PROLOGUE: BLUE PRINTS AND BY LAWS

ALet us
assume that the notion of a right interpretation of the Bible is not
meaningless, but it is eschatological.@C Hans Frei^[1]      

ALet us
remember that the story is called >Good
News.= It is
not a rule book. It is not a set of doctrines. It is above all not a ransom
note. It is a love letter.@C Wayne A. Meeks^[2]

A. The Point of
Departure

It has been said
that where one starts predetermines where one will end up.  I am not totally convinced this is so, but I
do think it would be wise if I lay some of my cards on the table at the
outset.  I trust you will find there are
no jokers in the deck.  A point of
departure at the least involves picking a particular trajectory or direction to
pursue.  

In his recent helpful
little theological study Dennis Kinlaw suggests Let=s Start with Jesus.^[3]  I like this line of thinking, especially of
course for Christians, but there are some problems with it. The story of Jesus
is the climax of the Biblical narrative, neither its beginning nor end, nor its
center.[4]   From a
narratological point of view it is difficult to start the tale at the climax.  It=s
rather like coming into a movie when its two-thirds finished.  Nevertheless, from a theological and ethical
point of view, I think Kinlaw is quite right. 
If we are to understand God and the divine blue print for humankind we
need to begin where the light is brightest and the insights into divine
character the clearest. 

This in turn means
that for a Christian he or she must first learn to read the Bible back
to front, so to speak. One needs to know the story of Jesus and the revelation
of God in Christ, and then read the OT in light of it.  This is precisely what we so often find the
writers of the NT doing.  Their
experience of and worship of Christ caused a Copernican revolution in their
thinking. 

Take, for example,
the case of Paul. Though as a Pharisee Paul had looked at life through the lens
of the Mosaic Law, now as a Christian he looks at all things through the eyes
of Christ, so to speak. This doesn’t mean he is leaving behind law or
imperatives. It means he will view God’s Law now through his Christological
lens. Too much of what passes for NT Theology or NT Ethics does not in fact
start with Jesus, either the person or his words and work.   While NT theology and ethics must not be
Christomonistic (there are other obvious dimensions to these subjects even when
examined in a Christian way), nevertheless it ought to be what the NT writers
themselves saw theology and ethics as beingB
Christologically focused.  This has
particular implications for both belief and behavior, and it is the latter
which often gets neglected.  The call is
for the Christian to be Christ-like, to follow Christ=s
example includes the call to embody the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, not
as just one possible Christian ethical stance but as an essential part of any
Christian ethical stance.  As we will
see, there are some pretty radical consequences to starting the NT theological
and ethical discussion with Jesus, and not with Paul, or someone else. 

Paradoxically,
what this Christian hermeneutical move does not entail however is reading the
OT in a non-historical manner, by which I mean reading it without a sense of
the development or progress of revelation through time and the con-commitment
development of God=s people
and their understanding of God over time, and indeed the development of what is
called variously the history of Israel, or salvation history.  On the one hand, the OT can be and should be
read as the Jewish Scriptures that they are, and they deserve to be heard on
their own terms.  These books were not
written by Christians nor in the first instance for Christians, although as the
NT writers were to say later, God had the later Christian audience in view as
well from the outset.  On the other hand,
the very existence of even just the Gospels and their substance, never mind the
rest of the NT show that Jesus and his followers did not believe the OT was the end of the story or even a self-contained
story.   It was not viewed from a
doctrinal point of view as a closed canon either, with Malachi or some other OT
book as the finish line.  More on this in
a moment.  For a Christian to fail to
read the OT in the light of the Christ event is to fail to follow the example
of the NT writers themselves.

There are other
theological and ethical issues we must introduce, before saying more about
concepts of progressive revelation and Christologically focused readings of the
OT.  Here it must be stressed that the
Christian approach to the OT has to avoid both a Gnostic or Marcionite approach
(treating the OT as if it was pointless or useless for Christian theology and
ethics, or as if creation theology and history didn’t much matter) and also a
purely non-Christian interpretation or valorization of the OT while still
respecting and learning from Jewish and other forms of non-Christian
interpretation of the OT.  Much of the OT
does not require, and some of it will not submit easily to a Christological reading
and so there must be some care and balance in how a Christian reads the OT, not
turning it into some sort of Christian allegory or study of the Incarnation
before there ever was an Incarnation.^[5]  History must be respected, and Christian
theology must also be served.  One
example must serve us here.

As I write this I
am staring at a replica icon given to me the last time I taught in Moscow, which comes from
the very monastery where Rubliev first made the icon of the >OT Trinity=.  It is a picture of the three angels who dined
with Abraham.  In my view, a proper
Christian reading of that OT story will say on the one hand that that story is
about angels, who represent God, not about members of the Trinity, but in light
of the NT, one can talk about that angelophany as perhaps a >foreshadowing=
what is to come.   Talking about typology and foreshadowing preserves the historical
givenness of the OT while still reading the material in light of its NT sequel.

B. Why Privilege
the NT Documents in such a Study?                     

One may well ask–
Why narrow oneself to theology and ethics in and of the New Testament?  Why privilege these twenty seven
documents?  It is a fair question.  The first reason is in fact an historical
one.  All other things being equal, the
historian will want to go with the earliest and best evidence about a subject,
the evidence that can be traced back to the eyewitnesses or those who knew
them.  The presumption must be that these
witnesses are more likely to know what was going on, what was thought and said,
at the beginning of the Jesus movement. 
And in fact, the earliest documents we have are those twenty seven which
are currently in the canon of the NT. 

