Pelican Scriptural Commentaries!

Our propitiation of Boston’s suddenly-wrathful Deity continues today with yet more Pelican Scripture Commentaries! I recently looked back at the Big Four, the long Gospel commentaries Pelican put out half a century ago, but in the course of nervously plucking them off my snowbound bookshelves, I came across plenty of secondary Pelican commentaries, several of which hold up just as well as their higher-profile brethren.

Take the 1973 volume Ethics and the New Testament by J. L. Houlden, for example. It’s a tightly-focused work about how the basic concepts of right and wrong play themselves out in the New Testament – glancingly in the Gospels themselves, but inevitably, Houlden (who can be just a bit on the wordy side, so brace yourselves) comes back around to St. Paul, who is, as a friend points out, not the foundation of all Christianity but certainly the entire house built on that foundation. Much as I hate giving St. Paul that kind of credit (he’s a fairly repellant figure), I can’t disagree, and Houlden very much agrees, spending a good deal of time sorting out the essence of how Paul himself estimates right and wrong:

The striking thing about Paul’s ethics is the way that he so often and so sharply brought this central conviction about Christ to bear upon the solution of moral problems with which his congregations faced him. In reply to the church at Corinth, he could easily have fallen back upon flat, unreasoned prohibition when called upon to deal with sexual immorality. In fact he appeals straight to the Christian’s intimate association with Christ – which renders such conduct not ‘wrong’ so much as treacherous or adulterous. He enjoins virtue not as inherently commendable but as following from possession of the Spirit. He urges generosity and humility not because they are desirable as virtues but but because they are attributes of Christ in his saving act for men.

Although Ethics and the New Testament is a wide-ranging little work, Houlden is at his most authoritative when discussing Paul, and he comes by that authority honestly: he wrote a book in 1970 called Paul’s Letters from Prison that covers Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, and Ephesians (Houlden’s name is misprinted on the Pelican cover, which had to sting a bit) and that is a much more dedicated attempt to capture what Houlden calls “the magnificent sweep” of Paul’s teaching. Paul’s Letters from Prison is a much deeper book than Ethics and the New Testament, and large chunks of it are also more personal in that peculiar way St. Paul seems to evoke in those who study him closely – perhaps because he himself is such an unabashedly personal writer, an almost unique voice from the ancient world. Certainly the complexity of his writings brings out the best in Houlden:

The strangeness of Paul’s idiom cannot disguise the fact that he is dealing with permanent questions of man’s existence in the world in a way which was not only original but also profound. The rigour with which he refuses all easy remedies for man’s moral ineptitude, the subtlety with which he explores man’s relationship with a righteous God in a sinful world, the richness with which he develops the implications of Christ’s person and role for the peace man longs for – all these features deserve to command respect from Christian and non-Christian alike, quite apart from the magnitude of his historical achievement in the development of the Church. Whatever his own personal attitudes to these matters, a man can find in Paul ample material with which to extend and deepen his consideration of them.

Paul is also the subject of John Ruef’s 1971 entry in the Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Paul’s First Letter to Corinth, which can’t help but feel like a bit of a step down after the sometimes soaring rhetoric of Houlden’s book. Ruef is a solid scholar, and the way he takes his readers through this all-important Epistle virtually word-by-word is an amazing service even today, but the book has just a few too many passages like this one:

Here again we see Paul stressing that the proper Christian profession is not, as the Corinthian Christians would have it, Christ is risen. The proper profession is, Christ died and is risen. But one cannot make this profession without providing the same basis of hope held out for others who have died. The hope is, after all, not a hope simply for individual salvation. This was a common idea among the gentiles, but it was not the way in which the Jews viewed salvation: salvation lay in God’s concern for his people. To belong to the people of God was to share in the hope of the people of God. If one were to affirm this hope for oneself as an individual believer, while denying this hope for members of the community who had died, one would in effect be shattering the unity of the community in this particular respect. And this kind of threat to the unity of the community was something which Paul would not tolerate.

You don’t have to be an Open Letters editor to see how much hot air has been pumped into a passage like that one (a moment’s consideration is enough to see that it could be boiled down to two sentences), but the balance of the book has some fascinating facts and insights about the very beginnings of Christianity, as seen in the microcosm of one its key documents.

And we go from microcosm to macrocosm in G. Ernest Wright and Reginald Fuller’s 1957 volume The Book of the Acts of God, which ranges across the whole of Christianity from its doctrinal roots in the Old Testament to every aspect of its flowering in the New Testament and even a bit beyond. Wright and Fuller seem to delight in asking the big questions and casting all around for their answers; it can be fun to watch:

After all, what is the Bible? Is it simply a series of tales about supernatural doings which only the gullible can accept and then only on ‘faith’? … Is revelation a series of dogma from heaven, or the actions of God which give meaning to history? And if the biblical events that are understood to be the acts of Go are seen to be continuous with and interpreted by events that a historian can study on a ‘secular level’, does this mean that the theological understanding of them is automatically wrong? On earth a meteor is a piece of rock, but does that mean it did not come from the heavens? Behind these queries is the question as to whether the Bible itself has a particular religious point of view that we today do not readily comprehend. What is the relation between fact and faith in the Bible? What are the acts of God?

Of course there were many more volumes than these in the Pelican Scripture Commentaries – these volumes spoke to a more liturgically literate age than our own (I was struck over and over by how often I came across untranslated Latin or Greek, to say nothing of French and German), a coddled age that didn’t have to deal with monster blizzards every week, as penitent Boston now must. The Hub is only predicted to receive a couple of fresh inches of tonight, but the weekend is fixing to inflict yet another round of the Deity’s wrath. St. Paul would have counseled humility – and he’d have been standing by with a shovel.