FULL REVIEWS

(Commendations From Scholars)

“In this engaging book, Borgman and Clark open the ears of their readers to the patterns that helped n ancient oral culture hear and respond to the good news. In so doing, they offer us the opportunity to hear the good news afresh and to respond with renewed vigor to the message of Jesus.” Ruth Anne Reese, Asbury Theological Seminary

“This is a wonderfully written, theologically alert, and practically purposeful book. Teachers and clergy alike, who are keen to lead their students and parishioners in close readings of Scripture, will want to add this book to their libraries. Highly recommended!”
Robert Wall, Seattle Pacific University and Seminary

“Written to be Heard pays huge dividends for modern/postmodern readers of the gospels today, as the authors show how ‘oral performance’ connects each successive unit to an emerging new whole and thus establish a cadence of advancing coherence, significance, and lasting impact of Jesus’s many interactions with his ‘followers.’ Indeed, Borgman and Clark advance narrative comprehension to a new level!” David P. Moessner, Texas Christian University.

The Forward for Written To Be Heard by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale University, Professor Emeritus)

You and I, literate citizens of the modern world, typically engage the New Testament gospels in the same way we engage most narratives: we read them; we don’t listen to them read aloud. And in our reading, we naturally employ the habits and skills we have acquired for reading and interpreting modern narratives, historical or fictional. We read the gospels as if they were modern narratives.
Some of us listen to passages from the gospels read aloud in church. But the printed liturgy for the day usually includes the text of the passage, inviting us to follow along by reading. And even if we don’t follow along, our listening is no different, in essentials, from reading the passage for ourselves.

Almost always, our reading of the gospels consists of reading snatches. Few of us have ever read a gospel straight through, and, almost certainly, none of us has ever listened to a gospel read aloud straight through. We don’t have time. In our liturgies, our group Bible studies, our private devotions, we content ourselves with snatches.

In our interpretation of what we read, we typically treat each gospel as part of that larger composition which is the Gospels, or the New Testament. And we employ theological lenses—the lens of Pauline theology, the lens of the theology of the book of Hebrews, or some alternative. We interpret what one of the gospels says about salvation, about sin, about righteousness, about Christ’s crucifixion, in the light of what the other gospels say about those matters and through the lens of our theology.

After developing the point that the gospels were written to be listened to by people who had the listening skills and habits of antiquity, the authors of Written to Be Heard analyze each gospel in detail to answer the question, What would ancient listeners have heard as the message of the gospel when they listened to it read in its entirety rather than in snatches, and when it was presented as a unified whole rather than as part of that larger entity which is the Gospels, or the New Testament? What cues would they have picked up as to the structure of the gospel and hence its message? What would they have heard as the message when they did not interpret it in the light of the theology of the New Testament epistles?

In their introductory discussion of ancient compositional and listening practices, the authors place special emphasis on two points. Authors in the ancient world who created compositions for listening typically made heavy use of repetitions to structure their composition: repetitions of words, of turns of phrase, of types of episodes, of images. Listeners grasped the structure of the composition, and hence its meaning, by being attentive to those repetitions. Repetition is seldom a structuring device in modern narratives, with the result that we are not attuned to taking note of repetitions. And even if we were, the fact that we read and listen to the gospels in snatches results in our seldom being aware of the repetitions and of their structuring function.

Authors in the ancient world were also fond of using so-called chiastic structures. In a chiastic structure, the main point of the passage is in the center. What immediately follows the center (call it A′) mirrors what immediately preceded the center (call it A); what follows A′ mirrors what preceded A; and so forth. Modern authors do not use chiastic structures, and so, of course, we are not attuned to taking note of them when we read ancient literature. We fail to catch the main point of a chiastically structured passage.

The detailed reading of the four gospels plus the book of Acts that Written to Be Heardpresents is a literary reading. But it’s a literary reading of a very different sort from most so-called literary readings. Most literary readings of the gospels treat them as texts meant to be read rather than listened to, and they employ modern skills and habits of interpretation. They do not invite and enable us to become first-century listeners.

