Old Testament Theology - Lesson 3

Father, we are grateful for today, and we are thankful that you have given us the strength to be here and to do this work that you call us to do. We ask that you would forgive us of our sins and that we would receive and accept your pardon. We thank you for Christ, who died to secure our forgiveness of sins. We thank you for the Holy Spirit, who lives within us, and for your watch and care over us. I ask today that you will be with this one who is in Romania now doing the mission work, and I ask that you would bless and guide and strengthen for these several weeks, that your will would be done and that the cause of Christ would be furthered by this and other work, and we would remember missionaries around the world. 

We know that they come in many different ages, and we know they come from many different groups, and we ask that each one would be committed to you and that you would bless their work. We pray that you would be with this new pastor and his family as they make this transition. Be with the church as they also make the transition, and make this a good and acceptable time in your sight as they serve you together. We ask for Gene, that you would help him in his visit with the bishop, that you would help his ministry to be sorted out and the things that he should do be made plain to those who need to know it, and I ask that you would bless these efforts. Be with the other classes that are meeting this summer. Give the professors and the students insight and endurance, and give them the grace that they need during this time. In Christ’s name. Amen.

A bit more background and then we’re going to work on creation and biblical theology. We have gone through to about 1957 or 1960 with Gerhard von Rad, and if my new dry erase marker that Mark has secured for us works, I will write a couple of names on the board; if it does not, we will continue our other method. 

So there was running alongside the works on Old Testament theology in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s an emphasis that came to be known as the Biblical Theology Movement, and the Biblical Theology Movement was not solely interested in the Old Testament theology as its name indicates. However, many of the persons who wrote in this movement were Old Testament theologians and they influenced a lot of the writing in Old Testament theology later. 

Just a few names. The first was a British scholar, H. H. Rowley, and he wrote a variety of books, but the first was in 1942, and the titles of the books that we’re going to mention here give you the essence of the movement and what it emphasized. For instance, Rowley’s first significant book, the Relevance of the Bible, 1942, what the Biblical Theology Movement sought to do was to recapture the importance of Scripture for the church and for its ministry and for its discipleship and for its teaching.

Now, of course, during the era of the ‘20s and ‘30s, as European liberalism caught up to the United States and Britain, there came a lessening of emphasis in the churches and in the pulpits on the importance of Scripture, in which a full-blown social gospel really was the order of the day in many places, and so though Rowley was far from a fundamentalist or conservative, or whatever, more in the vein of someone who emphasized Scripture the way Barth did, he said the relevance of the Bible for the church needs to be stressed again. He also later, about 1957, I believe, penned a volume called The Unity of the Bible, and this is the emphasis the Biblical Theology Movement made that perhaps caused the most controversy and yet also at the same time the most interest, because, as you know, Old Testament theology often stands apart and separate from New Testament theology. 

My hunch is, the problem is getting people who are: A, interested; and B, knowledgeable, in both Testaments, and it’s not, even you want to do both, as you have come to understand, all you have to do is take a survey of the Bible, take an Old and New Testament survey, and you see all the books on the list, you see all that and say, “Boy, if I was to try to master all these materials, what would I do?” But then there are those who would say “The Testaments really can’t be reconciled very well.” The Biblical Theology Movement rejected that notion, and not only Rowley, but others would write on the unity of the Bible.

Next name, also from the United Kingdom, Norman Henry Snaith, right in 1944, wrote a volume called The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament. The reason this work was significant and this emphasis in the Biblical Theology Movement was significant was, remember, that much of the Old Testament scholarship from Wellhausen’s time (1878 up till 1920) that we looked at yesterday, was talking about the similarity between Israelite religion and other ancient Near Eastern cultures. In other words, the Israelite religion was a religion like other religions of its time and place; it evolved in a certain way, it acted a certain way, it had principles that were similar to other ancient Near Eastern religions. So when Snaith said there are distinctive ideas to the Old Testament including issues like ethics, ethics that would oppose the oppression of the poor, ethics that would call kings into account, theological matters such as God being the only God and being the Creator, so Snaith said, the time has come, having done all this historical background to show that Israelite religion did have some similarities in other cultures, it is time to stress that it also has its own distinctives that set it apart as God-revealed religion. 

So you can see some differences between some of the authors that we looked at yesterday, the relevance of the Bible, the unity of the Bible, distinctive ideas of the Old Testament, and then one last one that I mentioned yesterday, George Ernest Wright in 1950 writes the volume, The Old Testament Against Its Environment. So even more boldly than Snaith, who’s talking about distinctive ideas, Wright says the Old Testament religion really is countercultural in its environment in its stressing of one God, in its stressing that history is not cyclical, always going in a circle, always coming back to the place it began, but that history is linear, it’s going somewhere. It had a beginning, and it will have an end, and thus sets forth the possibility of Biblical view of eschatology; we’re headed towards something, and it’s not the same old something. Wright penned a volume in 1952, perhaps his most famous book, God Who Acts. God’s actions are evident in history, Wright said, so that again he was stressing that unlike the other gods, which tended to be set off from the human race in the other ancient religions, or when they got involved, it was for selfish reasons often, but the God of the Old Testament was a God who acted on behalf of those he loved and those with whom he was in covenant.

