Essays on

Biblical and
Systematic
Theology

edited by
Ben C. Ollenburger

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 Essays on
Biblical and
Systematic
Theology

edited by
Ben C. Ollenburger

Text-Reader Series 4
1991

Institute of Mennonite Studies

Elkhart, Indiana
 Text-Reader Series

Series Titles:

1. Essays on Biblical Interpretation: Anabaptist'Mennonite Perspectives Edited by

Willard M. Swartley, 1984.

2. One Lord, One Church, One Hope, and One God: Mennonite Confessions of
Faith in North America. Howard John Loewen, 1985.

3. Monotheism, Power and Justice: Collected Old Testament Essays. Millard C.

Lind, 1990.

4. So Wide a Sea: Essays on Biblical and Systematic Theology. Edited by Ben C.

Ollenburger, 1991.

The Text'Reader series is published by the Institute of Mennonite Studies

with the encouragement of the Council of Mennonite Seminaries. The series
seeks to make available significant resource materials for seminary classroom
use. By using photographic reproduction and/or desktop publishing tech'
nology, and marketing primarily through individual channels, the series seeks
to make available helpful materials at relatively low cost.
Priority in accepting manuscripts will be given to material that has
promise for ongoing use in the seminary classroom, with orientation toward or
interest in the Anabaptist-Mennonite theological Tradition.
The Institute of Mennonite Studies is the research agency of the
Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, 3003 Benham Avenue, Elkhart,
Indiana, 46517-1999.

Copyright © 1991 by the Institute of Mennonite Studies.

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 Contents

Table of Contents iii

Abbreviations iv
Contributors V
Preface vii

Chapter 1 Biblical and Systematic Theology in Interaction:

A Case Study on Atonement. Thomas Finger page 1

Chapter 2 Biblical Theology and Normativity.

Elmer A. Martens page 19

Chapter 3 Biblical and Systematic Theology as Functional Specialties:

Their Distinction and Relation. A. James Reimer page 37

Chapter 4 Critical Theology and the Bible: A Response to A. James Reimer

Gordon D. Kaufman page 59

Chapter 5 Biblical Theology and Feminist Interpretation: A Dinosaur

at the Freedom March? Mary H. Schertz page 65

Chapter 6 Theology in Transition: Toward a Confessional Paradigm

for Theology. Howard John Loewen page 79

Chapter 7 Biblical and Systematic Theology: Constructing a Relation.

Ben C. Ollenburger page 111

in
 Abbreviations

ANF Ante'Nicene Fathers

ASBH American Studies in Biblical Hermeneutics
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
CGR Conrad Grebel Review
ET Expository Times
FRLANT Forschungen zur Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments
HBT Horizons in Biblical Theology
IDB Intrpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible
JBT Jahrbuch fur Biblische Theologie
JR Journal of Religion
JSOTSS Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series
JTS Journal of Theological Studies
KD Kerygma und Dogma
MT Modem Theology
NTA New Testament Abstracts
NZST Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie
OP Occasional Papers
RSR Religious Studies Review
SBT Studies in Biblical Theology
SJT Scottish Journal of Theology
TJ Trinity Journal
TRu Theologische Rundschau
TT Theology Today

IV
 Contributors

Thomas Finger, Professor of Theology, Eastern Mennonite Seminary,

Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Elmer A. Martens, Professor of Old Testament, Mennonite Brethren

Biblical Seminary, Fresno, California.

A. James Reimer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and

Theology, Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo, Ontario.

Gordon D. Kaufman, Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Professor of Divinity,

Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mary H. Schertz, Assistant Professor of New Testament, Associated

Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Elkhart, Indiana.

Howard John Loewen, Associate Professor of Theology, Mennonite

Brethren Biblical Seminary, Fresno, California.

Ben C. Ollenburger, Associate Professor of Old Testament,

Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, Elkhart, Indiana.
| ;
 Preface

Since Scripture, by which we are led to a knowledge of God, is

very broad . . . , there is little to be gained by launching beginners
on so wide a sea.

—Gabriel Biel, 1420-95

Since Scripture is “so wide a sea,” Gabriel Biel proposed to spare his
students by having them study, instead, Peter Lombard's Sentences. According
to G. R. Evans, from whom the above quotation is taken, Biel believed that
Peter Lombard, in the twelfth century, had arranged the relevant, chiefly
patristic material in such an orderly way that students would find in his
Sentences the resources to settle any questions that might arise. This would re¬
move the need of their having to consult the Bible itself.1
Many things have changed since the fifteenth century. Scripture remains a
very wide sea, but few are now likely to share Biel's confidence that a hand¬
book of theology would serve to measure its expanse. Already by Biel's time,
and aided by his precedent, theology had begun to divide its attention between
study of the Bible and ‘speculative theology’ (we would call it systematic
theology). This division could be overcome, at least in principle, when it was
the same theologian—someone like Biel or St. Thomas Aquinas—who com¬
mented on Scripture and, in another set of lectures, engaged in speculative
theology. But over the past five centuries, the division of theological attention
has developed into a division of disciplines, commonly allotted to different
university or seminary departments. It would now be uncommon, especially in
North America, for anyone to lecture on both the Bible and theology—or even
on both the Old and the New Testament. Scripture itself is a wide sea, and so
is the gulf dividing biblical studies and theology.
Specialization is the result of divisions like the one Gabriel Biel made,
but in our day it is also one of their causes. In their pragmatic distinction be¬
tween exegesis and speculative theology, Biel and his peers opened the way
for scholars, several centuries later, to specialize in one or the other. It would
be pointless, and I believe it would be mistaken, to argue that this specializa¬
tion has produced only negative results. Specialization, by itself, is only a
convenient division of labor in a common task. However, the division of labor
is sometimes so rigid that it is difficult to identify the common task.
Biel could assume a world—we may think of it as a world of discourse—
that encompassed Scripture, the patristic writers, a commentator like Peter

vu
Vlll So Wide a Sea

Lombard, as well as the contemporary church. Already the Reformation

complicated this world, not only by giving Scripture a unique status, but by
making it a relatively independent object of study. Now theology could no
longer rely on Peter Lombard, or even on patristic sources; whatever use
theology made of other material, it had ultimately to rely on Scripture itself.
By the seventeenth century, Protestant dogmatic theology had already come to
see that reliance as problematic; biblical theology emerged as an activity
oriented to demonstrating or reasserting it. In other words, biblical theology
was simply dogmatic theology's effort to guarantee its authentic reliance on
Scripture. But by the nineteenth century, following the Enlightenment and its
long aftermath, biblical theology confronted a choice: it could retain its orien¬
tation toward dogmatic (or systematic) theology, or it could identify itself with
the historical-critical study of the Bible.
This latter choice, which predominated, invigorated theology, but it also
raised problems that neither Gabriel Biel nor the reformers had to face.
While biblical theology retained its interest in theology's reliance on Scrip¬
ture, critical study of the Bible raised serious questions about what kind of
reliance that should be, or could be. Systematic theology raised the same
questions from within its own domain. By the end of the nineteenth century,
systematic theology seemed to face a peculiar tension. While historical-
critical study had to proceed in methodological independence of the Christian
tradition, in order to achieve its own historical and scientific understanding of
the Bible, dogmatic or systematic theology had somehow to depend on that
same tradition. The strategies theologians deployed to resolve or accommo¬
date this tension ranged across the spectrum of possibilities. One theologian,
C. A. Bernoulli, accommodated it with a sharp consistency by proposing
parallel tracks; he identified the first as purely scientific historical research,
and the second as a practical and unscientific dogmatics that served the needs
of the church.2 Of course, parallel tracks do not converge.
Systematic theologians found Bernoulli's solution completely unsatisfac¬
tory. So did Bernoulli, on subsequent reflection. Even so, Bernoulli forced
systematic theology to find a basis on which it could be both ‘scientific’ and at
the same time adequate to the church's needs. Whatever such a basis might
be—the proposals of Ernst Troeltsch and Karl Barth stand at either end of a
continuum—it would have to be found outside the historical-critical study of
the Bible (and of the church's tradition) itself. Since this seemed to violate the
principled objectivity of historical-critical research, biblical theology's
progress to the beginning of the twentieth century implicitly (sometimes
explicitly) endorsed Bernoulli's proposal. By then it had become wholly un¬
clear exactly what was theological about biblical theology. Theologians could
think of biblical scholars—even biblical theologians—as engaged in
exegetical or philological minutiae that had no positive theological impor¬
tance. For their part, biblical scholars could think of theologians as expanding
on the precedent of Peter Lombard, the title of whose work, Sentences
Preface IX

(sententiae), means “opinions.” On the one hand, historical-critical trivia with¬

out end; on the other, mere opinions. There is no common task worth pursuing
that combines trivia with mere opinion.
The past several decades have seen many efforts to correct those carica¬
tures, and to overcome whatever truth is in them. At stake in these efforts is
clarity on the question of theology's relation to the Bible. One way—it is
certainly not the only way—of framing the question is to ask about the relation
of biblical and systematic theology. This is the course taken by the essays in
this volume. However, it proves to be a complicated course because of serious
disagreements within biblical and systematic theology about the definition and
task—and even the legitimacy—of each; to speak of their relation requires
taking a stand on those disagreements. For that reason, the essays are also
proposals in biblical and systematic theology themselves. While this is a
complication, it also contributes to a genuine conversation across the bound¬
aries—or across the “sea.” It does so by requiring biblical theologians to
think, not just about, but in terms of systematic theology, and by imposing the
reverse requirement on systematic theologians. The success of the essays
depends, in no small part, on how well they meet those requirements.
For the authors of these essays the conversation is explicitly motivated by
the need to resolve issues concerning theology's relation to the Bible. This need
is itself rooted in convictions about theology's relation and responsibility to the
church. However, the precise nature of these convictions, and the way the issues
are understood, vary among the essays. Elmer Martens, after making a case for
biblical theology's “normativity” for the church, proposes a conception of
systematic theology commensurate with it. He draws that conception in large
part from the work of Thomas Finger, who makes his own proposal concrete by
showing how classical models of atonement illumine biblical texts. A. James
Reimer draws on Bernard Lonergan to argue that biblical and systematic
theology are not different disciplines but different functional specialties
within the discipline of Christian theology. Like Reimer, Howard Loewen
draws biblical theology into the wider orbit of theology, but he does so by
proposing a confessional paradigm for Christian theology. Ben Ollenburger
locates biblical theology within the “logical space of normative discourse”
(Jeffrey Stout), a space shared with systematic theology as an instance of the
church's self-critical discursive practice. Despite significant differences among
these proposals, they share convictions about the importance of theology's
relation to the Bible and to the church. On the other hand, Gordon Kaufman
assigns to theology a degree of autonomy that would allow it to exercise a
critical responsibility in regard to both the Bible and the church; he proposes
as theology's critical principle the triune God. Mary Schertz argues that
biblical theology must include, and be subject to, critical analysis. She bases
her proposal on feminist convictions that inform a social and ethical analysis
of the power relations involved in biblical interpretation itself.
X So Wide a Sea

The authors of these essays are Mennonites. However, the issues they take
up, and the proposals they make, are ecumenical in scope. The confessional
identity of its authors reflects the origin of this book in initiatives by the
Institute of Mennonite Studies to bring together biblical scholars and
theologians at annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the
Society of Biblical Literature. The essays by Thomas Finger, Elmer Martens,
A. James Reimer, and Gordon Kaufman were originally prepared for those
meetings, and have been revised for publication here. Kaufman’s essay is a
response to Reimer’s. It is included, not because the editor or anyone else
thought that Reimer's essay was especially in need of criticism, but because
Kaufman also mounts his own argument regarding theology's relation to
Scripture, and how that relation should be decided. In that respect, Kaufman's
response would apply to the other essays as well.
The editor would like to thank Willard M. Swartley for his help in this
project's initial stages, and the contributors for their patience and cooperation.
Thanks are also due to JW Graphics and Janice Wiebe Ollenburger for help
in the design and production of the book.
On this date a century ago, Karl August Wichert left the village of
Fiirstenwerder, near Danzig, and sailed across a very wide sea indeed. He was
truly a great grandfather.
Ben C. Ollenburger
June 7, 1991

Notes
1 Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to Reformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 104.
2 Ernst Troeltsch, “Half a Century of Theology: A Review," in Ernst
Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religions} ed. Robert Morgan and Michael
Pye (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), 77.
 Chapter 1

Biblical and Systematic Theology in Interaction:

A Case Study on the Atonement

Thomas Finger

I
Introduction

Ever since the decline of neo-orthodoxy and of the “biblical theology

movement,” systematic and biblical theology have drifted further apart.
While many lament this growing estrangement, it cannot be attributed entirely
to increasing specialization, nor to the new issues that have impacted the field.
Whether it arises from competition for students or publishing contracts, or
from deep convictions about religion or one's own branch of study, numerous
practitioners in both fields tacitly regard the other as largely irrelevant or
even dangerous to their own pursuits. Accordingly, talk about constructive re¬
lationships between the two fields would be premature if it by-passed
questions as to whether such relationships do or should exist.

II
Conflicts Between the Disciplines

Biblical theology is often characterized as a descriptive discipline.

According to most practitioners, its major task is not to make general truth
claims, but to analyze the conceptuality, imagery, theology, and style of various
biblical writings within their socio-historical contexts. Consequently, biblical
scholars often critique systematic theologians for indulging in generalizations
that ignore or distort the particularity of Scripture.
First, biblical theologians often fault systematicians for overlooking the
texts' specificity. Systematicians seldom bother to do exegesis. When par¬
ticular passages offer several interpretive possibilities, they seem to select the
one that fits their preconceived theory. And they seem to ignore passages that
challenge these theories.
Second, systematic theology seems to reduce the rich diversity of biblical
images and themes to a few fundamental motifs. Instead of marvelling at the

1
2 So Wide a Sea

multiplicity of issues and concepts found in writings of diverse origin and

purpose, systematicians seem intent on organizing as much as possible around
a few that they regard as central, and disregarding all else that will not fit.
Third, systematic theology often derives its leading concepts, not from the
biblical writings, but from sources such as philosophy, psychology, or com¬
parative religion. At best, these language games are somewhat alien to those
of the biblical writers, and poorly suited to express what they mean. In its
strongest form, this objection maintains that the biblical perspective is so
unique that other conceptualities will inevitably pervert what the writers of
Scripture want to say.
However, objections such as these do not run in one direction. Systematic
theology is often characterized as a constructive discipline. According to most
practitioners, its major task is not to analyze the imagery of ancient texts, but to
state a living faith's major truth claims in a conceptuality comprehensible for
one's own day. Consequently, systematicians often criticize biblical scholars
for being so preoccupied with the details of time-worn documents that they can
say little to the present's urgent concerns.
First, systematic theologians find biblical theologians guilty of an
absorption in minutiae that never ends. Passages are analyzed in such fine
detail that the arguments can hardly be followed. No sooner have texts been
painstakingly reassembled through form criticism than tradition and rhetorical
and canonical criticism are rearranging them all again. Amidst the shifting
avalanches of detail, any message from the text for the present seems to have
vanished.
Second, systematicians regard the identification of numerous biblical
images and themes as but a preliminary step. Once these elements have been
isolated and placed side-by-side, the most important questions remain. Are
they related to each other in certain ways? Are some prominent while others
are peripheral? If these questions remain unanswered, scholars and pastors
seem free to emphasize any motif that strikes their fancy, and in ways inconsis¬
tent with its original overall function.
Third, biblical scholars seem to assume that once they explain what a
biblical theme meant in its socio-historical context, its meaning for the present
is fairly plain. But we live in a far different world. Unless these themes can
be translated into modern terms they remain largely irrelevant. In its
strongest form, this objection maintains that biblical motifs are time-
conditioned expressions of truths that are available to humans in other ways,
and that systematic theology's task is to provide more generally accessible
conceptualities (philosophical, psychological, etc.) for stating them.
Can these gulfs between biblical and systematic theology be bridged?
This would be possible if one could begin on one side of the gap, affirming
the basic orientation and procedures of one discipline, and yet argue that,
when best carried out, these lead beyond the involuted ways in which they are
often practiced—and could then call for contributions from the other
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 3

discipline. Being a systematic theologian, I am tempted to argue that the con-

cerns of my own field are (to those without prejudice) obvious, but that we
could use help from biblical scholars. Partly for strategic reasons, however,
and partly due to my own deep convictions, I will try to begin on the other
side of the gap. In particular, I will support what I have called the strongest
objection against much systematic theology—that the biblical writings express
a unique perspective on reality, one that will be distorted if subordinated to
more general conceptual schemes.1 This claim, of course, is not just method'
ological. It is distinctly theological. It entails the rejection of what many
systematic theologians affirm—that biblical motifs are time-conditioned
expressions of truths generally knowable in other ways.

Ill
Interaction Between the Disciplines

A. From the Bible to Systematic Conceptuality

Starting from the uniqueness, diversity, and particularity of the biblical
writings, do these writings themselves call for something like systematic
theology? For the follow reasons, I would say yes.
First, most biblical writers refer to others. Jeremiah refers to Micah (Jer.
26:18). Paul mentions Peter (Galatians 2), and “Peter” mentions Paul (2 Pet.
3:15-16). Matthew and Luke know about Mark. More importantly, biblical
writings quote or allude to others innumerable times. Beyond this, numerous
books make reference to the same events and themes: for example, exodus,
exile, resurrection, parousia, God's judgment, God's love. To be sure, different
texts speak of these in different—sometimes vastly different—ways; the
distinctiveness of each must be allowed to stand. Nonetheless, from a purely
literary standpoint distinctiveness is not best discovered by treating writings or
themes as isolated instances. Their particularity, in other words, can be fully
appreciated only through asking (among other things) what they have in
common.
This consideration does not yet bring us to systematic theology—to a
discussion that articulates broad biblical truth claims in contemporary terms.
But at least it argues the need for a full-blown biblical theology—for
comprehensive comparisons and contrasts of what all the canonical writings say
on common themes. And it challenges the assumption that the particularity of
biblical texts and images can be discovered through concentrating on that
particularity alone.
Second, all biblical writings, so far as I can see, claim to speak of
ultimate realities—about God, salvation, etc. And ultimate realities, however
well a particular text may claim to express them, by definition transcend
whatever any one text can say. In other words, in the very attempt to speak of
the ultimate, one points to a reality so comprehensive that it cannot be
exhaustively defined in that single attempt. By its very nature, then, any one
4 So Wide a Sea

such expression acknowledges, at least tacitly, that other expressions from

other vantage points are possible. This leaves open the possibility that
essentially the same things can be expressed from different perspectives in
different contexts, and that it is legitimate to ask what those same things may
be.
In particular, many New Testament texts claim that God's definitive
eschatological act has taken place.2 To be sure, they differ in explaining how
the “already” of this act is related to its consummation, which has “not yet”
occurred. Nevertheless, none of them understands the eschaton as the abolition
of earthly history, as Rudolf Bultmann has claimed.3 Instead, the eschaton has
brought, is bringing, and will bring coherence and continuity among all God's
purposes for human history and the cosmos. All dimensions of reality are
affected by such a claim. Accordingly, it is permissible at least to ask how
any dimension—sociological, scientific, etc.—is related to and shaped by that
ultimacy toward which these New Testament writings point. In other words,
the claims of these writings legitimate systematic theology as a quest—as the
search, in their light, for coherence, comprehensiveness, and synthesis among
everything we can know. At the same time, of course, the biblical writings'
variety and particularity place limitations on the completeness and conceptual
uniformity with which this can be done.
Third, studied in their socio-historical particularity, many biblical
documents, including all New Testament ones, prove to have a missionary
thrust. Indeed, the more the particularity of their images and themes is
appreciated, the more does it prove to arise from their intention to express
their message in new situations and cultural settings. However, any deliberate
effort to express something in one particular culture or thought-world ac¬
knowledges at least tacitly that other expressions are possible. And it opens
the possibility that the same things can be expressed in other and later
contexts—as systematic theology seeks to do. In analyzing various writings as
productions of different communities, biblical scholars may sometimes forget
that these were usually communities-in-mission; that is, they were not freezing
the gospel into one limited cultural expression, but were outworkings of a
trajectory that was opening paths for further and different translations.
Ultimately, this trajectory aimed toward every person in every culture, under¬
girded by the assumption that the basic gospel claims could be expressed in
all of them.
Finally, the path from biblical to systematic theology becomes apparent
when we approach Scripture as canonical criticism recommends. First and
foremost, the biblical writings are documents of a living religion, not simply
records of ancient cultures. As a canonical whole, they have revitalized and
transformed churches in widely diverse cultural settings for centuries. In other
words, understood functionally and within their overall operating context, the
images, themes, and concepts of scripture exhibit an “adaptability” and a
range of “resignification” that stretches well beyond their socio-historical
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 5

origins.4 They prove to harbor latent meanings that emerge fully only in
different contexts. Accordingly, systematic theology's task—to inquire after
those meanings that transcend Scripture's original contexts and are expressible
in the terminology of others—is legitimated by the Bible as a living canon.
Starting from their uniqueness, diversity, and particularity, I have argued
that the biblical writings, understood as eschatologically ultimate, as
missionary and as canonical documents, legitimate not only descriptive study
of them within their socio-historical contexts, but also constructive statement of
their deepest meanings in the language of many other contexts. This latter task
will make some use of extra-biblical languages (such as philosophy, later
church tradition, or comparative religion). I have already asserted, however,
that the biblical writings express a unique perspective on reality—one that
will undergo distortion if subordinated to, or reinterpreted in terms of, other
language games. But given this assertion, which many biblical scholars sup'
port, how can any use of extra-biblical concepts be possible?

B. From Systematic Conceptuality to the Bible

Beginning from a given culture's conceptualities—philosophical, social,
psychological, or any other—what links with biblical themes might one expect
to find? Discussions of this matter often tend toward two extremes. Many
theologians assume that a generally accurate understanding of many issues on
which Scripture speaks is available through the proper use of rational tools
available to everyone. Of course, the insights of any philosophy, psychology,
or other conceptuality will need to be revised and/or supplemented in light of
biblical revelation. Yet all areas of human experience, and thus all concepts
that accurately express them, are thought to point in roughly the same direction
as the biblical writings, and in a more or less straight line.5
Other theologians, however, not only affirm that biblical thought-forms are
unique, they add that all other conceptualities point in directions opposed to
them. Extra'biblical concepts appear wholly unable to affirm what the
biblical writings do, even in an incomplete or partially distorted way. Karl
Barth, for instance, insists that the biblical God
completely takes the place of everything that elsewhere is
usually called ‘God,’ and therefore suppresses and
excludes it all, and claims to be alone the truth. . . . God in
the sense of the Christian Confession is and exists in a
completely different way from that which is elsewhere
called divine.6

Such an emphasis makes any use of extra'biblical concepts in systematic

theology highly problematic.
I come down somewhere between these extremes. On one hand, not only
does Scripture occasionally speak of “general revelation” of various kinds,7
but many biblical writers employ concepts from other religions and
6 So Wide a Sea

philosophies to express their own views. It seems exaggerated, then, to insist

that extra-biblical concepts assert something wholly other than or opposed to
Scripture. It seems better to say that they can refer to the same thing, or to
certain aspects of the same thing, although in partial or distorted ways.
On the other hand, I would still affirm a high degree of uniqueness for the
biblical writings. For when biblical authors utilize concepts from surrounding
cultures, these concepts often take on meanings quite different from their prior
ones (for example, the use of pleroma in Col. 1:19; 2:9). When one examines
parallels between biblical and other contemporary uses of images and
concepts, the differences usually prove much more striking than the
similarities. This suggests that the meaning of such concepts is largely shaped
by the overall contexts in which they function. Accordingly, the more
thoroughly a concept is embedded in a meaning-complex different from the
biblical one, the more opposed to the biblical perspectives its actual denota¬
tions and implications will likely be.8 However, this does not imply that most
extra-biblical images and concepts, in and of themselves, point sharply away
from (or toward) biblical truth. Rather, like those used in Scripture, many
such concepts have various degrees of “adaptability” and “resignification.”
Through incorporation into different meaning-complexes, they are capable of
being stretched and modified to signify a range of different things.
All this suggests how systematic theologians can utilize many
philosophical, religious, and other concepts found in their cultures. Take for
instance the possibility of using the legal concept of an equivalent penalty to
explain the significance of Jesus' death. Theologians will be best off assuming
neither that such a concept mirrors biblical truth, nor that it inevitably distorts
it. Instead, they should employ such concepts as proposals, as hypotheses.
They can best ask: “To what extent, and in what ways, might the concept of
legal penalty be appropriate or inappropriate for illuminating the cross?”
Consideration of the diverse biblical data on Jesus' death, if it is done care¬
fully enough, will probably not lead to simple affirmation or rejection of this
concept. Should a theologian eventually adopt it, its meaning will have been
stretched and revised through interaction with this material.
This approach is much like those often used in the sciences. When
physicists hypothesize, for example, that light behaves like waves, they are
asking a question: “To what extent does light behave like waves?” This pro¬
posal is then tested by various experiments, by means of which the original
wave model will almost certainly be modified and/or supplemented, or
possibly even scrapped. The testing of this hypothetical model against an
experimental field will seldom lead to simple confirmation or refutation of
the model. Even if the model eventually be abandoned, its testing will almost
always lead to a deepened understanding of the phenomena under
investigation—as well as of the explanatory potential of the original model
and of others that may come into play.9
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 7

Above, in part A. of this section, I argued that the biblical writings,

despite their wide variety of concepts, contexts, and subject matter, make
affirmations about common themes. I sought to show how the eschatological,
missionary, and canonical thrust of these writings make necessary the transla-
tion of these affirmations into other conceptualities. Now, in part B., I have
sought to show how such translation is possible, even though the scriptural
perspectives tend to be in conflict with other conceptual systems. I am arguing
that when extra-biblical concepts are pried loose, as it were, from such
systems and used as hypotheses in flexible ways, they can bring certain
dimensions of the biblical writings to light. And they can be modified through
this interaction to express biblical revelation.
So far, however, my approach may seem to imply that the above patterns
of interaction can simply be deduced from general methodological
considerations. In reality, this general theory has emerged gradually from my
wrestling with specific texts and their relationship to systematic doctrines.
Moreover, it is intended, not to demarcate the roles of biblical and systematic
theology with final precision,10 but to suggest ways whereby they might
profitably interact. To make my proposal clearer, and to illustrate its
usefulness, let me show how it operates in reference to an issue that played a
significant role in its development.

IV
A Case Study: The Atonement

In seeking to articulate the significance of Jesus' saving work, two major

theories, the substitutionary and the moral influence theories, have arisen in
western theology. Despite their great differences, both theories argue
deductively from premises borrowed in large measure from the cultural
contexts in which they arose. I will seek to show that a third approach, the so-
called “Christus Victor" motif, in several ways better reflects the variety of
the biblical material. I will support this claim by taking several of its major
concepts and employing them in the manner I have sketched above. I hope in
the process to illustrate one way whereby biblical and systematic theology
might profitably interact.

A. Traditional Theories of Atonement

Until the late 1930s, most western theologians assumed that a genuine
theology of atonement was first articulated in Anselm of Canterbury's Cur
Deus Homo? Of course, they knew that a dramatic, apparently mythological
portrayal of the atonement had been widespread for about a millennium
before that. According to this “Christus Victor” motif, Jesus brought salvation
by defeating Death and the Devil, thereby releasing humankind from their
grip. However, Anselm insisted that basing one's faith on such picturesque
images was like painting pictures in the air. He sought to ground his beliefs in
8 So Wide a Sea

something more solid—in necessary reasons that would show why atonement
had to occur.11 Without doubt, Anselm himself was steeped in Scripture; yet,
in introducing the two books that make up Cur Deus Homo? he emphasized his
fundamental method in this way:
The first . . . leaving Christ out of view (as if nothing had
ever been known of him) . . . proves, by absolute reasons, the
impossibility that any person should be saved without him.
Again, in the second book, likewise, as if nothing were
known of Christ, it is moreover shown by plain reasoning
and fact that ... all things were to take place which we hold
in regard to Christ.12

At the end of these efforts, Anselm's discussion partner, Boso, affirms that, “in
proving that God became human by necessity, leaving out what was taken from
the Bible . . . you convince both Jews and Pagans by the mere force of
reason.”13
Anselm seeks to deduce the atonement's necessity from premises com
cerning God's nature and governance of humankind. But while he sincerely
thinks that they are universal, these premises are clearly influenced by feudal
notions of honor and obedience, as well as by the philosophical and ecclesias¬
tical traditions of his time. These premises run approximately as follows.14
Since God is the sovereign ruler, God's purposes cannot fail; but neither can
God let any transgression go unpunished. God has ordained that at least some
humans will attain eternal life. Eternal life is to be merited by perfect obe¬
dience; one disobedient act, however, earns eternal death. Obedient acts
performed by God are worth infinite merit.
To these general premises Anselm adds the claim that everyone has
disobeyed. Everyone, therefore, deserves eternal death. Yet God has or¬
dained that some will find eternal life, and this purpose cannot fail.
Therefore, since humankind must obey God to merit eternal life, some human
must render God perfect obedience. Moreover, since all have disobeyed and
deserve eternal death, these transgressions must be so punished. Yet hu¬
mankind's collective penalty is so great that only a person of infinite value—
that is, God—can pay it. In this way, Anselm finally deduces that a divine-
human person must win our salvation.
Soon after Anselm developed this “substitutionary” explanation, Peter
Abelard put forth a “moral influence” theory of atonement. Yet this
approach never gained the upper hand until Protestant liberalism championed
it in the nineteenth century. For our purposes, it is significant that this theory,
too, was often deduced from contemporary notions of morality and of God's
governance of the cosmos.15 Horace Bushnell's The Vicarious Sacrifice abun¬
dantly demonstrates that he was steeped in Scripture. Methodologically,
however, Bushnell deduced much of his theory from a universal law of
vicarious love. This law affirms that any
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 9

good being is . . . ready, just according to his goodness, to act

vicariously in behalf of any bad, or miserable being, whose
condition he is able to restore. . . . Love is a principle essen-
daily vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with
others, and taking upon itself the burden of their evils.16

Now this love has priority even over God. For God “does not make the law of
love. ... It is with him as an eternal, necessary, immutable law, existing in
logical order before his will, and commanding, in the right of its own excel-
lence, his will and life.”17 From this law, then, one can deduce that God must
come into our world, and take the burden of our sin and sorrow upon himself.
Bushnell also deduces from this law other features of Jesus' atonement Since
love is a moral power, God will win us, not through threat of punishment, but
by inducement and attraction.18 Bushnell does make room for God's judgment,
but he deduces this from God's justice, an attribute that he defines quite
differently from love.19
Despite great differences between these theories, they exhibit one striking
methodological similarity. Both claim that an interlocking scheme of rational
concepts lays bare the universal truths that underlie the varied expressions of
Scripture. Neither theory acknowledges that what reason perceives might need
to be modified by the biblical writings. (Of course, neither system of concepts
would have been discovered, or attained its specific shape, apart from
Scripture. Yet, neither theory admits this or acknowledges any possible
discrepancy between its clear rational principles and the biblical data.)
To be sure, both theories helpfully articulate certain kinds of biblical
data. However, taken by itself, each rational scheme also omits, and thereby
distorts, some important scriptural emphases.20 For example, while Anselm
ultimately roots atonement in God's salvific will,21 divine love is largely ab¬
sent from his scheme. Without this balancing emphasis, it is scarcely
surprising that Anselm's overwhelming stress on eternal punishment for even
the slightest misstep has often led to an understanding of atonement chiefly as
vicarious punishment, and as a message about human sin 22
On the other hand, despite Bushnell's admirable focus on divine love, his
system of concepts also distorts it. In making vicarious love a law that even
God must obey, the wonder of the divine initiative is diminished. The atone¬
ment as an act of grace—as something that God did not “have to” do, espe¬
cially in light of our resistance—tends to be minimized.
These brief discussions have, I hope, clarified my claim that extra-biblical
concepts can illumine dimensions of the canonical writings that may otherwise
remain obscure—but also that, to the extent that they are not modified by the
biblical data, they lead in directions generally opposed to its central em¬
phases. Next, in contrast to these two partial distortions, I want to illustrate
how an approach that treats such concepts as modifiable hypotheses can better
illumine the uniqueness, diversity, and particularity of Scripture.
10 So Wide a Sea

B. The Christus Victor Motif

Ever since Gustaf Aulen's publication of Christus Victor, this ancient,
dramatic approach to atonement has received much attention. However, few
systematic theologians have utilized it as a major theme. For the most part,
they refer to it in episodic and rhetorical fashion. This is probably due to fac-
tors that have always hindered its recognition as an authentic theological
explanation.23 First, there is the strange character of Jesus' opponents: Sin,
Death, Principalities, the Devil. How can the rational enterprise of theology
explicate the nature of these apparently fantastic entities? Second, the
Christus Victor motif abounds in paradox. One the one hand, God seems to be
on the side of the powers, for they execute God's judgment on sin. On the
other hand, God seems to be against them, for Christ liberates us from their
bondage. Third, it has often been unclear precisely how this liberation takes
place.
These last two issues spawned some apparently strange explanations, even
in patristic times. Some argued that the Powers' rule over humankind was
legal: in their willingness to obey them, all humans have surrendered to their
rule. Accordingly, Satan did not have to let his captives go unless he was paid
a ransom of at least equivalent value. Foreshadowing Anselm, some proposed
that Jesus, being divine, was worth at least as much as all other humans, and
that the Devil accepted him as payment in their place. In this version, a substi¬
tutionary element appears, although the penalty is paid to Satan.24 Other
theologians, however, vigorously protested this explanation. They insisted that
Satan is a robber and usurper, and that God could not owe him anything.
This explanation was sometimes intertwined with the seemingly stranger
notion of the deception of the Devil. Some argued that the Devil would never
have sought to take Christ captive had he known who he really was. So “to him
who demanded a ransom for us," God “concealed himself under the veil of
our nature;” Christ's humanity formed the bait, as it were, concealing his Deity,
which was the hook. Like a greedy fish, Satan lunged for the bait, but he
found himself struggling with God, whom he was not powerful enough to hold.
In this way, Jesus and all who would be joined to bim passed out of Satan's
dominion.25

C. Christus Victor and Systematic Theology

If the notions of the ransom and the Devil's deception be understood as
rational explanations, combining them into a consistent theory seems very
strained, if not impossible. How shall we reconcile the assertions that Jesus
freed us by paying bis life to his captor, and also by escaping from his grasp?
And how can one maintain that God used deception at the heart of the atoning
work?
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 11

I suggest that profound meaning can be discovered in these notions if we

treat them, not as clear-cut concepts, intelligible part from the biblical data,
but as flexible hypotheses, which only make sense when employed in dialogue
with scriptural material. Let us take the strangest one of all, the deception of
the Devil, and ask whether it can illumine anything that the biblical writers
are saying. However, let us not insist on a perfect fit between any
preconceived understanding of this notion and all the scriptural data. Instead,
let us be open to modifying and filling out our initial concept in light of this
data, so that it might yield further insight into what the writers are saying.
If systematic theologians ask whether so strange a notion is found in
Scripture, it will force them to ponder carefully how the biblical writings
speak. For although this notion has apparently functioned in theology as a
strained explanation of legality (to show how Satan could be paid his ransom,
yet still be legitimately overcome), if it exists in Scripture it may not be found
in that form at all. Since it forms the climax of a deadly struggle, it may
more likely function as one element of an overall drama or narrative—and
perhaps such a narrative could be expressed in several ways. Moreover, if
theology is to ask what the Bible says about tbe demonic, it would be good not
to look primarily for clear propositional statements. For whatever the
demonic may be, it is probably not entirely rational; and in any case, biblical
narratives and images often communicate, among other ways, on intuitive,
emotional, and aesthetic levels.
1. The Hiddenness Theme. With these broad considerations in mind,
systematic theologians might first ask whether anything like Jesus' “disguise” is
mentioned in connection with his death. Well, there is 1 Cor. [Link] “None of the
rulers of this age understood [God's hidden wisdom], for if they had, they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” And there is also Acts [Link]
“those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers, because they did not recognize
him or understand the utterances of the prophets . . . fulfilled these by con¬
demning him.”26 According to these texts, Jesus was executed by those who
misidentified him. However, these are not Death and the Devil but earthly
rulers, representing supernatural powers (according to Paul) and supported
by the general populace (according to Acts).
Having located these brief assertions, systematicians might next ask
whether other texts or themes point in the same direction—although perhaps
with different imagery. Do other biblical writings speak of Jesus being un¬
recognized? The answer, clearly, is yes. There is the much-discussed
‘messianic secret’ in Mark. To be sure, this motif is not perfectly synonymous
with that of Satan's deception, for here it is the demons who do know who Jesus
is. Yet Mark profoundly impresses upon us how thoroughly the messianic way
of redemption, with its humility, servanthood, and suffering, contradicts the
human striving for position, power, and success. The crowds, Jesus' opponents,
and even his own disciples remain blind as to who he really is and what his
mission is about.
12 So Wide a Sea

Many have noted that this Markan theme is similar to Paul’s “theology of
the cross.” For Paul, also, the weakness and foolishness of Jesus' cross
contradict, and are hidden from, the world in its longing for power and
wisdom. This motif is presented most forcefully at the beginning of 1
Corinthians—the very place where the rulers of this aeon are said to have
crucified Jesus because they did not know what the true wisdom and glory that
he embodied were all about. An important similarity of theme exists, then,
between the overall emphasis of Mark and the text about the rulers of this
world being deceived (1 Cor. 2:8), whatever differences there may be in
imagery, style, vocabulary, audience, etc.
That Jesus and his mission were unrecognized is also emphasized in other
gospels. Luke repeatedly stresses a blindness theme: Jesus’ contemporaries
and followers could not understand the significance of Scripture, and how it
pointed to fulfillment in his ministry. When the crowds, Romans, and
religious rulers put Jesus to death, they knew not what they did (Luke 23:24; cf.
Acts 3:17). Seen against this broader background, Acts 13:27 appears, not as
an isolated proof-text, but as an expression of a very broad motif. John also
represents the crowds and disciples as continually missing the deeper
significance of Jesus' words and deeds. Among other things, they are puzzled
by his strange talk of being “lifted up.” This phrase, however, affirms that
Jesus' crucifixion, in its deeper, hidden meaning, was also his glorification.
Much as in Mark and Paul—despite great differences of imagery, style, etc.—
we hear that God's true glory is hidden in humiliation. And John also connects
this lifting up with the defeat of the Prince of this world (John 13:31-32; cf.
14:30-31; 16:11).
2. Isaiah's Servant. Though biblical scholars may well find other and more
varied expressions of Jesus' hiddenness, I content myself with one more. This
emphasis is very pronounced in Isaiah's servant theme. Many biblical
theologians (and, so far as I can tell, most systematicians) think that this motif
influenced various New Testament understandings of atonement. However,
others disagree. Morna Hooker, for instance, will grant that this theme was
influential only where “the nature of the Servant's sufferings and of their aton¬
ing value” is expressed.27 But she cannot find this substitutionary emphasis in
many references to the Servant songs.
I would argue, however, that the pervasiveness of the hiddenness theme in
these songs helps show that and how they influenced the New Testament. The
varied expressions of hiddenness discussed above surely indicate something
significant about Jesus' historical ministry. Jesus' followers must have been
deeply confused as to the meaning of his path, until his resurrection began to
shed some light. But as their eyes began to be opened, they could hardly have
failed to be impressed by texts expressing something so similar to their recent
experience. Much as Jesus' significance was hidden from his contemporaries,
so was the Servant's obscured by his humble appearance and his fate (Isa.
42:2-3; 49:7; 50:6; 52:14; 53:2, 7). Much as Israel had participated, actively or
Finger: Case Study on A tenement 13

passively, in Jesus' condemnation as a blasphemer, so those in the Servant's day

had “esteemed him stricken, smitten by God” (Isa. 53:4; cf. vv. 3, 8). Yet
unexpectedly, like the early converts, the Servant's contemporaries had been
astonished at the outcome of events: he was “exalted and lifted up” (52:13),
much as Jesus was raised. This wholly unforeseen reversal would startle kings
and nations (49:7; 52:15). Consequently, for both the Servant's and Jesus'
contemporaries, the whole chain of events engendered an overwhelming
conviction of their complicity in his death, and the heartfelt confession: “Surely
he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows . . .” (53:4; cf. vv. 5, 6; Acts 2:36'
37).
I am arguing that the major theme that the New Testament writers took
from Isaiah's Servant songs was not substitutionary suffering pure and simple.
It was the hiddenness motif, which includes the unjust but largely unwitting
murder of one whose mission was hidden. In other words, the Servant songs
and their New Testament adaptations express something better conceptualized
in Christus Victor than in substitutionary terms. This suggests that the earliest
understanding of atonement may have been expressed, not by particular sub-
stitutionary or sacrificial images, but in terms of a broad, conflictive drama.
That Jesus bore our griefs and transgressions may first have come to light, not
as the primary meaning of his work, but as one implication of his overall
mission of justice (cf. Isa. 42:1'4), his murder by enemies, and his final
vindication by God. All this indicates that scholars like Hooker, who find
sparse evidence of Isaiah's Servant in the New Testament, have overlooked the
overarching narrative in which Isaiah's substitutionary phrases are found.28
All of this can explain how the early chapters of Acts can be filled with
references to Isaiah's Servant, and yet how substitutionary motifs are virtually
absent from the book. This fits with Luke's emphasis on the significance of
Jesus' ministry for issues of justice and judgment, and mission to the gentiles.
Accordingly, Acts does not develop the substitutionary features of the Servant
motif (except, perhaps, in 20:28). Nevertheless, this shows how the church very
early emphasized the texts from which these features could quickly arise. In
any case, I think that investigation conducted in light of the Christus Victor
motif challenges the common assertion that the crucifixion has “no
soteriological significance” anywhere in Acts.29 Only if ‘soteriology” is iden-
tified with substitutionary (or even moral influence) themes can be this be so.
But if the judicial murder and divine vindication of Jesus is soteriological—
perhaps in the term's most fundamental sense—Acts is shot through with
soteriology.

D. Conclusions.
Let me summarize the implications that the kind of research I am
suggesting would have for that traditional theme, the deception of the Devil.
Systematicians can best utilize “the Devil,” not as a precise concept taken from
14 So Wide a Sea

some specific cultural context, to which references to Satan, the Prince of this
world, etc., can alone correspond; but, rather, more flexibly, as a pointer
toward evil's activity in various forms. If they do this, they will find that de¬
monic powers, religious and political leaders, Jesus' followers, and the crowds
all misunderstood the purpose of his coming, and consequently collaborated in
his crucifixion. Now this gives some concrete meaning, first, to this apparently
mythological personage. “The Devil” operates, at least in large part, through
social and religious structures, through collective group pressures, and through
the values and life-orientations that oppose God's way of servanthood.30
Second, the texts describing this drama of opposition throw light on the
notion of deception. All who participated in Jesus' murder indeed
misunderstood him and the purpose of his mission. But why? Was it because
God put on a “disguise” and appeared other than God is? On the contrary. It
was because God appeared as God truly is. Because God came in humility, as
a servant, as loving, as forgiving—and because these were so unlike what Jesus'
contemporaries thought of as God—they were deceived. Jesus' opponents were
not deceived because God tricked them; they were deceived by their own
assumptions about those values that really govern the universe and characterize
its Governor.
In other words, Jesus' “disguise” was not his humanity, pure and simple,
which covered up his deity. It was his lowliness, his humility, his “form of a
servant” (Phil. 2:7), which hide God only from those who cannot recognize him
in this form. Long ago, Irenaeus recognized that God conquered the Evil One,
“not by violent means, as it has obtained dominion over us at the beginning,
when it insatiably snatched away what was not its own, but ... as became a
God of counsel, who does not use violent means. . . .”31 Mennonites have also
insisted that God works in this way. Yet we have often restricted this emphasis
to ethics. I am suggesting that the apparently offensive notion of the Devil's
deception places this emphasis at the heart of the atonement itself.

