John Reumann

Serving Two Masters: Teaching and Writing Between Academy and Church

John Reumann

No. 9 · Summer 2000

Reumann reflects on more than fifty years navigating between academy and church—the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (whose Doktorvater Morton Enslin was unceremoniously dumped at Toronto by “young Turks” Robert Funk and others, while Harry Orlinsky saved the day at the centennial), the 1978–1987 New American Bible Revised New Testament committee with its bishops, the U.S. Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue volume on “Righteousness,” and the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification—and uses his Anchor Bible and Augsburg commentaries on Philippians, Colossians, and Romans to illustrate Krister Stendahl’s judgment that one can no longer master all the literature: epistolary research, rhetorical and discourse analysis, social-world readings, feminist scholarship on Euodia and Syntyche, the koinonia and friendship debates (Sampley, Fitzgerald, Witherington), and the house-church recovery of Filson. The academy is antepenultimate, the church penultimate, God ultimate—professors as “believers, testifiers, witnesses” serving pro bono, pro ecclesia, and pro Deo.