Centre for Biblical Studies

Disability and Embodiment in Namibia: Contextual Bible Studies

Professor Louise Lawrence

We are really excited to initiate (courtesy of GCRF AHRC funding) this interdisciplinary collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Namibia, the National Federation of People with Disabilities in Namibia (NFPDN) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia (ELCIN) to explore religio-cultural narratives of embodiment and disability in Namibia. We are going to be running three workshops throughout the year. The first will be held in April 2020 in the capital Windhoek and will be themed on ‘Experiences of Disability’. The second will be held in July 2020 in church premises in the North of the country and will be on ‘Disability, Religion and Culture’. The third workshop will be held at The University of Namibia (UNAM) in December 2020 to coincide with International Day of Persons with Disabilities (December 3) and will be themed on ‘Challenging Disability Marginalisation in Namibia’.

The project will seek to document lived experiences of physical and mental illness in Namibia alongside church responses and develop an educational package based on biblical and local cultural resources that tackles marginalising discourses. Given its use to address social injustices in Southern Africa, Contextual Bible Study has been chosen as an appropriate methodological approach to complement disability studies in a context where 90% of the population is Christian. The network will exchange knowledge and collaborate further on four themes: (a) collating and foregrounding impoverishing experiences of disability; (b) understanding challenges and priorities from the perspective of the disabled and their advocates; (c) mapping and interrogating religious and cultural narratives of inclusion/exclusion; (d). addressing religious and cultural narratives of inclusion/exclusion in order to promote inclusivity, equality and diversity and, thereby, to maximise potential for development. Members of the network will foster Namibian-centred approaches to the promotion of equality and diversity, avoiding the pitfalls of importing Western approaches to embodied diversities.

Ethnicity, Race, and Religion in Early Christian and Jewish Identities

A Critical Examination of Ancient Sources and Modern Scholarship

Professor David Horrell

Religion and ethnicity or race are facets of identity that intersect and overlap in complex and varied ways. They are neither identical nor entirely separable, but clearly bound up in some of the most intractable and prominent conflicts in the contemporary world. The key aim was to explore the intertwining of religious and ethnic/racial facets of identity in Jewish and Christian texts from the period of Christian origins, to expose the ideological and political motivations of scholarly depictions of these in modern New Testament scholarship, and to assess how far this scholarly discipline reflects and reinscribes a 'Western' mode of knowledge that is built on both religious and racial presumptions.

This AHRC Leadership Fellowship ran from 1 October 2015–31 March 2017.

Publications

David G. Horrell, Ethnicity and Inclusion: Religion, Race, and Whiteness in the Construction of Jewish and Christian Identities (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020)

Katherine M. Hockey and David G. Horrell (eds), Ethnicity, Race, Religion: Identities and Ideologies in Early Jewish and Christian Texts and in Modern Biblical Interpretation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018)

David G. Horrell, ‘Religion, Ethnicity, and Way of Life: Exploring Categories of Identity’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 83/1 (2021) 38-55.

David G. Horrell, ‘Judaean Ethnicity and Christ-following Voluntarism? A Reply to Steve Mason and Philip Esler’, New Testament Studies 65 (2019) 1-20.

David G. Horrell, ‘Grace, Race, and the People of God’ in John Anthony Dunne and Eric Lewellen (eds), One God, One People, One Future: Essays in honour of N. T. Wright (London/Minneapolis, MN: SPCK/Fortress, 2018), 191-210.

David G. Horrell, ‘Paul, Inclusion, and Whiteness: Particularising Interpretation’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 40 (2017) 123-47.

David G. Horrell, ‘Ethnicisation, Marriage, and Early Christian Identity: Critical Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3, and Modern New Testament Scholarship’, New Testament Studies 62 (2016), 439-60.

Events

Four events during the lifetime of the project brought together a range of scholars to address the questions at the heart of the research.

• 15-16 March 2016: Workshop on ideologies of race and their impact on NT Interpretation. Presenters: Love Sechrest, Kathy Ehrensperger, Halvor Moxnes, James Crossley.
• 19-20 April 2016: Workshop on ethnicity, race and religion in ancient constructions of identity. Presenters: Denise Kimber Buell, John Barclay, Judith Lieu, Tim Whitmarsh.
• 8th August 2016: ‘The Bible in the Bush: Translating and Reading the Bible in Africa’. Including an informal conversation with Musa Dube - 7.30pm at Exeter Cathedral’s Chapter House.  Poster with more information.
• 9-11 August 2016: International Conference - Ethnicity/Race/Religion: Identities, Ideologies, and Intersections in Biblical Texts and Interpretation. Main speakers: Musa Dube, Malou Ibita, Gregory Cuéllar.

