The Course

This 4-unit course is a "survey of the New Testament in the historical and cultural context of the Graeco-Roman world" with "special attention to literary forms and theological contexts" (Undergraduate Catalog). Of the General Education requirements, it meets the New Testament component.

Class time will feature structured discussions of the texts and lectures, student presentations (mainly homilies), spontaneous debates and sermons, and edifying tangents. Readings introduce complementary and competing accounts of the background, lessons, and uses of the New Testament of Holy Scripture.

Luther was right that the church is where the Word is kept. You could practically turn that saying on its head: the Word is where the church is kept.

The category of Scripture is so profoundly deep that it almost defies description. (This did not stop me from giving it my best shot in my dissertation, Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation.) The Bible is a historical artifact whose original home is a distant culture at the epicenter of human and cosmic history, but has taken up residence in every tribe, tongue, and nation, or will eventually. It is the standard by which Christian faithfulness is measured. It demands the same interpretive skills as all other texts, yet still reaches the barely literate. It is a work of vast intertextual and intratextual interpretation. It is the Word of the Holy Spirit, and that demands faith and calls for theological discernment, not just grammar and vocabulary and historical background. It runs through every Christian tradition around the world and over two millennia. The worshiping church is its home and lifeblood. It is an object of centuries of scholarly scrutiny, much of it helpful even when unfriendly. It is the constitutive text of the people God, bound up with the identities of those who find themselves confronted by it in unfamiliar, exhilarating, troubling ways. To teach New Testament is not merely to teach a text, but to teach this text and its worlds of old and new creation, and that is a great honor and solemn responsibility for all who who get to.

Teaching the New Testament should equip disciples to hear, keep, and proclaim the good news in all they do.

This course contributes to Westmont's General Education curriculum in serving the school's vision of Christian liberal arts collegiate education. To quote from the syllabus of my colleague Karen Jobes, "Study of the New Testament is inherently inter-disciplinary. You will recognize points of contact with many of the other disciplines in the liberal arts curriculum. You will become more aware of the issues in reading and interpreting an ancient text (i.e., hermeneutics). Questions of history, philosophy, comparative religions, sociology and anthropology, theology, critical scholarship, literary theory, rhetoric, and linguistics will challenge you to read the New Testament in a new and deeper way."