Must “Biblical Theology” Be Christian Theology?

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In its earliest use, just over 200 years ago, the term “biblical theology” meant Christian theology. “Biblical theology” represented a search for the overall theological meaning of the Bible—the New Testament and the Old Testament—from a Christian religious perspective.

This point may be emphasized by a historical footnote. The term was first used in 1787 by a German theologian, Johann Gabler, to distinguish “biblical theology” from “dogmatic theology.” The latter reflected, as its name implies, the dogma, beliefs and theology of the church. After the Protestant reformation, scholars—almost exclusively German—began looking for dogmatic support not simply from the church but from biblical texts. It was this search that led to the development of “biblical theology” as opposed to the more Catholic “dogmatic theology.” For Gabler—and even for many scholars today— “biblical theology” is simply a subdivision of “Christian theology.”

Several developments have occurred in the past 200 years that have affected the scholarly search for a “biblical theology.” Perhaps most important is the fact that biblical studies has lost much of its relationship to theology; instead, biblical studies has developed into an independent academic discipline encompassing various historical, philological, literary, archaeological and even religious studies, but often little, if any, theology. As such, biblical studies is now much more closely related to the humanities than to theology in the traditional sense.

In accordance with this trend, “biblical theology” often tended to turn into a largely historical enterprise. To a great extent, “biblical theology” was transformed into a “History of Israelite Religion” or “Early Christianity in the Framework of Ancient Religions.”

This historization of “biblical theology” soon led to a division of the field into two fields, “Old Testament theology” and “New Testament theology.” This happened really without design. It was a practical division, not a theological one. It did not occur as a result of any explicit consideration of how the Old Testament related to the New Testament.

After the First World War, a new interest in “biblical theology” arose, which refocused on theology as such, rather than on the history of religion or the history of religious ideas. But the division of “biblical theology” into two separate fields—Old Testament theology and New Testament theology—had become firmly established, and the scholars in these largely separate fields had still given little attention to the relationship between them. With the renewed interest in theology after the First World War, Christian Old 041Testament theologians were faced with a new and rather precarious problem: What was the theological relationship of the Old Testament to the New? To a certain extent, they were also required to consider whether “Old Testament theology” as such should appropriately be considered part of “Christian theology.”

Almost all the leading scholars in the field of “Old Testament theology” were, at that time, German. When the Nazis came to power, questions relating to “Old Testament theology” became enmeshed in the fierce fight among German theologians concerning the validity of the Old Testament within the Christian church. After all, the Old Testament was a Jewish book. Because of that undeniable fact, some of the most successful defenders of the Old Testament in the Nazi period—for example, Wilhelm Vischer—declared that the Old Testament after Jesus Christ was actually a Christian book. In this way, any Jewish claim to its use was denied, and Jews were implicitly invited to realize the true meaning of the Old Testament as revealed through Jesus Christ. For many years, even after the War, the Jewishness of the Old Testament was simply ignored. Only in the last 20 years or so has this situation changed.

What does it mean to the search for a “biblical theology” that the first part of the Christian Bible is at the same time, and was already earlier, the Jewish Bible? Let me give a somewhat roundabout, answer to the question.

In biblical studies since the Second World War, the international exchange and cooperation among Jewish and Christian scholars of the Old Testament has been rich, broad-based and fruitful. It would certainly seem that everyone now recognizes and accepts that the Hebrew Bible belongs to both Jews and Christians.

But things are obviously not that simple. I remember very well an international congress of biblical scholars in 1956 in Strasbourg, when the Jewish participants left the lecture hall as Walther Eichrodt read a paper asserting the impossibility of any non-Christian interpretation of the Old Testament.