Visiting scholars

The following academic visitors spent 1-2 weeks at Exeter as part of the project, presenting papers to one or other of the workshops or final conference.

• Love Sechrest is Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Columbia Theological Seminary and was previously an associate professor of the New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. She is the author of A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (T&T Clark, 2009) and co-chair of the African American Biblical Hermeneutics section in the Society of Biblical Literature.
• Denise Kimber Buell is Dean of Faculty and Cluett Professor of Religion at Williams College, Massachussetts, USA. She is the author of Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (Columbia UP 2005) and Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton UP 1999).
• Musa Dube is Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (Chalice Press, 2000); The HIV and AIDS Bible: Some Selected Essays (University of Scranton Press, 2008) and co-editor of Postcolonial Perspectives on African Biblical Interpretations (Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).

Dissecting Yahweh: The Materiality of the Divine Body and Its Biblical Autopsy

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou

This Leverhulme-funded project offers an anthropology of the ancient deity Yahweh, at the heart of which is the careful but visceral exploration of the materiality of the divine body. The primary objective of the project is to identify and explore the texture and value of bodily materiality in ancient constructions of the Iron Age deity Yahweh – including those attested in the Hebrew Bible - in order to better understand perceptions of the material and the bodily within ancient religious practice and discourse. I propose that divine bodies, like human bodies, were not understood as materially or socially 'complete' (or 'bounded'), but were regarded as ongoing social ‘projects’, recursively brought into being by means of an array of socio-ritual practices and cultural performances, whether undertaken by the deity, the deity's colleagues, or worshippers. Within this context, I will argue that human and divine sensory engagement with the material and the bodily, and in particular the dividual texture, composition, and agency of divine and human body parts (such as hand, face or genitalia), played a dominant and hitherto under-explored role in the social construction of Yahweh and the religious experience of his worshippers.

The Bible and the Devotional life

Dr Cheryl Hunt

This project seeks to explore how the personal spiritual lives of students (ordinands, trainee Readers and independents) at a Church of England theological education institution are affected by their participating in introductory study of both Testaments, within the framework of Common Awards. It will focus particularly on the students' employment of the Bible in their personal devotions. The research will consist of student reflections on their personal spirituality both as they begin and as they end level 4 studies on the Bible. It is to be hoped that findings will inform an approach towards delivering biblical studies which enables students to integrate their learning into their personal biblical engagement in such a way as to enrich spiritual formation and avoid any risk of undermining it. Might those undergoing theological education take on a new, critically-informed approach to their studies which nevertheless makes no impact upon their spirituality or personal devotional use of the Bible? Or might they be left in what Ricoeur termed a 'desert of criticism'? This project hopes to begin to answer those questions.

The Bible and the Devotional life was funded by a Durham University Common Awards Research Network seedcorn grant, September 2017–September 2018.

Texts of Land, Sea and Hope

Professor Louise Lawrence

The project initiated a number of Contextual Bible Studies in diverse contexts across the South West. Contextual Bible Study is a method which originated in post-apartheid South Africa and has since been used in a variety of situations across the world and among a range of readers, both Christian and non-Christian. It is a method of reading which prioritizes the question 'What does the Bible mean in this context, here and now?' The project involved rural, coastal, urban, performative, artistic and Deaf contexts all encountering stories from the Gospel of Luke and contextualising them within their own experience and place.

This three year project was sponsored by the South West Ministry Training Course (SWMTC).

The Social Life of the Corpse in the Ancient World

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou

This project examined in new ways the role and place of the dead in the lives of the living in the biblical world by focusing explicitly on the corpse and its agency (impact on social action) in both the Bible and the societies from which it emerged. Recent archaeological and socio-anthropological studies suggest that the corpse was credited with an enduring social value within ‘traditional’ societies. This prompts the question as to whether in biblical studies and related fields of enquiry it is still appropriate to accord the corpse a marginal or negative status in the biblical world.

To address this question, inter-disciplinary perspectives were employed to explore how the agency of the corpse might have reflected or shaped its socio-religious value within biblical societies. In particular, socio-anthropological and socio-archaeological studies were engaged to investigate the ways in which the materiality of the corpse might have rendered it a social agent as both person and object. This radical approach to the corpse in biblical studies better informs and contextualises scholarly reconstructions of the socio-religious perspectives of biblical societies and the literature arising from them. Research in this area tends to be coloured and distorted by the modernist, distancing assumptions about corpses dominant in Western culture and is often undermined by a prioritisation of written material (primary and secondary, ancient and modern) over non-written activities. This project counterbalanced these tendencies by conducting research reaching across conventional boundaries to argue for the valuable social role of the corpse in biblical societies.