There are only a
very few other non canonical documents which may be considered first century
A.D. sources of information about early ChristianityC
the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, 1 Clement, possibly 2 Clement, but
probably not the Gospel of Thomas.  I
rule out Thomas for the very good reason that it reflects a knowledge of all
four canonical Gospels and their editing and has an ethos and character quite
unlike our earlier more Jewish sources. It seems clearly to have been written
in the second century A.D. and probably in the latter part of that
century.   And while these other first
century documents are very interesting, they are also in various ways
derivative.  For example 1 Clement is so
transparently dependent on 1 Corinthians, and the Didache reflects material we
find in the Gospel of Matthew.   Even on
the showing of the Jesus seminar, the Gospel of Thomas may provide us with one or two more otherwise unknown parables of
Jesus, but they really add nothing significant to our understanding of Jesus
that we could not have derived from the earlier Gospel material. On the whole
it is fair to say we don=t
learn very much new about first century Christian theology or ethics
from these documents. 

And of course
besides this historical judgment about our earliest and best sources, there is
also the fact that the early church of the fourth century, both in the east and
the west, concurred on these twenty seven books being Scripture.  This was a theological judgment as much as it
was an historical one, as it was decided that these twenty seven documents were
normative and authoritative witnesses to the Gospel truth and the apostolic
evidence, suitable for use in faith and practice and particularly in worship,
including in the teaching and preaching of Christian theology and ethics.  These reasons are sufficient rationale in my
view for concentrating on these books and not on others.  They are our earliest, best, and most clearly
sanctioned witnesses to early Christian belief and behavior.  Thus this study will limit itself to what we
find in the NT itself. That is more than enough of a landscape to peruse in one
foray.[6]

C.    
Divine Revelation and NT Valorization

Another of my
assumptions, is that the Bible is both the words of human beings and also, in
and through those words, the living Word of God.   It seems quite impossible to me to deal with
a subject like NT Theology or Ethics without having clear in one=s mind what one thinks about the
concept of divine revelation.  If one
denies that revelation from God is even possible, then it is understandable
that one will be uncomfortable with talking about >the
theology= or >the ethics=
of the New Testament.  After all, there
are a variety of human authors and editors of the material in the New
Testament, and one cannot expect them to simply all agree as if by magic,
especially when many of them wrote while being quite unaware of what other NT
writers were or would say about a variety of topics.  It is the presumption of a divine mind behind
and speaking to and through all the human minds reflected in the NT that makes
a topic like NT Theology or NT Ethics a viable possibility. 

If you are a
student of church history at all, you will have noticed how often strong
disagreements and flat contradictions have characterized that history. Were the
NT just another church document, we would expect it to mirror these same sorts
of flaws, but in fact it reflects a remarkable degree of harmony and unity
through out, both in its theologizing and ethicizing. For example, we do not
find one NT book arguing that Jesus is not
the divine Son of God, whilst others argue for the case.  We do not find one NT book arguing holy
behavior is optional for Christians, whilst others argue it is mandatory.  If all Scripture, including the NT books, is
indeed God-breathed then we may anticipate there being some sort of unity
without uniformity in the NT literature, and in fact there is such a unity in
the midst of diversity and difference.

I have stressed in
The Living Word of God that if we take an inductive approach to the
issue of what the phrase >the
Word of God= means in
various NT witnesses, and take an inductive approach to what inspiration
amounts to and looks like, then we will come to the conclusion that various NT
writers believed they spoke and wrote not only their own words but indeed the
Word of God under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  But what inspiration actually looks like is
what we find in the NT itself.  This
means that preconceived ideas about how the Word of God or >truth=
can or should be expressed must be jettisoned in favor of a detailed
examination of how it has been expressed in various genre of literature
and in various forms of discourse in the New Testament.^[7] 

The Word of God that we have may not be the form of the Word of God we
might want, since it has many peculiar features, including varying testimonies
to the same events, and is often general when we would like it to be specific
and vice versa, but we have what we have. 
Furthermore, it=s
not merely a bunch of eternal principles which are to be ferreted out of a mass
of cultural forms of expression.   It
will not do to take a docetic approach to the Bible.  Rather we must recognize the incarnational
form of God=s
revelation as it has come in a particular language at a particular time in
particular forms of expression to particular first century authors and
audiences.  The text of the NT does not
have a meaning apart from its particularity. 
It has a meaning in its particularity. 
This is what we should expect since God came in person into human
history in Christ. An incarnational God quite naturally is witnessed to by an
incarnational text, full of historical particularities. This is one reason why
I will not be talking about the theology or ethics of the NT in this
first volume but rather about the theologizing and ethicizing of particular NT
writers.  And as my friend and colleague
A.J. Levine reminded me, the NT authors are writing to followers of Jesus, who
need to hear particular aspects of the ‘good news’. Thus there is a
praxis-oriented and person-oriented aspect to the study – the theologizing and
ethicizing is not a ‘one size fits all’ model, since human beings are not all
the same.  We all have different needs,
gifts, and talents.

D. Non-Autonomous
Texts, Non- Reader Originated Meaning, and Non-Canonical Readings of the NT

I have come to the
conclusion that there is no such thing as >the
autonomy of the text=,
despite many protests to the contrary in our era.  Furthermore, reader-response criticism of the
NT has frankly led people astray about the nature of meaning and how it works
in NT texts.   In fact, only in a
literate text-bound Internet age like ours would a thesis about the autonomy of
texts or one about meaning being in the eyes of the avid reader even be
possible.  But it is quite impossible as
a way of looking at the NT when one realizes that the NT texts are just parts
of or surrogates for the oral speech of specific individuals like Paul or
Peter.  While it is not possible to
become mind readers or channelers of the minds of deceased NT writers, we may
speak of the NT texts as expressing a portion of the thoughts and meaning of
various NT writers.  The fact that we are
active readers requires that we be aware and also wary of this fact lest the
text be read anachronistically over and over again. We must show respect for
the original historical authors and the meanings they encoded into their words
and sentences and discourses and seek first to understand what they wrote on
their terms, not ours.  This of course
requires actual historical study of the Biblical text.  This is not an optional added extra feature
to understanding the NT, it is essential to the study of the NT.  Not even NT theology or ethics should be
studied in a non-historical manner.   

