Around 1800 a genre of theological scholarship arose that proposed to instruct modern Christians about how they should interpret their Bibles. Variously known as “biblical theology,” “theology of the Old Testament,” “New Testament theology,” or some variation on those terms, such books told people—or at least sufficiently “modern” people—what were good and what were bad ways of reading the Bible, showing how to interpret the Bible looking for its history but ultimately for its theology. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to tell the story of that genre and to critique it. The purpose of the rest of the book is to offer an alternative.
Before modernity, Christians read their scriptures as if the text were the voice of God speaking directly to them. When the Apostle Paul refers to a scriptural text, for example, he simply says, “the writing says” or, to translate a bit more piously, “scripture says.”1 Scripture is simply its own voice, contemporaneous to Paul himself. Augustine similarly reads the Psalms as if they are speaking directly to him. He reads, “Let your anger deter you from sin” (Ps 4:4) and takes it to be a direct message from God, through “David,” of course, to Augustine and his fellow Christians.2 Although these premodern Christians knew that biblical texts had human authors, they read the texts not for what some author “behind” the text might have “meant” but for what the words of the text “said.” They acknowledged that David was the author of the Psalms (they thought, usually, that he was the author of all of them), that Solomon was the author of Proverbs and a few other books, and that Paul was the author of the letters that bore his name, but for ancient or medieval Christians, the main voice of the text was the text itself. The text was its own agent and had its own voice. People considered that the text was what was speaking, not a historically “reconstructed” author behind the text.
These premodern Christians also believed that the text spoke doctrinally and ethically, not just historically. In other words, they didn’t feel the need to ascertain what the text meant in its historical context before they could ascertain what it meant for themselves.3 They believed they could take the text at face value to give them Christian doctrine directly, which was also taught by the church. When they read the stories of the texts, they took them to be “true.” Granted, they didn’t mean true in the way modern people have often meant true—as being “just like history” or “just like science.” They knew that scripture could speak symbolically or allegorically. In those cases, the “truth” of the text’s narratives needed spiritual insight to gather its “truth” from any possible misleading historical, literal, or scientific error. But correctly perceived, the text of scripture itself told stories that were “true.” The “truth” of the story was in the story itself.4
In a sense, what I’m saying is that, before modernity, theology and biblical scholarship were the same thing. Medieval education in dogma and theology was fashioned around the reading of scripture. Scripture was assumed to be itself theology. And biblical writers were assumed to be speaking directly to the needs of the church in the year 500, or 1000, or 1300.
Though I’m greatly simplifying a complex historical development, I think it is fair to say that things began to change around 1800, at first, admittedly, only among scholars but eventually among many lay Christians in the pews. Beginning around 1800 the idea started gaining ground that a historical account of the meaning of the text of the Bible must precede—and furnish the basis for—a theological or doctrinal statement of Christian belief. As I will tell the story below in more detail, scholars began dividing up the duties of scholarship into two different tasks or even disciplines. First, they argued, scholars had to explain what the biblical texts meant in their ancient contexts, what they meant to their ancient authors, what they likely meant to their original readers or auditors. Only after the ancient meaning was established could scholars then apply those ancient meanings to modern Christian uses. In the modern world of theology and biblical studies, scholars began believing that they had to establish first the ancient “meaning” of the text and only after that ask what doctrine, theology, or ethics modern Christians should derive from those ancient texts today.
In thinking about biblical texts as occupying two different worlds—the ancient and the modern—modern scholars also, probably without realizing it, shifted their attention from the words of the texts themselves to the human author behind the text or the event the text was supposed to be describing. The meaning of the text increasingly became not “what is the meaning of the words of the text as they would be read by a competent reader?” but, instead, either “what happened?” or “what did the human author intend to say?” This was such a subtle shift that most modern readers failed to discern it, assuming, instead, that the meaning of a text is necessarily what the author meant.5 But that has never been the only way human beings have read texts. Throughout human history, texts have been read in many different ways, and the “intention of the author” has been only one among many other “tools” human beings have used to establish “the meaning” of a text. In modern biblical scholarship, however, a shift occurred in people’s minds: whereas Christians used to perceive scriptural texts to mean in many different ways (verbally word by single word, by sentence, typologically, allegorically, symbolically, anagogically, to name only some of the options), modern scholars insisted that at least the primary, or foundational, meaning of the text was a meaning we could imagine as the original author’s “intention.” Thus the ultimate goal of interpreting scripture shifted in the modern world from a concentration on the text itself to an imagined authorial intention or past event. The meaning was now not “in” the text but “behind” the text, usually in the author.
It is no accident that this change in theology and biblical studies happened around the same time as the rise in the authority of modern historiography. There had always been something like “history,” some telling of stories that purported to represent past events. But in the last couple of centuries people developed an increased sense that “the modern world” was vastly different from all eras before us.6 The divide between “the ancients” and “the moderns” came to dominate much of intellectual life and even popular culture. The rise of modern historiography worked with assumed or stated rules. To name just a few: the closer a witness (textual, archeological, whatever) was to an event, the better; the use of “primary sources” was preferred to the use of “secondary sources”; God, gods, or other “supernatural” beings could not be taken into consideration as agents or causes of events of “history”; different persons or events in history had to be treated analogically in comparison to similar persons or events (that is, no one or no thing could be incomparably unique in history).
Beginning around 1800, therefore, theologians began applying this kind of historical consciousness to their study of the biblical texts. The different documents of the Bible came from many different historical periods and different geographical locations. If we were to understand these texts correctly, we had to read them as historical documents, which is here just to say, as documents created by human beings in the ancient worlds of the Near East or the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Most theologians continued to believe that these texts would still be meaningful, even “truthful,” to us modern Christians, but the primary meaning of the texts had to be arrived at by means of philological, and especially historiographical, methods. The rise of what came to be known as “historical criticism” of the Bible—to put it simply, reading biblical documents for what we imagine their meaning would have been for their original authors and readers—corresponded with the rise of the hegemony in many academic disciplines of history.
Thus proceeded the development within the larger discipline of theology of the subfield “Theology of the Bible,” or, as I will narrow the topic for my purposes in this book, “Theology of the New Testament.” The genre—and the way biblical studies have been taught to most theological students throughout the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first—operates on the assumption that the “first” meaning of a biblical text must be arrived at by using methods of modern historiography. Theological applications of the meanings of those texts are supposed to “depend on” or be “founded on” the primary ancient meaning of the text. History has become something like the most important handmaiden to Christian theology—or, one might say, the governor needed to orient or control theological speculation.
Although I was myself initiated into modern historical criticism of the Bible and biblical theology during my own theological education at a very modern Princeton Theological Seminary and then more deeply in my doctoral program at Yale University, I gradually came to be dissatisfied with the reigning control such historical methods attempted on Christian interpretation of scripture. I came to believe that theological students were not being adequately taught how to think theologically and how to read Christian scripture for creative theological purposes rather than historical purposes.7 Priests, pastors, and ministers were also therefore not well-equipped to help laypeople in their churches read the Bible in ways truly helpful for their lives and for more mature ways of thinking about “what they were supposed to believe.” Biblical interpretation seemed increasingly to me to be cut off from a mature faith and understanding of Christian doctrine.
I also realized that through decades of being a biblical scholar but also reciting the creeds Sunday after Sunday, I had, without often thinking about it, developed my own ways of “thinking theologically.” I had developed ways of being true to “the facts and history” of the Bible, recognizing that little of the Bible stands up to the standards of modern “history,” that more of the Bible was “mythology” than anything related to either science or history, and yet I came to such knowledge while remaining a Christian who accepted the traditional doctrines of orthodox Christianity. How had I done that? How had I held in one life and one mind faith in radically premodern confessions and teachings while nonetheless working as a modern and very critical scholar? I have written this book in an attempt to work that out and to illustrate how I, no longer content with the genre Theology of the New Testament, might yet practice “theology with the New Testament.”
Most of this book, therefore, contains my own experiments in theological interpretation of Christian scripture that use but are not subservient to historical methods and historical criticism. It is organized along the lines of (at least one version of) systematic theology, with the major chapters addressing seven “usual suspects” of systematics: from epistemology to ecclesiology. Indeed, apart from my beginning with the theological topics of epistemology and theology of scripture, the remaining chapter topics are taken from traditional systematic theological templates, especially those of Protestant theology. I chose such traditional subjects for chapter organization because I was intentionally setting for myself constraints: I wanted to demonstrate that innovative (at least from the modernist point of view) methods of biblical interpretation could nonetheless take place within traditional theological categories and concerns. Before moving into my own interpretations, I will further illustrate the biblical theology of modernism by means of explaining the history of its rise and describing and critiquing three major examples of the genre.
Johann Philipp Gabler
Most accounts of the history of biblical theology point to an academic address delivered by Johann Philipp Gabler in 1787 as providing a convenient beginning point for the genre, or at least the fundamental ideas that led to the production of biblical theologies.8 Some scholars have noted that the significance of the occasion may be obvious to scholars more in hindsight than when Gabler spoke. Gabler delivered the lecture as his official inaugural speech upon appointment as professor at the University of Altdorf. It was no doubt published in some form at the time, though the original seems to be lost.9 It was delivered in Latin and seems to have had little effect on either biblical studies or theology until many years later. Apparently, not until 1836, almost fifty years after it was delivered, did a scholar refer to the speech as a significant turning point in the discipline. Indeed, it may have been the case that the text was available for wider use only after it was published after the death of Gabler by his sons in 1831 in a volume of Gabler’s collected writings.10 Regardless of the immediate impact of Gabler’s lecture, it has come to be cited by most histories of biblical theology as an important inauguration of the subdiscipline. At any rate, an analysis of Gabler’s speech may serve as a suitable entrée into a description of the modern genre of biblical theology.
