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1 Donald Juel’s Scriptural Imagination Matthew L. Skinner This book aspires to make the ideas of Donald H. Juel available to readers who are unfamiliar with his life’s work, as well as to readers who have known this work but may remain less than fully aware of how influential it has been to their ways of thinking about God and the Bible. Even more than that, however, this book is about God and the Bible. It aspires to help those who pick it up understand that reading and interpreting the Bible is a theological endeavor—that is, an opportunity for encountering God through the words of Scripture. Don Juel (1942–2003) spent his professional career as a professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary. He devoted most of his energy as a teacher and writer toward understanding what it means to read the New Testament as Scripture. This description might sound obvious to those who assume that most New Testament scholars do the same thing. But Juel’s work went beyond the historical, linguistic, and literary scholarship that is foundational to the academic training that all biblical scholars receive. As devoted as he was to illuminating the Bible’s past, its origins and environments, he was even more interested in the Bible’s present and future. What happens when people read the Bible? How is God present or made known in the act of reading ? What is the Bible supposed to do when a community of faith hears its promises and wrestles with its often disconcerting stories about a God who draws near to humanity only to have humanity do all it can to shield itself? Juel raised and pursued answers to questions like these, whether he was studying how ancient people wrote, studied, and referred to Scripture, Introduction 2 Shaping the Scriptural Imagination or was thinking about how a parable describing a man sowing seed or a story of an empty tomb might affect people of faith today. Weaving its way through his writings and sermons is an interest in highlighting biblical texts’ capacity to bring us face to face with God (or to show us something about God), as well as an interest in considering the character of this God. Juel emphasized to Christian audiences that reading the Bible is always a theological act. It is theological because it calls to the fore our understandings of who God is. It is also theological because it makes possible an encounter with God—an encounter that can reaffirm or totally unsettle our previously held understandings of God’s nature. The eight chapters collected in this book represent some of Don Juel’s most accessible writing; they were written for churchgoers, pastors, and seminary students. The eight sermons that follow were originally preached in chapel services on seminary campuses; therefore the sermons taught the Bible to people who were preparing for ministry, even as they proclaimed the word of God to a congregation. In all of these writings Juel was trying to articulate a particular view of God and model a particular way of engaging Scripture faithfully, intelligently, and imaginatively. Juel advocated faithful reading, in that he was interested in how the Bible nourishes faith—or, rather, how the Bible makes faith necessary by leaving its readers with more promises than proof. By reading intelligently we reject simple naiveté about the Bible and seek to be instructed by what we can know about a biblical text’s history, language, and original setting. Finally, imagination is required. Imagination amounts to neither escapism nor credulity; it is a willingness to perceive a text and reality differently. It is a creative appropriation of a biblical text, allowing ourselves to consider what consequences a curious biblical image (like the tearing of the heavens at Jesus’ baptism in Mark 1:10) might have for our understandings of God and the world. It is allowing ourselves to consider what it really means for us if God is really like what a biblical text suggests. Indeed, what if God will not remain passive in response to all of our attempts to isolate ourselves from divine influence? What if not even death itself can stop this God? Together, the eight chapters and eight sermons show Juel working in the ways he was most influential: not on the level of dry theory and abstract speculation, but in conversation with the Bible itself. While other scholars might spend most of their time discussing the idea...

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