LF subscribers will recall the recent piece by Robert Jenson, “The Trinity in Ezekiel” (Winter 2010), a foretaste of the feast laid out in much greater length in his full volume on said prophet. Jenson is not only a contributor but also a series editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible, the foundational conviction of which is that “dogma clarifies rather than obscures.” This is a timely and worthy correction to a tendency, sometimes more outrageous and sometimes more subtle, to isolate the Bible and the discipline of biblical studies from the church of disciples following Jesus Christ as well as from the whole unfolding history of that church discerning just what it means to follow Jesus. But correctives can over-correct, and my dabblings in other volumes of the Brazos series indicate that this danger remains ever-present. Some seem to lose all interest in the text itself in the eagerness to defend dogma or proffer interpretation; some seem to be mere exercises in cross-referencing and proof-texting.

But not so with Jenson. If he adheres to pre-modern dogmatic convictions, it is not because he ideologically prefers the un-critical or the pre-critical; it’s because he well perceives how critically astute premodern dogma was. At the same time, he doesn’t shy away from ongoing dogmatic development—indeed, it would be arbitrary to arrest the unfolding discernment of the Spirit in the church at any point in the past, whether at the conclusion of the ecumenical councils, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment. Jenson relies on studies conducted with all the tools of the historical-critical method, acknowledges his reliance on them, and if he disagrees it is chiefly for one of two reasons: either the historical critic overestimated her ability to untangle a textual history, or the historical critic entangled herself in a set of philosophical commitments alien to the Christian faith itself. While he’s at it, Jenson freely points out premodern exegetes’ entanglement in alien philosophical commitments, too; this is not a snare to moderns and postmoderns alone.

The point here, though, is not the uses and abuses of dogma or historical method, but the word of the Lord as communicated to the prophet Ezekiel. With very little air time in the lectionary, and a rabbinic warning that this book “most pollutes the hands” of readers (so tonic is its depiction of the Lord), most Christians know little of it aside from the vision and famous song about dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. If ever there was a book of the Old Testament that benefited from reading a commentary alongside, this is it. The first 24 chapters are a series of devastating oracles against Jerusalem, from the time of exile through its destruction at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, with repeated assurances from the Lord that He Himself is the one Who has led Israel’s enemies to triumph. The next eight chapters are words of condemnations against other nations, whose meaning (not to mention relevance) is often obscure. The book concludes more upliftingly with promises of redemption as exuberant as the previous words of condemnation, but the line between history and eschatology is constantly blurred and the concluding chapters’ vision of the eschatological Jerusalem and its temple will mystify the most earnest reader. Add to that the patchy redactorial work throughout the book, interpolating according to a code that has defeated even the most determined critic, and it altogether seems wiser to flip over to the more accessible Isaiah or Genesis.

Jenson’s book is a good companion in the venture of reading Ezekiel anyway. The commentary is broken down into the logical units of the text itself, never too unwieldly in length and sometimes quite short if the logic of the passage dictates it (one section covers only three verses). Several oft-repeated passages are treated up front: “The word of the Lord came to me,” “Thus says the Lord,” “The hand of the Lord was upon me,” “son of a man,” “the Lord/Lord God,” “Then you/they shall know that…” so repeated explanation of them can be avoided. In similar fashion, points already covered earlier in the commentary are indicated by an arrow next to the relevant citation. The overall effect is to let the book of Ezekiel speak for itself, on its own terms and with its own occasionally baffling logic. Jenson allows for multiple hands at work in the final text, but since it is after all the canonical text—which means on some level that it is the text the Spirit intended us to read—he doesn’t trouble himself overmuch about separating out the different strains. They all have something to say; he does his best to illuminate what all these pieces have to say; and he graciously admits defeat when stumped.

Not that this happens often. And Jenson is conscious of his task as interpreter in a particular time and place, in a crumbling Christendom with various theological and philosophical ideas in and out of the church disposing readers to read the Scripture in certain ways, not all of them right and good. Most unapologetically, Jenson is a Christian reader of an Old Testament book. He has made extensive use of Jewish interpretive sources (Moshe Greenberg’s commentary, the rabbinic commentator Rashi, the Targum translation with its frequent corrections of the scandalous original) but doesn’t hesitate to argue that a passage is best understood in the light of the trinitarian doctrine or fulfilled with the coming of Jesus the Messiah. Occasionally we are treated to suggestions as how this or that passage in Ezekiel might address contested Christian doctrinal issues: the Lutheran-Reformed dispute on the location of the risen Christ, for instance, or the law-gospel debate. Especially toward the end, in the chapters devoted to the eschatological temple, Jenson strives to make intelligible matters of ritual purity and practice; while not exactly unconvincing, these particularly cried out for more extensive treatment in the light of the New Testament’s revision of kosher observance. Most consistently, and not surprisingly given the emphases of Jenson’s oeuvre over his lifetime, he works to exegete a theology of history and the Lord’s involvement in that created history under Ezekiel’s guidance—and given the Lord’s adamant commitment to destruction among his own people, this is a daring task to undertake. Altogether Jenson’s commentary will not infrequently cause discomfort; but I suspect that a comfortable reading of Ezekiel would almost certainly be a faithless one.