The experience of many readers will be, as was mine, that of scales falling from one’s eyes. So that’s the message of Matthew, of Mark, of Luke-Acts, of John! I had never noticed those repetitions, or those chiastic structures. Nothing in my training as a reader led me to notice them. So I missed the cues to the structure of the gospel, and hence its main message. And even if I had been trained to notice repetitions, the fact that I engage the gospels in snatches means that I miss most of them. As for interpretation, I had always interpreted each gospel as part of that larger composition which is the Gospels, and through the lens of Pauline theology.

Why didn’t someone write Written to Be Heard long ago?

From Publisher’s Weekly, Jan 15

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8028-7704-8

Written to Be Heard: Recovering the Messages of the Gospels
Paul Borgman and Kelly James Clark. Eerdmans, $30 (328p) ISBN 978-0-8028-7704-8

Positing convincingly that the four gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke-Acts, and John—were written to be heard, not read, Borgman (David, Saul, and God), professor emeritus at Gordon College, and religion professor Clark (Abraham’s Children) analyze how themes embedded in each text resonate when listened to. The authors contend that the gospel writers constructed their texts as “oral performances” with “hearing cues,” narrative patterns, repetition, rhythm, and other literary constructions that helped original listeners comprehend key ideas, and contemporary readers (lacking this awareness) misinterpret fundamental themes. In extensive detail, the authors examine the narrative devices each writer employs. Employing an “authority-response” pattern throughout his gospel, Mark heightens the cautionary tale about true discipleship. From his opening genealogy (which is usually skimmed while reading) Matthew tells the story of the “next (and last) chapter in Jewish history,” framing his gospel with examples of how Jesus’ life and teaching offer fulfillments of Scripture. Luke and Acts, considered as a two-volume text, offer parallel stories, which can be performed sequentially so that prophesies in Luke are fulfilled in Acts. And in his opening intricate poem, John presents his gospel’s major theme: that believers will have power “to become children of God.” In excavating the gospel narratives’ intricate structure, this perceptive work of scholarship reveals thematic nuances long overlooked by Christian readers. (Mar.)

From Review Of Biblical Literature (RBL), Society Of Biblical Literature 02/2004, R. De W. Oosthuizen University Of Fort Hare; Alice, South Africa 5700

The fact that Borgman obtained a University of Chicago Ph.D. in the “art of stories,” a non-theological discipline, puts him to a certain extent in an advantaged position to appreciate some finer features of the Genesis story. . . . .Borgman [warns against] a “bits-and-pieces” approach that does not allow the reader to appreciate the text on its own terms—that is, to follow the clues of repetitive patterns within the text, and as a consequence miss the meaning of the story.

SBL/RBL 2004, Jan Lion-Cachet, Waikanae, New Zealand, 6010

In the introduction to his book, Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard, Paul Borgman writes: “The promise of this guide is to help with finding the connections that provide theme and character for Genesis, “including the character of God” (14). To be able to provide it, he tries to approach the Genesis story as objectively as possible. That is only possible to a certain degree. He realizes himself that his predisposition of “God is One”may have influenced his view that the Genesis story presents a unified portrait of God (17). He also wants to “involve the readers by helping to sort out the text’s clues” (19).

Borgman (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor of English at Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts. His insight and knowledge of the art of stories bring new light to the development and interconnection of the broader Genesis story. In a fitting way he is able to make use of seminar-like discussions between his students and himself and conversations with three well-known Old Testament scholars, namely, James Ackerman, Walter Brueggemann, and Terence Fretheim. He makes extensive use of typical literature elements in the Hebrew language, such as wordplays, silences, chiasms, repetitions, discontinuities, and changes.

Borgman follows the same sequence in his discussion on Genesis as the history line of Genesis.