The truth is that while there is a great deal of interchange between Jewish and Christian scholars of the Old Testament—indeed, the colloquium of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament was held in Jerusalem in 1986 when an Israeli, Benjamin Mazar, was elected its president—nevertheless, theology is generally excluded from the discussion. One reason for the exclusion of theological questions from the interreligious agenda is that “biblical theology” has been considered solely a Christian matter. Historically, there has been no Jewish “theology” and consequently no Jewish “biblical theology.“ The place and function of the Bible in the Jewish tradition is fundamentally different. Only recently have there been some new developments in this area. For instance, a new approach by Professor Moshe Goshen-Gottstein will appear soon in a forthcoming book.^a

I postpone any discussion of the development of a Jewish “biblical theology,” because the problem of the Jewish origin of the Hebrew Bible exists for Christian theologians regardless of whether or not Jewish Bible scholars are interested in “biblical theology.” The Christian theologian must face the question: Does it make a difference to a Christian theological interpretation of the Bible that part of the Christian Bible—the Old Testament—is of Jewish origin? Christian theologians have given essentially three different answers to this question.

The classical Christian answer is that the Old Testament is to be considered exclusively in its relation to the New Testament or to “Christian theology” in general. There are, of course, many variations to this approach. For example, the Christological approach seeks to find Jesus Christ already in several places in the Old Testament itself. Another approach, the typological approach, understands some Old Testament events as foreshadowing New Testament events. Some scholars who take this approach stress the concept of salvation history, by which they mean that God’s history with mankind that began with Abraham consequently leads to its final completion in Jesus Christ. Similar to that is the approach of promise and fulfillment, which understands the Old Testament only as a promise that has been fulfilled in the New Testament.

There are a number of other variants to this theological approach to the Old Testament, but they all have a common thread; they all interpret the Old Testament as presaging and relating to something outside itself. Working within this group of approaches, even those scholars who find some value in the Old Testament see it only as containing elements that lead to the true revelation, again to be found in the New Testament. In short, all those who take this first general approach to the Old Testament place a negative, or at least a lower, value on it and see it only as 042a preparation, without meaning or relevance in itself; when viewed from this perspective, the Old Testament actually lost its function after the coming of Jesus Christ.

Also in this group are those who, according to their own perception, use Christian theology as a measure to evaluate the religious contents of the Old Testament. This is a widely held position. For example, Antonius H. Gunneweg’s Understanding the Old Testament^b asserts that evaluating the Old Testament in any other way is not possible at all. According to this view, the Old Testament on its own is, theologically speaking, a nothing, a cipher. This is true even more so for people like Friedrich Baumgartel, who argue that the Old Testament is the testimony of an alien religion, which in their language means inferior to the Christian religion and even quite the opposite of what a true and real religion is.^c

For all this group, the fact that the Old Testament is a Jewish book means, first of all, that it is deficient. The Old Testament has nothing to say on its own. A theology of the Old Testament itself, without taking into consideration criteria imported from the New Testament or from Christian dogmatic theology, would be meaningless and even impossible.

A second theological group ostensibly takes a more “objective” approach, looking at the Old Testament as the testimony of an ancient religion that should be related to, and compared with, other religions of the ancient Near East. Some who take this approach try to demonstrate that Israel’s religion was but a regional variant of ancient Near Eastern religious ideas or patterns, perhaps one of minor importance. Others in this group see the Old Testament as the peak of ancient Near Eastern religious developments, without explicitly tracing the line of development to the Christian religion. Still others who take this approach try to avoid all evaluations, simply comparing the different religions of the Old Testament period in as unbiased a way as possible.

Inevitably, those who take this approach will be less interested in a “theology of the Old Testament” than in a kind of “history of religion” or possibly a “phenomenology of the religion of ancient Israel.” For them, the Jewishness of the Old Testament is a rather neutral fact.

Is there—can there be—a third position? Can there be a theological interpretation of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible that is not linked to, nor evaluated from, the point of view of the New Testament or Christian theology? Can there be a theological interpretation of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible that could be acceptable, in principle at least, from a Jewish viewpoint as well as from a Christian viewpoint? I believe the answer is yes.

This question is, of course, closely related to the more general one of the Christian attitude towards Judaism, but I can only peripherally note that relationship here.