The NT texts are
extensions and expressions of the historical persons who wrote them. They did
not exist in isolation when they were written and they do not exist in
isolation today.  They were only part of
an ongoing conversation and communion between believers then, and they are now
as well.^[8]  By this I mean, that we have more than
literary evidence about the past.  We
also have material and cultural evidence through the hard work of
archaeologists and historians.  We of
course also have some of their source material, namely the OT!  What we do not have in the NT is a sense of
canon, if we are referring to the NT writings themselves, except perhaps in 2
Peter 3.  There Paul=s letters are ranked along side >the other Scriptures=. 
Thus we do begin to see the process of canonization already during the
NT period. 

And this very
historical perspective is one reason why we cannot speak about the theologizing
and ethicizing going on in the NT and canonical theology or canonical criticism
in the same breath.  There was no NT
canon during the NT period, and it is not the later fact that there would be
a canon that shapes this material or
determines its theological or ethical contours. Canonical theology is an ex
post facto thing which by definition couldn=t
exist in any full sense before the fourth century A.D. if we are including the
NT canon in the discussion.   In other
words, the theology and ethics in the
NT is one thing, canonical theology is something else.  

It is not the
canonizing of this material in the first instance that gives it authority or
normativity in the church.  It already
had that before there was a canon for the very good reason that it was
apostolic testimony which spoke the truth about Jesus and other subjects
important to early Christians.  It is the
truthful and apostolic character that gave these documents authority, not the
church=s later
valorization of these books, though that accelerated the process of their
acceptance and recognition, even including disputed books like 2 Peter and
Jude.  And just as it is not the
canonizing of these documents that gave them authority in the first instance,
so also it is not the >church= which gave them authority in the first
instance.

We need to be as
wary of an ecclesiocentric approach
to NT Theology and Ethics as we need to be wary of a canonical one if our goal is to understand this material in its
original first century contexts.  The question
to be asked is why these documents were deemed authoritative and normative in
the very era in which they were writtenB
the first century A.D.  It is clearly not
because they were already part of a collection of books called the New
Testament! This means that they must have been viewed as having some sort of
inherent authority, not an authority derived from later church councils or
evaluations.  This inherent authority has
to do with their apostolic truth content. At this juncture it will be good to
have a brief dialogue with Francis Watson’s discussions about these very
matters.

E. Biblical Theology and New
Testament Theology

            It
is one of the fundamental assumptions of this entire study that what is
historically false cannot possibly be theologically true, when a theological
assertion is being made about something historical.  As applied to our study what I mean, for
instance, is that books written by Jews for Jews, and not for Christians in the
first instance, who did not yet exist, cannot lead to the conclusion that the
OT is simply a Christian book and its truth can only be properly understood or
interpreted by faithful Christians. This whole approach to the matter seems to
me to entail a fundamental denial of the very nature of God’s revelation and
its progressive character, and furthermore a denial that the Biblical message
is not merely for the found but also for the lost.  A theology of revelation or canon or of the
Spirit that involves ignoring the historical facts, or worse, denying them is
not a proper Biblical theology at all.

            Francis
Watson in his stimulating study Text and Truth. Redefining Biblical Theology,  insists that the “Spirit of truth bears
witness to the grace and truth that are to be found in the enfleshed Word not
directly but in and through the Christian
community–in and through its preaching and worship, its sacraments and
canonical texts. These texts are foundational to the life of the church, not on
the legalistic and biblicistic
grounds that they possess an inherent, absolute authority to which we are bound
to submit, but on the grounds that in them we encounter the particular life
upon which the communal life of the church is founded: the life that is the light
not only of the church but of the world.”[9]  

Apparently on this
showing the Spirit did not show up on planet earth prior to or outside the
context of the church. There was no direct encounter between God and his chosen
people, the Jews, prior to the coming of Christ and the Spirit to the followers
of Jesus.   I would not want to deny that
the church is one place where God reveals his truth through his Word, but it is
surely not the only place, otherwise evangelistic preaching in a place where
there is no church would be nothing more than words full of sound and fury but
accomplishing nothing.   There is a
further problem with this argument of Watson’s as well.[10]   The Bible does indeed have an inherent
authority precisely because it tells the truth about the matters it discourses
on.  It does not merely have an authority
because in it we encounter the Life, the Lord about which it speaks, though of
course that is true as well.

            Another
difficulty with Watson’s whole approach has to do with making ‘texts’ prior to
almost all else.  Listen to what Watson
says–“The Word made flesh is never encountered [never?] without textual
mediation, for Jesus is only recognized as such on the basis of a prior
textuality.  Jesus is initially
acknowledged as Christ and Lord because that which takes place in him is said
to take place ‘according to the scriptures’.”[11]  While I quite agree that “the life of Jesus
did not take place in a text-free vacuum”[12]  it did take place in what was largely an oral
culture, not a culture of texts. 
Furthermore, prior understanding of at least some of the Bible doesn’t
seem to have been a pre-requisite for grasping at least some of the meaning of
the Christ event, or having an encounter with Jesus in the first generations of
Christians. 

