Great Is Thy Faithfulness? An Interview with Heath Thomas
One character trait that I admire in a biblical scholar is his/her willingness to tackle tough subjects. They focus on aspects of biblical literature that others avoid, and then seek to draw their students and readers into new horizons of Scripture’s spiritual landscape. Dr. Heath Thomas is one such scholar. He serves as professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Recently, he was also appointed as the new Director of the PhD program.
Last year, Thomas co-edited a volume with Robin Parry on the oft-neglected book of Lamentations. The title of this intriguing book is Great Is Thy Faithfulness? Reading Lamentations As Sacred Scripture (Wipf & Stock). The Helwys Society is pleased to have Professor Thomas answer a few questions on the Forum about this recent book.
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HS: Professor Thomas, we appreciate you taking some time to share with our readers about this new book. Can you describe the intellectual journey that led you to produce this book, and also the larger context of your academic research on the book of Lamentations?
Dr. Thomas: First, let me offer a word of thanks for the invitation to talk with you. It is a real pleasure. I suppose I came to this book as a result of about 10 years of wrestling with Lamentations. It is a strange and beautiful little book, full of horrific imagery and elegant poetry. I love Hebrew poetry, and I love theology. These come together in a unique manner in the book of Lamentations. One of the remarkable realities for the Church is that, in the Protestant tradition (especially Evangelical Protestant tradition), this book remains too often neglected. My colleague, Robin Parry, and I wondered why this was so, and how it might be remedied. All Scripture is profitable for the Church, even Lamentations.
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HS: You acknowledge in the book’s introduction the general neglect of Lamentations due to its subject matter. Given an evangelical commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture, what are the implications for the church’s neglect of this text? What are pastors missing fundamentally when they avoid it due to its perceived irrelevance?
Dr. Thomas: I think the Church neglects Lamentations at its peril. One of the great gifts of this book is that it provides the Church a voice in prayer. It enables God’s people to confess sin, to voice pain, and to express frustration and confusion. All of these habits of life are necessary, indeed unavoidable, in the life of faith. I have found that Lamentations has an extraordinary power to provide a hurting or sinful congregation the means to re-engage God in prayer.
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HS: Because this is an edited volume, you are one of many contributors. The authors differ significantly, as you acknowledge in the introduction, in their backgrounds and expertise. Over the course of producing this book, what were you most surprised to learn about your co-authors in terms of their approach to Lamentations?
Dr. Thomas: Thanks for the question, and I suppose that one of the things that I found very interesting is the range that Lamentations provides its readers and interpreters. Some absolutely revile the book because of divine violence, but still they cannot put the book down. Zak Braiterman’s Post-Holocaust study of Lamentations’ reception in our volume I found to be very thoughtful, and it reflects this inability to put Lamentations away…it persistently haunts us!
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HS: One of the most unexpected features that readers may encounter is the expansive attention to the reception of Lamentations among Jews. Because it is a Hebrew text, some might be able to understand such attention. However, do you think there is general value in studying how specific texts of Scripture have been received in other nations and cultures? If so, what value does it have for Christians in the West?
Dr. Thomas: Absolutely we must read and reflect upon different receptions of the Bible. This is necessary for a number of reasons. First, it broadens our understanding of how people read a text like the Bible. Second, it helps open our eyes and unclog our interpretative ears to counter-voices that may, in fact, read the text better than we do (especially in the West). An Asian PhD student at a sister-school wrote a dissertation on corporate elements in Pauline anthropology. One of his examiners asked what he thought about scholarship in the western world, and he said that he discovered how individualistic it is. His dissertation, however, surfaces the corporate elements of the Pauline material…something western scholarship had not successfully done. As an Asian scholar, he had a distinctive perspective that enabled him to hear Scripture, I think, more fully than western scholarship had done. This is but one example. There are others to be sure.
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HS: You state the following on p. 15: “the shape of the Christian embrace [of Lamentations] will be necessarily different to the mainstream Jewish one, as it will be informed by two testaments that centre upon Jesus.” What would you say is the hermeneutical key that Jesus offers for unlocking Lamentations’ value to Christians today?