V
Summary

Biblical theologians often criticize systematicians—rightly—for sub¬

ordinating the uniqueness, diversity, and particularity of biblical texts to
general conceptual schemes that distort their meaning. Nevertheless, the
eschatological ultimacy, missionary thrust, and living canonical function of
these texts demand that their message be articulated in conceptualities other
than those of their original socio-historical situations. Yet the execution of this
systematic task is problematic, for extra-biblical conceptual schemes tend to
move in directions opposed to those of biblical revelation. This task can be
accomplished, however, if extra-biblical concepts are utilized, not as pre¬
defined categories to which scriptural themes must be conformed, but as
flexible hypotheses in light of which the messages of the canonical writings
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 15

can be examined. When employed in this fashion, the questions that these
hypotheses pose can illumine previously hidden meanings and relationships
among the biblical data. At the same time, the answers yielded by Scripture
can revise and modify the hypotheses, molding them into suitable conceptual¬
izations of that data.
The problems involved in subordinating biblical writings to pre-defined
categories can be observed in the substitutionary and moral influence
interpretations of atonement. While each theory illumines certain dimensions
of this biblical theme, the inner logics of their conceptual schemes lead in
directions that distort it. However, due to its intrinsically dramatic and
paradoxical character, the Christus Victor motif invites systematicians to utilize
its conceptuality in more flexible and hypothetical fashion. Such apparently
irrational notions as the ransom paid to the Devil and the Devil's deception,
when employed as suggestive pointers to a variety of biblical expressions, dis¬
close surprising commonalities among a number of apparently diverse images
and narrative themes.
Hopefully, our somewhat detailed examination of the “hiddenness” theme
has also shown how biblical texts can be illumined, not only by focusing on
their particular concepts and contexts, as biblical scholars are wont to do, but
also be examining them in light of broader concepts and issues from other
cultural settings. If Jesus' work can be clarified by notions so strange as the
Devil, deception, and ransom, it can surely be usefully investigated in light of
many others. Ultimately, this paper is intended, not to define the roles of
biblical and systematic theology with finality, but to propose a methodology
for their fruitful interaction.

Notes
1 I do not, however, assert this simply as a dogmatc presupposition. I
would argue that it can be established inductively from a careful examination
of the Bible's major themes and from repeated comparisons of them with
extra-biblical conceptual schemes. As will shortly become clear, however, this
does not imply that all such schemes are wholly false, and it allows the pos¬
sibility that some might be more compatible with the biblical framework than
others.
2 The following outlines my argument for the role of systematic
theology in Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach, 2 vols. (Scottdale,
PA: Herald Press, 1987, 1989), 1:31-46.
3 “the end is not the completion of history but its breaking-off. . . . The
old world will be replaced by a new creation, and there is no continuity be¬
tween the two Aeons. ... In the new Aeon . . . times and years will be
annihilated, and months and days and hours will be no more” (Bultmann,
History and Eschatology [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957], 30). For a rejec¬
tion of this catastrophic apoctalypticism, see Finger, Christian Theology, 1:110-
16 So Wide a Sea

13, 118-20; John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Wm B.
Eerdmans, 1972), 36, 108-9.
4 James Sanders, Canon and Community (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1984).
5 The intertwining of ‘natural* and ‘revealed* theology in Thomas
Aquinas is a classic expression of such a relationship. In recent discussions of
theological method, Gordon Kaufman recommends beginning by constructing a
concept of “world** in a philosophical way. Though Kaufman goes on to con¬
struct a “God” concept that relativizes and reconstructs this “world,” he insists
that the criteria involved in the latter task must also be universal and public
(An Essay on Theological Method [Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1973]). Cf. my own
discussion and critique in “Is ‘Systematic Theology* Possible from a Mennonite
Perspective?” in Explorations of Systematic Theology from Mennonite Perspectives,
ed. Willard Swartley’ OP 7 (Elkhart, IN: Institute of Mennonite Studies,
1984), 37-55.
6 Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 36.
7 Finger, Christian Theology, 1:247-55.
8 Ibid., 346-47, 252-55.
9 See Finger, “Is ‘Systematic Theology’ Possible?” 50-53.
10 While biblical theology seeks to describe what the biblical writings
meant in their original contexts, and systematic theology seeks to interpret
what they mean in the present context, no sharp dividing line can be drawn
between them. For in explaining what Scripture meant, biblical theologians,
too, must utilize the languages of the contemporary context; the greater the
number of texts, images, and writers they seek to cover, the more must they
select and interpret as systematicians do. Systematic and biblical theologies,
then, both lie on the continuum that stretches between original and present con¬
texts, although they are oriented toward the opposites poles (see Finger,
Christian Theology, 1:57-60.
11 Cur Deus Homo, in St. Anselm: Basic Writings (LaSalle, IL: Open Court,
1962), 182-83.
12 Ibid., 177-78.
13 Ibid., 287-88.
14 See Finger, Christian Theology, 1:304-8.
15 Ibid., 1:311-14.
15 The Vicarious Sacrifice, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1903), 41-42.
17 Ibid., 308; cf. p. 235.
18 Ibid., 154; cf. pp. 160, 403-04.
19 Ibid., 233-95.
20 Cf. Finger, Christian Theology, 1:346-48.
21 I disagree with Gustaf Aulen's criticism that atonement for Anselm is
achieved primarily by Christ “as man,” and not by God. See Christus Victor
(New York: Macmillan, 1960), 81-100.
Finger: Case Study on Atonement 17

22 ]. Denny Weaver highlights Anselm's emphasis that Jesus' crucifixion

paid the penalty of eternal death, but he hardly mentions Anselm's insistence
that Jesus' earthly obedience merited eternal life. While this is somewhat un¬
balanced as an actual account of Anselm, it does reflect the way Anselm's
theory has often been understood. See Weaver’s essay, “Perspectives on a
Mennonite Theology,” in CGR 2 (1984): 200-2. Many of my own criticisms of
Anselm correspond with Weaver's (see Finger, Christian Theology, 1:307-08.
23 Finger, Christian Theology, 1:317-22.
24 Since Satan executes God's judgment, however, it can also be argued
that this ransom is ultimately paid to God (see Aulen, Christus Victor, 56-57).
For a discussion of the ransom controversy, see ibid., 47-51.
25 Gregory of Nyssa, “Address on Religious Instruction,” as quoted in
Aulen, Christus Victor, 52.
26 All quotations from Scripture are according to the RSV.
27 Jesus and the Servant (London: SPCK, 1959), 110.
28 For instance, when Hooker cannot find substitutionary suffering in Acts
8:32-35, where the unjust death of the servant is emphasized, she concludes that
Isaiah 53 was quoted there only “as a proof-text of the necessity of Christ's
passion, and not as a theological exposition of its meaning” (ibid., 114). This
quotation of Isaiah 53 merely shows “how the early church was ready to make
use of any Scripture which was presented to her, in order to show how Christ's
work had been foreshadowed there” (ibid., 113).
29 Eduard Schweizer, Lordship and Discipleship (Naperville, IL: Allenson,
1960), 33; cf. Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1961), 201.
30 Although I agree with many features that J. Denny Weaver identifies
in the notion of the demonic, he apparently interprets it in a “demythologized
version,” in which “Jesus confronts not personal devil but the conglomerate of
evil present in the world. . .” (Weaver, “Perspectives,” 202, emphases mine). I
would insist, however, that the demonic cannot be reduced entirely to sociolog¬
ical terms. See Finger, Christian Theology, 1:331, 339-40.
31 Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter 1, Section 1 (ANF, 1:527).
 .

■
 Chapter 2

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY AND NORMATIVITY

Elmer A. Martens

I
What Is Biblical Theology All About?

Biblical theology takes as its task laying bare the theology that is in the
Bible. Even in this restricted (and inadequate?) definition the question arises:
to what extent are the results of such research directly relevant to the believing
community? Clearly such results are of historic interest. But do the conclu-
sions of a biblical theology have relevance in the sense of being ‘normative’,
and if normative, normative for whom and on what grounds? Are the results of
the investigations to be handed over to dogmaticians who will then rule on
their normativity (the current consensus), or has biblical theology itself more
immediate and direct responsibilities to the community relative to its belief
and behavior, as I shall argue it does?
The purpose of this paper is to tangle with these questions, to revisit
earlier answers to the question, and to nudge biblical theologians to bring the
results of their work more immediately to bear on the life of the believing
community, or even contemporary culture. Such an attempt may seem bold,
even rash, given the never-ending squabbles about the definition of biblical
theology's task, the plurality of the existing formulations, the dismal prospects
of the discipline, and the fear that to take on the larger task, which leads to
norming, is only to revert to the pre-Gabler era.
Several recent articles hardly offer encouragement to proceed in the di¬
rection proposed. R. N. Whybray, the British scholar, has put the legitimacy
of the enterprise into question in a published essay, “Old Testament Theology:
A Non-existent Beast?”1 John J. Collins, in a paper entitled, “Is a Critical
Biblical Theology Possible?” concludes, “Historical criticism, consistently un¬
derstood, is not compatible with a confessional theology that is committed to
specific doctrines on the basis of faith.”2 He makes room for biblical
theology, not as a normative discipline, but as a sub-discipline with an analyti¬
cal task whose main contribution “is to clarify the genre of the biblical
material in the broad sense of the way in which it should be read and the ex-

19
20 So Wide a Sea

pectations that are appropriate to it.”3 James Barr's essay, “The Theological
Case Against Biblical Theology,” in the Brevard Child's Festschrift, throws up
a host of cautions for the discipline, and raises questions about how
“theological” biblical theology is anyway.4
Discussion about the question of biblical theology and normativity can
serve to focus the issue, What is biblical theology all about? That role, this
paper will suggest, rather than being secondary or tangential, should be con¬
structive and deal more directly with what is normative or prescriptive for the
believing community. By ‘normative’ is meant that which is binding in charting
beliefs and behaviors. That is, biblical theology represents major input in
defining what the believing community confesses. Where, then, in a Christian
believing community a variety of factors vie in determining the shape of a
belief system, apart from the Bible itself biblical theology is a primary
arbiter. The operating presupposition is that the Bible is Scripture; the orien¬
tation here, derived from the free church tradition, is that the referent for bib¬
lical theology is the church as the first public, but that account needs also to be
taken of two other publics—the academy and general society.

II
The Debate About Normativity

The voices from the past give a mixed message on the question of whether
biblical theology has any further business beyond historical description.
Johannes Lindblom in the 1930s stated, “The scholarly study of questions of
enduring values in revelation and of similar problems of faith we gladly
leave to the theologians.”5 Similarly, biblical scholars of the nineteenth
century stressed that biblical theology had a limited function.
Reginal Fuller, in reviewing the effect of the historical method, notes,
“Instead of setting out a normative theology for contemporary preaching, New
Testament theologies became more and more descriptions of the history of
New Testament thought and religion.”6 H. H. Schultz, an Old Testament
scholar of the nineteenth century, wrote, “Biblical Theology has to show from a
purely historical standpoint, what were the doctrinal views and moral ideas
which animated the leading spirits of our religion during the Biblical period
of its growth.”7 W. A. Irwin concurred with Eichrodt: the biblical theologian
is: “concerned purely and simply with telling in organized form what Israel
believed.”8 Till today one hears that biblical theology is “a historical and
descriptive discipline rather than a normative and prescriptive one.”9
The reluctance to say more stemmed from the “fear that biblical theology
would attempt to take on a normative role.”10 The fear arose in part from the
sense that to move into the realm of eternal values and statements of faith was
to leave behind the hard-won results in the battle about methodology. That
battle had left the historical-critical method triumphant. For the biblical the¬
ologians to venture into the field of the confessional, or for them to give
Martens: Normativity 21

guidance on what was to be believed, was to slide into another (subjective)

method. Historical-critical scholarship “held that it [biblical theology] was a
historical discipline, not normative for faith. . . .”11 John J. Collins has recently
proposed a role for biblical theology that goes beyond the descriptive
function but stops short of being normative. Like Wrede and others, Collins
looks for an accepted commonly-held method, and while this method can assist
in the necessary analytical process, it is giving too much to biblical theology to
assign it a norming role.12
But there have been other voices that called for the discipline to do more
than describe an ancient faith. In 1909, Adolph Schlatter advocated that New
Testament theology be more than descriptive, that it function normatively for
the church's faith and preaching. In 1921, Rudolf Kittel urged that a final ob-
jective of Old Testament scholarship be “the assertion of the enduring values
of Old Testament religion and the expression of its place in the total of the
divine order of the world.”13 Kittel called for some systematic presentation
of the essence of Old Testament religion that could be called theological and
that was of lasting value.14 Karl Girgensohn proposed pneumatic exegesis,
while retaining the historical-critical method, as a way of grasping the endur¬
ing message of Scripture. Years later, Otto Baab concluded his volume with a
chapter on “The Validity of Old Testament Theology.” He wrote, “The suit¬
ability of attempting to formulate an Old Testament theology which involves
both description and evaluation is suggested by the need of modern men and
by the fact that validity is continuously claimed by the Old Testament itself
for the major beliefs which it records..”15 In a 1981 essay on the future task of
biblical theology, Claus Westermann urged theology to address itself more
self-consciously to humankind and the world as a whole, and held that to do so
called for an integration of the disciplines of biblical theology—historical
theology, systematic theology, and practical theology.16 More recently, Brevard
S. Childs has advocated a canonical approach which, among other things, “also
opens an avenue into the material in order to free the Old Testament for a
more powerful theological role within the life of the Christian church.”17
There are reasons, it is here suggested, to set aside the earlier reserve, and
even to make the case that biblical theology occupy itself with the question of
the “normative.”

A. The Dissolution of the “Meant"/“Means” Distinction

One of the reasons for biblical theologians shying away from any notion
of translating their results into immediate relevance is the view that one should
keep separate what the text meant from what it means. Biblical theologians
should occupy themselves solely with the first, that is, what the text meant.
Krister Stendahl's important dictionary essay on biblical theology was in¬
tended as a program for the discipline, as he himself later explained.18 That
program caught up the spirit of the discussion of the past decades by limiting
22 So Wide a Sea

the work of the biblical theologian to a description of what the biblical texts
meant. Stendahl explained that the tools of historical criticism enabled one to
explicate the text’s meaning. This descriptive function of detailing what the text
“meant” was to be sharply differentiated from the task of declaring what the
text “means” in our situation. Such a prescriptive function, he implied, be-
longed elsewhere than with biblical theologians.
While such a position appears simple and straightforward, subsequent
analyses have shown Stendahl's program to be encumbered with problems, so
much so that Brueggemann could say in the mid 1980s: “The distinction of
‘what it meant’ and ‘what it means,’ between descriptive and normative articu-
lations (most clearly stated by Professor Stendahl) is increasingly disre-
garded, overlooked or denied.”19 One reason for setting Stendahl's distinc-
tions aside was that the historicabcritical method, which was the kingpin in the
descriptive task, was itself under attack. More and more it was recognized that
the method was not subjectivity-free. While this observation did not invalidate
the historicabcritical method, it did raise the question how biases in prescribe
ing current belief were different from biases in describing past belief. That
is, the subjective element—always the problem for articulating what is norma-
tive in theology—was no longer the problem only for the prescriptive task; one
could not escape it already in the earlier stage of the descriptive task. So the
distinction between “what it meant” and “what it means” lost some of its force.
Indeed the descriptions of meanings were, and are, not a little determined by
what one believed the Bible to contain. If, as in Gabler's day, the Bible con¬
tained ideas, then the way to proceed was to describe what holy writers
thought (i.e. ideas) about divine matters. Others viewed the Bible as having
piety for its subject matter. A description then took the form of a ‘history of
religion.’ Still others approached the Bible as presenting a series of events.
The descriptive task could then issue in a ‘history of salvation.’
There were still other determining factors at work in the descriptive task
which entailed collecting and systematizing the theological data. Even within a
descriptive task, how did a system or a synthesis emerge? David Kelsey ar¬
gued that the synthesis arose as an act of “imaginative construal” by the
interpreter.20 The collection of material, if it was more than a catalogue, took
an ordering and a shape derived not so much from the texts, if at all, but from
the brain of the collector. Thus, Kelsey could use Rudolf Bultmann's work as
an example of the construal of New Testament materials about the presence
of God in the mode of ideal possibility. For Bultmann, the collection, ar¬
rangement, or “construal” was shaped by the scripture's statement about the
Kerygma and the consequent “possibility of authentic existence.”21 In short, it
was the mind of the theologian that creatively caught up the biblical material
and depicted it. The configuration of the “collection” was not one demanded
by the text but one created by the theologian. And in this respect, namely the
imaginative construal of the data, the biblical theologian and the systematic
Martens: Normativity 23

theologian were on common ground. The distinction, then, between a descrip¬

tion of “what it meant” and the prescription of “what it means” tended to blur.

B. Revision of the “Descriptive”/“Normative” Distinction

Further skepticism about the propriety of Stendahl's distinction centered
in logic and semantics. Stendahl proposed two distinct and largely opposite
modes of operation—the descriptive and the normative. But, as Ben C.
Ollenburger has noted, these are not as opposite as might at first seem.22 To
begin with, the descriptive task follows certain procedures or norms. One can
readily speak of a “normative description” without getting caught in contradic¬
tions. The one who describes is constrained in his or her activity by accepted
understandings. Ollenburger conjectures a range of acceptable frameworks,
such as the architectural or the functional, for the description, for example, of
the Tower of Pisa. However, an astrologically-based description of the Tower
would fall outside the recognized framework. So, norms come into play when
describing, including the describing process of the Old Testament. It was an
illusion that we ever thought they didn't.
What norms are there for Scripture? The historical-critical method is an
accepted norm. But as Ronald Clements notes (using the messianic text of Isa.
7:14), the historical-critical method, while helpful in giving a primary “correct”
meaning to a text, does not aid in giving the range of meanings.23 The fact is
that the “meaning” of this messianic text must take into account the meaning
ascribed to it within the canonical literature. That is, the Matthean use of this
text (Matt. 1:23) is part of what the Isaiah text means. The re-interpretation of
a promise within a collection of canonical books springs the boundaries of the
“correct” meaning required by the historical-critical method. In the light of
this example, does J. ]. Collins's statement stand, that the historical-critical
method is “the most satisfactory context for biblical theology”?24
Ollenburger complains that in advocating the descriptive method, Sten-
dahl allows only one angle of vision, namely the historical-critical method.25
In any case, Stendahl has set some priorities, which is to say that he has en¬
gaged in evaluation, which in turn is to be put at the edge of normative-type
questions; so one cannot speak about description without speaking about norms.
Neither can the norming process (conceding for the moment that it is a
separate process) be conducted apart from description. The setting out of
norms is essentially a descriptive enterprise. There is then one modality, that
of description, operating for both of Stendahl's “tasks.” This observation
means that the distinction between the “descriptive” and the “normative” that
Stendahl proposed is not at all as absolute as he thought. Ollenburger offers
further critique, enough to put into question whether the “meant”/“means” dis¬
tinction is valid. The distinction between what a text meant and what it means
is suspect because in both stages subjectivity is unavoidable, because semantic
confusion attends the distinction, and also because in doing theology, even in
the descriptive mode, there is an imaginative leap.
24 So Wide a Sea

One must admit that in the larger interpretative process we can distinguish
two moments. One “moment” is the explicating of the meaning of a text given
its contexts, its vocabulary, etc. Rolf Knierim rightly notes, “The descriptive
task is indispensable for the theological task but it is not identical with it.”26
Another “moment” in the total interpretative process, I suggest, is the articula-
tion of the meaning for contemporaries. The argument here is that the sharp
distinctions between the two moments is not tenable, and that therefore the
way is open to consider a role for biblical theology larger than the historical
summary of what was once believed.

C. Changing Expectations Regarding the Tasks of Biblical Theology and Systematic

Theology
1. Arguments for a Clear Distinction. One of the reasons for restraining
biblical theologians from addressing the contemporary situation was a con-
viction that the two disciplines—biblical theology and systematic theology—
were discrete disciplines, each with a clear-cut responsibility. It was the task
of the biblical theologian to assemble in theological fashion the scholarly
research and to present the results to the systematic theologian. So, for
example, W. A. Irwin states that the Old Testament worker “will serve his
function by bringing his results to an assimilable state and presenting them to
the professional theologian in a form which can be meaningful for his
studies.”27 Gerhard Ebeling is of the same opinion: “It [biblical theology]
leaves entirely to dogmatics the doubtful advantage of providing normative
theological statements for the present situation. . . .”28 Dietrich Ritschl makes
a similar observation: “And if such a ‘synthesis’ [of biblical materials] is
again and again attempted and presented (as is proper), the goal of such a
presentation should by no means be to deduce from these contents something
normative or theologically definitive for the present.”29
The prevailing view is that Old Testament theology or New Testament
theology should hand over its findings to the doctrinal theologians. So for
example, most recently Reginald Fuller notes that dialogue between dog¬
matics and New Testament theology is needed and proposes that the New
Testament theologian, in a final chapter of his work, hand over the results of
his/her work to the dogmatician.30 Is that not saying that the raw material, like
crude oil, is to be conveyed to the doctrinal theologian, who will render it into
normative form, so that in this form it may power the automobile, understood
as the believing community?
An immediate observation is that systematic theologians seem not neces¬
sarily to be dependent on the results forwarded to them by the biblical the¬
ologian. Krister Stendahl remarks that Paul Tillich could write a systematic
theology utilizing very little biblical support.31 In its development, process
theology was initially more dependent on Alfred North Whitehead than on
specific biblical materials, necessitating at a later stage a book by the title:
Martens: Normativity 25

The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism.32 To be sure, other
systematic theologians, of course, have been more attentive at all stages to the
“results” of biblical scholars.33 Still, it is in varying ways that systematic
theologians utilize the work of biblical theologians.
It was also clear that evaluative judgments were being made by biblical
theologians; what were these about if not to move toward the normative? As
Hayes and Prussner note, “. . . one might argue that if a work is going to be a
theological inquiry then it should have, in addition to its concern for the phe¬
nomenological or purely descriptive aspects of religion, also a definite and
legitimate interest in the problem of ultimate truth and value.”34 Otto Baab
held that “a consideration of the question of validity is a legitimate task for the
Old Testament theologian.”35 Baab wanted the biblical theologian to do the
work of a theologian: “Theology always claims, according to its adherents, to
be in some sense exclusive and final in its pronouncements.”36 This view con¬
trasts sharply with that of W. A. Irwin who cautioned, “The Old Testament
worker, if he is to perform his true function, must be trained in theology and
must keep himself abreast of the course of thought—always on guard, however,
lest he then imagine himself a theologian!”37
That last remark is echoed by both J. ]. Collins and James Barr. Collins
observes that conclusions from biblical theology could or even ought to be
compared with metaphysical systems—process philosophy, for example. But,
says Collins, “It is not within the competence of biblical theologians as such to
adjudicate the relative adequacy of metaphysical systems.”38 Similarly, James
Barr notes that “Biblical theologians can hardly presume to instruct doctrinal
theologians in what does or does not constitute theology.”39 Biblical theolo¬
gians have not the necessary material, he says. Now most biblical theologians
would concede lack of full qualification in the field of metaphysics. But is the
conclusion drawn from this state of affairs valid, namely, that biblical theolo¬
gians have no voice in depicting the contemporary relevance of their findings?
Could it not also be argued that doctrinal theologians have not the competence
needed to be biblical theologians, and that therefore they are also limited?
And have they such a sure Archimedian place to stand that they can pontificate
on the absolute truth? Moreover, is it not reasonable to think that the biblical
theologians, occupied with the primary material of research, Scripture, are in a
favored position to at least suggest how their conclusions might look, in terms
of their relevance?
2. Reasons for a Common Responsibility. This position of keeping biblical
theologians who want to address the question of the normative at bay, and de¬
ferring responsibility rather to doctrinal theologians, assumes a cleanly
marked area of function for each. When it is here suggested that biblical
theologians ought to engage in the task of setting out the norming guidelines
for faith that follow from their work, it is not assumed that they, rather than
the doctrinal theologians, will now have the last word about regulative faith.
The burden of this paper is not to suggest that biblical theology supplant doc-
26 So Wide a Sea

trinal theology. It is to say that biblical theology must take with greater
seriousness the responsibility to speak to the community of faith about what is
normative. It is also to say that the discrete division of labor needs to be re¬
examined. What if biblical theologians and systematic theologians were
conversation partners?
Just how one goes about bringing greater interaction between doctrinal and
biblical theologians needs further exploration. Paul Hanson describes his
approach and that of Bernhard W. Anderson and Walter Brueggemann as
moving “dialectically between descriptive and normative aspects of interpreta¬
tion. It does not seem advisable to leave the latter strictly to systematic the¬
ologians. . . .”40 One might well consider a restructured relationship between
biblical theology and systematic theology. Rather than to visualize them as
overly discrete and opposite, the two disciplines can better be plotted on a
continuum. Thomas Finger has helpfully suggested that a continuum exists be¬
tween the kerygmatic pole and the present contextual pole. The kerygma is
the gospel grounded in the Scripture. The current contextual pole is the be¬
lieving community for which the kerygma must be translated. “Systematic and
Biblical Theologies, then, both lie on the continuum which stretches between
original and present context, although they are oriented towards the opposite
poles.”41 In this conceptualization, both disciplines are occupied with the
biblical material and both have responsibilities to the contemporary context.
But there are different accents. Biblical theology will have the historical bib¬
lical context primarily in focus, but beyond the interpretative word it will also
take responsibility for the regulative word. Doctrinal theology, focussing more
on the contemporary agenda and sensitive to philosophical dimensions, never¬
theless draws from the biblical texts in order to delineate guidelines for the
community's faith and practice.
James Barr looks askance at such interlinkage between biblical theology
and doctrinal theology. It is troublesome to him that biblical theology has
been in the business of trying to influence and even to direct doctrinal
theology, rather than being simply ancillary. More to the point is his state¬
ment: “If biblical theology is to accept that it is dogmatically interlinked as a
matter of principle—-as in part it often is as a matter of fact—then it will have
to accept that that means also a reduction of its influence and effectiveness.”42
His point is that “too close an alliance with particular doctrinal trends can
only damage the reputation and the effect of biblical theology.”43 Barr has
argued correctly that biblical theology is not really independent. And yes,
biblical theology has in fact been pointing the direction doctrinal theology
should go. Any linkage in principle may diminish the image of biblical
theology, but more is at stake than an image. More is at stake than egotisti¬
cally guarding some turf. At stake are both the function of an enterprise more
whollistically theological, and the responsible guidance of a community. It is
the mission of theology that matters, and not the continued isolation of the dis¬
ciplines. Another scenario is possible, namely that by the interlinking of two
Martens: Nomnativity 27

disciplines there is forged a position that is to the advantage of both

disciplines.
The proposal here, it should be stressed, is not to return to pre-Gabler
days. Rather the proposal is for some dialogue between biblical and doc-
trinal theologians.44 Models for such dialogue are scarce, but the interaction
between the two disciplines in the essays printed in the annual Jahrbuch fuer
Biblische Theologie is to be lauded.
Now the position that calls for biblical theology to be more immediately
relevant, even “normative,” might be challenged on the ground of
“imperialism.” Stendahl cautioned lest biblical theology take too much on to
itself: “In restricting the primary role of the biblical scholar to the descriptive
task, it was my intention to liberate the theological enterprise from what I per-
ceived as ‘the imperialism of biblical scholars’ in the field of theology.”45
Stendahl conceded that biblical categories “stimulate and guide,” but he con¬
sidered it too forward for biblical theologians single-handedly to take to the
field of the prescriptive.
In reply to Stendahl's fear of “imperialism” one should urge that modesty
is becoming for any scholar or group of scholars. The results of biblical theo¬
logical research are submitted for testing to colleagues and to the believing
community. To advocate a role of contemporary relevance for biblical
theology is not to advocate theological dictatorship by biblical theologians.
For that matter, an imperialism of any sort, including that of systematic the¬
ologians, is to be resisted. With more dialogue between the biblical and
systematic theologies, as envisioned here, the fear of imperialism should be
largely allayed. The question is, can one not conceive of biblical theology and
systematic theology in a relationship such that both work at the normative task?

Ill
Refined Understandings of Theology as Theory

Our subject is complicated by the ambiguity of the term “theology.”

Collins refers to theology “understood as an open-ended inquiry into the
meaning and function of God-language.”46 James Barr admits that the discus¬
sion about biblical theology can be swung in different directions, depending in
part on the definition of theology. He distinguished between theology that has
the Bible for its horizon (biblical theology) and that which has God for its
horizon (doctrinal theology).47 Similarly, Ritschl identifies one definition of
theology as that which is declared about God, Christ, humankind before God,
etc. He himself favors a more elastic definition of theology as that which
informs the actions and beliefs of a community.48
We have proceeded thus far with the tacit understanding of theology as
that discipline which in its talk about God summarizes the essentials of the
Christian faith and what ought therefore to be believed by a Christian. In such
a view, theology is normative for the believing community. As Langdon Gilkey
28 So Wide a Sea

explains with reference to systematic theology, “traditional theology—mostly

before the modern period—understood itself, and was understood, as stating
authoritatively 'What ought to be believed,' as in that sense of setting 'norms'
for belief and often for both church and society.”49 Such a definition of
systematic theology needs inspection.
Whatever the reasons, and they are many, theologians do not now see their
task as building a theological edifice which neatly builds together all the
pieces and invites adherents of the Christian faith to take shelter in their
structure. To be sure, from the tradition, it may be expected that the theolo¬
gian's task is one of defining what ought to be believed. But as a matter of
fact, “As a moment's reflection will clarify, this is not what goes on in a con¬
temporary class or program in theology . . . any more than do most medical
schools now center their curricula around courses in bleeding.”50 The mono¬
lithic nature of systematic theology, if it ever existed, is outmoded.
The ‘normative’, in the sense of theology offering eternally valid positions,
is a notion not now widely advocated. In its place, as Gilkey explains, is a
view of theology as theory. Somewhat comparably, Thomas Finger speaks of
theological reasoning in terms of models. “A model is a well-known object,
image, or process which appears to have certain points of similarity with
something much less known.”51 Or again, under a section titled “The Norm
and Criteria of Theology,” Finger explains that theological reflection
“assesses the implications and the range of different models, compares them
with each other, and decides which models or combinations of models express
the kerygma adequately in particular contexts.”52 Theories or models are
something between the descriptive and the normative. Theology, then, is
engaged in setting up propositions for testing. These propositions are tested,
for example for faithfulness to Scripture, for adequacy, for clarity of
articulation in a new context.
One could compare the theologian's use of theory to that of the scientist.
By means of theory, the scientist seeks to take account of the data and to offer
an explanation. That theory is adequate to a greater or lesser degree. In so
far as the theory “works,” it becomes increasingly important as a guide. That
is, the theory is normative, even though admittedly it is of a provisional nature.
Quite conceivably, another theory could be advanced which more adequately
incorporated the data, and which would then become the new norm. The keys
to validity include adequacy, consistency, and comprehensiveness.
Similarly, theology, whether it be biblical theology or systematic
theology, represents a theory of how the theologumen, the components of
theory, are to be understood in their relationships. Biblical theology will use
the biblical data and organize its construct in biblical categories. Systematic
theology, in addition to the biblical data, will handle data from church tradi¬
tion and prevailing philosophical world views. The function of these theories
is to articulate for a new context the meaning and the application of the
Martens: Normatwity 29

kerygma. And within this function, either theology has a responsibility to offer
its theories as ‘normative’, that is, as regulative for faith and practice.
Undoubtedly, an objection to the “normative” nature of theories is that the
community of faith is confronted not with one theory but with a plethora of
theories or models, both by the biblical and also by the systematic theologian.
To this objection there are three responses. One response to this situation is to
acknowledge that the diversity is a diversity not unlike that found in the basic
document of the Scriptures. Scripture, even though its texts cannot be easily
harmonized, does not cease to have binding claims on the community. Nor is
the resulting variety of theories or models as norms to be dismissed simply
because of the variety. A second response is that the models or theories
inevitably have on them the imprint of the modebmakers and the theoreticians.
Ernest Best has documented well how the interpretation of a single text over
the centuries has been influenced by the questions brought to it out of different
contexts.53 In a similar way we can account in part for the plurality of
theories.
A further response is that there can be an ordering within multiple
theories. Rolf Knierim has called for a criteria of ordering, drawn from the
biblical source itself, that will adjudicate our plural theologies.54 Recently,
Paul Hanson for the Old Testament and James Dunn for the New Testament
have addressed the question of diversity.55 More recently still, John Goldingay
has helpfully noted that one can deal with theological diversity by taking
account of contexts, engaging in evaluations and by working constructively with
the diversity.56 Admittedly, “how such theories are testable is a tricky question
and varies with the level of theory to which we refer.”57 Thomas Finger offers
four criteria: coherence, logical consistency, adequacy and applicability.58 To
be sure, the plurality of theories complicates the discussion on how these
theories are normative. But the complication is not sufficient reason to deny to
them a regulative function.
Understanding the theologies as theories or models, while it raises prob-
lems, has some advantages: it opens the door wide for biblical theologians to
be theologians. It also clarifies in what way the Bible as Scripture is the ulti-
mate norm. Finger says, “Thus the kerygma expressed in Scripture is the sole
norm of the truth of theological statements.”59 Similarly Childs asserts, “To
do Biblical Theology within the context of the canon involves acknowledgement
of the normative quality of the biblical tradition.”60 Theologies are articula¬
tions about the meaning of the kerygma, the Scripture. These articulations
function as a derivative norm. The concept of primary norm (Bible) and
derivative norms (theologies) safeguards from according finality to any state¬
ment of theology. Pride of place is given to the canon; it remains the norm in a
way that theologies drawn from it do not.
30 So Wide a Sea

IV
The Function of Canon

A nudge toward incorporating into biblical theology the task of address-

ing the contemporary situation arises from the fact of canon. Biblical theology
has the two testaments as its primary documents. These primary documents
have a particular claim on the Christian believing community. It follows, by
definition, that biblical theology, which deals with the canonical material,
would be entitled to lay something of a claim on those for whom the Bible is
canonical. Ronald Clements notes, “. . . it is through its theological content that
the Old Testament can be claimed as authoritative for us.”61 A discipline that
identifies that theological content can hardly sidestep a direct responsibility to
the believing community.
Such comment already implies a particular referent. When talking about
meanings one cannot escape asking, “Meaning for whom?” The biblical the¬
ologian who stands within a confessional context can hardly detach his work
from the believing community. “One who practices Old Testament theology, as
distinct from rhetorical or literary criticism or history of religion, is likely to
understand one's self as nurtured by and accountable to a concrete community
of reference which has already decided some things.”62 For the biblical
theologian the “community of interest,” that is, the referent, is the believing
community. For the systematic theologian, the “community of interest”63 is
both the church and the wider world. Not infrequently theologians, whether of
the biblical or systematic variety, stand also in the context of the academy.
They work as colleagues, critiquing and affirming conclusions. Brueggemann
observes that the tendency in the academy is to hold commitments in “some
kind of tentativeness,” but goes on to say, “I think that we must recognize that
doing Old Testament theology requires that such decisions of reference cannot
be held in abeyance and must be acknowledged as proper to the work.”64
The move from the mere statement of results to wrestling with the contem¬
porary relevance for the confessional community is not unnatural. It is almost
inevitable. Krister Stendahl, while urging the distinction between description
and prescription, comments, “The following essays often move from the de¬
scriptive task to the development of meanings for church and society today.”65
Goldingay notes, “We are not merely reformulating the faith explicitly ex¬
pressed or implicitly presupposed by a believing community of Old Testa¬
ment times, in order to understand Old Testament faith for its own sake, but
formulating the theological implications of that faith in a way that brings them
home to us as members of a believing community in our time.”66 The scholar
in the academy who may stand apart from the believing community can never¬
theless render his/her students a service by pointing out the implications for a
believing community.
Brueggemann, after outlining a scheme for biblical theology around the
bi-polar concepts of legitimation of structure and the embrace of pain, says,
Martens: Normativity 31

“Insofar as Old Testament theology is related to the life of the church, this
way of organizing our understanding of the text may be peculiarly poignant in
our cultural context.’’67 Brevard Childs even suggests that contemporary con-
cerns became agenda for the biblical theologian. After noting how both the
academy and the church are “referents” for biblical theology, he remarks,
“Rather, it would be far more productive if biblical theologians of various
persuasions begin to work on some of the burning questions of the day.”68 He
cites male/female relationships, creation, and ecology.
The direction of my argument is to lend support to the work done in the
series, “Overtures to Biblical Theology.” The first volume, by Professor
Walter Brueggemann, for example, is not limited to the mere description of
what the Old Testament has to say about the subject of land. What is said
about land, while informed by historical criticism, is said theologically in a
way that is to serve as a guideline for the current community of faith.69
Katharine Doob Sakenfeld's volume, Faithfulness in Action, makes the same
theological move—from the descriptive to the normative—and does so quite
self-consciously.70 Paul Hanson, after fourteen chapters about “The People
Called,” concludes with a final chapter on the implications of this material
for the believing community.71 If such moves are not within the domain of
biblical theology’s mandate, then a discipline needs to be created where such
moves are legitimized and explored.
The practice by biblical theologians of bringing their work to bear on the
current community does not necessarily make the argument that they should do
so. However, these contemporary examples, not unlike the appeal for rele¬
vance by Rudolf Kittel and Paul Girgensohn in the 1920s, raise anew the ques¬
tion of the propriety of biblical theologians identifying the relevance of their
work for the confessing community. This essay declares that it is appropriate.
A final comment, something of a footnote, is to observe that for biblical
theologians to assume a norming role in theology is in keeping with an original
vision for biblical theology. Biblical theology as a discipline is usually dated
to 1787, the year in which J. P. Gabler in a formal lecture laid out the distinc¬
tion between biblical theology and dogmatic theology. His vision for biblical
theology was for it to be an historical discipline in contrast to dogmatic
theology. He proposed that biblical theologians first describe with care what
the “holy writers felt about divine matters.” Such research would yield a
“true” theology, namely one in accord with the biblical material. Next, the
biblical theologian would collect the typical ideas of each biblical author and
examine these in “comparison with the help of the universal notions.”72 This
research would issue in “pure” theology. That program has only sporadically
been followed through. Interpretations of what it means to do “pure”
theology vary, but one must agree with Hayes/Prussner that in attempting
“pure” theology, “the descriptive task moved to the level of the normative
task.”:78
32 So Wide a Sea

The burden of this essay is not that the biblical theologians displace doc--
trinal theologians. The concern, highlighted by noting that historically biblical
theologians have eschewed moving their conclusions upon the believing com'
munity in the form of truth claims, is that they now, for the reasons given,
reverse their position. These reasons include a revised understanding of the
function of theology as theory, a revised understanding of the relationship of
biblical theology to systematic theology, considerations of what it means for
biblical theology that its primary document is canon, and a critique of the
older distinction between “meant” and “means.” That distinction at one time
reinforced the reluctance of biblical theologians to show how their work was to
be appropriated by the community. But such reluctance cannot be justified.

