Asking Good Questions: An Interview with Ellen Davis

Ellen Davis is a professor at Duke Divinity School where she is beloved for her insightful, challenging preaching and for her gracious manner of sharing her deep knowledge and love of Scripture with students.

Kaya Prasad is a student at Duke Divinity School pursuing a Master of Theological Studies. Here are a few highlights from her conversation with Dr. Davis, touching on teaching and preaching, what Jewish thinkers can teach Christians about reading the Bible, and the possibility of engaging theologically with the arts.

Ellen Davis: When I was eighteen I went to Jerusalem for my junior year of university at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I studied Hebrew intensively that year and loved it. But I didn't really intend to be entering biblical studies or using Hebrew professionally for something like a dozen years, and in the meantime I did a lot of different things. One of the things I did was work in religious communications, and out of that I decided I wanted to go to seminary. In my third year of seminary I realized that I was called to teach, which came as complete surprise to me, but once I knew that I was called to teach, then it was obvious to me what I would teach, because I had always enjoyed Bible, and Hebrew had been important to me for a long time.

ED: I've never felt the slightest calling to ordained ministry. I investigated it in a sense, of course, because I was in denominational seminary — my own denomination; I'm an Episcopalian. In order to be open to [ordination] as a possibility I did do a Master of Divinity rather than a two-year MTS kind of degree. I'm glad I did that, because while there's never been a change in my sense that I am not called to ordained ministry, the opportunity and even the requirement to preach turned out to be very useful, because I do have a calling to preach.

ED: It became evident to me the summer after my first year at seminary. I was doing Clinical Pastoral Education in a parish setting, and part of what I needed to do was preach. It was the last thing I was interested in doing. I had not at that point taken a homiletics class. I did not like public speaking, but as soon as I got into the pulpit I knew that it didn't matter whether I liked it or not. That was part of what I was supposed to be doing. That was pretty strongly affirmed by the people who heard me preach.

In my teaching I regularly assign certain sermons to my students to read, and I've found that that generally opens up a fruitful theological conversation. Preaching continues to be one of the places that I develop my theology, and I continue to think that preaching is, for me, the most intimate way of doing theology, because you're preparing it with an audience in mind, and you're going to be delivering it--except in these times — you're going to be delivering it to people you can actually see, and you can gauge the body language, their faces, you speak to them afterwards. It has more immediacy than writing something that people are going to be reading.

ED: Well, I would say that, first of all, I never considered teaching in an environment other than a seminary or a divinity school. While my undergraduate degree, as I've told you, was at the University of California in Berkeley and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, two secular places, I never considered teaching at a liberal arts college or a university such as the one that I attended. I knew that I wanted what I consider to be the freedom to speak confessionally; I can speak as a Christian. I don't always assume that my students are Christians, while most of them in the Divinity School are. This year for instance, this past year and again this coming year, I'll be teaching a class that has undergraduates in it. Well, of course I don't assume that they are Christians, but I have the freedom at least to acknowledge that I am and to show how that shapes a particular way of looking at a text. I try very much to indicate that it's not the only way to look at a text and to give other people freedom to read in different ways, but I like being able to bring in the explicitly confessional element and to show how people with religious commitment have read this text, because that's what interests me most, and because the text was written by people who had a religious commitment — which was somewhat different from mine, but certainly in the same family.

Because teaching and preaching are for me closely related activities, I love teaching in a place where I also get opportunities to preach, and I love preaching in a place where I also get to teach. At the Divinity School, I do consider that I have — in a secondary sense I consider that I have some pastoral responsibility to my students, and I like that.

ED: I would say that the question that underlies everything — including even my first book, which was my dissertation on Ezekiel — the question is, "So what?" If we read the text this way, who cares? What difference does it make? My questions are questions of practical theology, and I think that biblical theology, when it's well done, is a practical discipline, so I'm seeking to interpret texts in ways that are useful to communities of faith. Most of my books, not all, but many of them I hope will be useful to Jews as well as to Christians.

ED: When I was eighteen, as I said, I spent a year in Jerusalem. Almost all my friends were Jewish, and this was the late sixties, so it was only a little over twenty years after the end of the war. Probably all of my friends' parents had numbers on their arms; they were all survivors, and for most of my Israeli friends, I was the first Christian they had known. In some cases, I would be the first Christian who had been in their home, been in their world since Auschwitz. Some of them went to Auschwitz because Christians betrayed them. So because of the fact that they took me into their lives, and some of those people are amongst my closest friends, I've always been aware of the other community with whom we share these texts.

