A Teacher Like Elijah

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In my first teaching position, at Colgate University, I arranged for my own teacher, Dr. James Muilenburg, then at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, to give a lecture at Colgate.^a At the family dinner table before his visit, my youngest daughter asked, “Who is Dr. Muilenburg?” “Oh you know, Joan,” answered my oldest daughter, Carol. “He’s Daddy’s God!”

Dr. Muilenburg is held in comparable high esteem by his distinguished students from Union Theological Seminary, including Walter Harrelson, Phyllis Trible, Norman Gottwald and Walter Brueggemann. It was at Union that Dr. Muilenburg’s career reached its climax. There was, however, another exciting chapter before that—at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in Berkeley, California.

Dr. Muilenburg (esteem restrains me from speaking of him familiarly as “Jim”) began his career as a theological school teacher in 1936 at PSR, as the successor to the archaeologist William Frederic Badè, after whom the Badè Institute is named.^b There I came under the spell of Dr. Muilenburg’s powerful teaching, took all the courses he offered and finally, at his urging, went to graduate school at Yale. Perhaps I was his first theological student to go into graduate studies.

Those years at PSR prepared Dr. Muilenburg for his later professional fulfillment at Union, but they had their own glory. I vividly remember several things about Dr. Muilenburg, one of the leading biblical interpreters of the 20th century:

First, I was impressed with the rigor of his scholarship. Having studied in Germany, he admired German scholars, above all Hermann Gunkel, who, in commentaries on Genesis and the Psalms, established “form criticism” as a method for understanding Scripture in the context of the religious literature of the ancient Near East.

Second, I remember his lively sense of history—not only the history of ancient Israel but also of the nations that vied for control of Palestine: the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, Syrians, Assyrians and the rest. He insisted that we know about the pharaohs of the XVIIIth and XIXth dynasties and the historical problems associated with Israel’s Exodus from Egypt. As a successor to the archaeologist Badè, he became involved in the archaeology of ancient Gilgal—the city where the Israelites first encamped after crossing the Jordan (Joshua 3–4) and which later became an important religious and political center (1 Samuel 11:14–15; 13:4–15). For Dr. Muilenburg, history was not an archaic museum but a dynamic reality, a human drama. In those years, when war was spreading in Europe, he and John Bennett, who also went on to Union, led us in wrestling existentially with the ethical demands and eschatological meaning of the historical hour.

Third, I remember his great literary sensitivity. In those days we were baptized into the documentary hypothesis and marked our Bibles in four colors, for J, E, D and P respectively, following the analysis of S.R. Driver’s Introduction.¹ But even then, as I learned in his seminars on Jeremiah and Second Isaiah, he was moving beyond old-style literary criticism into form-critical analysis, inspired by Gunkel, and even beyond that into “rhetorical criticism,” a kind of stylistic analysis.² His magnificent study of Second Isaiah is one of the few writings that survive the passing of the old Interpreter’s Bible.³

Fourth, I remember the dramatic power of his teaching. He was able to recreate biblical scenes so that we felt personally involved in them. Dramatizing the scene in Exodus 32, he played Moses, who had been in touch with God and was coming down the mountain with the two tablets in his hands. His face became flushed with anger when he beheld the spectacle of the Israelites performing their ecstatic orgies before the golden calf. Suddenly the drama was interrupted: A secretary appeared at the door and exclaimed, “Dr. Muilenburg—a phone call. It’s urgent.” He paused a moment (as we half expected the tablets to crash to the ground), then handed them to a student sitting in the front row, saying, “Here, you hold these!”

Fifth, and finally, I remember him as a man of faith. He began each class with prayer. Those prefatory prayers were extraordinary works of art: carefully chiseled, beautifully expressed, penetrating to the heart. They set the tone for the scholarly lecture that followed, and they betokened the spirit in which all of his academic work was undertaken. He thought, imagined and wrestled as one 047who stood with students in the community of faith.

Dr. Muilenburg did not create a school, as did William F. Albright, the distinguished American archaeologist. However, his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, “Form Criticism and Beyond,”⁴ released different impulses through his students: rhetorical criticism (Trible), sociological interpretation (Gottwald), Old Testament theology (Brueggemann). A rare teacher, he was able to hold together three dimensions that are often separated in modern Bible scholarship: the historical meaning, the literary form and the theological significance of biblical texts.

There was something Elijah-like in Dr. Muilenburg, as Phyllis Trible has observed. Now he has been translated from our ken, like Elijah, and his mantle has fallen upon us, who follow after. Left in wonder, we look up and exclaim: “The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” (2 Kings 2:12).

In my first teaching position, at Colgate University, I arranged for my own teacher, Dr. James Muilenburg, then at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, to give a lecture at Colgate.a At the family dinner table before his visit, my youngest daughter asked, “Who is Dr. Muilenburg?” “Oh you know, Joan,” answered my oldest daughter, Carol. “He’s Daddy’s God!” Dr. Muilenburg is held in comparable high esteem by his distinguished students from Union Theological Seminary, including Walter Harrelson, Phyllis Trible, Norman Gottwald and Walter Brueggemann. It was at Union that Dr. Muilenburg’s career reached its climax. There was, […]