Notes
1 R. N. Whybray, “Old Testament Theology—a Non-existent Beast?” in
Scripture: Meaning and Method. Essays Presented to Anthony Tyrell Hanson} ed. B.
P. Thompson (North Yorkshire: Pickering, 1987), 168-180.
2John J. Collins, “Is a Critical Biblical Theology Possible?” in The
Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. W. H. Propp, Baruch Halpern, D. N.
Freedman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 14.
3 Ibid.. See also his “Biblical Theology and the History of Israelite
Religion,” in Back to the Sources: Biblical and Near Eastern Studies, ed. Kevin J.
Rathcart and John J. Healey (Dublin: Glendale, 1989), 18.
4 James Barr, “The Theological Case Against Biblical Theology,” in
Canon Theology, and Old Testament Interpretation, ed. Gene Tucker, David
Petersen, R. W. Wilson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 3-19.
5 Cited in W. A. Irwin, “The Reviving Theology of the Old Testament.”
JR 25 (1945): 246.
6Reginald Fuller, in Harpers Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Theology, New
Testament.”
7Quoted in James D. Smart, “The Death and Rebirth of Old Testament
Theology,” JR 23 (1943): 10.
8 W. A. Irwin, “The Reviving Theology of the Old Testament,” JR 25
(1945): 244.
9 Jesper H0genhaven, Problems and Prospects of Old Testament Theology
(Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 93; cf. H. G. Reventlow, “Zur Theologie des
Alten Testaments,” TRu 52 (1987): 221-67.
10 J. H. Hayes and Frederick Prussner, Old Testament Theobgy: Its History
and Development (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 209.
11 Reginald Fuller, “New Testament Theology,” in The New Testament
and Its Modem Interpreters, ed. E. J. Epp and G. W. MacRae (Philadelphia:
Fortress), 565.
12 Collins, “Biblical Theology and the History of Israelite Religion.”
13 Cited in Irwin, “The Reviving Theology,” 246.
14 Cf. Hayes and Prussner, Old Testament Theology, 153.
Martens: Normativity 33

15 Otto Baab, The Theology of the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon-

Cokesbury Press, 1949), 20.
16 Claus Westermann, “Aufgaben einer zukiinftigen Biblischen
Theologie,” in Enrage der Forschung am Alten Testament, Gesammelte Studien, 3
(Miinchen: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1984).
17 Brevard Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 6.
18 Stendahl, Meanings: The Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1984), 2. The essay was first published in 1962, in ZDB, s.v.
“Biblical Theology, Contemporary.” in IDB; it appears in Meanings as
“Biblical Theology: A Program,” 11-44.
19 Walter Brueggemann, “Futures in Old Testament Theology,” HBT 6
(1984): 1.
20 Kelsey, The Usess of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1975), 159, 161, 163, 166.
21 Ibid., 161.
22 Ben C. Ollenburger, “What Krister Stendahl ‘Meant’—A Normative
Critique of ‘Descriptive Biblical Theology,’” HBT 8 (1986): 61-98. The fol¬
lowing is largely a summary of Ollenburger's argument.
23 R. E. Clements, Old Testament Theology (Atlanta: John Knox Press,
1978), 11-15.
24 Collins, “Critical Biblical Theology?” 14.
25 Ollenburger, “What Stendahl ‘Meant’,” 90.
26 Rolf Knierim, “On the Task of Old Testament Theology,” HBT 6
(1984): 94.
27 Irwin, “The Reviving Theology,” 243.
28 Gerhard Ebeling, “The Meaning of ‘Biblical Theology’,” in Word and
Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 89.
29 “‘Whare’, ‘reine’ oder ‘neue’ Biblische Theologie? Einige Anfragen
zur neueren Diskussion um ‘Biblische Theologie’,” JBT 1 (1986): 141
(translation mine).
30 Fuller, “New Testament Theology,” 577.
31 Stendahl, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” 427-28.
32 Lews S. Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
33 Thomas Finger is an example. See his Christian Faith: An Escatological
Approach, 2 vols. (Scottdale: Herald Press, 1987, 1989).
34 Hayes and Prussner, Old Testament Theology, 209.
36 The Theology of the Old Testament (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949),
19; Hayes and Prussner, Old Testament Theology, 209. Th. C. Vriezen says some¬
thing similar, in An Outline of Old Testament Theology (Oxford: Blackwell,
1948), 118-25.
38 Baab, Theology of the Old Testament, 19.
34 So Wide a Sea

37 Irwin, “The Reviving Theology,” 244.

38 Collins, “Critical Biblical Theology?” 14-
30 Barr, “Case Against Biblical Theology,” 10.
40 Paul Hanson, in Harper's Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Theology, Old
Testament.”
41 Thomas Finger, “Biblical and Systematic Theology: A Proposal for
their Interaction Concretized by Reference to the Atonement,” unpublished
paper, 1986, 14. (A revised version of Finger’s paper is published as chapter
1 of this volume—ed.).
42 Barr, “Case Against Biblical Theology,” 13.
43 Ibid., 14.
44 See Ollenburger, “Biblical Theology: Situating the Discipline,” in
Understanding the Word, ed. ]. T. Butler, E. W. Conrad, B. C. Ollenburger
(Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 51.
45 Stendahl, Meanings, 1.
46 Collins, “Critical Biblical Theoloyg?” 15.
47 Barr, “Case Against Biblical Theology,” 10.
43 Ritschl, “Diskussion um ‘Biblische Theology’,” 140-41.
49 Langdon Gilkey, “The Roles of the ‘Descriptive’ or ‘Historical’ and of
the ‘Normative’ in our Work,” Criterion 20 (1981): 10.
50 Ibid.
51 Finger, Christian Theology, 1:51.
52 Ibid., 53-54.
53 Ernest Best, “Fashions in Exegesis: Ephesians 1:3,” in Scripture:
Meaning and Method, 79-91.
54 Knierim, “Task of Old Testament Theology.”
55 Paul Hanson, The Diversity of Scripture: A Theological Interpretation
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982); Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New
Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1977).
56John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old
Testament (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987).
57 Gilkey, “The Roles,” 13.
58 Finger, Christian Theology, 1:55-56.
50 Ibid., 54-55.
5° Brevard Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1970), 100.
61 Clements, Old Testament Theology, 24.
62 Walter Brueggemann, “Futures in Old Testament Theology,” HBT 6
(1984): 3.
63 Ollenburger, “Biblical Theology.”
64 Brueggemann, “Futures,” 3-4.
Martens: Normativity 35

66 Meanings, 2.
66 Goldingay, Theological Diversity and Authority, 111.
67 Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II:
Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 414.
68 Walter Brueggemann, “Some Reflections on the Search for a Biblical
Theology,” HBT 4 (1982): 9.
89 Walter Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).
70 K. D. Sakenfeld, Faithfulness in Action: Loyalty in Biblical Perspective
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
71 Paul Hanson, The People Called (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986).
72 Hayes and Prussner, Old Testament Theology, 3; John Sandys-Wunsch
and Laurence El dredge, “J. P. Gabler and the Distinction Between Biblical and
Dogmatic Theology: Translation, Commentary, and Discussion of His
Originality,” SJT 33 (1980): 141-42.
73 See Hayes and Prussner, Old Testament Theology, 63; Ollenburger,
“Biblical Theology.”
 '

'

,
 Chapter 3

Biblical and Systematic Theology as Functional Specialties:

Their Distinction and Relation

A. James Reimer

I
The Basic Argument

Christian theology in general is reflection on the grounds, contents, and

experience of the Christian faith. It is an activity that assumes the transcendent
reality of God, God's self'revelation in Jesus Christ, and God's ongoing pres-
ence in the life of the church and the world as the unifying theme(s) running
through the diversity of the church's foundational texts and historical events,
and the manifold interpretations of those texts and events. To the extent that a
scholar (whether biblical, historical, systematiC'dogmatic or practicabpastoral)
is engaged in this activity with these assumptions, to that degree she is engaged
in Christian theology. Technically speaking, therefore, the prevalent distinc¬
tion among biblical, historical, systematic, and practical theology, as though
these were four different theologies, is false.
All Christian theologians are engaged in one set of interdependent tasks
and the interpretation of a common collectyion of foundational texts, directed
toward a common goal. They specialize in different areas for mainly practical
reasons of skill, temperament, convenience, and so on. Biblical theology, for
instance, is not a separate genre of theology (although it is often seen to be just
that) set over against systematic theology, as though it alone were truly bibli¬
cal and were unconcerned about coherence, unity, synthesis, systematization,
mediation, or even dogma. If it is a form of Christian theology, it is interested
in these things. All theology is to a greater or lesser degree systematic, and
all theology if it is Christian ought to be biblical. With these provisos, how¬
ever, there is some value in differentiating among the areas of specialization
(sometimes called “functional specialties”)—biblical, historical, systematic,
and practical—as long as we remember that, if their respective practitioners
want to attach the common noun “theology” to their specialty, they are admit¬
ting to being engaged in a common enterprise with the others—Christian
theology.

37
38 So Wide a Sea

The primary focus of systematic theology, as a functional specialty, is the

church within the world of contemporary culture—its language, values, assump-
tions, and demands. Its task is to summarize and schematize the essential
tenets of the Christian faith, as revealed in Scripture and interpreted historic
cally, for the purpose of helping the church to shape the beliefs and values of
her adherents; to mediate between the world of the Bible and her life within
contemporary culture; and critically to address the assumptions and demands
of the present age, as well as her own ideological distortions. The primary
focus of biblical theology, as a functional specialty, is the world of Scripture;
that is, to research, analyze, synthesize, elucidate, interpret, and translate the
biblical texts, and to identify the assumptions of the biblical age, using all the
tools of modern culture and insights from tradition in order to do so. Both are
essential to the life of the church. Biblical theology, with its greater concentra-
tion on the inner diversities and infrastructure of the biblical materials
themselves, including the milieu of those writings, has the responsibility
toward systematic (or dogmatic) theology of keeping it from ideologically fab
sifying the biblical texts (and world) in its necessary task of summarizing.
Systematic theology, with its greater concentration on the assumptions of the
contemporary world and the summarized unities of the tradition, has the
responsibility toward biblical theology of identifying and unmasking the con-
temporary presuppositions that are inescapably present in, and may distort,
biblical studies—for example, the positivistic fragmentation and quantification
of Scripture.

II
The Importance of Catechesis

The divisions and specializations within the general field of Christian

theology are fluid, and they vary significantly from one historical period to
another, from tradition to tradition, from institution to institution, and from
scholar to scholar.1 This fluidity suggests that these various schemas are
relative, and developed to meet the exigencies of particular situations. One
may lament this increasing differentiation as a fragmentation of what once was
and ought still to be one basic, unified set of activities—the reading, interpret
tation, appropriation, and application of Scripture. Nevertheless, the speciab
izations seem to be here to stay; they have to do with the accumulation of data
that need to be absorbed but cannot be mastered by any one group of
scholars, let alone by an individual. A division of labor between individuals,
but also between groups of specialists, appears to be an unhappy necessity.
The most common and perhaps the most useful contemporary curricular
categories are those dividing Christian theology into biblical, historical,
systematic, and pastoral (or practical) specialties. I intend in this paper to
concentrate on two of these commonly accepted disciplines—biblical
“theology” and systematic “theology.” I will attempt to delineate what I con-
Reimer: Functional Specialties 39

sider to be the distinctive operations and methodologies of each, at least

functionally, in the present situation, giving special attention to systematic
theology and its relation to biblical theology.
Leaving aside the thorny issue of whether or not the practitioners of bibli¬
cal and systematic theology can properly fulfill their functions outside the
community of faith, I will assume in this essay that in both cases the the¬
ologians belong existentially to a believing community of Christians (that is,
they have experienced conversion, in some sense of that term2) and are seeking
to be faithful in proclaiming the Christian understanding of God in and to the
present age. They are, in short, engaged in a common enterprise— theology.
Neither biblical nor systematic theology is antiquarian, interested in the past
for its own sake. Each views its respective task as a form of piety and fidelity
to God in the contemporary context.
The German-English Catechism that first initiated me into the life of the
Altona Bergthaler Mennonite Church,3 and which first introduced me to the
‘systematic* categories of creation, fall, and redemption, began with the fol¬
lowing question: “Was ist das Notwendigste, wonach ein Mensch in diesem
Leben trachten soli?” The answer: “In Gottes Gemeinschaft und Gnade zu
leben und nachmals die ewige Seligkeit zu erlangen.” There followed a
rather questionable translation. Question: “What should be our chief aim in
this life?” Answer: To live in God's fellowship, enjoy his favor, and obtain
eternal happiness hereafter.” Despite the weak translation, and all of the
modem Enlightenment and post-modem problems associated with this answer,
I hold this affirmation to be fundamentally true and applicable to all
Christians, including professional theologians. The alpha and omega of our
theological work and reflection is to live in God's fellowship and grace, and to
proclaim the same to others in our pluarlistic context.
This catechism summarized what its writers considered to be the essentials
of the Christian faith, for the purpose of educating baptismal candidates; I
consider this to be one of the essential tasks of systematic theology. The
opening statement of the “Foreword” says: “This catechism was first published
in the year 1783, at Elbing, Prussia, with the purpose of presenting to the
Mennonite young people the cardinal truths of Christianity in a brief and
simple form.”4 This catechetical manual characterizes itself as giving “Brief
lessons from the Holy Scriptures;” it consists of 202 questions and answers,
each supported by one or more Bible verses, divided into these major sections:
Introduction; “Part One: The Creation” (ranging from God as Creator of all
things, the Trinity, to God as preserver and ruler of the world); “Part Two: the
Fall of Man” (dealing with the condition of humanity before, during, and
after the Fall); “Part Three: The Redemption of Man” (covering the promise
of redemption, the role of law, Christ and his death, resurrection, ascension,
the Holy Spirit, faith, regeneration, justification, sanctification, the church,
baptism, the Lord's supper, nonresistance, government and the oath, the future
destiny of humanity, judgment, and so on).
40 So Wide a Sea

What is going on here? For one thing, from the perspective of modern
contextual-critical biblical scholarship, this catechism commits the unpardon¬
able sin: it assumes without question an underlying canonical unity, ranges
freely backwards and forwards across the Old and New Testaments, moves
with ease from one book to another, and uncritically selects isolated Bible
verses in support of its particular doctrinal framework—without ever asking
any social-historical and contextual questions, admitting of any genuine
heterogeneity in the biblical materials, or allowing for any hermeneutical dif¬
ficulties. An yet, it seems to me that this catechism engages in a legitimate
task and, in its own distinctive way, does what the Christian church has done
from antiquity until recently; namely, it simplifies, summarizes, and schema¬
tizes what it believes to be true, for the purpose of shaping and nurturing the
beliefs and values of the church's existing or potential adherents.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of George A. Lindbeck's “cultural-
linguistic approach to religion and . . . regulative view of doctrine,” a subject I
will return to in the last part of this paper, I do think he helps us understand
sympathetically what is going on in a catechism like this.5 For one thing,
Lindbeck's analysis lends support to my own long-standing contention that
doctrinal language is indispensable for the Christian church, including the
Mennonite church. I might add, here, that I consider confession, doctrine,
creed, and dogma to be family members of the same literary and theological
genre, even though there are important differences between them. Doctrinal
formulations, while not the whole of it, are an intrinsic part of systematic
theology's work. They represent the Christian community's attempt to develop
a coherent picture out of the many diverse concepts, images, and symbols
found in early Christian writings—particularly in reference to God, Jesus
Christ, and the Holy Spirit—for the purpose of catechesis.6
Lindbeck is right in arguing that, historically, catechesis rather than trans¬
lation “has been the primary way of transmitting the faith and winning converts
for most religions down through the centuries.”7 In my view, this has also been
an important aspect of the Mennonite way. Whether Lindbeck's postliberal
cultural-linguistic model is the best way to conceive of doctrine or catechesis is
another question. This point I want to make here is that Lindbeck is justified in
stressing the importance of doctrine and catechesis in the life of religious
communities and in the work of systematic theology—which, incidentally, he
refers to as a ‘descriptive’ discipline: “The task of descriptive (dogmatic or
systematic) theology is to give a normative explication of the meaning a
religion has for its adherents.”8 For Lindbeck there is no such thing as
“creedless Christianity.” Doctrines, at least operationally if not officially, are
a requisite for communal identity: “A religious body cannot exist as a
recognizable collectivity unless it has some beliefs and/or practices by which
it can be identified.”9
Lindbeck is also clearly right in asserting repeatedly that the modern age
and its theology have an antipathy to catechetical-doctrinal thinking and a
Reimer: Functional Specialties 41

concomitant dogmatic-systematic theology. This so for a number of reasons.

First, doctrines in the narrow sense (meaning those central beliefs considered
essential and normative for the existence of a particular religious community),
and dogmatic theology in the broader sense (the explanation, interpretation,
and justification of those doctrines), presuppose the existence of an organic
religious community. However, the modern age is characterized precisely by
the breakdown of community and community norms, as sociologists have been
at such pains to point out. This disintegration of a cohesive communal society,
or communal enclaves, is the consequence of modern notions of individual
freedom and autonomous authenticity. What we have, in fact, is an
increasingly global-homogeneous society in which only a privatized and interi-
orized religiosity appears able to survive. The experiential-expressive
approach to religion—the liberal alternative to what Lindbeck somewhat
problematically calls the classical “propositional” approach10—is more
attractive to a culture defined by “religious privatism” and subjectivism.”1 1
The prevalent aversion to dogmatic standards reflects a theology inclined to
accommodate and legitimate, rather than to stand over against, a pluralistic-
atomistic age.
However, this contemporary resistance to doctrinal norms cannot be at¬
tributed simply to the perversity of modern culture. Lindbeck correctly per¬
ceives some conceptual difficulties with traditional doctrinal propositionalism.
It cannot account for the development of doctrine over time, it is unable
adequately to distinguish between what is essential and what is nonessential
when interpreting doctrines in new situations, and it cannot deal satisfactorily
with ecumenical issues.12 In another context I have pointed out that in
Mennonite churches—I believe this could be said about other traditions as
well—various other ways of speaking about the Christian faith in the present
situation have replaced the doctrinal-dogmatic approach, the therapeutic and
socio-political models being two of the most obvious.13 It is doubtful that
these alternatives substantially improve upon the doctrinal-confessional genre.
An understanding of the nature of doctrine and dogmatic theology is required
that can meet some of these objections. To what extent Lindbeck's own
cultural-linguistic approach meets these requirements remains to be discussed
later. Here I simply wanted to introduce catechesis or doctrinal thinking as an
essential aspect of systematic theology, and of theology in general, and as a
way of distinguishing systematic from biblical theology.
I make no claims for originality here but am simply defending what I con¬
sider to have been an ancient understanding of the task of Christian theology.
My own view is in fact very close to that of Karl Barth, for whom “Christian
doctrine is the attempt, undertaken as a responsibility of the church, to
summarize the gospel of Jesus Christ, as the content of the church's preaching.
Its source and its goal is the authentic witness to the gospel in Holy
Scripture.”14 For Barth, dogmatics is a critical, human science, located
halfway between exegesis and practical theology, a means for testing the
42 So Wide a Sea

church's teaching and preaching; “not an arbitrary testing from a freely chosen
standpoint,” but a measuring of “the Church's proclamation by the standard of
the Holy Scriptures, of the Old and New Testaments. Holy Scripture is the
document of the basis, of the innermost life of the Church, the document of the
manifestation of the Word of God in the person of Jesus Christ.”15 Dogmatics
has not fallen from heaven. It is a “human and earthly” science by which the
“Church draws up its reckoning in accordance with the state of its knowledge at
different times.” Thus, “Christian dogmatics will always be a thinking, an
investigation and an exposition which are relative and liable to error.”16
What is noteworthy is how high a regard Barth does have for the dogmatic
formulations of the patristic period of the church, particularly the
development of the classical trinitarian and christological dogmas, and the
relative authority he is willing to assign them.17 “Holy Scripture and the
Confessions do not stand on the same level,” he says. “We do not have to
respect the Bible and tradition with like reverence and love, not even tradition
in its most dignified manifestations.” Nevertheless, confessions do have a cer~
tain kind of normativity: “If Holy Scripture has binding authority, we cannot
say the same of the confessions. Yet there is still a nonbinding authority,
which must be taken seriously.”18 For Barth, then, ‘dogma* is simply the term
we give to that which we in the church, and based on Holy Scripture, consider
to be normative or valid in the church's proclamation and life. While this is
the proper sphere of systematic or dogmatic theology, to the extent that bibli-
cal theology (or a biblical theologian) respects this normativity, to that extent
it is in fact engaged in what I consider systematic'dogmatic theology.

Ill
Biblical Theology: Ollenburger versus Stendahl

In his provocative 1986 essay, “What Krister Stendahl ‘Meant’—A

Normative Critique of ‘Descriptive Biblical Theology,’” Ben C. Ollenburger
persuasively points out the logical and semantic confusions inherent in
Stendahl's classic program for “biblical theology.”19 In his famous 1962
essay, “Biblical Theology, Contemporary,” an article that significantly shaped
the way biblical theologians understood their task thereafter, Stendahl pro-
posed that biblical theology be limited to describing what the biblical texts
meant, whereas systematic theology should be left with the normative task of
interpreting what the texts mean.20 Unfortunately, although Ollenburger hints
at how biblical and systematic theology might differ from each other, he
deliberately restricts himself to dismantling Stendahl's proposal and does not
make any constructive proposal of his own. He succeeds in undermining the
usefulness of Stendahl's underlying distinctions concerning the differences
between biblical theology and systematic theology.
First, Ollenburger maintains that Stendahl's division between “‘the de~
scriptive study of the actual theology and theologies to be found in the Bible
Reimer: Functional Specialties 43

[biblical theology]’,” and ‘“any attempt at a normative and systematic theology

which could be called “biblical”,”’ in the end leaves biblical theologians with
little more than historical studies—that is, studying the “meanings ascribed to
the text by interpreters over history,” without any means of adjudicating be-
tween alternative meaning statements.21 For Stendahl, hermeneutics (the
attempt to find the normative meaning of a given text) would appear,
consequently, to belong solely to the domain of systematic theologians.
Hermeneutical decisions, according to Stendahl, do not naturally grow out of
the text itself but are made from a “specific theological stance,” a stance that
presupposes a community of faith and canonicity. In short, Stendahl, in
Ollenburger's eyes, reduces all biblical studies to two types— historical (the
realm of non-normative description) and normative systematic theology.
Stendahl—so argues Ollenburger—gives us no clear method of relating the
one to the other, of methodologically moving from description to normative
work. By inference, one can assume here that Ollenburger thinks of biblical
theology itself as being a transitional method or “discipline” standing halfway
between history and systematic theology. I think Stendahl does in fact provide
us with what he considers to be a connecting link between descriptive and
normative statements, a bridge that grows out of historical description itself. It
is this, in fact, which colors Stendahl's whole view of what systematic theology
should be. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Second, Ollenburger claims that the distinction between “descriptive” and
“normative,” which lies at the basis of Stendahl's whole argument, entails a
logical and semantic confusion. For one thing, there is no reason why some-
thing cannot be both descriptive and normative at the same time. It is possible
to have ‘normative description.’ Dogmatics, in the Barthian sense, for instance,
claims to be both descriptive and normative. Further, normativity can mean
different things: (a) it can mean ‘to be constrained by a given set of rules or
standards,’ or (b) it can refer to ‘a set of rules by which something else is to
be constrained.”22 Thus, biblical theologians, for the most part, consider
descriptions governed by the rules of the historical-critical method as
normative in trying to understand texts. Stendahl assumes much too narrow a
definition of normativity, taking it to refer to those accounts that are considered
binding or authoritative by rules other than the historical-critical ones.
Stendahl thinks that “Normative interpretations (accounts) of Scripture are to
be understood as those interpretations by which we are constrained to order
our beliefs and actions as Jews and Christians.”23 Ollenburger allows that
“there is nothing at all wrong with this tendency . . ; it merely shows that
descriptions can be offered of different things.” The point that Ollenburger
wants to make is that “‘normative’ accounts are not less descriptive than, say,
strictly historical ones, and, on the other hand, strictly historical accounts are no
less normative than these.”24 Ollenburger's agenda appears to be quite a
modest one—namely, to demonstrate that even in its use of what is ordinarily
considered to be a purely descriptive method, historical-criticism, biblical
44 So Wide a Sea

theology is making normative judgments. This is an extremely significant

point, for it means that all biblical-theological work, including even its most
descriptive tasks, is colored by philosophical presuppositions.
What is important here is not that historical description can also, and
often does, make normative judgments (that to make normative descriptions is
logically possible), but rather that historical descriptions necessarily entail
normative presuppositions; and that in so doing, they have a philosophical (or
systematic) side to them. The strength of Stendahl's argument is that he con
rectly identifies the “normativity” issue with systematics (or philosophy). The
problem is that he separates description and normativity into two distinct
disciplines. Ollenburger's essay in fact demonstrates that biblical theology is
much more systematic (or philosophical) than it sometimes likes to think of
itself as being. What Ollenburger does not address, unfortunately, is in what
sense the descriptive-normative components of biblical theology might differ
from those of systematic theology—or, for that matter, whether there is a
rationale at all for their separate existence as disciplines within Christian
theology.
Finally, in Ollenburger's opinion Stendahl's problems are simply com¬
pounded when he goes on to further differentiate biblical and systematic
theology on the basis of the meant/means distinction. The problem with this
dichotomy becomes evident as soon as one seeks a criterion by which to deter¬
mine the property of a text (meant) apart from its interpretation (means). As
Ollenburger convincingly shows, first by way of an inserted discussion of
Samuel Terrien's problematic understanding of biblical theology, and then by
a feat of complicated “symbolic logic,” any attempt to describe what a
biblical text meant apart from what it means involves one in the logical oddity
of asserting that a simple entity T (Text) possesses two exclusive properties:
M (Meant) and M' (Means), one capable of being described without refer¬
ence to the other. The upshot of all this, for Ollenburger, is that to say
something about what a text meant is invariably also to say something about
what it means, and that biblical theologians are always engaged in both.
The fundamental problem with Ollenburger's essay, despite its obvious
strengths as outlined above, is that it does not tell us when biblical theology
(which Ollenburger evidently assumes to be a legitimate discipline in its own
right) is doing historical work and when it is engaged in theology. He appears
to be drawing an invisible line between “biblical theology as history” and
“biblical theology as theology,” without ever identifying how they are
different. In fact, at some points he seems to imply that Stendahl's distinctions
do after all apply to one but not to the other. Here is what Ollenburger says:
That biblical theologians describe texts (or their theologies)
and determine what they meant is of little use in differenti¬
ating biblical scholarship from other historical disciplines,
or in distinguishing biblical theology from other kinds of
biblical scholarship. But this characterization has proven
Reimer: Functional Specialties 45

extremely useful in differentiating biblical scholarship

from theological inquiry generally, and for preventing bib'
lical scholarship, as a historical discipline, from being given
theological responsibilities that historical disciplines cannot
legitimately exercise. While it is not always recognized, it
seems to me that this is where Stendahl's real contribution
lies.25

What is Ollenburger saying here? Is Stendahl's proposal helpful in distin-

guishing between historical work and theological work or not? What is
“theological inquiry generally” as something incompatible with “biblical
scholarship, as a historical discipline?” Is biblical theology, then, not engaged
in theological inquiry in general? Is this to be left to the systematic
theologians? The only sense I can make out of these statements is that
Ollenburger is drawing a distinction between ‘history’ and ‘theology’ within
the discipline of biblical theology itself.
This becomes a little clearer later in the essay when Ollenburger says
that
Stendahl is right to distinguish between history and
theology, and to urge us to practice the kind of civility that
does not try to mount historical arguments that depend on
theological warrants. But to contrast descriptive and norma-
tive as he does is to confuse the issue by asking us to contrast
the descriptive component of one discipline with the
normative component of another.26
What appears to be going on here is an attempt by Ollenburger to make
“biblical theology” a self-sufficient discipline, with both a historical and a
theological component, but quite different from and independent of
“systematic (or dogmatic) theology.” My contention is that, when conceived of
in this way—that is, as one part of a separate discipline known as biblical
theology, the other part being history—theology tends to be defined primarily
in terms of the historical-critical (if not historicist) paradigm. This is implicit, I
think, in Ollenburger's observation that
Stendahl seems to think theology tells us how we ought to
believe or what we ought to believe. In a sense, this is the
case—in the same sense that it is true that history tells us
how and what we ought to believe, only about different
things. In fact, theology describes Christian belief, or
Christian faith. It is, we might say, an account of the grounds
and content of Christian faith, and there are properly de¬
scriptive and properly revisionary such accounts.27

Ollenburger may not have intended as much, but he does appear here to
be suggesting that “history” and “theology” use the same methodology; it is
just in their subject matter that they differ. That is, biblical theologians ought
to see their normative task as similar to the way history makes normative
46 So Wide a Sea

judgments. The strength of Ollenburger's essay—his main intent—is in show-

ing how the biblical theologian (as historian) is never doing purely descriptive
but always also normative work.
I read Stendahl's 1962 essay, as well as his 1984 introduction to a reprint
of it, before reading Ollenburger's article. What struck me positively about
Stendahl's differentiation between biblical theology and systematic theology,
despite its weaknesses, was how seriously he tried to limit the scope of
biblical theology in order (i) to preserve the integrity of the biblical texts and
their world as distinct (or distant) from our world, and (ii) to make room for
the legitimate and ongoing task of systematic theology. He was, in fact, very
deliberately counteracting an anti-systematic prejudice and methodological
imperialism among biblical theologians. He says so quite explicitly in his
1984 introduction:
In restricting the primary role of the biblical scholar to the
descriptive task, it was my intention to liberate the theologi¬
cal enterprise from what I perceived as 'the imperialism of
biblical scholars' in the field of theology. The more clearly
one sees ‘what is meant’, the more obvious it becomes how
impossible it is to live without the ever-ongoing work of
systematic theology. Biblical categories stimulate and
guide, but do not confine the task of contemporary theology
be it in the academy or the churches, in seminars or in
sermons.28

To adapt Kant's famous dictum, Stendahl was limiting biblical theology in

order to make room for systematic theology.29
Whether or not he pulled it off is, of course, another question. Now,
especially after reading Ollenburger's critique, it seems to me that Stendahl's
strict distinction between description and prescription (or interpretation), espe¬
cially when divided according to disciplines, will not work. How should one
differentiate, then, between biblical and systematic theology? I would like to
propose, below, that before one can answer this question one must first be
clear about the difference between history and theology, in terms of both
method and content.
Contrary to Ollenburger's charge that he does not provide us with a means
of moving from the one discipline (the descriptive) to the other (the
interpretive and normative), Stendahl does in fact give us precisely what he
considers to be the bridge between the two, namely, history itself. Even the
biblical theologian can find an organic unity running through the diversity of
the biblical texts, and that is the unity of “sacred history;” this is the unity
“which holds the material together in the Bible itself.”30 Thus, in the words of
Stendahl, “the thrust of an OT theology ... is ultimately to establish how
history is not only a stage upon which God displays his nature through his acts,
but that the drama itself is one of history.”31 Thus there is to be found within
the historical world of the biblical materials themselves, open to the non-
Reimer: Functional Specialties 47

normative methodology of description, that which leads naturally into the

world of systematic theology if understood historically. This is what he says:

The descriptive approach has led us far beyond a conglom-

eration of diverse ideas, the development of which we may
be able to trace. We are now ushered right into a world of
biblical thought that deserves the name “theology” just as
much as do the thoughts of Augustine, Thomas, Calvin, and
Schleiermacher. . . . The relation to the historical record is
not any more one where systematic theology takes the raw
material of nonsystematic data of revelation and gives it sys-
tematic structure and theological stature. ... It is a relation
between two highly developed types of theology: on the one
hand, theologies of history, from which all statements about
God, Christ, man, righteousness, and salvation derive their
meaning and connotations, in terms of their function within
the plan and on the plane of history; and on the other hand,
theologies of an ontological sort, where Christianity is
understood in terms of the nature of God, Christ, man, and
so forth.32

It is not entirely clear, from this passage, whether or not Stendahl allows
for the legitimate role of both types of theology, one historical and the other
dogmatic. Neither is this clear from his other statements in the essay.
However, it does seem that Stendahl, while not wanting to reject outright the
‘ontological’ approach to theology (or what he calls the “once for all” or
“perfect tense” of biblical thought, as the Greeks thought of it), the overriding
paradigm by which he wants to understand theological categories is the
“radically historical” one. This historical model stands, for Stendahl, in direct
contrast to the “radical, ahistorical” model of a Barth or a Bultmann.
I want to argue that, while theology must take history with great serious-
ness, as a discipline it must retain its own distinct methodology, which is quite
different from the historical one in the assumptions it makes and in the way it
deals with its subject matter. While both biblical and systematic theologians
are accountable to the historian in some sense, both, to the degree that they are
Christian theologians, make what I call ontological assumptions that the histo¬
rian as historian cannot make. There is no doubt that the historian is both
descriptive and normative, and may even make ontological assumptions; in fact,
the historicist gives history itself ontological status. However, the Christian
theologian cannot make history the primary ontological category. For her, I
would argue, the underlying unifying assumption is a trinitarian one—the
suprahistorical reality of God, God's self-disclosure in history (not as history),
and God's ongoing presence historically in the life of the church and the
world. These are not solely historical assertions. They are also ontological
affirmations; that is, they purport to say something theologically (a nonliteralis-
tic way of speaking and thinking about things) about the structure(s) of reality.
48 So Wide a Sea

The historian as historian cannot make these assumptions methodologically

determinative. I would like to suggest that the oft-perceived conflict between
biblical theology and systematic theology is really a conflict within biblical
theology itself. It cannot make up its methodological mind between history
and theology. In naming itself “theology,” it clearly commits itself to making
assumptions and speaking a language that the historian as historian (including
the biblical historian) cannot make or speak. The temptation for the biblical
theologian is, therefore, either to disguise her extra-historical theological pre-
suppositions and commitments as descriptive history, or not to be theological at
all but positivist in her treatment of the Bible.
There is an important place for the biblical scholar as historian (with all
of the historical presuppositions that are peculiar to the historian) in biblical
studies. However, if there is such a discipline as “biblical theology,” in
adopting this terminology it ipso facto joins the methodological family of
theology (of which systematic theology is also a member); in so doing, it
acknowledges making theological assumptions about God, Jesus Christ, and
history that the biblical scholar as historian cannot make. That the biblical
theologian's specialized sphere of study is the biblical world itself does not
change her underlying theological assumptions, which she has in common with
the systematic theologian, and with which she approaches the biblical
materials.

IV
Systematic Theology: What Is its Task?

I think it could be persuasively argued that “biblical theology” ought not

be conceived, strictly speaking, as a separate discipline but rather as a
functional specialty within theology in general, of which systematic theology is
another specialty.33 In order to help us differentiate between these two
specialties it may be useful to look at the first few centuries of the Christian
church.
During the patristic period there were two parallel movements going on
side by side, more or less during the same period and basically for the same
reasons: one was canonization and the other creedalization.34 While it is true
that socio-political forces were at work in both movements, both were
nonetheless attempts by the early Christian community to establish norms by
which to preserve the truth of the apostolic witness; or to put it negatively, they
were attempts to guard against the heretical distortion of that truth. Further,
both were theological developments beyond the earliest form and content of
the witness. The selection process of canonization, whatever may have been its
primary criteria, was in fact a narrowing for normative purposes. The process
of creedal formulation was a more intensified narrowing for normative pur¬
poses. In short, creedalization was doing the same thing canonization was
doing, except in summary form.
Reimer: Functional Specialties 49

The importance (and strength) of the canonical writings over the

confessionahcreedal statements of the early church was that they preserved
within themselves a much greater (although still selective) diversity of histori-
cal and theological materials and positions. The importance (and strength) of
the confessionahcreedal formulations was that they systematized the
multiplicity of images, symbols, experiences, and accounts within the canonical
writings—for (i) catechetical purposes and for (ii) apologetic purposes, both
necessary in the church's missionary task.
Biblical theology and systematic theology are parallel theological activi¬
ties and are related to each other somewhat as were the early church's
parallel movements of canonization and creedalization. Biblical theology
takes its cue from the one, systematic theology from the other. Both are
essential to the life of the church in the world, and both have their particular
strengths and dangers, for which each needs the compensating strengths of the
other. Biblical theology has as its specialty the analysis, interpretation, and
translation of the biblical texts,35 using all the various critical tools and
methodologies available to it (historical, literary, archaeological, sociological,
and philosophical.36 In its being theological, however, it is more than a
scientific methodology and acknowledges a hermeneutical bias: it takes its sub¬
ject matter to be the Word of God,37 and, consequently, as having a normative
(or canonical) claim over us. Systematic theology has as its specialty the
summarizing and schematizing of the essential tenets of the Christian faith for
the purpose of helping the church in shaping the beliefs and values of her
adherents, mediating between the world of the Bible and her life within con¬
temporary culture, and critically addressing the assumptions and demands of
the present age. In this task, the concern for doctrinal formulations plays a
vital role.
A recent example of the confessional-doctrinal imperative of Christian
theology is the Barmen Confession. The point of division among Christians in
the Third Reich was not solely between those who claimed fidelity to
Scripture and those who did not. Both the German Christians (at least a
significant number of them) and Confessing Christians based their positions on
Scripture. In fact, some of the best biblical scholars sided with the German
Christians. Good biblical scholarship in itself did not guarantee sound
theology (let alone right politics). In this situation members of the Confessing
Church found it necessary to summarize the essentials of the Christian truth, as
they perceived it, in propositional form, clearly dividing between right belief
and wrong belief. A confessional or doctrinal statement in itself does not
guarantee good theology (or good politics), but it does recognize the need for
articulating, as clearly as possible, what one believes to be true and how this
applies in a given situation. The danger in such confessional-dogmatic
narrowing, especially when it becomes a tool in the hands of a political power,
is that other legitimate points of view are inevitably excluded. However, this
danger does not cancel out the need for, or the legitimacy of, such doctrinal
50 So Wide a Sea

summarizing; it simply means that all such systematization and narrowing must
be recognized for what it is—a finite human activity and language subject to
error.
Confessional-doctrinal thinking is important to systematic theology not ex¬
clusively for its own sake but for three reasons: (i) to inculcate certain beliefs
and values in the actual and potential adherents of the Christian church
(catechesis); (ii) to mediate between the world of the Bible and the world of
the church within contemporary culture; (iii) to address critically the assump¬
tions and demands of contemporary culture. I have spoken to the first earlier
in this paper. Let me conclude with a few observations concerning the second
and third.
In another context I have argued that doctrines are really mediating prin¬
ciples or ‘middle axioms’ that bridge the world of Scripture and the con¬
temporary situation, and are useful in dealing with new situations and new
issues as they arise for the church.38 In a recent article I have indicated how
this might work when dealing with a specific issue like homosexuality from a
theological perspective.39 Although I take biblical theology to be interested
in mediation as well (mediation and translation),40 the kind of mediation that
systematic theology is compelled and ready to undertake is more radical, it
seems to me, than that of biblical theology. Systematic theology is prepared
to move beyond the biblical texts quite deliberately and consciously in
attempting to address contemporary issues that the biblical text itself does not
adequately address. But it does this in a way continuous with or growing
naturally out of the biblical materials. Its paradigm is the way the early
ecumenical creeds, in addressing the trinitarian and christological issues,
moved within and yet beyond the biblical writings. In other words, systematic
theology does not simply translate, it mediates. But it does not do so through
free association or unrestrained individual imagination. It follows certain
formal guidelines, known as doctrines, which have their foundation in Scripture
and have received their most universal articulation in the early ecumenical
creeds. Thus, there is a kind of classical balance between formal restraint and
creative imagination in the work of systematic theology.
The danger of such mediation is that one capitulates to the dominant
assumptions of an age. It is incumbent upon biblical theology to provide a
bulwark against a simple accommodation of the church's foundational writings
to contemporary culture. Biblical theology's primary focus as a specialty is
the world of Scripture; its interest in the language, assumptions, methodolo¬
gies, and insights of contemporary culture is directed primarily toward the
illumination of the Bible's world and the translation of that world into
contemporary language. Thus, biblical theology jealously guards the distance
between the biblical world and the contemporary world. The main focus of
systematic theology is the contemporary situation, that is, the illumination of
the church's life within contemporary culture from a Christian perspective. In
Reimer: Functional Specialties 51

this it is uniquely torn between what might be called a “prophetic-critical no”

and a “priestly-sacramental yes” to the assumptions of the modern age.41
The triumph of technicabanalytical reason in modem technology, with its
accompanying view of reality, nature, and history, has its own metaphysics and
ontology, which in my view are very difficult to reconcile with classical
Christianity and God as transcendent creator, to whom human beings are ac-
countable.42 The privatization of religion that comes with the victory of a
therapeutic understanding of human nature in modern post-communal culture,
as manifested in the “cult of self worship,” may be seen as a direct counter¬
part to the dominance of modern technique, and equally as irreconcilable with
biblical Christianity.43 These are just two examples of the assumptions of the
modem age, which suggest that we are in fact becoming a much more globally
homogeneous culture than a superficial analysis of modern diversity and
pluralism would lead us to believe. It is these assumptions that systematic
theologians need to address and critically analyze in the light of the Christian
kerygma.
One of the strengths of George Lindbeck's “cultural-linguistic” approach
to religion and his “rule theory” view of doctrine is the importance he places
on foundational texts and “intratextual theology.” In this model believers
conform their experience to the Bible rather than the other way around.
“Intratextual theology,” he says, “redescribes reality within the scriptural
framework rather than translating Scripture into extrascriptural categories. It
is the text, so to speak, which absorbs the world, rather than the world the
text.”44 Or to put it in other words, “To become a Christian involves [not so
much making a decision as] learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well
enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms.”45
According to Lindbeck, the danger has always been that extrabiblical
materials become the framework for biblical interpretation. This was the case
in rationalism, pietism, and historical criticism, in which the biblical text
became, not a lens through which one viewed the world, but an object of study
through the lens of the external world.
The irony is that Lindbeck's whole model grows out of a very
contemporary agenda—ecumenism. This is what he says:

Although the focus of this book is on extra-Christian theo¬

logical and ecumenical issues, the theory of religion and
religious doctrine that it proposes is not specifically ecu¬
menical, nor Christian, nor theological. It rather derives
from philosophical and social-scientific approaches; and yet,
so I shall argue, it has advantages, not only for the nontheo-
logical study of religion but also for Christian—and
perhaps also non-Christian—ecumenical and theological
purposes.46

I would suggest that Lindbeck's “cultural-linguistic” model is in some ways

more faithful to recent linguistic theories like those of Noam Chomskv and
52 So Wide a Sea

Ludwig Wittgenstein than it is to traditional understandings of Christian

theology or doctrine. This is most clearly evident in his attempt to address the
thorny issues of truth claims. According to Lindbeck, . . a religious utterance,
one might say, acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence
only insofar as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that cor¬
respondence.”47 Further,

Just as grammar by itself affirms nothing either true or

false regarding the world in which language is used, but
only about language, so theology and doctrine, to the extent
that they are second-order activities, assert nothing true or
false about God and his relation to creatures, but only
speak about such assertions.48

This touches upon the fundamental problem with Lindbeck's model. How
does one ultimately arbitrate between competing cultural-linguistic systems? It
is well and good that, as Christians, we ought to shape our experience in
accordance with the biblical stories and not in terms of propositional truth
claims. I think Lindbeck is right to criticize wooden propositionalism with its
particular correspondence theory of truth, although he fails to differentiate
adequately between modern propositionalism and classical creedal thinking.
The question remains: why one story over another, why one semiotic system over
another? For Lindbeck, despite his admirable efforts to do so, there is
ultimately no way of answering this question, because all criteria are internal
to a particular cultural-linguistic framework. In the end, he is caught in
hopeless cultural-linguistic relativism, a fate that haunts all of us. Where in
Lindbeck's system is there the possibility of a radical breaking-in from the
outside? Where is the basis for missions and conversion? It seems to me that
in an age no longer defined by a variety of traditional cultural-linguistic
systems but by one dominant, technological cultural-linguistic system,
Lindbeck's proposal does not offer the radical critique of contemporary
culture that is demanded from the systematic theologian.
The primary focus of systematic theology is the church within contempo¬
rary culture, and its task is to summarize the tradition (particularly its biblical
moment) for the purposes of (i) catechesis and of (ii) mediation. However, in
order for it to be able to do this comprehensively, systematic theology must
understand and address the particular contemporary culture within which it
finds itself—its language, art, philosophy, religions, politics, economics, and so
on. Only as it listens to and understands these bearers of culture can it
determine what within contemporary culture is authentic and positive
(supportive of the created order) and what is negative (destructive of that
order), in the light of the Christian revelation. Where Lindbeck's proposal is
useful is in emphasizing the particular cultural-linguistic conditionedness of
all our religious and theological feeling, thinking, and acting. However, it is
not clear to me that his model allows for the radical breaking in, shattering,
Reimer: Functional Specialties 53

and judging of a particular culturaMinguistic context, or contemporary

technological culture as a whole, from the outside.
Seen from a purely “profane” perspective, the crises of modern and
postmodern culture—the injustices perpetrated by both western capitalist and
eastern communist-socialist countries on minority groups, the grave moral
perils arising out of medical advances and biogenetic experimentation, the
objectification and destruction of nature brought about by the hubris of
modern technology, the growing gap between rich and poor, both within our
own societies and between first, second, and third world; the nuclear threat, not
to mention the unimaginable atrocities of the past century—would appear to
call for more universal, transcultural, and translinguistic answers than what
Lindbeck's model offers. Seen from the Christian perspective, the underlying
affirmations imbedded in the church's confessions, doctrines, creeds, and
dogmas are more than “rules” intrinsic to a “language game;” they assert
something fundamental (call it ontological, metaphysical, whatever you like)
about God as transcendent reality, God as freely entering into and acting
within history (paradigmatically in Jesus Christ), and God as ultimate author
of human dignity and the dignity of the created order as a whole. These
fundamental affirmations by the Christian church are conditioned but not
exhausted by a cultural-linguistic-semiotic view of religion and theology. It is
at the point of this claim—that Jesus Christ and the biblical witness to Jesus
Christ is not simply one among a number of stories, not simply our story, but
the story, the Word of God to us—that biblical theology and systematic
theology become Christian theology.