There were
undoubtedly some who encountered Jesus without prior knowledge of the Hebrew
Scriptures, and some of them indeed became his supporters, his partisans, his
followers.  One cannot well imagine the
Gadarene demoniac as a student of the Hebrew Scriptures who understood Jesus on
the basis of prior textual knowledge. To the contrary it was the encounter with
Jesus that will have led various people into a proper relationship with the
text of the Scriptures.  There were both
mediated and unmediated encounters with Jesus, just as there have always been
both mediated and textually unmediated encounters with the Holy Spirit and God
the Father as well.  It is one thing to
say that Jesus, God the Father, and the Spirit cannot be fully understood
without an understanding of the Scriptures.  It is quite another to suggest that the church
has a monopoly on the truth, or the encounter with and grace of God, or that it
can only happen in the context of Christian community, worship, and the sharing
of Christian texts.  One can only wonder
what the Moslem ‘followers of Issah’ in various Moslem countries, who have
become such because of visions they have had of Jesus but who had previously
never read the Bible nor been part of a church, would think about such
assertions.  I am confident they would
find something terribly wrong with such notions.

On the other hand,
Watson is right that the text of both testaments, Old and New, are needful if
one is to understand the full scope and meaning of the revelation of God in
Jesus Christ. On this basis, Watson goes on to insist that “all Christian
theology must be biblical theology”.[13]   I would agree with this assertion if by it
one means that NT theology is founded and grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures and
is dependent on them as a revelatory source in various ways.  NT theology cannot stand alone, nor should
Christian interpreters become the followers of Marcion. 

This fact however
does not make the Hebrew Scriptures in the first instance ‘the church’s book’,
nor does it mean that we may expect to find full blown Christian theology in
the OT–for instance a doctrine of the Trinity, or a doctrine of salvation by
grace through faith in Jesus.  It is
precisely the historical realities reflected in the OT which rule out such a
theological approach.  Christian theology
which draws on the OT cannot be done in some sort of a-historical or flat way
that does not take into account the progressive revelation of God and the
fundamentally pre- or non-Christian character of the OT.  The attempt to turn the OT into a Christian
allegory involves a failure to grasp the historical nettle, and at the end of
the day is a bad example of historical anachronism.  This does not mean that the OT cannot be used
in various Christian ways. It can. But that is more a matter of homilectical
use and application than it is a matter of interpretation of the OT.

The OT is
primarily about the revelation of Yahweh, the one Christians call God the
Father, and only in a secondary sense, and by way of promise and prophecy, a revelation
of the Son and the Spirit.  If the actual
theological substance of the OT is taken into account, and not merely its
contemporizing hermeneutical use by later Christians, then in fact it is
possible to say that what we have in the OT is truths that could equally well
be affirmed by Jews, Christians, and Moslems and in fact they are affirmed by various such believers though the uses
they make of these texts vary.  The
fact that these OT truths may not be sufficient in themselves unto Christian
conversion or salvation is another matter. 
Truth is no less true simply because it is, as the author of Hebrews 1.1
suggested–‘partial and piecemeal’.  

It is crucial to keep steadily in view both
the historical givenness of the Biblical texts and their theological
character.  They always and everywhere
speak about a God who reveals himself in space and time in various ways to
various persons, both saved and lost, both Jew and Gentile, both literate and
illiterate, both textually aware and oblivious to Biblical texts.  Abraham did not encounter and follow God’s
directives on the basis of a prior understanding of Holy Writ mediated to him
through a community of faithful interpreters of the Genesis sagas.

I quite agree with
Watson however that the Bible is irremediably theological in character.  It is all about God, and God’s relationship
with various human individuals and groups. The Bible’s history cannot be
readily abstracted from its theologizing or vice versa. There is of course a
good reason for this–God is committed to involvement in the messiness and
contingencies of human history and always has been.  Indeed, it should be said that God, as the
creator of all things including all human beings, is the one who made history
possible, viable, having purpose and goal, and so on.  Further, I agree with Watson that the
segregation of Biblical studies from theological studies has led to the
impoverishment of both fields.  Exegetes
are working on inherently theological texts! 
Biblical theologians require exegetical study to come to grips with the
subjects of their own fields of interest and inquiry.  Watson is right to complain about the rigid
divisions of these fields in the guild.

Watson urges a
‘dialectical’ interdependence between the OT and the NT, decrying the tendency
to see the OT as merely background for the NT. 
He urges “the notion of a dialectical unity between the two bodies of
writing, constituted as ‘old’ and ‘new’ by their relationship to the
foundational event that they together enclose and attest, only makes sense from
a theological standpoint.”[14]  I
would agree with this assertion in principle, but I would add that such an
assertion only makes sense from an historical viewpoint as well.  After all, the terms ‘old’ and ‘new’ refer to
time and space, and events that happen in time and space and objects that are
created in time and space, such as the various parts of the Bible. Watson later
rightly stresses that the Biblical texts are both theologically motivated but
also genuinely historiographical in intent and character.[15]

 Here is where I must insist however that
unless one does justice to both the historical and theological character of
these texts, one will not be doing
theology properly, nor doing history justice.  What do I mean by this?   For one thing I mean that the OT does not
cease to be Christian Scripture simply because it mostly tells us about God the
Father and his relationship with the universe, the world, a people.  Patrology (the study of God the Father) in
the more antique and theologically loaded sense of that term is just as much a
part of Christian theology as Christology is. The fact that with benefit of
hindsight and further revelation Christians came to view the Father through the
lens of the Son and the Spirit does not mean that we cannot appreciate what is
going on in the OT on its own terms, and furthermore recognize that the
Christian doctrine of God would be severely and seriously impoverished without what
the OT has to say about that matter and many others.  For example the holiness, justice, mercy and
indeed the love of God would be far less clear if we did not have the Hebrew
Scriptures.

