Ellen F. Davis Quotes & Sayings

...consider how [the Proverbs] define success: the establishment of righteousness, justice and equity. (pg. 95) — Ellen F. Davis

The great question that God's speech out of the whirlwind poses for Job and every other person of integrity is this: Can you love what you do not control? — Ellen F. Davis

The very idea of wisdom, as the Bible understands it, challenges the mind-set of our society and the view of knowledge that all of us have to some extent internalized. (pg. 94) — Ellen F. Davis

The resurrection produces a "conversion of the imagination" that causes us to understand everything else differently. — Ellen F. Davis

Agrarians are committed to preserving both communities and the material means of life, to cultivating practices that ensure that the essential means of life suffice for all members of the present generation and are not diminished for those who come after. Agrarianism in this sense is, and has nearly always been, a marginal culture existing at the edge or under the domination of a larger culture whose ideology, social system, and economy are fundamentally different. So agrarian writers, both ancient and modern, always speak with a vivid awareness of the threat posed by the culture of the powerful. — Ellen F. Davis

Worship is a vigorous act of reordering our desires in the light of God's burning desire for the wellness of all creation. (pg. 152) — Ellen F. Davis

Careful practical work is the best expression of our freedom and safeguard of our sanity. In a healthy society, such work is the means most consistently available for people to practice holiness of life, to imitate God's enabling and sustaining care for the world. — Ellen F. Davis

the impression that many seminarians seem to take from their introductory Bible course, that a given text is a puzzle with only one solution - an impression that often makes biblical study oppressive rather than exhilarating. — Ellen F. Davis

If God has a best friend (and why not?), then surely it is Moses. (pg. 46) — Ellen F. Davis

The Garden of Eden was the place where the first human creatures might have acquired wisdom: Eden was the place for total intimacy with God, and that is the sole condition fur becoming wise. Day by day they might have grown in wisdom and stature, taking those strolls with God in 'the breezy time of day (Genesis 3:8). But they could not wait to get smart, so they chose the quick and dirty method... (pg. 149) — Ellen F. Davis

Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ. — Ellen F. Davis

Yet accurate speech about anything, and especially about God, is in fact a rhythm of silence and speech, speaking and listening. — Ellen F. Davis

...Job rails against God, not as a skeptic, not as a stranger to God's justice, but precisely as a believer. It is the very depth of Job's commitment to God's ethical vision that makes his rage so fierce, and that will finally compel an answer from God. (pg. 133) — Ellen F. Davis

From a biblical perspective, salvation is a subcategory of revelation - or better, salvation is a consequence of revelation fully received. — Ellen F. Davis

It is appropriate to speak of the artisans as possessed of wisdom (and not just "skill"), because the biblical writers share the understanding common to most traditional societies that the active form of wisdom is good work. Wisdom does not consist only in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise. — Ellen F. Davis

For us the true measure of our wisdom will never be the grade point average we covet, a degree or rank, the right job, the book accepted by a prestigious press. No, we will be wise when we desire with heart, soul, mind, and strength only the things that God also desires for us--and nothing else compels us, or ever catches our wandering eye. (pg. 151) — Ellen F. Davis

Whenever we pick up the Bible, read it, put it down, and say, "That's just what I thought," we are probably in trouble. — Ellen F. Davis

it cannot be the purpose of Scripture to provide us with certified information about some entity outside its story about us, whether that third entity be God or certain classical religious experiences or the theological history of Israel and the primal church or whatever. Since we and Scripture and what Scripture talks about are not external to one another, since Scripture tells a story about God and us that we are even now living, there is no position from which such exchanges could be conducted - perhaps not even God has such an Archimedean point. This observation kills two historically instantiated errors with one stone. — Ellen F. Davis

Scripture is not merely a record of divine-human history but a proclaiming of it, not merely an account of God's life with us to date but a voice in that life. When we read Scripture in the church, someone addresses us. And by the unanimous tradition of the church, this voice is the Word of God, the Logos, the second identity of the Trinity. — Ellen F. Davis

The fourth-century Greek theologian St. John Chrysostom said that Job's greatest trial was that his wife was not taken. (pg. 125) — Ellen F. Davis

Bonhoeffer's permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiah's and Huldah's Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian. — Ellen F. Davis

God accommodates [Moses'] complaints and makes in-course corrections. God does not take a human being so fully into the divine confidence--you might say, God does not depend on a human being so fully--until Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit. (pg. 16) — Ellen F. Davis

The danger of Christians reading the Bible confessionally is that we run the risk of reading alone. — Ellen F. Davis

That the Old Testament represents God chiefly as angry Judge and vicious Warrior is a false stereotype. While these images are not absent, they are more than balanced by striking portrayals of God as Lover or Husband, infatuated with Israel beyond all reason or deserving. God is not too proud to grieve terribly over Israel's unfaithfulness, nor to be giddy over her return home. ... [This covenant's] primary quality is love at the highest pitch of intensity. (pg. 77) — Ellen F. Davis

What gives a liturgy its plot? A liturgy is always a sort of drama, that is, an intentional sequence of events, however simple or simply done, that has a plot. — Ellen F. Davis

Contrition means finding the courage to let your heart break over sin. Willfully letting your heart break and then offering the pieces to God is a radically counter cultural idea in our society (pg. 168) — Ellen F. Davis

Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged. — Ellen F. Davis

But 'true wisdom is such that no evil use can ever be made of it.' That is worth our pondering because we, more than any previous generation, are witnessing the evil effects of perverted knowledge, knowledge not essentially connected to goodness. ... No other generation has been so successful at using its technological knowledge in order to manipulate the world and satisfy its own appetites. (pg. 96) — Ellen F. Davis

