Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation
    Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation
    Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation
    Ebook881 pages12 hours

    Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation

    By Craig Bartholomew, Mary Healy, Karl Möller and

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Biblical theology attempts to explore the theological coherence of the canonical witnesses; no serious Christian theology can overlook this issue. The essays in the present volume illustrate the complexity and richness of the conversation that results from attentive consideration of the question. In a time when some voices are calling for a moratorium on biblical theology or pronouncing its concerns obsolete, this collection of meaty essays demonstrates the continuing vitality and necessity of the enterprise. Richard B. Hays, George Washington Ivey Professor of New Testament, The Divinity School, Duke University, USA This volume on biblical theology jumps into the fray and poses the right kind of questions. It does not offer a single way forward. Several of the essays are quite fresh and provocative, breaking new ground (Bray, Reno); others set out the issues with clarity and grace (Bartholomew); others offer programmatic analysis (Webster; Bauckham); others offer a fresh angle of view (Chapman, Martin). The success of this series is in facing the challenge of disarray in biblical studies head-on and then modeling a variety of approaches to stimulate our reflection. Christopher Seitz, Professor of Old Testament and Theological Studies, St. Andrews University, UK

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateMar 1, 2011
    ISBN9780310873495
    Out of Egypt: Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation

    Related to Out of Egypt

    Titles in the series (100)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Why Study Church History?

      Jun 15, 2020

      Why Study Church History?
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Remembering Luther & the Diet of Worms...

      Mar 10, 2023

      Is anyone keen on a special diet to keep fit? With many making plans that include some fitness goals, the answer may be an emphatic yes! How about a diet of worms? Mopane worms, to be specific. These may be a delicacy north of the Limpopo River, thou

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Crosses Across Asia

      Apr 8, 2022

      Crosses Across Asia
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      THE WAR FOR OUR YOUTH Why creation still matters

      Dec 30, 2019

      We’re being told by public education systems, universities, media, some parents, and unfortunately many church leaders, that parts of the Bible are not relevant anymore and that we need to reinvent God’s word. So, with this situation, in order to und

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Fake News, Fake Gospels!

      Dec 31, 2021

      Fake News, Fake Gospels!
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Kairos Document

      May 20, 2022

      The Kairos Document
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Young Evangelists Are Answering The Call

      Jul 22, 2022

      Many years ago, Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke spoke of a vision that the Lord had given him of young people preaching the Gospel on the streets of Europe. That vision has taken another step forward with the introduction of Fire Camps – retreats for youn

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Keeping The Faith

      Oct 28, 2022

      Keeping The Faith
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Did You Know?

      Dec 31, 2021

      How many books are in the Bible? The Bible contains 66 books, divided among the Old and New Testaments. How many books are in the Old Testament? There are 39 books in the Old Testament. How many books are in the New Testament? There are 27 books

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Faith Or Politics? Trump Supporters Swell Evangelical Pews.

      Oct 5, 2021

      After years of stagnancy, the number of Evangelicals surged from 25% of the adult U.S. population in 2016 to 29% in 2020 – fueled by white Trump supporters.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      ‘A History Of The Bible’ Offers Scholarly Insights Into Its Construction

      Aug 27, 2019

      Theologian and Anglican priest John Barton takes a well-researched look into the context and composition of the Bible.

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      James H. Cone, Founder Of Black Liberation Theology, Dies At 79

      Apr 28, 2018

      The Arkansas native is remembered for his fierce challenges to traditional Christian norms of his era.

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Red Alert

      May 20, 2019

      Why does the Church today appear to be so powerless? Why are so many churches emptying? Why have young people fled the church? Why do some Christians consider ‘gathering together as the church’ to be irrelevant? What is happening in our generation?

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ways To Faith

      Dec 9, 2023

      Explore a selection of digital history guides in the History Scotland store: https://scot.sh/hsdownload Edited by Dr Louise Heren [email protected] Eds Chris R. Langley, Catherine E. McMillan, & Russell Newton, St. Andrews Studies in Sco

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Kabbalah

      Feb 28, 2020

      Think of the mystical religion Kabbalah, and many will immediately picture the singer Madonna. As one of a number of celebrities to embrace its ancient wisdom in recent years, she has sought to study and understand Kabbalah’s deep teachings, often in

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Out of Egypt

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Out of Egypt - Craig Bartholomew

      Biblical Theology and Biblical Interpretation

      Introduction

      Craig G. Bartholomew

      ‘The real question is not whether to do Biblical Theology or not, but rather what kind of Biblical Theology does one have.’¹

      It is hard, in my opinion, to overestimate the importance of biblical theology for the Christian church. Week after week congregations confess in response to the readings from the Bible that ‘This is the Word of the LORD’, and we reply ‘Thanks be to God.’² However it is difficult, some would say impossible, to translate that thankfulness into hard work on the Bible in the academy. For built into that confession is a strong sense of the Bible as a unified, coherent word from God,³ and in large swathes of the academy we have in practice, if not in theory, given up on our attempts to articulate the unity of the Bible on its own terms. And that, after all, is what the discipline of biblical theology is all about. Biblical theology is, in my opinion, the attempt to grasp Scripture in its totality according to its own, rather than imposed, categories.⁴

      The origin of biblical theology is commonly traced back to Johann Gabler’s inaugural address, ‘On the proper distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology and the specific objectives of each’, given on 30 March 1787. Gabler commences his inaugural with his concern about the variety of views among Christians. One of the reasons he discerns for this variety is the failure to distinguish biblical theology from dogmatic theology. Gabler contrasts religion with theology:

      Religion then, is every-day, transparently clear knowledge; but theology is subtle, learned knowledge, surrounded by a retinue of many disciplines, and by the same token derived not only from the sacred Scripture but also from elsewhere, especially from the domain of philosophy and history.⁵

      Gabler associates the Bible with religion in this contrast. He argues that, ‘There is truly a biblical theology, of historical origin, conveying what the holy writers felt about divine matters; on the other hand there is a dogmatic theology of didactic origin …’⁶ Biblical theology remains the same, whereas dogmatics changes all the time.

      Gabler’s understanding of biblical theology is deeply rationalistic. There is much in the Bible that is culturally conditioned, and he argues that we need to separate the things in the Bible which refer to their own times from the ‘pure notions which divine providence wished to be characteristic of all times and places’.⁷ Thus we firstly need to collect the sacred ideas of the authors and then classify them, after which we should compare them with the universal ideas of reason. From this process biblical theology will appear.

      Gabler was not original in making the distinction between biblical theology and dogmatics; rather he sought methodological clarity on the relationship between them.⁸ Gabler’s whole approach is so coloured by rationalism that one is tempted to dismiss him out of court, but this would be a mistake. His distinguishing of biblical theology from theology is helpful and, I suggest, an important step in the differentiation of biblical theology in the ‘theological encyclopaedia’. For biblical theology to flourish as an entity in its own right such a distinction is important, provided we can distinguish it from Gabler’s rationalism.