Chapter 1 starts off with the account of creation. The names of God feature prominently in the creation story, which leads to better understanding of the character of God. In this chapter we also recognize the start of a possible theme that Borgman will try to emphasize throughout his book. On the one hand, humans try to establish their own name and prominence in history, and it leads to sinful deeds and behavior (30, 37). On the other hand, God wants humans to be a blessing to all humanity. Borgman writes: “What God had wanted was a good world in which humans would find their highest good in a balanced partnership with one another . . . and also in partnership with God” (29).

Chapter 2 starts with God’s promise to Abram. The emphasis is placed on the way Abram experiences a radical insecurity regarding life and name (55) and his inability to be a blessing to the rest of the world (41).

Chapter 3 discusses Abram’s first four visits with God (Gen 12:1-15:21). Abram’s fear and the upholding of his name are an integral part in the understanding of the four visits.

In chapter 4 visits five and six are discussed (Gen 17:1-18:33), and Abraham takes an increasingly active role in his partnership with God. The usage of the names of God suggests more emphasis on God’s global vision.

The seventh visit is discussed in chapter 5 (Gen 22:1-19). Again, the usage of the names of God presents us with an understanding of God’s character (88), and Abraham must trust in God both for his own name and for the ultimate promise, blessing to all people (91).

Chapter 6 points out that the challenge “not to fear” is central to all the visits with God and fundamental in Abrahams plea of self-preservation for his wife and self-promotion of his interests (113).

Chapter 7, the epilogue of Abraham’s story, concludes with the way Abraham brings blessing to all people. Chapter 8 is about Jacob’s own attempts to promote himself and his fear of not having a name (140, 148).

In chapter 9 Jacob is confronted with his own deceiving ways. Chapter 10 discusses a possible reorientation of Jacob’s heart, but self-promotion at the expense of others is still part of the life of Jacob and his family.

Finally, in chapters 11-13 self-promoting interests in the life of Joseph and his brothers, as well as God’s overall purpose for his people to be a blessing to all nations, are discussed. The conclusion is that it is all too human to promote oneself at the expense of others (233), but through Abraham’s seed all nations will indeed be blessed (236).

Borgman succeeds in driving home the theme of self-promotion and the establishment of One’s own name in the lives of the patriarchs, on the one hand, and God’s overall purpose of them being a blessing to all nations, on the other hand. The way he explains the revelation embedded in the names of God helps the reader to understand more of the character of God and the reaction of people to it. His ability to prove a constant and overall theme in the history of the patriarchs helps to pull it together and to explain individual passages better. Borgman concludes that Genesis is a story “that challenges our conventional ideas about God, about human transformation, and about what constitutes the truly good life” (241).

However, his claim that this is a story “we haven’t heard before” is not proved. Hasel wrote that “historical events must be capable of being explained by antecedent historical causes and understood in terms of analogy to other historical experiencesî” (G. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic issues in the Current Debate [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982], 173). In doing that, scholars were able to recognize a vast variety of possible themes in Genesis.

Comments Solicited By The Publisher:

NANCY LINTON, The Oregon Extension

“From the murder of Abel by his brother Cain to the dissension between Joseph and his brothers, Paul Borgman weaves together biblical stories, previously seen as remnants, into a richly textured and provocative Genesis tapestry. Here humans embody belief and unbelief, flounder and thrive, each accompanied from start to finish by a relational God who loves them toward individual wholeness that promises healing for the world at large. Listening to texts particularly troublesome for women, Paul responds with exegesis so engaging of readers that it encourages further questions and prompts one to reread Genesis.”