Watson is calling
scholars to practice ‘biblical theology’. 
He defines it as follows: “Biblical theology is biblical that is, concerned with the whole Christian Bible; it is
more than the sum of Old Testament theology and New Testament theology,
understood as separate disciplines. Biblical theology is theology, where attempts are made to limit it to a purely
descriptive capacity, it quickly becomes redundant and the expression passes
out of use.”[16]  While I am in sympathy with the thrust of both
of these sentences some qualifications are needed.  Firstly, while Biblical theology may be more
than the sum of OT and NT theology, if it is truly ‘Biblical’ theology it
cannot be other than OT and NT
theology lest it cease to be Biblical in the proper sense.  By this I mean that Biblical theology can
only be constructed out of OT and NT theology and theological material.  It has no other primary resource.  And when it goes beyond what is said in the OT
and/or NT it has to be ever so careful not to go against what is said in those sources.

I do not think
that Biblical theology can or should be attempted without reliance on both OT
and NT theology, and on the work of those scholars who labored long in the
vineyard of OT or NT theology. This includes reliance on the work of various
non-Christian scholars, and means indeed that the attempt to build or frame a
Biblical theology cannot be seen as a task which involves only reliance on or
dialogue with Christian interpreters.  In
other words, a hermeneutical
ecclesiological apriori is a mistake when one is attempting to do a Biblical
theology worth its salt, and open to all insights from whatever sources and scholars.[17] 

Secondly, I must
insist that the proper order of things is that discovering and discerning the
character of OT theology and NT theology on its own merits, must be seen as a
necessarily prior enterprise to the constructing of a Biblical theology, not
least because we have all seen what happens when the Bible is read through the
grid of later Calvinist or Arminian or Lutheran, or Orthodox or Catholic
systematic theology–namely the Biblical text is read anachronistically and is
gerry-mandered for various later theological purposes and battles about which
the Biblical writers were innocent and ignorant.  In short, distortion of the meaning of
Biblical texts happens over and over again as the attempt is made to make them
fit a pre-existing theological schema.   A good example of this is the rapture doctrine
which underpins Dispensational Theology, a doctrine the church had never heard
of or really believed in before the 19^th century.[18]

And then there is
the further problem that when one begins talking about the ‘Christian Bible’,
one must ask–which one?  Would that be
the Bible of the Orthodox or the Catholics or the Protestants?  What counts as foundational texts, and are
any beyond the generally received sixty six books legitimate as sources for
Biblical theology?  But when you ask
which Christian Bible you have asked not merely a theological question but a
historical one as well. 

I personally, as a
NT scholar do not feel competent to do ‘Biblical theology’ and frankly know few
people who are competent to do so, whether exegetes or theologians, for this
requires a level of knowledge and expertise not only in the OT and NT but in
the larger sphere of theology as well.  I
suspect that such a project would require a variety of OT and NT scholars and
theologians working together. I do however feel competent to talk about the
influence of the OT on NT thought, on the use of the OT in the NT, on the
grounding of much of NT thought in OT thought and the like, without ignoring
the paradigm shift that comes as a result of the Christ event.   From a hermeneutical point of view, since
Christians are not under the old covenant in any of its manifestations, how exactly
the OT is the basis of Christian theologizing is a delicate question in various
regards, and it is not sufficient to say that the OT must simply be read
Christologically, though that is one of the tasks the NT writers themselves
undertake and encourage us to undertake.

More helpful are
Watson’s trenchant criticisms of post-modern and reader response approaches to
the Biblical text.  He throws down the
gauntlet at the beginning of his essay on this subject stressing: “A Christian
faith concerned to retain its own coherence cannot for a moment accept that the
biblical texts (individually and as a whole) lack a single determinant meaning,
that their meanings are created by their readers, or that theological
interpretations [sic–surely he means interpreters] must see themselves as
non-privileged participants in an open-ended, pluralistic conversation. Such a
hermeneutic assumes that these texts are like any other ‘classic’ texts:
self-contained artifacts, handed down to us through the somewhat haphazard
processes of tradition, bearing with them a cultural authority that has now
lost much of its normative force, yet challenging the interpreter to help
ensure that they will at least remain readable, and continue to be read.”[19]

Watson is right to
assert that an author’s meaning is encoded into the words by which he conveys
it and we can know something of the author’s intention in saying such things by
studying his words in their original contexts. Writings, perhaps particularly,
inspired writings, have the intention of communicating something of importance
to one or more recipients. Watson puts it this way: “When A speaks to B about
x, what B receives is not a communication about x that might have come from
anywhere…but a communication that is distinctively A’s communication. To
understand and to respond to the communication is therefore not only to
understand and respond to what is said about x but to understand and respond to
A. Communication is an irreducibly interpersonal
event…”[20]  

This is right on
target.  If one properly understands a
text then one has understood what the author intended to say and does say. The
text cannot be severed from its original author, since it is an expression of
the mind of that author, nor can or should it be assumed that the meaning of
the text is to be generated by the receiver of the communication. “Verbal
meaning is not so ephemeral…Readers can only receive meaning, they cannot create it. “[21]    Can there be a secondary significance to a
text not originally intended by the author? 
Well yes, that is possible, but as Watson goes on to stress “true ‘significance’
is to be found in the single, verbal
meaning itself, that is in its enduring…force. The notion of a secondary,
ephemeral ‘contextual significance’ is therefore subordinate to the primary
universal significance this text claims by virtue of its role as ‘gospel’.[22]  I would prefer to substitute the phrase ‘Word
of God’ here for the term Gospel.