      Does this originating moment of biblical theology mean that it never existed before 1787? Barr argues that it is anachronistic to see Calvin and others as doing ‘biblical theology’,⁹ while Childs argues that biblical theology has a history going back to the early church fathers. Certainly the church fathers were drenched in Scripture. Wilken tells of how in his research into the church fathers he has been impressed by

      the omnipresence of the Bible in early Christian writings. Early Christian thought is biblical, and one of the lasting accomplishments of the patristic period was to forge a way of thinking, scriptural in language and inspiration, that gave to the church and to Western civilization a unified and coherent interpretation of the Bible as a whole.¹⁰

      Wilken notes that ‘when they [the first Christian thinkers] took the Bible in hand they were overwhelmed. It came upon them like a torrent leaping down the side of a mountain’.¹¹ Clement’s writings embody a ‘conceptual framework drawn from the Bible’.¹² And in his struggle with Marcion and the Gnostics over the unity of the Bible, Irenaeus articulates the unity of the Bible as a single story:

      Two histories converge in the biblical account, the history of Israel and the life of Christ, but because they are also the history of God’s actions in and for the world, they are part of a larger narrative that begins at creation and ends in a vision of a new, more splendid city in which the ‘Lord God will be their light.’ The Bible begins, as it were, with the beginning and ends with an end that is no end, life with God, in Irenaeus’s charming expression, a life in which one is ‘always conversing with God in new ways.’ Nothing falls outside of its scope.¹³

      With Irenaeus’s narrative approach to the Bible we certainly have an incipient biblical theology. The unity of the Testaments is affirmed–there is one God who called Abraham, spoke with Moses, sent the prophets and is also the father of our Lord Jesus Christ¹⁴–and is articulated in terms of the story shape of the Bible as a whole. Furthermore, the story is explained in terms of the theme of renewal, or re-creation.¹⁵

      Nevertheless, for all the common ground one finds with biblical theology in the church fathers, Aquinas and the Reformers, it remains true that prior to Gabler’s time theology and biblical theology were undifferentiated.¹⁶ It is this differentiation that Gabler is associated with, and provided it can be carefully distinguished from his rationalism and the endless fragmentation of the Bible that historical criticism led to, it is a helpful and legitimate distinction because it allows biblical theology as distinct from systematic theology to come into focus in its own right.

      The story of biblical theology since Gabler has often been told and I will not repeat it here.¹⁷ Bauer was the first to distinguish Old Testament and New Testament theology, and soon the view arose that the discontinuities between the Testaments were so strong as to defy attempts to articulate their unity. The related stress on the diversity of Scripture that has been central to most historical criticism has haunted biblical theology to this day.

      The more immediate context for contemporary efforts in biblical theology is the rise and demise of the so-called Biblical Theology Movement (BTM). Dates for this movement can be set with precision, namely from around the end of World War II to 1961, when publications by Gilkey and Barr are said to have sunk the BTM. The BTM was strongly Protestant, particularly American and consciously oriented towards reading the Bible for the church, while acknowledging the legitimacy of historical criticism. The BTM was connected with the emergence of the neo-orthodoxy of Barth, although it tended to be suspicious of Barth’s supposed rejection of historical criticism. Indeed, Brunner rather than Barth was the greater influence on the BTM.

      The BTM in the United States represented a major attempt to break out of the impasse of the modernist/fundamentalist debate about the Bible that had plagued American churches, through a vibrant recovery of biblical theology. Its major emphases were:¹⁸

      A recovery of the Bible as a theological book. Historical criticism has a legitimate role to play, but it represents the start, and not the end; it must lead us to hear God address us through his word, and biblical theology is a major ingredient in this respect. G. Ernest Wright, one of the major representatives of the BTM, lamented the neglect of biblical theology and noted that it was difficult to find a leading graduate school where one could specialize in it.¹⁹

      The BTM stressed the unity of the Bible as a whole and regarded it as vital that we overcome the chasm that had opened up between Old Testament and New Testament. Wright noted that ‘The scholarly study of the Old Testament has been separated from that of the New and from its moorings in the proclamation of the Church.’²⁰ He diagnoses the condition of biblical interpretation in his day as a revival of Marcionism and argues strongly against this:

      Surely, if the New Testament is not proclaimed as the fulfillment of the Old, if the Gospel as proclaimed by Jesus and by Paul is not the completion of the faith of Israel, then it must inevitably be a completion and fulfillment of something which we ourselves substitute–and that most certainly means a perversion of the Christian faith.²¹

      Wright himself articulates the unity of the Bible through a recitation of the great acts of God, finding their fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth.

      The BTM, as is evident from Wright’s approach described in point two, above, made God’s revelation of himself in history central to biblical theology. The pagan religions of the ancient Near East had no concept of history; in this respect Israel was regarded as utterly unique, and God reveals his being and will through his great acts, and particularly in the Old Testament through his redemption of the Israelites from Egypt.

      Fourthly, the BTM laid great stress on the distinctiveness of the biblical perspective. In this respect it reacted strongly to the tendency among scholars to explain Israel’s faith as part of an evolving history of religion. Israel’s view of God and the world was quite unique in its ancient Near Eastern context and this stemmed from God’s revelation of himself to Israel.²²

      By 1961 the BTM, which manifested such energy and hope for a recovery of the Bible, was verging on collapse. What were the structural deficiencies that facilitated the demise of this great edifice? Childs argues that there were a host of unresolved problems in the BTM that eroded it from within and made it vulnerable to the sort of attack from Barr and Gilkey from without.

      According to Childs, the BTM never resolved the issue of the Bible and its authority. Fundamentalism was rejected, but so too was Barth’s use of the Bible, which was regarded as not taking historical criticism sufficiently seriously. Problematically, no clear alternative emerged to either of these views. For all of its emphasis on the Bible, the BTM failed to produce great commentaries and generally seemed to confine its use of the Bible to a few favourite books.

      Secondly, the emphases of the BTM were seldom translated into educational and curriculum policy in the seminaries. ‘Very infrequently did Biblical Theology become an integrating factor that provided a focus for the other disciplines.’²³ This meant inter alia that changes in systematic theology and hermeneutics left biblical theology vulnerable and with little defence.

      In the late 1950s and in the 1960s the church was feeling the need to respond to the modern world and the great diversity of challenges it represented, challenges which extended way beyond the institutional church. The BTM appeared to be sorely lacking in this respect–it had not given rise to a new style of preaching and theological ethics seemed to be getting along quite well without it.