So the Biblical Theology Movement was coming out of, really, the sorts of emphasis that Barth and Eichrodt were making and were really even more conservative than those, were very set on the unity of the Bible, very set on the history of the Bible, very interested in the distinctive nature of the Bible, and very interested in recapturing the Bible for the church, and so these were emphases that you would then find in American Old Testament theologies in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and still even in the ‘90s. Great Britain – really, this was kind of a golden age for them of Old Testament Theology because they never got involved; it’s basically been an American or a German endeavor to Old Testament or Biblical Theology, with this exception.

Now this movement, then, is running alongside the Old Testament Theology strains that we were talking about yesterday, but as time went on, it was influencing Old Testament theologians, particularly in America, more and more, and it has only been really till recently, in the last ten or fifteen years, that that strain has gotten lighter. You have to be somewhat younger than I am to have missed that influence simply because the teachers that I had in seminary in the 1980s were older persons who had been influenced by people like G. Ernest Wright, and so whereas these sorts of scholars did not hold to the full truthfulness of the Scripture, they did talk about biblical authority. Now, of course, that’s one of their Achilles’ heels; not just were they bitten on the heel by the conservatives but by people more liberal themselves. How do you hold such a thing in balance was always a problem, but they made a very strong run and continued, I think, to bring Old Testament theology out of a ‘history of religions’ descriptive mode. You know what I mean, just kind of describing how religion got there to an Old Testament theology, that frankly, with the Biblical Theology Movement and their interest in the church, was prescriptive – not prescriptive in the sense that you have to conduct Old Testament theology the way we do, but prescriptive in ‘the Bible is the Word of God and is speaking to us,’ it calls us to do something. 

So we don’t do Old Testament theology from the Biblical Theology Movement standpoint by, say, well you know, let’s describe what happened in Israel and Israelite religion in the eighth century to the sixth century BC. They would press the claims of Scripture, how the New Testament and the Old Testament are a whole, and press the claims of the text into the life of the church. You know, certainly, this was something Barth was doing with systematic theology in his own way, and that other systematic theologians were doing as well, but very different from what Wellhausen and company had been conducting up to the 1920s. 

Student: [Inaudible]

Dr. House: I don’t know how to answer the question exactly. I mean, let me remind you of what I think was going on with Wellhausen and maybe that will answer the question, or you can follow up.

Wellhausen basically took what we would call a dynamic view of inspiration, as he believed that human beings wrote it as they best understood God, and some people had a heightened awareness of God, just like I was talking about yesterday; you know, Shakespeare had a heightened awareness in poetry that I don’t possess, or, you said you can do the same with music, or, as far as I am concerned, with virtually anything anyone can do. George was talking about mechanics that cost seventy five dollars an hour, you know, just for starters. Some of them have a better feel for it and ability than others, I mean, I’d just say that’s the way it is across the board.

So he thought the Old Testament was a group of people, some of whom were more in tune with God (he did believe in God) than others, and they were writing about their views of God and what happened, and that though it might have some moral value, a lot of it didn’t. And you have to try to figure out when they wrote what they did and what seems to be truth in the Old Testament and isn’t, as far as authorship, date, etc., and he thought, then since this was the situation, how it was written, as time went on, there came in the Old Testament and then in Judaism. It started as creeping and then became a rampant legalism that, you know, the Pharisees were the embodiment of. Then Jesus freed people, and when Wellhausen thought about Jesus freeing people from the law, he didn’t mean from the penalty of the law, he meant from what the Old Testament really taught and the legalism that had grown up around it. 

So he saw Jesus in New Testament religion as evolutionary, you know, it got higher than this down here; it was greater than the religion in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament needed to be set aside as far as its rules and regulations, which came as a great relief. Jesus really was seen as a liberator. Jesus was seen as the climax of religion. He was seen as one who sets people free. So Wellhausen saw that in the progression of history from something lower to something greater, Jesus was the greatest that could come.

I can’t tell that Wellhausen doesn’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God. This is a very interesting thing. I’m grateful to say it’s impossible to have Christianity without Jesus. But it’s very interesting that when you come to, whether it is Old Testament or New Testament scholar who has a hard time with miracles, it’s amazing how often that Jesus becomes the exception, and not everything about Jesus, now, but particularly the incarnation, even if they don’t believe in the virgin birth, in some manner, the incarnation, Jesus is God in the flesh, however they believe that occurred, and that something happened at the resurrection.