Equally helpful is
Watson stress that the Biblical author is concerned not merely that the
audience understand, but that they act. There is of course a distinction
between understanding a communication and choosing to respond appropriately to
it. “An adequate interpretation of the literal sense of a text will seek to
explain not only what the author is saying
but also what he or she is doing.”  He reminds us that even with lack of clear understanding
of what an author or speaker is saying, we may still know what he wants,
precisely because of the context. Watson gives the example of encountering a
border guard speaking in a foreign language one does not know. One correctly
surmises that the guard is performing a speech-act wanting the listener to
produce his passport. The speech act is successful even though one has failed
to understand the meaning of most or all of the words, because the context made
clear what the speaker wanted.[23]  

Watson goes on to
stress that normally speech-acts require a certain context if they are to
achieve their intended effect: “to make a promise or issue a command
presupposes a complex set of prior conditions and relationships.”[24]   This is true, but only up to a point, or
else a speech-act could never communicate successfully with a stranger or a
foreigner unaware of the author’s context, and not sharing his community.  Evangelism would be impossible if one takes
too narrow a view of what pre-conditions are required for genuine
communication.

Watson however is
quite right that the intention of the author should not be divided from the
text of the author, as if intent lies only in the mind of the speaker or
writer, and the words are something else. He rightly warns “It misunderstands
authorial intention as a purely psychological event that precedes and
constrains the words, exerting a continuing influence on the text from the
outside. Against this view, authorial intention is to be seen as primarily
embodied in the words the author wrote”[25]  “Authorial intention is the principle of a
text’s intelligibility, and cannot be detached from the text itself.  The capacity of writing to extend the scope of
a speech-act in space and time precludes an understanding of authorial
intention purely in terms of the author’s immediate historical context.”[26]    But
it is not just the capacity of writing that does this, for we are dealing with
the living Word of God, not just any kind of communication. We are dealing with
Words that God uses repeatedly to convey not merely his meaning but his
presence, his salvation, and many other things. Much of the discussion in this
particular section prepares us for our next section which deals with the issue
of context.

F. Original
Context Rules 

I tell my students
all the time that a text without a context is just a pre-text for what we want
it to mean, and thus the NT text must be read in its historical, rhetorical,
literary, social, religious contexts. This is just as true of the theologizing and
ethicizing of the NT writers as anything else.  
Texts themselves do not theologize or ethicize into various
contexts, people do.  We can talk about
the theologizing or ethicizing of Paul or Peter, but we cannot talk about the
theologizing or ethicizing of 1 Corinthians, for instance.  Talk of the theology or ethics of this or
that book is just one more attempt to abstract the theology from its human and
personal and historical context so it can be manipulated, and this is a
mistake.  The texts come from real human
beings in real situations which through various forms of contextual study we
know a good deal about. These texts do not have meaning, or at least their
meaning cannot be fully understood, apart from a knowledge of these linguistic,
cultural, social, rhetorical, historical and religious contexts.

For example, I
will not understand what Jesus meant in Mk. 10.45 about being a ransom in place
of the many unless I understand something about processes of redemption out of
slavery and bondage in the first century, something about early Jewish thinking
about death as a means of atonement, something about the echoes of Isaiah 53 in
this verse, to present only a brief list of things needful for
understanding.  Without reading texts in
their original historical contexts there is the ever present danger of
anachronism and distortion.  In other
words, Christian theologians need to care about history and its contexts,
because the NT is not composed of abstract philosophizing about Jesus or the
Christ event.  They need to stop talking
about the autonomy of texts altogether if the NT is their point of
reference.  It is also not all that
helpful to start by reading the NT in light of later philosophically grounded
theological debates that resulted in the creeds of the third and fourth century
and later.  Rather we must pay it
forward.  The creeds should be read in
the light of the NT and critiqued by the NT.  
In fact, all later biblical, historical, systematic, or modern special
interest theologies (e.g. post-colonial readings or radical feminist readings)
need to be normed by and critically sifted in the light of what the New Testament
actually says and means, if we are interested in doing Christian theologizing
or ethicizing.

G.  The Intentional Fallacy of the Intentional
Fallacy Theory

An equally
egregious mistake often made today is talking about the >intentional
fallacy=.  As my friend Philip Esler has recently
stressed in his ground-breaking work New Testament Theology: Communion and
Community, ^[27]  W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beasley who were the
ones who coined the phrase and wrote the original essay about >the intentional fallacy= (published in 1946) were talking about
only one kind of literary textB
poems!   It is about poems that they said
Athe design or intention of the author
is neither available nor desirable as a standard of judging the success of a
work of literary art@.^[28]  In their view poems existed in a highly
unusual world of signification divorced from both intentionality and meaning.
Wimsatt and Monroe go on to make the following important distinction AIn this respect poetry differs from
practical messages, which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the
intention.@^[29]  In other words, since the NT is not simply a
bunch of poems, even the original authors of the >intentional
fallacy= idea
would not see it as applicable to the New Testament!^[30] 

As Esler stresses,
what we have in the NT are very definitely practical messages which presuppose
historical authors and audiences that have a relationship, even in the case of
an anonymous document like Hebrews or 1 John (see e.g. Heb. 13).  Therefore, it is important to interpret NT
texts in light of all the available contextual evidence we have, and we must assume
that these texts express some of the mind and intentions of their historical
authors.

We must also
assume that these texts were intended to have, and do have meanings.  Meaning is encoded in the text, it is not
something the reader should feel free to construct for themselves, though of course
it is true that active readers do often read things into the text of the NT
that simply isn=t
there.  We would call that a bad reading
of the text.  My theory of meaning is
derived from the work of people like E.D Hirsch and more recently Kevin Vanhoozer,
and as a historian I must say that their epistemology and theories of meaning
seem much close to that of the NT authors than modern scholars who are more
indebted to existentialist and nihilist philosophers than they are to the
Biblical sources when it comes to the matter of meaning.^[31]  Words have meaning in contexts, and the
context is not just literary in the case of the NT documents, it is the
rhetorical environment of oral discourse, declaration, proclamation,
persuasion.  The more we know about how
words worked in an oral culture, the better we will understand the theologizing
and ethicizing of the NT.                                 