      The BTM’s emphasis on God’s acts in history appeared to solve many problems, but this apparent success concealed some major cracks in its edifice, cracks which James Barr and Langdon Gilkey exploited ruthlessly. The distinctiveness of Israel’s perspective was also being questioned as scholars such as Frank Moore Cross demonstrated that Israel’s neighbours were much closer to her views in all sorts of ways than the BTM proponents had allowed. We will explore Barr’s and Gilkey’s critiques in more detail below–suffice it here to note that their publications in 1961 were perceived as dealing a mortal blow to the BTM. Childs says of Barr’s The Semantics of Biblical Language, ‘Seldom has one book brought down so much superstructure with such effectiveness.’²⁴

      The consequent thrust of Childs’s Biblical Theology in Crisis is that biblical theology is in crisis and a new paradigm is required. In Biblical Theology in Crisis, and in his subsequent writings, Childs goes on to propose a canonical paradigm for biblical theology as the answer to this crisis. Barr argues, by contrast, that Childs overestimates the extent of the problem in order to set the stage for his new paradigm. Indeed, Barr denies that there really was/is a crisis of biblical theology, and biblical theology has continued to flourish in all sorts of ways.²⁵ What happened, rather, was that biblical theology lost its power to assert itself over against other aspects of the ‘theological encyclopaedia’.

      Either way, the arguments that facilitated the demise of the BTM bear close scrutiny. It is fascinating to look back now on the arguments that were perceived as fatally damaging for the BTM. Gilkey’s 1961 article is entitled ‘Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language’. He argues that the BTM got caught between being half liberal and modern and half biblical and orthodox: ‘its world view or cosmology is modern, while its theological language is biblical and orthodox’.²⁶ In opposition to liberalism, the BTM asserted its belief in revelation through God’s mighty acts, thereby understanding God’s speech and acts literally and univocally. At the same time it held on to the modern belief in the causal continuum. As Gilkey notes,

      this assumption of a causal order among phenomenal events, and therefore of the authority of the scientific interpretation of observable events, makes a great difference to the validity one assigns to biblical narratives and so to the way one understands their meaning.²⁷

      A modern understanding of causality means that most of the biblical events did not in fact happen; they become symbols instead: ‘we believe that the biblical people lived in the same causal continuum of space and time in which we live, and so one in which no divine wonders transpired and no divine voices were heard’.²⁸ Gilkey probes the writings of the BTM in this respect and finds them riddled with contradictions. He argues that the implication of this tension for the BTM is that the Bible is really a book of great acts the Hebrews believed God to have done but which we know he in fact did not do. The result is that the mighty acts of God are reduced to God’s ‘inward incitement of a religious response to an ordinary event within the space-time continuum’,²⁹ akin to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on religious experience.

      Gilkey argues that the BTM needs a more sophisticated view of language and a theological ontology. Hebrew recital must be distinguished from our recital; the biblical writers use language univocally whereas we know that we can only speak of God analogically. Furthermore, we need to relate the biblical message to our understanding of the world:

      For this reason, while the dependence of systematic and philosophical theology on biblical theology has long been recognized and is obvious, the dependence of an intelligible theology that is biblical on the cosmological and ontological inquiries of believing men, while now less universally accepted, is nonetheless real.³⁰

      Living as we do in the light of ‘postmodernism’s’ undermining of many aspects of modernity, it is remarkable to think how effective was Gilkey’s argument. As with Bultmann and Barr and so much modern thought, there is an implicit assumption of the modern myth of progress. The contemporary perspective is simply assumed and absolutized without ever being argued for. It is now more apparent, however, that Gilkey is assuming the particular perspective of modernity,³¹ as well as misrepresenting the biblical and Christian tradition. Even within the Bible there is awareness that its language of God is not univocal, and certainly the Christian tradition³² is well aware of the complexity of its language for and of God.³³

      Barr’s critique of the BTM relates to two main areas: the concept of revelation and history central to the BTM;³⁴ and its misuse of word studies and the so-called Greek/Hebrew contrast in views of the world.³⁵ Barr’s critique of the historical emphasis of the BTM is similar to that of Gilkey. He focuses on the antinomy or ‘double talk’³⁶ between the confession of God’s acts in history and history as the result of critical examination of data. Barr furthermore finds that substantial parts of the Bible do not fit with an historical emphasis.

      Barr’s better known critique is of the BTM’s persistent failure to take modern semantics into account–thus it is guilty time and again of ‘illegitimate totality transfer’ and thereby wrongly reads meanings into words. Barr is critical of the tendency of the BTM to find the distinctive theological content of the Bible in its vocabulary, as exemplified for example in the Kittel-Friedrich dictionary. Barr devotes an entire book to the BTM’s handling of the biblical words dealing with time.³⁷ According to Barr, Cullman’s theology of time in the Bible is illegitimate because:

      The whole case being argued is that the Bible has, and normally and constantly displays, a particular conception of time, which can be traced in its lexical stock and which forms an essential background or presupposition for the understanding of its theology. It is therefore naturally impossible to except any example of usage from full consideration on the grounds that it is ‘merely temporal’ and not of theological significance.³⁸

      There was undoubtedly a need for Barr’s critique of the understanding of how language worked in the BTM. Indeed Barr mediated modern semantics à la Saussure into biblical studies, and his contribution in this respect has been of lasting importance. However, Francis Watson has recently and rightly argued that Barr’s critique of the BTM in this respect is not as devastating as is often suggested, and not least by Barr himself.³⁹ According to Watson, Barr builds his sweeping criticism on a narrow foundation and wrongly suggests that the errors are foundational to the entire project of the BTM. Watson re-examines Cullmann’s work on time, a particular object of Barr’s critique, and demonstrates how Cullmann is aware of the diverse ways in which the New Testament words for time are used, but consciously chooses to focus on those occasions which are theologically poignant. For Watson such an approach is quite legitimate. Barr also criticizes Cullmann for his contrast between Hebrew and Greek thought. Cullmann contrasts the New Testament view of the resurrection with the ‘Greek’ concept of immortality and, as Watson shows, Cullmann is quite right in this respect.

