Debates on Biblical Theology

Sometime ago at BeginningwithMoses.org there was debate between Graeme Goldsworthy and Carl Trueman about Systematic and Biblical Theologies. I've written on this before (Biblical Theology - An Endangered Species), but here are a couple of quotes from each author:

Trueman: "Year in, year out, I teach the history of Christian doctrine; and, year in year out, I have not only taken flack from those liberals for whom the whole idea of doctrine is somewhat fanciful; I have also taken flack from those evangelicals who ‘just have their Bible’. That the church wrestled for at least 1700 years with issues of systematic theology, not just biblical narrative, and did so in a manner which sought to preserve the balance between economy and ontology in the church’s proclamation of God in Christ, is lost on such students. My fear is that the biblical theology movement, while striving to place the Word back at the centre of the church’s life, is inadequate in and by itself for the theological task of defending and articulating the faith. Reflection upon the wider church tradition is needed, creeds, confessions and all, because this is the best way to understand how and where the discipline of biblical theology and redemptive history can be of use to the wider picture without it usurping and excluding other, equally necessary and important theological disciplines. Christianity is Trinitarian at its very core, and it is my suspicion that biblical theology on its own is inadequate to protect and defend that core. We need ontology as well as economy if we are to do justice to the Bible’s teaching on who God is and what he has done. The biblical theological revolutionaries have become the new establishment, it time for those of us rebels who think that the Bible raises more than just redemptive-historical questions, and that the creedal tradition of the church gives important insights on this, to raise our voices in dissent, to highlight the very real dangers of making this insight into an ideology and to do our best to bring the pendulum back a little."

Goldsworthy: "One more point needs to be made. By its very nature, systematic theology involves a measure of abstraction in order to show the contemporary relevance of the revelation that was given within its redemptive-historical context. If systematics is divorced from this context it becomes a total abstraction. The gospel is not an abstraction but the proclamation of a once-for-all historic event within time and space. To de-historicise the gospel is to destroy it. This has happened in the moving of the one saving event to the continuous repetition of the mass in Catholicism, to the existential moment in Bultmannism, or to the timeless ethical ideal of Liberalism. Biblical theology is necessary to prevent this de-historicising of the gospel by anchoring the person and work of Christ into the continuum of redemptive history that provides the 'story-line' of the whole Bible. The only thing that can rescue systematics from such abstractions is biblical theology. In fact, systematic theology is plainly impossible without biblical theology. Biblical theology is the only means of preventing every biblical text having equal significance for Christians (e.g. we need it to sort out what to do which the ritual laws of the Pentateuch). It prevents us from short-circuiting texts so that we isolate them from their theological context and then moralise on their application to believers."

Vanhoozer on Theological Method

My advice to systematic theology students in the Evangelical Tradition is to read Vanhoozer as much as they can. He shows that doing theology needs to take into account hermeneutics, speech-act theory, postmodern objections to foundatonalist epistemology, the canon, and critical engagement with Barth. In his essay "The Apostolic Discourse and its Developments" (note the echo of C.H. Dodd) in Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible Vanhoozer narrates his experience in theological method.

"Once upon a time, if asked what in the New Testament was authoritative, I would have replied, 'Revelation.' (On this point, thomists, evangelicals, and Barthians all agree, though they parse 'revelation' differently.) Theology's task, I thought was the extraction of propositional revelation or truth from Scripture and its consequent organization into a consistent conceptual system. Two pictures - one of Scripture as revelation and one of theology as a two-stage process, from descriptive exegesis ('what it meant') to a normative dogmatics ('what it means'') - held me captive. Scripture is not simply a propositional shaft to be exegetically mined and theologically refined like so much textual dross to be purified into systems of philosophy or morality On the contrary, both the form and content of the New Testament are elemetns in the divine drama of revelation and redemption".

