WILLIAM A. BEARDSLEE
Bibliography
Eldon Jay Epp and George W. MacRae, editors, The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters.
John H. Hayes and Carl R. Holladay, Biblical Exegesis: A Beginner’s Handbook.
Douglas A. Knight and Gene M. Tucker, editors, The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters.
Cross-Reference: Biblical Theology, Canon, Hermeneutics, Structuralism.
BIBLICAL THEOLOGY
Biblical theology in its simplest form is the effort to state what is the theology of the Bible or the theology found within the Bible. Although that may be understood narrowly as referring to what the Bible says about God, more often biblical theology is concerned with a broader range of theological concerns, seeking to give an account of Scripture’s statements about numerous topics. It differs from systematic and constructive theology in the way that it does not turn to other sources, such as experience or tradition to construct theology, although such sources may have some implicit role to play (and indeed the discussion today is raising various questions about the place of such aspects of the theological enterprise in the formulation of biblical theology). Rather, biblical theology seeks theological formulation in some constructive, holistic, and unified manner of what one finds in the Bible.
Background. The twentieth century saw the discipline of biblical theology go through various swings and changes, increasing and decreasing in popularity. The earlier tendency to articulate a biblical theology much as if it were a history of Israelite religion (a tendency that grew out of the origins of biblical theology in the Enlightenment as a historical discipline), shifted in the post–World War II period under the impact of the theologians Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. In the United States and Europe, vigorous endeavors to set forth the theology of the Bible or of one of the Testaments or of some particular biblical topic multiplied. The emphasis on history did not disappear, but it no longer determined the structure of any particular formulation. The developmental notions that were earlier present and tended to bring forth a reading of the Old Testament pointing to its archaic, primitive character gave way to readings of the theology of the Bible that assumed and sought to demonstrate the Bible’s immediacy and accessibility for modern faith and the forms that theology takes in preaching, personal piety, and social action.
In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, the broad sway of biblical theology, especially on the North American scene, and the apparent consensus about its character broke down for reasons from within the field of biblical study, well described by Brevard Childs in his Biblical Theology in Crisis (1969), and from within the broader fields of systematic theology, suggested, for example, in a now famous essay by Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language” (Journal of Religion 41 [July 1961]: 194-205). Gilkey challenged the intelligibility of fundamental axioms of contemporary biblical theology, particularly its effort to build faith upon historical events that are accepted as the revelation and activity of God. Childs pointed to the many ways in which widely accepted assumptions that undergirded the broad emphasis upon biblical theology had come under severe question. These assumptions included an overemphasis upon history as the category of divine revelation and uncertainty about what that history consisted of; an insistence upon the unity of the Bible at a time when much biblical study was sharpening up the sense of its diversity and its multiple, if not contradictory, voices; a claim for a distinctive way of “biblical” thinking that rested upon poor linguistic procedures; and an apologetic claim for the uniqueness of biblical religion in the ancient world that could not be sustained in the face of the increasing knowledge of that world and its impact upon the Bible. Childs described a growing sense that the broad sway of biblical theology, within American biblical studies particularly, had had its day and was now gone. His own analysis reinforced that fact even though he desired to chart a new way for biblical theology.
The dominance of biblical theology that was apparent in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States indeed disappeared in the succeeding decades. New modes of analysis, such as literary criticism and social history, that were less interested in the theological dimensions of the Bible—if not hostile to them in some respects—came into currency and still command much attention. History of religion studies, which had been eclipsed in the movement toward biblical theology, came back to the forefront. Despite all of this, however, the sense that the Bible, with God and Jesus as its central subject matter, is in very basic respects a theological document and one that shapes the theology of the communities of faith that adhere to it, has meant that the effort to formulate a theological understanding of Scripture has continued to occupy the attention of interpreters of the Bible. Indeed, the last quarter century of the twentieth century saw a spate of works in Old and New Testament theology.
Some Approaches. A look at some of the more comprehensive efforts at biblical theology and the options they suggest identifies possibilities and issues that confront the biblical theologian. In several works, history provides the fundamental datum or framework for biblical theology. Although he never wrote a biblical theology and his views changed in the course of his lifetime, G. Ernest Wright wrote a seminal volume, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, in which he argued that “the primary and irreducible assumption of biblical theology is that history is the revelation of God.” Wright means that biblical theology is “first and foremost a theology of recital,” a confession of faith in which the redemptive and formative events are recited. The task of biblical theology is to lay out and interpret those events and to make the appropriate inferences from them, such as the election of Israel, the covenant relationship, and the unity and meaningfulness of universal history. Wright’s exclusive focus on history, to the neglect of nature as well as the wisdom literature, has been criticized frequently, yet the historical emphasis has been carried forward in a quite different fashion in the work of Gerhard von Rad. His two-volume Old Testament Theology is built around a historical framework, but that framework is not the event-determined history of which Wright spoke. It is the history of Israel’s traditions, of the various testimonies to the power and activity of God, that are the subject matter of biblical, or in this case, Old Testament theology. The actual history is often inaccessible, but theology is built upon the interpretation or understanding of that history, not the history itself. The result is a biblical theology that is, in effect, a sequence of testimonies, often radically different. The diversity of the Scriptures is lifted up. One does not seek to blend all these testimonies into a single unified perspective, even though they often hold much in common.
Von Rad’s approach has some similarities to Rudolf Bultmann’s epochal New Testament theology. He also assumed both that the actuality behind the texts was often inaccessible, or even nonexistent, and that the subject matter of New Testament theology is the interpretation of the Christ event as it takes place in different New Testament writings. In his case also, the theology of the New Testament is self-consciously set forth in relation to an analysis of being that is provided by existentialist philosophy. The center of New Testament theology is Paul, both because he is the primary interpreter of the meaning of the Christ event, which was the subject matter of the kerygmatic preaching of the early church, and because his theology is susceptible to an anthropological emphasis. Later efforts at New Testament theology, including the work of Bultmann’s own student Hans Conzelmann, have pressed the theological significance of the close connection between the risen Christ and Jesus of Nazareth in the early Christian community as well as in the New Testament.
Relating more directly to the work of von Rad and contributing significantly to the post-Bultmannian directions in New Testament theology have been the efforts of the Old Testament scholar Hartmut Gese and the New Testament scholar Peter Stuhlmacher, working independently but in conversation with each other, to uncover connections between both Testaments out of the stream of history of traditions. Growth of the biblical traditions begins in the Old Testament and continues into the New Testament. The two Testaments make up a unified, organic whole, according to Gese. Indeed, the history of biblical traditions in the Old Testament is not complete until it reaches the New Testament. This