      Watson concludes from his analysis of Barr’s critique of the BTM that ‘there is little basis for his claim that biblical theology as once practised was fundamentally and irretrievably flawed. If biblical theology collapsed, it did not do so because of the overwhelming force of its critics’ arguments.’⁴⁰ Indeed, for Watson, ‘There is, then, little or nothing in this piece of modern theological history to deter one from attempting to renew and to redefine biblical theology.’⁴¹

      What is clear from both Gilkey’s and Barr’s critiques of the BTM is that they stem from particular theological outlooks. The demise of the BTM is related to the radicalization of modern theology at the time, and Barr appeals regularly to this ‘progress’ as part of his critique. Indeed a common element in Barr’s armoury is the appeal to progress. Thus, in his 1974 article on ‘Trends and Prospects in Biblical Theology’, he argues contra the BTM’s concern to see the Bible as a whole that ‘the tendency now is to say that there is no one theology, either of the Old Testament or of the New, and still less of the entire Bible: rather, the Bible, and each Testament contains a number of quite different theologies, the theologies of different strata, different writers, and different periods’.⁴² Likewise in his The Bible in the Modern World, Barr stresses that nowadays there is less enthusiasm for reading the Bible as a whole.⁴³

      This style of argument is found regularly in Barr’s critique of the BTM,⁴⁴ and it is a style of argument which lays great weight on the theological trends of one’s immediate context, thereby suggesting that theology has progressed towards this point. What is lacking in Barr’s and Gilkey’s approach is a healthy sense of plurality in theology and the way in which different theological perspectives might relate to something like the BTM. Barr’s approach is very much that of liberal theology, whereas Childs’s is that of a scholar working in the Reformed, Barthian tradition, and these contexts orient them towards biblical theology and the BTM in quite different ways. Theological context makes a huge difference when it comes to (the very possibility of) biblical theology, and it helps to be aware of all the elements in the often vitriolic debates around the subject.

      Barr suggests, as noted above, that there never really was a crisis in biblical theology, but that Childs needed there to be one to justify his new canonical approach to the subject. This seems to me somewhat ingenious in the light of the successful attacks by Barr on the BTM, but it does alert us to the fact that biblical theology was always more than the BTM. There were real problems with the BTM, as Childs indicates. Although these were not as serious as Barr and Gilkey suggest, it is important to note that the well-being of biblical theology does not stand or fall with the BTM. Within the evangelical tradition, for example, biblical theology continued to thrive despite the so-called death knell of the BTM in 1961. Scholars such as Herman Ridderbos, O. Palmer Robertson, George Eldon Ladd, Meredith Kline, Graeme Goldsworthy, Bill Dumbrell⁴⁵ and others continued to take biblical theology seriously in the years following the demise of the BTM, with the result that a corpus of ongoing work in biblical theology is available from the evangelical stable.⁴⁶ And, since 1960, multiple works in Old Testament and New Testament theology, plus studies of the theology of parts of the Bible, have been published.⁴⁷ What is noticeably lacking, however, are a plethora of attempts at a theology of the Bible as a whole.⁴⁸ Recent decades have witnessed the appearance of only two major biblical theologies, namely those by Childs and Scobie. If biblical theology is concerned with the Bible as a whole, then this may be more significant than the multitude of publications Barr refers to, and may well indicate that biblical theology remains in something of a crisis.

      Quo Vadis?

      Childs discerns the following eight models for biblical theology nowadays:⁴⁹

      Biblical theology organized according to the categories of dogmatics

      Allegorical or typological approaches

      A great ideas or themes approach

      A history of redemption approach

      Literary approaches

      The cultural-linguistic method

      Sociological perspectives

      Jewish biblical theology

      Childs interacts critically with each of these approaches and then makes a new proposal for a canonical biblical theology.⁵⁰ He remains as committed as ever to his earlier view that ‘There is a need for a discipline that will attempt to retain and develop a picture of the whole, and that will have a responsibility to synthesize as well as analyze.’⁵¹ The canon is the proper context within which such biblical theology is to be done. ‘The Scriptures of the church are not archives of the past but a channel of life for the continuing church, through which God instructs and admonishes his people.’⁵² Biblical theology must take the different extent of the canon in Catholic compared with Protestant circles seriously and it must ‘participate in the search for the Christian Bible’.⁵³ Utterly central to biblical theology must be the question of the Old Testament–New Testament relationship, and this needs to be carefully nuanced:

      At the heart of the problem of Biblical Theology lies the issue of doing full justice to the subtle canonical relationship of the two testaments within the one Christian Bible. On the one hand, the Christian canon asserts the continuing integrity of the OT witness. It must be heard on its own terms … On the other hand, the NT makes its own witness … the challenge of Biblical Theology is to engage in the continual activity of theological reflection which studies the canonical text in detailed exegesis, and seeks to do justice to the witness of both testaments in the light of its subject matter who is Jesus Christ.⁵⁴

      In Biblical Theology in Crisis, Childs used the citations of the Old Testament in the New Testament as a major route into the biblical theology of both Testaments. But by the time of his Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments Childs is more wary of this approach, lest it undermine the discrete witness of the Old Testament.⁵⁵ The way in which the New Testament uses the Old need not exhaust the witness of the Old, and it is vital that we attend to the discrete witness of each Testament in its own right. Consequently, Childs organizes his Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments according to the following sections:

      Discrete witness of the Old Testament

      Discrete witness of the New Testament

      Theological reflection on the Christian Bible

      Childs’s extensive work on biblical theology positions him as the leading authority in this area today. Barr has been his great nemesis, but without producing a comparable corpus in constructive biblical theology.⁵⁶ What can we learn from Childs’s work about the way forward for biblical theology and biblical interpretation?

      1. Childs never lost sight of the vital importance of biblical theology for the church, and nor should we.

      In Biblical Theology in Crisis Childs observed that, ‘It is highly significant that many of the leading Biblical scholars of the present generation, while at times critical of the older theological positions, still identify with the long-range goals of the movement and share in gratitude a strong sense of solidarity with this generation of church-oriented scholars.’⁵⁷ Childs recognized the legitimacy of many of the criticisms of the BTM, but this did not lead him to abandon biblical theology but to a concerted attempt to establish it on better, more rigorous, foundations. A critique of the BTM was that it lacked academic rigour. Such a criticism could never be levelled against Childs’s wide-ranging work on biblical theology, and our continued attempts to reinvigorate biblical theology must learn from this. ‘The challenge of the Christian interpreter in our day is to hear the full range of notes within all of Scripture, to wrestle with the theological interpretation of this Biblical witness, and above all, to come to grips with the agony of our age before a living God who still speaks through the prophets and apostles.’⁵⁸

      As we have noted above, the critique of the BTM was not nearly as devastating as many thought at the time, and there is a significant legacy to be salvaged from the BTM. We need inter alia to revisit the BTM’s vast corpus of literature and to separate off the chaff from the wheat. I suspect there is a lot of wheat there that we can distil into contemporary work on biblical theology.

      2. Childs recognizes that biblical theology will flourish or decay in relation to certain theological perspectives, and so should we.

      In Childs’s opinion we need a strong sense of the Bible as canon for the Christian church as the context in which biblical theology should be done. Childs upholds the valuable contribution of historical criticism but insists on linking the historical and the theological. Biblical theology will be descriptive but always oriented towards the Christian church.

