of Deuteronomy is used to show how this can be put into practice.

How do the Psalms prophesy the Messiah? The New Testament writers like to cite the Psalms to show Jesus of Nazareth is Israel’s Messiah, but they do so in ways that surprise us. This has caused a long-standing interpretive problem, for while the reasoning may have been clear to them it is not clear to us. This article therefore speaks to that issue. It makes a case for a canonical approach to the Psalms as a window into the interpretive practices of the New Testament writers. Psalm 45, an Israelite wedding song cited in Hebrews 1 as evidence of Christ’s exalted nature, is used as test case.

Theological education finds itself in uncertain times, with questions about its future coming from many angles. With religion losing its pride of place in society, with increased government scrutiny and decreased government funding, with fewer full-time students (and fewer students all together), with increasing ambivalence toward traditional training within churches and without, and with serious questions being raised about its very nature and value—many wonder what the future will look like for theological education, if it even has one. None of these questions is answered, at least not directly, by Volf and Croasmun’s new book, For the Life of the World. But it does address the most fundamental issues of them all: What is theology and what is it for? And in doing so, it provides a point of departure for the most foundational issues in theological education, too: What is it and what is it for? This paper reviews the book with an eye toward its contribution to these questions.

The distance between the student and the world of the Bible seems an impassible gulf, but that is what the lecturer is asked to bridge. So how do we do this? Eugene Peterson has said that the critical part is self-implication, that is, causing students to feel the weight of biblical events as if they themselves were there. In essence, Peterson is expressing a basic principle of education called identification. The better students can identify with a story’s characters the better they will understand the world the characters inhabit. Yet again, though, we must ask how we might achieve such a thing? For this paper, I would like to suggest a way in which cognitive science offers us insight here. Namely, it shows that visual memory plays a pivotal role in shaping our perspective on things. If we learn about events purely informationally, our memory of them will be from a distant perspective, from a bird’s-eye view. If, however, we learn about events and people through visual cues, our perspective will shift to first-person. That is, we will remember things as if we had seen them through our own two eyes. It really does sound far-fetched, I know, but research into false memories has shown this to be strangely true. I therefore explore how as educators we might employ the idea in helping students identify with biblical people and events. I use the book of Deuteronomy as a test case.

The aim of this work is to address a gap in scholarship concerning memory in Deuteronomy. While the trend in biblical studies has been to look at texts as memory products, we shall take a different tack by analyzing the text as a memory producer. That is, we look not at how cultural memory shaped Deuteronomy, but how Deuteronomy itself aims to shape cultural memory. We approach this task by leveraging appropriate tools from contemporary memory research, especially from the realms of linguistics, sociology, and psychology. We train them, in particular, on the what, the why, and the how: What is Deuteronomy's conception of memory, why is it so important, and how does the book seek to inculcate it? If it is true that Deuteronomy forwards memory as central to the covenant loyalty of the people, then the implications of this study are not insignificant.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The world of the Old Testament is one many students see as a “strange land” (Rodd, 2001). For those who teach the Old Testament as Scripture, this is a significant problem, for that land and its people are part of our faith story—something we need to identify with. The aim of this article, then, is to show how memory research might provide a way forward in helping students identify with Scripture. By leveraging false memory research in particular, it is argued that by carefully embedding sensory features within storytelling we can facilitate a pseudo-experience, thereby helping students to “see” themselves in biblical events. This seeing, in turn, accomplishes meaningful and long-term identification, for it shifts students' memory of biblical events from the perspective of an observer to that of a participant. The book of Deuteronomy is used to show how this can be put into practice.