Bergen novel

Reading Kierkegaard into
‘The Case of Lena S.’

David Bergen. The Case of Lena S. McClelland & Stewart, 2002. The smooth surface of David

Bergen’s prose belies the emotional turbulence of the teenage lives he portrays in his latest novel. Father of four and veteran high school teacher, Bergen is an experienced and compassionate observer. His talent earned him a nomination for the Governor General’s award in 2002.

Mason Crowe is a sensitive, cautiously experimental 16-year-old. The most central figures in his life include a distant and ineffectual father, a macho older brother and three women who present both allure and betrayal: his mother who has left his father, an Indian woman who resigns herself to an arranged marriage, and Lena, his smart, sexually provocative and suicidal girlfriend.

Mason appears helpless in the hands of the wilful Lena, yet is drawn by his own need to rescue her from self-destruction. Bergen masterfully navigates the psychological complexities of this relationship. As often happens in such a situation, Mason is sucked into Lena’s negative behaviour instead of saving her from it.

Bergen describes a generation uprooted from its spiritual tradition. Organized religion is treated as an empty relic which fails to provide any solution for these teenagers. In desperation, Lena gets baptized, but it leaves her with even deeper confusion and self-loathing. Bergen seems to make the claim that religion has lost its power to transform.

Interestingly, Bergen originally intended to call his novel Reading Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, was committed to making a fundamental ethical or religious choice, a “leap of faith,” and sticking to it, no matter what the consequences. He chose to reject his beloved fiancée in an attempt to test the limits of true love and to purify it.

Lena, like Kierkegaard, eventually alienates Mason, despite her love for him. Bergen interprets Lena’s act as self-sacrificial, but it is not the courageous act idealized by Kierkegaard. As the “clinical” title of the book suggests, Lena’s act is suicidal. She sacrifices the one person she treasures most, making herself dangerously ill.

With his clean, effortless style, Bergen lulls his audience into treacherous emotional territory. The book simply leaves one depressed—these young people are asking important questions but there are no adequate answers, according to Bergen. I reject his analysis. Mason and Lena yearn for redemption, for a spiritual life, yet seem to be world-weary and cynical before their time. They lack community, and therefore have no perspective outside of themselves. Bergen accuses institutional religion, as well as all the adults in Mason and Lena’s lives, of being spiritually impotent.

Believing that every institution and mentor is a colossal disappointment is the illusion of youth. Late in his life, Kierkegaard realized that sacrificing one’s fundamental relationships, like Lena does with her parents, the church and Mason, does not result in personal salvation but simply in self-annihilation.

—Christina Reimer

The reviewer is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Toronto.

Exodus commentary raises interesting questions

Waldemar Janzen. Exodus. Believers Church Bible Commentary. Herald Press, 2000, 496pp.

Waldemar Janzen, long the Old Testament principal at Canadian Mennonite Bible College, is one of a quartet of Mennonites—Millard Lind, Elmer Martens, and John W. Miller included—who studied with the best Old Testament scholars, returned to teach in Mennonite schools, and continue to make significant contributions to the church and to scholarship.

This is the ninth Old Testament commentary in the Believers Church series, and it follows the format of its predecessors. A brief introduction sets out the approach, describes something of the book’s contents and suggests its structure. The body of the commentary includes a “preview” of the larger unit, “explanatory notes” on a specific text, followed by comments on the biblical context and “The text in the life of the church.”

In this volume, a detailed outline of Exodus precedes 14 essays on topics arising out of Exodus, from “Moses” to “beauty” to “narrative technique.”

Janzen describes his approach as “canonical-literary,” by which he means that the text as we have it—the “Exodus” we read—exhibits sufficient literary unity to be the object of commentary. On occasion he employs technical terms such as “implied reader,” adverts to the history of composition and reception, or refers to other ancient literature. All of this scholarship he employs lightly, and accompanies with lucid explanation, so that it enhances our reading of Exodus.

The hallmarks of the commentary series are the sections on “The text in biblical context” and “The text in the life of the church.” Set apart from each other that way, a Believers Church commentary imitates the inventions of modernity—as if the explanation of a biblical text is something apart from its biblical context, and as if that sort of explanation goes on in independence of, and then should govern, the text’s life in the church.

The oddness of this modern(istic) format is reflected also in Janzen’s commentary. On occasion, the distinctions seem arbitrary: when he considers the text’s biblical context, we often have further explanation of the text itself. And Janzen’s discussions of the text in the life of the church vary widely between remarks about a text’s history of interpretation (including, often, by Martin Luther and Menno Simons) and his own judgments about contemporary church life: he offers “multimedia use” and “pop music” as contemporary examples of idolatry (meeting “popular ‘religious needs’”) that Aaron practised and God regarded a capital crime (Exodus 32–34).

To be sure, Janzen’s commentary reflects sophisticated exegesis conversant with contemporary scholarship. And here there will be room for debate.

For example, does the covenant offered in Exodus 19 extend the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17 (and 15), and recalled in Exodus 2, or is this a different covenant? Does the exchange between God and Moses in Exodus 32–34 elicit a new divine self-definition, even as it introduces the term “pardon” into the biblical vocabulary (Exodus 34:9)? Does God live, and so we, with some tension between an arbitrary but solemn covenant of God, on one hand, and a conditional (“if…then”) covenant on the other?

Read the book.

—Ben C. Ollenburger

The reviewer is professor of biblical theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana.