RBL 07/2023

RBL 07/2023 Charles B. Puskas Hardness of Heart in Biblical Literature: Failure and Refusal Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2022. Pp. xvi + 116. Paper. $20.00. ISBN 9781666736502. John Goldingay Fuller Theological Seminary In his reflections on the idea of hearts being hardened, Charles Puskas includes a striking quotation from the Alcoholics Anonymous handbook: Rarely have we seen a person fall who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. The “cannot or will not” is so poignant. It is such a mystery that we make such stupid decisions— decisions that are morally stupid or are against our own better interests, in a way that other people can often identify. Sometimes we know they were thoroughly and simply our decisions. Sometimes it is as if “something made me do it.” And the mystery extends to many of the sensible and good things we do. What makes us do them? In this slim volume that goes back to work he did for comps in his PhD program, Charles Puskas considers this question by asking about the way the scriptures use expressions such as “hardness This review was published by RBL ã2023 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. of heart.” He lists the Hebrew expressions that are translated in this way and adds to them the terms for rebellion and stubbornness and the idea of having an uncircumcised heart. He notes that hardening is not confined to hearts: it also affects ears, eyes, face, forehead, neck, shoulder, and back. I did miss any analysis of the meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words that are translated “heart,” which, for instance, cover reason and courage at least as much as feelings and thus contrast with the English word. I suspect this fact is significant for English speakers in understanding hardness of heart. In other words, hardness of leb and hardness of kardia are different from hardness of heart. Puskas first works through the use of the expressions in the Hebrew Bible in connection with non-Israelites, on the basis of a JEDP reading of the Pentateuch, with references to a wide range of scholars. He then considers the exodus narrative, and in that connection I smiled at his reference to Franz Hesse’s suggestion that it was “out of the joy of storytelling that the hardening of Pharaoh was added to the plagues.” I appreciated even more Juvenal’s observation that “the wrath of the gods may be great, but it is certainly slow” (10). Puskas moves on next to consider those expressions as applied to Israel. He focuses on Isa 6, the one specific passage to which he gives a section to itself. Near the beginning of the book, he had described hardness of heart as a dominant explanation for what Led Zeppelin sang about as “Communication Breakdown.” It is a common interpretation of Isa 6:9–10, understood as Isaiah’s after-the-fact understanding of the effect of his words. But Puskas notes that the text of Isaiah presents the hardening declaration as more like a performative statement. It is a judgment. When the passage is quoted in Acts 28, however, it is closer to being an after-the-fact interpretation, and likewise in Matt 13 and maybe in Mark 4. In in my estimate, in itself Isa 6 likely shares the nature of most prophetic declarations that announce calamity to come on people: they can be performative, but they are also designed to provoke people to turn to God and thus to be self-falsifying. Puskas picks up the way Craig Evans’s dissertation “To See and Not Perceive,” on the use of this chapter in early Jewish and Christian interpretation, speaks of how the “severe word” in Isa 6 is “tempered” by the closing footnote about the “seed” and how Isaiah may be picking up proverbial sayings, to judge from similarities with Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and the Qur’an. As well as Isaiah, Puskas considers 1 Kgs 22, Jeremiah, Second and Third Isaiah, Ezekiel, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History, other prophets, and the Writings (Proverbs, Psalms, Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah). After briefly considering Qumran and 2 Esdras, he goes through a parallel sequence of study for the New Testament: the Greek words and the theme as applied to gentiles, to Israel, and to people who believe in Jesus. Here, too, he notes that the text makes allowance for both the “cannot” and the “will not” of people’s responding to Jesus. The hardness imagery, then, functions to provide a sort-of answer to the question of why we make the stupid decisions that we do. Yet it does not somehow make us not responsible for our decisions. This review was published by RBL ã2023 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home. Do not harden your hearts, Hebrews says, and the New Testament includes many warnings to believers to stay faithful—with the implication that they can if they choose to. They are not hardened against their will. This fits with the title of Puskas’s book, which suggests that Puskas is especially interested in the way we harden our hearts as opposed to the idea of God hardening our hearts. There are some further aspects of the scriptural text that he thereby reminded me of. One is that Exodus’s treatment of the hardening of heart makes fruitful use of the qal, the piel, and the hiphil of these verbs and also of the adjectives meaning “hard.” Hearts can be hard, or they can become hard. People can harden their own hearts, or God can harden them. So Exodus provides a brilliant example of the way narrative theology can work, as it interweaves all those uses of the words and illustrates how they all offer insight on the dynamics of hardness of heart. Further, in Exodus, God does not harden hearts until people have hardened their own hearts—yet he declares the intention to harden hearts before Exodus says their hearts actually are hard. So it sets alongside each other God’s lordship and human freedom without pretending to resolve the tension between them. A substantial appendix to that main paper on hardness of heart discusses the relationship of the church and Jesus in light of Robert Jenson’s discussion of this question in his Systematic Theology. Puskas takes up three matters from Jenson. The first is whether Christians should utter the name of Yahweh, given that most Jews would not. My own comment would be that many Jews indeed would not utter the name (though others will), but as far as I have been able to tell, they are not necessarily offended by gentiles doing so. While refraining from uttering the name is part of their religious discipline, it is like wearing a yarmulke in being a discipline that God expects of them but not of gentiles. The second is that fidelity to the gospel requires rejection of supersessionism, “the idea that the church succeeds Israel in such a fashion as to displace from the status of God’s people those Jews who do not enter the church.” The tricky question, then, is how one foregoes supersessionism in a way that maintains fidelity to the gospel. The third concerns “God’s unbroken faithfulness to God’s covenant with Israel,” which takes Jenson and Puskas into Rom 11. Puskas here rightly, in my view, disputes the idea that Paul’s final declaration that “all Israel will be saved” refers to the church as Israel. It surely refers to the nation of Israel, as it does through the rest of the chapter. I enjoyed Puskas’s expression of surprise that Jenson, “a Trinitarian theologian of Norwegian descent, raised on Luther’s catechism, and educated at Germany’s renowned Heidelberg University, would be so forthright about Israel and her descendants ‘after the flesh’ (historic Israel)” (63), so forthright in his positive comments about Israel. This review was published by RBL ã2023 by the Society of Biblical Literature. See https://www.sblcentral.org/home.