      It seems to me that Childs here puts his finger on issues that are central to the flourishing of biblical theology. As I mentioned at the outset of this introduction, the impetus towards biblical theology is a sense of the Bible as God’s word as a whole, tota Scriptura. Liberal theologies which privilege diversity over ultimate unity will be far less predisposed towards the project of biblical theology in this sense. Thus Childs’s Barthianism is demonstrably a far more fecund soil for a constructive biblical theology directed towards the Bible as a whole, compared with Barr’s liberalism. This is not for a moment to deny those working in different theological traditions the right to work on biblical theology. The point rather is that there is much to be gained from acknowledging the confessional plurality in theology and making room for different theological approaches to flower in biblical theology, so that real comparisons can be made between divergent approaches.⁵⁹

      3. Childs recognizes the distinction between biblical theology and systematic theology, and so should we.

      Childs is right, in my opinion, to insist on the descriptive nature of biblical theology, albeit descriptive in the context of a canonical hermeneutic. In this he honours Gabler’s differentiation of biblical theology and theology. Childs does not see the relationship between biblical theology and theology as one way–indeed he argues that a good theology will enable us to read Scripture better; this, after all, was the aim of Calvin’s Institutes. Childs’s acknowledgement of the descriptive nature of biblical theology is significant in terms of the minority renewal of theological interpretation today. As is evident from this volume, the renewal draws heavily on patristic exegesis and often collapses theology and biblical theology back into a single category. Childs does not do this, and personally I think he is right in this respect.

      4. Childs makes the relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament central to biblical theology, and so must we.

      The Old Testament–New Testament relationship is utterly central to any biblical theology, and we mentioned above Childs’s stress on doing justice to the discrete witness of each Testament. Watson, however, argues that Childs’s ‘treatment of the discrete witness of the Old Testament is in practice characterized by the absence of a single, Christological centre as the object of this discrete witness’.⁶⁰ Watson finds a healthier paradigm for Old Testament interpretation as a Christian theological enterprise in von Rad and seeks to develop this for biblical theology today.⁶¹ There are complex issues at stake here, but clearly any biblical theology will have to attend closely to how to articulate the relationship between the Testaments. This debate needs to be a priority among biblical theologians.

      5. Childs discerns a close connection between biblical theology and theological interpretation, and so should we.

      For Childs, biblical theology and theological interpretation of the Bible are distinct but altogether complementary. As we noted above, not all who support the renewal of theological interpretation agree with this.⁶² In my opinion it is important to distinguish the two, and to see that biblical theology is an important ingredient in theological interpretation.

      In Volume 3 of the Scripture and Hermeneutics Series, A Royal Priesthood, we dialogue with Oliver O’Donovan about how to read the Bible ethically and politically. In the introduction to that volume I noted the role of biblical theology in O’Donovan’s extraordinarily creative theological interpretation of the Bible.⁶³ In Resurrection and Moral Order, O’Donovan appropriates the Bible through the Pauline understanding of resurrection as the reaffirmation of creation. In The Desire of the Nations, O’Donovan draws more on a salvation historical approach to God’s work with Israel, culminating in Jesus of Nazareth. In both cases biblical theology is the means for appropriating the unity of the Bible and developing theological concepts that can do the work that theology requires.

      In my opinion O’Donovan’s work is an excellent example of the capacity for biblical theology to fund theological interpretation of the Bible. Childs notes that, ‘Whatever shape a new Biblical Theology will take, surely it must be one that will aid in the process of making the knotty ethical decisions that daily confront the Christian.’⁶⁴ In Biblical Theology in Crisis, Childs laments the paucity of work from the BTM which addressed the cultural issues of the day. Not much has changed since then. There are examples of works relating biblical theology to education, and series such as the ‘Overtures to Biblical Theology’ have produced some fine examples of this genre. But a great deal of work remains to be done. Works of the calibre of O’Donovan are rare. We need a spate of new works in this genre, drawing deeply upon the best contemporary biblical theology.

      6. Childs’s work in biblical theology is ecumenical, and so should ours be.

      Childs’s attempt to renew biblical theology is overtly ecumenical, and it is vital that attempts to renew and reinvigorate biblical theology and biblical interpretation should be so too. One of the most exciting developments in the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar is the growing Catholic participation, as is evident in the essays making up this volume. Many of us have been refreshed to find in our Catholic brothers and sisters an equivalent concern to recover and promote biblical theology, and this has been a great source of encouragement. We have learned that it is still the case in Catholic as well as Protestant circles that biblical theology courses are rare in theological curricula, and that there is considerable work needed to get biblical theology firmly on our agendas.⁶⁵

      Out of Egypt: The Content of this Volume

      There is no shortage of work to do if we are to see a healthy renewal of biblical theology and biblical interpretation. Childs and others have provided us with a significant corpus of literature, upon which we need to build. From its inception, the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar identified biblical theology as a vital topic in any agenda for renewing biblical interpretation. In September 2003 the Seminar met at St Andrews University to focus intensively on biblical theology and biblical interpretation. We had three stimulating days together in a great environment, and the chapters that make up this volume stem from that consultation. We have divided the essays into four sections.

      Section One deals with Approaches to Biblical Theology. Gerald Bray examines the relevance of the church fathers for biblical theology. Karl Möller’s chapter interacts with the most recent biblical theology, namely that of Charles Scobie, looking in dialogue with Scobie at appropriate methodologies for biblical theology. Chapters 3 and 4, by Father Francis Martin and Nuria Calduch-Benages, respectively, explore contemporary Catholic works in biblical theology thereby bring into the discussion works in languages other than English which are little known in the English world. Chris Wright argues for the fecundity of a missional biblical theology, and in a complementary way Bartholomew and Goheen seek to reinvigorate the possibilities of a narrative biblical theology. James Dunn explores the challenge to the production of biblical theology of the fact that the Old Testament is also the Hebrew Bible.

      Section Two includes two Great Themes of the Bible. Richard Bauckham explores the theme of monotheism, while Stephen Barton unpacks that of the unity of humankind.

      Section Three is concerned with the interpretation of Parts of the Bible and Biblical Theology. Al Wolters examines the interface between the interpretation of Zechariah 14 and biblical theology. Bill Dumbrell focuses on the relevance of biblical theology for the difficult challenge of how we read Romans 9:30–10:4. Andrew Lincoln explores the significance of the Epistle to the Hebrews for contemporary biblical theology.

      Section Four brings together five essays that all deal in one way or another with the relationship between Theological Interpretation and Biblical Theology. Trevor Hart discusses the relationship between these two areas through a focus on Moltmann and Barth. John Webster unpacks the contemporary significance of the clarity of Scripture for theology and biblical interpretation. Rusty Reno examines the interface of theological interpretation and biblical theology. Stephen Chapman investigates the role of imagination in biblical theology and theological interpretation. Finally, Charles Scobie assesses the significance of biblical theology for preaching.