Notes
1 For instance, Bernard Lonergan, to whom I am indebted for my notion
of systematic theology as a functional speciality, divides theology into eight
functional specialties: research, interpretation, history, dialectic, foundations,
doctrines, systematics, and communications (Method in Theology [New York:
Herder and Herder, 1972], 127). David Tracy, strongly influenced by
Lonergan, works with a tripartite scheme: fundamental theology, linked pri¬
marily to the public of the academy; systematic theology, linked primarily to
the public of the church; and practical theology, focused primarily on society.
“Theology, in fact,” he says, “is a generic name not for a single discipline but
for three: fundamental, systematic and practical theologies. Each of these
disciplines needs explicit criteria of adequacy” (The Analogical Imagination
[New York: Crossroad Books, 1981], 3). While most seminary programs
divide their curriculums into biblical, historical, systematic, and practical (or
pastoral) theology, some graduate theological programs experiment with
different classifications; the Conrad Grebel Master of Theological Studies
program has four subject areas: Scripture; theology and philosophy; history,
society, culture; and ethics, mission, ministry.
54 So Wide a Sea

2 My use of ‘conversion’ here is similar to that of Lonergan, who says

“by conversion is understood a transformation of the subject and his world.
Normally it is a prolonged process though its explicit acknowledgement may
be concentrated in a few momentous judgments and decisions. Still it is not
just a development or even a series of developments. Rather it is a resultant
change of course and direction. . . . Conversion, as lived, affects all of a man’s
conscious and intentional operations. It directs his gaze, pervades his imagina-
tion, releases the symbols that penetrate to the depths of his psyche” (Method
in Theology, 130-31). I would argue that conversion—for Mennonites,
theologically a condition of church membership—profoundly affects the way
one goes about studying the Bible, church history, systematics and doctrine, and
the practical life of the church.
3 Catechism: German and English (Altona: D. W. Friesen & Sons, 1954,
1957).
4 Ibid., 132.
5 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a
Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 19.
3 Ibid., 94.
7 Ibid., 132.
8 Ibid., 113,
9 Ibid., p. 74.
10 His own, third option is a postliberal cultural-linguistic model. The
problem with Lindbeck’s schematization is that everything traditional—that is,
everything premodem—is classified as “propositional,” in contrast to modern
(or nineteenth-century liberal) experientialism, and postmodern cultural lin-
guisticism. This is an unfair caricature of the ancients' understanding of
theology. Lindbeck seems to recognize this when he says, quite correctly, “Both
the Protestant who insists on scriptural inerrancy and the Roman Catholic
traditionalist counterpart are likely to be suffering from vulgarized forms of a
rationalism descended from Greek philosophy by way of a Cartesian and
post-Cartesian rationalism reinforced by Newtonian science; but in the early
centuries of the church, ontological truth by correspondence had not yet been
limited to propositionalism. Fundamentalist literalism, like experiential-
expressivism, is a product of modernity” (ibid., 51). So is Lindbeck’s own
cultural-linguistic model a product of modernity, one might add. The point is,
however, that while Lindbeck sometimes acknowledges that his so-called
“traditional ‘propositionalist’” category does not fit the ancients, he seems
again and again to include the classical theological tradition under this cate¬
gory. I would suggest that classical theology, as represented by the church
fathers during the classical period of orthodoxy, did not view doctrine either
propostionally, in the fundamentalist mode; experientially, in the nineteenth-
century liberal mode; or cultural-linguistically, in the postmodern mode;
rather, they viewed it confessionally, with “propositional-ontological,”
“experiential-expressive,” and “cultural-linguistic” components. Absolutely
essential to the classical way of thinking and confessing was a trinitarian
Reimer: Functional Specialties 55

understanding and experience of reality, making it both continuous and discon-

tinuous with the Greco-Roman tradition, on the one hand, and the Hebraic
world on the other. Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical
Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) remains a classic on this
topic.
11 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 77'79.
12 Ibid., 78.
13 “Mennonite Theological Self-Understanding, the Crisis of Modern
Anthropocentricity, and the Challenge of the Third Millennium/’ in Mennonite
Identity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Calvin W. Redekop and
Samuel ]. Steiner (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 13-38.
14 Karl Barth, Learning Jesus Christ Through the Heidelberg Catechism
(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1981), 17.
15 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper &. Brothers,
1959), 12,13.
16 Ibid., 10, 11.
17 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1:1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark,
1936), 431-40.
16 Barth, Outline, 13.
19 Ben C. Ollenburger, “What Krister Stendahl ‘Meant’—A Normative
Critique of ‘Descriptive Biblical Theology,”’ HBT 8 (1986): 61-98.
20 Krister Stendahl, “Biblical Theology: A Program,” in Meanings: The
Bible as Document and as Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 11-44. The
essay was first published in 1962, in IDB, s.v. “Biblical Theology, Contem¬
porary.” My own reading was based on the 1984 reprint. Ollenburger bases
his critique on Stendahl's 1965 article, “Methodology in the Study of Biblical
Theology, in The Bible in Modem Scholarship, ed. J. P. Hyatt (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1965), 196-209.
21 Ollenburger, “What Stendahl ‘Meant’,” 69.
22 Ibid., 74.
23 Ibid., 77.
24 Ibid.,
25 Ibid., 61-62.
26 Ibid., 78.
27 Ibid.
28 Stendahl, “Meanings,” in Meanings: The Bible as Document and as
Guide, 1.
29 Immanuel Kant: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge
in order to make room for faith (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (Toronto: Macmillan, 1929), 29.
30 Stendahl, “Biblical Theology: A Propopsal,” 29 (emphasis his).
31 Ibid., 25.
32 Ibid., 30.
56 So Wide a Sea

33 This depends, of course, on how loosely one defines what constitutes a

‘discipline*. David Tracy, for example, goes into an extensive discussion of
theology as a legitimate academic discipline with certain criteria of adequacy,
warrants, and backing (or publicness), like every other university discipline.
Actually, Tracy argues against the view that theology, generically speaking, is
one separate discipline, and maintains that theology consists of three
disciplines—fundamental, systematic, and practical—each making its own truth
and meaning claims, and needing separate criteria of adequacy (The Analogical
Imagination, 14-31). It is not clear where, in Tracy's whole scheme of things,
biblical theology or biblical studies fits as a separate focus; it appears to
belong most comfortably in his discipline of systematic theology. I am more
inclined than is Tracy to give ‘biblical theology’ a distinct place in the theolog¬
ical enterprise, but to argue for the generic methodological unity of all types
of theological studies, whether biblical, historical, systematic, or practical. To
define ‘biblical theology’ and ‘systematic theology’ as distinct disciplines, with
separate methodologies and separate criteria of adequacy, strikes me as
undermining the unity of Christian theology itself. That is why Lonergan's
notion of distinct but interdependent “functional specialties,” within theology
as a unified method, appeals to me.
34 I am not suggesting here that the Bible and the creeds have equal
authority for the Christian church, merely that the selection of the biblical
writings and the defining of orthodoxy in the creeds took place more or less
during the same time (creedalization extending temporally beyond canoniza¬
tion) and for similar reasons. The apostolic witness to Christ as recorded in
the biblical writings themselves is prior (in both authority and chronology) to
the formulation of the creeds. It could be argued, on the other hand, that the
confession-content of the creeds (e.g., Jesus is Lord) reaches farther back than
does most of the written content of the biblical materials themselves, and that
it is, thus, more primal or primary.
36 I am using the term ‘translation’ deliberately here, to describe the
work of the biblical theologian in contrast to ‘mediation’ as the work of the
systematic theologian. Translation is what a biblical scholar like Paul Minear
is doing when he is preparing a new Revised Standard Version of the Bible. His
primary goal is to present the original as accurately as possible. Because the
meaning of words and concepts change, he needs to make changes here and
there; he tries, for instance, to use more inclusive language wherever the
original warrants it. The biblical theologian does more than simply translate,
she also elucidates, interprets, analyzes, and synthesizes, enters into and en¬
gages herself with the assumptions of the biblical world. Nevertheless, I think
the work of the Bible translator is a kind of paradigm for what the biblical
theologian does or ought to do—focus on the world of the Bible, and present
that world as faithfully as possible to us in our world. At the point where the
biblical theologian begins consciously to move beyond the biblical world in
order to ‘mediate’ or ‘bridge’ these two worlds, the line between the task of
biblical and systematic theology becomes more fuzzy.
Reimer: Functional Specialties 57

36 In the words of Raymond B. Williams, “Thus, the Bible is not a cap-

tive of one methodology; rather, literary, historical, sociological, archeological,
and philosophical analyses complement the study of the Bible. Genealogical
relationships of disciplines and methods exist so that the study of the bible
assumes an inter-disciplinary character. Thus, the student of the Bible applies
a wide range of critical methods developed in the Western intellectual tradi¬
tion to the central text of that tradition” (“Foreword,” in The Bible and the
Liberal Arts [Crawfordsville, IN: Wabash College, 1986). The point is that all
these different methodologies are devoted to the study of the biblical texts
themselves. The systematician also is an interdisciplinarian, but is more di¬
rectly engaged in conversing with and addressing the various disciplines as
bearers of the assumptions of contemporary culture, intent both on mediation
and on confrontation.
37 It is at the point of this faith bias that the biblical theologian and the
systematic theologian are united in their methodologies. It is here that both of
them are Christian theologians.
38 A. James Reimer, “Mennonite Theological Self-Understanding.”
30 “A Call for Compassion and Moral Rigour,” Mennonite Reporter 17,
13 (June 22, 1987): 7-9.
40 Because the biblical theologian is not simply a historian but also a
theologian—that is, she considers the biblical writings to have authority and
normativity as the ‘Word of God’ for herself and for the Christian
community—the primary motive for specializing in the biblical texts and the
biblical world is to discover in what sense that world has authority over us,
and how it can be made accessible to the believing community. Here again,
the biblical theologian and the systematic theologian overlap in their
specialties.
41 Culture (e.g., language, art, science, politics, economics, and so on) is
that which makes us human. One cannot throw off culture without losing one's
humanity. Contemporary culture (whether one views it on the superficial level
of its diversity or on the deeper level of its homogeneity) is the culture within
which our own humanity is being expressed; it is a culture from which we can¬
not extricate ourselves. There are, of course, both positive (divine?) and
negative (demonic?) elements in every culture. It is the task of systematic
theology to analyze modern culture and to determine which aspects are to be
affirmed (as those which are supportive of our own humanity and universal
humanity) and which are to be rejected (as destructive of humanity). For the
Christian, of course, what it means to be human receives its primary definition
from God's Word in Jesus Christ.
42 The uniqueness of modern technology and the assumptions behind it—
particularly its presuppositions concerning human freedom, the domination of
human and nonhuman nature, the reduction of reason to technical or analytical
reason, and its homogenizing effect on modern world culture—find their most
penetrating articulation in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas,
George Grant, and Jacques Ellul, among others. At the very heart of modem
58 So Wide a Sea

technology, it would appear, is a denial of any accountability to a transcendent

reality.
43 Cf. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After
Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 1987); Paul C. Vitz,
Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self'iuorship (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1977).
44 Nature of Doctrine, 118.
43 Ibid., 34.
43 Ibid., 7-8.
47 Ibid., 65. To Lindbeck's credit, be seriously addresses the problem of
truth claims, and admits that the great advantage of the cognitive-propositional
view of religion (in contrast with the experiential-expressive view) is that it can
allow for such truth claims, and that it is the burden of the cultural-linguistic
approach to show that it also can do so. But despite his valiant attempts to
demonstrate that it can, through his intrasystematic notion of truth, and even a
certain kind of propositional-correspondence view of truth (in which the entire
system can be described as a giant proposition corresponding to what it con¬
siders to be “Most Important,” and “Ultimately Real”), the truth is in the end
still described in terms of practice—living out one's story. The question that
remains is this: Is there such a thing as a wrong story, or are there right and
wrong parts to a story, and how (by what criteria) does one determine when a
story is right and when it is wrong?
« Ibid., 69.
 Chapter 4

Critical Theology and the Bible:

A Response to A. James Reimer

Gordon D* Kaufman

First I want to sketch briefly what I take to be Jim Reimer's position; then
I shall pose some questions for further discussion.
Reimer's position on the relationship of biblical and systematic theology
stems directly from his conception of theology itself. I will come back to the
significance of this point, below. For now we will simply note that he views
both of these disciplines (or emphases) as functional differentiations or spe-
cializations within theology. In this respect, for Reimer biblical theology is to
be sharply distinguished from strictly historical work on the Bible; the latter
does not normally make theological assumptions but only historical ones.
Reimer does not really give a clear argument for the conception of Christian
theology itself that he is using here, a conception on which everything else
depends. He simply affirms what he later calls a “doctrinal-confessional”
understanding (p. 41), and he seems to think it is more or less self-evident that
this is the only justifiable view. For this conception there appear to be two
fundamental features of Christian theology: (a) theology must be “biblical,’*
and (b) it must be concerned with the situation and task of “the church within
the world of contemporary culture’’ (p. 50). These two features provide
theology's two principal foci, and they thus determine the understanding of the
relationships between biblical and systematic theology. These two are simply
functional distinctions within Christian theology itself, which is a single com¬
prehensive discipline with four sub-disciplines—the other two being historical
theology and practical theology.
According to Reimer, biblical theology focuses on and sets out an inter¬
pretation of biblical texts and ideas (using all the tools of modern scholar¬
ship), but it must do so, of course, with an eye on the problems and tasks of the
church in the modern world; thus, it is not simply a kind of positivistic or
uncommitted historical work. Systematic theology focuses on the situation of
the church within the modem world—its language, values, assumptions, de¬
mands, etc.—attempting to summarize and schematize “essential tenets of the
Christian faith, as revealed in Scripture and interpreted historically” (p. 38).

59
60 So Wide a Sea

So biblical and systematic theology represent two interdependent poles or

emphases in the one common theological task. Biblical theology has the
special responsibility “to provide a bulwark against a simple accommodation
of the church's foundational writings to contemporary culture” (p. 50). Sys-
tematic theology mediates biblical materials to the modern situation of the
church by means of its doctrinal formulations. Each task is indispensable; and
it is important for those who take up either to keep in mind the other with
which their work is intrinsically interconnected.
This bi-polar conception of theology seems at first glance to be relatively
clear and straightforward. However, I want to suggest that there are some
deep problems lying beneath the surface, problems that need considerable
further discussion. I will take up three issues.

A. The Problem of Construing Scripture

Reimer suggests that, although systematic theology “must move beyond the
biblical text quite deliberately and consciously in attempting to address con¬
temporary issues that the biblical text itself does not adequately address” (p.
50), it does so “in a way continuous with or growing naturally out of the bibli¬
cal materials” themselves (p. 50). This notion of a simple or “natural” or
straightforward relationship between biblical and systematic theology con¬
ceals some difficult problems. David Kelsey's work some years ago (The Uses
of Scripture in Recent Theology [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975], not men¬
tioned by Reimer) showed that there is no such thing as a “continuous” or
“natural” development of doctrine out of scripture. Scripture itself must be
“construed” (Kelsey's term) as some particular sort of literature that we use
for certain purposes; and such a construal always involves an imaginative act of
the theologian. Hoiu Scripture is to be construed is not directly given by
Scripture itself, and this accounts for its construal in many different ways by
different Christian theologians—as history, story, sets of beliefs or truths, the
praise of God, a vehicle for existential self-understanding, the presentation of
a kerygma, etc. Scripture is, in fact, much too pluralistic in character to
interpret itself, and it is capable of being put to many different uses and un¬
derstandings. Thus, Scripture cannot clearly authorize any one particular way
of construing it. Many different sorts of construals of Scripture can each claim
some plausibility, and they lead, thus, to many different sorts of theology. So
even if we grant Reimer's point—that biblical theology and systematic
theology are two interdependent poles—this in fact tells us very little about
how these poles are actually related to each other, or how they ought to be re¬
lated to each other. The really difficult problems remain unaddressed. I
would like to hear a good bit more about how Reimer understands the
movement from Scripture to theology.
Kaufman: Critical Theology 61

B. The Problem of a Doctrine of Scripture

It should be clear from what I have just said that Scripture itself does not
and cannot determine the actual relationship of Scripture to theology. There is
no specifically scriptural idea or doctrine of this relationship; indeed, there is
no scriptural idea of theology (of the sort Reimer is proposing to practice) at
all. Thus, the biblical theology pole cannot determine the relationship between
biblical theology and systematic theology. We are left, then, with two alterna¬
tives: Either (a) this question of how this relationship and interconnection is de¬
fined and justified will be left unaddressed and unexamined, and one will
simply follow out some traditional patterns of thought rather uncritically; or
(b), it will be through theological reflection itself that the question of the proper
meaning and use of Scripture—and thus the understanding of the relationship
of Scripture to theology—is explored and is to be answered. In Reimer's
paper, I am sorry to say, it appears that the first of these two alternatives is
accepted. There is no carefully argued theological discussion of the nature of
Scripture; of the question of biblical authority (what is this? how does it
work?); of the respects in which the Bible is authoritative and the respects in
which it is not; of the variety of literary genres and documents in the Bible, etc.
All of these questions, Reimer seems to take for granted, are unimportant for
the problem of the relationship of biblical to systematic theology—or they are
taken to have self-evident answers: Scripture is simply the “foundation” for all
theological doctrines (p. 50), and the fundamental binding “authority” and
“norm” for all theological work (p. 42).
We really need an explicit theological doctrine of Scripture—that is, we
need to move to the second of the two alternatives mentioned above—and this
must be carefully argued. In this argument, one cannot simply presume either
what Scripture is, how it is to be read or interpreted, or what “authority” or
other relationship to theological reflection it might have. Precisely these ques¬
tions are the ones to be explored, and they must not be begged in the
argument. Until they are settled, and depending on how they are settled, we
cannot even begin to address the question of the relationship of biblical to
systematic theology.
What Reimer calls systematic theology, then, has a fundamental priority
over what he calls biblical theology. Systematic theology must determine what
the Bible is, and how it is to be used—as well as what theology itself is—for
the bible itself addresses none of these questions directly. It is not really
clear that theology can be based simply or “naturally” on Scripture at all, as
Reimer maintains it should be in his basic bi-polar model. In his own way,
Reimer acknowledges this priority of theology over Scripture, in his suggestion
that both biblical theology and systematic theology are in fact specializations
within the wider discipline of Christian theology as a whole. This must mean
that their relationship to each other—and each of these itself—is to be under¬
stood first of all theologically, and only after that, and in the light of that un¬
derstanding, can biblical material be properly used within theology. But if
62 So Wide a Sea

all of this is true, we need to hear a lot more about how such a basic
underlying theological argument addressing these questions is to be carried on,
since it is clear that it cannot itself be based directly on Scripture. I would
like to hear much more about the way in which Reimer would develop these
theological questions that arise prior to the working out of the relationship be-
tween what he has called biblical theology and what he calls systematic
theology.

C. The Problem of Theology's Autonomy and Critical Focus

We can now see that even to carry out Reimer's own program, theology
must be given a certain autonomy over against Scripture, if only to ascertain
what Scripture is and how it is to be used. Reimer does give us an important
clue to his basic understanding of theology at other places in his paper—
where he is not directly addressing the relationship of biblical and systematic
theology. For example, in the very first sentence of his paper, he states:
“Christian theology ... is reflection on the grounds, contents, and experience of
Christian faith” (p. 37). Later on, he suggests that this reflection leads to an
understanding of theology as a kind of trinitarian ontology. By this he means
an interpretation of reality and the world, of history and nature, in terms of a
particular three-fold structure—“the suprahistorical reality of God, God's
self-disclosure in history (not as history), and God's ongoing presence histor-
ically in the life of the church and the world” (p. 47). This interpretation of
theology as a kind of trinitarian ontology that focuses every point on God is
clearly not itself a direct biblical claim; the Bible nowhere directly discusses
“ontology.” It is a distinctly theological claim, and it provides a way to
construe the Bible and certain aspects of many biblical texts, as well as a way
to construe reality as a whole. (It is a form of construal with which I am
personally in concurrence).
If we make this trinitarian conception our deepest theological insight into
reality, and thus the fundamental point of departure for all our theological
reflection, and the ultimate criterion of our theological claims and conclu-
sions—as Reimer apparently wishes to do—we will have to take up a rather
different stance toward the Bible (and toward biblical theology) than his
paper suggests. For in this trinitarian conception it would seem to be God, not
the Bible, that is to be the ultimate point of reference in terms of which we
understand all else. God is the ultimate authority; God is the ultimate source
of all reality and truth. So everything is to be understood in relationship to
God—this is what the doctrine of the “First Person” is all about.
A central theological question that arises from this point of view is the
question, then, of “God's self-disclosure in history,” and this is what the
doctrine of the “Second Person” deals with: how, when, where does this self¬
disclosure occur? The answer to these questions will certainly not be: in the
Bible—that is, in this particular arbitrary collection of documents. The Bible
Kaufman: Critical Theology 63

has never been held to the Second Person of the Trinity. Jesus Christ is the
Second Person of the Trinity, but how that is to be understood raises many very
difficult and disputed theological questions. And the nature of God's “ongoing
presence” in history (the “Third Person”) similarly opens up important ques-
tions that can be answered only by examining what sort of reality history is—
how we experience it, what we mean by it, etc.—not simply by looking into the
Bible (which does not even have a word for “history”). Doubtless Scripture
will have some place in answering many of these theological questions, but
many other things will also have a significant place in working out these
answers.
It may even turn out, as we work out our answers to these questions about
the trinitarian God, that Scripture itself (“what it meant”—Stendahl) will turn
out to be seriously misleading in certain respects for our time, in some of the
ways that it speaks. One thing that I very much miss in Reimer's conception of
theology is a clear acknowledgement that theology has an important critical
function—in the critique of tradition, and even of biblical ideas and claims.
God, as we must conceive God today—if it is truly God in whom we are inter¬
ested, and not simply ideas of God that have been handed down to us from
other historical-cultural settings—may now be requiring us to think differently
about Godself from the way much tradition and the Bible thought. (The very
idea of a trinitarian God is itself a post-biblical idea, as is well known.) To
be loyal to God we must be prepared to make such moves: we must not be
bound to earlier notions simply because they are traditional (or biblical).
One example of this sort of necessary movement in theological thinking has
become quite prominent recently: it has to do with the exclusive use of male-
gender language and images to conceive of God, a practice that has been op¬
pressive to half the human race, and continues to be oppressive and alienating.
Patriarchal linguistic and cultural religious patterns are taken for granted in
the Bible, and they are found everywhere in tradition. It is clear that if
Scripture is to be used in a theologically valid way—that is, if God is to be
treated as God (not simply as the legitimating projection of Israelite
patriarchy)—the biblical materials must themselves be criticized theologi¬
cally, now that we know of the evils of sexism, not simply accepted or
followed as we have received them. And this must be done in the name of God,
the trinitarian God who revealed Godself in history in the past, and continues
to reveal Godself in the ongoing history in which we are living.
Jim Reimer seems to allow no place for such a theological critique of bib¬
lical claims and the biblical world. Rather, all critique must apparently go in
the opposite direction: the biblical world-picture is to stand in criticism of all
aspects of our world, never the reverse. This seems to me to be bibliolatry
(Bible-idolatry), not theology (thinking about God—the ultimate point of
reference that is to order all of our thinking). This position seems to me to in¬
volve a fundamental forsaking of Reimer's very proper and profound
trinitarian insight, and putting in its place simply the desire to maintain “the
64 So Wide a Sea

old time religion.” It is to live in response largely to traditions out of the

past, instead of in response to the living activity of the living God today.
I do not wish to pursue these problems further, but this poses my third
and last question. Is it finally to be God that we serve in our theological re¬
flection, or is it to be the Bible? These two are not the same, and they cannot
be collapsed into each other. If it is to be God, then theology will have to be
understood rather differently from what Reimer's paper suggests—namely, as
concerned essentially with the “explanation, interpretation, and justification”
of those “beliefs considered essential and normative for the existence of a par¬
ticular religious community” (p. 41). And the first reason for undertaking
theological reflection surely will have to be something more than merely
helping to “inculcate” (p. 50) those beliefs and values in members of the
church. Theology will have a much more fundamental purpose than that—
namely, to inspect those traditional beliefs; to criticize them where they have
become misleading, dangerously destructive or dehumanizing, in short, idola¬
trous; and to reconstruct them so they can give significant guidance to Christian
faith today, as Christians, together with die rest of the human world, face some
of the gravest crises of all human history. If one recognizes that it is this very
fundamental purpose that motivates and necessitates “reflection on the
grounds, contents, and experience of Christian faith” (p. 37), we will be led to
a considerably different conception of the relationship between biblical and
systematic theology from the one Reimer sketches in his paper.
 Chapter 5

Biblical Theology and Feminist Interpretation:

A Dinosaur at the Freedom March?

Mary H. Schertz

I
Are Feminists Doing Biblical Theology?

There is something of an enigma surrounding the current relationship be-

tween the discipline of biblical theology and the practice of feminist inter-
pretation. While feminist biblical scholars have given very little attention to
the theory of biblical theology as a discipline, many of them approach their
work from that perspective. A recent issue of New Testament Abstracts lists
several articles and books written from a clear feminist persuasion under its
sections entitled “Biblical Theology.”1 However, none of these entries is theo¬
retical in nature, nor do any of them appear to emerge from a theoretical
curiosity about biblical theology as a subject worthy of discussion in itself.
They seem, rather, to be directed by an interest in a certain text or biblical
theme that summons the writer to a biblical theology approach. In other
words, these writers seem to be drawn into doing biblical theology without
much self-conscious and reflective thought.
The appearance is that feminist interpreters frequently use the standpoint
of biblical theology2 but do not particularly claim it as their own. If the
observation is true, there could be several reasons for it. Perhaps the editors
abstracting the articles incorrectly perceive the writers as biblical theologians.
Perhaps the mainstream scholars who have struggled to define the discipline
of biblical scholars have done it in ways so completely acceptable to feminist
scholars that there is no need for them to enter the theoretical discussion.
I doubt, however, that either of these explanations is convincing or suffi¬
ciently answers the question of why the topic of the methods and approaches of
biblical theology seems to have been met with a resounding silence on the part
of feminist exegetes, even as they continue their work as biblical theologians.
While the feminist writers may or may not recognize themselves as biblical
theologians, these writings fit the category as well as the other articles in the
lists of abstracts do. In addition, no feminists “worth their salt” have ever

65
66 So Wide a Sea

been content to let more traditional scholars set the parameters of their work.
Nor can this gap in the scholarship of feminist writers be explained as a
disinterest in theoretical matters as such, since the literature in the areas of
feminist hermeneutics and interpretation discloses very lively discussions
along these lines. Yet any introduction of discussion on ’’biblical theology”
into these conversations about hermeneutics and interpretation has an awk-
wardness to it. It is almost as if a great, lumbering, gentle, ineffective di¬
nosaur whom everyone had thought to be extinct were to suddenly appear at a
political rally. No one seems to be particularly frightened but, although the
creature clearly appears to be along for the ride, no one really knows what to
do with it, either.
In this essay, I want to look at some of the reasons this conversation be¬
tween biblical theology and feminist interpretation (as a limited but perhaps
representative strand of some of the wider concerns of liberationist thought3)
seems to be stalemated at worst and awkward at best. First, we will examine
some of the different ways of conceptualizing the task of biblical theology in
order to determine whether the theoreticians of the discipline have defined it
in such a way as to limit its usefulness for feminist perspectives. I will
compare and contrast two authors who are post-Bultmannian (in that they posit
the same goal for the discipline as Bultmann does while suggesting other
categories or methods) with another author who claims a different goal for
biblical theology and thus offers something of an alternative to Bultmann.
Secondly, I will evaluate these conceptualizations from a feminist perspective.
My assumption is that a feminist viewpoint demands certain kinds of “space”
from any specific approach. Some of these required “spaces” are room for:
taking experience seriously; exposing the biases and prejudices of the inter¬
preter; raising questions of power and authority; and dealing with texts in a
dialogical and interactive mode. I will expand on these points by asking the
question of what challenges these perspectives offer the discipline of biblical
theology. Finally, I plan to explore some components of a potential
rapprochement between tbe disciplines of biblical theology and feminist
interpretation. I will argue that if biblical theology is understood to be
situated within the more general endeavor of interpretation or hermeneutics
and if that location includes a recognition that social analysis is vital to the
project, it can be helpful to the enterprise of feminist interpretation of
biblical texts.

II
What is Biblical Theology, Anyway?

Let's look first at some contemporary ways of conceptualizing the task of

biblical theology. One might ask such questions as: What is the goal of the
biblical theology project? Whom or what does it serve? What are the
methods being proposed as helpful toward the stated goals and services?
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 67

There are at least two different kinds of answers to these questions. One is
a post-Bultmannian answer, which is in dialogue with Bultmann and strongly
indebted to him. Proponents of these proposals agree with Bultmann that the
task of biblical theology is to serve both the sacred texts and contemporary
thought by isolating the “kernels” of meaning within the texts and opening
them for modern perusal and evaluation. The goal is to derive central
statements from the biblical text that can be utilized by the modern world.
The second answer is an answer that may be loosely designated as prag-
matic. A proponent of this proposal presents a view that differs from
Bultmann's description of the task of biblical theology. In this view, the task
of biblical theology is to serve the church. The goal is to help the church en-
gage in critical reflection upon its practice.
The first of these conceptualizations, that of those operating in the tradition
of Bultmann, may be represented on the current scene by an article by James
M. Robinson on “The Future of New Testament Theology” which appeared in
the Religious Studies Review, in 1976, and an article by Hendrikus Boers, on
“Polarities at the Roots of New Testament Thought,” in a collection of essays
honoring Frank Stagg, in 1985.4 Robinson explicitly affirms Bultmann’s
project. After careful review of the history of the discipline of New
Testament theology, he asserts that an expansion of the “front opened up by
Bultmann”5 constitutes one serious positive answer to the question Wrede
raised in 1897, about whether there is a future for the discipline. He says that
Bultmann not only “went behind” the explicit New Testament doctrines to the
understanding of existence objectified in the doctrines, he also traced the
“movements” of the New Testament's language to get at the meaning implied.
Thus Bultmann exposed an underlying level of understanding of existence that
is present in the text latently and implicitly but also actually (p. 20). It is in
exposing this layer of meaning that Bultmann successfully fulfills both the his-
torical and normative tasks that, for Robinson, the task of biblical theology
comprises.
Exemplary as these efforts are, however, Robinson concedes that Bultmann
does need to be “updated.” The categories of individualism and
existentialism are no longer adequate for our times. Those categories, accord-
ing to Robinson, need to be expanded—an expansion that needs to take place
in a particular direction. It is Robinson's judgment that a move from
Bultmann's anthropological categories to ontological categories (considerations
of qualities of being) and to cosmological categories (considerations of the
social and political issues of the world; p. 21) would facilitate the discovery of
the underlying levels of meaning in the text that would enable the
contemporary biblical theologian to fulfill likewise the historical and norma¬
tive tasks required by the discipline.
Thus, for Robinson, the most pressing current task of biblical theology is
to make Bultmann's breakthrough “audible” for our age. By contemporizing
Bultmann we can help ourselves
68 So Wide a Sea

move beyond the New Testament doctrinal constructs, which

can only lead us into the business of an antique shop, and
into the movements of language that can be interpreted in
terms of alternatives in the modern world (p. 22).

According to Robinson, biblical theologians ought to move in continuity with

Bultmann's methodology while, at the same time, revising his categories of
meaning in order to present the challenges of the biblical claims in such a way
that they emerge as “a serious alternative for modern times, capable of being
decided for or against, without being falsified in this process of translation
into modern alternatives” (p. 17) Thus, while the method Robinson proposes
remains Bultmann's demythologization, and the goal remains the service of
modem meaning, updating is necessary in the matter of categories. Bultmann's
anthropological approach gives way to an ontological and cosmological
approach.
Hendrikus Boers, on the other hand, while affirming Bultmann's basic pro¬
gram, suggests that new understandings of myth and new methodologies for
working with myth may be needed. Boers takes a position similar to Bultmann
when he says that the “task of interpretation is to move beyond the expressions
to what was expressed.”6 His concern, like that of Bultmann, is to abstract a
“message” to which contemporary Christians can attend without “being dis¬
tracted by debates concerning the historicity or mythological nature of the
means of its expression” (p. 60). Like Robinson, however, he questions
whether Bultmann's existentialist categories of interpretation are adequate for
the contemporary scene. He notes that while existentialist thought was favored
at the time that Bultmann was writing, our own time demands greater attention
to social and historical categories. Furthermore, he contends, Bultmann's
existentialism has difficulty dealing with fundamental contradictions in a New
Testament concept (p. 60). An example of such a conflict is the long-standing
debate between the notion of salvation as a free gift and salvation as a de¬
mand for obedience. What is needed to resolve such a conflict, he says, is a
“better understanding of myth” (p. 61).
This better and more useful understanding of the category of myth can be
found in the methods of structuralism—specifically the structuralism
developed and used by Levi-Strauss and Greimas, because they understand
myth itself as an “attempt to cope with irresolvable contradictions.” Such an
approach, Boers feels, allows both poles of the contradiction to retain their
full meaning (p. 61).
To prove his point, Boers proceeds through an exegesis of the conflictual
understandings of salvation and concludes that notions of faith and works are a
fundamental polarity at the root of the New Testament. Some of the New
Testament authors, namely Matthew and John, resolved the polarity in one
direction or the other; others, namely Paul, do not (p. 75). For the purposes of
this essay, the results of Boers's exegesis are not of consequence. Our main
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 69

interest is his attempt to contemporize Bultmann by changing the approach and

method of working with the phenomenon of myth while essentially retaining
and affirming the categories and basic goals of Bultmann's demythologizing
project—which provides a vital service to an understanding of contemporary
meaning.
In an article entitled “Situating Biblical Theology,” which appeared in a
1985 Festschrift for Bernhard W. Anderson, Understanding the WordJ Ben C.
Ollenburger proposes an understanding of the goals and methods of the
discipline that differs significantly from Bultmann and his disciples. Like
Robinson and Boers, Ollenburger develops his argument against the backdrop
of the history of the discipline of biblical theology—going back a century
earlier than they do to deal with the figure he calls the “‘father’” of biblical
theology—J.P. Gabler.
Ollenburger makes the point that, historically, the terms of the discipline
were set by problems that are no longer problems. In his view, Gabler's argU'
ments for the conjunction of historical assessment (pure biblical theology) and
philosophical reflection (true biblical theology) in the practice of biblical
theology were postulated largely against Kant's insistence that each of these
disciplines “has its own sphere and that the one should not be allowed to
legislate the proper activity of the other” (pp. 43, 44). According to
Ollenburger, Kant felt that any unification of the discipline of biblical
theology (as historical inquiry) and philosophy would be disastrous for each.
Theology would need to abandon its reliance upon revelation and subject it'
self to the rule of reason. In this event, the church would suffer. On the other
hand, if philosophy were to be united with the claims of Scripture, it would
lose the freedom necessary to its authentic practice (pp. 44, 45).
But, as Ollenburger points out, much has changed in our theoretical and
philosophical understandings since the beginnings of biblical theology as a
discipline. With the disintegration of the subject-object dichotomy, or what he
calls “the collapse of rationalist epistemology” (p. 46), neither the distinction
that Gabler makes between historical assessment and philosophical reflection
nor the distinction that Kant makes between revelation and reason retain
validity. According to Ollenburger,
History can then be seen as the relation of mind to itself
and becomes the object of vigorous philosophical activity;
for if history is in some sense the relation of mind to itself,
then it is also, in some sense, revelatory of mind. And of
course if the mind (or spirit) of which we speaking is
Absolute, then history is revelation (p. 47).

Although Ollenburger does not make this connection, it would seem that a
perspective denying in this way the validity of the separation of subject and
object, assumed by rationalist epistemology, does not only call the earlier
distinctions between revelation and reason or pure and true biblical theology
70 So Wide a Sea

into question. Would not the program of demythologization as outlined by

Bultmann and affirmed by both Robinson and Boers also be seriously called
into question? In my judgment, the program of demytbologization is indeed
called into question, because it is at heart an effort to de-subjectify an
historical text and re-objectify the truth contained within it. If one questions
the subject-object dichotomy, then the effort to reject the form of a text while
at the same time affirming its content is based upon an insupportable epis¬
temological notion.
Ollenburger continues the argument by addressing the relationship be¬
tween biblical and systematic theologies—there is a problem with the way this
relationship has been conceived. The prevailing assumption (expressed by
Gabler but by a whole host of current scholars as well) is that “to be theologi¬
cally useful in the present, the texts must be removed from the particularities
of their own history and culture” (p. 49). In other words, they must be
universalized.
There is, Ollenburger suggests, an alternative. First, theology itself has
changed and is changing. Beginning with propositional truth or universals is no
longer the only way to do theology (p. 49). Secondly, the most important
sense in which Scripture functions theologically is in providing an identity for
a community. He says:
Scripture is theologically useful in the first instance, not be¬
cause it is porous to universally normative explanations, but
precisely because in conversation with the historical particu¬
larities of its stories and prophecies and proverbs the church
is able to sustain its identity as a worshipping, working,
protesting community (p. 51).

In short, Ollenburger sees the goal of biblical theology (which he

describes as more nearly an activity than a genre) to be “helping the church to
engage in critical reflection on its praxis through a self-critical reading of its
canonical texts” (p. 51). This goal is accomplished, not by distinguishing
sharply between revelation and reason or between true and pure biblical
theology, not by demythologizing, not by isolating the essence from the form,
not by separating the universal from the particular, not by depending upon a
dichotomy between subject and object—but through hermeneutics, through the
activity of recovering and discovering the meanings of texts in concrete and
critical communities of faith (p. 53). In this context, categories of meaning are
developed and used in the interaction between texts and the communities as
texts are appropriated. These categories of meaning are, therefore, ultimately
dictated by the interactions and connections that communities of faith make be¬
tween the texts and the contemporary situations in which they find themselves.
Thus we might see Ollenburger's thesis as a live option that should be
placed alongside the post-Bultmannian projects as alternate modes of doing
biblical theology. We have now defined two basic positions or possibilities.
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 71

On the one hand there is the post-Bultmannian option. Proponents of this

option are agreed that the goal of biblical theology is to extract universals that
can be made available for modern perusal and evaluation. Such persons
sometimes disagree on the method—whether it is better to retain the basic pro¬
ject of demythologization or move on to something else such as structuralism.
On the other hand we have a pragmatic option. Proponents of this option
contend that the primary goal is to assist the critical reflections of the church
while an incidental benefit is to make scripture available to theologies that do
not necessarily begin with assumptions about universal truth. The method of
this enterprise is hermeneutical and depends upon an understanding that form
and content are a unity. The categories are fluid, established in the interaction
between the text and the community.

Ill
What Does Biblical Theology Have to Offer Feminists?