STEVE NISENBAUM, Ph.D., J.D., Department Of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital And Harvard Medical School

“This book I shared right away with my rabbi, my Jewish friends and colleagues. It is at once creative, enlightening and psychologically sophisticated. Borgman’s enjoyable commentary offers astonishingly compelling narrative truths to unlock the giant riddles of Genesis. No longer is God ‘inscrutable,’ being a ‘chosen people’ an entitlement of indelible righteousness, or God’s ‘plan’ mere arbitrary triumphal tribalism. And so, it illuminates an intrinsic coherence between contemporary Christian theology and the ethical relational striving informed by precursor truths known to the historical Jew Jesus.”

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, Columbia Theological Seminary, Author Of Genesis And Theology Of The Old Testament

“Borgman has read widely and is well rooted in the scholarly literature. His goal, however, is to make sense of the text by asking the kinds of questions that are raised by readers who have not been tamed away from the shock and puzzlement of the text. The book will interest those who have a literary sensitivity and face a literature that is theologically thick but unfamiliar. Borgman gives easy access but does not compromise the unfamiliarity and does not ‘explain’ the thickness in an easy way. Readers are invited to hear as for the first time.”

RUTH ANNE REESE, Asbury Theological Seminary

“In this book Borgman reminds us that God seeks real relationship and friendship with self-interested humanity. Such a relationship often involves change for both parties—indeed, this is one of the key points of Genesis: The Story We Haven’t Heard. These thoughts are pointers for understanding God and our own journey with him. This is a book well worth reading.”

THOMAS HOWARD, Author Of Christ The Tiger And The Novels Of Charles Williams

“In a prefatory note Paul Borgman remarks that Genesis has proved to be the most difficult book with which he and his literature classes have struggled over the years. If this strikes you as anomalous, then you are the one to read this book on Genesis. Borgman is a vastly astute and massively well-read critic. I have never read a book like this—and I am deeply bothered by some of it. I don’t like my suppositions haled up for remorseless scrutiny. But I do like Borgman’s lucid English prose, and his assiduity as a biblical scholar.”

JAMES S. ACKERMAN, Indiana University, Editor Of Literary Interpretations Of Biblical Narrative, Author Of Teaching The Bible As Literature

“Paul Borgman is an exciting and experienced teacher, and this book on Genesis—not your standard biblical commentary—comes from many years of dialogue in the classroom. It is a work that will prove interesting and useful both to laypersons and to college students. I highly recommend it.”

LELAND RYKEN, Wheaton College, Coeditor Of A Complete Literary Guide To The Bible And Dictionary Of Biblical Imagery

“The subtitle of Paul Borgman’s book signals the nature of his achievement, namely, the ability to look closely at an ancient text that seems elusive to a modern reader. The virtues of this beautifully written book include its willingness to wrestle with the baffling aspects of Genesis, its unobtrusive but conscientious attention to scholarship on Genesis, its systematic coverage of the entire book of Genesis, its unfolding of the richness of human experience to be found in Genesis, and the fresh slant provided by a literary approach to the text. Paul Borgman has lived closely with Genesis for twenty-five years. This book is a mature and triumphant sharing of what he has discovered.”

And Finally, A Blog Review (Richard Kew) And A Personal Email Of Thanks, From Hong Kong:

Reviewed by Richard Kew

<richardkew@aol.com>

For a reason that is best known to God and my soul, I have spent most of the last couple of years studying, restudying, and then restudying again the first two or three books of the Bible. Somehow, I found myself getting to the end of what I thought was the process and something else would come up, prodding me to dive back into the Penteteuchal waters. I began to feel like a friend, an Old Testament scholar, whose wife complained early in his ministry that he never seemed to preach from anywhere but Genesis!

Some months ago, when I thought I was ready to move on to another part of the Scriptures at long last, Paul Borgman’s book, Genesis – The Story We Haven’t Heard, arrived in the mail. At first, I tried to ignore it, but after a couple of weeks, like a Pavlovian dog, I was incapable of preventing myself from leaping once again into these particular Old Testament waters.