My point of departure is the simple fact that the Hebrew Bible came into existence, and more or less assumed its final shape, before Christianity emerged. Therefore, for simple historical reasons and for the sake of intellectual honesty, it seems to me to be impossible to measure or to evaluate the Hebrew Bible from the viewpoint of theological conceptions that came into being only after it. If we refuse to accept this conclusion, we must assume that the Hebrew Bible had no meaning at all before Christianity appeared.

In short, I believe—and many biblical theologians today agree—we should examine the theology of the Hebrew Bible independently of any later religious developments, whether Christian or Jewish.

As “biblical theologians,” how should we approach the Hebrew Bible? What questions should we put to the text? Again, the answer is 043very simple. We should look for the questions in the text itself. I mean that in a very strict sense: by reading the Hebrew Bible. By reading, not by distilling ideas.

“Biblical theology” has too often taken its ideas and topics from outside the Hebrew Bible—for example, using Christian criteria to explain the theology of the Old Testament. But the Hebrew Bible is not organized according to ideas (Christian or otherwise)—neither is the New Testament, for that matter. When we select our topics and questions from sources outside the Old Testament, we get answers only to those questions. But these are not the questions to which the Hebrew Bible attempts to provide answers.

We can learn what those questions are only by reading the Hebrew Bible on its own. Our point of departure must be first to read the Hebrew Bible in its given form as a theological book. If it is not theological on its own, then it cannot be theological at all. And if it is not theological, to try to uncover a “biblical theology” would be to misuse the Hebrew Bible for a purpose alien to its own intention. But if it is a theological work—as it surely is—we can expect to be able to find the biblical authors’ intentions in their work; they had no reason to hide them; they wanted the reader clearly to understand their message, and therefore wrote their texts in a way that would certainly be understood.

When I speak of authors, I mean, of course, the final authors, or redactors, or editors, those who are responsible for the final edition as it has come down to us. We must do this because these are the only texts we have. I do not deny that it is interesting to investigate the history of Israelite thinking and belief and to attempt to reconstruct, for that purpose, earlier stages in the texts. But this kind of historical analysis takes the biblical texts only as a material that the exegete uses for his or her own purpose of reconstruction. “Biblical theology,” however, should take the biblical text itself as its basis.

Where should a theology of the Hebrew Bible begin? Systematic approaches usually begin with a certain topic that the particular scholar feels is most relevant, such as the word of God, the name of God, revelation, the saving God, the blessing God, and so on.

I would urge a more “holistic” approach. Gerhard von Rad uses the Exodus as his point of departure. For him, this is the basic and fundamental event in Israel’s history. I believe we should begin where the Bible itself begins—with creation. But a holistic reading of the Hebrew Bible should not isolate the creation. Rather, the creation should be understood in context. The creation is followed by the sin of man and by a flood that almost brings an end to the world that God created; the flood is followed by a new creation, sanctified by a divine covenant. According to the concept imbedded in this primeval history, mankind does not live under the auspices of the original creation, but in a world that was and still is endangered by sin; nevertheless, humans continue to exist on the basis of God’s promise, a promise guaranteed by his covenant.

We find this same structure of threat and covenant in the Sinai story: The covenant is given, but it is endangered by Israel’s sin in worshipping the Golden Calf. God nevertheless restores the covenant and establishes it a second time (“Behold, I make a covenant”—Exodus 34:10). Israel no longer lives under the original covenant, but under the second one that exists, despite Israel’s sinfulness, because of God’s grace. This double structure—of covenant and covenant renewal—shapes the first two books of the Torah,^d Genesis and Exodus.

I hope I have illustrated an approach to a “biblical theology” of the Old Testament that stands on its own; one that can be understood on its own, without being placed in the shadow of ideas or concepts extraneous to it—whether Christian or otherwise.

In its earliest use, just over 200 years ago, the term “biblical theology” meant Christian theology. “Biblical theology” represented a search for the overall theological meaning of the Bible—the New Testament and the Old Testament—from a Christian religious perspective.