Gabler begins with the problem posed by the existence of one Bible but many different interpretations: how can scripture provide a “secure sanctuary” for sacred knowledge when there is such “ambiguity and vicissitude of human knowledge” among different individuals and “the various sects” of Christianity? Gabler begins, therefore, with a stated need for epistemological security amid different interpretations of the Bible. He admits that one reason for such differences is that some people simply “read into” the text their own ideas and prejudices. But he adds that the confusion arises also because people don’t recognize the difference (a) between “religion” and “theology” and (b) between biblical theology and dogmatic theology. Most of the rest of his lecture is dedicated to explaining these differences and advocating that scholars treat each of these topics separately rather than confusing them.
“Religion” refers to the simple teachings of scripture about “what each Christian ought to know and believe and do in order to secure happiness in this life and in the life to come.” Religion is “everyday, transparently clear knowledge” (136). “Theology,” on the other hand, is complex, subtle, and must be taught and learned. Theology refers to the teachings of the Bible elaborated by interaction with other disciplines, especially philosophy and history.
Theology is then itself divided into biblical theology and dogmatic theology. Biblical theology is what we have when we try simply to describe what ancient authors believed and taught about their religion, and this is to be produced using the philological and historical tools developed in the Humanist and Renaissance movements, but especially in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, toward the end of which Gabler is speaking. Biblical theology, therefore, is a straightforward description of the theology “contained in” the Bible but not elaborated by modern needs of dogmatics. Once the philologian or historian has established, for example, what Paul believed about some theological topic and has compared Paul’s teachings to those derived from other biblical authors, it is the duty of the dogmatic theologian (today we would probably prefer some term such as “systematic” theologian) to bring in issues from other disciplines, especially philosophy, to show how that biblical theology may be used in our own, very different, historical situation. Dogmatic theology, for Gabler, is to be derived from biblical theology and then elaborated for modern consumption.
It is important to notice that each pair—religion versus theology and biblical theology versus dogmatic theology—is structured so that the first item is “simple” and the second “complex.” Moreover, for Gabler, the second item in each pair must be built on the foundation of the first item: theology is founded on the simplicity of religion, and dogmatic theology is founded on the relative simplicity of biblical theology. Both sides of each of these pairs is necessary for modern Christian theology. The tasks move from simple to complex. They also move from historical construction of ancient ideas to modern elaboration of those ancient ideas for systematic theology for modern Christians. Moreover, much that we find in the Bible will be particular to its own historical setting and not usable for modern Christians. It is the job of the scholar to ascertain the universal and eternal truths by separating them from the historically contingent particulars of the ancient text. As John Sandys-Wunsch put it, “The result of Gabler’s theology, then, is to postulate a double biblical theology, one setting out biblical religion as it appeared in history and the other setting out God’s eternal truths enclosed in this historical shell.”11
In spite of my observation that Gabler’s speech may not have been seen at the time as revolutionary or of supreme historical significance, it does offer an opportunity for analyzing the development of modern historical criticism of the Bible. Gabler insists, for example, on recognizing the vast difference between ancient historical times and ours: the worldviews, mythological ideas, and assumptions of ancient authors cannot be taken as doctrine for us moderns. The Mosaic laws, he insists, were appropriate for their time but not for Christian observation. Paul was expressing a contingency of his own culture when he urged the veiling of women (1 Cor 11). For Gabler it is self-evident that such teachings have no universal or eternal relevance or truth.12 Our consciousness of the difference between the ancient and the modern is a central theme of modern biblical scholarship. We simply cannot transfer the ancient world into ours, and we must also be careful not to impute our own ideas to the ancient text. Rather, we must carefully discern what in the ancient text is applicable for us—and what not.
Other themes of modern historical criticism can be found in Gabler’s text. He insists, for instance, that the different authors of the Bible and the different texts differ from one another, even in significant ways. They should not be hastily harmonized (140). He warns against allegorical or “spiritual” interpretation.13 He insists on the use of only proper, modern philological and historical methods. Gabler also recognizes that “revelation” within the Bible developed over time (see commentary at 153). Recognizing what is specific to different historical periods of the Bible helps the modern scholar recognize “what was meant for all times” (154). These are all important themes of modern biblical criticism taught to just about every seminary or divinity student to this day.
The most important aspect of Gabler’s method for my purposes, however, is how he structures the different tasks of biblical theology. The first, the one that is of first importance, is to do the work of history: what is religion in the Bible and what is theology? What is the biblical theology of the different ancient authors and texts? Only once those descriptive tasks have been accomplished, carefully using the tools of modern philology and historiography, can the modern theologian provide the more elaborated system of doctrine necessary for a mature theology for modern churches. The historical task provides the epistemological foundation, the basis, for the secondarily elaborated modern theological application. This is the cardinal rule for almost all “theologies of the Bible” produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: history first, theological application second.14
Most of the biblical theology attempted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least that of the more critical bent, generally followed, theoretically if not in actual practice, Gabler’s insistence that theological systems must be founded on historical research. Gabler’s arguments became even more significant after they were updated and promoted by William Wrede in 1897.15 Though beginning with Gabler and claiming that much of what Gabler called for was by Wrede’s time “self-evident” to most scholars, Wrede actually goes further than Gabler and insists that the goal of New Testament theology should not be refining theology or dogma at all, but describing the pure “history” of early Christian belief and practices.16 At any rate, the positing of New Testament theology on a historical “base” has been the dominant quest for most practitioners of the genre for the past two hundred years.
This general “base/superstructure” of “history/theology” was significantly challenged in the last decade of the nineteenth century by the writings of Martin Kähler, especially in his famous lecture, first published in 1892, Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus (The so-called historical Jesus and the historic, biblical Christ).17 Admittedly, Kähler’s concern was with nineteenth-century “Life of Jesus” proposals, but as I shall clarify shortly, the arguments Kähler here proposes for historical Jesus research are just as applicable for any attempt to “base” modern Christian theology on some indispensable “historical foundation,” even when that is a construction of the “historical” meaning of a biblical text read in its original context.
Kähler begins by insisting that “we do not possess any sources for a ‘Life of Jesus’ which a historian can accept as reliable and adequate.”18 Scholars had come to realize that the Gospels are themselves theological documents, that we have no eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life and ministry, and that no ancient “sources” rise to the level of adequate “records” in the sense needed by modern biographers. But the more devastating critique laid out by Kähler centers on what it is that constitutes Christian faith in the first place. Is Christian faith the belief that “Jesus the man” or “Jesus in the flesh” existed? Isn’t it rather that Jesus is “the Word become flesh”? Even unbelievers can accept that Jesus of Nazareth existed and was “flesh.” What makes Christian faith Christian is “the Word” (God!) part of the formula, or perhaps we could say, the combination of the flesh and the Word. The historical details of the “flesh” part of that formula are (1) insufficient for faith and (2) relatively unavailable to us.19
Kähler insists also that belief in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus is an indispensable part of Christian faith: “The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament” (65). Moreover, “to confess him as Christ is to confess his unique, supra-historical significance for the whole of humanity” (65). The apostles and other disciples did not go out preaching about a mere man. Inspired by their “experience” of the resurrection and his glory, they preached about a person who was much more than any merely historical man. This leads to what is perhaps Kähler’s more famous slogan: “This real Christ is the Christ who is preached. The Christ who is preached, however, is the Christ of faith.” The merely “historical” (historische) Jesus, a constantly variable product of modern scholars, is not the object of Christian faith; we believe rather in the Jesus Christ whose incarnation, ministry, and resurrection changed people then and changes people still, the “historic” (geschichtliche) Christ.20
Kähler’s work strongly influenced both systematic theologians and biblical scholars after him.21 Some have credited his arguments, coupled with Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), with causing a hiatus in historical Jesus research until the revival of such interests in the 1950s and 1960s. At any rate, his work exerted powerful influence certainly on Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, the former considered by many the most significant systematic theologian and the latter occupying that role in biblical studies of the twentieth century. Neither Barth nor Bultmann entertained any interest in the historical Jesus. Yet what they took from Kähler for the historical Jesus was definitely not absorbed with regard for their views of the use of historical criticism in the interpretation of the New Testament. In fact, both of them, when writing about the meaning of New Testament texts, often assume that the historical construction of the ancient meaning of the text remains normative for modern interpretations of it.22 To demonstrate this and to illustrate the problems of the twentieth-century genre of Theology of the New Testament, I turn to Barth’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.
Karl Barth
Barth’s commentary, Der Römerbrief, was first published in 1918 and famously caused a stir, primarily because it seemed more a theological treatise than the usual modern historical-critical scholarly commentary and because it was correctly seen as a radical rejection of the German liberalism that had so ruled German theology before the First World War. The commentary went through six editions, Barth writing new prefaces for each. In fact, reading the different prefaces itself provides insight into what Barth thought he was doing. For example, in his preface to the English translation, published in 1933 and based on the sixth edition, Barth shows that he felt stung by readers of his commentary who took him to be offering more a “spiritual” reading of Romans. He insists, on the contrary, that his “sole aim was to interpret Scripture,” to “ex-plain the text.” “I shall not be impressed in the least by general propositions concerning the value or lack of value of my ‘spiritual outlook,’ or of my ‘religious position,’ or of my ‘general view of life.’ My book deals with one issue, and with one issue only. Did Paul think and speak in general and in detail in the manner in which I have interpreted him as thinking and speaking? Or did he think and speak altogether differently?”23 Since Barth explicitly rejects the label “spiritual” interpretation, I assume he would agree that the criteria for ascertaining what Paul “thought” and “spoke” were normal historiographical criteria, that is, through what I have been calling historical criticism. Therefore it is by those standards that I intend to evaluate Barth’s interpretation of Paul’s letter to the Romans: does it work adequately with the methods and criteria of modern historiography?
