A conversation with Brittany Melton

You and your family have recently moved to Florida — so what brings you back to Tyndale House?

I’m here all week for the Tyndale Fellowship Conference, an opportunity for Christian Bible scholars from around the world to share papers and get to know each other.
I’m currently serving as secretary of the Old Testament study group.

You recently published your first book — tell me more.

I’ve been researching books of the Bible where God either isn’t mentioned at all or doesn’t explicitly speak or act — Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther (or the Megilloth as they’re collectively known). In particular I’ve been looking at how influential the idea of the “absence of God” has been in the way we read them. That really started as a result of the so-called Death of God movement, which began after the Second World War, when people were questioning how a war like that could have happened, and even if there is a God at all. But the writers of the Old Testament weren’t asking “Does God exist?”. So when we approach the Bible with this question, we have to remember that we’re trying to fashion an answer to something the text isn’t addressing. We have freedom to ask these sorts of modern questions, but it’s also good to consider questions that arise directly from the passages, such as “Why does God at times seem distant?”

What should the Church learn from the Megilloth?

One feature, particularly found in Lamentations, is the practice of lament, and the benefit we can derive from lament. We have a biblical precedent that indicates we should be lamenting, but we’re rarely doing that. Back in the 1980s the theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote about this, but today I’m not sure many people even know how to lament, and the Church is all the poorer for that.

What can we do practically to change that?

This is something I’ve been exploring with my husband, Drew, who is a minister and academic. We recently started a Bible study group called Pass the Pulpit, and every week we listen to a sermon by someone from a minority group, or a preacher from a different denomination.

Through this we listen to things we don’t often hear, and to problems that we never lament because we don’t acknowledge they’re problems. One of those sermons examined how our idea of race is formed, and how that has impacted Native Americans and African Americans. The preacher gave a call to lament what we are missing by not appreciating diversity in the Church, and where we’ve gone wrong by not listening to those who are hurting.

What’s the next project in the pipeline?

At the moment I’m contributing to the revision of a series of four books called Handbooks on the Old Testament (with Baker Academic). The senior editor is Dr David Firth, who is chair of the Tyndale Fellowship Old Testament study group. Having thought recently about racial equity in the Church, we’ve committed in the suggested reading lists to promote Majority World academics (for example those from Asia, Africa or Latin America), and minority voices, alongside classic works of Bible scholarship to which we’re all indebted. We realised this was important not just for the sake of diversity but because this series is one of the most-used resources in the Majority World. There won’t be suggestions from every reader’s specific community, but at least we can make sure we are advocating for a wider range of voices.