Sense and Stigma: Sensory-Disabled Characters in the Gospels

Professor Louise Lawrence

This project, funded by the British Academy, looks at how sensory-disabled characters are portrayed New Testament texts.

The senses are used within New Testament texts as instruments of knowledge and power and thus constitute important mediators of cultural knowledge and experience. Likewise, those instances where sensory faculty is perceived to be "disabled" in some way also become key sites for ideological commentary and critique. However, often biblical scholarship, itself "disabled" by eye-centric and textocentric "norms," has read sensory-disabled characters as nothing more than inert sites of healing; their agency, including their alternative sensory modes of communication and resistance to oppression, remain largely unaddressed.

In response, this project seeks to initiate a variety of interdisciplinary dialogues with disability studies and sensory anthropology in a quest to refigure characters with sensory disabilities featured in the gospels and provide alternative interpretations of their conditions and social interactions. In each instance the identity of those stigmatised as "other" (according to particular physiological, social and cultural "norms") are recovered by exploring ethnographic accounts which document the stories of those experiencing similar rejection on account of perceived sensory "difference" in diverse cross-cultural settings. Through this process these "disabled" characters are recast as individuals capable of employing certain strategies which destabilise the stigma imposed upon them and tactical performers who can subversively achieve their social goals.

Academic visitors to the Centre of Biblical Studies

Ralph Hochschild

Dr Ralph Hochschild recently spent a sabbatical leave (Sept-Dec 2018) working at Exeter on a project on a social-scientific approach to the parable of the “Rich Fool” (or rich farmer) in Luke’s Gospel. Dr Hochschild, following a PhD in New Testament studies at the University of Heidelberg, works as a “Schuldekan”, responsible for religious education in schools in a region of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Love Sechrest

Love Sechrest, Associate Professor of New Testament at Fuller Seminary, California, USA, visiting from 14-17 March 2016 under the auspices of the AHRC-funded project on Ethnicity, Race and Religion in Early Christian and Jewish Identities. She is the author of A Former Jew: Paul and the Dialectics of Race (T&T Clark, 2009) and co-chair of the African American Biblical Hermeneutics section in the Society of Biblical Literature.

Professor Denise Kimber Buell

Denise Kimber Buell, Dean of Faculty and Cluett Professor of Religion at Williams College, Massachussetts, USA visiting from 17-22 April 2016 under the auspices of the AHRC-funded project on Ethnicity, Race and Religion in Early Christian and Jewish Identities. She is the author of Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (Columbia UP 2005) and Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy (Princeton UP 1999).

Professor Musa Dube

Musa Dube, Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Botswana, Botswana, visiting from 1-14 August 2016 under the auspices of the AHRC-funded project on Ethnicity, Race and Religion in Early Christian and Jewish Identities. She is the author of Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible (Chalice Press, 2000); The HIV and AIDS Bible: Some Selected Essays (University of Scranton Press, 2008) and co-editor of Postcolonial Perspectives on African Biblical Interpretations (Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).

Dr Aikaterini Tsalampouni

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, visiting 4-8 March 2013.

Professor Hanna Roose

University of Lüneburg, Germany, visiting 16-23 May 2012 under the Erasmus scheme which supports academic exchanges. Professor Roose presented an undergraduate lecture on the parables and led a study day for postgraduate students.

Dr Elisabeth Boase

Director of Studies, Department of Theology, Flinders University, Brisbane, Australia, visited in May 2012. Dr Boase visited because of an interest in the Exeter project on the Bible and Environmental Ethics. She presented a paper on Lamentations for which she is writing an Earth Bible commentary.

Dr Kevin McDonnell

Rector Emeritus, Catholic Bible College, La Rochelle, Johannesburg, South Africa, visited March-May 2012. Dr McDonnell visited because of an interest in the Bible and Environmental Ethics project. He presented a paper on reading the Bible in a time of ecological crisis and is preparing academic and educational materials on the subject of the Bible and Environmental Ethics.

Professor Harry Maier

Professor of New Testament Studies, Vancouver School of Theology, Canada, visited 25 April-23 May 2009. Progessor Maier presented a research seminar and advised on the Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics project.

Professor Todd Still

Associate Professor of Christian Scriptures, George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, visited 1-13 December 2008. Professor Still completed an edited book with David Horrell on social-scientific study of the Pauline churches 25 years after The First Urban Christians, presented a research seminar and advised on the Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics project).

Professor Ernst Conradie

University of the Western Cape, South Africa, visited 27 January-23 February 2008. Professor Conradie advised on the Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics project.