Barth himself says that the meaning of Romans can be summed up in a few short sentences: “Where the faithfulness of God encounters the fidelity of men, there is manifested His righteousness. There shall the righteous man live. This is the theme of the Epistle to the Romans” (42). But this characterization is woefully inadequate for the huge, complex commentary supplied by Barth. In order to analyze what Romans is about for Barth, we must illustrate the complexity of his interpretation. And though what I provide here is itself only a short and too simple description of the book, some such description is necessary in order to comment on the nature of Barth’s exegesis.
Romans, for Barth, is a story of human predicament and the radical means God offers for the way through death to life, through imprisonment to freedom. “Men” find themselves to be “slaves and puppets of things, of ‘Nature’ and of ‘Civilization,’ whose dissolution and establishing by God they have overlooked.”24 The history of religions is a history of men trying to achieve God’s approval (111), get God’s reward, or escape the ultimate meaninglessness of their existence. Men through religion seek to save themselves. Religion, however, even at its best, can take man only so far. Barth often castigates “religion” (and he does seem to believe that there is such a thing as “religion” in general and universally). “All religions either reckon that human achievements in this world—some concrete human behavior or disposition—constitute a claim to the favour of God and must be rewarded by Him (ii. 6); or else they reckon that human achievements are themselves the reward of God, since they are the tangible and recognizable products of a transformation of human behaviour that has been wrought by God. . . . In all religions it is therefore possible to disregard or to escape from the paradox of faith.”25 The church is also thus indicted. In fact, the church seems for Barth to be merely the best form of religion he can conceive. The church, even at its best, comes up short. The church is “a living witness in history that men have exhausted every human possibility” (338). The church has done, though, some positive work in history. Commenting on Rom 7:22–25, Barth says, “We have seen at last the reality of religion; we have recognized what men are. How vast a gulf separates the nineteenth-century conquering-hero attitude to religion from that disgust of men at themselves, which is the characteristic mark of true religion!” (269). Note that here “religion” is a good thing, to an extent. But it is not “faith” or “God” or the essence of the gospel. If anything, “true religion” may be something like a handmaiden helping, in its desperation, to lead to the need for faith and the gospel. Note also Barth’s implied attack, as so often in his book, on the optimism and faith in “progress” of liberal theology.
As the church seems to be for Barth “religion at its best,” so Abraham for him represents man at its best. If man could be saved by his own efforts or achievements, surely Abraham would have been justified (118–23). But he was not by his works. And by “works” Barth means (as would just about all Protestant interpreters of his time) not just works of the Jewish law but any human deeds: “Works are the behavior of men, when they do not apprehend the judgement regulating the whole relationship of God and man” (367, commenting on Rom 9:32). “Abraham . . . stands under the krisis of everything human” (120). “Like all other men, Abraham stands under negation. That he awoke to his position and was aware of the krisis, that in this krisis he feared God, that he heard the ‘No’ of God and understood it as His ‘Yes’—this is Abraham’s faith” (123).
The only way out of the predicament is by faith in Jesus Christ. But faith shows us we trust a God about whose real nature we can know nothing.26 Faith, however, is not just confession of creeds or agreeing to propositions. “Faith is conversion: it is the radically new disposition of the man who stands naked before God and has been wholly impoverished that he may procure the one pearl of great price; it is the attitude of the man who for the sake of Jesus has lost his own soul. Faith is the faithfulness of God, ever secreted in and beyond all human ideas and affirmations about Him, and beyond every positive religious achievement” (98). “Faith” is “conversion” but to a completely apophatic notion of God. “Faith means motionlessness, silence, worship—it means not-knowing” (202). But that is the way to freedom. There is nothing more to do than “to go forth into the fresh air and to love the undiscoverable God” (76).
I have quoted so much of Barth because it is important to hear how he expounds his theology. The question now is, was this Paul’s theology? Is Barth’s problem the same problem for which Paul attempted an answer, the narrative his teachings assumed, and the solution proposed by Romans as read by historical criticism? I do believe Barth’s theology is good theology, at least for the middle of the twentieth century and his political location.27 But is it good history? To answer that question, I have to describe recent developments in scholarship on Paul and Romans and sketch out my own interpretation of the letter to the Romans.
The “center” of attention for the Letter to the Romans has, over the past several decades, shifted for scholars. Previously, especially in Protestant interpretation, the first half of the letter, say, Rom 1–5 or 1–8, has been taken as the theologically significant part of the letter. Today, on the contrary, many scholars believe we get to the true goal of Paul’s writing only in chapters 9–11, for the theology, and chapters 12–15, for the practical matters.28 Paul is writing to a predominantly gentile church to explain to them his understanding of God’s inscrutable will and his vision of what is yet to come. Paul’s understanding of his call and apostleship (he would not have considered himself “converted” in any sense) is that he has been appointed by God as a special messenger to take the gospel of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah to the nations outside Israel. This is because Paul reads certain Old Testament prophets as predicting that before the very end—when the Messiah will arrive, defeat the forces of evil, and establish God’s reign in heaven and earth—all the nations will flock to Israel. All “the nations,” the gentiles, non-Israelites will come to believe that they also must go to Jerusalem, worship the God of Israel, and await the arrival of his son, the Messiah. Before the final end, according to Paul, the nations must be evangelized and added to the body of Israel.
It is unclear just how Paul did it, but for whatever reason he came to believe it was not God’s will that the believing gentiles follow the Law of Moses. God had never intended to bring the gentiles into Israel through circumcision and law observance. Paul’s argument in Romans is that it was God’s will all along to justify all human beings by faith, not by works of the Mosaic Law. This is proven for Paul by the fact that Abraham, the father of the Jews, was himself justified by his faith before he was circumcised and before Moses had given the law.
Note that in Paul’s mind it was perfectly fine that the Jews keep their ancestral laws, but it was not required for gentiles. In fact, as Paul had argued in his more radical letter to the Galatians, if gentiles even attempt to keep the Law of Moses, they will be “cut off” from Christ; they will “fall from grace” (Gal 5:4). There are not, in Paul’s preaching, two ways to salvation, one for the Jews by law observance and another for gentiles by faith alone. All, Jews and gentiles alike, are justified by grace through faith. But that need not mean that Jews should cease observing the law. In fact, it seems certain that Paul himself was a law-abiding Jew when he found himself in a Jewish context (see 1 Cor 9:20).
But Paul had said some radical things about the law in the Letter to the Galatians, so that he has developed a reputation for antinomianism by the time he writes his letter to the Romans. Paul is also planning a trip to Jerusalem, mainly to deliver money to the Judean church, money he has collected from all his churches, which are all gentile. In Paul’s mind, the collection will cement the unity of his gentile churches with the Jewish church in Judea. So one of the main reasons he writes to the Roman church is to explain how he is not against the law but supports it, when its role is correctly understood. He does this also because he wants the support of the Roman church, which seems to comprise both gentiles and Jews, for his upcoming trip to Jerusalem.
Paul writes to explain with more nuance his views on the law. But he also writes to insist that although there may be an increasing number of gentiles in churches around the Mediterranean, the Jews still have priority in God’s plan, and that although most Jews are currently unbelievers, that was God’s will all along to allow for the bringing in of the nations. God’s ultimate plan is to save “all Israel,” granted, in some yet unknown manner (Rom 11:26).
The problem with Paul’s plan is that he knows that the Judean disciples may not accept his and the gentiles’ gift of money. Accepting the gift, after all, would imply that they approved of Paul’s ministry and even of his theology. And they may not actually approve of either. If the Jewish disciples reject Paul’s gift, that would be a serious blow to the unity of the Jewish–gentile church that is the goal of Paul’s entire ministry.
At least for a significant consensus of scholars today, the Letter to the Romans is not about individual salvation of universal Man in any kind of abstract sense. It is not about universal human experience of guilt. It is not about some abstract doctrine of “justification by grace through faith alone” rather than “justification by human works and achievement.” It is about ethnicity, politics, money, status, and the joining of gentiles into an eventually saved and united Israel in an eschatological kingdom. This may not be the “correct” theory of the original writing of Romans, but it is at least much more sensitive to the social, cultural, political, and ethnic situation of Paul’s writing than is Barth’s.
Barth makes of Romans something like a theological allegory for a twentieth-century rejection of liberalism, idealism, and optimism and the advocacy of a theology of crisis and existential decision in the face of the absence of knowledge of the nature of God. Barth takes Paul’s reference to “the Jew” to refer to “religious or ecclesiological man” and “the Greek” to be a stand-in for “man of the world” (40, 63). But for Paul’s rhetoric to work in his own context, his naming of “the Jews” must refer to actual Jews (though I think “Greek” for Paul is a stand-in for gentiles in general). Paul refers to “those under the law,” and he seems obviously enough to have to be referring to law-abiding Jews (Rom 3:19–20). But Barth takes the reference to be “the idealists, the especially favored, those who have an experience of God or, at least, a remembrance of such experience” (87; see 87–91). I take it that Barth is thinking of “liberals” or perhaps of all humanity. But that would make no sense in Paul’s historical context. Paul’s references to Jews and gentiles must remain concretely ethnic. Barth turns it all to modern theological allegory.