Having sketched two options for doing biblical theology, let us return to
the questions with which we began. First, do these theoreticians, as represen¬
tative of their discipline, define it in such a way as to limit its usefulness for
liberation perspectives? Second, do these theoreticians leave the kind of space
that is needed for liberationist perspectives to thrive? As noted, these
requirements are openness to: the validity of experience as a source of the¬
ology; an examination of the biases and prejudices of the interpreter; raising
questions of power and authority; a dialogical and interactive mode of dealing
with texts. Third, what challenges do these perspectives offer the discipline of
biblical theology?
In asking these questions, we need to note that none of these theoreticians
directly address the concerns of feminist exegetes or of any other liberation
exegete. Neither the post-Bultmannians nor Ollenburger are asking the
critical questions from a liberationist perspective. Therefore, any assessments
made will necessarily need to be drawn by inference.
While there are some components of Robinson’s proposal that feminist
exegetes may find useful, he leaves limited space for the kinds of concerns
that are foremost in liberationist thought. Robinson's notion that there are
levels of meaning that are latent and implicit but actually there in the texts is
a notion that guides some feminist biblical scholars. Such work has ranged
from some of the earlier and more popular efforts to portray the “feminism”
of Jesus or Paul to the sophisticated literary analysis of someone like Phyllis
Trible, who insists that there is an underlying level of meaning to the Genesis
accounts of creation that is affirming of women.8
Robinson also makes some room for experiential thinking by opening up
the categories of interest to include cosmological concerns. For him, this
category of meaning includes social and political issues, issues that are, of
course, crucial to feminist as well as other liberationist concerns. In addition
72 So Wide a Sea

to these affinities, Robinson gives something of a bow to a dialogical and

critical interaction with the text when he says that the goal of biblical theology
is to bring these ancient meanings into modern parlance so that contemporary
Christians can choose whether or not to accept them.
But on the whole, though there are some subtle resonances between
Robinson's proposal and feminist interpretation, and though one must certainly
acknowledge the vast impact Bultmann has had in setting the parameters for
any modern discussion of meaning, this proposal does not offer a great deal of
help to biblical theologians with liberationist persuasions. While Robinson
deals tentatively with the issues of experience and allows that some criticism
of the text is in order after the fact, or when the results of the study are
complete, he really does not address the issues of power and authority at all.
Boers, on the other hand, offers some substantive insights without going
quite far enough in a particular direction to be really helpful to feminist inter'
prefers. He makes some implicit references to the need to expose the biases
of the interpreter when he questions the adequacy of Bultmann's existentialist
interpretation. He notes that the popularity of existentialism during the
period of history in which Bultmann was writing had much to do with
Bultmann's existentialist orientation. Likewise, he implies that experience has
some influence upon the way we theologize from the texts when he suggests
that our present day demands an awareness that places greater emphasis on
historical and social modes of thought.
However, Boers's greatest contribution to feminist interpretation may be
his insistence that a biblical theology method must be able to cope with the
paradoxes and contradictions found within the sacred texts. Feminists have
long said that there are conflicting voices and strands of thought within the
canon. But Boers's solution leaves little room for the kind of critical reflection
that is so vital to feminist interpretation. He suggests that structuralism is a
method by which the interpreter can determine whether a biblical author re-
tains a tension or resolves an issue in one direction or another. But he does not
suggest that such resolution or lack of it has any ethical impact. He suggests
rather that what would be a problem in a group of documents from which one
expected some systematic unity is not necessarily a problem in a group of
religious writings. In fact, “what appears systematically as a weakness could
be a sign of richness” in this “religious framework within which the Christian is
called upon to understand herself or himself.”9 This approach is, I suggest,
both helpful and somewhat less than helpful. On an issue such as the dh
chotomy between faith and works, with which Boers is struggling, such an
approach can be genuinely helpful. On those issues that can not be morally
and ethically compromised, however, such a reconciliation of the different
voices within the text raises some profound questions.
Therefore, Boers is both helpful and unhelpful to feminist interpreters.
He recognizes the importance of assessing the prejudices of the interpreter, but
he does not state why this assessment is so important. He recognizes the
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 73

contradictions in the texts and offers a way to work with these tensions in a
helpful way, but he makes no provision for those tensions that may be
ethically irreconcilable from a particular standpoint, such as the feminist point
of view. In the end, he leaves some space for liberationist perspectives but not
quite enough and not quite the right kind.
To summarize, the post-Bultmannian options resonate with the feminist in-
terpretive project in some ways. There is common ground in the concern for
the interplay between text and interpreter, for the biases of the interpreter
and for working with paradox and contradiction. There is, however, in these
proposals very little room in which to ask the ethical questions, the questions of
power and authority that are so important to feminist as well as other libera-
tionist perspectives.
Ollenburger provides more space for the interests of feminist interpreters,
largely because in the end he situates biblical theology within the larger
rubric of hermeneutics. He notes the “collapse of rationalistic epistemology,”
and that understandings of theology have changed to accommodate starting
points other than abstract universalisms. Then he asserts that the main task of
biblical theology is to help the church engage in critical reflection on its
praxis through conversation with the particularities of the biblical story. In
these understandings and assertions, Ollenburger interjects into the process of
biblical theology some of the concerns feminists have for the importance of
experience and a dialogical, interactive mode of working with the texts. In
addition, as noted, he also accomplishes one of the important moves that must
be made in order for feminists to lay claim to the discipline of biblical
theology—the location of it within the larger rubric of hermeneutics or
interpretation.
As helpful as this proposal is, however, it ends up being like the propos¬
als of Robinson and Boers in that it is two-dimensional rather than three
dimensional. In all three of these cases, there is ample discussion of the rela¬
tionship between the text and its interpreters. True, there are differences in
the way the text is perceived among the three, and there is even more differ¬
ence between the ways the interpreters are perceived. Robinson and Boers
imply that the interpreters they have in mind are scholars in search of some
kind of meaning, while Ollenburger is explicit that the interpreter he has in
mind is the church (or scholars who have the church in mind).10 But, basically,
all three of these proposals deal mainly with the relationship between two
dimensions of reality—texts and their readers.
This limited dimensionality is largely due to the failure on the parts of
all three theoreticians to address the ethical issues of power and authority11 in
the texts, in our social world, in the academy and in the church. While the
biblical texts can and do function in the articulation of contemporary meaning;
while they can and do function in the formation of the church's identity; and
while they can and do function critically in the church's praxis in the world—
the readings of the texts whether by scholars or within the church itself are
74 So Wide a Sea

shaped and controlled by those who hold power and authority. What feminist
interpreters and other liberationist interpreters have been saying over and over
is that social analysis is a necessary third dimension in the doing of theology.
Therefore, while interaction between the texts and scholars can yield state-
ments of meaning, and while interaction between the texts and the communities
of faith can help the church reflect critically upon its praxis in the world,
neither of these activities is useful for feminists (or for others who care about
liberation and justice) unless the interactions are exposed to the clear light of
social analysis and ethical judgment. Until awareness of the ethical issues
embedded in the act of reading is achieved, there is probably not enough
space within the discipline of biblical theology for feminist interpreters to
embrace it as a real and ongoing possibility for their work—though I suspect,
of course, that many feminist biblical scholars will continue to occasionally
practice the discipline.
Thus, I conclude that the while the discipline of biblical theology is not
inherently closed to feminist interpreters, the welcome is not an especially
warm one either. There is some recognition on the parts of these three theo¬
reticians about the significance of experience, the biases and prejudices of the
interpreters and a dialogical, interactive mode of working with texts. While
these concerns are not addressed directly, for the most part, there are
implications that lead me to believe that biblical theology is, as a discipline,
not inherently unsuitable for those interested in incorporating liberationist
perspectives into their work with texts. At the same time, the lack of a critical
edge, an ethical perspective in these proposals gives pause. That critical edge,
of course, has been developed through the route of hermeneutics—via
Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Fiorenza and others. Not surprisingly, the pro¬
posal that comes the closest to giving space for ethical discernment in the act
of reading and interpreting is the one that situates biblical theology within
hermeneutics.
Are we to conclude then that biblical theology is a dinosaur at the free¬
dom rally? Perhaps—at least as the discipline now stands. But before we
leave the matter there, let us at least look briefly at another possibility.

IV
A Modest Proposal

I suggest that there is a potential rapprochement between the disciplines

of biblical theology and feminist interpretation. I suggest furthermore that
there are benefits to such a rapprochement for each discipline.
Such a rapprochement depends upon retaining some aspects of both the
post-Bultmannian and the pragmatic approaches to biblical theology. What is
important to retain from the pragmatic approach is the conviction that it is
necessary to locate the discipline of biblical theology within the larger rubric
of hermeneutics. That understanding nurtures the full use of historically
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 75

particularistic biblical materials (in addition to the more general ones), as

Ollenburger is advocating. But that is not all that locating biblical theology
within hermeneutics accomplishes.
This understanding of the relationship between biblical theology and
hermeneutics also retains a path down which we can walk in the exercise of
feminist morality. It is in the tensive connections between messages and their
particularisms that we can and must make a very important moral judgment—a
judgment that has two steps. The first step has to do with whether the message
expands or contracts the historical situation from which it arises. Is the
message morally larger or smaller than its context? These being sacred texts,
we might approach the question optimistically. Most of the time, the message
will morally expand the context. But this optimism is perhaps not universally
warranted—some feminists would say that some of the later New Testament
texts dilute or distort the gospel message, for instance. The second step has to
do with whether the message expands or contracts the contemporary historical
contexts to which it speaks—both communal (or ecclesial) and individual
(spiritual). Is the message of the text morally larger or smaller than the con-
temporary contexts? Again, these being our sacred texts, we might approach
the question optimistically. Most of the time the message will morally
expand these contexts. But, again—perhaps not always, at least if we take the
continuing revelation of God seriously.
These judgments necessarily need to be judgments that are carefully con-
sidered, but they are legitimately the work of the feminist biblical theologian.
The judgments have many linguistic, literary, cultural, historical and
theological components—components that will vary according to the type of
text being studied. But all sucb studies bave one common element. Social
analysis or ethical critical thinking must be a vital part of each judgment, of
each operation of these two steps—which brings us back to the aspect of the
post-Bui tmannians that it is important to retain in a feminist model of biblical
theology.
While it is true that biblical theology or its parent rubric, biblical
hermeneutics, cannot legitimately abstract messages and throw away their
contexts, it is also dangerous and irresponsible to fail to articulate meanings.
Biblical stories and metaphors cannot be reduced to propositional statements.
There must continue to be direct interaction between communities of faith and
the biblical materials in all their particularism. However, from a feminist
perspective, our hermeneutics must necessarily take place within an ethical
discourse that opposes models of domination and subjugation. This ethical
discourse involves an understanding that reading the Bible and describing its
meanings are political acts. They are acts that involve the use of power and
authority. They are acts that are not equally available to all people. They are
acts that have both constructive and destructive possibilities. Until biblical
theology recognizes these realities any rapprochement is premature and
probably not profitable.
76 So Wide a Sea

Therefore, it is necessary to protect a critical distance if this ethical dia-

logue is to take place in healthy and constructive ways. Protecting this distance
may or may not take the shape of demythologization or structuralism. There
would certainly be other options. Sandra Schneiders, for example, speaks of
de-contextualization and re-contextualization in a way that is helpful and
perhaps does not create quite the same problems as the term demythologiztion
on the issue of the subject-object dichotomy.12 What is important is that a
distance be maintained for critical interaction with the texts. If the methods of
the post-Bultmannians is of somewhat limited use to us as feminist inter-
prefers, their legacy to us is a solid philosophical underpinning for protecting
the kind of space we can use for ethical purposes.
Having put forth these qualifications, I contend that meeting the conditions
is worthwhile for both the enterprise of biblical theology and the enterprise
of feminist interpretation. While it may not be absolutely necessary for
biblical theology to take the issues of feminist interpretation seriously, it is
necessary for biblical theology to connect with some contemporary issues in
order to maintain relevancy to the tasks of reading the Bible in the church.
Obviously, not every one in the church agrees with the claims of liberation
theologians. Just as obviously, agree or disagree, the church cannot speak to the
world as it is without understanding and responding to those claims. No less
biblical theology.
A rapprochement is also worthwhile for feminist interpreters. While the
focus of this essay has been the question of whether biblical theology can
accommodate and interest feminist investigation, it is my conviction that
feminist interpreters should extend their practical participation into a concern
about the theoretical definition of the discipline as well. It is not sufficient to
just do biblical theology as feminist interpreters. We must also be concerned
about how it is done. While our hermeneutical work has often led us to new
understandings of the meanings of discrete texts, too often we have not been
able to extend those meanings into a solid understanding of how the Bible
functions in the life of the church. Nor have we been able to derive from our
interpretations of various texts a coherent and consistent challenge for the
church or for individual Christians. Too often, we have left dangling the
questions of what these texts mean for our lives. If we were to take ourselves
more seriously as biblical theologians as well as feminist interpreters, if we
were to contribute to the theoretical definition of the discipline as well as its
practical use, perhaps we could be more useful not only to ourselves but to the
wider church and the wider world. Perhaps we should reconsider the dinosaur.
Perhaps it is not extinct. Perhaps it has a place in the freedom march after all.
Perhaps it belongs to us also.
Schertz: Feminist Interpretation 77

Notes
1 A recent issue of New Testament Abstracts, for instance, listed the
following titles under its “Biblical Theology” section: Mary, Woman of
Nazareth: Biblical and Theological Perspectives; The Case for Women's Ministry:
Biblical Foundations in Theology; and White Women's Christ and Black Women's
Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (NTA 34 [1990]: 262, 263).
2 There is no single, identifiable standpoint for the discipline of bibli¬
cal theology, of course. The phenomenon that I am noting here has a
counterpart on the wider scene. The academy lacks consensus as to what the
discipline is all about, but plenty of people are just going ahead and doing it.
3 In this essay, I regard feminist perspectives to be a subcategory of
liberationist perspectives. While I will sometimes appear to be using the
categories interchangeably, I mean to denote those areas and ways the two
perspectives intersect and overlap—I do not mean to collapse one into the
other.
4 Robinson, “The Future of New Testament Theology,” RSR 2 (1976):
17-23; Boers, “Polarities at the Roots of New Testament Thought,” in
Perspectives on the New Testament, ed. C. H. Talbert (Macon, GA: Mercer
University Press, 1985), 55-75.
5 Robinson, “New Testament Theology,” 20. Page numbers immedi¬
ately following in the text refer to Robinson's article.
6 Boers, “Polarities,” 60. Page numbers following in the next refer to
Boers's article.
7 JSOTSS, 37 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 37-62. Page numbers
following in the text refer to Ollenburger's article.
8 See her God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1978), and the companion volume, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1984).
9 Boers, “Polarities,” 29.
10 Both Robinson and Ollenburger talk about a third party but, in my
opinion, these third parties do not constitute other dimensions that exert any
real “pull” in the process of biblical theologizing. For Robinson, this third
party consists of the people (presumably the Christians) who will decide for
or against the meanings proposed by the scholars when the research is done.
These are the people for whom the studies are done, but, they do not play an
integral role in the process of the studies themselves. For Ollenburger, this
third party consists of the systematic theologians who may incidentally reap
the benefits of the biblical theologians' work. These are not the people for
whom the studies are done, and they play no role in the research, but they may
accidentally benefit from the work of the biblical theologians.
11 While Ollenburger uses the word ‘authority’ frequently, on pp. 49-50
(“Biblical Theology”), he is defending particularistic texts as equally authori¬
tative with more general texts.
78 So Wide a Sea

12 Sandra M. Schneiders, “Feminist Ideology Criticism and Biblical

Hermeneutics,” BTB 19 (1989): 3-10.
 Chapter 6

Theology in Transition
Toward a Confessional Paradigm for Theology

Howard John Loewen

I
Theology and Paradigm Shifts

A. Theology in Crisis
Thesis: The presenting problem of the relationship of biblical and sys-
tematic theology is derivative of the larger issue of the relationship between
biblical exegesis and theological reflection in a confessional community.
Ultimately, it is derivative of the nature and function of theology itself.
In his most recent work, Theology for the Third Millennium, Hans Kiing
contends that the church and theology are in a crisis period of transition be-
tween the modern period and an emerging post-modern period. The notion
that western culture is experiencing the throes of a major paradigm shift is not
new, of course. Such observations have been coming from various fields of
study for some time. What is distinctive about Kiing's proposal is his
application of the concept of paradigm change to the entire history of the
church and theology. He contends that there have been a number of major
shifts in the “total constellation of convictions, values, and patterns of
behavior” in the history of the church and in western society as a whole. He
argues that we are currently in the midst of another “epochal threshold,” from
modernity to postmodernity.1
Kiing maintains that only when theology has resolved the classical conflicts
that remained unresolved from previous epochal shifts will it be prepared to
work out future perspectives and be adequately prepared for the third mil¬
lennium.2 For him, the heart of those classical conflicts revolves around issues
of how we understand Scripture in relation to tradition and theology. Put
more precisely, “What role do we assign to the discipline of expounding
Scripture—exegesis—in relation to the discipline that systematically ponders
the content of faith—dogmatics.”3 Kiing is convinced that there cannot be a

79
80 So Wide a Sea

truly evangelical and ecumenical theology until there is some consensus on this
issue.
Kiing's identification of the problem in this manner is important for our
discussion here, for the presenting problem in this collection of essays has
been articulated in terms of the relationship between biblical and systematic
theology. Yet the issue at hand is certainly deeper than the nature of the
relationship between two disciplines in theology. It is my contention that we
are dealing here with the nature of the theological task itself, related to our
understanding of Scripture as canon.
The purpose of this paper will be to take seriously Kiing's call to address
the contemporary crisis in theology from a historical perspective. For it is clear
that “one cannot do justice to the present crisis in theological orientation if it is
isolated. If something helpful is to be said to the crisis, one must be aware
that the difficulties indicated did not originate from modem times.”4
My approach will be to present the basic models which are representative
of the way in which the Christian tradition has conceptualized the nature and
task of theology in relationship to its use of Scripture. I will also attempt to
provide an understanding of the social location which gave rise to the various
approaches.
A central thesis in this study is that the presenting problem of the
relationship of biblical and systematic theology is a derivative of the larger
issue of the relationship between biblical exegesis and theological reflection
in the church. Or, put another way, the critical issue is the theological use of
Scripture in the hermeneutical context of confessional Christian communities.
In conjunction with this way of putting the question we will also discuss one of
the major ways in* which the Bible has been appropriated in theological
reflection in the contemporary period.
The construal of the relationship between biblical exegesis and theologb
cal reflection is inextricably linked to one's understanding of the nature and
role of ‘theology.’5 Therefore, we will also attempt to propose an historically
sensitive and hermeneutically sound conception of theology in light of the
classical models and within the framework of the contemporary hermeneutical
discussion.

II
Development of the Classical Models in Theology

B. Theology as Knowledge
Thesis: In the early church period biblical exposition and theological
reflection in the context of the church were inseparable. Theology was
centered on the interpretation of Scripture. There was no distinction between
biblical exegesis and the theological interpretation of Scripture and thus no
understanding of having different disciplines in theology.
Loewen: Theology in Transition 81

The first model of theology emerges in the first several centuries of the
early church period as the Christian faith makes its transition from first-
century Jewish Christianity, with its apocalyptic paradigm, to the early
Catholicism with its more Hellenistic paradigm.
According to Rogers, early on the teachers of the church wrestled with the
problem of their twofold environment, the Jewish and the Greek, and some
coopted philosophy in the service of their cause, wrestling with the relationship
of the Bible, faith, and reason. Yet in the main, the Bible was a resource of
primary data, accepted by faith, from which reasoned conclusions could be
drawn. The Apologists “exegeted typologically in the context of the kerygma,
the central gospel message, the pattern of Christian truth recognized by the
church.” 6
Farley concurs that from early on the church wrestled with the relationship
of the Bible and reason. But the polemical and systematic expositions were
not seen as part of a ‘science* in the later Aristotelian sense of a demonstrative
undertaking. Rather, the task of theology was understood in terms of
appropriating the knowledge of God as revealed in Scripture.7
According to Farley, understanding theology as salvific knowledge of God
as revealed in Scripture was very much a part of the Christian movement and
its literature. In fact, a salvifically oriented knowledge of divine being was
part of the Christian community and tradition long before it was named
‘theology.’8 As Rogers argues, the accessibility of this kind of knowledge pre¬
supposed a strong affirmation of the incarnational concept of God
accommodating to the human situation. It enabled theologians to take
seriously both the human textual matrix and the divine theological meaning. It
functioned to modify the prevailing philosophical forms of thought adopted
from the Greek environment. The theological emphasis was not philosophical
but a salvifically oriented knowledge of God.9 This emphasis on God's
incarnational and redemptive relationship to the world ultimately finds sig¬
nificant expression in the ecumenical creeds which reflect the outcome of the
early theological controversies.
Thus, according to Pannenberg what we today call theology was in the
early church centered on the interpretation of Scripture. During this period
the expositional and systematic functions of theology were not separate. Only
at the end of the second century was there typological interpretation of the
Old Testament with reference to Christ, followed by interpretation of the New
Testament writings and commentaries on them. The critical issue here is the
employment of the allegorical method to demonstrate the unity of Old and
New Testaments. But there was no distinction between the historical and
systematic interpretation of Scripture, and thus no understanding that there
were different disciplines in theology.10
For Farley, ‘‘the great teachers of the church . . . engaged in what now
could be called inquiry, a discipline of thought and interpretation occurring in
their commentaries on Scripture and in their polemical and pedagogical
82 So Wide a Sea

writings.” He states that their effort had primarily the character of exposition,
the interpretation of the received text from Scripture or council (Farley, 33).
But significant differences began to develop regarding the use of Scripture
in theological formulations. There was, on the one hand, a major representa¬
tive like Origen, whom Rogers calls a ‘“man of the Book* who studied the
Bible more thoroughly than any theologian of his time. He was at the same
time a ‘man of his age.’ He imbibed the reigning philosophy and did his best
to make Christianity credible in Platonic categories.” He “moved beyond the
common typological interpretations of previous church teachers to solve
difficult problems through allegorical exegesis,” and also “produced the first
systematic theology of the Christian era,” sometimes changing the meaning of
the biblical message to fit the system (Rogers and McKim, 15).
Church theologians like Origen, and Clement before him, represented the
more western Alexandrian school, where the biblical truth was increasingly
given distinctive shape by systematic and philosophical reason. On the other
hand was the Antiochean school of theology and exegesis. It represented more
the eastern Mediterranean world. According to Rogers, it had a “stronger
feeling for the human element in the biblical writings and for the historical
reality of biblical revelation” (Rogers and McKim, 16). It represented a
grammatical-historical method of biblical interpretation. As Rogers points
out, its most noted teacher was Chrysostom. Yet he shared in common with the
Alexandrian school “the early church's view that God had accommodated his
teaching to our capacities for understanding,” most notably in the incarnation
of Jesus Christ. He urged people to read the Bible. He shared with the chief
theologians of the early church the full acceptance of “the authority of
Scripture and attributed its saving message to God” (Rogers and McKim, 20).
For Chrysostom, “theology was a practical not a theoretical calling. The bibli¬
cal message made a difference in people's lives” (Rogers and McKim, 21).
Thus, in this earliest paradigm of Christian thought, theology had the basic
character of being divine, sapiential knowledge, revealed in Scripture for the
practical purpose of bringing salvation to the lives of people through the
church (Farley, 29-33). Its significance was profoundly linked to God's
redemptive nature and to the spiritual disposition of God's people. This
model needs to be distinguished from what developed later in the medieval
period. But before we move to that discussion, I need to say something about
the transitional period between the two. The developments here can best be
represented by Augustine who, by most estimates, was a transitional figure
between the early and medieval periods, and whose own understanding of
biblical interpretation and theological reflection profoundly shaped the
direction in which theology moved.
Rogers points out that, like most of the church theologians before him,
Augustine had a strong view of God's incarnation and accommodation to history
as revealed in Jesus Christ. He instinctively understood that faith was needed
to seek understanding and that the primary purpose of Scripture was to bring
Loewen: Theology in Transition 83

us into a practical and personal knowledge of faith (Rogers and McKim, 27).
Augustine's method of interpretation was, in the main, concerned with the
“practical fruits of Scripture study” (Rogers and McKim, 32). Yet the new
emphasis in Augustine was the need for the church's authority in interpreting
Scripture. Rogers aptly describes those developments:

An outgrowth of the interaction of church and Scripture was

the *regula fidei, the rule of faith. There was in circulation
in the church a brief creedal formula. It was probably
originally a baptismal formula that had been elaborated
for use in instructing new members of the church. Around
this core statement of faith were grouped a series of funda-
mental doctrines of the Christian faith acknowledged as
essential by the church. This creedal statement and these
doctrines were traditionally attributed to Christ himself, as
communicated through the apostles. . . . Through this appeal
to the regula fidei as an interpreting principle, Augustine
was kept in touch with the kerygma, the central saving
message of the church (Rogers and McKim, 34).

This development, as represented in Augustine, is most significant in that

the established norms for theology as knowledge, in the classical period of
Christianity, were these articles of faith themselves. As Farley states, “These
doctrines of church tradition were not products, accomplishments of theology,
but the ‘principia,’ the givens. They were the norms for interpreting Scripture
and determining Christian truth and responsibility.” (Farley, 41).11 This
generally characterized the theological task in the premodem period. As we
shall see, the solidification of this emphasis also had significant implications
for the relationship of Scripture to theology in the medieval period.

C. Theology as Science
1. The Emergence of the Medieval Model. Thesis: In the medieval period
there was a gradual separation of the exegetical task from theological reflec¬
tion within the context of the establishment of Christendom, the revival of
Aristotelian studies, and the development of Scholasticism.
In this second paradigm, we have moved from the world of the early
church in a Hellenistic context to the world of the medieval, Roman Catholic
church, where the final shape of theology finds its culmination in Thomas
Aquinas. Politically, the Middle Ages marked the end of the Roman Empire
and the coming into being of Europe as a political entity;ecclesiastically, [it]
“was that period when the Roman church claimed to be the one true state.”
Intellectually, “both of the major ancient philosophical schools, that of Plato
and that of Aristotle,” were carried on into this period (Rogers and McKim,
35).
During the early Middle Ages, theologians continued the Augustinian
attitude toward the authority and interpretation of the Bible (Rogers and
84 So Wide a Sea

McKim, 37). However, a different approach began to emerge in theological

studies. Beyond the reading of the texts, from Scripture and the church
theologians, and the lectures on them, there was introduced the argument, at
first to clear away linguistic and grammatical difficulties and later to
harmonize authorities” (Rogers and McKim, 38). This method reflects the
medieval juridical pattern.
The study and interpretation of texts later took on a standardized four-
step form: question, provisional answer, objection, and definitive answer.
Accordingly “the methodology shifted the focus...from faith in the authority to
the reasons why an opinion was held” (Rogers and McKim, 38). There were
those theologians whose “aim was to provide a complete, rational explanation
of Christian doctrine as found in the Bible and the church fathers” (Rogers
and McKim, 38). The authority of Scripture and creeds was not questioned,
but reason and authority tended to be seen as coming from one source of
divine wisdom, and they could not contradict each other.
Thus there came about a philosophical shift that finally led to Platonic
thought being replaced by Aristotelian reasoning and the appeal to an open
mind (Rogers and McKim, 39-40). Soon there would be developments that
would lead to giving reason priority over the Bible. Stronger claims would be
made for human reason outside the realm of faith commitment, as for example
in Anselm. Gradually, reason came to have a more unquestioned superiority.
According to Rogers, the logic of Aristotelian Scholasticism
shaped the style of academic teaching by placing a
premium on accuracy of form and subtlety of expression,
rather than on practical consequences in life. The thirteenth
century saw a revival of Aristotelian studies. Logic re¬
placed discovery (Rogers and McKim, 36).

Thus, Rogers continues,

scholasticism represented a movement away from the early
church's common foundations of theological method and its
approach to the Bible. . . . The developments were uneven,
but the direction is discernible. Christian doctrine was
organized, sorted out, and classified as a body of knowl¬
edge to be analyzed and expounded by human reason
(Rogers and McKim, 37).

Abelard symbolized this shift in emphasis. Again as Rogers points out,

his book, Theologia Christiana, introduced the term ‘theology* in the sense it had
subsequently—a body of doctrine that could be analyzed. He organized all
doctrines under the headings of faith, love, and sacrament. The church fathers
had never used ‘theology* in that sense to refer to Christian doctrine (Rogers
and McKim, 41-42).
Peter Lombard advanced this emphasis in his work, Four Books on Sentences,
which represents a collection of the annotations and commentaries on texts of
Loewen: Theology in Transition 85

Scripture and the church theologians. Rogers states that “the texts and
commentaries were organized into four books on the plan of the chronological
order of the history of salvation: God, creation, redemption, and the sacraments
and eschatology.” This book became the standard theological textbook until
the Reformation, and “its style and plan of organization influenced the
subsequent Summas by Thomas Aquinas and others” (Rogers and McKim, 42).
According to Rogers,
these theological texts were studied and expounded far
more than the Scriptures during the Scholastic era. They
focused the attention of theologians on traditions and the
opinions of theological schools. Aristotelian logic, as a
means of resolving contradictions among traditional opin-
ions, was . . . the operative norm by which theological
decisions were made (Rogers and McKim, 42).

Pannenberg summarizes the developments of the medieval period well.

According to him, there appeared alongside scriptural commentaries, not only
didactic and occasional writings of various sorts, but also collections of sayings
of the Fathers. They attempted to resolve the contradictions in the Fathers, but
now lost their connection with the exposition of Scripture and were collected
by topic and compared for compatibility by the dialectical method, an
approach which developed and increased (Pannenberg, 352).
Pannenberg states that the biblical texts tended to become obscured in the
teaching of theology by the proliferation of quaestiones. Accordingly, this is the
point at which systematic theology's growth into an autonomous discipline
began—a shift of interest towards the systematic relevance of the material
contained in scripture and the patristic tradition, as a result of the sententia.
According to Pannenberg, many see this as a normal development of theology
into an organized science. Hence theology as a science was bom (Pannenberg,
352-53). This, according to Farley, created a new distance among Bible,
theology, and the church (Farley, 38).
In this regard, Pannenberg states that in the Middle Ages, as was to be the
case in scholastic Protestantism, exegesis was enclosed within the frontiers
fixed by systematic theology. Aristotelian scholasticism greatly shaped
Christian theology in Catholicism and Protestantism alike. Hence, theology in
the strict sense was the total explication of Christian doctrine, proceeding by
systematic methods and normative for exegesis. This, Pannenberg says, ex-
plains why there was no incentive for systematic theology to seek
independence from scriptural interpretation, for it had successfully circum-
scribed it and brought it into its own orb (Pannenberg, 353). As Rogers states,
“textbook Thomism in the seventeenth century put reason prior to faith,
emphasized proofs for the existence of God, and accented the words of the
Bible interpreted according to a logical system rather than the meaning of
Scripture interpreted in its historical context” (Rogers and McKim, 47)
86 So Wide a Sea

There was, then, a major transition of Christian learning and teaching

based on Scripture into an Aristotelian science located in centers of learning.
Theology became a faculty in the university, a deliberate and methodological
undertaking whose end was knowledge (Rogers and McKim, 43-44). Farley
maintains, somewhat more optimistically, that in this period theology was still
wisdom, but wisdom deepened and extended significantly by human study and
argument. He states that what gave this period its unity was the coming to¬
gether of the classical patristic doctrinal scheme and the school (Farley, 51-
52).
According to Farley, the result was the appropriation of learning,
especially from philosophy, into a framework to explore and express the
classical scheme. It resulted in theologia as scientia, in the distinctive scholastic
sense of a method of demonstrating conclusions. The distinction between
theology as knowledge and theology as discipline was sharpened, a trend that
ultimately led to its division. One strand of late scholastic thought developed
the science, the other the mystical knowledge. The former development
dominated the latter. The separation was finalized in the modern period
(Farley, 51-52).

2. The Rejection of the Scholastic Model. Thesis: The Reformation represents

a rejection of the Aristotelian-Scholastic method of understanding and inter¬
preting the Bible, and a reaching back to the understanding of Scripture and
theology in the early church period.
The medieval paradigm, characterized by the synthesis of faith and reason
in theology, began to disintegrate in the late thirteenth and fourteenth cen¬
turies, through the work of such theologians as Scotus and Occam, and also
through such pre-Reformers as Wycliffe and Hus. The separation of the
spheres of theology and science in the pre-Reformation period, with their own
criteria of validation, opened up the possibility of viewing theology once again
as a more practical discipline and reasserting the primacy of the Bible's
authority in fulfilling the theological task (Rogers and McKim, 45-46, 74-75).
The basis for this development was the nominalist claim that theology could
not be a science because its assertions were based on faith not reason (Rogers
and McKim, 80).
The Reformation itself, therefore, represents a rejection of an
Aristotelian-Scholastic method of understanding and interpreting the Bible.
Luther reached back to the attitudes of the early church by regarding the
Bible's purpose as salvation and guidance in the life of faith. Calvin influ¬
enced by his humanist training focused on the plain and practical meaning of
the biblical text. Thus, both Luther and Calvin were primarily ‘biblical’
theologians, as their many commentaries witness. They saw the task of
theology to be both pastoral and pedagogical (Rogers and McKim, 92).
Tire Radical Protestant wing of the Reformation, together with Luther and
Calvin, also reasserted the principle of sola scriptura. They particularly em-
Loewen: Theology in Transition 87

phasized the concrete practice of biblical faith. They brought into central
focus themes such as costly discipleship, the visible church and its mission,
adult baptism, and the way of love and nonresistance to express their radical
biblicist perspective.
The various attacks of the Protestant Reformation on scholastic theology
were significantly based on biblical interpretation—and on the hermeneutical
assumption that the Bible is its own interpreter—even though this did not lead
to the establishment of biblical theology as an autonomous discipline, as we
have since come to know it. The only immediate effect was to keep the sys¬
tematic treatment of Christian doctrine closer to the content of the biblical
texts than it had been during the Scholastic period. The reformers accepted
the ancient creeds, not so much because the councils of the church had ratified
them, but because their content conformed to Scripture (Rogers and McKim,
77). Even the Anabaptists generally assumed the validity of the creeds,
although, within the sixteenth century context, they did not appeal to their
authority in any explicit sense.
Thus, the Reformation itself represents a paradigmatic shift away from the
model of theology as a science. It moved toward reappropriating the model of
the earlier church period. However, within the course of several generations,
there was a return to the medieval paradigm of theology as a science, even
though it was now manifested also in a Post-Reformation Protestant
Scholasticism, in addition to the newly reasserted Counter-Reformation,
Catholic Scholasticism. Scholasticism did not cease to exist, despite the strong
Protestant reaction to it. In fact, it seems to have returned with greater
strength.

3. The Reassertion of the Scholastic Model. Thesis: In the Post-Reformation

period there was a gradual transition from the more Augustinian orientation to
Scripture and theology, fostered by the mainline Reformers, to a full-blown
Protestant Scholasticism, which now took its position beside the newly re¬
asserted Catholic Scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation.
Whereas the Reformers “had taught theology primarily through exegesis
of biblical passages” the new scholasticism once again “felt obliged to clarify
and systematize the passages cited” (Rogers and McKim, 162). Increasingly,
Scripture and doctrine became separated, and theology, even more than be¬
fore, was viewed “as a scholastic science instead of a practical discipline”
(Rogers and McKim, 163).
In this environment of a renewed Aristotelian scholasticism,
theology was no longer viewed as a practical, moral disci¬
pline exclusively directed toward the salvation of people
and their guidance in the life of faith. Instead, it now
became an abstract, speculative, technical science that at¬
tempted to lay foundations for philosophical mastery of all
areas of thought and life (Rogers and McKim, 148).
88 So Wide a Sea

God now supplied scientific information, and “the Bible became a book of
delivered truths” (Rogers and McKim, 166). The new science and philosophy
rejected all appeals to authority, and increasingly placed its confidence in
human reason, intuition, or experience where God's truth was inferred from
nature or humanity.
The post-Reformation scholastic theologies “placed great emphasis on
precise definition and systematic, scientific statement” (Rogers and McKim,
173). Theology and Scripture became the formal principles of dogmatics on
which to construct the material doctrinal issues into a scientific theology.
Scripture took on the formal role of an epistemological principle rather than a
soteriological function.
Rogers states that “scholasticism structured theology as a logical system of
belief in reliance on Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning. The emphasis was on a
rational defense of a settled deposit of doctrines” (Rogers and McKim, 187'
88). Protestant scholasticism
substituted philosophical speculation for growth in the
Christian life as the goal of theological work. Once again
theology attempted to return to the medieval ideal of being
the queen of the sciences. A total unified system of knowb
edge was desired rather than just a deepened insight into
Christian faith (Rogers and McKim, 186).

What do we make, then, of the relationship between biblical interpreta-

tion and the developments in systematic theology in this period? Two things
should be noted. First, in Catholic theology, alongside the scholastic
theological developments there was the development of a ‘positive* (i.e,.
exegetical) theology already in the sixteenth century. Second, in Protestant
theology, as we have already indicated, there was the rehabilitation of, or un¬
fortunate return to, a scholastic and academic theology alongside scriptural in¬
terpretation, after the beginning of the seventeenth century. According to
Pannenberg, it was these developments that finally brought biblical-exegetical
and systematic theology to co-exist as disciplines for the first time in the post-
Reformation period. Thus, notes Pannenberg, by 1628 the term ‘exegetical
theology’ (earlier called ‘positive theology’) appeared in George Calixt's
Apparatus theologicus (Pannenberg, 354).

D. Theology as Practice
Thesis: With the emergence of the modern enlightenment period the
distinction between exegetical and systematic theology was increasingly solidi¬
fied, thereby separating the historical and dogmatic elements in theology.
As we have intimated, the separation between exegetical and systematic
theology came about as a result of the development of the concept of a bibli¬
cal theology as distinct from scholastic or dogmatic theology. Simultaneously,
systematic theology, since the beginning of the seventeenth century, was also
Loewen: Theology in Transition 89

establishing its own legitimate place. Pannenberg points out that the proposal
for a biblical dogmatics as distinct from the scholastic form was now soon
superseded by the distinction between biblical studies (which increasingly saw
its work as history) and dogmatics of any sort. Biblical theology thus came to
be understood as a historical discipline (Pannenberg, 356).
Therefore, the separation of the systematic and historical elements in
theology (and thus systematics from history, and biblical theology from
dogmatics) to form distinct disciplines is a relatively recent event in the history
of the church. Similarly, other theological disciplines have also acquired
autonomy at various times since the Renaissance/Reformation period.
Farley says that the distinction between Scripture interpretation and
dogmatics happened quite naturally under the circumstances subsequent to the
post-Reformation period. For them to be firmly established as distinct
sciences, the critical principle and historical method of the Enlightenment had
to be applied to the study of Scripture. Then exegetical theology, as a
historical discipline, could become a separate scholarly discipline with its own
methods, and dogmatics could be distinguished from it by a larger complex of
materials (creeds, confessions, doctrines) and a different method. Eventually a
fourfold encyclopedic division developed out of this fundamental distinction
between the exegetical/historical and dogmatic/practical: Bible, church history,
dogmatics, and practical theology, a pattern which, according to Farley, ulti¬
mately departs from the material unity of theology (Farley, 39-44, 50-54, 77-
80, 89-90).
Yet it should be noted that exegetical/biblical theology in the pre¬
encyclopedia period would not be thought of as a discrete science, but rather
as the study of the writings where God's revealed Word was found (Farley,
51, 54-55). However, as Farley points out, by the late nineteenth and in the
twentieth centuries, specialists in the biblical area tended not to think of their
subject matter that way—as revelation occurring in and with the texts of their
specialty. More typical was the attempt to define the discipline or science, not
by the collection, but by the historical phenomenon—the religion of Israel or
the origins of Christianity (Farley, 107).
In regard to systematic theology, Pannenberg notes that the concept of
systematic theology came into theology in the seventeenth century, after the
introduction of the concept of ‘system’ into theology to describe the theology
known as scholastic academic theology (Pannenberg, 404) The first use of the
term theologia dogmatica was in 1659. Dogmatics provided a unified discussion
and summary of the content of Scripture. Later it came to be known as
systematic theology (Pannenberg, 405-06).
In the eighteenth century the term systematic theology included only
dogmatics and moral theology. Later came its development into independent
disciplines, and the transition from polemics to symbolics to denominational
studies to modern ecumenical studies. Apologetics as a separate discipline
only emerged at end of eighteenth century. However, the designation
90 So Wide a Sea

‘systematic theology’ became more and more inadequate, since the investigation
of the nature and truth of Christianity became a specialized area, and not a
shared responsibility of Christian theology as a whole (Pannenberg, 410-11).
Farley, even more than Pannenberg, decries the direction in which theology
has gone in the modem period. He contends that, subsequent to the post-
Reformation era, theology continued to undergo such radical transformation
that the original senses of theology as salvific, sapiential knowledge, and as a
full-fledged scientific discipline, virtually disappeared; effectively, effec¬
tively another paradigm emerged. Theology as a personal quality continued,
not under the term theology, not as a salvation-disposed wisdom, but as the
practical know-how necessary to ministerial functions in the church. For
Farley, this is an outcome of theology's long career as an Aristotelian science
(Farley, 109-16).
According to Farley, this paradigmatic shift to theology as practice was
inaugurated by two movements: continental Pietism and the Enlightenment.
Both constituted a basic critique of the scholastic theologies. These movements
had the effect of precipitating a fundamentally different approach to theology
(Farley, 56-65).
Farley gives considerable attention to the significant influence
Schleiermacher had on this shift by articulating a formal framework for it. For
Schleiermacher, theology is not a science in the pure sense but in the sense of
“a theory for an area of social practice.” What unifies theology for him is
“the social situation of clerical praxis external to the university and the faculty
of theology.” Hence, theology is the knowledge needed by the clerical lead¬
ership in the social ordering of specific religious communities (Farley, 87).
He thus replaces traditional doctrinal truths with a focus on practice and
experience as the subject matter. Theology is no longer knowledge in the
classical sense, but clearly an objective referent of knowledge whose cate¬
gories are set by what is needed for the social ordering of the church.
In Schleiermacher's scheme, those categories became practical theology,
historical theology, and philosophical theology. The material unity of this
scheme replaced the theological unity of the earlier scheme of Scripture,
church history, and dogmatics. By adding the area of practical theology to the
earlier threefold scheme, Schleiermacher secured the fourfold scheme of the
theological encyclopedia. For Schleiermacher, the unity of theology as a
positive science lies in its capacity to educate the leadership of a living
community. According to Farley, this represents a shift from a scientific to a
ministerial paradigm, with primarily a functional, rather than theological,
unity (Farley, 85-86, 88-89).
In this way, according to Farley, theology became a study of discrete
disciplines pertinent to ministry. Theology as a discipline involving a single
science was lost. The literary expression of this plurality was the theological
encyclopedia. Here theology becomes one of the specialties along with
biblical studies, ethics, pastoral care, etc., largely in the form of systematic
Loewen: Theology in Transition 91

theology. Each of these specialties must somehow be made personally rele¬

vant for faith and life. Theology thus attends to the course and conduct of
Christian life. It is now the means toward the end, the holy life. This, in
Farley's view, is a serious form of reductionism, for it objectifies theology.
Theology is a sort of objectified teaching to be translated toward the practical
end of training clergy (Farley, 8-94, 110-11).
In this paradigm, theology is no longer defined by its ability to communi¬
cate salvific knowledge or to name divine truths. Rather, it is thought of as a
collection of truths from which a bridge must be built toward practical ends.
Thus, according to Farley, theology has shifted from being (a) salvific, sapien¬
tial knowledge, to (b) doctrinal truths themselves in a unified science, to (c)
practical training for ministry (Farley, 127-35). He correctly notes that buried
in this paradigm shift of the modern period is the issue of the meaning of
theology itself, for there has been a major shift from a theocentric to an
anthropocentric focus, from God's own self-knowledge to emphasis on present
practice of the Christian life. We will return to this point. However, before
we do, we must consider a major transitional development in the contemporary
period of the church.

Ill
Development of a Contemporary Model in Theology

E. Theology as Hermeneutics
Thesis: With the complete separation between the interpretation of the
biblical text and its theological use in the context of the interpreter during the
last several centuries, the late modern period has seen the emergence of
another theological paradigm—theology as hermeneutics. This development
has corresponded with the contemporary shift in the toward the cultural and
contextual.