      We do not for a moment suggest that this volume solves all the pressing challenges facing biblical theology. However, the contributions to this volume do create an agenda for a renewal of biblical theology and suggest a variety of ways forward in this vital area. Much work remains to be done.

      Bibliography

      Alexander, T.D., and B. Rosner (eds.), New Dictionary of Biblical Theology: Exploring the Unity and Diversity of Scripture (Leicester and Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2000).

      Alston, W.P., ‘Divine and Human Action’, in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism (ed. T.V. Morris; Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 257–80

      —, ‘How to Think About Divine Action: Twenty-Five Years of Travail for Biblical Language’, in Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrar (ed. B. Hebblethwaite and E. Henderson; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990), 51–70

      Barr, J., Old and New in Interpretation: A Study of the Two Testaments (London: SCM Press, 1966)

      —, The Bible in the Modern World (London: SCM Press; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1973)

      —, ‘Trends and Prospects in Biblical Theology’, JTS 24 (1974), 265–82

      —, ‘The Theological Case Against Biblical Theology’, in Canon, Theology and Old Testament Interpretation (ed. G.M. Tucker, D.L. Petersen and R.R. Wilson; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 3–19

      —, The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999)

      —, Biblical Words for Time (London: SCM Press, 1962)

      —, The Semantics of Biblical Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1961)

      Bartholomew, C.G., ‘Introduction’, in A Royal Priesthood? The Use of the Bible Ethically and Politically (ed. C.G. Bartholomew, J. Chaplin, R. Song and A. Wolters; SHS 3; Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 1–45

      Bartholomew, C., C.S. Evans, M. Healy and M. Rae (eds.), ‘Behind’ the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation (SHS 4; Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003)

      Berger, P., A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, 1990)

      Bright, J., The Authority of the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967)

      Childs, B.S., Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970)

      —, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)

      Fowl, S.E., Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998)

      Gabler, J.P., ‘An Oration on the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each’, in The Flowering of Old Testament Theology: A Reader in Twentieth-Century Old Testament Theology, 1930–1990 (ed. B.C. Ollenburger, E.A. Martens and G.F. Hasel; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 493–502

      Gilkey, L., ‘Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language’, JR 41 (July 1961), 194–205

      Gunton, C., Christ and Creation (Paternoster: Carlisle; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992)

      Hahn, S., Kinship by Covenant: A Biblical Theological Analysis of Covenant Types and Texts in the Old and New Testaments (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004, forthcoming)

      Harrington, W.J., The Path of Biblical Theology (London and Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973)

      Hasel, G., Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 4th edn, 1991)

      Hebblethwaite, B., and E. Henderson (eds.), Divine Action: Studies Inspired by the Philosophical Theology of Austin Farrar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1990)

      Horton, M.S., Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002)

      Reventlow, H. Graf, Problems of Biblical Theology in the Twentieth Century (London: SCM Press, 1986)

      Seitz, C., ‘Christological Interpretation of Texts and Trinitarian Claims to Truth: An Engagement with Francis Watson’s Text and Truth’, SJT 52 (1999), 209–26

      Watson, F., Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1997)

      Wilken, R.L., The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003)

      Wright, G.E., God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press, 1952)

      —, The Old Testament against Its Environment (London: SCM Press, 1950)

      Notes

      1 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 95.

      2 Or some such response.

      3 As Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 8, rightly asserts, ‘The Christian Church responded to this literature as the authoritative word of God, and it remains existentially committed to an inquiry into its inner unity because of its confession of the one gospel of Jesus Christ which it proclaims to the world.’

      4 For a discussion of the definition of biblical theology see Barr, Concept, ch. 1. My definition is akin to what Barr calls ‘pan-biblical theology’ because it insists on relating biblical theology to the whole of the Bible. This is not to deny the value of theologies of parts of the Bible but to argue that biblical theology should always be oriented towards the whole. In this volume we have not insisted on a particular definition of biblical theology.

      5 Gabler, ‘An Oration’, 495.

      6 Gabler, ‘An Oration’, 495.

      7 Gabler, ‘An Oration’, 496.

      8 Childs, Biblical Theology, 4.

      9 Concept, 3.

      10 Wilken, The Spirit, xvii.

      11 Wilken, The Spirit, 53.

      12 Wilken, The Spirit, 60.

      13 Wilken, The Spirit, 63.

      14 The issues Irenaeus wrestled with remain highly relevant today. The relationship between the Old Testament and New Testament is perhaps the major issue in any biblical theology. See Reventlow, Problems of Biblical Theology, who devotes almost the entirety of his book to this issue. And Irenaeus’s fight to affirm the identity of the LORD with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ remains foundational for the practice of a Christian biblical theology. In response to salvation historical readings of the Bible, Reventlow (Problems, 14) asserts that by itself the Christ event should not be regarded as a continuation of the Old Testament event; only faith sees it thus. Such an (faith) assumption seems to me to be an indispensable starting point for a Christian biblical theology.

      15 Reventlow, Problems, 66. See Bartholomew and Goheen in this volume, as well as Gunton, Christ and Creation, for the importance of Irenaeus in discerning the shape of the Bible as a whole.

      16 On the church fathers and biblical theology see the chapter by Gerald Bray in this volume.

      17 See, e.g., Hasel, Old Testament Theology, ch. 1.This is not to say that it does not need to be retold. An urgent need of our time is the retelling of the story of biblical studies and biblical theology, so that we can truly discern what is at stake in the story - such consciousness is a vital ingredient in any renewal of biblical interpretation.

      18 I am leaning heavily here on Childs’s classic Biblical Theology in Crisis, which tells the story of the BTM.

      19 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 36, 37.

      20 Wright, God Who Acts, 15.

      21 Wright, God Who Acts, 17. Cf. Bright, Authority.

      22 See, e.g., Wright, Old Testament.

      23 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 56.

      24 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 72.

      25 Barr, ‘Theological Case’, 3, 4.

      26 Gilkey, ‘Cosmology’, 194.

      27 Gilkey, ‘Cosmology’, 195.

      28 Gilkey, ‘Cosmology’, 196.

      29 Gilkey, ‘Cosmology’, 201.

      30 Gilkey, ‘Cosmology’, 205.

      31 Berger, Rumour, 46, 47, helpfully alerts us to the fact that, ‘it may be conceded that there is in the modern world a certain type of consciousness that has difficulties with the supernatural. The statement remains, however, on the level of socio-historical diagnosis. The diagnosed condition is not thereupon elevated to the status of an absolute criterion: the contemporary situation is not immune to relativizing analysis. We may say that contemporary consciousness is such and such; we are left with the question of whether we will assent to it.’

