Filmstrips

Startling in its interpretation, beauty, and significance is The Bible as Literature: In the Beginning Was the Word (Center for the Humanities, 2 Holland Ave., White Plains, NY 10603). This producer makes major quality audiovisual materials for public schools. Suitable for high school and beyond, this slide presentation is a collage of the finest literary, visual, and aural arts, ancient and modern, that draw their inspiration from the Bible. The essential, universal message of the Bible in its own words is combined with man’s responses—Jew, Christian, believer, reluctant doubter, and wavering skeptic. The aids are first-rate, and evangelicals will be pleased to note the influence of C. S. Lewis in the follow-up activities. Curiously the bibliography refers only to the Old Testament, though the range of the program integrates both testaments. A finer production is unlikely to be found, and if this is widely used in public schools a major step toward appreciation of the Bible in our culture and a major step toward the erosion of ignorance will be taken.

Frontiers of Life is the fifteen-minute slide/tape introduction to the mushrooming Neighborhood Bible Studies movement (Box 222, Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522). An effective audiovisual introduction, it stresses the inductive approach to Bible study: observe, interpret, and apply. This is probably the most useful lay evangelistic approach to Bible study. The attitude here is reverent and irenic, and the handsome photos illustrate well the inductive method. If the follow-up is equal to the introduction of this program, I would enthusiastically recommend it.

An evocative approach is offered in Winston House’s Joy in Creation (430 Oak Grove, Minneapolis, MN 55403). Although not strictly a Bible study, it is certainly Christocentric and scriptural. The heart of this slide program is the “Song of Creation,” which is the “story of how we became blind to the beauty of the world, blind to the beauty of each other, and how Jesus came to open our eyes again.” The origin of the song is Genesis, but its goal is Christ. The incarnational theology, though understated, is that Christ is still both crucified and risen on our behalf until the consummation of all things in him through which all things shall be made new. Stunning photos are enhanced by lovely textual and musical interpretation.

Larry Richards, evangelical Christian education authority, has led in trying to unite the church and the home in cooperative education. This trend is also strong among Roman Catholics. Family: Parish Religious Education from Paulist (545 Island Rd., Ramsey, NJ 07446) is a biblical, educationally sound, and eminently usable set that—with two or three exceptions to the eight filmstrips—ought to be seriously considered for use by evangelicals. Good teaching aids complement such filmstrips as “Faith in Mark’s Gospel,” “Community in the Acts of the Apostles,” “Who Is Jesus?,” and “World Hunger.” For older children through high school.

Twenty-Third Publications (Box 180, West Mystic, CT 06388) is another major producer of religious materials. It’s All in the Family is an introductory program. Separate, but complementary, is an excellent four-part filmstrip program for preschoolers, The Formative Years. Christ is presented as the model for intellectual, social-emotional, spiritual, and physical development. The program was created by Dorothy Dixon, former director of a famous laboratory school associated with the Eden Theological Seminary (United Church of Christ). Parents and educators will thank her for this series. The continuity of Jewish and Christian celebrations/activities in the accompanying textbook is a treasure all its own. Another well-known Christian educator, Dorothy Curran, gives us the wonderful two-part Family Celebrations for Religious Education. Part one, “Why Celebrate?” answers the question within a Catholic framework. Part two, however, makes up for any limitations of part one. Dorothy Curran is also the creator of Parents as Sex Educators, a resource guide rather than a “what-to-explain” manual. Photographs accurately depict the teenage sexual milieu in its unhealthy aspects: Parents will not only want to do something, but will.

Here are three subjects needing good coverage for teenagers and their elders: venereal disease, divorce, and death. Marshfilm (PO Box 8082, Shawnee Mission, KS 66208) meets the challenge in these three filmstrips: VD: Twentieth Century Plague is a factual survey of this problem. Good photographs and drawings increase the value of the narrative. The information is accurate, although it does not mention that venereal disease is becoming highly resistant to drug treatment. When Two Divide is a sensitive, realistic picture of divorce and the guilt it may create in innocent children. This filmstrip can help children understand why parents separate. More importantly, it tells how children can feel good about themselves despite their parents’ feelings. Death: A Natural Part of Living is an up-to-date study including Kübler-Ross’s groundbreaking studies, the modern hospice movement, and the Living Will or “right-to-die” movement. But the film lacks theological understanding. Perhaps death is not “natural,” or if it is, what does it say about the meaning of life?—DALE SANDERS, pastor, United Presbyterian churches, Orleans and Stamford, Nebraska.

Behind The Old Testament Canon

Prophecy and Canon, by Joseph Blenkinsopp (Notre Dame, 1977, 209 pp., $12.95), is reviewed by David E. Aune, professor of religion, Saint Xavier College, Chicago, Illinois.

Canon criticism” is a relatively recent trend in biblical scholarship that examines the way the biblical canon determined the framework for the development and interaction of Israelite, Jewish, and early Christian traditions. One of the first contributions to this renewed emphasis on the significance of the biblical canon was Brevard Childs’s Biblical Theology in Crisis (Westminster, 1970), in which the author insisted that the canon is the most important context for a truly biblical theology. Childs demonstrated how the biblical interpreter could deal creatively with successive developments of various biblical traditions through the Old Testament to the New Testament. In Prophecy and Canon, Joseph Blenkinsopp, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, makes an important and distinctive contribution to this emerging area of biblical studies.

As an Old Testament scholar, Blenkinsopp is leery of reducing canon criticism to the problem of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Instead, he chooses to limit his discussion to the boundaries of the Jewish canon of Scripture, which reached final form by the first century A.D. This limitation has many advantages, including the promotion of serious contemporary dialogue between Jews and Christians.

The central thesis of Blenkinsopp’s book is that the infra-canonical tension between normative order (Torah) and the independent and self-authenticating claims of free prophecy is a constitutive element in the origins of Judaism. Dependent on Julius Wellhausen’s critical judgment that the traditional order of law, then prophets, should be reversed, Blenkinsopp contends that one of the more important impulses toward canonization was the claim of free prophecy to promulgate an inspired reinterpretation of Israelite tradition. The formation of the Torah canon in the last days of the monarchy, and its expansion toward the end of the Persian period, is viewed as a response to the threatening claims of free prophecy. Blenkinsopp views the third division of the Hebrew canon, the Writings, as a cross-section of the various ways in which prophecy was absorbed, scribalized, and clericalized in the post-exilic period. The Old Testament canon, then, is a witness to the diversity and complex internal developments of the faith and life of Israel.

Blenkinsopp has succeeded, within the framework of Old Testament critical scholarship, in describing a creative and innovative approach to understanding the theological developments underlying the formation of the Jewish canon. Blenkinsopp makes one rather serious factual error. He traces the “myth” of the final Jewish canonization of the Scriptures at Jamnia, ca. A.D. 90, to the Christian scholar H.E. Ryle in 1892. Although Blenkinsopp is quite right to reject the notion that a Jewish council at Jamnia canonized all or part of the Hebrew Scriptures circa A.D. 90, the first scholar in modern times to formulate that hypothesis was the great Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in a monumental thirteen-volume work published 1853–1876. Even earlier, the great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza proposed the basic idea without referring to Jamnia explicitly.

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