A Testament for the Times

...David Plante (Romans) sensitively probes the paradoxes involved in Paul's glorification of chastity, making them the subject of a dialogue between "Daniel"—the narrator of his autobiographical trilogy of novels—and a college roommate whom the young man secretly loves...

...Putting off childish things, most of the contributors, whether currently churched or not, wrestle with the hard issues of faith in this century...

...Not everyone retains wholly pleasant memories...

...To treat the New Testament as some sort of exclusive club with exclusive membership would have been to ignore what was said in it...

...Instead, this movement claims that only those who believe Jesus Christ to be the Son of God can be saved...

...One is born into Judaism...

...Even in Calvinist New England, Emily Dickinson mocked the Good Book as "an antique volume/Written by faded men," contrasting it unfavorably with classical attitudes...

...the wide variety of writers Rosenberg selected shared an ethnic, albeit not necessarily a dogmatic, identity...

...Each of the 23 authors was chosen, rather, for the spiritual or "incarnational" quality in his or her voice or fiction...

...All of them approach the gospels or epistles they were assigned with admirable seriousness...

...This masterly vignette alone justifies a reading of Incarnation...

...Auden once put it, "Wemustlove one another or die...

...Guy Davenport (Paul's Second Letter to Timothy) evokes a Southern Baptist upbringing that was "dreary and dull all the way...

...Rita Dove (Ephesians) writes of a "hellishly handsome" but zealous youth minister, "like a male model from Ebony," who instilled her African Methodist Episcopal Sunday School class with deep anxieties about sin...

...But all recognize that we must subdue self in order to bond with others, that, as W.H...

...Nor has the spirit behind such institutionalized practices been completely expunged in modern times...

...Here perplexities arise from Christian attitudes toward sexual behavior—notably homosexuality—and the limited role of women in the pulpit or at the altar...

...I have no musical gift and thus hated all the hymns...

...that Jesus' nudity on the cross was far more painful to him than the nails in his hands and feet...

...Larry Woiwode (Acts of the Apostles) grapples with the arguments for and against female clergy that are raised in Scripture and in his conservative Presbyterian denomination...

...Jude's message: "Forme, the benediction that grows out of torment is the essence of art"—and of religious faith, one might say...

...Plante's narrator imagines the Apostle "looking into the nighttime sky, in which the stars defined a great body, Christ's, risen with arms outstretched, which Saint Paul contemplated with greater love than Daniel would ever have for anyone in his life...

...Today, there is a conservative movement afoot in virtually all denominations which disclaims the humanism that used to be called Christian ethics...

...In medieval times the arts existed to glorify the Creator, and people learned to read in order to study Holy Writ...

...Not all the contributors are practicing Christians, or even theists," he points out in the Introduction...

...Many have dug extensively into commentaries—too extensively in a few cases, judging from a certain amount of regurgitated scholarship...

...Since the contributors are creative writers, not Biblical experts, they especially engage the reader when they focus on the personal...

...Grace Schulman (Jude) describes how an interest in Christian painting and literature blended with the "Hebrew melodies" of her upbringing...

...She castigates her Roman Catholic upbringing for obscuring what she perceives to be the deepest meaning of Mark: "We were never allowed to think of Jesus as someone who learned, or grew, or developed...

...We are called by faith to meet with all the other pilgrims on the road...

...In his advice to the church at Galatia, Paul rejected Moses' teachings...

...They looked like flavors of ice cream...

...Particularly in relation to a woman...

...Throughout Christian history, whenever institutional churches come to seem too oppressive, some of the faithful turn to mysticism for a more immediate glimpse of divine reconciliation...

...No wonder, then, considering how secular we have become, that a defensive note creeps into the poet Alfred Corn's Introduction to Incarnation: Contemporary Writers of the New Testament (Viking, 361 pp., $19.95...

...When David Rosenberg edited Congregation, a similar volume that had distinguished Jewish literary figures discuss their favorite books of the Tanach, he faced no such problems...

...Corn agrees that salvation is not achieved simply by reading the Scriptures: If God did become man, then we meet Him in others "to the extent that they have become 'words' themselves, become embodiments of text, readable, instructive, and filled with compassion—'living sacrifices.'" Secular cultures translate these ideals into their own terms: psychological, economic, sociological, etc...

...Two of them are Jews [Anthony Hecht and Grace Schulman] who had important comments to offer on these texts, or on Christianity at large...

