Can We Find God Without History? - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 1999

Can We Find God Without History?

The story of one scholar’s failed attempt

By Paul D. Hanson

How can we discover—or uncover—the Israelite God in the text of the Hebrew Bible? That is the problem scholars refer to as Old Testament theology. A recent book that has created quite a stir in the academy, written by the prominent Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, answers the question in a way that I believe is quite misguided. For Brueggemann, history is irrelevant to this subject. He doesn’t care what really happened; he doesn’t think it profitable to explore the real-life context in which the Israelite God was revealed. His approach is ahistorical. To find the Israelite God, Brueggemann, of […]

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Footnotes

1.

Developed in the 18th century, positivism limits sources for acquiring knowledge to data accessible through empirical observation and experimentation.

2.

Postmodernism refutes the claim that reality can be determined by scientific methods and insists that knowledge is the creation of interpreting communities or individuals.

3.

Most biblical scholars attribute chapters 40–55 of the Book of Isaiah to an anonymous prophet active within the Jewish community during the Babylonian Exile (586–538 B.C.)

Endnotes

1.

Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1997).