Now, we don’t often work back that if that miracle is true, why isn’t this one? Now if I were in their shoes, I’d start with, well, Elijah isn’t the Son of God; there are different ways to work with it. But Wellhausen was an interesting fellow in the sense that he never intended, he did say and write and thought that his work would create better faith. When he found out that was not the case by and large, he quit teaching ministerial candidates. It was not his desire to wreck faith, and so he went into Semitics in ancient history. But Wellhausen, again, I think he’s like a lot of persons, he did not want to wreck faith, but he found that his teachings did. It is also very interesting that the Biblical Theology Movement people, virtually all of them, were raised in conservative Bible-believing traditions and then kind of…they didn’t go as far as Wellhausen did, but they went left from where they had been, of course, where some of us were raised with not a lot of room to the right, but you know… 

At the same time, the Biblical Theology Movement people would have said, I think all the ones on board said, that Jesus is the virgin-born Son of God, the incarnation explained by the virgin birth, miracles occurred, Jesus was raised from the dead, doesn’t mean that every word of the Gospel is absolutely accurate, but we have in the main a solid picture of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God who was promised in the Old Testament, and what’s more, God actually gave those commandments at Sinai, and God actually took the Israelites out of Egypt. They doubt that an axe head floated when Elisha needed it to, but you know, certain things, but in the main, see…

I think from any kind of fair conservative reading, there’s much that is serviceable in the Biblical Theology Movement, lesson Wellhausen; I have some sympathy for Wellhausen after all these years of teachings because I honestly don’t think he would have held many of his views given the kind of scholarship he tried to embody, had he lived during the time of the archaeological discoveries. I just don’t think he would have come to the same conclusions. 

But through time with Wellhausen's views there wasn’t any question that a descriptive history of religion’s approach to Old Testament theology basically killed any interest in the Old Testament for the church, and as time went on, Wellhausen, being probably the most famous scholar of his day, and then followed in the early 20th century up till 1930, when I believe, let’s see, I forget when Adolf von Harnack died, but he was church historian, history of dogma—all of his volumes are in your library, I saw yesterday. He’s the most famous scholar of his day, and he basically wrote, you know, at the University of Berlin, that it was high time that we realized that the Old Testament is not Christian Scripture – it was about 1910 – we needed a new canon. 

Well now, he wasn’t alone in this, and so that’s how far a solely history-of-religion descriptive approach that basically emphasizes what I said Wellhausen emphasized, when you get to the New Testament, that’s one logical conclusion you can take. Another logical conclusion is if we don’t agree with that, we’d better revive interest in the Old Testament, and that doesn’t get done in Germany until post World War II, really, with von Rad and others. Over in Switzerland, Eichrodt was making a strong effort to do that, and in Britain, you know, in World War II and then after the Biblical Theology Movement was doing some of these things.

And before I criticize von Harnack too much, certainly, I’ve been around enough to see, and maybe you have (if not, I’m very grateful for you) but I’ve been around enough to see that if they wouldn’t say what von Harnack said… I have been in churches where for all practical purposes that was true. So at some point, we have to say, even if they’ve never heard of von Harnack, at what point, what methodology, what hermeneutic, what manner of thinking led a church, led Christians, led a minister, led a believer to basically operate like that. In some cases, it’s simply, we don’t have enough time to do everything. In other cases, like a friend of mine who is in a big pastorate – I don’t know, I consider over a thousand a big church – he says you can’t grow a church preaching anything from the Old Testament; that’s just his attitude. And I laughed and said; no I don’t think you could. But some have given it a shot – I mean that’s just insanity. 

So the Biblical Theology Movement said let’s recapture the Bible for the church, or three-fourths of the Bible, and von Rad was trying to do that. We ended the day yesterday with Gerhard Von Rad, and he was certainly trying. He was a preacher. I cannot recall whether he served in the German army in World War II, but I do know that he spent time in prison for his views, as some others did, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the most famous, I suppose, though von Rad obviously was not martyred, but von Rad had a strong interest in preaching and the reuse of vital traditions. 

Again, the Achilles’ heel of von Rad’s work was when more conservative or more liberal scholars asked “At what point can you hold on to authority if you find so many mistakes or errors in the Scriptures?” And von Rad would say, “We hold on to the traditions that are preached and re-preached and stated and re-stated.” Why hold on to the Exodus tradition? Because it’s so pervasive in the Scriptures, he believed that an exodus took place. Why hold on to ethical monotheism, that there is one God and this God has ordered the universe and holds us accountable for it? Because it is so pervasive in the prophetic literature and in the New Testament. 

In a way, it’s almost like where we started, wasn’t it? How do we know what the universal principals of the Old Testament in the Bible are? Well, those that are repeated over and over again would be a start, and some of it is the only way we can learn them, right? We hear them so often, we finally get them. 