Dr. Thomas: Well, I am not sure there is “a” hermeneutical key that unlocks Lamentations. Of course the Scriptures testify to Jesus, but they do so in various ways. Lamentations opens us up to God in prayer, to the nature of suffering, and to confession of sin. My co-editor and I have actually provided two ways in which Lamentations is opened up to the Church in light of Christ. I have offered reading Lamentations as a Kingdom Text, a way to pray that God’s Kingdom in Christ would come, amidst the pain, suffering and sin of the present world. Robin offered a Christological reading of Lamentations that associated the suffering of Zion and the suffering of Jesus. Both of these approaches are faithful to Scripture, faithful to the idea of Jesus being central to the biblical testimony, and yet they basically do different things. Both, however, I would suggest are valuable to the Church and are only opened for the Church because of Jesus’ work.
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HS: Your co-editor Robin Parry writes about Lamentations in the context of Christian worship. Can you say a bit about why making sense of this topic is so difficult for evangelical worship leaders today? Do you see portions of the Psalter presented the same “problems”?
Dr. Thomas: Of course, American Christianity is full of very good stuff in terms of worship. Liturgical worship is gaining force especially in the Evangelical Anglican tradition, while free-church worship (with praise-and-worship bands) of course is popular. Much of it is very good. However, in the latter of these two streams, it is interesting that there is very little available for the church in terms of (1) corporate confession of sin, or (2) lament prayer. There may be deeper reasons for this other than stylistic. I think one of the reasons is the supposition that the New Testament teaches Christians to rejoice in suffering or to endure hardship because it is soul-building. After all, soon enough God will either take us out of the world or make all things new. To this, I would simply say that some suffering is soul building, but some of it is inscrutable. Surely God knows which is which, but often for us mere mortals, it is very difficult to discern which is which, at least until we have the benefit of hindsight (either now or in eternity!).
I also have heard it said that the reason that we don’t lament in the church is because it is impious – you cannot speak to God the way that the biblical poets (like those in Lamentations and the Psalter) do. To my mind, this is a fundamental mistake. Jesus teaches his followers to trust that God will take care of those who love him, but that means often prayers regarding justice (see, for instance, Lk. 18). Jesus himself lamented on the cross (Mk. 14). And interestingly, the martyrs under the throne lament to God, “How long, O Lord, faithful and true?” (Rev. 6). James admonishes the church to confess and wail in humility before God over sin (Jas. 4). Another reason for the neglect of these texts may be a feeling that they are “downers” in a seeker-sensitive service…who wants to sing or pray texts like these?! I suppose at that point, we must be prayerful and reflective about the nature of worship services and whom they are for. For my part, worship services are devoted to the primary audience of: God, the Church, and then those outside the Church. The Church then is to go outside the walls to actually evangelize and to be good news to the community around them.
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HS: What would be your counsel as a theologian-churchman to pastors as they attempt to take more seriously books like Jeremiah and Lamentations? What are some pit-falls they should avoid?
Dr. Thomas: The first thing I would encourage is a close and repeated reading of the books. Read them over and over and over. Get a sense of what they are about: the contents, the key words and figures, and the things you are unsure about. Pray through the books, and use their words as your words of prayer to God. God gave us the books as a gift, repeat His words back to Him! Meditate very carefully on the words of the books…slowly chew on them…allow God’s Spirit to bring out words or phrases that stand out to you. When the Lord highlights certain things from the books, you may well find yourself in a place of open rebuke or gentle encouragement. However God has challenged you, respond with a quick and grateful obedience. This process leads us into a deep spiritual formation in the Word of God by the Spirit of God.
The pitfall I would encourage us to avoid is to use the Scriptures for our own ends. That is to say, God gave the Word for transformation…not information to be mastered and used like a weapon. So my encouragement to Christians who engage God’s Word is to allow it to master them…to shape and form them. Sermons and teaching that comes out of this formation is deeply relevant and personal. More than that, it is authentic to what God is doing in the life of the pastor-teacher. This is especially true for books like Lamentations.
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HS: The Helwys Society hopes that Forum readers will avail themselves of this interesting and useful resource. They can learn more about Professor Thomas’ work online at the Paideia Centre, where he serves as a fellow, or at Cardus, where he has contributed before.
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