1. The Development of Theology as Hermeneutics. The modern period

represents a turn toward the historical, the anthropological, and the sociologi¬
cal dimensions of reality. It involves a shift from source to situation. This shift
has been accompanied by a relativization of the traditional theological sources
of authority—Scripture, theological tradition, and the teaching ministry of the
church—and thus of the content of theology itself. The shift from content to
context has greatly affected our understanding of the theological task. It has
particularly brought into focus the question of how world views are
constructed, and how one brings together the world of the contemporary inter¬
preter and the world of the text. How do we move from our horizon toward a
fusion of our world with that of the world of the text?12 These developments
have given birth to another paradigm for understanding Scripture and the task
of theology—theology as hermeneutics.13
92 So Wide a Sea

According to Wood, the world of the text and the role and context of the
interpreter were increasingly separated. Interpreting the text has become a
descriptive historical function, in which the interpreter's disposition to the text
is not a factor in understanding it. Yet today that viewpoint is seriously
questioned.14 Accordingly, “one of the most intriguing developments in recent
general hermeneutics is the acknowledgement that the question of one's under-
standing of a text cannot be intelligibly discussed apart from the question of
the use one has made or is prepared to make of it.” Wood says that “an
explicit acknowledgment of the relationship between understanding and use
can have some important consequences for the discipline of interpretation
known as theological hermeneutics.”15
In this emerging paradigm the task of theology is not simply a question of
determining the meaning of biblical texts, but of ascertaining the Christian
understanding and appropriation of those texts. That determination is part of
the larger and total task of theological reflection and cannot be relegated to
one or another discipline, such as biblical or systematic theology, or to some
inadequate relationship between the two. It is a more basic and primary theo¬
logical task that the church must once again reinstate and appropriate. The
fundamental issue is not the relationship of biblical and systematic theology,
but the very nature, meaning, and role of theology itself.
It is, therefore, a significant step forward explicitly to conceptualize the
task of theology once again as hermeneutical, for theology is fundamentally
interpretational in nature.16 In my judgment, it is not adequate, in the late
modern and emerging postmodern period, to formulate the task of theology
simply as knowledge, or as science, or as practice. In a very real sense, these
emphases must all be included in a full-orbed understanding of the
hermeneutical nature of theology. But we will return to that point later. Here
it will be helpful to illustrate the hermeneutical nature of theology from the
thought of David Tracy.
For Tracy, the main task of theology is “the ever new interpretation of the
text of Christian tradition for the respective situation.” It is, he says,
concerned with the specifically Christian confession of faith
in the God of Jesus Christ, a profession which has become
expressed in the texts, symbols, formulae and prayers of
the Christian tradition. This activity is hermeneutical
throughout. The interpretation of the Christian texts con¬
tributes to a disclosure of the truth present in the texts.17

On this reading, exegesis is also theological, and interpretation is the business

of theology. Thus, for Tracy, theology as hermeneutics affirms the conversa¬
tional nature of the interpretive task, acknowledging the autonomy of the text
and the historical intersubjective framework of every interpreter within a
community of readers. It takes its orientation from the reader, but it allows
Loewen: Theology in Transition 93

justice to be done to the text. The text and the reader (in community) stand in
a dialectical relationship to each other.18
In this view of Scriptural understanding and theological reflection, the
basic question is not the relationship of biblical and systematic theology. Nor
is the most basic question how one relates biblical exegesis and theological
interpretation. But the question is, rather this: how does one's hermeneutical
understanding of the biblical text relate to one's hermeneutical understanding
of the contemporary situation. One must read hermeneutically both the
Scriptures and the situation today in order to fulfill and complete the task of
theological interpretation. According to Tracy, the aim of all hermeneutical
endeavors in Christian theology is transformative in nature. Therefore, our
interpretational situation is, in each case, just as much the object of theological
interpretation as are the biblical texts themselves, through which our situation
is brought into fuller view. Therefore, theology as hermeneutics involves a
double interpretational venture.19
Tracy contends that, in the hermeneutical paradigm, the Bible is seen as
itself grounded in hermeneutical experience. We are only able to acknowb
edge the transforming power of the biblical text when we read (i.e, interpret)
it. The Bible must be understood in terms of tbe reception of its normative
message and norming power to defend itself against any definitive interpreta-
tion, and to disclose transformative truth.20 Thus, for Tracy, theology is open to
unplanned interpretational results, to unsuspected changes of the interpretative
perspective, and of the situation of interpretation itself.21

2. A Hermeneutical Understanding of Bible and Theology. But we must return

to the question of the relationship of biblical and systematic theology, and
again evaluate its status within the framework of this paradigm. With respect
to so-called systematic theology, I would agree that assigning primarily to
systematic theology, as one of the modern theological disciplines, the task of
developing concrete interpretations, is still to fall prey to the notion that the
‘systematic’ presentation of biblical truth, in modern philosophical or
sociological garb, precedes and is a more advanced function than the ad hoc
theological interpretation of biblical truth in confessional communities seeking
to be faithful in their contemporary contexts.22 Such a view still seeks to
circumscribe the task of theology in terms of the classical notion of system. It
fails adequately to appropriate a hermeneutical understanding of theology
that takes into consideration the dynamic nature of the interpretive process with
regard to both the text and the context.
It is my view that so-called systematic theology is best conceived of in
hermeneutic rather than in systemic terms; that it is a discipline which must
therefore be inextricably linked with the primary biblical pole in the
hermeneutical process, as well as to the contemporary situation; and that it has
a distinctive translational function that bridges tbe church's reflection on
Scripture and its contemporary experience, reminding the church that Scripture
94 So Wide a Sea

is its canonical text.23 Moreover, it has the primary hermeneutical function of

articulating and clarifying the methods used to translate the message of Scrip¬
ture into the church's particular cultural context. Here it clarifies and critiques
the systematic whole within which the Bible is being interpreted. But one
should not see its fundamental role as simply providing a system of theology
that the church should adopt, anymore than one should view the role of bibli¬
cal theology as providing a systematic summary of biblical thought, which can
then be passed on to systematic theology for use in constructing a theological
system for the church's use. So-called systematic theology must take more of a
servanthood role than it is historically accustomed to, in assisting the church to
be faithfully grounded in the gospel.
By the same token, if by biblical theology we simply mean a historical,
descriptive discipline that needs to furnish the data for the task of systematic
theology, then in a paradigm of theology as hermeneutics that descriptive
function is not best described as ‘theology* but as ‘exegesis.’ However, if
biblical theology claims to be doing more than exegesis, and is in fact
attempting to replace the inadequacy of systematic theology, then it has
nonetheless moved into the interpretive tasks historically claimed by
systematics, but only by another name.
But now, in addition, biblical theology suffers from an identity crisis, for it
does not adequately know whether its task is primarily exegetical and descrip¬
tive or systematic and prescriptive in the larger hermeneutical sense. It seems
that the modern hermeneutical context has placed biblical theology in a
position where it cannot simply choose between the exegetical or the sys¬
tematic role, but must clearly recognize a more full-orbed hermeneutical
function for itself.
It is my view that the function we still describe as biblical theology is
most adequately understood as representing one hermeneutical pole (anchored
in the discipline of exegesis), and that it need not claim to replace systematics
by another name. Rather, it should understand its own function as serving the
broader task of theology as hermeneutics, moving between the text and the
contemporary situation. But it should also understand itself as having a more
particular role of reminding the broader theological endeavor—particularly
as it is carried on in the social matrix of the church—of the primacy of the
biblical, textual pole in hermeneutical understanding.
If, then, the functions of biblical and systematic theology are both concep¬
tualized in a hermeneutical paradigm, the two disciplines are drawn into a
different relationship with each other. They are not governed by a building-
block model, where systematics builds on biblical theology; nor by a
replacement model, where biblical theology assumes it can somehow replace
the task of systematics, or systematics thinks it can somehow do without
biblical theology; nor are they jointly governed by a reductionistic understand¬
ing of the task of theology based simply on a system-building or source-to-
application model. Rather, they come to be closely related in an interactive
Loewen: Theology in Transition 95

model, or one configured in terms of concentric circles, where their fundament

tal goal and function are really the same, but the matrices and parameters
governing their activity might be somewhat different, depending on the context
in which the theological task takes place, and thus the purposes for which it is
engaged.
In such a paradigm the question must be asked whether we should not then
dispense with the old labels and give the various tasks—or this larger unitive
task—a more appropriate name. It seems that the very labels we attach to the
respective theological tasks militates against a more unitive understanding of
the role of theology. There is a sense in which the rubric and practice of
theology as hermeneutics has already tended to encompass and supercede
some of the standard nomenclature. Yet at this juncture, it seems unlikely that
the theological enterprise will quickly dispense with the standard labels and
categories used to describe the various functions. Obviously, the classical des-
ignations for speaking about the theological task already have been
significantly modified and redefined over time. And we must continue to be
open to finding new ways of understanding, naming, and expressing the fun'
damental tasks accompanying the church's existence in the world. However,
what is more important than changing labels is to bring our modes of thought
and our ways of doing theology into conformity with the church's best current
understanding of that task.

3. Hermeneutical Theology and the Classical Models. Under the current

historical and cultural circumstances, it is clear that biblical understanding
and the nature of theological reflection are at a critical juncture. For the shift
that has taken place in this most recent contemporary paradigm is, in certain
respects, more significant than the ones that occurred in the classical period.
Although the classical paradigms—theology as knowledge, as science, and as
practice—differed significantly in the central focus they gave to the task of
theology, they were similar in this respect: they had a common definitional
understanding of theology that was content'based. The classical paradigms in-
stinctively understood that there was a specific content to be appropriated,
understood, or applied. Furthermore, there was also significant agreement
concerning the nature of the theological content, even after one allowed for all
the traditional doctrinal differences.
However, in the contemporary paradigm of theology as hermeneutics a
significant shift has occurred. First, the basic issues are approached on
hermeneutical rather than on doctrinal grounds. The basic questions asked are
not only questions pertaining to the necessity to appropriate divine knowledge,
or the formulation of correct doctrine, or the translation and application of the
doctrine into practice. Rather, the question is how one comes to appropriate
theological understanding at all in one's particular context. How does one do
this, taking seriously the biblical text, which represents the original and
primary witness to the basic events informing theological understanding. Here
96 So Wide a Sea

a strong emphasis is placed on process and context of theological formula¬

tions, and much less on the final product and content of doctrinal formulations.
Here the basic questions regarding the nature of biblical understanding and
theological reflection move behind the assumptions of the classical paradigms.
Second, the contemporary paradigm of theology as hermeneutics does not
necessarily assume a common doctrinal viewpoint to which this hermeneutical
understanding will lead. Conscious of the emerging postmodern context, it
accepts more readily the plurality of spiritualities, theologies, and strategies,
rather than pressing for an actual or perhaps even a potential, broadly based
agreement regarding theological or religious truth. Thus, the contemporary
paradigm of theology as hermeneutics has raised fundamental questions re¬
garding the nature of biblical understanding and theological reflection. It has
done so hermeneutically, rather than doctrinally, with more of an emphasis on
context than on content. It focuses more on the process of discovering and
ascertaining truth in the context of religious pluralism, rather than on a final
doctrinal position that is acceptable to a broad hearing. It attempts to take
seriously the particularity of theological convictions.
Theology as hermeneutics has made a significant contribution to under¬
standing the theological task by incorporating into that task the two
hermeneutical poles of the biblical text and our contemporary context. It has
done so by taking seriously the reality of pluralism in the modern world. In
its attempt to counter the modern reductionistic trends in theology, it has
reopened the question of the nature and task of theology at a more basic level.
However, with its strong focus on context instead of content, and process
instead of product, it has also tended to be open to criticism regarding its
theological ambiguity and incipient relativism. Does this paradigm play too
much into the pluralistic and relativistic language of late modernity?
Interestingly enough, this assessment has made some of the positive features of
the classical paradigm, by way of contrast, seem more viable again. In fact,
the bankruptcy of so many of our modern theological alternatives has led an
increasing number of contemporary theologians to look more carefully at the
classical models for theological resources.
In my earlier discussion of these classical paradigms I mainly attempted
to describe their development in their respective historical contexts, and their
historical demise as the next paradigm emerged. This has had the intended
effect of giving them a mainly critical assessment. It has perhaps also uninten¬
tionally given the impression that these classical paradigms are not operative
in the contemporary world, or that in principle they should no longer inform
the contemporary church and theology. The fact is that, in the midst of the
emergent contemporary theological models, these classical models are in
varying degrees still operative in Christian communities today.24
Moreover, it would not accord with my intention to give the classical
paradigms only a critical reading, and by implication the contemporary
models mainly a positive one. Not only would that represent a faulty histori-
Loewen: Theology in Transition 97

ography, but it would close the door to our need to have the past inform the
present, even though it will always be reconstituted in a different context. Yet
it must be noted that the future of theology does not lie in simply making
undifferentiated appeals to the past. It must do so discerningly and with a
great deal of sensitivity to context, both then and now. But contemporary
theology must continually draw from the church's past in shaping its own
framework. In principle, the hermeneutical paradigm allows for that, but in
practice its bias tends at times to be against the constructive use of the past.
It is not within the realm of possibility to assess, in this essay, all the
positive and negative features of each of the theological paradigms in their
historical context. It is my conviction that the emergence and development of
theology largely out of one social, historical or theological matrix has been a
detrimental development in the church.25 Theological reflection arose in the
historical context of dominant western culture. It matured in the conceptual
and institutional framework of authority, in the intellectual world of classical
Christian orthodoxy. The critical question in our contemporary cross-cultural
context of theological pluralism and relativism is whether theology can or
must be disengaged from that classical framework; to what extent it is able to
retrieve, translate, and thus build on that framework; and whether it can or
should have a distinctively post-modern form. These are the deeper questions
lingering behind the presenting problem of the relationship between biblical
and systematic theology.
It is my conviction that it is possible and necessary within the contem¬
porary context to construct working models that do not at the outset, or in
principle, explicitly or implicitly, rule out the possibility of having these
classical paradigms continue to inform us positively. Of course, one can never
assume full continuity or complete discontinuity, but one must have some
ongoing dialectical and hermeneutical relationship with past models, that is,
with tradition. For theology as hermeneutics will not, in its best form, ignore
classical tradition for the sake of contemporary translation, but will rather
seek to do the latter in light of the former and, where possible, build on it.
Thus, to complete the analysis of theological paradigms, I am proposing a
framework that draws its impetus from the concern of the contemporary
hermeneutical model to define the theological task contextually, but which
also appeals to the major strengths of the classical theological paradigms.
Their quintessential understanding of the task of theology in its context must
not be lost for ours, but must be appropriated critically and constructively
within the emerging paradigms of our culture and our world.
98 So Wide a Sea

IV
A Confessional Paradigm For Theology

F. Theology as Confession
Thesis: Theology, as a task grounded in the biblical narrative, is confes¬
sional language attending to a full-orbed hermeneutical understanding of
God's presence in the context of a confessional community in the world.
As an outgrowth of the analytical framework developed so far, we are
proposing an understanding of “theology as confession,” a model which, by
building discerningly on the contemporary hermeneutical model, is able
critically and constructively to incorporate significant features from each of the
classical historical models. I will attempt to build my case on both biblical-
historical and contemporary-contextual grounds.26 I begin with the biblical-
historical pole of the hermeneutical process.

1. Hermeneutical Foundations: A Canonical Perspective. Central to this

model is the notion of ‘confession.’ On this point, the New Testament is in¬
structive. It reflects the apostolic church’s confession of faith in a wide variety
of ways. Beyond the lexical data surrounding the biblical concept of
‘confession’, it is particularly pertinent for our discussion to take note of the
various confessions that are used in connection with the worship settings of the
early church, related to baptism and the eucharist.27 What do we make of
these early christological confessions? How do they inform our theological
model?
It is my thesis that the full-orbed concept of confession in the New
Testament must be understood in terms of acts of worship, statements of
doctrine, and the ongoing process of translating faith into life. This threefold
unitive perspective relating to the modes, concepts, and practices of the early
church expression of faith provides some initial biblical support for consider¬
ing a model of theology as confession. Accordingly, the following observa¬
tions need to be made.28
First, it is significant that, in the New Testament, the verb “to confess”
(exomologeo) appears more frequently than the noun. Thus, in its original form
confession is an event, an act that is a response to what God has done in and
through Jesus Christ toward creating a confessing people. Consequently, in the
New Testament all confession involves the joyous expression of gratitude to
God for his presence in the believers' lives. That is why the early church as a
resurrection community, in effect, does not have a confession; it exists in its
confessing, in its response of faith-obedience to the servant lordship of Jesus
Christ. Accordingly, confession in the early church finds its basic expression
and response in the eschatologically celebrative statement: “Jesus Christ is
Lord.” Here we see confession expressed as worship. This was truly an
expression of one's being in word and deed.
Loeiven: Theology in Transition 99

Second, it must also be noted that the oldest summaries of the early
church's preaching revolve around the cross and resurrection. This is reflected,
for example, in the elemental structure of the earliest forms of the apostolic
sermonic material in the Acts of the Apostles: “you killed him, but God raised
him from the dead.” The early christological hymns are a foundational
representation of this death/resurrection structure. Out of these stylized
summations, hymnically expressed, there developed a body of distinctive
doctrine held as a sacred trust from God. It was central to the apostolic
preaching (kerygma) and teaching (didache). Doctrine in the early church was
but another extension or expression of its preaching and teaching. Subsequent
to the apostolic period, these basic doctrinal formulations went through a
redaction process linked to the formation of the classical Christian creeds. For
the New Testament church, confession involved the affirmation of true doctrine,
an affirmation that was not without its struggle in the pluralistic context of
Jewish and Greek culture.
Third, the New Testament concept of confession instinctively involved an
understanding of living one's faith concretely. The notion of confession
(exomologeo) is not only inextricably linked to the central concepts of kerygmai
(to preach) and didasko (to teach), but also to martureo (to witness). The early
church's confession involved an ongoing process of translating faith into life,
frequently in the context of suffering. The force of the New Testament concept
of confession includes a strong affirmation of the witnessing dimension.
Implied in this is a clear apologetic that this person Jesus and no other is
Christ the Lord. For early Christians this was not simply talk, but
fundamentally a walk.
Stanley J. Samartha's comments are most apropos. He says that the church
in its mission must press into service the concept of ‘witness,’ for
“‘witness’[marturia] is a biblical term” and together with ‘kerygma’ and
‘diakonia’ involves a “readiness to suffer and die for the sake of others,
through which the Lordship of Christ is confessed.” Therefore,

witnessing to the Lordship of Jesus Christ cannot be mere

verbal proclamation to the world at large. It has to be con-
crete and particular in the living context of relationships. It
is not just a statement to be accepted, but a confession to be
made at the end, not at the beginning, of an experience.29

One final thing must be said regarding the New Testament understanding
of confession. Confession here is first and foremost a corporate act and only
derivatively an individual one. The very existence of the church depends on it.
Because confession of faith in the biblical sense is a profoundly communal act,
statement, and process of life, a confessing church discerningly listens to what
others, past and present, have said. Our understanding of the theological task
must always be shaped by this perspective. For this reason, contemporary
theology must also listen carefully to voices from the classical past.
100 So Wide a Sea

It is my contention that a New Testament understanding of the concept of

confession provides adequate support for understanding theology as
confession. To understand theology as confession on biblical grounds means
that the task of theology is inextricably linked with a unitive understanding of
confession as worship, doctrine, and life. It is involved in a holistic rendition
of the Christian faith, inclusive of being, thinking, and doing. Thus, celebrating
God's presence, thinking critically about the meaning of God in life, and acting
obediently in response to God's will and way come into the orbit of theology.
To define theology strictly as conceptual inquiry is simply too narrow a
definition of the term and the task.

2. Historical Framework: The Classical Paradigms. It is my conviction that

understanding theology as confession provides the necessary framework into
which one can critically incorporate central dimensions of each classical
model. This paradigm serves as a heuristic devise to view the three classical
models as each representing an integral part of a broader and deeper under¬
standing of theology. Rather than seeing each model as having run its course
and as no longer relevant, I am suggesting that theology as knowledge, as
science, and as practice, properly understood, are all essential to the task of
theology; but they have been pulled apart and separated from each other
through the epochal shifts that have occurred in western culture.
Moreover, I would suggest that the threefold classical development of
theology as knowledge, science, and practice is roughly synonymous with the
threefold canonical understanding of confession as worship, doctrine, and life.
My purpose here is not to make a simple correlation between biblical themes
and historical developments. But I am, in principle, suggesting that historical
developments in the church frequently separate what is understood much more
integratively in the scriptural context, and that the inadequacy of a particular
historical development—for example, the reduction of theology to a narrow
view of science—lies not so much with what is being emphasized as in the
absence of the whole from which it has been separated. It is my view that
much can be gained for our understanding of theology by retrieving the
significant parts that have been separated, through historical development,
from the whole of the theological task. I will attempt to do this briefly with
each of the classical models.30
First, the model of theology as knowledge stands as a constant reminder
that theology must not lose its redemptive goal within the matrix of the church.
In this model, the task of theology is closely connected with an understanding
of Christian community as redemptive in nature and taking seriously its
received confessional tradition and its truth convictions. Here theology is
linked to the churchly tasks that center on the corporate and individual occur¬
rences of redemption. Here theology as salvific and sapiential knowledge
evokes understanding and action. It shapes one's experience of God and
therefore one's self-understanding, identity and spiritual formation. This
Loeiven: Theology in Transition 101

model reminds us that, in the historical matrix of the earlier Christian period,
theology is done through worship, liturgy and story; that its confessional matrix
is the creed that gives rise to first-order, liturgical language; and that as
confession, it functions expressively in the public sphere as doxology.
Today, the Christian tradition that continues persistently to remind us of
this indispensable dimension of theology is the Eastern Orthodox Church,
largely as a suffering minority in the eastern context of Islam and atheistic
Communism. As Demetrios J. Constantelos writes, “Hie Orthodox have viewed
religion as the right ‘doxa,’ and ‘doxa’ means glory, glorification. Thus
Orthodoxy is not so much right creed as right doxology-worship of God the
Creator.” Thus, “worship in the early church meant, as it does in modern
Orthodoxy, the centrality of Christ in the Eucharist, in faith, life, and action.”
This is the Orthodox model of theology and discipleship.31 The twentieth-
century charismatic movement has also provided various manifestations of a
doxological model of theology throughout the global Christian community.
Second, the model of theology as science stands as a reminder that
theology must not lose its goal of enabling the Christian community by
interpreting the church's doctrinal tradition in relation to its contemporary
situation. Here theology as a discipline, unified in its theological character
and subject matter, is involved in scholarly inquiry, seeking consistency and
coherence, in the matrix of sound theological teaching. Here theology is
rigorously involved in ascertaining the truth. Here it develops the content,
meaning, and parameters of Christian confession. It directs us to ultimate
reality and promotes seeing that reality as God's reality, attempting to bring
our minds, through critical thinking, in conformity with that reality. This model
reminds us that in the historical matrix of the medieval Christian period
theology focused significantly on words, language, and statements; that its
confessional matrix is doctrine that represents second-order, analytical
language; and that as confession, it functions descriptively in the public sphere
as doctrine. Today, the major Christian traditions that have consistently
reminded us of this indispensable dimension of theology are the western
Roman Catholic and particularly the conservative Protestant traditions, as
dominant, established traditions in the western cultural context of secular
humanism.
Third, the model of theology as practice stands as a reminder that
theology must not lose its fundamentally practical character and goal of
attending to the life, existence, and behavior of the believer, or the faith
community in the world. This model reminds us that theology is inextricably
linked with Christian experience in the matrix of society. In the strongest
representations of this model, the authenticity and integrity of theology are
seen to be preserved only through the costly practice of Christian discipleship
in the world. For it affirms that discipleship behavior changes reality, and
that it constrains one to reflect faithfully on the servant lordship of Jesus
Christ.
102 So Wide a Sea

This model also reminds us that theology is not primarily an activity

limited to the professional clergy and theologians, but is fundamentally an ac-
tivity in which all of God's people can, and indeed must, participate in the
context of their life-situations. It reminds us that corporate and personal
insight without technical scholarship can also be theological reflection. It re¬
minds us that the theology is not primarily theoretical in nature but
fundamentally practical knowledge, promoting, forming, and disciplining
theological understanding for faithful witness in the world.32 This model
reminds us that in the modern Christian period, theology has focused
significantly on life, witness, ethics and the contemporary situation; that its
confessional matrix is the practice of Christian life in the world, which is, in
effect, first-order language (language of worship) in an ethical key; and that as
confession, it functions prescriptively in the public sphere as discipleship.
Today, the major Christian traditions that most radically remind us of this
indispensable dimension of theology are the two-thirds world Christians who
are an oppressed minority in the southern hemisphere, countries frequently
dominated by the political and economic powers of the North. Earlier, the
classical liberal Protestant tradition gave significant expression to the ethical
and practical dimensions of Christian faith and theology, in the context of an
increasingly modern and secular western culture.
Again, it is important to reiterate that our purpose is to establish a
hermeneutically sound and historically sensitive model of theology. Here I
have contended that not only do each of the classical paradigms, within their
historical matrices, remind us of an integral dimension of the theological task,
but that these dimensions are inextricably linked in a more full-orbed under¬
standing of the theological task. They are important, separated parts
belonging to a more unitive whole that I have named theology as confession.
The temptation, of course, will be to try to associate each of these three areas
with a scholarly discipline via the encyclopedia model—biblical, systematic,
and practical theology. But this is only to retreat, once again, into a
reductionistic concept of theology, and away from a hermeneutically sound and
historically sensitive model. My claim is that all three of these dimensions
must be held together in a full-orbed understanding of the nature and function
of theology. Worship, word, and witness must be inseparably connected in
carrying out the complete hermeneutical task of a confessional community in
the world. Theology as confession represents a ‘thick description’ of that task.
It reveals the depth and richness of the theological task and keeps it from
being reduced to a single, timeless essence.

3. Heuristic Formulations: A Contemporary Proposal, (a) Confession as

Transformative Language. So far, I have based my claims regarding theology
as confession on biblical and historical grounds. It also will be necessary to
establish my case more fully in the context of contemporary hermeneutical
thought. This will provide the conceptual grounds that permit holding together
Loeiuen: Theology in Transition 103

the dimensions of act, statement, and the ongoing processing of life. Within
the framework of contemporary hermeneutics and epistemology, I believe that
‘confession* is best conceptualized in terms of a speech-act model of language.
Such a view of language engenders a full-orbed understanding of confession,
namely, that it also creates reality rather than simply defines reality.33
In this view theology as ‘confession* is understood as a “statement** or a
“locution” employed in a particular kind of act, a speech-act, which aims at
expressing and producing “life.” It is language understood in terms of how it
is used and what it does.34 In other words, ‘confession’ is language understood
as speech-act, where statements as locutions are employed as an act with the
aim of expressing and producing life, and where linguisticality is defined by
the full-orbed meaning of a speaking and listening God (dabar/logos) who acts
and responds in the “language” of being, thinking, and doing.35 Thus,
“theology as confession” is what the church, in its hermeneutical reflection on
Scripture, “says” about God in terms of act, statement, and process of life.
This conceptual framework, in my estimation, is able to accommodate the inte¬
grative biblical understanding of confession as an act of worship, a statement
of doctrine, and the process of living faithfully. Likewise, it provides a
structure by which we can critically integrate the classical options of theology
as knowledge, as science, and as practice.
Theology as confession is “language” that does not only describe reality, it
also creates reality. It does not just state what the church believes, it gives
shape to its faith by constructing a new reality by attending to Christian
confession as worship, word, and witness. But we cannot make this profound
claim for theology apart from grounding it in its primary context, which is
Scripture as the primary witness to the apostolic faith. This witness is confes-
sionally embodied in the early Christian communities and continually
transforms them. Thus, the Bible itself, in a fundamental sort of way, needs to
be construed as a primary ‘confession’ in terms of a speech-action or text-action
model. Here Scripture as confession not only bears witness to a new reality,
but is itself continuously taken up in the church's interpretive process, through
which it repeatedly gives birth to new spiritual and social reality.
This understanding of Scripture as a kind of original confession
presupposes the importance of a community of faith that confesses that the
God of the biblical story performs reality changing actions—transformative
actions—in and through the church's faithful construal of Scripture. The
church's act of confessing the truth of the biblical witness, in its particular
context, is a profoundly transformative function, and it is my contention that the
task of theology must emerge out of the heart of that transforming function.
Therefore, theology as confession in worship, word, and witness designates
the community's and the individual's orientation to God and to the world. This
unitive, threefold dimension carries with it the affective and interactional
dimensions of reality, and does not slant the theological task only to a cogni¬
tive/analytical or a pragmatic/functional framework. It must avoid the
104 So Wide a Sea

excesses of both an objectivistic ontologism and a subjectivistic pragmatism.

Theology as worship, word, and witness within the confessional paradigm
intrinsically relates to the reality of God, the people of God, and the world.
It is a transformative hermeneutical process grounded in a historico-relational
ontology.36 Thus theology as transformative, confessional language does not
reduce the theological task to a hermeneutical process or an epistemological
formulation, but grounds it ontologically within transformative reality of a
God who “speaks” and “listens” in and through the experience, explanation,
and expression of confessing communities of faith.
(b) Confession as Embodied Language. However, the focus of theology as
confession is not just on how the divine acts transformatively in the human
sphere (more so the classical theology emphasis), but also on how the human
arena experiences the divine activity of God (more so the contemporary
theological emphasis). These two spheres of reality must not be separated
dualistically. It is my view that the three inseparable dimensions of the
confessional paradigm are also eminently translatable into the sphere of
concrete human experience of God in the world. It is therefore important to
understand human experience of divine reality in terms of our analytical grid
of confession as worship, word, and witness.37 First, there is the level of “basic
experience,” which refers to the immediate experience of God's presence in
personal or corporate Christian experience, in a sense uninterpreted. This
would be the first-order level of worship as experienced in personal and
corporate ways in the gathered experience of God's people.
Second, there is the level of “formed experience,” which is experience as
conveyed in and through the cultural “language” of one's context. This is first'
order language transposed into another key, namely, the actual experiential,
embodied witness and ministry of God's people in the world. It is always
expressed through the language of culture.
Third, there is the level of “interpreted experience,” which is the
systematic attempt to think about and integrate spiritual and religious experi¬
ence into a larger world view. This would be the second-order level of
confession as word, where the church attempts to articulate coherently and
consistently, and to validate, its faith in its cultural context.
This portrayal of the paradigm in terms of the language of human
experience focuses the common distinction in theology between first-order and
second-order language—that is, the primary language of experience versus the
secondary language of reflection. It is my view that the content given to first-
order language in the classical and contemporary models of theology is
deeply influenced by the inferiority of western spirituality, and especially of
contemporary western devotion. However, within the framework of the confes¬
sional paradigm, first-order language is significantly expanded and indeed
transposed into another key. Here it still remains first-order language—that
is, the language of primary faith-experience—but it moves beyond corporate
or individual devotional language (confession as worship) to integrate and
Loetuen: Theology in Transition 105

embody the experience of the church reaching out beyond itself in disciple-
ship, mission, service, action, and ethics (confession as witness, or worship in its
full-orbed New Testament sense of worship as service).
There is a real sense in which first-order language must be transposed into
a key that includes the entire sphere of the church's experience of embodying
God's presence in her public witness in the world. This is truly the range of
New Testament first-order language.38 This is not language “about” our ex¬
perience of God. This is first-order language of the experience of God's
presence as witness in and to the world. This is first-order experiential lan¬
guage, in terms of both the inward and the outward journey of spirituality and
formation. It entails the embodiment of a transformative witness to the world,
grounded in the ontological and experiential reality of God's presence.
Therefore, the concept of first-order language has to be greatly expanded and
theologically grounded. First-order language must be inclusive of worship
and witness. The confessional paradigm attempts to do this.39
It is also the case that second-order language is profoundly influenced by
modern, western notions of rationality and language. Just as first-order
language tends to be run through the epistemological grid of an emotive-
expressivist view of language (and thus excessively subjectivistic), so second-
order language is largely understood through the epistemological grid of a
propositional/cognitivist view of language (and is thus excessively objectivis-
tic). The epistemological framework of our model of theology as confession
helps to transcend the limitation of these views. Here second-order language
is not so much “a set of propositions to be believed,” but is more “the medium
in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one's life.”40
This view of language can relate second-order language much more inte-
gratively to first-order language, so that the task of theology can incorporate
both levels. Second-order language represents the reflexive action of thought
on the inward and outward processes of believers' experiences in the world.
Theology as confession embraces and embodies this entire experiential-
reflexive process.
Therefore, my central thesis is that theology, as a task grounded in the
biblical narrative, is confessional language attending to a full-orbed
hermeneutical understanding of God's transformative presence embodied in
confessional communities in the world. Theology as confession attends to
worship as the primary language of faith, to word of doctrine as the essential
grammar of faith, and to the process of witness in life as the indispensable
task of testing the adequacy of this confessional language and grammar and
continually shaping it. It must do this in the twofold context of the biblical
narrative and the contemporary community of faith. The task of theology in¬
volves attending to the full range of this transformative and embodied
hermeneutical process.41
106 So Wide a Sea

V
Conclusion

It is my contention that a model of theology as confession permits a

broader and deeper understanding of the nature and role of theology. It can
hermeneutically appropriate the primacy of the biblical witness from the very
outset of the theological task; it can discerningly incorporate important
features from the classical models of theology; and it can critically appropri-
ate the strengths of contemporary models, and interact genuinely with the
contemporary situation.
Theology as confession is a model that makes exegesis of the biblical text
(and the contemporary context) a precondition for theological reflection, and
theological reflection an indispensible horizon for such exegesis. Simub
taneously, it is a model that affirms the transformative function of the
theological task, which must always be embodied in its present context. Thus,
theology as confession attempts to be historically sensitive and hermeneu¬
tically sound. It seeks to appropriate a full-orbed understanding of the
theological task. Without such vision, the church and theology will continue to
be pulled back into the historical conundrums, and imprisoned in the contem¬
porary hermeneutical crises.

Notes
1 Hans Kiing, Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View
(New York: Doubleday Books, 1988), 1-11. See also Howard John Loewen,
“The Mission of Theology,” Explorations of Systematic Theology from Mennonite
Perspectives, OP, 7 (Elkhart: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1984), 84-88.
2 Kiing, Theology for the Third Millennium, 11.
3 Ibid., 6.
4 Gerhard Ebeling, The Study of Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1978), 1.
5 Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of
Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 32.
6 Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation
of Scripture (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 15. This work is
particularly useful in analyzing the way in which Scripture was understood
and used as an authority in theology in the various periods of the western
church. I am using it, together with works by Wolfhart Pannenber and Edward
Farley, to develop the basic classical models of theology.
7 Farley, Theologia, 29-48.
3 Ibid., 33.
9 Rogers and McKim, Authority of Scripture, 12.
Loeiven: Theology in Transition 107

10 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science

(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 349-352. Since I will make frequent
reference to the works of Pannenberg, Rogers and McKim, and Farley (see
notes 5 and 6), I will hereafter refer to them in the text, by authors' names.
11 It is important and instructive to understand Augustine's use of
Scripture within the context of the authority of church and creed, and in rela¬
tionship to his view of the interiorty of knowledge. See Howard John Loewen,
“The Use of Scripture in Augustine's Theology,” SJT 34 (1979): 201-224.
12 Susan J. Hekman, Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge (South
Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 139-159.
13 Earlier, hermeneutics had a text-based focus which was then expanded
to include epistemological and ontological issues. Today, hermeneutics, as
philosophical hermeneutics, “investigates the relationship of human under¬
standing to the interpretation of texts, as well as to the so-called 'text ana¬
logues' of human language and society” (Mark I. Wallace, “The World of the
Text: Theological Hermeneutics in the Thought of Karl Barth and Paul
Ricoeur” [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1986], 2. See now Wallace's The
Second Naivete: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology, SABH, 6 (Macon,
GA: Mercer University Press, 1990. My references will be to Wallace's
unpublished dissertation).
14 Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding: An Essay
in Theological Hermeneutics (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), 15-29.
15 Ibid., 20.
15 Werner G. Jeanrond, Text and Interpretation as Categories of Theobgical
Thinking (New York: Crossroad, 1988), chapter 1.
17 Quoted in ibid., 130.
18 Ibid., 134.
19 Ibid., 147.
20 Ibid., 140-142.
21 Ibid., 139.
22 See ibid., ch 3, and Wallace, “The World of the Text,” ch 6.
23 Loewen, “The Mission of Theology,” 88-97.
24 We find a good illustration of this in Robert K. Johnston, ed., The Use
of the Bible in Theobgy: Evangelical Options (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985).
One can find the various classical and contemporary paradigms represented
within this broad and most useful representation of specifically evangelical
uses of Scripture in theology.
25 Here I agree with Farley's assessment throughout his work, that the
development of theology in the western tradition has taken a “fatal” turn.
26 Thomas N. Finger in his two volume work on Christian Theobgy: An
Eschatobgical Approach (Scottsdale: Herald Press, 1987, 1989) develops escha-
tologically oriented systematic theology in terms of the dynamic relationship
between the kerygmatic and the apologetic poles of the theological task. He
108 So Wide a Sea

shows unusual sensitivity to both the biblical text and the contemporary context
in his hermeneutical understanding of the task of theology.
27 The following texts, either implicitly or explicitly, express the christo-
logically centered confession of the early church: John 1:1-14; Rom. 1:3-4, 6:17,
10:9f; 1 Cor. 8:6, 11:23-26, 12:3, 15:3-5, 15:22; Phil. 2:5-11; Eph. 2:14-16, 4:6, 5:19;
Col. 1:15-20, 2:6, 3:16; 1 Thess. l:9f, 2:6; 2 Thess. 2:15; 1 Tim. 3:16, 2:5, 4:6, 6:12-
16; 2 Tim. 1:13-14; Heb. 1:3, 3:1, 4:14, 6:lf, 10:23; 1 Pet. 3:18-22; 1 John 1:9, 2:23,
4:2,4:15.
28 Howard John Loewen, “A Confessing People,” Direction 15 (1986), 22-
23. In this essay, I am relying on that body of recent biblical scholarship that
has provided the new perspectives on the early church confessions as under¬
stood in the context of baptism and/or the eucharist; as expressed in the earli¬
est christological hymns; and as related to the central New Testament concepts
of kerygma (proclamation), didache (teaching), marturia (witness), etc.
29 “The Lordship of Jesus Christ and Religious Pluralism,” in Christ's
Lordship & Religious Pluralism, ed. G. H. Anderson and T. F. Stransky (New
York: Orbis Books, 1981), 34.
30 Such an approach is taken by George A. Lindbeck, who in his cultural-
linguistic model takes up and accommodates the positive features of both the
propositional-cognitivist and the experiential-expressivist models, which in
other ways he finds seriously deficient. See especially chapter 2 of The Nature
of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1984). It is also significant to note the correlation between
the three paradigms under discussion in Lindbeck and the three classical
paradigms of theology as knowledge, as science, and as practice. An implica¬
tion of this correlation is that the first model—theology as knowledge—is
better able to accommodate the other two than either of them is able to
accommodate the others.
31 “An Orthodox Perspective,” in Christ's Lordship and Religious
Pluralism, 189-90.
32 Those who understand the theological task in terms of this model find
it difficult to affirm constructs that define theology and religion primarily in
terms of the theoretical. Schreiter describes it well. He says that
“Christianity's giving predominance to religion as a view of life rather than a
way of life cannot be traced to Jesus or the New Testament as such.” He asks,
“Why did the view of life come to predominate over the way of life in
Christianity.” And, “Why are ideas so important to us? What does this empha¬
sis on ideas say about our pastoral experience of community in the Lord Jesus
Christ?” For Schreiter the issue of theology today “has as much to do with the
state of our communities and our sense of belonging as it does with our formu¬
lation of ideas” (Robert J. Schreiter, “Response,” in Christ's Lordship and
Religious Pluralism, 49-51).
33 I am indebted here to George A. Lindbeck's cultural-linguistic
approach, as articulated in The Nature of Doctrine. In place of the current,
dominant theories governing religion and theology—propositionalist-cognitivist
and experiential-expressivist—Lindbeck proposes a cultural-linguistic ap-
Loewen: Theology in Transition 109

proach characterizing the human sciences. In this interpretive scheme, religion,

doctrine, and theology are understood “as comprehensive interpretive schemes,
usually embodied in . . . narratives,” which when used make possible “the de-
scription of realities, the formulation of beliefs,” and the experience of inner
convictions instilled and shaped by “becoming skilled in the language, the
symbol system of a given religion (32-34). There is a significant correlation
between the three implied levels in Lindbeck's model and my understanding
of theology as confession in the threefold terms of worship, word, and witness.
Wallace represents a similar approach. He states that “theological hermeneu¬
tics is the interpretive method by which the language-event of the Word of
God is understood in the present.” Following Barth and Ricoeur, he says that
“the event of the Word of God witnessed to in the biblical texts is the subject
matter of theological hermeneutics,” which is “more than the methodology of
exegesis,” for “it concerns the constitution of the theological object as ‘speech
event’.” It is “the understanding of ‘words’ as present-day ‘events’ of revelation
that characterizes hermeneutical inquiry.” Thus “the subject matter of
hermeneutics is not the biblical texts as such, but these texts as occasions for
the word-event of God speaking to us again in the present” (Wallace, “The
World of the Text,” 86).
34 I am indebted in this section to Jerry Truex, my research assistant, for
the further clarification he has brought to my position through his analysis of
speech-act theory and its application to an understanding of theology as con¬
fession, especially in his research paper “Christian Faith: A Non-foundational
Exploration and Proposal” (Fresno, California: Mennonite Brethren Biblical
Seminary, December, 1989).
36 See the following note.
36 Analytically speaking, hermeneutics is a function of one's episte¬
mology, which is grounded in one's prior ontological understanding of the way
in which God's reality is known in the church and in the world. It is instructive
to see the kinds of hermeneutics that emerge from the different constructs of
the relationship between God, the people of God, and the world, and how the
nature of the theological task is construed in light of each construct. My focus
has deliberately been on the hermeneutical, yet with a concern for its ontologi¬
cal grounding. We have not tried to create another ontotheological system
seeking to ground theology on the basis of a general philosophical scheme that
tries to be more exact than the church's first and second order languages. We
agree with Wallace that “whenever theology is hermeneutically sensitive to the
surplus of meaning always present in the Bible's competing modes of dis¬
course, it will remain suspicious of any philosophical and conceptual termi¬
nology that offers one-to-one equivalents to Scripture's diverse ways of speak¬
ing.” Yet this suspicion “should not issue in hostility toward the disciplined
use of extratheological concepts and vocabulary in Christian reflection.” For
“hermeneutical theology is not a species of philosophical theology, but it is not
simply exegesis either.” Its interpretive function is by nature ad hoc and will
also involve “the cautious use of extra-theological language” (Wallace, “The
World of the Text,” 272-275.)
110 So Wide a Sea

37 See Arnold Bittlinger, ed, The Church is Charismatic: The World

Council of Churches and the Charismatic Movement (Geneva: World Council
of Churches, 1982), 33-35.
38 Such an understanding is grounded christologically. As Costas puts it:
The key to Jesus' authority “was not in his words but in the fact that these words
were 'embodied in his presence.' His words were an extension of himself and
he was filled with the presence of the Spirit of God” (Orlando E. Costas, “A
Radical Evangelical Contribution From Latin America,” in Christ's Lordship
and Religious Pluralism, 138).
30 Lindbeck argues that a culturablinguistic model transposes the expe-
rientiabexpressivist emphasis on internalized first-order language into exter¬
nalized dimensions from which the inner experience is derivative. In this
interpretive scheme religion, doctrine, and theology as 'language' give shape
and intensity to the the first-order language of inner experience (Nature of
Doctrine, 34). Therefore, philosophically speaking, Lindbeck believes that it is
unnecessary to conclude that 'first intentions' (those acts whereby we mentally
attend to an activity) are somehow linguistically unstructured. For they are
shaped by our reflective acts, that is our 'second intentions' (those acts whereby
we reflect on our first intentions; p. 38).
40 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 38. Significantly, Lindbeck says that the
second-order language of doctrines as rules involves propositions, but they are
propositions expressing convictions about how first-order thought and language
work. Accordingly, doctrines may function as a first-order proposition if so
employed (ibid., 80).
41 Our thesis echoes James Wm. McClendon's understanding of the the
theological task. He states, “Theology is the discovery, understanding, and
transformation of the convictions of a convictional community, including the dis¬
covery and critical revision of their relation to one another and to whatever
else there is.” McClendon understands theology to be hermeneutical theology
that is communally based by the hermeneutical vision of a shared awareness
of the present Christian community as the primitive community and the
eschatological community (Systematic Theology: Ethics [Abingdon Press, 1985],
31). Accordingly, there are also significant parallels between McClendon's
understanding of ethics in terms of the three interrelated strands of the
organic, the communal, and the anastatic, and my claim that the hermeneutical
task of theology must be understood in terms of worship, word, and witness.
 Chapter 7

Biblical and Systematic Theology

Constructing a Relationship

Ben C. Ollenburger

“Theology seems to be what theologians have been doing and will do. Possibly this
tautology is a definition.1

I
Introduction

We would have an easier time relating biblical and systematic theology if

we agreed on what we were relating. The issue this essay addresses is compli-
cated by—perhaps it is constituted by—the lack of a consensus about what
biblical theology is, or about what biblical theologians should do; the lack is
hardly less serious in systematic theology. For that reason, we cannot simply
point to the definition of biblical theology, and to that of systematic theology,
and then propose some way of relating these two disciplines.2 To speak of the
relation between them without defining them would beg the question, and it
would be a distraction. In any event, an account of the relation between
biblical and systematic theology can only be in the form of a proposal about
both. If we want a relationship between them, we will have to construct one.
The proposal I will make in this essay is itself theological in nature; in other
words, it is an argument that depends on theological grounds, and on a particu¬
lar definition of systematic theology.3 It is also a purely formal proposal that
omits a host of material questions. Since one crucial test of any such a
proposal is its usefulness in relation to Scripture itself, this one remains
incomplete.4
In the following section of this essay, I will make some brief, historically
oriented comments on the relation of biblical and systematic theology. This
historical orientation seems essential, since many of the problems we face are
the legacy of particular historical developments. In the third and fourth sec¬
tions, I will discuss some of those problems, and particularly James Barr’s

111
112 So Wide a Sea

criticisms of biblical theology. This discussion will provide an opportunity for

locating our specific issue—the relation of biblical and systematic theology—
in the larger context of theology's relation to Scripture, and for defining that
context more precisely. If things go as planned, this will clear the way for my
own proposal in a fifth section.