Well, we have seen now, then, you have the Biblical Theology Movement’s emphasis. We have von Rad now coming along, wanting to emphasize preaching and the re-preaching of traditions, that Old Testament theology amounts to working with the ongoing traditions in the Scriptures. And then we have the single-theme people, right? Remember that? Even before Eichrodt, but Eichrodt being the person with covenant being his main thing. I want to note kind of how some of these emphases lessened, though, take 1978, Walther Zimmerli took a single-theme approach to Old Testament theology, a rather nice, concise book, a couple hundreds of pages. He says the primary theme of the Old Testament is what it teaches about God. He says that the first command is primary throughout Scripture: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt; you shall have no other gods before me.” Earlier, von Rad had said the whole of Old Testament theology is a referendum on the first commandment, and in a way, all of Christian life, I think, is a referendum on the first commandment.

Also, in 1978, Walter Kaiser Jr., now he is president of Gordon–Conwell Seminary, written many works, but in his book Towards an Old Testament Theology, Kaiser is pretty bright; several of his books have ‘towards’ in them. Hard to blame somebody—how do you criticize his books, that he made no progress whatever towards his subject? I mean, it’s hard to get a zero on a long essay [laughter]. Kaiser is very much in the old salvation history – remember von Hofmann, Gustav Oehler in that tradition? And he stresses Messianic theology, took a page right out of von Hofmann and Hengstenberg. I was pleased to see up in your library all four volumes of Hengstenberg’s Christology translated into English up there. I didn’t want to know how often it had been checked out; I thought I’d check it out if nobody else had, just to say it had been, but…

Student: Have you seen the one-volume edition of that?

Dr. House: I have, that’s the Kregel I was talking about yesterday, and I don’t know whether it’s condensed or what.

Student: [Inaudible]

This I don’t know. But I was happy to see—it’s always fun to go to the new library because books you didn’t know existed in certain versions. I might have expected to see the four German volumes, but I did not know at all at one point it had been translated into English. 

But he’s right in the von Hofmann and Hengstenberg tradition that the Bible is a series of promises, according to Kaiser. The chief promise is of the Messiah, the King coming, and so he is very much involved in salvation history. He will try to fit every book of the Old Testament eventually. He will put it in its historical setting and then show how it leads to the Messiah. At times, it’s like another single-theme approaches; you’ll find some point and you’ll say, I believe that’s a bit forced, as when, you know, I often found it difficult for him to stress the book of Proverbs and how that all fits directly into Messianic prophecy. He has to tie it to Solomon, which is tied to David, which you know, we’re three or four steps removed, but still, if you want an Old Testament theology volume that’s going to stress Messianic theology—and then he has a smaller book, something like the Messianic theology in the Old Testament.

It’s hard to do better than Kaiser. He’s a digest of Hengstenberg, von Hofmann, and several others, really, and so these works do not bring an end to, but again, single-theme approach now has offered to us many different possible single themes, and any time you start to read the books at a certain era, in every preface it says, “Why another book on Old Testament theology?” We have to justify what we were doing; there’s so many of them, and so many from single-theme, you can begin to think that, at least for a while, the topic may be exhausted, or the method.

We’ve had single-theme. We’ve had the Biblical Theology Movement going on. In 1970, you have Brevard Childs, who would become prominent in the movement. Brevard Childs wrote a volume entitled Biblical Theology in Crisis. That’s another sign that the movement may be having some difficulties, as if a major proponent of the view says we are in crisis, it may just be someone crying fire, or was it crying wolf. But actually, here he was saying we have run in with some difficulties. We have not established the unity of the Bible. We haven’t been able to establish the Bible in the church because our view of authority never gives it enough authority, never gives the Bible enough authority, and several other things, but he was saying about how the biblical theology is in a bit of crisis.

And then as far as von Rad and his tradition theology, here is another difficulty that I am sure you would want to leave for people. It was so hard to do tradition-oriented theology and preaching-oriented theology as well as von Rad had done it, and lots of people didn’t try articles and some other things, but very difficult. So now, this is kind of where we are. These ideas I won’t give you, but I can give you several examples; these ideas continue on, but starting about 1978 to 1981, you have a different movement.

In 1978, Ronald Clements begins to stress theology as it unfolds in the canon, the list of books accepted as Scripture, and he wrote about Old Testament theology – it’s a brief book, a lovely little 200-page book of the theology in the law and the theology in the prophets – and promised to write about the writings later and did on wisdom literature. But what he is saying is, it’s not a matter of finding a single theme; it’s not a even a matter of simply talking about God’s acts and history, though they didn’t deny those, didn’t say those were just useless, hopeless, worthless ways, but he said we need to take the canon as it unfolds and find the themes and emphases there, and he gently suggested that Messianic theology is not all the theology that’s there, and also gently suggested that ethical monotheism is not all there is to Old Testament theology either. So what he was looking for was a fuller approach to the whole canon of Scripture.