      32 Already in Aquinas we find a careful distinction between univocal, equivocal and analogical language.

      33 See, e.g., Horton, Covenant and Eschatology, especially ch. 2. Alston and others have developed sustained critiques of Gilkey‘s view of God (not) acting in our world. Alston, ‘Divine and Human Action’, 258, argues that language of God may be partly univocal. Alston’s excellent ‘How to Think About Divine Action’ is devoted entirely to a rebuttal of Gilkey’s view of God’s action as articulated in Gilkey’s 1961 article. Alston also notes that, contra Gilkey, we need to distinguish univocal from literal language.

      34 See Barr, ‘The Concepts of History and Revelation’, in Old and New, 65–102.

      35 See Barr, Semantics.

      36 See Barr, ‘Trends and Prospects’, 267, for the language of double-talk.

      37 Biblical Words.

      38 Biblical Words, 49.

      39 Watson, Text and Truth, 18–28.

      40 Watson, Text and Truth, 24.

      41 Watson, Text and Truth, 26.

      42 Barr, ‘Trends and Prospects’, 270 (italics mine).

      43 Barr, Bible, 6.

      44 Watson, Text and Truth, 23, 24, also notes this tendency of Barr to work out of a particular theological style which privileges the more radical spectrum in theology.

      45 Goldsworthy and Dumbrell both worked for many years at Moore College in Sydney, Australia, where biblical theology has been a core part of the curriculum for many years, stemming from (Archbishop) Donald Robinson’s innovative leadership.

      46 See, e.g., Alexander and Rosner (eds.), New Dictionary of Biblical Theology: Exploringthe Unity and Diversity of Scripture.

      47 Consider, e.g., Brueggemann’s works on Old Testament theology.

      48 Writing in 1973, Harrington, Path, 260, noted that for all the work on biblical theology, ‘there are practically no theologies of the whole Bible’. A similar lack exists today.

      49 Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 11–29.

      50 This is an extension of his earlier proposal in Biblical Theology in Crisis.

      51 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 92.

      52 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 99.

      53 Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 67.

      54 Childs, Biblical Theologyof the Old and New Testaments, 78, 79.

      55 Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 76.

      56 This is not to say that Barr’s position does not hold real potential for doing biblical theology. In our chapter in this volume, Mike Goheen and I find Barr’s view of story most helpful in this respect.

      57 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 92.

      58 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 163.

      59 Of course, for this to happen we need a genuine pluralism in the academy. Too often a reigning ideology such as ‘the discourse of the academy’ is asserted so that an overtly theological approach is ruled out of court. See the dialogue between Bartholomew and Plantinga in Bartholomew et al. (eds.), ‘Behind’ the Text.

      60 Watson, Text and Truth, 216.

      61 See Seitz’s ‘Christological Interpretation’, a review of Watson’s Text and Truth. Commenting on the issue of a discrete witness, Seitz, ‘Christological Interpretation’, 218, 219, asserts that ‘the solution is to be found in a true trinitarian reading, based upon a regula fidei with exegetical parameters, not in a christological interpretation whose worry is a discrete voice of the Old Testament’.

      62 Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture, is an obvious example.

      63 Bartholomew, ‘Introduction’.

      64 Biblical Theology in Crisis, 124.

      65 An encouraging example of renewal of interest in biblical theology in Catholic circles is the academic and popular church-oriented work of Scott Hahn. His PhD, Kinship by Covenant, is a fascinating examination of the biblical theology of covenant in the Bible, ranging across the Testaments. Scott is also founder and president of the St Paul Center for Biblical Theology, whose website is well worth exploration: www.salvationhistory.com.

      Approaches to Biblical Theology

      1

      The Church Fathers and Biblical Theology

      Gerald Bray

      Defining our Terms

      Where do the church fathers stand in relation to biblical theology? In one sense, this is an extremely easy question to answer, because if we define the ‘church fathers’ as those Christian writers who expounded the faith in the centuries when the dominant Greco-Roman culture was still pagan, then it is clear that they all believed that the Judeo-Christian Scriptures were the only acceptable source of Christian theology, and in that sense they could all be called ‘biblical theologians’ virtually without exception. The difficulty comes when we turn to consider the meaning of the term ‘biblical theology’. If we believe that ‘biblical theology’ is the attempt to grasp Scripture in its totality, according to its own categories and inner dynamic, can the claim of the Fathers to have been ‘biblical theologians’ be allowed to stand, even if we have to make some reservations when it comes to the phrase ‘according to its own categories’.

      Problems with the assertion that patristic theology was simply ‘biblical theology’ inevitably arise when we try to impose modern understandings of what biblical theology is (or ought to be) on the ancient texts. Even allowing for the fact that modern interpreters are by no means always agreed about how the term ‘biblical theology’ ought to be defined,¹ it is clear that there are some things which are now included in it which would not have occurred to the Fathers. Likewise, there are other things, including some of the basic presuppositions of modern theological thought, which make establishing a genuine relationship between what the Fathers thought of as ‘biblical theology’ and what we now understand by that term somewhat problematic.

      Modern scholars think of ‘biblical theology’ primarily in analytical terms. They start with what they regard as the theology of Paul, or of the wisdom literature (or whatever), and then they try to situate this in relation to the rest of the canonical scriptural tradition. To take only the most familiar instance, modern scholars all believe that it is possible to discern peculiarly Pauline themes in his writings and to present a generally coherent picture of them, though by no means all of them would claim that Paul’s theology is either comprehensive or entirely consistent. They may assert that he developed his ideas over time, and even that he tailored his arguments to fit his different audiences, with the result that discrepancies can be detected when one compares different writings. Furthermore, many of them divide the Pauline corpus into ‘authentic’ and ‘deutero-Pauline’ writings, using theological content as one of the criteria for deciding which is which. What is true of Paul is even more true when his writings are set alongside the rest of the Bible. Broadly speaking, most modern students of biblical theology are prepared to believe that it developed over time, and that the later a document was written, the more sophisticated the theology it contains is likely to be. Loose ends and contradictions are an almost inevitable consequence of this pattern of development, so that we must not expect ‘biblical theology’ to offer us the kind of coherent picture that systematic theology demands.

      The analytical principles and practices associated with this modern form of biblical theology are certainly not beyond questioning, and even when they are accepted they can lead to some surprisingly varied conclusions, but it can safely be said that the Fathers would have found them alien and unacceptable. They approached the Bible as pagans who had been converted to the Christian gospel, and Scripture presented them with a mental and spiritual universe that struck them as entirely different from what they had grown up with. Some of them were prepared to grant that certain pagan philosophers, like Plato, had discovered elements of the truth–but this was either because those philosophers had read the Old Testament and adapted it to their own purposes or because they had stumbled upon some aspect of reality, rather like blind men in the dark, and had correctly guessed what it was they had encountered.² What we now call ‘natural’ and ‘philosophical’ theology was acceptable to the Fathers only in so far as it was validated by Scripture itself. Passages like Psalm 19, for example (‘The heavens declare the glory of God’), provided a basis on which they could recognize the validity of some pagan insights. The Apostle Paul’s appeal to the philosophers of Athens in Acts 17 showed that it was sometimes possible to quote pagan authors in support of Christian beliefs. But, for the Fathers, the true locus of authority was never in doubt. Pagan testimonies were valid only to the extent that they agreed with the biblical witness, and such agreement was likely to be haphazard and partial at best.