I concur here. Some systematicians who have drunk at the well of rationalism proceed in the theological task as if God (by either folly or due to human weakness) gave revelation most unfortunatley in different genres: Law-code, narrative, prophecy, Proverbs, Gospels, Epistles, and Apocalypse. We can navigate our way around this unfortunate circumstance by translating this genred revelation into proposition statements of truths to be believed. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, wrote: "In demonstration, in council, and all rigorous search of truth, sometimes does all; except sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude, and then there is so much use of fancy. But for metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded. For seeing they openly profess deceit, to admit them into council, or reasoning, were manifest folly." In other words, metaphors are a stupid means of conveying truth (and that probably goes for playwrites as much for God). Yet, our theology should take into account not only the propositional cohere of what God says in Scripture, but also the how of God's self-communication. In other words, form and genre are equally important in our analysis of the divine discourse. Indeed perhaps our theology (and even our preaching) should convey not only what God says, but also how he says it. I tell my students, if you're preaching narrative material then preach narratively; if you're preaching topical material, preach inductively/proverbially; if you're preaching didactic material, then preach deductively/didactically. The same holds for theology does it not? Yet I would add that Alister McGrath has shown the viability of a cognitivist-propositional approach to theology and thus we need not yield to the oldYale crowd with their narrative theology?

On the Two-step mechanism - what it meat to what it means - I admit that this is problematic given the nature of pre-understanding, however, I'm not sure if Vanhoozer's "dance" is necessarily the best option or even the intuition we have in doing theology. Vanhoozer cites Gilbertson's book on exegesis and theology on the Book of Revelation as an example of this, and this is a good book I have reviewed elsewhere and comment on the subject.

New Book on NT and Christian Theology

One of the best books I've read in recent times is:

Markus Bockmuehl & Alan J. Torrance

Scripture's Doctrine and Theology's Bible: How the New Testament Shapes Christian Dogmatics

Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008.

The first essay on the Septuagint by J. Ross Wagner (who I must try to meet one day) looks at the Septuagint as part of the Christian Bible. He points out that there was no single "Septuagintal" text that the NT authors drew on, but a diversity and fluidity of biblical texts in Greek that, in an on-going process, translators were constantly trying to bring into closer conformity to the Hebrew text. He finally opts for John Webster's dogmatic theory of the "sanctification" of Holy Scripture that specifies how the Septuagint may legitimately lie with the Church's ongoing search for the Christian Bible. God speaks in and through texts that remain very human artifacts. The sanctification refers to the Spirit's election and overseeing of the historical events leading to the formation of Scripture so that the events themselves serve the purposes of God. The Spirit's superintending refers to the production of a text, not just its authorship.

In the second essay, "Is There a New Testament Doctrine of the Church?" Markus Bockmuehl, in his usually good form, contrasts the presentations of Ernst Kaesemannand (a then young) Raymond Brown at the 1963 World Conference on Faith and Order on the Church in the NT. argued for no unifying ecclesiology which emerges largely from his conviction that there is a plethora of christologies and theologies in the NT. In other words, the fragmentation of churches has its justification in the multiplicity of conflicting confessional positions in the NT itself. At the same time, Kaesemann raised ecclesial and canonical diversity to a metaphysical ideal, this is helped much by Walter Baur's Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, and embraced by postmodern discourse that idolizes endemic and irreconciliable diversity as a hegemonic metanarrative. Brown, in contrast, departs from Kaesemann by stressing that Luke-Acts cannot be reduced to a later harmonization of incompatible Palestinian and Gentile church views into a coherent construct. And the disputed or "pseudepigraphal" epistles are not a correction to Pauline and Petrine views, as much, a continuation of their style and thought. For Brown there are three areas of common conviction among NT authors as including continuity with Israel, apostolicity, and baptism/eucharist. Bockmuehl goes on to argue that there was a widespread perspective in the NT of the New Covenant people of God as the elect of the God of Israel. The Old Testament fathers are our fathers of the faith. On apostolicity, the Rule of Faith shaped the canon but was also shaped by it. As Irenaeus supposed, one cannot be in authentic ecclesial life if one stands apart from the apostolic foundations. Bockmuehl also contests Alfred Loisy's much repeated dictum that "Jesus foretold the kingdom of God, and it was the church that came". Bockmuehl maintains that Jesus did intend to found a messianic community since the intended outcome of Jesus' ministry was the Son of Man's messianic rule over Israel as its King. That required a further apostolic mission from his chosen disciples to gather the leaderless lost sheep of the house of Israel. That is why, according to the Synoptics and Paul, that Jesus expressed his thought on the matter by instituting a eucharistic meal that became the focucs of their remembrance and worship.