And then a very interesting book, Elmer Martens, a delightful guy (Ronald Clements was nice too but Elmer Martens was a delightful guy, a Mennonite). It is a little bit interesting to talk to the Mennonites; when you talk reformation theology with them, for instance, they don’t talk about Luther and Calvin; they talk about Menno Simons, they talk about people of their heritage who got drowned and that kind of thing, and if you read Dr. George’s Theology of the Reformers (as good decent ‘ites’ all should), you’ll note that whole strain. Also, Mennonites tend to be (tend to be, they’re not all) pacifist; they tend to be interested in stewardship, and Martens writes about Old Testament theology from the standpoint of key themes, but more than one that he finds in Exodus 5:22 to 6:8, and among them are community and land and the nature of God, but again, in a very readable book that lasts about 240 pages, he takes this text and says from this text you can find themes, four or five themes, that the whole Old Testament can hold together. 

So he takes a thematic approach, but he just says he didn’t know of one that would do all the work. So what we are beginning to see from this base, single-theme, Biblical theology, and traditional theology, we’re starting to see an emphasis on canon, on multiple themes, but trying to hold these things together. 

Elmer Martens is one of the editors of your Flowering of Old Testament Theology textbook, and one of his articles on land is very interesting, very helpful in the volume that you’ve got. 

Now I want to reintroduce you to Brevard Childs. I have already mentioned his work in the 1970 on Biblical Theology in Crisis. It’s pretty easy to write a crisis book, in a way. I mean, if you have a mind and an eye to see, you could write a book, be in some divinity school in crisis; you could find out all the things that were wrong with it, and if it were truly in crisis, then it would be easier to write the book. And there are many books written about crises that never offer a solution. I tend not to buy these anymore unless I just really feel good about saying “Yeah, it’s crummy; yes, that’s bad. Yeah, yeah…” when I already have a solution. 

Childs wasn’t the kind of person who writes an ain’t-it-awful book and has no option for the future. Like Clements, he thought that if we’re going to restore authority to the Old Testament, then we must start with the text. We must say the text of Scripture is the most important thing that we can study. History is not irrelevant, but the text matters more. The church is certainly not irrelevant, but we can’t do anything with the church till we start with the text. And the text of Scripture has been considered Scripture for thousands of years. He argued, therefore, in a 1980 volume, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, that if we would take the Old Testament seriously, we would take it in canonical order – Law, Proverbs and Writings – that we would know how each book is shaped theologically. Each book has its own distinct theological witness, and then we would know how the ongoing witness of the Old Testament also has a witness to God. 

He follows this up in 1984 with the New Testament as canon, Introduction to the New Testament as Canon. He is an Old Testament scholar, so this is out of his field, but has brought considerable reading to it. In 1985, he writes an Old Testament Theology that’s very brief and I think inferior to his Old Testament intro, and then in 1992 writes Biblical Theology. So you see he was on a 20-some-year-old quest to try to show that you can have the Old Testament treated as Scripture in canonical order, the New Testament treated as Scripture, biblical theology coming from it, arguing in his own way for the unity of Scripture so it can be recaptured for the church. 

It is a very interesting thing to read the introduction. It’s just four or five pages. Sometime read the introduction in Child’s Biblical Theology, which he published in ‘92. In this he writes about how difficult it was, as an Old Testament scholar, to engage in dialogue with New Testament theologians and with systematic theologians, how that often, it was not a conversation that could be had. It is true that Childs has been embraced by some of his colleagues, including Christopher Seitz, who talked to him for a while, who is now teaching at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and it is true that he influenced other people more of his own tradition. But Childs had a stronger influence probably amongst evangelicals, the reason being in the last 20 years, evangelicals have tried to figure out a way to do Old Testament theology that would be true to the Scripture, in which all of us would hold a high view of the inspiration and authority of Scripture and at the same time not cast off the gains that have been made in historical analysis and that would do theology that would benefit the church. In other words, the people we work with could then do something with the theology in the pulpit and the pew, and that sort of thing. 

So when Childs began stressing the canon of Scripture, that the Bible itself is God’s word, or he would say it contains God’s word, and using it as the structuring device; in other words, how do I approach the study of Old Testament theology, the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, distinct sections, but related sections; sections that Jesus himself talks about, sections that Paul himself reflects, sections that, you know, et cetera, that we talked about yesterday. So the canon became a structuring device and the notion of the Scriptures being a structuring device, also that it was theology for the church became helpful.

And so in 1995, John Sailhamer, who teaches at Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest and taught for many, many years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, wrote a volume, Introduction to Old Testament Theology, and what it was was a very technical, conservative treatment of how you would do canonical theology the way Childs talked about doing it, and in 1998 I published the book that you have, which really was the first—it doesn’t make it great or anything, it was the first kind of Old Testament theology that attempted to be a full Old Testament theology written by an evangelical in 20 years, so we’d come out of this long period, and there will be others. Bruce Waltke’s working on one, John Sailhamer says he is working on one, but there are other things he just keeps getting moved ahead of it. 