What justifies specifically churchly exegesis of Scripture? Can church doctrine guide our reading? Why should it? Why should we interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac by the passion of Jesus? The answer is bluntly simple: What justifies churchly reading of Scripture is that there is no other way to read it, since "it" dissolves under other regimes. Thus a hermeneutical exhortation from this first perspective. Be entirely blatant and unabashed in reading Scripture for the church's purposes and within the context of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, guide your reading by church doctrine. For if, say, the doctrine of Trinity and Matthew's construal of the passion do not fit each other, then the church lost its diachronic self in the early fourth century at the latest, and the whole enterprise of Bible reading is moot. The question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other? — Ellen F. Davis

bad biblical interpretation proceeds not just from ignorance but from sin.36 Therefore, part of the hermeneutical challenge to contemporary Christians is to repent of our millennia-long hardness of heart. — Ellen F. Davis

Scriptural interpretation is properly an ecclesial activity whose goal is to participate in the reality of which the text speaks by bending the knee to worship the God revealed in Jesus Christ. Through Scripture the church receives the good news of the inbreaking kingdom of God and, in turn, proclaims the message of reconciliation. Scripture is like a musical score that must be played or sung in order to be understood; therefore, the church interprets Scripture by forming communities of prayer, service, and faithful witness. — Ellen F. Davis

But is it not absurd to think of the Word as in any sense incarnate before the flesh existed, before Jesus was born? So that it could be the incarnate Word who spoke to Moses on the mountain or who cried out to his Father in many psalms? Or is it not absurd to think of the writing and collecting and reading and interpreting of the New Testament as this same Word's actual speech to us, who, as the angel said, is not here but risen? — Ellen F. Davis

Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole. — Ellen F. Davis

And there we recognize that our frailty is not meant to cause us anxiety and sorrow. Rather, God means it to be a source of confidence, and even, as it was for Etty [the Dutch Jew previously mentioned that died in Auschwitz], a source of joy. For it is exactly that frailty--the strict limits to our powers, their inevitable failure, the certainty of death--that creates the need and the desire to see God's power at work... (pg. 167) — Ellen F. Davis

The problem was acutely described in 1909 in a penetrating essay by Adolf Schlatter: According to the sceptical position, it is true that the historian explains; he observes the New Testament neutrally. But in reality this is to begin at once with a determined struggle against it. The word with which the New Testament confronts us intends to be believed, and so rules out once and for all any sort of neutral treatment. As soon as the historian sets aside or brackets the question of faith, he is making his concern with the New Testament and his presentation of it into a radical and total polemic against it.... If he claims to be an observer, concerned solely with his object, then he is concealing what is really happening. As a matter of fact, he is always in possession of certain convictions, and these determine him not simply in the sense that his judgments derive from them, but also in that his perception and observation is molded by them.352 — Ellen F. Davis

The sufferer who keeps looking for God has, in the end, privileged knowledge. ... She passes through a door that only pain will open, and is thus qualified to speak of God in a way that others, whom we generally call more fortunate, cannot speak. (pg. 122) — Ellen F. Davis

Holiness is the character of a community observing a comprehensive pattern of life that is healthful... the Priestly vision of holiness emphatically includes the land, the covenanted community of creatures who prosper along with a people living in accordance with the design of the creation -- or, alternatively, who suffer when the intended pattern is violated. — Ellen F. Davis

If for some reason academics outside the church choose to study any or all of the pieces into which Scripture falls in their hands, they are of course at liberty to do so. They are even at liberty to take the whole canon, as this odd collection the Christians once put together, and investigate why the church might have done that, what arbitrary sense she might have been imposing on the collected bits. And the church may happily receive any and all insights such investigations stumble across or information they make available. But such activity is not and cannot be exegesis of texts from the volume we call the Bible. — Ellen F. Davis

For outside the church, no such entity as the Christian Bible has any reason to exist. It is not merely that exegesis of the Bible is likely to be mistaken in one way or another when done outside the church; interpretation of the Bible outside the church must be arbitrary, uncontrollable, and finally moot. — Ellen F. Davis

Blessing is essentially the transformative experience of knowing and honoring God as the Giver; it means valuing the steady flow that sustains the world even above the gift of life that each of us receives and is in time constrained to relinquish. — Ellen F. Davis

The land's fruitfulness is the "natural" consequence of covenant faithfulness enacted on both sides, Israel's and God's. A productive land is a gift something like a child to a healthy marriage; in each case, thriving results from and witnesses to long-sustained faithfulness between two partners. — Ellen F. Davis

The Song [of Solomon] captures the ecstatic aspect of love that is the main subject of the whole Bible. (pg. 67) — Ellen F. Davis

...our role as comforters is not to solve the problem of pain; even less is it to stick up for God. Trying to vindicate God to a person in agonizing pain is like explaining to a crying infant that Mommy is really a well-intentioned person. ... While [Job's friends] remain mired in their convictions, Job is moving. (pg. 130) — Ellen F. Davis

Sloth may disguise itself as "conscientious work" and meet with various forms of public approval or success. But work that is not motivated by love for the life of the community, beyond the temporal and spatial confines of one's own small life, cannot free either worker or community from profound anxiety. — Ellen F. Davis

Proclaiming resurrection turns the world upside down (cf. Acts 17:1-9) and holds out to the poor and lowly the hope of being vindicated while posing a worrisome prospect to those who have already received their consolation in the present life (cf. Luke 6:24).322 — Ellen F. Davis