For several entire chapters Barth reads any reference to “Jews” or “Israel” to be a reference not to actual Jews but to “the church” and Christians. Barth takes Paul’s lament over his own people (Rom 9:1–5) to be about “the church,” which is the best human “possibility” but not the gospel and not the “existential krisis” and paradox of faith. “Who can teach us to speak existentially and not ecclesiastically? No one except God. And even should we be taught of God, His incognito remains” (334; see 330–39). This is true of Barth’s treatment of all of Rom 9–11. References to “Israel” or “my people” are taken by Barth to refer to the church. “Gentiles” are often taken by Barth to be people outside the church (see 400–405, for example). The “casting away” of unbelieving Israel, for Paul, is taken by Barth to be the “casting away” of “the church” (405). “And so all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:26, NRSV), which in current scholarship is central for reading Romans as being about actual Jews, is interpreted by Barth to mean that even the church will need saving by God’s grace and mercy (416).
Barth makes many other interpretive moves that cannot be supported by modern historical criticism. In interpreting Rom 1:19–21, where Paul is actually insisting that the gentiles did “know” enough about God to be culpable for forsaking the worship of the one God and inventing idols, Barth rather makes it all about our not “knowing” anything about God: “And what does this mean but that we can know nothing of God, that we are not God, that the Lord is to be feared?” (46–47). Again, I agree with the theology. As will become clear in this book, I am as committed as Barth to “negative” or apophatic theology. But for Paul’s context in Rom 1, he must get his readers to accept that the gentiles did “know” enough about the God of Israel to be worthy of the punishment God meted out to them described in Rom 1:18–32.
There are many other instances where Barth’s interpretations make fine theology but bad historiography.29 In any case, Barth’s interpretation of Romans is not historical criticism at all. It is acceptable theology based on bad history.30 This will be a theme of my book: modern theologies of the New Testament were failures from a Christian point of view precisely because what they ended up offering was bad history, bad theology, or both. My task now is to demonstrate my thesis by analysis of two influential New Testament scholars of the twentieth century: Rudolf Bultmann as representing a more liberal approach, though he also rejected the liberalism of early German theology, and George Eldon Ladd, who was one of the most influential evangelical scholars of the New Testament in the last half of the twentieth century. I choose them not because they are especially guilty of the problems I am highlighting but precisely because they were both exceptional and famous scholars of their times. If they couldn’t pull the genre off, perhaps it can’t be done.
Rudolf Bultmann
I can spend fewer pages on Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament because in many ways my criticisms of it are similar to those I have already leveled against Barth’s Romans commentary.31 In the middle of the twentieth century, people tended to read Barth and Bultmann as two opposite poles of German language theology: Barth often caricatured as the conservative and Bultmann the liberal. Indeed, in his Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament, published in 1958, Alan Richardson calls Bultmann’s theology heretical, a judgment most biblical scholars or theologians would reject.32 From our perspective, at least if we are comparing Bultmann’s theology to Barth’s commentary on Romans, the two look much alike. They both give little attention to the doctrinal concerns of systematic theology, they reject the previous “liberalism” of earlier German theology, they claim that biblical theology is not concerned with political reform or challenge of political structures but is instead, at its best, about the existential decision individuals are called upon by the gospel to make in a situation of “krisis,” or crisis. Much of my criticism of Bultmann’s theology, therefore, and especially his treatment of Paul, will echo my critique of Barth above, both in terms of their theologies and their exegesis.
Famously, Bultmann argued that the message of Jesus of Nazareth and the “historical Jesus” itself are not New Testament theology but the “presupposition” of New Testament theology, which is not the message of Jesus but the preached message (the “kerygma”) about Jesus Christ. Bultmann does proceed, however, to expound on the message preached and enacted by Jesus. As Barth had done, Bultmann projects the stereotypes of Judaism from his own German Protestant assumptions onto the Judaism of the time of Jesus and Paul. Jesus’s message “is a great protest against Jewish Legalism—i.e. against a form of piety which regards the will of God as expressed in the written Law and in the Tradition which interprets it, a piety which endeavors to win God’s favor by the toil of minutely fulfilling the Law’s stipulations.”33 The Jewish emphasis on ritual and cultic laws ends up “vitiating” the “motivation to ethical conduct.” “That is the result not only in the wide extent to which the idea of reward and punishment becomes the motivation, but also—and this is the characteristic thing for Judaism—that the obedience man owes to God and to His demand for good is understood as a purely formal one; i.e. as an obedience which fulfills the letter of the law, obeying a law simply because it is commended without asking the reason, the meaning, of its demand” (1.11–12). Moreover, according to Bultmann, “the error of Jewish legalism” leads necessarily to “works of supererogation” (1.12). In this quotation we see the common practice of the time to conflate a stereotype of Judaism with a matching stereotype of Roman Catholicism, here in typical Protestant condemnation of “supererogation,” familiar since the time of Luther.
Bultmann insists, “Polemic against the temple cult is completely absent from the words of Jesus” (1.17). He explains that Jesus showed little concern for the temple cult because the temple and its cult had, by the time of Jesus, lost its centrality and meaning for Jews, “for Judaism was no longer a cultic religion, but had become a religion of observance” (1.17). This is a completely unhistorical retrojection into Jesus’s day of the way Judaism was perceived in mid twentieth-century Germany: having no temple or sacrificial cult any longer, the Jews had turned to legalism and raised the significance of the Law to its highest and most ridiculous level.
Jesus was also not at all concerned with “an ethic of world-reform.” Jesus’s message is not about any kind of politics but concerns only the “individual”: “It is an ethic that, by demanding more than the law that regulates human society does and requiring of the individual the waiver of his own rights, makes the individual immediately responsible to God.” The “Reign of God” has nothing to do with “the molding of human society” (1.19). Here Bultmann introduces a term absolutely central to his program, but one he must completely redefine from its ancient (and certainly more accurate) meaning: “eschatological.” Whereas “eschatological,” when used by most scholars, necessarily has something to do with the “end of the world as we know it”—after all, eschaton means “end” in Greek—to Bultmann, good New Testament theology must not be about anything that will occur in the future. “Eschatological” rather refers to “Now,” and an eschatological event is the proper response demanded of individuals by the preached message of the gospel in the now-time. What Bultmann means by “eschatological” is not political or social, in spite of the fact that any historically accurate interpretation of the “kingdom of God” in the ancient context must necessarily include reference to a heavenly–earthly establishment of God’s social and political reign, and almost always on earth. What Bultmann means by “eschatological” is the relationship of the individual to God in a decisive, existential change of life in response to the preached message in the now-time.
There is nothing, therefore, “apocalyptic” about Bultmann’s “eschatological.” Thus he can say, “Judgment and salvation are eschatological events in the strict sense; i.e. events in which the present world and all history cease to be.” Jesus “‘de-historicized’ God and man” (1.25). Therefore, “eschatology” for Bultmann, in the teaching of Jesus, has nothing to do with the actual end of this world or creation of a new heaven and earth. It is all about the individual face to face with the demand for a “decision” about God and his fate: “Jesus’ idea of God does not essentially differ from that of the Old Testament and of Judaism, though it is true that in the common piety of Judaism faith in God the Creator had weakened even while it was strictly preserved in its official theology and confession” (1.23). As had many Protestant theologians before him, Bultmann here combines a connection of Jesus to the great Old Testament prophets with a disconnection of Jesus from his contemporary fellow Jews. What could have counted as the “official teaching” of Judaism in Jesus’s day could only be a product of German Protestant fantasy.
Bultmann’s “Judaism” is an anachronistic and dangerous stereotype.34 Jesus’s message is somehow eschatological without having anything to do with history, an actual end, or politics. Jesus’s message has nothing to do with the temple or society, only with the individual. Jesus’s message does not demand particular ethical actions, only a decision. This is all midcentury German, Protestant, dialectical theology, not the historical Jesus or even the Jesus of the Gospels. It isn’t a decent construction of prerabbinic Judaism or even of twentieth-century Judaism taken without prejudice. It is modern ideology.
In any case, the climax of Bultmann’s first volume comes not with Jesus or the “Hellenistic Church Aside from Paul” but with Paul, for Bultmann the “founder of Christian theology” (1.187). Paul’s “conversion,” Bultmann insists, “was not a conversion of repentance,” which in Bultmann’s system would place it too much within “Judaism” and the more “Jewish” forms of early Christianity. But Bultmann is not done: “Neither, of course, was it one of emancipating enlightenment.” By these terms, Bultmann refers to ancient philosophy, the various kinds of “religion” he lumps under the terms “hermetic” and “Gnostic,” and to modern liberalism, all in one. “Rather,” Bultmann concludes, Paul’s “conversion” “was obedient submission to the judgment of God, made known in the cross of Christ, upon all human accomplishment and boasting” (1.187).
As he had done for Jesus, Bultmann must also do for Paul: separate him as much as possible from “Judaism”: “The immediate contrast is that what for the Jews is a matter of hope is for Paul a present reality—or, better is also a present reality” (1.279). Again, however, the word “decisive” characterizes Paul’s gospel. “The contrast between Paul and Judaism consists not merely in his assertion of the present reality of righteousness, but also in a much more decisive thesis—the one which concerns the condition to which God’s acquitting decision is tied. The Jew takes it for granted that this condition is keeping the Law, the accomplishing of ‘works’ prescribed by the Law. In direct contrast to this view Paul’s thesis runs—to consider its negative aspect first: ‘without works of the Law’” (1.279). According to Bultmann, Paul was no more interested in the historical Jesus than Bultmann was. What is central is the kerygma of the significance of the Christ-event: “In the word of proclamation Christ’s death-and-resurrection becomes a possibility of existence in regard to which a decision must be made, and in the fact that faith seizes this possibility and appropriates it as the power that determines the existence of the man of faith” (1.302).