I would also make
a distinction between the meaning of a text and its larger significance for
later readers.  A text can have all sorts
of personal significances for various people that are not necessarily directly
derived from the original intended meaning of the text.  For example, when our first child was about
to be born my wife and I were reading Ezekiel, in its latter chapters and we
heard about how God would multiply their kindred, keep them safe, and they
would come home soon.  Of course I knew
that these were promises to exilic Israel
about their return to the Holy Land, but God
used those words to speak to my wife and I, and sure enough our first child was
born safely the next morning, and they came home from the hospital soon
thereafter. That=s an
application to a different audience in different circumstances, but the promise
was just as significant to us.

H.  Meaning vs. Significance and Relevance. Is
there a Significant Difference?

In a seminal essay
written in the 1960s, my old Harvard professor Krister Stendahl made a
distinction between what a text meant and what it means today.  I am not entirely happy with this
distinction.  I would prefer to talk
about the difference between what it meant and what it may signify for various
people today.  I prefer to say that what
it meant back then and there is still what the text means today.  The meaning has not changed, though the
implications, applications, significances do change as the world and its
cultures change.

Stendahl admits in
his discussion that the reason for the distinction between what it meant and
what it means is because of distaste for and the attempt at distancing himself
from the original meaning or at least from the history of religions findings
about the original meanings of these NT texts. What especially disturbed
scholars like Rudolph Bultmann, Karl Barth, and Oscar Cullmann was the
disregard for both the theological substance of the NT documents and the
discounting of their relevance for current thinking, believing and
behaving.  It was in response to the
history of religions approach that what came to be called the biblical theology
movement arose, but with a price.  Stendahl
notes: Athe
biblical theologian becomes primarily concerned with the present meaning, he
implicitly (Barth) or explicitly (Bultmann) loses his enthusiasm or ultimate
respect for the descriptive task.@^[32]   On the one hand this sort of assumption led
a figure like Bultmann to insist on the demythologizing of the text and on the
other hand to look for a contemporary form of thinking, in this case
existentialism, to serve as the new language through which to express theology
and interpret the NT.  There were
problems with both ends of this project. 
Barth, for his part, took more of an a-historical approach to the
theology of the NT, without endorsing existentialism as the vehicle that
provides the hermeneutics or language of proper discourse.  

Why is it
important to take the stand that what the text meant is still what it means
today?  The answer is simple.  If the NT is indeed the Word of God, then we
must work especially hard to respect its historical givenness and incarnational
quality.  We must do our homework and do
our best to understand the inspired words in their original form and
settings.  Put another way, these words
were the Word of God for first century persons. 
They had to make some sense to them as they originally addressed those
audiences.   And they will make sense to
us the more we enter into their thought
world, the more we understand their
forms of discourse.

The negative
corollary of this is that what these words could not possibly have meant in
the first century, they cannot mean today, even when it comes to prophetic
material, as we shall see.  A good
example of the problem is shown by Augustine’s famous allegorizing of the
parable of the Good Samaritan, in which he argues that the Samaritan is Jesus,
the oil and wine are the sacraments, the inn is the church, and the money is
penance money!  It is safe to say that
Jesus’ original audience could never have understood this parable to mean that,
and nor did Jesus himself.  NT theology
is not properly done if it either discounts, or ignores, or downplays the
historical character and substance of the NT documents.  As Stendahl puts it, we need a Atheology which retains history as a
theologically charged category@.^[33] 

NT theology or
ethics is also not properly done if we simply assume that our modern world view
and presuppositions are obviously better and more correct than that of the
authors of the NT itself.  Actually we
most often see this latter assumption in play when it comes to NT ethics.  For example, we will hear things like >the NT writers accepted and even
endorsed slavery, which we know now is obviously wrong and therefore we cannot
simply accept and apply the ethical imperatives of the NT today.=  
These sorts of judgments then give permission to take a >pick and choose= approach to both NT theology and NT
ethics, and the basis of such choosing is usually certain unproven and
unexamined modern assumptions.   There
are numerous problems with this whole approach.

In the first
place, it involves a failure to do one=s
historical homework adequately.  The NT
writers no more endorse slavery than they endorse ancient patriarchy.  Rather they must begin their discourse on such
subjects where the audience de facto
is and try to mold a more Christian approach to existing institutions. Close
examination of what the NT says on both these subjects shows the NT writer
prodding and leading their audiences to question the Zeitgeist in regard to
these issues and move beyond such fallen views and institutions.  So, for instance, in Philemon, Philemon is
exhorted to treat Onesimus no longer as a slave but rather as one who is much
more than a slave, as a brother in Christ. 
Similarly in Ephesians 5, Paul offers, as a heading for his discussion
of submission, respect, and love in the family, an exhortation that all
Christians should submit to one another out of reverence for Christ (Ephes.
5.21). 

In other words, a
superficial reading of the historical evidence has led to the conclusion that
at least some of the NT evidence is morally and even theologically repugnant
and thus needs to be replaced by more modern ideas.  I do not agree with this assumption, which
takes as its premise >we
know better than they did what is theologically and ethically right=. I don=t
really think that modern human beings, who allow atrocities like the Holocaust
in WWII or Darfur or other enormous ethical
lapses to happen, are in the position to lecture ancients about their ethics or
theology. 

