As a graduate of Berklee College of Music and a bi-vocational pastor who makes the bulk of his living as a professional musician, I was intrigued to read Jeffrey Keuss’s exploration of popular music and how it relates to the theological loci of faith, hope and love. Keuss is a professor and Associate Dean in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. What initially strikes the reader is the author’s engaging prose, which draws the reader in with a sharp wit, perceptive insight and an unassuming intelligence. Keuss is clearly a sharp-minded theologian, yet he manages to produce a work that is indeed rich in theological insight, but also entirely accessible to the layman.

The basic premise of the book is that there is much that can be learned from the world of popular music as it pertains to our search for meaning and existence. The author argues that what many of us search for and yearn to experience through church, worship and community, others search for through popular music. Keuss writes, “our neighbor is not only listening to the music that many Christians listen to but also listening for the very things that animate the hearts and the minds of those sitting in the pews on a Sunday morning” (p5&6). Keuss describes these musical soul-searchers and songwriters as “sonic mystics”, an apt name that tips its hat to the medieval Christian mystics who sought divine encounters and communion with the living God.

Rob Wilkerson resonates with a recent article.

Robin Williams as Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society

Jeffrey Overstreet, “How I Got Dead Poets Society Wrong: And how a great professor changed my mind” ChristianityTodayOnline (September 16, 2014).

Overstreet’s article brought back memories. A lot of them, to be honest. To some degree, the feelings the movie evoked returned to me like I saw it yesterday.

First, there were the memories of how I felt as a high school graduate, the same year the movie was released. I remember identifying intensely with Keating, a mentor every kid wished was his dad. I remembered thinking how much of Neil was in me, both the joyous freedom to be me, mixed with the insanity of conformity to cultural norms and standards.

Second, there were memories of how I felt about rules and standards. Growing up on the legalistic side of Christianity, I could understand the concerns of Neil’s father and Keating’s administration. Rebellion is built into every fiber and DNA strand of every human being. This was probably true of me when I watched it. The movie was like a pinball inside my soul, thrashing around, ringing bells, sounding noises, while smacked by the paddles of my legalistic upbringing and the taste of free grace.

Third, there are memories of my parenting. I’m a father to four awesome kids. Too often I’ve parented like Neil’s father. At least, that’s what I fear. More often I’ve wanted to parent like Keating, loosening the ropes, the guides of culture (including Christian culture) from the fragile sapling of grace I saw growing inside my children. Overstreet said it best. “Looking back at authority figures who have inspired my respect, and at those who have been driven by ego and a desire to control, I’ve come to suspect that anyone who seeks to instill character in another person by force will produce an equal and opposite reaction.”

There is a root found in both men in this movie. It is fear. Plain and simple. Neil’s father was fearful that his son wouldn’t fit into his tiny little world, that his son would find a type of happiness that he had talked himself out of years earlier. He was fearful of freedom, so he couldn’t let his son enjoy it. Then there’s Keating. Overstreet believes that “Mr. Keating models a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility. He descends into that world of order, accepting the form of a servant, and makes all things new. He shows them what the imagination, taking the shape of love, makes possible.” Perhaps. Probably. But undoubtedly obvious in Keating, as well as in his real life character, was this tinge of immaturity.

Jeffrey J. Niehaus (PhD, Harvard University) is professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His previous publications include God at Sinai: Covenant and Theophany in the Bible and Ancient Near East (Zondervan, 1995) as well as commentaries on Amos and Obadiah (Baker, 1992-93) and numerous journal articles. In the text now under discussion, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology, Niehaus draws on research into ancient Near Eastern contexts to compare numerous parallels in (especially) the Old Testament (OT) and the Bible as a whole. Carefully researched and yet written in quite readable language, it is well organized and has a short but good bibliography and Scripture and subject indexes. This work should be an excellent resource for students, teachers, pastors, and Bible readers interested in understanding more deeply the cultural and spiritual background of the Holy Scriptures.

The Preface and first chapter identify Niehaus’ guiding principles. He writes reverently. He is convinced of God’s sovereignty over history and human cultures, and therefore contends that God has “allowed a variety of parallels to arise between theological concepts and practices in the ancient Near East and their counterparts in the Bible.” However, he thinks “there is not only a parallelism between certain themes in the Bible and its world, but there is also a structure of thought that is common to them both and that forms the theological backbone of the Bible.” Niehaus defends a strong doctrine of truth rooted in the biblical revelation. Yet he also defends the idea that ancient myths can contain elements of truth more plainly manifested in the Bible itself. Some try to account for this strange fact by positing some universal aspect of human nature and others simply see the Bible as dependant on pagan literature; but Niehaus looks at pagan literature through the lens of the Bible rather than the converse. In a word, Niehaus parts company with much of contemporary ancient Near Eastern and OT scholarship. He plainly does not see the Bible as dependant on pagan literature. Rather, he thinks the biblical revelation draws on preexisting and widespread cultural thought constructs to communicate divinely revealed eternal truth.

Niehaus argues, first, that the OT preserves true and accurate accounts of major events (e.g., Creation, the Flood), but that extra biblical sources may also “preserve the memory of such events”, albeit in distorted forms. Second, he argues that the OT uses literary and legal forms current in surrounding cultures as vehicles of special revelation. Third, he argues that the parallels between these appear “because God allowed concepts that are true of him and his ways to appear in the realm of common grace.” Accordingly, the Old and New Testaments complete and fulfill “the shared theological structure of ideas” that already existed in the ancient Near East. He goes farther, however, insisting that this shared theological structure provides “the theological backbone of the whole Bible.” He readily admits that in the ancient Near East the shared structure eventually became “blurred” and that in modern western cultures it has been “abandoned”; it is only “kept alive” in the Church, “God’s people, who continue to be his temple and to advance his kingdom, until he returns to establish it once and for all, for all time, and for all who believe in him.”