Moreover, just as the message of Jesus had no concerns about cosmology, so Paul begins his letter to the Romans, his great attempt to explain his theology to a church he did not found, not with cosmology but with the “plight of mankind.” This again differentiates Paul’s message and theology from “the Hermetic tractates,” by which Bultmann means all kinds of theology or philosophy he considers to fall under the influence of “Gnosticism.” Instead, Paul begins Romans “by exposing the plight of mankind, so that then the proclamation of God’s salvation-deed becomes a decision-question” (1.301). The “man-under-the-Law” is made to see his situation as the “‘miserable wretch’ groaning for deliverance from the ‘body of death.’”
All of this may be good-enough theology, hyper-Protestant though it is. But from the point of view of historical criticism, all the criticisms leveled against Barth’s presentation of the theology of Romans must be made also against Bultmann’s, as well as Bultmann’s presentation of Paul entire. It may be good theology. (I think it was, given the limitations of its historical, political, and ideological context.) It may be a stellar version of dialectical “crisis” theology. But it is not good history. It is not a defensible historical-critical construction of Paul or his letters.
Things do not get any better when Bultmann turns to the other of his favorite New Testament “theologians,” the author of the Fourth Gospel. As he had for Paul, Bultmann takes his demythologizing program into the Gospel of John (not just as a secondary interpretation of John): “Is the devil a reality for John in the mythical sense? That is very doubtful, to say the least” (2.17). And as he had for Paul, Bultmann begins with the “plight” of human beings, in this case, when they are trying to be religious. Without reproducing the detailed critique I offer above about Bultmann’s treatment of Paul when he turns to John, I may simply summarize that Bultmann reads the Fourth Gospel to be not about the relation of the author’s community to the Jewish synagogue, as would be taught by most scholars of our time. Nor is the author of the Gospel concerned about conflicts between believers and nonbelieving Jews over the proper understanding of the divinity of Jesus, again as would be assumed by most scholars today. Rather, Bultmann takes the Fourth Gospel to be about the inadequacies of religion (see 2.27, for example) and the need for an existential decision by the individual in a situation of crisis (see 2.18). Again, this may be good theology, at least in the middle of the twentieth century and in reaction both to older forms of theological liberalism, on one side, and the German theology and ideology of the Third Reich, on the other. But it is not good historical criticism.
Along with many other scholars I have argued that the main message of the Fourth Gospel is about the correct acceptance of Jesus’s true identity, as “divine” in a very “high” sense. It is also about communities of Jews fracturing and separating from other communities.35 The message of the Fourth Gospel is both theological and social. Making the Gospel be about an individual’s “decision” to arrive at a “self-understanding” changes the meaning of the Gospel to be about twentieth-century individualism and existentialism. Again, what may be good theology is here bad history.
George Eldon Ladd
George Eldon Ladd was one of the most respected scholars of the New Testament among conservative or evangelical Christians in the twentieth century. He spent a long career teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary. His Theology of the New Testament was written for and used as a textbook by seminary students, especially those at evangelical institutions. And Ladd saw his book as a major answer to what he viewed as more liberal treatments of New Testament theology, that of Bultmann especially: there are many references throughout Ladd’s Theology to Bultmann’s book, which had been published around twenty years earlier. I select Ladd’s Theology because it is self-consciously and openly conservative and evangelical, yet he explicitly intends to follow the methods of modern historical criticism, and he fashions his book to fit squarely within the modern genre of Theology of the New Testament. I view it as perhaps the best of the genre from an evangelical scholar in the twentieth century. Thus I will use it also to advance my thesis that modern “theologies of the New Testament” render either bad history, bad theology, or both. In the case of Ladd’s Theology, I believe it is both.
Ladd agrees with Krister Stendahl and most other scholars contemporary to himself about what defines biblical theology in the modern world: “Biblical theology is that discipline which sets forth the message of the books of the Bible in their historical setting. Biblical theology is primarily a descriptive discipline.”36 That is, biblical theology should not be “constructive, systematic” theology offered as “normative” for a Christian or church. Its sole purpose, in this understanding, is to describe the theology of the different biblical books or authors as they would have been understood in their ancient context, as reflecting the “intentions” of the authors or the likely understandings of the texts by their original readers and hearers. Modern scholars must not read into the biblical texts the theologies they themselves happen to hold.
Ladd recognizes that this task necessitates the use of modern historiography, and Ladd understands “history” to be “the modern historian’s reconstruction of the events of the past by the critical use of ancient documents. In such a reconstruction, there must be accepted critical procedures, ‘ground-rules’” (29). At least when it comes to the stories and claims of non-Christian ancient texts, “history” will not admit the historicity of “mythology”: “When one reads in Greek literature of the alleged activities of the gods among men, he does not consider this to be history but mythology” (29). Yet Ladd does not allow this differentiation between history and myth to affect his (therefore “uncritical”) acceptance of all stories in the New Testament that critical scholars do take to be “mythology” (such as Bultmann, as Ladd laments). Ladd pushes all texts in the New Testament so that they may be counted as “historical” and also in agreement with what Ladd takes to be proper Christian doctrine.
Examples occur throughout the book. Recognizing that Paul’s words in Rom 11:25–27, “All Israel shall be saved,” could be read as a prediction by Paul that indeed “all Jews” will eventually “be saved,” Ladd, who as a conservative Christian was scarcely going to accept some kind of “universal salvation” for Jews, insists that Paul need not mean “all Jews” but only “the people as a whole,” though he doesn’t explain what he means by that (562). Admitting that the list of the twelve tribes found in Revelation 7 “are not the twelve tribes of the Old Testament Israel” and moreover do not match any other list in the Bible, Ladd simply insists that this was a “deliberate irregular listing of the twelve tribes” by John in order to indicate that it is to be read symbolically (627). Ladd accepts all sorts of stories of the New Testament as historical with no question. He quotes Paul’s words in Acts 22:3 as the actual words of Paul (360), in spite of much scholarship that has shown that the author of Acts almost certainly composed the speeches himself. Ladd doesn’t even bring up the possibility of whether the Damascus road conversion narratives of Paul are historical. He simply takes it for granted that they are (366).
Ladd briefly entertains the opinions of critical scholars that many of the documents of the New Testament were not written by the persons whose names they bear. But he ends up insisting that they all are authentic: James, the brother of Jesus, wrote James; Peter wrote both 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3 John were written by the same person who wrote the Fourth Gospel, and though Ladd refrains from insisting that he was John, son of Zebedee, one of the twelve disciples, in the end he implies that it was: Ladd says that the Gospel was written by one of the “intimate” disciples of Jesus (222). Ladd does not explicitly say that Jude was written by Judah / Judas (the Hebrew and Greek forms of the name), brother of James and therefore also a brother of Jesus, but he implies as much since he never raises the question of the pseudepigraphy of Jude and calls the author Jude throughout (607–8). Ladd does not explicitly discuss the problems of taking all thirteen “Pauline” letters to be actually by Paul; he assumes they all are.
Throughout his book Ladd too often appropriates a certain rhetorical strategy popular especially among conservative Christian scholars. He will admit that “a previous generation” may have held to a particular critical view or that a more skeptical consensus may have existed in the past, but in order to counter that previous view or consensus, Ladd merely points to some more recent (conservative) scholarship that has made a case for the opposite opinion. So, for example, though noting that “a generation ago” it was customary to emphasize the radical diversity of teachings and assumptions in the New Testament, Ladd simply mentions other scholarship that more recently has emphasized the unity of the New Testament documents (33).37 But pointing to conservative scholars who simply insist on a more conservative interpretation is not the practice of historiography; it is just claiming that because “someone else” has given conservatives permission to dismiss the more skeptical arguments of their colleagues, those more skeptical interpretations need not bother anyone. This is special pleading, not critical historiography.
That Ladd is not really a practitioner of modern, critical historiography is obvious in what he insists must be accepted as “historical.” To remind ourselves: what should be accepted, at least in principle, as historical is an account that could and most likely would be accepted as historical by modern, professional historians—say, those holding professorships in the best universities and colleges regardless of their religious inclinations or lack thereof. If an account is put forward by a conservative Christian as historical and yet it is quite unlikely that anyone but a Christian would find the argument persuasive, that account is not granted the status of history. History is what is made by historians. Ladd seems not to understand that.
For example, Ladd insists that “Israel’s history is different from all other history” (27). But to claim that the history of Israel is unique simply because Israel has been especially chosen and used by God is not to make a historical case at all. It is common knowledge among real historians that either (1) nothing in history—no human being, no nation, no people—is truly “unique,” or (2) everything is. A historical biography will not present a George Washington that is completely unlike every other human being in history, or is completely like every other human being. Uniqueness is not really a historical category. Either nothing is or everything is—according to how one understands the term “unique.”
Moreover, real historians do not include the actions of God in their histories. One may believe that God caused Washington to be the first president of the United States of America, but any historian of the American presidency who offers that as a historical thesis will be laughed out of court. So when Ladd simply insists that “biblical theology” must be allowed to describe “what God has done” in history, he has departed from historiography entirely (see 25). When Ladd claims, “History also reveals God in wrath and judgment” (27), he simply shows he does not recognize the difference between stories, which may or may not be historical, and history, which, in the modern world, does not claim to observe the actions of God.
Ladd insists on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus and the empty tomb narratives (319). He says that the only reason people do not accept these as historical is because of their prejudice and adherence to a rigid, modern assumption that such things are not possible. But that is not at all the reason to reject the accounts as historical. Many scholars, including some Christian scholars, do not accept these as history because (as I demonstrate below in chapter 4 in my treatment of the historicity of the empty tomb narratives) there are contradictions among all the accounts. The stories contradict one another, and none of them even claims to represent eyewitness testimony to the actual resurrection. Not only is Ladd’s treatment of the resurrection accounts bad historiography—actually not historiography at all by modern critical standards—it is also bad exegesis because he ignores the differences in the accounts about place, time, people, details, and more. Whereas Ladd often practices bad historiography, this is also bad attention to the details of the text, that is, bad exegesis.