11
A Historical Diagnosis

Whatever may be the problems in defining their current relationship, bib-

lical theology had its origin, and has had the greater part of its history, in
relation to systematic or dogmatic theology, which is to say, in relation to
specifically Christian theology.5 Such a statement shows that I am talking
about biblical theology as an area of inquiry and not merely as, for example,
the theological content of the biblical books. If we were to limit the term to
this latter meaning—to “the theology contained in the Bible,’’ as it is often
put—our question would be very different. Then we would be asking how
contemporary theology, of whatever kind, related itself to the Bible's theology.
It is not necessary now to go into the various reasons why we should not limit
ourselves to this question, even if it should be an intelligible and legitimate
question. It is sufficiently clear that if we can ask about the history of biblical
theology, and say that it began approximately in the seventeenth century, then
we are not talking only about the Bible's theology.
Something called biblical theology first emerged in the seventeenth cen¬
tury, around the time of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). That historical
conjunction may be more than coincidental. The war's havoc affected genera¬
tions. Among its other, collateral effects, it cemented confessional divisions
and hampered the distribution of Bibles. Some Protestant pastors owned no
Bibles and had none available to them. At the war's end, there were no
Bible's for sale at the Leipzig book fair, the largest book market in Europe.
At the same time, bitter arguments between Lutherans and the Reformed in
Protestant northern Germany constituted a further impoverishment of religious
life. A return to the Bible promised to ameliorate those disputes while simul¬
taneously providing a proof of Protestant Christianity against Roman
Catholicism in southern Germany.6 It is not surprising that, in such a context,
the earliest expressly biblical theology was a polemical Protestant undertak¬
ing to demonstrate, against Roman Catholic teaching, that Scripture is the
sufficient source and criterion of theology and doctrine.7
Biblical theology as a critique of doctrine was then very soon applied to
Protestant theology itself. Protestant theology's formal dependence on the
Bible meant that it was always open, in principle, to such critique. At the same
time, the highly developed Protestant systems of theology were vulnerable to
the charge, whether justified or not, that they were in some respect or another

g
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 113

insufficiently biblical.8 Biblical theology in the eighteenth century was not

less interested in doctrine than were the scholastic theologians it criticized. It
sought to reform theology on the basis of a thoroughly Protestant foundation,
which would result in doctrines that were properly biblical. The pietistic im-
pulses behind biblical theology in the early eighteenth century9 were fob
lowed by rationalistic ones in its later years. For example, the young C. F.
Ammon proposed to study the Bible in order to determine, according to the
criterion of reason, which church doctrines needed to be reformed and which
needed to be abandoned.10
While pietism and its version of biblical theology flourished in many
parishes, the new biblical criticism spawned by an invigorated academic
theology joined a new religious sensibility brought about by the spreading
Enlightenment. The historical consciousness that emerged from these sources
created yet another dissatisfaction with traditional theology, which was seen to
be out of touch both with the historical character and religious vitality of the
Bible, and with the religious needs of the churches. Within this intellectual
and religious environment, Johann Philipp Gabler argued for a clear distinc-
tion between dogmatic and biblical theology.11 Current discussions sometimes
overlook that biblical theology had a history prior to Gabler; he did not invent
it. Gabler's invention was to define biblical theology as something
methodologically distinct from, but at the same time foundational to, dogmatic
theology. Gabler intended this distinction, which soon assumed a life of its
own, to provide a firm biblical basis—or, as he put it, a foundation in truth12—
for dogmatics, and to make the latter more pertinent to the religious life of the
churches. By the late nineteenth century, the dynamic, historical character of
the Bible was again pitted against dogmatic theology. The history of religion
school reacted against the dogmatic tradition in favor of a thoroughly critical
and often romanticist historicism, which stressed an immediate encounter with
the spirit of the biblical authors.13
The twentieth century dissatisfaction with liberal theology was indirectly
related to the history of religion school, but turned against it with a vengeance.
On this continent, the efforts of the biblical theology movement (beginning in
the 1940s) to bring theology into closer relation with its biblical foundation
were, once again, religiously motivated, attending both to the use of the Bible
in the Christian churches and their theology, and to matters of academic re¬
sponsibility.14 That movement eroded on both fronts. In North America,
theology progressively repudiated the neo-orthodox theological framework of
the biblical theology movement, while critical study of the Bible uncovered its
internal inconsistencies. Even those theologians and biblical scholars with neo¬
orthodox commitments found the movement to be misguided. As a result of
these developments and others, including the emergence of various liberation
theologies and a revitalized liberal theology, the relation of theology to the
Bible is again an open question.
114 So Wide a Sea

This may seem the appropriate place in the narrative to predict that bibli-
cal theology will emerge in yet another form, as a critical response to recent
developments in systematic theology. The prediction would be premature,
however. This very brief overview is sufficient only to show that, throughout its
history, biblical theology has had a close and a critical relation to systematic
theology. Indeed, in each of its principal historical moments, it has emerged
in critical response to—at least among other things—then current trends in
systematic theology. But it emerged in different forms. For example, the
biblical theology of the seventeenth century was not much different from the
systematic theology against which biblical theology protested in the eighteenth
and especially in the nineteenth century. This tendency of biblical and sys-
tematic theology to coalesce should not be surprising, because, until relatively
recent times, biblical and systematic theologians were not only working to¬
gether in the same faculties and departments, they were the same people. It
was often the case, until late in the nineteenth century, that biblical theology
was an inquiry undertaken by Christian theologians in order to reform or to
reconceive systematic theology, and to provide its foundations.15
If our starting point were the Reformation, rather than the date when
books with “biblical theology” in their title first appeared,16 the picture
would be quite different. Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion was in¬
tended as a handbook to guide Christian readers of the Bible, and
Melanchthon's Loci Communes was first a set of explanatory comments to his
lectures on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. In relation to the predominant
Roman Catholic theology of their era, these works—leave alone those of
Luther—can be seen as efforts in biblical theology. Indeed, Richard Muller
speaks in this regard of the “Reformation...demand for a biblical theology
responsive to the needs of piety and worship,” a critical demand that “had
ample precedent in the late Middle Ages.”17 On the other hand, in relation
to developing Protestant theology—or even in relation to their own subsequent
editions—the Institutes and the Loci can be taken as initial Protestant efforts in
systematic theology. This complex situation makes it difficult, and perhaps
pointless, to debate whether Calvin and, early on, Melanchthon were engaged
in biblical or in systematic theology. It may be that the conditions of such a
debate were already in place with the later editions of Melanchthon's text,
or—in quite a different context—even earlier, when commentators on Peter
Lombard's Sentences, in the fourteenth century, began to pay less attention to
Scripture than to philosophy.18 In any case, the possibility of such a debate
depends, historically, on at least these conditions: (a) that some theology's
appropriate relation to the Bible is crucially at issue; (b) that there are some
criteria of appropriateness. Whatever those criteria may be, they are not
abstractly fixed. The history of biblical theology's relation to systematic
theology—or the history of theology itself—shows that those criteria have to be
worked out concretely and afresh in different contexts. But if there are no such
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 115

criteria, even in principle, or if they do not matter, then the relation of biblical
to systematic theology can only ever be a historical question.
This abbreviated survey also helps to illustrate the point made in the
introductory section, above. Taken in the abstract, the question, “What is the
relation between biblical theology and systematic theology?” is only a distrac-
tion. That helps to explain why answers to this question typically beg it.

Ill
Scripture’s Problematic Relation to Theology

A. Historical Criticism and the Independence of Biblical Theology

The preceding section of this essay has tried to show that the critical (and
occasionally constructive) relation between biblical and systematic theology
has largely turned on this question: What is the appropriate relation of
theology to Scripture? Biblical theology as a particular area of inquiry, and
perhaps as a discipline, has tended to raise a distinctive voice when that
relation, exemplified in some current systematic theology, has been judged
inappropriate on some grounds. With the development of biblical studies as
a historical discipline, pursued in sometimes self-conscious independence of
theology,19 the issues became much more complex. Biblical (or Old or New
Testament) theology continued to regard itself as important to systematic
theology, but it grew increasingly reluctant or unable to say precisely in what
way,
In place of an understanding, or an account, of how the two independent
subjects—biblical and systematic theology—should be related, biblical the¬
ologians substituted the image of a transaction. This image, originating in the
early years of the nineteenth century, has persisted—the image of biblical
theology as a historical-critical inquiry whose results are passed on to
systematic theologians for elaboration.20 The image of a transaction that
occurs between historians and theologians is sometimes perpetuated under the
formula of “what it meant,” in distinction from “what it means.” It is not
necessary to examine this formula in detail.21 It is sufficient to say that the
formula, with the transactional image it is sometimes used to capture, is itself
unhelpful and has never accurately conveyed the relation of biblical to sys¬
tematic theology.22 Systematic theology is not now, nor has it ever been,
simply the elaboration—perhaps with certain philosophical tools that only
theologians possess—of what biblical scholars happen to discover in their
theologically disinterested, purely historical research.23
In the past, biblical theology depended on the pertinence of a certain
question, a question concerning the appropriateness of some theology's relation
to Scripture. Obviously, if biblical theology is now conceived as a discipline
or a specialty area wholly within historical-critical scholarship, then it cannot
depend on the pertinence of that question.24 Indeed, if it is principled, it
116 So Wide a Sea

cannot even take that question into account. It does not follow necessarily that
biblical theology so conceived is then irrelevant either to Christian faith or
specifically to systematic theology. Nor does it follow necessarily that bibli-
cal theology as a specialty area within historicabcritical scholarship, or
perhaps within the scientific study of religion (Religionswissenschaft), must
remain ignorant of its possible relation to Christian faith or to systematic
theology.25 We can leave such arguments aside; it is sufficient to say that the
question concerning the appropriateness of some theology's relation to Scrips
ture cannot be pertinent to biblical theology so conceived. In this disciplinary
realignment, both matters are left entirely to systematic theology. Systematic
theologians must decide how or whether theology is appropriately related to
Scripture, and only systematic theologians can judge how or whether biblical
theology may be related to their work.
However we may evaluate this development, it represents a change in the
role and self-understanding of biblical theology. Formerly, whenever the
question was raised about the appropriateness of some theology's relation to
Scripture, the answer always and necessarily included a proposal about the
way in which historical-critical interpretation of the Bible becomes
theologically useful.26 If biblical theology now excludes that question in
principle, reserving it to systematic theology, it may be unclear whether
historical-critical interpretation of the Bible is in any sense a theological task,
or whether it has a relation to theology. This was already at issue in the
biblical theology movement, which criticized the lack of theological interest
and usefulness in the then current interpretation of the Bible.
In its effort to redress matters as it saw them, it may be that the biblical
theology movement was, in theory or in practice, susceptible of Edward
Farley's criticism. “Biblical theology” he says, “is caught between the recogni¬
tion that it is a historical undertaking—the uncovering of a 'theological' stratum
of an ancient literature—and the pretension that the undertaking somehow
establishes the truth of the theological contents uncovered.”27 While it seems
unlikely—it seems incredible—that any contemporary biblical theologian
would consider her “undertaking” itself to establish the truth of Scripture's
content,28 Farley's criticism at least points to an important issue. However we
should define biblical theology, in what sense is it now theological? The
definition of biblical theology as a historical-critical discipline first prompted
this question; however, the question does not depend on that definition, or on
the predominant use of historical-critical methods in biblical studies.29 The
question of biblical theology's theological character is crucial in any event; it is
one that James Barr has addressed persistently. It may help to make the
discussion more concrete, and it will provide me the opportunity to introduce
some constructive points of my own, if we engage Barr in conversation.80
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 117

B. The Bible and Theology

In a recent essay, “Exegesis as a Theological Discipline Reconsidered and
the Shadow of the Jesus of History,”31 Barr poses the following question: “Is
exegesis really a theological activity, or can it become one?” (p. 11). Barr's
question is odd. For example, we could substitute an activity for “exegesis”
and ask the same question: is the critical study of texts, in their original
languages, really a theological activity, or can it become one? What if the text
is in Latin and its author is St. Thomas Aquinas? What if it is in German and
its author is Martin Luther? Or, what if it is the Greek text of Chalcedon?
Can the critical study of St. Thomas or Luther or Chalcedon really be or be-
come a theological activity? Of course it can, I suppose everyone would agree.
We could test the supposition by checking to see what theologians do when
they are theologically active; some of them study the texts of St. Thomas, or of
Martin Luther, or—more rarely—of Chalcedon. Some of them, as it still
happens, also do critical study of biblical texts. But Barr knows that his
question is odd, and so he puts the question more “realistically” (his term): as
theologians—Barr says dogmaticians—how do we allow our theology, or our
“dogmatic principles” to be “influenced, enriched or modified by the impact
of actual biblical material?” (p. 13).
This more realistic form of the question, as Barr takes it to be, covers some
assumptions that ought to be exposed. By “dogmatic principles” Barr seems to
mean those basic elements of Christian faith that we inherit, if we are Chris-
tians, almost natively. And by “actual biblical material” Barr seems to mean
the conception of the Bible we would acquire if we were theological students
in one of Oxford's colleges. In saying that such students do not, at least as a
rule, learn to do exegesis from James Barr and then, on that basis, form a set
of dogmatic principles—but rather, they come to the study of biblical exegesis
as committed believers, and for that reason—Barr is surely correct. And that
is the basis for his realistic question: why does the biblical exegesis theologi¬
cal students learn to do at Oxford have no reforming impact on their dogmatic
principles? Of this more realistic question Barr asks another: “why has it not
generally been expressed in this way?” (p. 13). In other words, why have we
first defined the practice of exegesis and then asked whether or how this
practice can become theological, rather than beginning with theology and
asking how exegesis fits within it?
In attempting to answer this question, Barr seems to get sidetracked. In
fact, he takes the question to be asking something slightly different: why do
theologians—or theological students, in his example—fail to revise their
theological convictions when the Bible undermines them? That leads him into
a discussion of presuppositions, theological or religious ones, and he lands yet
another fatal blow against the notion that documents of faith can be understood
only from within these presuppositions or convictions. So stated, the notion is
false; there is no harm in pointing that out once more, but it is a diversion from
Barr's argument. Barr gets on track again by pointing out that, theologically
118 So Wide a Sea

considered, “in exegesis Scripture is set over against existing theological be¬
lief: not as an antagonist, indeed, but in the hope and expectation of fruitful
interaction” (p. 17).
This last point seems unassailable and in accord with the history of
biblical theology adumbrated above, in section II. But Barr himself has here
moved away from the question that opens his essay. That question asks about
exegesis as a theological activity, while Barr has gone on to talk about the
Bible and “dogmatic principles,” about two different but putatively interre¬
lated texts, if you will.32 The difference between an activity and a text is not
trivial. Without incorporating them within some activity, some kind of reading,
it is bard to think bow texts could be interrelated. The two “texts,” Scripture
and dogmatics, have been interrelated in a wide variety of ways, each of them
incorporating Scripture in a different kind of activity. The Bible could be the
type of which dogmatics is the antitype. Sometimes, texts have been
interrelated in that way. The Bible could be a set of allegories, the literal
sense of which theology sets out; a collection of metaphors that theology uses
to redescribe reality; a comprehensive but unharmonious manual of doctrine
that theology puts in harmonious, coherent, and contemporary form; a set of
historical facts whose significance theology extrapolates; a literary expression
of religious experience that theology seeks to reoccasion in contemporary
readers. All of these are ways of relating texts to each other, and are thus
ways of conceiving the activity or practice of theology. What is more, the Bible
itself cannot rule against, or for, any of them. The Bible cannot, that is, simply
set itself “over against existing theological belief.”
That is so because texts cannot tell us what we must do with them. The
Bible contains a good bit of instruction, for example, but it cannot tell us to
treat its instructions or laws as laws—or as halakah—to guide our behavior or
to shape our communities. We can use the Bible's laws as historical or
anthropological evidence, rather than as moral and cubic instruction. We can
study biblical law as a literary genre, or as sociological data, or as any
number of other things; our decisions to do so are our own, not the Bible's.
Gibbon's history of Rome's decline and fall is sometimes cited as an example
of the same thing: it is written as a history but is frequently, perhaps usually,
studied as a literary text. Gibbon's text is now, perhaps, more easily
incorporated within the activity of literary criticism than within that of histori¬
cal research on the Roman empire. Psychologists may be more interested than
theologians, or Christians practicing the devotional life, in St. Augustine's
Confessions. Similarly, we determine how we will use the Bible according to
the activity in which we are engaged—not according to any law internal to the
text itself, but in accordance with some more or less rule-governed practice.
One such practice is theology—we can say that much without deciding what
theology is.
A statement of “theological beliefs,” as Barr calls them, will often
include some account of theology's own practice. Furthermore, theology will
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 119

either assume as part of its practice, or state as a component of its beliefs,

some particular way in which Scripture is to be used. In some cases, a chapter
on hermeneutics is the first chapter of a systematic theology; it is so in the
Dogmatics of David Friedrich Strauss and, according to Eberhard Jiingel, of
Karl Barth.33 Such chapters are not only, and sometimes not at all, a summary
of customary academic practice in the interpretation of texts; rather, they are
much more like a policy statement: “In my theological activity, and for these
reasons, this is the use I shall make of the Bible.” The policy differs, of
course, according to what one takes theology to be.34
This, too, Barr understands: “theological consequence does not follow
directly from the text itself but only from its interaction with other texts and
with pre-existing theological tradition” (“Exegesis,” p 23). He does not
entirely approve of it, however. In a lengthy discussion of the “Quest of the
historical Jesus” (p. 24), Barr criticizes Martin Kahler for opposing that quest
on theological grounds. His specific criticism is, on this point, that Kahler's
“whole argument is predicated entirely upon one particular type of
Christianity, his own, and does not consider how the question might work from
within a different total structure of theology.” (p. 37). Whatever Barr means
by a “total structure of theology”—perhaps a comprehensively systematic
theology—he links it with Kahler's “particular type of Christianity.” Kahler's
particular type of Christianity is then commensurate with, presumably, a par¬
ticular systematic theology, which includes a set of remarks on its relation to
Scripture. That particular relation, in turn, is such that “nothing relevant to
Christian faith can be gained by going behind the testimony as we have it in
the Bible” (p. 37)—Barr's summary of Kahler's remarks. But Barr objects to
this coordination among a particular type of Christianity, a particular
systematic theology commensurate with it, and an equally particular view of
this theology's relation to Scripture. His objection seems to center on Kahler's
refusal to consider “all the possibilities”—including, perhaps, the possibility
that something theologically constructive (or usefully deconstructive) might be
learned from research on the historical Jesus. And this refusal, Barr says, “is
symptomatic.” It is symptomatic, specifically, of the motivation among theolo¬
gians “to find a satisfactory position for the question of the historical Jesus
within their own theological system.” These theological positions “were never
worked out on the basis of what happened in practical interpretative work” (p.
37).
These latter comments of Barr's are somewhat obscure.35 Barr could mean
(a) that theologians like Kahler failed to ground their remarks about the
historical Jesus in the results of historical inquiry. If that were the case, they
would fail as a criticism. There is no general rule requiring systematic
theology, whether ordered to a particular Christian confession or not, to ground
its remarks about Jesus exclusively in the results of historical inquiry.36 Or,
Barr could mean (b) that theologians like Kahler were mistaken about what
historical inquiry is actually in a position to determine about Jesus. This is a
120 So Wide a Sea

potentially pertinent criticism, depending on whether such mistakes were and

are, in fact, made. Finally, Barr could mean (c) that it is theologically mis¬
taken to dismiss research into the historical Jesus. Perhaps Barr means a
combination of these last two: theologians like Kahler were and are mistaken
both about what historical inquiry can achieve with respect to Jesus, and
mistaken as well about the theological importance of this kind of inquiry. Barr
says quite explicitly that “belief in the Christ of the apostolic witness must
necessarily imply some adequate continuity with what he did, and thought, and
said, and was, in his earthly ministry” (“Exegesis,” p. 35), and this necessary
implication of Christian belief warrants attention to historical inquiry.
It is not crucial here to decide between Barr and Kahler. Of importance
to our discussion is that the issue between them, as Barr casts it, is an explicitly
theological one. The quest of the historical Jesus does not assume importance
only because historians can pursue such a quest, and pursue it legitimately; it
becomes important for the explicitly theological reason Barr cites—it is a
necessary implication of Christian belief, as Barr (and surely not only James
Barr) construes Christian belief. “Theological beliefs,” for Barr no less than
for Kahler, include an at least implicit account of theology's practice. And
theological practice includes, for both, a particular way—perhaps a particular
variety of ways—in which Scripture is to be used. That use is not simply
determined by narrowly theological considerations alone. Barr and Kahler
make their arguments in conversation with, or in response to, historical inquiry
as actually practiced, and the conclusions it actually reaches, in their quite
different respective contexts. In spite of that qualification's importance,
however,37 the judgments of both Kahler and Barr about the historical inter¬
pretation of Scripture are explicitly theological. They concern the appropriate
relation of Scripture to theology.

IV
Biblical Theology and Christian Confession

In another essay, “The Theological Case Against Biblical Theology,” Barr

claims that, in the biblical theology movement, “nothing was more vehemently
opposed than the idea that the biblical scholar should be primarily a
historian.”38 The claim is striking. If we may take as canonical Brevard
Childs's description of that movement, then it included H. H. Rowley and G.
Ernest Wright among its spokesmen. As biblical scholars, and by virtue of
their education and their research, both were primarily historians, and no one
insisted more vigorously than did G. Ernest Wright on the theological
importance of historical research.39 There may be room for argument whether
the work of Wright is not, in fact, primarily theological rather than historical,
but that argument should not beg its central question. To claim, as Barr does,
that according to the biblical theologians, “it was quite wrong to suppose that
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 121

historical research into the Bible could lead to wholesome theological

results,” (“The Theological Case,” p. 5) does beg the question. It does so un¬
less we should concede that research assuming the contrary is, by definition,
not historical. In fact, the biblical theologians were concerned not merely to
inject historical research with a theological purpose, but also to sponsor or
support a particular notion of theology itself—one that would have their kind
of historical research at the heart of its interests. I believe they would have
agreed with the statement, just contrary to Barr's own assessment of them, that
biblical scholars should be primarily historians (in their view, what else?), if
their scholarship is to be theologically interesting. Apart from such a state-
ment, it is impossible to understand them as biblical theologiansy given the very
predominantly and intentionally historical character of their work.40
Only in this light can we agree with Barr's further observation, that there
were “basic theological reasons against the claims of biblical theology” (“The
Theological Case,” p. 6). The eventual demise of biblical theology, Barr
claims, was brought about, not by its own internal problems, but by the hostil¬
ity toward it of “theology, as theology” (p. 6). I take Barr here to be speaking
of theologians—those engaged in “theology, as theology”—who were not
biblical scholars and who had, in addition, their own theological reasons for
opposing the biblical theology movement and perhaps anything that would
call itself biblical theology. In other words, there were theologies and
theologians for whom the work of biblical theologians was simply not pertinent,
and who rejected or had important disagreements with the kind of theology to
which these biblical scholars and biblical theologians could make a material
contribution. Unfortunately, Barr does not go on to make his case, saying only
that “nowhere, perhaps, were these [basic theological reasons against the
claims of biblical theology] expressly stated, and to this extent we have to
imagine for ourselves what was in people's minds” (p. 6). We do not need to
rely on our imagination in order to appreciate the plausibility of his sugges¬
tion: biblical theology was compatible with only some kinds, and not with
others, of what Barr calls “real theology” (p. 10). Whatever its internal
problems may have been, and however much they may have contributed to its
decline, the biblical theology movement Barr describes and criticizes had a
substantial part of its rationale in a more or less specific kind of “theology, as
theology.”
Barr himself draws attention to this, observing that some theologians “felt
that biblical theology was a partisan movement” (p. 8). Indeed it was, but its
partisan character cannot be understood only as an academic affinity for neo¬
orthodox theology or for Karl Barth, as Barr proposes. The biblical theolo¬
gians themselves were often very critical of Barth, particularly of his views on
history and historical criticism, but on other matters as well.41 Academic
factors were not alone decisive in the emergence of biblical theology. Childs
points to some of the other factors in his account of the movement; for example,
he notes that “the most aggressive leaders in the new movement were often
122 So Wide a Sea

Presbyterian in background or affiliation . . . ,” and that throughout, “the real

impetus of the movement continued to center in the Free Church wing of
Protestantism. . . ,”42 Childs attributes this heavy Presbyterian participation to
the fundamentalist-modernist controversy through which that group had come,
and to which biblical theology held out hope of being a solution. But it is also
appropriate to ask why this group would favor an approach to—or a use of—
the Bible that promised to solve this particular controversy, and even why they
would think it important. One answer to these questions is surely to be found
in the churchly identity of those whom Childs places in the leadership of the
biblical theology movement. By vocation, as seminary or divinity school
teachers, and by confession, they were committed to an integral and credible
relation between Scripture and theology. They did not come to this commit-
ment as the result of philosophical and theological developments on the
continent, however much those developments may have helped them, or
emboldened them, to articulate it. G. Ernest Wright, as an example, did not
require Emil Brunner—leave alone Karl Barth—to tell him, as one at home in
and committed to the Reformed tradition, that Scripture and theology have to
be related. His partisan stance on this issue was unrelated to any specifically
Barthian sympathies—Wright seems to have had none—and the issue could not
be resolved, credibly, by either of the choices offered by fundamentalism and
modernism.
In his essay, “Wanted: A Biblical Theology,” in the inaugural issue of
Theology Today, Paul Minear attacked the cleavage between “Biblical histori¬
ans” and theologians perpetuated in seminary departments of Bible and
theology, and complained that “in graduate schools which train Bible teachers,
the Ph.D. program requires no grounding in confessional theology.”43 And
Childs, too, mentions the importance to biblical theology of the possibility that
biblical criticism could be used “without reservation as a valid tool while at
the same time recovering a robust, confessionally oriented theology.”44 This
emphasis on the confessional character of theology may seem striking and even
out of place as a concern of biblical scholars, and it lies behind Barr's
characterization of biblical theology as “a partisan movement.” It was so, Barr
claims, because biblical theologians “lined up on one side of a series of dis¬
agreements that were really a matter for doctrinal theologians to discuss
among themselves” (“The Theological Case,” p. 8). While we can appreciate
the whimsy of Barr's image of “doctrinal theologians” convening privately to
decide whether, for example, the Bible is “authoritative in a degree not com¬
parable with any other human cultural manifestation” (p. 7), it also helps
diagnose the problem. For whom should the doctrinal magesterium decide
this question, and on what grounds?45
Barr is quite right: by itself, biblical theology cannot determine whether or
how theology will relate itself to the Bible (“The Theological Case,” pp. 10-
11). On what basis, though, can “doctrinal theologians,” or does “real
theology” (p. 10), presume to make this determination? According to Barr,
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 123

biblical theologians are unable to resolve these issues, not because they lack
competence—he says that most have studied doctrinal theology—but because
“they do not dispose of material that will enable them to judge and decide the
question;” (p. 10) “they do not have the material to which they can turn” (p. 11,
emphasis his). Here Barr acknowledges what we claimed above, that the Bible
cannot determine how it will be used or to what end: texts cannot tell us what
we must do with them. In Barr's own words, “Any decision about what is or is
not theology depends on going outside the circle of directly biblical guidance”
(p. 11, emphasis his). As noted in the preceding paragraph, Barr relies on
doctrinal theologians to settle the question: “. . . it must be a question of
entirely open discussion in the general realm of doctrinal and philosophical
theology” (p. 11). I believe we should welcome such open discussions, even
though I cannot see any way that philosophical theology could resolve the
question at issue—”it does not dispose of’ the relevant material. But neither
do I see why biblical theologians are at any disadvantage in such a discussion.
Barr is himself eloquent and living testimony that biblical scholars can dis-
pose of material beyond that of the Bible. If they can dispose, as Barr does,
of the material of linguistics, or as others do, of sociological, literary, and
historical theory, then doctrinal and philosophical theology should be well
within their grasp; its material is no less accessible.46 Biblical scholars have
never been content to rely on “directly biblical guidance” in pursuing any
inquiry. How could they be? Why should they be content do do so with
theology? But more than that—how does the material specific to doctrinal and
philosophical theology put those who dispose of it in a position to resolve the
question of theology's relation to Scripture?
Tire concerns of Minear and Childs may be illuminating. Following his
analysis of biblical theology's crisis, Childs asks why biblical theology, of a
more disciplined sort, will continue to be required. One important reason is
practical: “Christian pastors continue to do their own Biblical Theology,” and
they do so as Christian pastors—”By the very nature” of their office. On this
accounting, should Barr's conventicle of doctrinal theologians declare all
biblical theology irrelevant, their declaration would be correspondingly irreb
evant to the work of those Christian pastors for whom Scripture's role is given
in the nature of their office.47 For these Christian pastors, if for no one else,
Scripture's importance to theology is a confessional, a vocational, and thus a
practical matter. On this accounting, biblical theology will assume a
decidedly partisan stance in favor of the kind of theology that regards
“biblical teaching” to be “the basis of our talk about God.”48 That these
terms are Karl Barth's does not mean that biblical theology is necessarily
biased in favor of Barthian, or of what has come to be called neo-orthodox
theology; it means only that Barth took 'Dogmatics' to be “the self-examination
[Selbstpriifung] of the Christian Church in respect of the content of its distinctive
talk about God,”49 and that this corresponds to—or it is compatible with—the
confession, vocation, and practice of at least some Christian pastors. The bias
124 So Wide a Sea

is entirely on the part of Barth, and it is a bias grounded in what he and at

least some Christian pastors take the Christian church and its talk of God to
be.50

V
Constructing a Relation

In the two preceding sections of this essay I have argued—with the help of
James Barr—that the problems biblical theology has inherited are theological
in nature. They concern primarily the appropriate relation of Scripture to
theology, and, partly as a consequence, the relation of biblical to systematic or
doctrinal theology. I have also argued that biblical theologians should—as
Barr himself does—make theological judgments about these problems, and
cannot avoid doing so if they want to be clear about the nature and purpose of
their work.
Throughout, I have maintained that how we understand the relation of
biblical to systematic theology depends, in turn, on how we understand each of
these. I have also tried to show that, in the course of its history, biblical
theology has tended to emerge, in different forms, when a question has been
raised about the appropriateness of some theology's relation to Scripture. The
point of calling it ‘biblical’ theology has often been, then, a critical and
polemical one. That point has depended on the conviction or the confession
that, in its function as Scripture, the Bible is foundational, as we may say, to
Christian communities, and hence to any explication of Christian faith.51
Christian communities may come to a differing conviction; if they do, I cannot
see that biblical theology on any definition has warrants specific to itself for
showing them to be wrong. It cannot be the task of biblical theology, then, to
make a case for the foundational importance of Scripture to Christian commu¬
nities. On this account, and in the argument of this essay, biblical theology
depends on such foundational importance, and thus on the identity and practice
of at least some Christian communities.52

A. Scripture as Foundational
These claims require some clarification. In what sense can Scripture be
foundational to Christian communities? As I understand the matter, the Bible
as Scripture is foundational to Christian communities if it is indispensable to
their identity, and if its use is integral to their practice, as Christian
communities.53 And it is just in this sense, I am proposing, that biblical theol¬
ogy depends on the identity and practice of Christian communities, namely,
those for whom Scripture is foundational. The way in which different
communities have their identity, indispensably, in relation to Scripture can
vary; the variety will matter to biblical theology but does not undermine it.
And even within Christian communities, or among those who share a common
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 125

way of having their identity in relation to Scripture, the uses of Scripture will
also vary. As David Kelsey observes, “scripture is used in a wide variety of
activities that constitute the common life of Christian communities: in liturgy,
preaching, education, counsel, controversy, even governance.”54 Scripture will
still be foundational to these communities—apart from it, on their own self-
definition, they would not be Christian communities—but there is no one,
uniform use of Scripture that all of these activities have in common.
If for some Christian communities Scripture is foundational—that is,
indispensable to their identity, and its use integral to their practice—and if
systematic theology is one of the activities in which Christian communities
engage, perhaps in dependence on others, then it seems to follow that Scrip¬
ture is foundational to systematic theology. And if that makes sense, then it
may also seem that we have solved the formal problem this essay addresses:
biblical theology lays the foundation on which systematic theology builds.
While this is one view of their relation, and a traditional one—it was Gabler's
view, for example55—the earlier parts of this essay, and especially our
conversation with James Barr, have at least pointed to some respects in which it
is unsatisfactory. Even if Scripture is foundational to systematic theology, it
does not follow that biblical theology is. Here it is appropriate to recall the
distinction I drew earlier (section III) between texts and practices. As a text,
the Bible is foundational, on some definitions, to the practice of systematic
theology, and that the Bible is in some sense foundational to biblical theology
seems self-evident. However, it does not follow from any of this that one
practice (biblical theology) is foundational to the other (systematic theology).
I propose that the relation between biblical and systematic theology is
more complex and at least potentially more fruitful than the traditional view
represents. Such a proposal requires, minimally, that we have a definition of
theology that makes sense of the identity and practice of Christian communi¬
ties, and can take into account Scripture's foundational character in those
communities. Hans Frei has offered a definition that seems to fit these
requirements:

One could say that theology is part of the heritable social

currency of a specific religious community, the Christian
church. It is its self-critical inquiry into the use of its
language for purposes of applying and handing it on for use
by the same developing and changing community in the
future. It presupposes connection to another, more elemen¬
tal use of the same communal language, that is, the constant
transition from the Christian religious affections to their
kerygmatic, rhetorical, and finally their descriptively
didactic linguistic shape.56

This definition, which is Frei's paraphrase of Friedrich Schleiermacher,

accords with what I have said is an activity in which Christian communities en¬
gage. They do so, it is sufficient here to say, for reasons internal to themselves
126 So Wide a Sea

and consistent with their identity. It ought to be clear, since Frei is describing
Schleiermacher, that this definition of theology does not conceive biblical
theology as foundational to systematic theology. When Schleiermacher does
speak of biblical theology—in his terms, “exegetical theology” or “scriptural
dogmatics”—he conceives of it as complementary or coordinate, but not
foundational, to systematic theology or Glaubenslehre.57 Scripture is
nonetheless foundational to systematic theology, on Schleiermacher's account,
but not directly foundational. That is, systematic theology is grounded directly
in the church's confessional documents, which is to say, in the Symbols of the
Evangelical Church, and specifically, the Prussian union of the Lutheran and
Reformed churches. But given the character and confession of that church,
Scripture (but only the New Testament) is indirectly basic to systematic
theology as Schleiermacher conceives it and carries it out. Schleiermacher
makes this point explicitly:
Thus the direct appeal to Scripture is only necessary either
when the use which the confessional documents make of the
New Testament books cannot be approved of (and we must
at least admit the possibility that in individual cases all the
testimonies adduced, even if not falsely applied, may
nevertheless be unsatisfying, since other passages of
Scripture must be applied as means of proof), or when
propositions of the confessional documents do not
themselves seem sufficiently scriptural or Protestant, and
these must accordingly be superannuated and other
expressions substituted, which will then certainly the more
easily find acceptance, the more it is shown that Scripture on
the whole favours them or even perhaps demands them.58

It may be that systematic theology's appeal to Scripture will need to be

more constant, if it is to be in a position to assess, at every point along the way,
the confessional documents' use of it. And by the same token, there will likely
need to be some available sense of “Scripture on the whole.” It is sometimes
considered biblical theology's task to determine the sense of “Scripture on the
whole,” a sense that systematic theology could then use in its own and distinc-
tive task. This solution seems premature, however, and not only because
biblical theologians have been perennially unsuccessful in achieving it.
Perhaps the Bible is not susceptible of the kind of wholeness (or unity)
biblical theologians have traditionally sought, or perhaps biblical theology as
usually conceived is not equipped to make sense of Scripture on the whole.59
In any event, Schleiermacher is talking about systematic rather than biblical
theology, and precisely about systematic theology's critical appeal to Scripture
in describing the “collective consciousness” of a specific Christian
community.80 The sources for that description are the confessional documents,
but they are occasionally inadequate relative to Scripture. In that case, direct
appeal to Scripture is warranted and necessary in support of “other
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 127

sions”—other than those in the confessions. And their conformity with

“Scripture on the whole” will win acceptance for these expressions, since they
will thus show themselves to be more adequate expressions (precisely) of the
collective consciousness of the specific Christian community in question.
I believe there is a strong compatibility in Schleiermacher's view between
the collective consciousness of a Christian community and a determinate sense
of Scripture on the whole. That is what 1 propose here—namely, that a
Christian community is itself a kind of commentary on Scripture, as an em-
bodied and enacted construal of “Scripture on the whole.” In other words, the
life and character of a Christian community is a proposal about Scripture’s
wholeness. And if that is the case, then Frei's remark about theology as that
kind of community's “self-critical inquiry into the use of its language” creates a
space and a rationale for biblical theology's relation to systematic theology.

B. Biblical Theology's Systematic Framework

Even if we have succeeded, with the help of Frei and Schleiermacher, in
creating a space in which to relate biblical and systematic theology, we have
not yet defined biblical theology's rationale. Its relation to systematic theob
ogy is biblical theology's primary rationale. Rather, its primary rationale is
the use of Scripture in relation to those activities or practices that “constitute
the common life of Christian communities.”61 In other words, (1) there is a
use of Christian communal language “more elemental” than theology's own
use of it. Furthermore, (2) just as the Christian religious affections acquire (or
simply have) a kerygmatic or rhetorical but inevitably “linguistic shape,” so
the practices constitutive of Christian communities are themselves
predominantly linguistic—kerygmatic, rhetorical, and even discursive. Finally,
(3) the Christian religious affections have their specific linguistic shape, and
constitutive Christian practices have their linguistic character, in self-conscious
relation to Scripture. If this is the case—or I should say, when this is the
case—then the interpretation of Scripture is intrinsic to Christian identity. It is
intrinsic not only in the sense that a Christian community must engage in
explicit and specific acts of interpretation in order to maintain its identity; it is
also intrinsic in the more elemental sense I have suggested, in dependence on
Frei (and Schleiermacher). That is, a specific religious community's affections
and practices represent a kind of commentary on Scripture and a construal of
Scripture on the whole; they represent judgments, even if merely ad hoc or
implicit, about Scripture's wholeness and its significant patterns.62
Biblical theology has its rationale in just this character of at least some
Christian communities. Such a linguistic or even rhetorical community63 has a
strong natural interest in assessing the appropriateness of the more elemental
use of its language (in other words, its first-order language), and hence the
appropriateness of its kerygmatic, rhetorical, and discursive practices. Given
what was said in the preceding paragraph, this will necessarily include an
128 So Wide a Sea

assessment of such a community's use of Scripture, and thus of its explicit and
implicit interpretation.64 Or, to use Schleiermacher's language, this will
include an assessment whether the religious affections of a given Christian
community are genuinely Christian. In so far as such a community claims
(minimally) that its affections are shaped in relation to Scripture—and thus
constitutes, as I would say, an implicit commentary on Scripture and a specific
but variable construal of Scripture's wholeness—such assessment makes a
legitimate and necessary appeal to Scripture. It is the proposal of this essay
that such assessment is the defining task of biblical theology.