But I can tell you as an evangelical Old Testament person, when you try to do Old Testament theology, you do not have that many evangelical partners to read as you go, other than J. Barton Payne; I mentioned most of them that exist, Gerhard Hasel and some others. But I’m just saying there wasn’t a whole lot that I could dialogue with from my own perspective as we did the work, but basically, my volume is much indebted to Childs, though not agreeing with his view of inspiration and authority, though I think Childs is certainly a vast, vast improvement of the Wellhausen era, I mean. 

Childs has been most bitterly criticized by his own constituency. He had hoped to move the adherence to the historical critical method closer to the text. Instead, he was attacked basically as a fundamentalist because he talked about Scripture too much. He’s even been called anti-Semitic, of all things, because he argued that Old Testament theology is done by the church and he emphasizes Christ as the means of salvation. Now, he never said that the synagogue didn’t do theology; he never said any such thing, but already we’re moving into a different era, and the last Old Testament theology I mentioned is Walter Brueggemann.

Brueggemann wrote, what I would say, the first thoroughly postmodern Old Testament theology in 1997. First of all, Brueggemann is like Wellhausen in that Brueggemann is a bright, bright man, a creative man, and an outstanding writer, and I suppose that for many years, he and Childs would have shared similar theology, basically being Barthians. Brueggemann, however, has shifted strongly toward a postmodern view, which goes something like this: In the first part of his book is about 120 pages of survey of the discipline. Then he writes, as I recall it, either 125 or 250 pages of a section he calls, “Unifying Forces in the Old Testament,” and he writes as good an essay on the unity of the Old Testament as anyone would want to read anywhere.

If I didn’t know what came next – you know, if the book had just stopped there – I’d probably have lots and lots of people reading it. He then goes to the section which he calls “Competing Voices.” Rather than seeing different emphases in Scripture, he calls them “competitors,” and he pits them against one another, so he finds in the Old Testament there is the voice of the poor fighting against the voice of the rich, sometimes in the same book, but he is saying not that you have a divinely inspired work that emphasizes different things at different times, but these are competing voices, and doesn’t necessarily prefer one over the other; he lays them out there where you can see them.

So what is the postmodern ideal, supposedly? That you would have – there are 13 of us here at the table (now how lucky can we get?) – that if we all had a different viewpoint, a different voice, we would all sit down at the table as equals with our viewpoint and our voice. Now of course, somebody like me or maybe many like you (I’m a fourth child, fourth of six), I note that when we sat down at the table, there were often competing voices, and no matter how much Mom tried to get us to speak in our turn, dad being as bad as anybody, though he could trump all of us, I guess, we weren’t just all trying to have our say; we were trying to have our way. I don’t mean that in a bad sense.

Start by saying we just want everybody to have a voice, but if you bring your voice to the table to try to convince someone else to your side, we blow a whistle, throw the penalty flag, tee you up, throw you out, ask you off the grounds, whatever; that is not acceptable. I know very few people really able to play by those rules even if you want that to be so, because eventually, if a white supremacist sits down, some people are not going to like that viewpoint. Don’t they have their say? Don’t they have the right at the table? Well, you would say it only in the most begrudging way, but if we let them talk too much at the table…you could pick out whomever you want. Well, what if you’d just say that person is sweet, but they are insipid; they really have nothing to contribute, and after a while we’re saying, you know, there’ve got to be some standards here; it’s not enough. It’s not enough to just have everybody at the table have their say. 

So Brueggemann, though he sets up the rules of postmodernism, of course he breaks his own rules because he has a list of people who just don’t belong at the table, and you know what I say, I say he is right; there are people who, even if they sit at the table, you bring them there to help them understand that they are mistaken. I am often wary of people when they say, “Well you know, I’m really postmodern.” I’ll say “What does that mean in this context?” I’ve never known any really thoroughly postmodern people because eventually, they will make decisions, they will make qualitative decisions: this is right, this is wrong, even if it is just a ‘yuck’ factor, you know? In other words, they see it and go “Ugh, that’s abhorrent, that’s terrible, that shouldn’t happen!” Why? Why? That’s the issue, and then we will get to the authority base. 

Always talking about people, I’m very simplistic, you’ll notice that. People deserve better than this, but I’m just ranting now. I always love the guys who say well, I believe all truth is relative. You know what I say now? I used to talk but now I say “No, you don’t.” I mean, you really don’t! See that guy George is getting paid 75 bucks an hour, he really did want how much? 75 bucks an hour, didn’t he? Is that a relative amount? Beeson’s going to pay me for this little experience. I don’t want that to be—you know, I don’t want them to relatively pay me; I do want to get paid. Fidelity in marriage, how relative do we want that to be? So, no you really don’t. Some things are important enough for you to say “This is true” and “This is false” and “This is the way I will have it.” What is important enough to you?

