Guest Blog by Gregory Mobley
Professor of Christian Bible, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School
I was asked to write 500 hundred words about the spirit of Andover Newton. Five hundred? I could write five thousand solely about the contagious spiritual joy that Hebrew College has brought to Institution Hill, about how over the final ten years of its Newton Centre sojourn, our two century-old Christian school was born again through the miracle of reunion with its older sibling, Judaism, from whom it had been separated for two millennia.
I could write another five thousand solely about the single most extraordinary spirit either Newton or Andover ever graduated—George Washington Williams. Wounded Union infantryman, Buffalo Soldier, the first African-American graduate of Newton (in 1874), Baptist pastor, historian who authored the first comprehensive history of African Americans, the first African-American member of the Ohio state legislature, global journalist, novelist, lawyer, the man who coined the term “crime against humanity” to describe King Leopold’s murderous and rapacious colonial rule of the Belgian Congo: though largely forgotten, Williams belongs to the ranks of that century’s giants, alongside Douglas, Whitman, Lincoln, Tubman, Cady Stanton, Red Cloud.
But they brought me here to teach Bible and it is the legacy of biblical teaching and scholarship throughout Andover Newton’s history that I feel both inadequate to bear and yet responsible for as our school moves to its fourth campus and its second Ivy League address atop Prospect Hill in New Haven.
In the 19th c. Andover Seminary was the conduit through which Continental scholarship entered North America, freeing biblical study from dogmatism and enriching it with linguistics, archaeology, history, and literary sophistication. Moses Stuart, at Andover from its beginnings, was the linguist; his lexica and grammars for Hebrew and Greek became standards in the states and also provided Andover’s missionaries with the tools they used in Bible translations in Asia and Oceania. Stuart’s protegé Edward Robinson revolutionized biblical geography though his travels in the Holy Land and identification of biblical place names with locales in the Ottoman Levant. Near the end of the century, George Foot Moore wrote the finest American Bible commentary to date, on Judges, a work that remains useful still.
Around the turn of the 20th c., Newton’s Shailer Matthews, in N.T., was the leading theorist of the Social Gospel movement. Andover’s C. C. Torrey was considered the dean of Semitic linguistics and of biblical archaeology in America. It was at Andover Newton the 1930’s that Amos Wilder (Thornton’s older brother) taught New Testament and displayed his academic and unsurpassed poetic gifts. In the 1950’s Andover Newton graduated Leander Keck and Louis Martyn, who subsequently became two of the country’s leading N.T. scholars and theological educators, at Yale and Union (N.Y.), respectively.
I take special pride in the quality of the O.T. faculty in the second half of the century: Walter Harrelson, Norman Gottwald, John van Seeters, Phyllis Trible, and William Holliday—all so different in approach and style yet united by their preeminent status. It shames me to bow before Brevity and single only one out, that being Trible for personal reasons. In my first job, I was her junior colleague at Union and she became my teacher.
Widely acknowledged as “the matriarch of feminist biblical scholarship,” no one has Phyllis’s touch with a sentence of Biblical Hebrew. She holds it delicately, first finding its precise midpoint where its Oriental balance is struck, then probes the currents and contrasts that flow across its Masoretic equator. Only then does she assay the weight of each word. She isn’t finished until she returns the sentence to its larger context, Jacob-like in her refusal to let go till she was wrested the blessing of meaning from it, Love’s lyric fully redeemed. Trible is the best close reader of the Bible I know.