I didn't really begin studying the Bible until I was a late teenager, and my first teachers were Jews, and I was reading with other Jews, so that has shaped me, and it's an enormous privilege. This morning, a friend of mine who's a rabbi wrote to me and said, "What do you think's going on in this text in Exodus? Why do you think it's this way?" So we had an exchange about that, and he sent me a rabbinic response concerning that. It honors me. I have another friend who's a rabbi who's dying right now, and a third friend who's a rabbi wrote and said, "I think he'd like to study with you." That that's something that he wishes to do at this time in his life, that's an enormous privilege, so that's why I always write with that community in mind, and I am fortunate that a fair number of learned Jews find my writing useful to them. As you know, that's not been the way it's been between Christians and Jews through the centuries. That we can do some of that now, I consider that an enormous privilege after sixteen centuries of Christians persecuting Jews, that some are still interested in how we think.

ED: Certainly in my writing I refer to Jewish interpretations of scripture with some regularity, so if you have ears to hear, you get it. My Jewish friends fairly often comment that when they read me, I sound like a Christian, but it still makes sense to them. 

Both in my classroom and in my writing, I assume that most of my Christian students have virtually no awareness of how Jews think religiously. Therefore, I try to help them discover that it's interesting how Jews think religiously, it makes sense, and it's fun to learn about. And I consider, again, that that opens a door that has been shut and nailed pretty tight for about sixteen centuries or more. It's the little bit I can do, so I feel very strongly about trying to do it, I hope in an inviting way rather than a scolding way.

I also assume that insofar as my Christian students think anything at all about how Jews might think theologically--to use a word that Christians use much more liberally than Jews — much of what they think is wrong. They think that Judaism is very wooden, very uncompromising, death-dealing, and it's just awful to be a Jew, and the more religious you are the more awful it is, and I just think that's wrong [laughs].

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ED: One of my doctoral students commented, after having been my teaching assistant for the Old Testament Interpretation class, that he thought the amount that I use art, just to show somebody's visual interpretation of something even if I don't do a lot with it, was one of the most effective ways to open people up to the notion that there is more than one way to read a text. I've found that many of my students are not particularly adept at reading complex texts. Not necessarily their background. But you are a very visual generation, so if I throw an image up and say to you all, "What do you see?" the room will not be silent. If I put a poem up, or a complicated text and say, "Talk to me about this," then people are gonna be much shy-er to do that. So in some ways it's pedagogical reasons that have made art so important for me, and I just enjoy it. It's beautiful, it's interesting, and sometimes it says very hard things — if you're looking at an image of the Levite’s concubine dismembered, it says a hard thing but you don't necessarily have to use a lot of words. You just show it and let it speak for itself.

I see the arts as building bridges between different ways of looking, thinking. They can create shared sympathies, perhaps, and a sense of wonder and delight. A theological argument does not always create wonder and delight.

ED: Almost all of my books are written for such an audience. What I'm assuming is that people have patience with the Bible, that they're willing to move slowly, they're willing to entertain a lot of detail, but I do not assume that they know Hebrew. I do not assume that they know what the Documentary Hypothesis is. I don't assume they're Christians.

In terms of advice, then, I would say, find a good teacher, whether that's a person you see or whether that's somebody you read, and read slowly, and learn how to ask good questions. The questions are more important than the answers, and frankly a lot of bad theology is done by people asking bad questions, fruitless questions. I try in my writing and my teaching to help people learn to ask good questions. I try to offer some plausible answers, but if you don't buy them, that's okay.

ED: “Why this word?” That's a little tricky if you're reading in translation, but, “Why did the biblical writer put it this way?”

“What does the biblical writer want to tell me?” — which is not always the first question that's in my mind — but, “Where do they want my attention to be? What are the things that they don't bother to tell me that I might really wish they did?” It's important to notice what a text doesn't say as well as what it does [laughs], because some of the things we argue about are things that the Bible doesn't say.

Another good question is, “Within the covers of the Bible itself, what different ways are there for looking at this?” It's not very helpful to say, "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that's that on that," because in most cases there's more than one way to think about it. “What might I gain from noticing that variety?” You can notice it as early as the second chapter of Genesis when you notice it's rather different from the first chapter of Genesis [laughs]. "Why didn't they choose one and not the other, or iron out the differences? Do I get something more from that complexity?” Good questions are questions that tease out complexity and take the complexity of the text seriously instead of trying to get to some neat bottom line and move on.

ED: Thank you, I enjoyed it.

This interview transcript was edited for length and clarity. If you’d like to read more of what Dr. Davis has to say about the art of preaching, her career at Duke, and her collaborative work with artists, you can read the full interview.