One criterion we may use for deciding whether a scholar’s account is one by a “critical scholar of the Bible” is the following: If one can predict the conclusion a scholar will arrive at with regard to authorship, historicity, or doctrinal “correctness” by knowing the author’s confessional position, that author is not a critical scholar. If one can point to no specific issue in which an author denies the historicity, authenticity, or orthodoxy of a detail from the text, that author is not a critical scholar. A critical scholar of the Bible is one who is willing to offer an interpretation of a text of the Bible that does not necessarily uphold that scholar’s own theological opinions.
Before leaving Ladd, however, I need to demonstrate my other claim about his book: that it is not merely bad history but also inadequate theology. This can be demonstrated in Ladd’s treatment of the Holy Spirit and his lack of any discussion of the trinity. To his credit, he does not attempt to mount an argument for reading the trinity “in” or “out of” the New Testament. He seems to recognize that there is no doctrine of the trinity “in” the New Testament when read through the rigors and requirements of historical criticism.38 But that just leaves him in a theological conundrum precisely because the trinity is one of the most central, significant, and indispensable doctrines of Christian orthodoxy.
Ladd does mention the Holy Spirit several times in his study, noting the many places where Paul’s language about the “spirit,” for example, may be taken as a reference to “the” Holy Spirit. But his most concentrated treatment of the Holy Spirit comes in one chapter devoted mainly to the spirit in the Gospel of John (286–97). Ladd takes “spirit” in John 4:23 to refer “to the Holy Spirit and not to inner ‘spiritual’ worship as opposed to outward forms” (292). The Holy Spirit is a person or at least “a separate personality” from Christ and the Father. John uses neuter pronouns for the “Paraclete,” or Holy Spirit, when demanded by the grammar of the context (pneuma is neuter, so it takes a neuter pronoun: 295). But then John will switch and use male terms for the Spirit (“he”; 14:26; 15:26; 16:13). To Ladd, this demonstrates that the Holy Spirit is a person in the Gospel of John. Throughout this section Ladd is working with an assumption of trinitarian doctrine: the three persons of the trinity are all divine and all God but without being the same person; they are distinct but nonetheless One God. But Ladd never says any of this explicitly.
And that leaves Ladd with his insufficient theology. If Jesus is divine, is he divine as fully as God the Father is? If so, how? Is the Holy Spirit divine as Jesus is divine as the Father is divine? May we worship Jesus? May we worship the Holy Spirit? If we do, are we not practicing idolatry and polytheism? Without the doctrine of the trinity or something much like it, how does Ladd’s theology avoid polytheism and idolatry, on the one side, or lack of recognition of the deity of Christ and the Spirit, on the other? Ladd, in spite of all his efforts to read the New Testament in line with Christian orthodoxy—even to the extent of practicing faulty historical criticism to get there—leaves his readers with insufficiently orthodox theology. The modernist theology of the New Testament project has ended up with bad history, bad theology, or both.
The Problem Is the Genre
My survey of the work of Barth, Bultmann, and Ladd is not meant to demonstrate that their proposals were especially bad. Indeed, I chose them because I consider them to be some of the best representatives of New Testament theology from the twentieth century. My point is that the genre itself is the problem. As long as Christian scholars insist that they are simply “describing” the theology that is really “in” the text itself, and they arrive at their conclusions using historical criticism, as long as the “meaning” they claim to “find” in the text is supposed to be also what the ancient author “intended” or the ancient audience would have understood, they cannot produce robust, sufficient, orthodox Christian theology.
Orthodoxy took several centuries to be developed. That is totally understandable. Disciples of Jesus apparently began “worshipping” him fairly soon after his death, after some of them had come to believe he had been seen alive after his death. They prayed to him; they took him to be a special mediator between themselves and God. They took Jesus to be the Jewish Messiah, but in a special way: as a messiah who was “divine,” at least in some sense. Likewise, as their liturgies and prayers developed, they began speaking of a “spirit” that was more than simply God’s spirit or Jesus’s spirit but was itself a being with whom they could be in some kind of relationship. And eventually they also began thinking of that Spirit as having some kind of personality. As we will see throughout this book, doctrine and theology follow practice.39 Making sense of one’s beliefs is a felt need only once practices have become the first realities. Once early disciples recognized that they were worshipping Jesus and the Spirit alongside “God” and began realizing they wanted to remain believers in “the one God” and not become polytheists, they had to come up with rational ways to explain that to themselves. Thus the development, over a long period of time, of doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and the Spirit, their relation to “God,” eventually termed “the Father” rather than simply “the only God alongside Jesus and the Spirit.” Moreover, they had to explain to themselves—and to other Christians who disagreed with their understanding—the precise relationship between Jesus and the Father, the Spirit and the Father, the Spirit and Jesus. Christology, as it was to become more fully developed in the fourth century, and the doctrine of the trinity were not developed sufficiently by the authors of the New Testament to meet the needs of later Christians for making sense of their practices and liturgies. So expecting to find orthodox Christian doctrine “in” the texts of the New Testament read in their original historical context is unrealistic and anachronistic. The modern genre of biblical theology was flawed from the beginning, if the goal was to arrive at sufficient, robust, orthodox Christian doctrine and theology by a simple reading of the New Testament texts in their historical contexts.40
Thus we may survey many other examples of such attempts, organized and written in a variety of ways. Many of them make the assumption—the modernist assumption—that to get the “best” or “purest” form of Christianity we must go to “the source,” the “earliest” kind of Christianity. Walter F. Adehey, in his 1894 work, expresses this notion perfectly: “The literary and historical study of Biblical Theology should precede the more metaphysical speculations of Systematic Theology, because no just conception either of Judaism or of Christianity can be obtained before we have come to perceive the thoughts of the inspired writers in their original purity. Here we have the stream at its fountain-head.”41 Perhaps more recent scholars have come to be suspicious of the idea that Christianity is “purest” the closer we can get to “the fountainhead,” but the overriding interest in “the original” meaning of biblical texts still rules much work, at least on New Testament theology.
Different attempts at New Testament theology may take different tacks or shapes and vary from conservative to less so. Whereas some scholars arrange their studies by chronology, treating books of the New Testament in order of their probable dates of composition, others organize theirs by theological topics.42 In all cases, however, New Testament theology is a genre of historical studies that ascertains the primary meaning of the text as foundational in order then to be used or applied by modern theologians or everyday Christians. That is the problem with the genre and why it has been a failure, at least from an orthodox Christian point of view.
What This Book Is and What It Is Not
First, what it is not. Obviously, this book is not a theology of the New Testament. As I discuss various theological topics and particular Christian doctrines, I feel free to draw from the New Testament, to offer different kinds of readings, and to be creative in interpretations and applications of the text. I do at times use historical criticism, that is, the various tools and methods developed in modernity to construct the ancient meanings of these texts in their likely historical contexts.43 But I often offer readings of biblical texts to convey theological truths though I know that the “meaning” I am taking from the text would not have been even understandable to the original author or readers. I practice creative anachronism. I read into the text all kinds of views I would not say are simply in the text. This is creative, Christian interpretation that uses the text of the Bible as something with which I “think theologically.”
I should, though, address the issue of why just “theology with the New Testament” and not with the whole Bible? Scripture for Christians is the entire Bible, Old and New Testaments. Why do I focus in this book on the New Testament? First, I want to be very clear that I agree that Christian scripture is the entire Bible. I do not believe Christians should especially privilege the New Testament over the Old. I am no Marcionite who believes we can ignore, dismiss, or denigrate the Old Testament. Though I will occasionally focus on passages from the Old Testament (and I explain in the chapter titled “Scripture” below why I am content to use that term rather than “Hebrew Bible” or other recent suggestions), I concentrate on the New Testament merely because that is the area of my expertise. My choice to concentrate on the New Testament says nothing theologically but is simply an example of my own limitations as a scholar.
Further on what this book is not: it is not an apology for or defense of Christianity, orthodoxy, or theology. I happen to believe that God needs no defense from me or from anyone else. If readers want to dismiss a particular argument of mine or a particular doctrine or theological idea I am seeking to explain, that is fine with me. I am not offering an apology of anything for anyone. I am merely attempting to explain why and how I continue to find traditional Christian doctrines and confessions “true,” why I’m willing to confess the creeds, even though I am a critical scholar who knows much of the Bible is not “true” when taken as history or science. This is not an apology but an attempt at explanation and illustration.
Finally, the book is also not evangelism. I am not particularly concerned to convert anyone to Christianity. I don’t believe anyone should come to faith out of fear. I do not, could not, trust a God who created and maintained an elaborate structure to torture human beings for eternity. I will say below why there may be some ways I could understand “hell” as a reality, but not at all in the traditional sense of a place where sinners are left to roast and suffer forever at the will of God. Given my faith and theology, that is simply an impossibility. So I have no reason to run about attempting to evangelize or convert anyone. I offer my attempts at theology because I find theology meaningful and comforting (though also sometimes disturbing, as all good theology must at times be), and if that helps anyone else, fine. But my goal again is explanation and illustration, not proselytism.
Now for what the book is. In this book I attempt to offer a nonfoundationalist, postmodern, Marxist, orthodox, ecumenical, and provisional theological interpretation of the New Testament. First is that it is theology. I am attempting here not just an interpretation of the theological assumptions or views of the biblical authors. I am instead actually offering my own theology, the theological understandings I have held over many years that help me make sense of what I confess in church.
I do not believe theology is “talk about God,” though I recognize that to be a common way theologians have sometimes defined “theology.”44 I believe God is so radically unavailable to us in God’s very self that we should refrain from thinking that our theological musings or declarations are actually “about God,” as if God is “comprehensible” rather than, as I argue below, ultimately “incomprehensible.”