C. Biblical Theology and Normative Discourse

An immediate implication of this proposal, a proposal that lacks any
uniqueness whatever, is that biblical theology is one dimension of a Christian
community's “self-critical inquiry into the use of its language.”65 And an im¬
mediate implication of that claim is that biblical theology presupposes—it
does not invent—a set of linguistic practices, ranging from kerygmatic to
discursive. And included among those discursive practices is systematic theol¬
ogy. If systematic theology is a Christian community's critical self-description,
and if for such a community Scripture is foundational, then systematic theology
will both presuppose and articulate a communal practice of self-assessment in
relation to Scripture. In the case of both biblical and systematic theology, a
given community is basic.66 A Christian community, then, will include implicit
or explicit rules for communal self-assessment; in Schleiermacher's case, the
communal rules were represented principally by the Evangelical confessions.
These communal rules did not, for Schleiermacher, eliminate all direct
appeals to Scripture. They did, however, provide a normative framework for
determining the kinds of appeal to Scripture that would count. To put it
differently, the church of the Prussian union constituted a community of
interest—a community whose precise interests in Scripture, as confessionally
defined, set the terms according to which appeals to Scripture could be
included in “normative discourse.”
I have borrowed the latter term from Jeffrey Stout, who says, regarding
ethics, that

by presupposing standards not currently in doubt among

members of my community, I am using or relying on those
standards in a way that commits me to their authority. This
is what places me within the logical space of normative
discourse, the only space in which expressions like “is justi¬
fied” and “is true” can be used, not merely mentioned.67

Schleiermacher occupies the logical space of normative discourse by using

standards in a way that commits him to their authority. The principal
standards he uses are the Evangelical confessions, on the basis of which he can
assess certain samples of Christian speech as true, and certain proposals about
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 129

Christian speech as justified. When Schleiermacher says of his pronounce¬

ments on the divine act of justification, “But the truth is this,” he is using “is
true” and not merely mentioning it.68 Schleiermacher's use of standards not
then in doubt among members of his community did not commit him to agree
with everything his community said or believed, nor did it commit him simply
to accept those standards uncritically; it committed him to their authority as
situated expressions of the community whose faith he was describing—and, as
it happens, redescribing. Schleiermacher knew his systematic theology was
occasional, as was the community for which we wrote it. In any event, a given
community remained basic.89
If biblical theology participates, as I am arguing, in a Christian commu¬
nity's self-assessment, then it will have to attend to the terms in which that
assessment is carried out, and to rules governing the use of those terms. For
biblical no less than for systematic theology, then, a community is basic; more
specifically, a given linguistic and rhetorical community is basic—a community
that not only has a particular language but is especially interested in the
appropriate use of that language. It is only within what Stout calls “the logi¬
cal space of normative discourse” that biblical theology can participate in a
community's self-assessment. If for the Christian community this assessment
consists in a self-critical inquiry into the use of its language, then biblical
theology has to take account of—indeed, it has to presuppose—the kerygmatic,
rhetorical, and discursive uses of that language. These uses of this language
form the standards that biblical theology presupposes, if it stands in the
logical space of normative theological discourse. But is not that logical space
occupied precisely by systematic theology? While systematic theology stands
in that space, it does not fully occupy it. In fact, systematic theology (on the
definition given above) is the paradigm instance of Christian discursive prac¬
tice.70 But if this is the case, and I think it is so self-evidently, then the relation
between biblical and systematic theology is quite different from, if not just the
reverse of, the traditional view I noted earlier in this section, that biblical
theology lays the foundation on which systematic theology builds. To the
contrary, I am proposing, systematic theology is an indispensable framework
of biblical theology.71

D. Biblical Theology's Descriptive Vocabulary

A framework is different from a foundation, and the change in metaphor
is significant. Foundational to both systematic and biblical theology is a set of
communal practices, whose rules for self-assessment systematic theology both
presupposes and articulates. It may also propose revisions; but as
Schleiermacher says, these “seldom proceed directly from the dogmatic dis¬
cussions themselves, but are for the most part occasioned, in one way or
another, by the proceedings of public worship or by popular literature for the
dissemination of religion.”72 This, too, emphasizes the governing point: a
130 So Wide a Sea

community is basic. It is in systematic theology's articulation of the commu¬

nity's rules or standards for self-assessment, and in its use of both those
standards and the community's language itself, that biblical theology has
systematic theology as its framework. And that framework serves precisely to
define the logical space of normative discourse, and to provide for biblical
theology a descriptive vocabulary.73 The latter point is crucial because of
what I observed earlier: texts do not tell us what to do with them, or how we
should relate them to other texts. Nor is it sufficient to say of biblical
theology that it is descriptive—that it describes biblical texts or some features
of their content. Such a statement is true but trivially so, since virtually all the
interesting and contested issues concern what we are to describe and in what
terms. Those issues are implicit in virtually every proposal in biblical
theology's history (they are biblical theology's history, one might say).
In her treatment of metaphor, Janet Martin Soskice argues for the
importance of an interpretive tradition linked with Saul Kripke's notion of a
linguistic community.74 Any speaker, says Soskice, is a member of a particular
linguistic community; further:
The descriptive vocabulary which any individual uses is, in
turn, dependent on the community of interest and investiga¬
tion in which he finds himself, and the descriptive
vocabulary which a community has at its disposal is embed¬
ded in particular traditions of investigation and conviction.75

Corresponding to the scientific communities of interest, there

are religious communities of interest (Christians, for
example) which are bound by shared assumptions, interest,
and traditions of interpretation, and share a descriptive
vocabulary.76

A Christian community provides biblical theology its descriptive vocabu¬

lary, embedded in particular traditions of investigation and conviction—and in
a particular set of linguistic practices. One of those practices, systematic
theology, is discursive. In so far as biblical theology participates in such a
community's self-assessment—or its self-critical inquiry into the use of its
language—it has systematic theology as its framework. Biblical theology is
not “theological” because it uncovers “a 'theological' stratum of an ancient
literature” (Farley), or because “the contents of the Bible are of decisive sig¬
nificance for Christian teaching and practice.”77 It is theological—this is my
proposal—because it shares with systematic theology, as a Christian
community's discursive practice, the logical space of normative discourse. This
explains, I think, why Minear and Childs had the temerity to suggest that
biblical theology has something to do with confessional theology.78
That biblical theology is a descriptive activity is a virtual commonplace.
However, it is insufficiently recognized that an interpreter (or a community of
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 131

interpreters) necessarily chooses the terms, the vocabulary, of any descrip'

tion.79 In the case of Scripture, terms at home in Christian linguistic practice
often find their way into biblical interpretation, but they are more mentioned
than used. For example, John Barton has recently suggested that critical
reconstructions of Israel's history raised, or should have raised, “enormous
questions about how the history thus reconstructed could be seen as provident
daily guided.”80 “Providence” is obviously a piece of Christian theological
vocabulary, and to show why or how Christian theologians need to revise their
notion of God's providence Barton would need first to consider how that term
is used in at least some samples of Christian discursive practice. It could turn
out that a reconstruction of Israel's history does indeed call for revisions in
Christian talk of providence, but to show this would require using “providence”
as part of a descriptive vocabulary applied to the study of Scripture. James
Barr suggests precisely the same thing, in respect of at least some Christian
kerygmatic practice, when he claims that “belief in the Christ of apostolic
witness must necessarily imply some adequate continuity with what he did, and
thought, and said, and was, in his earthly ministry.”81 His criticism of various
biblical scholars and theologians is determined in part by what he regards as
their failure to take into account what Christian believers mean when they
express faith in the apostolic witness. His disagreement is within the logical
space of normative discourse, and specifically within Christian discursive
practice, and his recommendation is embedded within a particular tradition of
conviction. To carry forward either investigation, Barton's or Barr's, would be
to commit an act of biblical theology.

VI
Conclusion

The proposal I have developed seems (1) just the reverse of what biblical
theology has been at crucial points in its history—a critical response to
systematic theology, and specifically to systematic theology's relation to Scrip¬
ture. Moreover, it seems (2) to erase the clear distinction between biblical
and systematic (or dogmatic) theology that Gabler advocated, and on which
biblical theology has sometimes insisted, and to collapse the two disciplines
or activities into one. Finally, it seems (3) to rob biblical theology of its
critical and revisionary potential by subordinating it to the actual practice of
particular communities—or of a particular community. That it merely seems to
fail in these ways suggests that I do not regard it to have done so. I will
address these apparent failings individually, in this conclusion.
(1) Biblical theology as a critical response to systematic theology has
depended on a judgment that some systematic theology's relation to Scripture
is inappropriate. The grounds for such a judgment have varied (see section I,
above). In some cases, such a judgment has depended on religious grounds,
132 So Wide a Sea

and thus on some version of a community's first-order use of Scripture—its use

in kerygmatic and rhetorical practice. In these cases, biblical theology's argu¬
ment has amounted to a systematic theological one—an argument, for example,
that systematic theology has vacated the logical space of normative discourse.
Gabler's original proposal for biblical theology was just such a judgment: it
was a systematic theological judgment that dogmatic theology (in his case) had
endangered its foundation in truth. My proposal does not assume that all
systematic theology is always in that situation. It depends on a definition of
theology drawn from Frei, who drew it from Schleiermacher. In relation to
other definitions of systematic theology, the proposal would look quite
different.
(2) I have no worry that biblical theology is in danger of collapsing into
systematic theology. At the same time, a distinction between them is not
essential. Gabler's argument for such a distinction depended on philosophy's
ability to show what in Scripture is historical and thus dispensable; dogmatics
takes from Scripture only what philosophy can show is not merely historical
but true.82 Philosophy having given up its truth-legislating powers over history,
we are no longer bound by the distinction Gabler invented. But while it is not
essential, a division of linguistic labor (Hilary Putnam's phrase) between
biblical and systematic theology is useful. Biblical theology concerns itself
specifically with what Stout calls normative and explanatory accounts—
accounts of Scripture, in our case—and with negotiating the differences.83
Explanatory and normative accounts are not the same thing. We may want an
account of, say, John's Gospel to explain its redaction, its differences from the
synoptics, and its social location. But we also want an account of John's Gospel
as a witness to Jesus Christ. We are likely to prefer accounts that hold these
two aims together as nearly as possible, and there is nothing odd about that
preference. As Stout says,
It is anything but unusual...for normative and explanatory
aims to work in tandem, each informing and constraining the
other in the labor of interpretation. The normative aims you
hold will influence the explanations you seek. The shape
your explanations take will in part determine the normative
aims you can reasonably pursue.84

Normative aims are shaped in relation to what Soskice calls a community of

interest and investigation, and what Stout calls “the interests, purposes, and
background beliefs of interpreters.” Explanatory accounts sometimes con¬
tribute to reshaping those aims, interests, purposes, and beliefs—and even
those communities. That is a prudential and theological justification for a
division of labor. Nonetheless, biblical theologians can in principle reflect
competently on normative aims, and systematic theologians—or philosophical
ones—can in principle offer competent explanatory accounts. Nothing positive
accrues to biblical theology, or to anything important, by insisting on its com-
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 133

plete independence. The danger is greater when biblical theologians, or

systematic ones, defer entirely to each other.
(3) For some of the reasons just given, biblical theology (on my proposal)
is not inherently conservative. Biblical theology depends on the linguistic
practices of Christian communities, but it also depends on the interests those
communities have in assessing the appropriateness of their practices in relation
to Scripture. My proposal does not assume any one criterion of appropriate-
ness, nor does it assume any one, specific pattern for relating a community's
practice to Scripture. It does assume that Scripture can function critically in
relation to any of the linguistic practices—kerygmatic, rhetorical, or discursive.
Kathryn Tanner makes a similar point by distinguishing between the text and
its plain sense, on the one and, and interpretation on the other. Any exposition
of the text, she says, including any proffered account of its plain sense, is itself
an interpretation and thus distinct from the text and its plain sense. In short, the
plain sense of the text is

unavailable in any form distinct from the text itself. The

plain sense of the text becomes an independently unspeci-
fiable locus of meaning, something that transcends any and
all attempts to reformulate it. As such it functions critically
even with respect to consensus readings of a text; it works to
evacuate the pretentions of communal discourse generally.85

Since, on Tanner's accounting, it is always we who specify Scripture's plain

sense, and since the text perdures through any specifications of its plain sense,
Scripture remains a potential focus of and for self-criticism. Biblical theology
is not the only way such self-criticism and reform can come about, but neither
is it bound to stand in the way by celebrating the pretentions of communal
discourse. Christian communities are rhetorical, not deductive.
The relation between biblical and systematic theology I have proposed, or
constructed, is meant as a response to the needs of Christian communities. It
does not have its starting point or rationale in the demands and possibilities of
an academic discipline.88 Neither do I think it ignores either the demands or
the possibilities. But the question is not just whether biblical theology can or
ought to do what I have here proposed for it in relation to systematic theology;
the question is also how some Christian communities should conduct their
necessary self-critical inquiry in relation to Scripture. If biblical theologians
tend strictly to other things, biblical theology will probably go on, or emerge,
in their place. To rephrase Etienne Gilson's remark, biblical theology always
buries its undertakers.87
134 So Wide a Sea

Notes
1 M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Tanakh Theology: The Religion of the Old
Testament and the Place of Jewish Biblical Theology,” in Ancient Israelite
Religion, ed. P. D. Miller, Jr., P. D. Hanson, S. D. McBride (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1987), 626.
2 It is not obvious that biblical theology is, technically, a discipline. For
a discussion of what constitutes a discipline, see Stephen Toulmin, Human
Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Edward Farley,
The Fragility of Knowledge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 29-55, 109.
Biblical and systematic theology could be considered speciality areas within
the discipline of theology. Matters seem particularly complicated for Old
Testament theology, if it wants to be both a historical and a theological
discipline. See M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Tanakh Theology,” 614-44; W. H.
Schmidt, “Die Frage nach der Einheit des Alten Testaments—im
Spannungsfeld von Religionsgeschichte und Theologie,” JBT 2 (1987): 33-57.
Similar complications exist for New Testament theology, and perhaps also for
systematic theology. For example, Folk Wagner has recently argued for
greater clarity about the role of the history of theology in warranting
systematic theology's claims (“Zur Theologiegeschichte des 19. und 20.
Jahrhunderts,” TRu 53 [1988]: 113-200).
3 It could be otherwise. Arguments about biblical theology could be
made on methodological grounds: it must remain independent of theology in
order to preserve its scientific or objective character as an independent
historical-critical discipline, for example. The same argument could have a
theological justification, of course. See Gerhard Ebeling, “The Meaning of
‘Biblical Theology’,” Word and Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 79-
97; cf. also his seminal essay, “The Significance of the Critical Historical
Method for Church and Theology in Portestantism,” ibid., 19-61.
4 I have attempted to put this proposal into practice in “Isaiah's
Creation Theology,” Ex Auditu 3 (1987): 54-71. The present essay can be
understood as a rationale for what I have done there.
5 I agree entirely with Jon Levenson that biblical theology—if it has the
Bible as its context—is either Jewish or Christian; it cannot be neutral between
them, if only because there is no neutrality on the question of what “Bible”
includes, and to what it must be related (“The Eighth Principle of Judaism and
the Literary Simultaneity of Scripture,” JR 68 [1988]: 222-25). His essay is of
cardinal importance for biblical theology. See also his “Why Jews are not
Interested in Biblical Theology,” in Judaic Perspectives on Ancient Israel, ed. J.
Neusner, B. A. Levine, E. S. Frerichs (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 281-
307. There is no need to complicate matters further by trying here to define
the distinction between systematic and dogmatic theology; the distinctions
theologians draw between between them are sometimes as polemical in intent
as that between biblical and systematic theology. Hans-Joachim Kraus offers
one such polemical distinction, in favor of systematic over dogmatic theology
(Systematische Theologie [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1983], 113-
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 135

15). His argument demonstrates how vastly the theological context in Europe
changed over the half-century since Barth began writing his Church Dogmatics.
In any event, I will not be careful, in this essay, to distinguish between
systematic and dogmatic theology; but I will always have in mind something
roughly equivalent to “specifically Christian theology,” perhaps in a
particularly Protestant mode.
6 For details, see Andrew L. Drummond, German Protestantism Since
Luther (London: Epworth Press, 1951), 11-35.
7 Hans-Joachim Kraus, Die Biblische Theologie (Neukirchen-Vluyn:
Nuekirchener Verlag, 1970), 20. Kraus is here describing the Collegium
Biblicum of Sebastian Schmidt (1671). The fuller title of Schmidt’s books is
illuminating: “in quo dicta Veteris et Nova Testamenti iuxta sierem locorum
communium theologicorum explicantur.” The theological loci (topics) that
Schmidt proposed to explicate, in relation to their Old and New Testament
dicta (texts), were of a distinctly Protestant character.
8 Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Dogmatics} vol. 1: Prolegomena to
Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987) offers a sympathetic and immensely
rewarding account of the Protestant dogmaticians.
9 On the pietistic character of biblical theology see Kraus, Die Biblische
Theologie, 20-26.
10 C. F. Ammon wrote a biblical theology in 1792, revised as Biblische
Theologie, 3 vols. (Erlangen: J. J. Palin, 1801-1802). The unstable relationship
between pietism and rationalism can be seen (1) in the priority accorded
religion over theology, and (2) in the use of rationalistic criteria to determine
what in the Bible is abidingly useful for religion.
11 The relevant portion of Gabler’s address has been translated and
published by John H. Sandys-Wunsch and Laurence Eldredge, “J. P. Gabler
and the Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology,” SJT 33 (1980):
133-58.
12 According to Gabler, biblical theology yields “truth” by following
the historical investigation of the Bible with a philosophical operation, which
distinguishes from among the Bible's statements those that agree with the
universal truths of reason. Those biblical statements failing this test Gabler
assigned to the realm of the merely historical. I have treated Gabler at
greater length in “Biblical Theology: Situating the Discipline,” Understanding
the Word (JSOTSS 37; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985): 37-62.
13 This is especially true of Hermann Gunkel, the major figure in the
school. See his programmatic essay, “Ziele und Methoden der Erkl_rung des
Alten Testamentes,” Reden und Aufsatze (G_ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1913), 11-29. Werner Klatt has offered a thorough account of Gunkel and his
context, in Hermann Gunkel: Zu seiner Theologie der Relgionsgeschichte und zur
Entstehung der formgeschichtlichen Methode, FRLANT 100 (Gottingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969).
14 Brevard Childs chronicles this movement, in his Biblical Theology in
Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970).
136 So Wide a Sea

15 An obvious but not unusual example is W. M. L. de Wette, who made

significant contributions to both critical studies of the Bible and theology. His
biblical theology (first published in 1813) and his dogmatics are bound
together in one volume as a Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogrmtik (Berlin: G.
Reimer, 1831).
16 The first was Wolfgang Jacob Christmann's Teutsche Biblische Theologie,
in 1629 (Kraus, Biblische Theologie, 20). Apparently, no copies of the book have
survived.
17 Reformed Dogmatics, 63 (emphasis mine).
18 G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to the
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Frank Talmage,
“Keep Your Sons from Scripture: The Bible in Medieval Jewish Scholarship
and Spirituality,” Understanding Scripture: Explorations of Jewish and Christian
Traditions of Interpretation, ed. Clemens Thoma and Michael Wyschogrod
(New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 88. Brian Gerrish understands the change in
Calvin's Institutes betwee 1536 and 1539 to be a change in the direction of
“explicitly biblical theology” (“Nature and the Theater of Redemption:
Schleiermacher on Christian Dogmatics and the Creation Story,” Ex Auditu 3
[1987]: 121, emphasis mine. Unfortunately, the published version drops a line,
in the crucial passage, from the typescript of Gerrish's address). This
judgment depends, of course, on what we mean by biblical (and by
systematic) theology. 1 would see in the editions of Calvin's Institutes progress
in the direction of a systematic theology that was increasingly biblical (see
Elsie Anne McKee, “Exegesis, Theology, and Development in Calvin's
Institutio: A Methodological Suggestion,” in Probing the Reformed Tradition:
Historical Studies in Honor of Edward A. Dowey, ed. E. A. McKee and B. G.
Armstrong [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 154-73, and my
essay, “We Believe in God . . . Maker of Heaven and Earth: Metaphor,
Scripture, and Theology,” forthcoming in HBT).
19 It need not be only a historical discipline. What matters, for this part
of the discussion, is that biblical studies is pursued, quite legitimately, without
principled regard for its relation to systematic theology. Robert Oden may be
correct in claiming (a) that biblical studies should be pursued in
independence from theology, and (b) that what he calls “the theological
tradition” has continued to dominate biblical studies (The Bible Without
Theology [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987]). However, I want to insist on a
pair of distinctions. First, being a biblical scholar influenced by theology, or
by whatever counts as “the theological tradition,” is different from relating
biblical studies to systematic theology. Second, one may proceed in self-
conscious independence from systematic theology while still regarding one's
work as important for theology, or for Christian faith, or for the church, etc. I
would hazard the guess that a large percentage of those who today consider
themselves biblical scholars would fall into at least the latter category, if
only because they teach in seminaries or divinity schools.
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 137

would hazard the guess that a large percentage of those who today consider
themselves biblical scholars would fall into at least the latter category, if
only because they teach in seminaries or divinity schools.
20 This image is give perhaps its clearest expression by D. G. C. von
Colin, in his Die biblische Theologie des AIten Testaments, 2 vols (Leipzig: J. A.
Barth, 1836), 1:4-12). It is customary to describe J. P. Gabler as holding this
view, and even to name him as its principal sponsor (Gerhard Hasel, Old
Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, third ed. [Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1982], 21-22, 78). See above, note 12, for a contrasting
interpretation of Gabler.
21 I have done so previously, in “What Krister Stendahl ‘Meant’—A
Normative Critique of ‘Descriptive Biblical Theology’,” HBT 8 (1986): 61-98.
That article is a critique of Krister Stendahl's argument in “Methodology in the
Study of Biblical Theology,” The Bible in Modem Scholarship (ed. J. P. Hyatt;
Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), 196-209. However, what I have to say, in this
paragraph, about the image of a “transaction” between biblical and systematic
theology does not strictly apply to Stendahl; he has a view (or a proposal)
about systematic theology that does not require it.
22 See the comments of Dietrich Ritschl, in “‘Whare,’ ‘reine,’ oder ‘neue’
Biblische Theologie,” JBT 1 (1986): 135-50, especially p. 141.
23 This is not to say that systematic theologians never make use of
historical investigation of the Bible. Edward Farley, for example, points to
historical criticism as one of the factors in the collapse of “the house of
authority,” on which his theological proposal depends (Ecclesial Reflection: An
Anatomy of Theological Method [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982], 136-52).
But that would be, and is for Farley, just a reason not to ground systematic
theology in historical investigation of the Bible. In a totally different
direction, Karl Barth makes repeated (and not always negative) reference to
historical-critical biblical scholarship (e.g., Church Dogmatics, vol. 1:2
[Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956], 494). It would be evident nonsense to claim
that the volumes of Barth's Dogmatics are an elaboration of what historical
investigation of the Bible had uncovered.
24 Hie “if’ is to be taken seriously: I do not imply that this always is or
that it must be the case. Wilhelm Wrede was consistent in this regard; he
considered the issue meaningless for biblical theology: “How the systematic
theologian gets on with its results and deals with them—that his is own affair”
(“The Task and Methods of ‘New Testament Theology’,” in The Nature of New
Testament Theobgy, ed. Robert Morgan, SBT, 25 [London: SCM Press, 1973], 69.
Wrede's address was first published in 1897). See Friedrich Mildenberger's
remarks on Wrede's conception of biblical theology, in Theology of the Lutheran
Confessions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 215-16.
25 M. H. Goshen-Gottstein comments on an analogous relationship for
Jewish study of Tanakh (“Tanakh Theology,” pp. 627-30). He observes as well
that the issues are different between Judaism and Christianity. This possibility
worried William A. Irwin right at the beginning of the biblical theology
138 So Wide a Sea

movement. In a letter responding to James D. Smart's approbation of Old

Testament theology's renewal (Smart, “The Death and Rebirth of Old
Testament Theology,” ]R 23 [1943]: 1-11, 125-36), Irwin asks whether we are to
have “a Jewish and a Mohammedan and a Hindu” Old Testament theology, in
addition to a Christian one. In that prospect, Irwin suggests that Old
Testament theology be “relegated to the limbo of all subjective dogmatics”
(“Old Testament Theology—Criticism of Dr. Smart's Article,” ibid., 286).
26 This claim is made only for biblical theology since the eighteenth
century. Since then, biblical theology has been joined with historical
interpretation of the Bible (L. F. O. Baumgarten-Crusius, Grundziige der
biblischert Theologie [Jena: Frommann, 1828], 4). Prior to that time, history would
not have been the focus of attention. However, the medieval debate regarding
the appropriateness of classical methods in theology provided an analogous
question (See G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology
as an Academic Discipline [Oxford: Clarendon, 1980]).
27 Farley, The Fragility of Knowledge, 106. Farley's criticism is not limited
to the movement of a generation ago; it is more general and more radical, but
sometimes less profound, than that. For example, he says that “scholars
working in the biblical fields act as if the old federal theology of covenants
were still intact when they continue to speak about the Old Testament and the
New Testament. This nomenclature disguises the historical-critical shift they
take for granted” (ibid.).
28 Such a claim would be appropriate, in varying degrees, regarding
nineteenth-century theologians, ranging from Gabler and de Wette to Vatke
and Hofmann. It would be appropriate because these theologians
incorporated philosophy—or, in the case of Hofmann, theology—within
biblical theology itself, just in order to determine what in (or about)
Scripture's content is true (see my essay, “From Timeless Ideas to the Essence
of Religion,” in The Flowering of Old Testament Theology, ed. B. C. Ollenburger,
E. A. Martens, Gerhard Hasel [Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, forthcoming]). On
these grounds, they would be less susceptible to Farley's formal criticism than
would be the biblical theologians he apparaently has in mind. Of course,
Farley is himself a good deal more insistent on raising “the truth question”
than he is clear on how to get it answered.
29 It would be just as pertinent if the methods were, for example,
literary or structural or post-structural. See Burke O. Long, “A Figure at the
Gate: Readers, Reading, and Biblical Theologians,” in Canon, Theology, and
Old Testament Interpretation, ed. G. M. Tucker, D. L. Petersen, R. R. Wilson
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 166-86; Regina M. Schwartz,
“Introduction: On Biblical Criticism,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and
Literary Theory, ed. Regina M. Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1-15.
30 From among Barr's extensive corpus, see especially Semantics of
Biblical Language (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Old and New in
Interpretation (London: SCM Press, 1966, 1982); The Bible in the Modem World
(London: SCM Press, 1973); Does Biblical Study Still Belong to Theology?
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 139

31 In The Hermeneutical Quest: Essays in Honor of James Luther Mays, ed. D.

G. Miller (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Press, 1986), 11-45.
32 To be sure, Barr has already conflated, somewhat prejudicially, the
content of the Bible—the “actual biblical material”—and the activity of
exegesis. The point of that conflation seems to be to insure that historical-
critical exegesis will retain the mandate for determining what is the actual
biblical material. In his earlier critique of Karl Barth, Barr proceeded in the
same way. Of Barth’s biblical interpretation, Barr said “the things said in the
intepretation are just not there in the text, if one follows the linguistic form of
the text” (Old and New in Interpretation, 94). And Barr insists that this has
nothing to do with Barth's “lack of historical criticism” (ibid.). I do not know
how the issue could be resolved by appeal to the text's “linguistic form,”
unless there were some means (Barr's or Barth's or some other) of determining
what that form is. See also Levenson's comments, in “The Eighth Principle of
Judaism,” 213.
33 Eberhard Jiingel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God's Being is in Becoming
(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1976).
34 Theology may proceed apart from any foundational appeal to
Scripture, as is evident from some contemporary theologies. In Christian
theology, however, even those theologies that make no foundational appeal to
Scripture often say why this is the case, and thus make some policy statement
with respect to Scripture. See as an example Sallie McFague, Models of God:
Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 42-
45.
36 By “practical interpretative work” I take Barr to mean something
roughly equivalent to “actual biblical material” (13). That is, practical
intepretative work is the kind of exegesis Barr and his colleagues do, and the
actual biblical material is determined by just that exegetical work. Barr is not
explicit about this, but he implies that the “practical interpretative work”
critical exegesis does is uniquely fitted to the “actual biblical material.”
36 It is important to observe the logical difference between (1) refusing
to ground remarks about Jesus exclusively in the results of historical inquiry,
and (2) refusing to make any use, or to take any account, of historical inquiry.
The first refusal does not entail the second. S. W. Sykes makes a similar
point in his “Introduction” to Karl Barth: Centenary Essays, ed. S. W. Sykes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11.
37 One part of its importance lies in the weight it grants to the actual
practice of historical inquiry, which varies greatly from one era to the next, and
even in the same era. Theologians cannot prescribe what historians should do,
but they may find some kinds of historical inquiry more congenial to theology
than others. Indeed, theologians may revise their theological method on the
basis of one kind of historical inquiry, as Wolfhart Panneberg once did on the
basis of Gerhard von Rad's history of traditions (Offenbarung als Geschichte, ed.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, third ed. [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 3rd
edition, 1965], 132-48).
140 So Wide a Sea

38 The Theological Case Against Biblical Theology,” in Canon, Theology

and Old Testament Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Brevard S. Childs, ed. G. M.
Tucker, D. L. Petersen, R. R. Wilson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 5.
39 G. Ernest Wright, “History and Reality: The Importance of Israel's
'Historical Symbols' for the Christian Faith,” in The Old Testament and
Christian Faith, ed. B. W. Anderson (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 176-
99; “Historical Knowledge and Revelation,” in Translating and Understanding
the Old Testament, ed. H. T. Frank, W. L. Reed (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
1970), 279-303. Rowley himself says that “The Old Testament theologian must
remember all the work done by the historian, and the study of the history of
Old Testament religion must continue side by side with the study of the
theology of the Old Testament” (The Faith of Israel [London: SCM Press,
1956], 15). See also Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 4T42.
40 Elsewhere, Barr says that “biblical theology never advanced or
demanded criteria or procedures which differ from the treatment of evidence
in a descriptive treatment of the same phenomena,” and he is referring in this
context to “historical description” (“Trends and Prospects in Biblical
Theology,” JTS 25 [1974]: 278). This seems at odds with his claims in the essay
under discussion.
41 See Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 51-52. G. Ernest Wright was
vehement in his criticism of what he took to be Barthian “Christomonism.” See
his The Old Testament and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Barr's
Oxford colleague, John Barton, follows Barr (without referring to him) in
suggsting that those who want to reconsider the relation of biblical studies to
theology are motivated by “a prior commitment to a Barthian approach to
theology” (“Should Old Testament Study be More Theological?” ET 100
[1989]: 445).
42 Biblical Theology in Crisis, 21. The term “Free Church” is somewhat
elusive. Childs is not speaking here of, say, Mennonites or Baptists.
43 TToday 1 (1944-45): 47-58. The quote is from p. 55 (emphasis his).
44 Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, 21 (emphasis mine).
45 Barr says that “the authority of the Bible . . . must be shown on
sufficient grounds” (“Trends in Biblical Theology,” 282). Charles M. Wood
seems to suggest something similar. He locates biblical theology within
historical theology, because in his view, theology does not assume that “the
church has acted rightly” in assigning the Bible a function in judging “the
representativeness of Christian witness.” It is “always open to question,” he
says, whether the church has acted rightly in this assignment (Vision and
Discernment [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985], 43).
46 The most imposing use of sociological theory by a biblical scholar is
Norman Gottwald's. On its basis he even advocates a revised definition of
theology: theology is “a scientific study of the divine manifestation in history”
(The Tribes ofYahweh [Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979], 794, note 100).
47 Biblical Theology in Crisis, 95.
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 141

48 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1:1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975),
16.
49 Ibid., 11.
50 David Kelsey discuess similar issues clearly and at length in his The
Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology: (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972). Barr
refers (19) in this connection to Dietrich Ritschl's observation that very little of
the Bible, including the Pauline letters, is really “theology” (Ritschl, The Logic
of Theology [London: SCM Press, 1986], 68-69). That observation is not new and
is strictly beside the point. (Ritschl says that his observation on this point has
“been guided by” his “conversation partner and friend James Barr” [Ritschl,
69].) That theology should have the Bible as its criterion does not depend, if it
has ever depended, on the Bible constituting “a material, tangible and directly
applicable collection of doctrinal statements” (ibid., 68). Even the post-
Reformation scholastics recognized that. Biblical theology, we may say, de¬
pends on this recognition, a self-evident one, in support of which Barr invokes
Ritschl (who invokes Barr) to undermine biblical theology. I have no objection
to Ritschl's commendation of patristics as a neglected focus of Christian theol¬
ogy, though I have no idea why he thinks this would avoid “fideistic and
fundamentalistic absolutism and a biblicistic postivism of revelation” (ibid.,
74-75), despite the daunting mass of opprobrium.
51 Mutatis mutandis, the same is true of Judaism, at least on Goshen-
Gottstein's account (“Tanakh Theology").
52 For purposes of this argument we do not need to prove, in other words,
that this serves as a generalization for all Christian communities, and we do
not need to argue—in this context—that it should so serve. See note 44, above.
53 On this definition, Christian communities may be committed to one or
another version of foundationalism. Whether they are so in fact will depend
on the specific accounts Christian communities, or their theologians, offer of (or
for) their dependence on the Bible as Scripture. (For example, see Ronald F.
Thiemann, Revelation and Theology: The Gospel as Narrated Promise [Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985]; John Sykes, “Narrative Accounts
of Biblical Authority: The Need for a Doctrine of Revelation,” MT 5 [1989]:
327-42; L. Gregory Jones, “A Response to Sykes: Revelation and the Practices
of Interpreting Scripture,” MT 5 [1989]: 343-48. On philosophical foundation-
alism see Alvin Plantinga, “Coherentism and the Evidentialist Objection to
Belief in God,” Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. R.
Audi, W. J. Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1986), 109-38; William P.
Alston, “Plantinga's Epistemology of Religous Belief,” A Ivin Plantinga, ed. J.
E. Tomberlin, P. Van Inwagen (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985], 289-309.) It is
sufficient here to observe that the foundational importance of texts does not
entail foundationalism, and it may even be an antidote.
54 Biblical Narrative and Theological Anthropology,” in Scriptural
Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1987), 137. I made a similar point in “Biblical Theology:
Situating the Discipline,” 53.
142 So Wide a Sea

56 More recently, it is also Gerhard Hasel's view (“The Relationship Be¬

tween Biblical theology and Systematic Theology,” TJ 5 [1984]: 127). Hasel
says that “biblical theology is foundational for systematic theology, if
systematic theology is to receive its normative authority from Scripture.”
While Hasel insists that biblical theology should not derive its “structure”
from “the loci of systematic theology” (ibid., 126), and that systematic theol¬
ogy “is not made superfluous through biblical theology” (ibid., 127), he does
not say from where systematic theology should derive its loci, or why it should
have them—or why systematic theology is not strictly superfluous.
56 Hans W. Frei, in “Barth and Schleiermacher: Divergence and Conver¬
gence,” Barth and Schleiermacher: Beyond the Impasse? ed. J. O. Duke and R. F.
Streetman (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 79.
57 The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), #27, p. 116. See
B. A. Gerrish, “Nature and the Theater of Redemption,” 122-23. I will con¬
tinue to speak of systematic theology, even though the term is not strictly
accurate in reference to Schleiermacher. If we were to pursue the argument
further, we would need to make more careful distinctions, and to face the
possible liabilities in conceiving systematic theology as Glaubenslehre. Here I
have in mind Anders Jeffner's criticisms of the “flight to descriptivism” in
dogmatics: “Instead of asserting a given theological doctrine, the theologian can
simply describe it, adding that this is the doctrine of the Christian Church or of
a specific Christian Church. To establish the truth of such a description, you
need none of the special theological criteria of truth” (Theology and Integration
[Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1987], 37-38, quoted in Vincent Briimmer,
“Philosophical Theology as Conceptual Recollection,” NZST 32 [1990], 68).
Scripture will be included in whatever are those “theological critiera of truth,”
and on that basis I continue to find Schleiermacher useful in arguing about
biblical theology's relation to systematic theology.
58 Christian Faith, #27, p. 113. On p. 115, Schleiermacher says why, in his
view, the Old Testament cannot independently attest any genuinely Christian
doctrine, and is thus “simply a superfluous authority for dogmatics.” I see no
reason to follow him on this point, and many reasons not to do so.
99 See Manfred Oeming, Gesamtbiblische Theologien der Gegemvart, second
ed. (Suttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1987), 225.
60 Gerrish notes that while Schleiermacher's method is “pscyhologizing,’
“it is a collective consciousness that occupies his attention” and not an individ¬
ual consciousness or self-consciousness (“Nature and the Theater of
Redemption,” 122). On Ronald Thiemann's definition of “nonfoundational
theology”—it is “located squarely within Christian tradition and seeks to ‘re-
describe* the internal logic of the Christian faith” (Revelation and Theology,
75)—Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre is nonfoundational, as Gerrish argues
against Thiemann (Gerrish, 128-32). Whether Schleiermacher himself was, in
other respects, a foundationalist is quite another question. There is nothing
self-contradictory, I suppose, in conceiving and practicing dogmatic theology
nonfoundationally, while being at the same time a philosophical foundation-
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 143

self-contradictory, I suppose, in conceiving and practicing dogmatic theology

nonfoundationally, while being at the same time a philosophical foundation-
alist. Still, some of his successors did think of this as an inconsistency within
Schleiermacher’s work.
61 Quoting Kelsey, “Theological Anthropology,” 137. One may propose
that a Christian community's first-order discourse is taken up as, or incorpo¬
rated within, systematic theology's second-order discourse. In this case,
systematic theology's discourse—even if its vocabulary parallels that of a
Christian community's—would be “a-semantic” (Kathryn Tanner, “Theology
and the Plain Sense,” Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation (ed.
Garrett Green: Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987) 62.
62 David Kelsey (The Uses of Scripture, 192-97) and William Placher
(Unapologetic Theology [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989], 123-37)
stress the importance of patterns in Scripture, or the patterns of biblical narra¬
tive, for theology. Sometimes Christian communities make an explicit
judgment about Scripture's wholeness, as in a catechism. In other cases, such
judgments are both ad hoc and implicit.
63 Rebecca Chopp speaks of the “constant deliberation of life together in
Word and with the Scriptures” as “the rhetorical nature of community, the on¬
going deliberation of who it is, what it does, where it is going, the nature of its
past” (The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God [New York: Crossroad,
1989], 91).
64 No Christian community can be understood exhaustively, or reduc-
tively, as a commentary on, or an interpretation of, Scripture. Any such
community could also be understood as a commentary on, or even as an in¬
scription of, the prevailing culture, for example.
65 In fact, it is formally similar to Gabler's proposal, which gave birth to
biblical theology in 1787—only formally similar, since it assumes a concep¬
tion of theology markedly different from Gabler's own. See also Robert
Morgan, in Morgan and John Barton, Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford U.
Press, 1988); Klaus Berger, Heremeneutik des Neuen Testaments (Giitersloh:
Gerd Mohn, 1988).
66 This does not assume a narrow understanding of ‘community.' A given
community may be as broad as the whole Christian church. No matter how
narrowly theology may work in a given instance—Schleiermacher's for
example—one could argue that its horizon should never be narrower than the
church catholic. Its horizon should never be so narrow as one public culture, or
as a single subculture within it, say an academic one.
67 Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents
(Boston: Beacon, 1988), 28.
68 The Christian Faith, #109, p. 502.
60 He speaks, in this regard, of “all doctrines which are dogmatic expres¬
sions of that which, in the public proceedings of the Church (even if only in
certain regions of it), can be put forward as a presentation of its common piety
without provoking dissension and schism” (The Christian Faith, #19, pp. 89-90).
144 So Wide a Sea

70 I have been assuming distinctions among kerygmatic, rhetorical, and

discursive practices, and identifying theology with the latter. However, it
should be clear that their boundaries are fluid and porous, and that they are
mutually dependent.
71 A similar theme is struck, with somewhat different accents, by
Oeming, Gesamtbiblische Theologien, 223-37; Friedrich Mildenberger,
“Systematisch-theologische Randbemerkungen zur Diskussion um eine Bib'
lische Theologie,” in Zugang zur Theologie: Fundamentaltheologische Beitrage, ed.
F. Mildenberger, J. Track (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 11-32;
“Biblische Theologie als kirchliche Schriftauslegung,” JBT 1 (1986): 151-62;
Ulrich Kuhn, “Die Kirche als Ort der Theologie,” KD 31 (1985): 98-115. The
concerns of these theologians represent a sometimes striking difference from
what Richard H. Roberts describes as “North American university theology,”
which “has moved decisively in the direction of an academicist liberalism,”
and away from a “healthy insistence upon the Church and witness-related
character of Christian theology.” Roberts says that “the consequences of this
distancing of the pursuit of theology as a liberal arts discipline from a re¬
sponsible relationship with tradition and equally from the active life of the
Church may well be considerable” (“The Reception of the Theology of Karl
Barth in the Anglo-Saxon World: History, Typology, and Prospect,” in Karl
Barth: Centenary Essays, 154-55).
72 The Christian Faith, # 19, p. 90. Any dogmatic system, he says, “of
purely and entirely individual opinions and views, which, even if really Chris¬
tian, did not link themselves at all to the expressions used in the Church for
the communication of religion, would always be regarded as simply a private
confession and not as a dogmatic presentation, until there came to be attached
to it a like-minded society, and there thus arose a public preaching and
communication of religion which found its norm in that doctrine” (ibid.).
73 I set out what I understand by 'descriptive' and 'normative' in “What
Krister Stendahl ‘Meant’” (see above, note 21).
74 Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 127, 149. See also Kripke, “Naming and Ne¬
cessity,” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 253-355; Wittgenstein on Rules and Private
Language (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1982). I do not believe Soskice's use
of Kripke is undermined by Colin McGinn's criticisms of him in Wittgenstein on
Meaning (New York: Blackwells, 1984), 184-200.
75 Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, p. 149.
76 Ibid., 150. In “Biblical Theology: Situating the Discipline,” I made a
similar point: “Any disciplined form of inquiry...presupposes a community of
interest whose methods and procedures rest upon commonly held assumptions
that have endured over time (a tradition); and the phenomena to which inquiry
is directed are chosen, or perhaps shaped, on the basis of their relevance to
that community” (p. 52).
Ollenburger: Constructing a Relation 145

77 Jesper H0genhaven, Problems and Prospects of Old Testament Theology

(Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1988), 126, note 1.
78 Much of what William A. Christian, Sr., says about philosophers of
religion applies in the present context: “In the past two centuries there has
been a tendency for philosophers of religion to take the religious reflections
of individuals as their subject matter. One reason is that in this period the ties
of individuals to religious communities have often been loosed or broken. So
individuals who continue to have active religious interests have tended to look
elsewhere than to their own communities for inspiration and guidance. In
response, many philosophers of religion have undertaken to offer inspiration
and guidance to such individuals in their religious reflections. So a good deal
of what has been produced under the auspices of philosophy of religion has
been religious philosophy” (Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical
Study [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], 229).
79 References to taking the texts “on their own terms” obscure this. Cf.
Sallie McFague, Models of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 43; John Barton,
People of the Book (Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox, 1988), 17. Any inter¬
pretation, any description, of a text is in—and on—terms other than its own.
Especially instructive in this regard are the remarks by Tanner on Scripture’s
‘plain sense’ (see below).
00 “Should Old Testament Theology be More Theological?” 448.
81 “Exegesis as a Theological Discipline,” 35.
82 See Ollenburger, “Biblical Theology: Situating the Discipline,” 44'46.
83 Jeffrey Stout, “The Relativity of Interpretation,” The Monist 69 (1986):
103-18 (see especially pp. 112-16). Stout deals with interpretation generally,
and not at all with biblical interpretation (his first example in these pages is
Herbert Fingarette's interpretation of Confuscius). The remainder of this
paragraph depends heavily on Stout's article.
84 Ibid., 113.
85 “Theology and the Plain Sense,” p. 72.
88 For a contrasting approach, see Heikki Raisanen, Beyond New Testament
Theology: A Story and a Programme (London: SCM Press, 1990).
87 In Gilson's original, “Philosophy always buries its undertakers”
(quoted by Hilary Putnam, in Philosophical Papers, vol 3: Realism and Reason
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 303).
 The relation between biblical and systematic theology is once again the
subject of vigorous debate. In So Wide a Sea: Essays on Biblical and Systematic
Theology, biblical scholars and systematic theologians enter into this debate,
which has significant consequences for theological education and the church.
The book’s title derives from Gabriel Biel's observation, five hundred years
ago, that Scripture is “so wide a sea.” Since then, this sea has sometimes
divided biblical and systematic theologians. The authors of So Wide a Sea
make a significant contribution to understanding and bridging this division.
As Ben C. Ollenburger, its editor, says in his preface to the book, “At
stake in these efforts is clarity on the question of theology's relation to the
Bible. One way ... of framing the question is to ask about the relation of
biblical and systematic theology. This is the course taken by the essays in this
volume. However, it proves to be a complicated course because of serious dis¬
agreements within biblical and systematic theology about the definition and
task—and even the legitimacy—of each; to speak of their relation requires
taking a stand on those disagreements. For that reason, the essays are also
proposals in biblical and systematic theology themselves. While this is a
complication, it also contributes to a genuine conversation across the bound¬
aries—or across the ‘sea.’ It does so by requiring biblical theologians to think,
not just about, but in terms of systematic theology, and by imposing the reverse
requirement on systematic theologians.”
So Wide a Sea will be important reading for anyone concerned with
theology, the Bible, and the church, and especially for scholars and students in
theology, biblical studies, and hermeneutics.

Institute of Mennonite Studies

ISBN 0-936273-18-6