That's all for now. I might post highlights later on.

The Place of the Gospel in Biblical and Systematic Theology

Over at BeginningwithMoses.org, Dave Gibson and his cohort of biblical-theological-bloggers have put together another find series of articles on biblical theology. It includes a piece by myself entitled: A Theology of the Gospel: The Gospel as the Starting-Point and Integrating-Point for Biblical and Systematic Theology. One of my rare forays into systematic theology.

Systematic Theology vs. Biblical Theology

I remember reading Mark Seifrid's 1992 monograph Justified by Faith where Seifrid commented that alot of the debate about the New Perspective on Paul comes down to a difference between those who want to read their Bible's historically and those who want to read the Bible theologically. This is particularly true in the Reformed world and is confirmed to me by two things:

(1) I read one book about the NPP which attacked the 18th century German scholar J.P. Gabler for allegedly trying to prevent systematic theology from being a tool for the church. That is just patternly false (if you don't believe me go read D.A. Carson's article on NT Theology in DLNTD or better yet go read Gabler yourself!) as Gabler wanted a biblical theology that would engage with what the biblical writers were actually saying on their terms and in their language and without having to conform to the categories, language, or findings of systematic theology. Importantly, Gabler also believed that good biblical theology should feed into systematic theology; he was not against systematic theology, on the contrary, he wanted to see it refined and become more biblically informed!

(2) Those who engage daily in the practice of biblical studies and having to actually study the Greek text of the NT in its historical context have a tendency to be more sympathetic to what the NPP is saying even if they do not fully agree with their findings. In contrast, those whose loyalty is primarily towards a theological system rather than to Scripture, have been particularly aggressive and scathing in their criticism (one or two particular books come to mind).

The difference is between those who say (1) "my authority is Scripture and I am willing to affirm a Confession in so far as it coheres and comports with Scripture"; and (2) those who say "my authority is Scripture as understood by the Confession". These are not the same thing. The second position is not "truly reformed" and it treats the Confession rather like the Mishnah of the Rabbis or the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Note: for more on the positive role and limitations of Reformed Confessions see Andrew McGowan's forthcoming book, The Divine Spiration of Scripture and his book Always Reforming.

I believe Stanley Hauerwas once said that "New Testament scholars ought to be lined up and run off of a cliff!" I would retort by saying that sometimes I think that all Systematic Theologians should be beaten to death with a soggy fish! Let me say that Systematics is a good thing, we need Systematics to have a comprehensive world view, to bring Scritpure together, and to answer questions not raised in Scripture. BUT, Systematics cannot demand that exegesis and historical study conform to its system. Theology may be the "Queen of the Sciences" but she is a puppet Queen sustained by the strings of exegesis and by the hands of biblical scholars.

As such I was pleased to read Reggie Kidd's recent contribution to the debate. This quote shows that while some theologians want to cleanse their denomination of certain types, even naming evangelicals as the bad guys, there are those of us who remain committed to the Bible, the evangelical tradition, and historic Orthodoxy. Reggie said this:

Battle as relentlessly and courageously as the Church of England’s N.T. Wright does to champion the view that Paul’s theology is animated by a comprehensive and integrated story of promise and fulfillment — scoring points against both the postmodern deconstruction of the biblical meta-narrative and the dispensational fracturing of the singular story of “the Israel of God” into dichotomous stories of “Israel” versus the “church” — and what do you get from your potential allies in the conservative reformed world? How about getting dismissed as importing an alien biblical theology into the established categories of systematic theology, as being vague about the atonement, and as compromising biblical authority? While we build careers at our potential friends’ expense, the hostile armies and navies amass. Nice work.

Read the comments section with some big names weighing into the debate: Doug Green, Steve Taylor, John Armstrong, John Frame, Scot McKnight etc. Do read the whole post! And for the otherside of the argument read the response by R. Scott Clark.