...Interestingly, Marina Warner (Paul's First Letter to Timothy) credits her Catholic convent school with furnishing powerful female role models in its nuns, thus undercutting Paul's more gynephobic pronouncements...

...A fair proportion of Incarnation's contributors have been inspired by these writings, or by personal experiences of a mystical nature...

...Corn (Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians), raised a Methodist, confesses that as a child he relished "sword practice"—a game so called in deference to St...

...The faithfilled theology there was only half a step out of a tent...

...Bythel9th century, though, writers were converting to skepticism in unprecedented numbers...

...One must become a Christian, however, by professing its tenets...

...Matthew Arnold, an early proponent of the Bible as Literature, thought hecould detect "the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of "the Sea of Faith," and suggested that we assuage its loss with love and loyalty in personal relationships...

...you could still smell the sawdust...

...Sixteenth-century papal interpretation of Paul's Epistles led to the formation of Jewish ghettos, together with the use of public humiliations as incentives for conversion...

...From a Jewish perspective, she evokes what is most universal in St...

...Corn, though a practicing Christian, repudiates this view...

...Judas, off to one side, was, of course, chocolate—detestable Judas, the class treasurer, who betrayed the Lord...

...If the idea strikes you as incongruous, this simply proves how far we have moved from the theocentrism that once dominated Western civilization...

...Amy Clampitt (Thessalonians) grimly considers radical theologian Rosemary Ruether's suggestion that anti- Judaic attitudes are too deeply embodied in the structure of Christianity to be removed without destroying the whole edifice, then laments: " We [Christians] inhabit a ruin of embattled certitudes, an incarceration of error fossilized, of an injustice so appalling that for any response at all there seems nowhere to turn but to the Hebrew prophets"— or, she adds, to certain English devotional poets...

...Corn knows that many people associate the whole subject of Christian Scripture with fundamentalist diatribes about how the rest of us ought to think and live...

...Many members of the Victorian intelligentsia deplored the suppression of pagan culture, with its deities who did not require followers to give up the pleasures of this world to gain those of the next...

...His own theology is inclusive...

...Doubts about miracles seem to have been the problem of earlier generations, for a significant number of the essays eagerly defend the supernatural aspects of religion...

...ULTMATELY issues of gender and sexuality yield precedence to the matter of anti-Semitism...

...Hecht, for his part, counters the harsh judgments of Paul with Jesus' affirmation of Mosaic Law...

...Our church was for white people only...

...and Miss Lottie Estes told us...

...Dove becomes reconciled with St...

...Incarnation's writers remind us that Bibheal metaphors describe life's universal conditions, and thus help us come to terms with our own humanity...

...members of it belonged to the Ku Klux Klan...

...Michael Malone (James), an author of Christian novels, reminds us that the New Testament is a story intended to intersect our own: " The Word asks us to let our quarrel with the world be a lovers' quarrel...

...Mary Gordon (Mark's Gospel) finds Christ interacting with mothers, prostitutes and young girls...

...The esthetic impressions of childhood seem to be particularly tenacious, and provide a fascinating microcosm of American religious education...

...Paul by composing a poem about him that helps her grasp his spiritual transformation...

...The pretty young man who rested his head on the breast of Jesus wore a robe of goldish yellow, a sherbet color, something fragrant and a little exotic, perhaps pineapple...

...Annie Dillard (Luke's Gospel) remembers the intensity of a Presbyterian church camp where one " filed out of the woods to chapel twice on Sunday dressed in white shorts...

...Although in the aftermath of the Holocaust many American churches repudiated attempts to proselytize Jews, during the last few years there has been extensive backsliding...

...As an Episcopalian, I have watched a burgeoning grass roots fascination with the works of such medieval visionaries as Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, Hildegard of Bingen, and Jakob Boehme—women and men whose perception of divine love assured them that, in Dame Julian's words, "All manner of things shall be well...

...As Anthony Hecht (Galatians) observes, this is so much a part of the culture founded on Pauline principles that many cannot even recognize it...

...singing, praying, and listening to one another's stories...

...Robert Haas (who writes about the Johannine Epistles) recalls a picture representing the Last Supper that hung in his Catholic school: "Each of the apostles wore a robe in a different shade of bright pastel...

...Paul's use of military analogies for the spiritual life—where contestants flipped through their Bibles trying to be the first to identify a specific verse...