Moreover, if theology must be understood as talk about God, that would mean, it seems to me, that atheists or agnostics could not “do” theology. Or that Jews could not practice Christian theology. But I have known Jews who seemed to me to be good theologians even of Christian propositions and beliefs. Theology is second-order reflection on first-order language about God and faith. Theology is not faith, nor does it require faith. It may sometimes be, in that traditional phrase, “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum). But for me theology is simply showing how statements of faith and belief can be seen as rational, sensible, and coherent. Theology, in this book, is to be understood not as talk directly “about God” but as “talk about talk about God.”45
I emphasize, however, that this is not to imply some kind of epistemological hierarchy between “talk about God” and “talk about talk about God,” as if one is higher than the other or as if one provides the foundation for the other. It is merely to admit that many Christians may not need, in their own lives, lots of reflective theology. They may worship, believe, pray, and follow traditional liturgy with no felt need for elaborate reflection about the why of it all. My approach is just to admit that Christian theology, when done right, proceeds from Christian practice and belief rather than preceding or prescribing Christian practice.
“Foundationalism” is the term I have used in several publications to describe a certain modernist understanding about the relation of “fact” to “evidence.” In science the idea was that the job of scientists was just to “observe nature,” to put aside all bias and prejudice and simply “describe” the “world” they “discover.” But as many studies have demonstrated over the past few decades, that has never been the way scientists actually work. Rather they begin with ideas, they invent experiments, and they create facts. Scientific “facts” are made, not “found.”46 (I like the philological “fact” that the English word derives from the Latin factum, literally meaning “something made.”) Foundationalism is the idea that we, scientists with nature or readers with texts, can find some place that will provide a dependable “basis” of firm, secure, incontrovertible “knowledge” on which we can then build systems of secondary values, beliefs, systems of thought or belief. Nonfoundationalists argue that no such place exists in the universe, either for science or history or textual interpretation. It is interpretation “all the way down.”
Foundationalism in textual interpretation is what I’ve been illustrating in this chapter: the idea that we will be on more secure ground in our interpretations of scripture for ourselves if we first “find” the ancient, historical “meaning” of the text. On that “foundation” we can then build our (admittedly more speculative) modern theologies or ethics. Nonfoundationalists such as myself argue that there is no “meaning” “back there” in history or “in the text” to be uncovered before “interpretation” can then take off. It is all interpretation. The difference between “knowledge” and “belief” is simply one of degree of certainty—more or less—but knowledge is never completely and indisputably certain beyond all doubt and interpretation.47 This book is based on a nonfoundationalist theory of reality, including texts and their meanings.
And that dispute of modernist foundationalism is one of the things I mean by “postmodern.” I can illustrate something of what I mean by “postmodern” with a citation of Carl Braaten from his introduction to Martin Kähler’s So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ. Braaten commented that Kähler’s career pursued more a theological than philosophical direction, but, he adds, Kähler “always retained the philosopher’s love for ultimate reality, universal validity, and absolute certainty.”48 I would say that trio provides a good portrait, not of all “philosophy” but of modernism. The modernism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries searched for ways to discern and describe “ultimate reality” free from bias, prejudice, or even interpretation. For any truth to be ultimately true, moreover, it had to be universally valid. And modern science was the search not for half truths, interpretations, or beliefs but absolute certainty. What makes a position or theory or theology postmodern is that it has given up on those quests. It still has the hangovers from modernism; for example, it uses modern inventions such as science and historiography, but it has lost the confidence that we human beings have any place in the universe we could find so as to arrive at ultimate, universal truths that will provide us with absolute certainty.
Postmodern is not premodern. Postmodern thinkers such as myself have no nostalgia to return to the premodern or medieval or ancient. We recognize that we are ourselves to a great extent products of modernism. We just no longer have confidence in the results of modernism, and we no longer believe even in the questions of modernism. We believe that true statements will be true in some context and not true in other contexts or when interpreted in different systems of meaning-making. Thus throughout this book I make the case that no doctrine or theological proposition is always and universally true. If it is true at all, it is true only “in a sense,” perhaps in a historical sense, or a theological sense, or a Christian sense, or a mythological sense. I also argue that any Christian statement, even if true in some sense, will necessarily also be false when interpreted in a different sense. I take it that I think this way because my thinking is postmodern. I have gone “through” modernism but have for the most part left its epistemologies behind.
By using the term “Marxist” to describe my approach, I simply mean I have been convinced by Marx and Marxist scholarship that the most important phenomenon to be critically studied and debated in our time is capitalism. Instead of taking capitalism to be “natural,” the “end of history,” “human nature,” or “just the way things are,” Marxists, in my usage, believe our lives are shaped, influenced, and even oppressed by the social, cultural, and economic system of capitalism more than by any other comparable force, whether culture, family, psychology, nature, or whatever other thing anyone may suggest. By citing Marxism, I mean that whatever I want to study, I need to keep its material manifestations and activities and realities in the forefront of my mind. I mean that historical materialism—the analysis of material, social, cultural realities—must never be left out of our methodologies.
By calling my approach Marxist, I am not advocating any kind of communist prescription for society or government. What I call postmodern Marxism is the acceptance of the diagnosis of capitalism by Marx, but without entertaining any of the “prescriptions” offered by him or any other theorists about “what we should replace capitalism with.” I don’t know what should or will replace capitalism. But Marxism has taught me to think of capitalism not as simply natural or necessarily “the way things are and the way we human beings act and will always act.” Marxism teaches us to realize constantly that capitalism—its modes of production, its social and political structures, its ideology—is historical. There was a time when it was not, so there will certainly be a time when it will be no longer. Our job now is to think about capitalism, to avoid being sucked into its ideology and self-defense and “naturalness,” and to realize that human beings do not have to be oppressed by capitalist exploitation and ideology forever. By focusing, even when doing theology, on bodies, class structure and class conflict, gender, economy, and politics, my theology is materialist, or Marxist.
But why am I so concerned about orthodoxy? It is certainly not because I am afraid that if I don’t remain faithful to traditional Christian doctrine I will “go to hell” as a “heretic” or “heathen.” As I said, that kind of notion of hell is nowhere part of my theology or worldview. I am concerned with orthodoxy simply because that is my starting point. I find myself remaining in churches, saying the creeds, reciting the prayers of the Book of Common Prayer or other prayer books, even though I may interpret those statements, confessions, or doctrines in less than traditional ways. My attempt to remain orthodox is simply because that is where I find myself.49 Indeed, though many of my readers may assume that orthodoxy is the possession only of Christians who are conservative or reactionary in their theology or politics or both, a main goal of my writing is to take orthodoxy out of the hands of conservative Christians and to show both scholars and laypeople how to read the Bible beyond historical criticism.
But what I mean by “orthodox” is nothing very exact. I simply mean the kind of Christian statements and claims made by classical Christian thinkers, such as the “Rule of Faith” of Irenaeus, along with the great ecumenical creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, the Creed of St. Athanasius (Quicunque Vult), and the Apostles Creed, along with the “Definition” of Chalcedon.50
It may be noticed that I cite what I take to be the great ecumenical creeds from before the splits among Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants. Those great creeds are called ecumenical because, at least as the church has traditionally claimed, they were formed by councils that included Christians from “the whole inhabited world,” or, the oikoumene, to transliterate the Greek. Though I was raised in a fundamentalist church in small-town Texas, I have for decades attended Episcopal churches, and I am an active member in a high church, Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish. One aspiration of our parish is to be “catholic” in the sense of representing the commonly held doctrines associated with the three main branches of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant, all in the broad senses of those terms. Thus I have avoided including discussion of what I take to be Roman Catholic doctrines special to the Council of Trent or later decisions and proclamations, such as the immaculate conception, transubstantiation, or papal infallibility. I do discuss in the chapter titled “Spirit” below the Filioque Controversy that so unfortunately divides Eastern from Western churches, but I avoid taking a firm stand on one or the other side of that issue.
Though I admit that some of my views are doubtless influenced by my past and present affiliations, my theology has been heavily influenced also by central and famous figures of theology, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. In fact, Thomas has come into my thoughts mainly through four contemporary theologians who all interpret Thomas through their leftist political views and through Wittgensteinian “ordinary language philosophy.” I am here referring to the Roman Catholic Irish or British theologians Herbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, Nicholas Lash, and to my Yale colleague Denys Turner. Thus, though I admit influences from Protestantism and particularly the Anglican tradition, I intend the theology here explained to be recognizable as orthodox, “basic Christianity” also by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, at least for the most part.
Finally comes merely my admission that this theology is, as all theology must be, incomplete and provisional. Much better theologians than I have insisted that all Christian theology is provisional.51 The doing of theology is never ending. We must be constant in reform, revision, experiment, if for no other reason than we must remain open to all new and unexpected movements of the holy spirit.52 I especially sense my own inadequacies, as someone trained more as a historian and biblical exegete than as a constructive theologian. But I take heart in the knowledge that good theologians before me have insisted that all Christian theology is and must be provisional. This one certainly is.
Notes
1. See Rom 4:3; 10:11; 11:2. But other New Testament authors do the same (John 7:42; 19:37; Acts 1:16). See the discussion below in the chapter titled “Scripture.” All quotations from the Bible are my translations unless otherwise noted.
2. Confessions 9:10. See fuller discussion in Martin, Pedagogy, 56–60.
3. I allude here to the famous essay by Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary.”
4. The allusion here is to Hans Frei’s famous book Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.
5. The most well known representative of this position is Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, but it has been widely assumed throughout the twentieth century, only to be almost universally rejected by philosophers and theorists of textual interpretation since around 1980. See my discussion below in the chapter “Scripture.”
