Word: terrien
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...later issue of the Century, Samuel Terrien, professor of Old Testament at Union, maintained that MacLeish's J.B. is an entirely different character from Job. The Bible's Job "shouts his pride, shrieks his blasphemy, and fights with a God who eludes his attacks." By comparison, Terrien finds MacLeish's J.B. "emasculated." He is merely "the diseased victim of fate, who hardly, if ever at all, rises above the level of intellectual stupor and spiritual impassivity...
...Terrien's and Driver's academic boss, President Henry P. Van Dusen of Union Theological Seminary, took them both to task in the Christian Century for not taking into consideration the fact that the Book of Job is not one book but two-a poem with a prose introduction and conclusion on a much lower level. Since the picture of Job is not consistent in the first place, says Van Dusen, Dr. Terrien's complaint that J.B. is not faithful to the Book of Job is irrelevant. Instead of "slavish imitation" of the Biblical Job, "Mr. MacLeish...
Biblical critics nowadays are grateful for the work of their 19th Century predecessors. But, says Professor Samuel Terrien of Union Theological Seminary, they "have come to realize that many extreme positions [of the "higher criticism"] which were widely held at the beginning of the 20th Century should be either utterly rejected, or at least corrected in the direction of a qualified conservatism ... It is no longer a matter of crucial importance to know whether or not Moses wrote the Pentateuch in its present form, whether or not Isaiah of Jerusalem was responsible for all the chapters of the book which...
...scholars, says Scholar Terrien, "are learning that biblical scholarship cannot be divorced from contemporary Christian testimony. Indeed, they even begin to sense that, in order to penetrate to the core of biblical religion, they must give up the delusion of 'absolute' scientific objectivity . . . They must join, with humility and consecration, the [fellowship] of the saved and look at it from within...