Brueggemann has some of those, but in his volume, if you want to read what amounts to a postmodern—it’s almost like if you say, “Well, I pick this party.” “Say fine, that’s one voice I got going here.” And there are times, of course, if you ever been abused by some sort of head-thumping kind of work, you know, you can say, “Well I might appreciate somebody who says, ‘Well there’s more than one way.’” But Brueggemann is a sign of the times, but fabulous scholarship, extraordinary bibliography; he dialogues strenuously with people like Childs, who he says is simply reductionist if he thinks Christian theology is what we are doing. Why not understand the Muslim theology? Why not understand…you know, and I always want to say polytheistic theology, you know, why not?

But he also writes—it is a voice that cannot be neglected or mistaken, because if Brueggemann is a major scholar, it’s a major book, and it reflects a major way that people think today, or believe they think today. So the method that I’ve tried to work with that you are seeing would go something like this. It has certain presuppositions, and I will try to tell you what they are. However poorly in this class or in the textbook I carry this out, the first presupposition is: The Bible text is God’s Word and carries God’s character. The Bible as we have it is God’s word and carries God’s character, the same way your word carries your character. It has to, can’t do anything else. 

Now the second presupposition – and a presupposition, by the way, is not a knee-jerk reaction, hopefully. Hopefully, it is a studied conclusion that you base your thoughts on. A presupposition is a studied conclusion you base your work on. 

The first one is the biblical texts are God’s Word and carries God’s character. The second is the Bible unfolds canonically in the ways that I have described it, the Law, Prophets, Writings, etc., and it reflects God’s work in history. Sometimes as the canon unfolds it repeats some of God’s same acts in history from a different perspective, but it repeats some of the same acts so that we would see that the Bible unfolds canonically and reflects God’s work in history. Those two things are not in opposition to one another, but they both need to be said. 

Third, the Bible’s viewpoint, or the viewpoint of the Bible’s writers, conflicts quite often with how people acted in history. The Bible’s viewpoint conflicts with how people acted in history. This is in opposition to saying Old Testament theology should be seen as a history of religions. I think Old Testament theology is an understanding of what the Old Testament thought was true. Boy, that is important! How many people have you ever heard in a church saying, “Well, the Old Testament says thus and so?” And what they’re doing is relating an account that’s in the Bible that the author is giving you to show you how horrible something is.

Take the last several chapters in Judges. It starts, chapter 17, verse 6, tells you, “There was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” That’s a marker for you. And the last verse of the book says the same thing. You’ve got a self-contained section in which you have horrible things, not just civil war, not just killing, but a civil war and killing that was sparked by a woman being raped to death by a group of men and then her—it wasn’t even her husband, cuts her in pieces and mails her to the various tribes of Israel. Now then, does the text approve of that activity? No, the bookends to the stories are this is what happens when people just do whatever is right in their own eyes. 

But if you did say, “Well you know, the Old Testament has this.” Well, it is true; it has it, but does it approve of it? Or well, you know, “Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, and that was all right.” Well, was it all right? If you read the Pentateuch, that sort of thing’s already said it’s not right. Rash vows can be redeemed; you don’t have to do that. In other words, if you read the first five books of the Bible and you ask the question, was it all right what he did? the answer is no. Or pick your favorite atrocity; that is no more right than to say, “Well you know, in the New Testament, Herod kills the babies.” So understand that the Bible, its viewpoint conflicts with how people acted in history.

The fourth presupposition, the Bible interprets itself canonically; that is, Jesus says what was the true meaning of the law, prophets and psalms. That’s one way the Bible interprets itself. That gives us an order in which to operate. 

Fifth, the Bible interprets itself historically. In other words, it will tell you what happened in history so that later on, for instance, Paul will interpret what happened when Adam and Eve sinned and tell you what that meant historically, or, you know, Paul will talk about the book of Numbers and what that teaches us. When I say the Bible interprets itself historically, that helps me understand some things about accuracy. It is possible for us to say the New Testament writers were wrong to consider what happened in the Old Testament an accurate account, but it would be hard to argue that that wasn’t what they thought.

Sixth, the Bible interprets itself thematically, and that gives us unity. For instance, in Romans 4, Paul says, “I want to talk about justification by faith.” We talked about that yesterday. That’s a mighty theme he is talking about, it’s a theme he is tracing. So having said the Bible interprets itself canonically, that gives me an order for my study; having said the Bible interprets itself historically, that gives me some accuracy for my study; having said the Bible interprets itself thematically, that gives me some unity to my study. That doesn’t leave me without problems – however lightly I was treating some of them moments ago – but it does give me a chance to get it started, which I am anxious to do despite the fact that I have spent a day and a half on method.

So how do I proceed? Those were my presuppositions; that’s what I believe to get started. That’s my prolegomena five methodological points in. What do you do? First, you start with the text in canonical order; we will go from Genesis to Revelation, if we are doing biblical theology; we are going Genesis to Chronicles if we are doing an Old Testament theology. The longer I teach, the more I even say things like, well, if you want to do the English Bible order, just do that, if that’s what you—run along and do that, if that’s what you want to do; let’s get started! but start with the text in canonically order. 