6. For one description of the sense of the “different worlds,” see Volf, Captive to the Word, 5–6.
7. My research confirming this, along with my suggestions for changes in theological curriculum, can be found in Martin, Pedagogy.
8. Examples are practically endless, but one may consult at least the following: Ladd, Theology of the New Testament, 14; Boers, What Is New Testament Theology?; Sandys-Wunsch and Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler,” 149; Guthrie, New Testament Theology, 21–28; Adam, Making; Esler, New Testament Theology, 2, 12–20; Matera, New Testament Theology, xix–xx.
9. See Sandys-Wunsch and Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler.” I have depended on the English translation provided there and also on the commentary by Sandys-Wunsch that accompanies the translation. It is on that commentary that I depend for this historical overview of the publication and impact of the speech in its own time.
10. Ibid., 149.
11. Ibid., 157.
12. Ibid., 142.
13. The word Gabler uses here is “trope,” but, as the translators point out, this was in Gabler’s context a technical term referring to allegorical or similar methods of interpretation: 140n4.
14. Again, see Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary.”
15. Wrede, Über Aufgabe und Methode. For English translation, see Morgan, Nature of New Testament Theology. Morgan translates the title of Wrede’s work as “The Tasks and Methods of ‘New Testament Theology,’” but that deemphasizes Wrede’s designation of the genre as “so-called New Testament theology” (my emphasis).
16. For the “self-evident” statement, see “Tasks and Methods,” 68. For discussion, see Adam, Making Sense, 63–76.
17. Kähler, So-Called Historical Jesus. The English translation is based on the second edition, published in 1896. For the particulars of publications, see the introduction by Braaten, esp. 9n17.
18. Kähler, 48 (all citations are to the English translation).
19. This is all in the long Enlightenment intellectual tradition inspired by Lessing, that “Accidental truths of history can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason.” Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” 53. Or, as Søren Kierkegaard famously put it, “How can something of a historical nature be decisive for an eternal happiness?,” Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 86.
20. For explanation of Kähler’s rather idiosyncratic use of these two German words (even he would not be consistent in maintaining this difference in all his writings), see the introduction by Braaten, 20–21.
21. See the introduction to Kähler by Braaten.
22. As I point out in note 30 below, this is true for Barth in his commentary on Romans, though less so in his later writings.
23. Barth, Epistle, ix–x.
24. This is offered as an interpretation of Rom 1:23–25. Ibid., 51. I use the terms “men” and sometimes “Man” or “man,” because it is Barth’s terminology but also because it helps us keep in mind that his theology is universalistic in that all human beings come to God as individuals, but all human beings are, in the system of salvation, the same: “for men are one” (51).
25. Ibid., 111.
26. See ibid., 46–47. The unknowability of God is a theme repeated throughout the book; contrary to his reputation as a “dogmatic” theologian in the popular sense of that term, Barth’s theology is apophatic and much dependent on traditional negative theologians.
27. I could offer, though I will not here, criticisms of Barth’s theology, at least as it appears in his commentary. For starters, I would fault it for its individualism and relative lack of interest in the social and political. I would criticize its universalism in its assumptions about “man,” society, and “religion.” But that is for another day.
28. There is so much published scholarship on the “new perspective” on both Paul and Romans that it is impossible to give even a representative list, but I would name as among some of the most influential works Stendahl, “Apostle Paul”; Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism; Stowers, Rereading of Romans; Gager, Reinventing Paul; Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul. For a fuller treatment of my own interpretation, see Martin, New Testament, 231–46.
29. It is not clear, for example, what Barth means by “history” or “historical” when he insists that Abraham’s “uncircumcision” has “a real status in history” (128).
30. I emphasize that this criticism of Barth’s method applies to his insistence in Der Römerbrief that he is practicing a simple literal exegesis of Paul’s intended message. In his later theology Barth admits that a historical, literal reading of the Bible will not necessarily produce adequately robust orthodox dogma, but that should not be seen as a problem. See his discussion of the doctrine of the trinity and the Bible in Church Dogmatics, I/1, pp. 301–12. I believe Barth was much less careful in his Römerbrief to distinguish legitimate theological interpretation from historical interpretation. And what Barth means by “historical” also becomes much clearer and more sophisticated in his later work. For example, in terms clearly influenced by Kähler’s earlier differentiation between historisch and geschichtlich, Barth explains in Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 325, “Historical does not mean historically demonstrable or historically demonstrated. . . . What we mean by this is rather that the Bible always understands what it calls revelation as a concrete relation to concrete men. God in His incomprehensibility and God in the act of His revelation is not the formula of an abstract metaphysics of God, the world, or religion which is supposed to obtain at all times and in all places. It is rather the record of an event that has taken place once and for all, i.e., in a more or less exact and specific time and place.” Barth was not so clear in his Römerbrief.
31. Bultmann. The German was published in 1948 and 1953.
32. Richardson, Theology of the New Testament.
33. Bultmann, Theology, 1:11.
34. I hasten to add that Bultmann cannot be accused of the racial anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. He was adamantly opposed to that. But he was influenced by the religious and cultural “anti-Judaism” of his time; and that is at least dangerously close to anti-Semitism. For the complexities of Bultmann’s life and views on these topics, see Hammann, Rudolf Bultmann.
35. See Martin, New Testament, 152–67. Especially important for reading the Gospel and letters of John as reflecting the history of a particular community are the works of Raymond E. Brown and J. Louis Martyn. See Brown, Gospel According to John; Brown, Epistles of John; Martyn, History and Theology; see also Martin, New Testament, 168–78.
36. Ladd, Theology, 25. Ladd cites Stendahl’s essay “Biblical Theology” mentioned above.
37. A related problem, brought in also at places where Ladd wants to emphasize the “unity” of the New Testament or the Bible, is Ladd’s tendency to attribute a “view” or “intention” to the text itself, even to the point of insisting that the entire New Testament or the entire Bible has a “view” or “intention” (e.g., see 25, 29). Besides papering over the differences within the entire Bible, this makes the added mistake of false ascription of agency to an inanimate text. A “text” can’t have a “view” or “intention,” much less can one demonstrate that the entire Bible does. For demonstration of the speciousness—and moral danger—of attributing agency to texts, see Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 1–16; Pedagogy, 29–45; and discussion below in the chapter “Scripture.”
38. “The dogma itself [of the Holy Spirit understood in trinitarian terms], then, is not in Scripture; it is exegesis of Scripture.” Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 467; see, for the same admission about the doctrine of the trinity, 375–76, 381, 415, 467.
39. The idea that doctrine follows practice is sometimes expressed by the Latin phrase lex orandi lex est credendi, or, even more briefly expressed (as is easy to do in Latin), lex orandi, lex credendi. See Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 11. This is from the introduction by Anderson. See also p. 90; §25.59, for an instance where Basil uses liturgy to guide doctrine. See also Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed., paragraph 1124. John Zizioulas makes the point that Eastern Orthodox tradition “lives and teaches its theology liturgically”: Being as Communion, 19.
40. For a few scholars who have come to the same conclusion, see Paddison, Scripture, 74–75; Adam, Making Sense; Meeks, “Why Study the New Testament?,” 167–68.
41. Adeney, Theology of the New Testament, 2.
42. There are too many examples to cite, but to select a few: for chronological organizations, see Stevens, Theology of the New Testament; Morris, New Testament Theology. For topical: Richardson, Theology of the New Testament; Guthrie, New Testament Theology; see also Guthrie’s discussion of these different options: 72. For a “mixed” organization: Bonsirven, Theology of the New Testament; Schnelle, Theology of the New Testament.
43. This chapter has already provided indications of what I mean by historical criticism, including word studies, comparison of the different documents of the Bible with one another but without interpreting one author simply by recourse to other biblical documents or authors, avoiding anachronism, etc. I have explained the historical critical method more fully elsewhere, so I am brief here: see Martin, Pedagogy, 3–9; Martin, New Testament, 322–29.
44. See, for example, Volf, “Theology for a Way of Life.”
45. Theology, in the words of Frei (and I add that he is talking about Christianity, not just any and all “religion”), is “a second-order discipline dependent on the first-order language” of Christianity: Theology and Narrative, 96.
46. I have discussed foundationalism and antifoundationalism elsewhere, so my discussion here is limited. See Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 1–5. For just a few studies of scientific methodology and philosophy: Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry; Van Fraassen, Empirical Stance; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Latour, Pasteurization; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance.
47. As Johannes Hoff points out, in a book on the epistemology of Nicholas of Cusa, our lack of certain knowledge relates not only to God but to everything we attempt to “know.” Hoff, Analogical Turn, 71.
48. Braaten, in Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus, 4.
49. “A theologian must always start with what is already there.” Volf, After Our Likeness, 5.
50. For the “Rule of Faith,” see Irenaeus, Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, 6, and Against Heresies 1.10.1.
51. See Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 146. “Truth” in science is also “always provisional”: Potter, You Are Here, 87.
52. I more often speak of the “holy spirit” in this book rather than of the “Holy Spirit” for a few reasons. Mainly, I want to keep front and center that “Holy Spirit” is not a name for the third person of the trinity. And as I explain in the chapter titled “Spirit” below, the holy spirit is much less “personal” in our minds, for most of us, and in Christian tradition than is God the Father or Jesus. Sometimes I also avoid capitalizing “father” and “son.” That is to remind us that these are also not names but titles. I think sometimes using “Father” and sometimes “father,” and sometimes “Son” and sometimes “son” keeps before us the fact that these are words that work in various ways, sometimes admittedly like names, sometimes like titles, sometimes simply as terms that denote relations. The variation is intentional and, I believe, theologically heuristic.