      As far as the influence of Hellenistic philosophy was concerned, the notion that a coherent, Christian theological system could be built up using only the evidence of nature and reason was anathema to the Fathers. It is not that they were unaware of the possibility of doing this–they knew only too well that someone could take a philosophical idea, find it in some biblical text, and erect an entire system on that slender basis. This was actually being done in the late first and early second century by a number of teachers whom we collectively refer to as ‘gnostics’. The first person to attempt a refutation of their methods was Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 202), who attacked their heresies (as he understood them) by claiming that the Bible was the only source of truth, that it spoke primarily of the Christian God and that it could be read and interpreted only according to a ‘rule of faith’ which outlined its fundamental teachings.³

      It is not too much to say that it was Scripture, even Scripture alone, which set their theological agenda, and it is noticeable that their apologetic was often strongest precisely at those points where Scripture clashed with what the average pagan believed.⁴ For example, almost all of the major church fathers wrote commentaries on the creation narrative in Genesis, because they understood that the Christian doctrine of creation was antithetical to what most ancient philosophers taught about the origin and nature of matter.⁵ It must be admitted that this sometimes led them to make assertions which most modern theologians, including very conservative ones, prefer to avoid or reject. Augustine, for instance, was quite prepared to argue that the world had been created relatively recently, and in the space of six days–particularly in the face of the standard pagan belief that matter was eternal. Almost no one would now follow him in this but it ought to be recognized that, however much it was stated and believed, it was not really fundamental to the Fathers’ doctrine of creation. Much more important was their belief that created matter was good, not evil (as the majority of pagans believed), and here–where it really matters–the modern reader is more inclined to go along with them.⁶ On a different level, the Fathers were forced by the evidence of Scripture to work out a theology in which traditional Jewish monotheism could be held in tandem–and in tension–with the assertion that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were all equally God. The Trinitarian theology which resulted flew in the face of everything that the Fathers had inherited from their Jewish and pagan backgrounds, and its emergence can only be explained as the result of accepting that the New Testament texts are the uniquely authoritative source of truth. The so-called Athanasian Creed, written sometime in the early sixth century, sums up their position quite succinctly:

      Just as we are compelled by the Christian Verity (i.e., the New Testament) to affirm that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all fully God and Lord, so are we forbidden by the Catholic Religion (i.e., the Hebrew and the Christian Verity–the two Testaments–taken together) to say that they are three gods or three lords.⁷

      In these few words, we have what may be the earliest conscious statement of what might be called a form of biblical theology–as long as that term is understood to mean the systematic exposition of the teaching of the canonical Scriptures. What the Fathers did not do, and (in fairness to them) could hardly have been expected to do, was to differentiate between the study of the Bible as a historical document and the systematic reflection on its contents which we now think of as ‘theology’. Of course, the Fathers were aware that the Bible had been written by a number of different people over a long period of time, and it was a fundamental part of their belief that the New Testament was a fuller revelation of God than the Old. But they did not understand these things in the same way that most modern interpreters do. Without in any way rejecting the truth of the historical narrative, the Fathers believed that it was necessary to see in it the eternal purpose of God at work, a purpose which was unchanging because it was rooted in his own eternal being.⁸ The main difference between ancient and modern approaches to ‘biblical theology’ is that the ancients thought that the Bible was an objective revelation from (and of) the eternal, unchanging God. Most modern commentators, on the other hand, think more in terms of an essentially subjective spiritual insight or inspiration occurring to the authors of Scripture and so deriving authority from their experience, not from the God of whom they speak.

      To the ancients, the God who spoke to Abraham was the same being who later spoke to Moses, David and the Christian apostles. They saw themselves in direct continuity with pre-Christian Israel, and they criticized the Jews of their own time for having rejected their heritage, which pointed to Christ. Nevertheless, the all-but-unanimous testimony of the Fathers is that God still has a purpose for his ancient chosen people, who will one day return to the faith and confess Christ. Thus Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who represents the Antiochene (more literal) tradition of ancient biblical interpretation says, when commenting on Romans 11:25:

      Paul insists that only a part of Israel has been hardened, for in fact many of them believe. He thus encourages them not to despair that others will be saved as well. After the Gentiles accepted the gospel, the Jews would believe, when the great Elijah would come to them and bring them the doctrine of faith. The Lord himself said as much: ‘Elijah will come and restore all things’ (Mt. 17:11; Mk. 9:12).⁹

      Commenting on the same text, from the rival Alexandrian (or more allegorical) school of thought, Cyril of Alexandria had this to say:

      Although it was rejected, Israel will also be saved eventually, a hope which Paul confirms by quoting this text of Scripture. For indeed, Israel will be saved in its own time and will be called at the end, after the calling of the Gentiles.¹⁰

      God may have said somewhat different things to the Old Testament prophets than he did to the New Testament apostles, but they both belonged to the same community of faith, which would be reunited at the end of time. What really mattered was that, in both cases, it was the same God speaking about the same basic reality–himself. Anomalies and paradoxes which might be observed by comparing one biblical text with another were therefore not to be understood as contradictions, or as errors on the part of the human authors, but as different facets of the one unchanging being of God. Augustine even went so far as to say that difficulties of harmonization between different parts of Scripture were put there by God himself, in order to keep us on our toes and make us probe more deeply into the divine reality.¹¹ Over time, this divine (self-) revelation grew in quantity but it did not change in quality–nor could it, since the being who is revealed does not change. For this reason, a term like ‘Pauline theology’ could have had no real meaning to a church father. Either Paul had an objective knowledge of God that anyone could have had, or he did not. If we accept that he had such knowledge, then it could not be essentially different from the knowledge of God possessed by Luke, John, Peter or even Abraham. ‘Paulinism’ would be reduced to a matter of style and vocabulary, which might be determined by the subject matter and circumstances of any particular epistle, but which would not affect the fundamental vision of God himself.

      The Fathers admitted that the Old Testament spoke in types and shadows of things which were to come in the future and would be fully revealed in the New Testament, but the things themselves were (and had to be) identical. Perhaps the Fathers could have assented to H. Graf Reventlow’s statement in Problems of Biblical Theology: ‘It was only faith, in the light of the experience of Christ, that discovered the historical dimension of God’s address in the Old Testament witnesses, which is necessarily extended in time.’¹² But they

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1