Second, discern subjects in the text. It’s hard to miss creation if you start with Genesis 1:1. Third, trace the subject in canonical order. Find out about what, if anything, each book says about the subject and then what the whole says about the subject. In other words, you’re building data. You’re tracing a subject in canonical order. Not every book says something about every subject.

Four, note connections between your subjects and other related subjects. For instance, you will be dealing with creation and you will find that Isaiah connects creation with the Exodus, doesn’t it? We read that in Isaiah 40 to 48 today. Or you get to the Psalms and you will find out the psalmist basically says if God is the Creator, he is also the King, and if he is the King, he is the one who blesses and judges, so we see creation having related themes, and after a while, you have to limit those because you can’t do them all. But note connections. 

Five, draw thematic conclusions. Bring your study together so that you can have, if nothing else, even something this simplistic, I came up with five or six major themes, major emphases about creation in the Old Testament.

So again, start with the text in canonical order, discern subjects in the text, trace the subjects in canonical order, note connections between the subjects and others, and draw thematic conclusions. 

Now, I guess as a postscript to this, I could say there’s another way you could start, and that’s the way most of us do start. We have a legitimate question about what the Bible says about a certain subject. It’s ideal to say, okay we’re going to deal with New Testament theology; let’s start from the beginning and do what I just said. However, it’s just as likely that you’re going to start the way I did, as I gave that little testimony yesterday; I started by saying, how were people saved in the Old Testament? How did they come to know God, have their sins forgiven, and spend eternity with him?

Well, if you have a subject like that, I would say the method is still relevant: Start with the text, discern the subject, trace it in canonical order, and draw your summary, etc. So it is possible you could bring a question to the text, and virtually any question can be answered, or at least you can get a start and you can work on it. I have found as I have studied the Scriptures historically, theologically, I am going to give you one result, and that’s quite simply that not only is theology its primary goal, the study of God, the Old Testament’s main emphasis is on God, and that he is the only God. That was a revolutionary concept in the ancient world; the very notion that you would tell a Canaanite or an Egyptian or a Babylonian that there is only one God and that Israel serves him, I’ll bet you lots of them laughed.

Perhaps of all the biblical writers (I shouldn’t say writers) all the major biblical characters, perhaps only Jesus basically ministers to people who hold to a one-God thesis. Think about it. In the Old Testament, Moses, the prophets, the others, weren’t they were dealing with people who were constantly being tempted to believe in more than one god and to serve them? There was a polytheistic context. Think of the apostle Paul. Was the first century Greek world a real strong monotheistic outfit? No. Paul has to take time to tell the Corinthians we know that there is only one God, but other people (he’s talking about the meat offered to idols), but other people recognized these gods. 

Plus, it’s great to walk through this missions center and see an emphasis, and it’s great to have some of you who are world Christians and interested in missions. I walked by a clock out there that’s telling me how many billions of people live in the world – have you done that yet? I stood there and blinked, and eighteen babies were born. Now, how many of those billions are basically in a world that adheres to the polytheistic context, what would you suppose? I don’t know the answer, but I can tell you there are about a billion people in India, and though there are many, many Christians there and some Muslim, just talking about polytheism and monotheism, I’d say the vast majority are in a polytheistic context, and we just go on, and last I checked, people are moving around and moving here. So all I am trying to say is, maybe at one time in human history, maybe it was just in a Eurocentric view of the world, I don’t know.

Maybe we could have said basically, polytheism is not an issue. But boy, it would be hard to make that point in a global world now, to speak of Asia, Africa, and all the other places, to say nothing to the fact that basically, secularism is a different god. So it’s a pretty relevant point to say the Lord is God and there is no other, and the Scriptures have revealed him, and we need to proclaim him. So I didn’t think people laughed and said, “Well, Zimmerli stated the obvious point that the Bible is about God.” I think the point is so important that we could miss it if it is too obvious. This is the kind of methodology I employ. I think it is valuable for you because as you do your ministry or as you do your own Bible studies for your own purpose or for your own lives, if you will bring a relevant biblical subject to the text and do the hard work of following it through the canon, you will learn more, you will have – and Mark asked this question after class – you won’t be able to just pick and choose, then. You will be confronted, say with seven items about creation, two of which trouble you because they call you up short, but as long as I can stick to my preconceived notions, or what I have always heard about Genesis 1 and 2, I won’t be troubled by what Solomon says about creation.

As important as some of the issues that had been battled out, Christians have battled out about creation over the last several years, we’ve hardly ever battled out over creation theology or what it means about God’s judgment – we usually don’t let that affect us – or what it says about worship or what it says about a host of other subjects. That is not to say the discussions have been unimportant; I don’t mean that. What I mean is would we get the full flavor of what creation theology would have to say to us in the Scriptures, and we can only get started on that. And we will do that.