Borgman, a college professor of literature, has used Genesis as a primary text for one of the classes that he teaches. The fruit of that exercise is the substance of his book. His approach flies in the face of the methodology behind so much biblical scholarship in the last 150 years, for instead of breaking the text up into smaller and smaller segments that are then analyzed to death, he gets us to see and read the story as a whole – starting at the beginning and finishing at the end. Borgman challenges us to look at Genesis as a rich interweave of tales that make up the larger story of God making himself known, especially to his friend, Abraham, and Abraham and Sarah’s heirs and successors.

What Borgman does is to let the narrative speak for itself about the human condition and about God’s way of enabling transformation in the flow of human affairs. At the same time he helps us to dig beneath the mere words, uncovering rich veins for us to mine. His method, however, presses us not to lose sight of the essence of the text as we use literary, theological, and historical skills to untangle what it said to its earliest readers – and, therefore, what it is saying to us today.

There is, however, one primary organizing principle: Borgman points out that from a human point of view the whole saga from chapter one to chapter fifty is about the fundamental human need to make a name for ourselves. The first eleven chapters, he suggests, are like snapshots in an album, and they illustrate the family resemblance. “The dark truth of each character is tied to that of the others by a similarly sinister but ordinary way of being in the world. It’s all so human, so perfectly normal, this disposition to promote oneself at other’s expense. What once was – Eden’s harmony, intimacy and pleasure – is lost. With unnerving clarity, this preface illustrates the distance between the ideal and its loss” (Page 233).

What this book does is ask us to read the text and see what the text says, rather than, as we are so prone to do, importing our own ideas, presuppositions, and interpretations. I found it fascinating that there are few cross-references in this book, and there is no mention of the New Testament vision at all. That is not to say that the wider revelation is not there lurking at the back of Borgman’s mind, but he wants us to draw the connections for ourselves when we have read and understood exactly what the original narrative is saying.

I found myself, as I worked through Genesis with Borgman’s book, discovering whole layers of the story of four generations of patriarchs that I had never noticed before, as well as their interconnection – and that is not for want of looking on my part in years past. For example, after the first eleven disastrous chapters, we are introduced to Abraham, together with all his strengths and shortcomings, peculiarities and foibles. Abraham learns from God that he and his seed are to be a blessing to all peoples. Then we are shown how this promise begins to be fulfilled in the midst of human fallenness, until there is Joseph feeding the whole of the eastern Mediterranean because of the position into which he found himself thrust in Egypt, thereby being a blessing to a wider humankind than just the clan of Abraham.

As I have studied Genesis with the Bible in one hand and Borgman in the other, what has been happening is that I have been learning how to read the text in a different, perhaps more attentive, manner. I have discovered how to unpack characters, and also how to unpack those seemingly unlikely tales that suddenly are parachuted into the larger story, like that of Judah’s misconduct with his daughter-in-law, Tamar, in chapter 38, for example. What Borgman does is use the literary critic’s insight to ask why such a detail is there, and then to search within the wider tale for an answer to his question.

Borgman’s book is a delight, and I hope that he does not stop writing at this point because there is probably a great deal more he can teach us. I would hazard that as we move deeper into postmodernity, an age in which narratives are becoming substantially important, what Paul Borgman is teaching us is that we need to see what the story is actually saying rather than allowing it to come to us second-hand, transported along on some scholar or pastor or journalist’s presuppositions.

Those of us who take the Scriptural text seriously are often wooden and graceless in the way in which we handle it. As a result we miss the subtleties as well as the broad sweep of God’s message to us. I am delighted to have spent three months in his company, because I come away from Genesis this time a far richer, and I hope humbler, Christian.

Dear Prof. Borgman

I’ve finally found a book on Genesis that is fit for teaching, and devotional and academic pondering. Thanks for your “The Story We haven’t Heard” and I’m on my way to unlearn and relearn the messages in Genesis.

A Thankful Reader in Hong Kong.

Yan Wing So

So_Yan_Wing@mouchel.com.hk