Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament

Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. By Ellen F. Davis. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2001. x + 208 pp. $13.95 (paper).

In this volume, based on sermons and lectures given over a period of fourteen years, Davis, now associate professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School, offers reflections and explications of various Old Testament passages. In each, she provides short, readable applications of Old Testament materials to Christian life and faith.

The volume is divided into 5 sections:

I. Pain and Praise: The Psalms as Common Prayer. Four chapters about praying various genres of the psalms

II. The Cost of Love. Chapters on the Burning Bush, the Binding of Isaac, and the Song of Songs

III. The Art of Living Well. Chapters on the wisdom literature: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job

IV. Habits of the Heart. Chapters on discipline (Proverbs 8), taking pleasure in God's beauty (Exodus 33), relying on faith rather than experience (Psalm 102), God's vulnerability to human sin (Psalm 51), and seeking rest and refuge (Isaiah 49)

V. Torah of the Earth. Two chapters on ecological concerns, the first offering an Old Testament basis for concern for the earth, and the second focusing on Numbers 11.

The strengths of Davis's volume lie in her ability to demonstrate ways in which the Old Testament can be relevant for contemporary readers. In her readings, the text speaks to the issues of meaningful work, rampant consumerism, sexual expression, and ecology. Biblical truth is accessible and translatable to the life of the contemporary believer, not requiring sophisticated historical study to reconstruct its message. Davis does draw faith implications from philological translational work (as on page 193), but while hers in not an ahistorical, "here's-what-the-Bible-means-to-me" approach, she also argues the validity of reading the Bible as a mystical text (as in her chapter on the Song of Songs).

Davis's strengths, however, are also her weaknesses. Throughout, she gives a sympathetic, almost apologetic reading of the text, rarely naming or engaging its ethical difficulties. For example, over at least the past fifteen years, feminists have highlighted the inherent violence of Hosea, naming its treatment of the female as abuse and underscoring the danger of replicating its rhetoric in contemporary contexts. In Davis's connection of Hosea 2 with ecological concerns, however, she does not mention these concerns; she reads "with" the text, repeating with apparent agreement Hosea's theology (p. 199). Similarly, she explains the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) as the urgency of God to be assured of Abraham's love (p. 63) without considering the ethical and theological significance of the image of a God who would ask for the death of a child in order to soothe his own anxiety.

In turn, the communities that Davis seems to address are those of middle-class Christians in the U.S. For example, while I agree that buying produce from local farmers and planting a garden (p. 200) have ecological benefits, I was disappointed not to learn more wide-reaching, indeed more radical, things I could do to honor Davis's call toward greater accountability to the natural order.

Getting Involved with God is accessible to the general reader, and its short chapters lend themselves to small group lay study. In my judgment, however, Davis's perspective alone ill prepares readers to deal with the difficulties of Scripture, and fruitfully could be supplemented with readings from The Women's Bible Commentary (Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe [eds.], Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998); Carol Delaney's Abraham on Trial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); and/or John Barton's Ethics and the Old Testament (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1998).

JULIA M. O'BRIEN

Lancaster Theological Seminary

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Summer 2002
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