In the second
place, we need to bear in mind that just because a remark is a word on target
for a first century audience, and so historically and culturally conditioned,
it does not follow from this fact that it is historically and culturally
bound.   If there is one thing that
the Bible has demonstrated over and over again, it is its ability to cross time
and cultural barriers and be a living Word of God in very different settings
and eras than the original ones.  This is
not because the Word has been or needs to be transformed to suit the different or later
audience and its predilections.  It is so
because the living Word has simply been translated adequately and accurately
for a different time and place, and applied in a culturally sensitive
manner.   The Word is eternally relevant
as it is, it does not need to be transformed into something it was not in the
desperate quest for >relevance=, nor does it need to be >made relevant=
for today.  It is rather we who, and our
cultures that, need to be transformed in the image of the Word.  It is however a necessary part of any good
Christian communication to be able to show the meaning, importance, and
relevance of the text of Scripture.  A
good motto to follow is that of Johannes BengelB
AApply the whole of yourself to the
text, apply the whole of the text to yourself.@

I.  NT Theology and Ethics, not Canonical or
Biblical Theology and Ethics

The historical
approach taken here, unlike a canonical one or a >biblical
theology=
approach, also leads to other important insights as well.  Take for instance the use of God language (theos)
in the NT.  In all but seven places in
the NT the term theos refers to the one Jews knew as Yahweh and earliest
Christians called Father or Abba.   In
those other seven instances the term refers to Jesus, God=s Son. 
The term never refers to the Trinity in the NT, though I would argue
(and I will do so in Volume 2 of this study) that the raw materials of later
Trinitarian doctrine and the beginnings of Trinitarian thinking are already in
evidence in the NT itself.  The idea of
God who is tri-personal is beginning to be expressed in places like Matthew 28
but this nodal idea was to be developed over time and after the time of the NT
writers.

We may talk about
trajectories of ideas and understandings that are further developed beyond what
the NT says in the succeeding centuries, but when this is done faithfully it is
consonant with the earlier source material and moving in the same
direction.  But we do not find in the NT
itself the Chalcedonian formulae, or even the earlier Nicene Christology in
toto  for that matter, and in fact some
of the things said about God in those later formulae do not comport with some
of the things said in the NT itself about God (e.g. about the apparently
impassable nature of God).   Much less do
we find later Reformation or Counter-Reformation theology in the NT.

NT Theology like
NT ethics is not a completely finished product, if we evaluate it
anachronistically based on the later standards of creedal orthodoxy much less
confessional orthodoxy or canon law or even modern notions of orthodox
Christianity of whatever stripe.  We can
talk about normative beliefs and ethical standards in the NT but we cannot talk
about NT dogma.  This is why I think a
historical approach to this material requires that we speak about the
theologizing and ethicizing into particular contexts in the NT.  All of this is by way of reminding the reader
that you may well find what is said about NT theology and ethics in these
volumes not answering all the pertinent questions you might have on the basis
of later standards and understandings of what Christian belief and behavior
ought to look like.  There is an apparent
incompleteness to the NT when it comes to our interests in things like
Trinitarian theology, or modern medical ethical discussions, though I would
urge that the NT has some valuable things to say that aid and should inform
those discussions.  Indeed I would say
the NT provides us with the sort of theological and ethical vision out of which
we can wisely address such issues.

J. Genre
Interpretation not Generic Interpretation

A further
assumption with which I am operating is that understanding the genre of a
particular NT document is a key to being able to understand its meaning. The
genre conventions being followed in the NT are not modern but ancient ones.  Matthew, Mark, and John reflect the
conventions of ancient biographies, whilst Luke-Acts reflects the conventions
of ancient Hellenistic historiography. There are in addition in the NT ancient
letters, sermons, rhetorical discourses, and apocalyptic prophecy, each of
which has its own genre signals and distinctives. It is quite impossible to
ferret out the meaning of this or that text while ignoring the genre signals in
these various documents.  Such a
procedure, which all too often happens when one takes a >purely
theological= or a >purely ethical= approach to the NT data while ignoring
the historical issues, leads to misunderstanding, and misinterpretation of
various sorts.

What we should
deduce from this previous paragraph is that there is something fundamentally
wrong with an a-historical or even anti-historical approach to God=s revelation in the pages of the New
Testament. A historical approach will recognize that we must take into account
that the NT writers operated with a concept of progressive revelation.  The OT could be interpreted typologically
while remaining historical in orientation, such that various persons and
institutions in the OT were seen as pointing forward to, or were types of
Christ.  This mode of interpretation is
very different from the later allegorical mode of interpretation popular in the
Alexandrian school which finds post-canonical and philosophical ideas in
pre-Christian texts like the Song of Solomon (taken as an allegory of Christ
and the Church).  Respecting the historical
givenness of the OT means that while it is possible to talk about the
pre-existent Christ as God=s
Wisdom at work in Israel (see 1 Cor. 10), this did not lead the NT writers to
assume they could find the Trinity under every rock in the OT.  I assume that the best guide to the limits of
Christological interpretation of the OT, are the NT writers themselves.   And basically the NT writers assume that
there is a historical motion to the Biblical story, there is a before and
after, and a process which leads to a climax in Christ.  

This means that
there was no full understanding of the Trinitarian nature of God in the OT
writers, indeed there were many things they longed to understand and know about
the future and, as 1 Pet. 1.10-12 says, God=s
Spirit simply let them know they were speaking about a later time when they
spoke messianically.  Heb. 1.1-2
especially makes this sort of notion of progressive revelation clear.  Revelation was partial and piecemeal in the
past but has become full and reaches a climax in Christ.   I assume that we should follow the NT
writers in this direction.  This in part
means that the OT for a Christians becomes a book of foreshadowing,
foretelling, and of types in the light of the later revelation.  It does not become a textbook for any sort of
full exposition of the doctrine of the Trinity, or for that matter the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit, or for that matter even Messianism.   In Christian thinking the canon cannot be
read flatly without regard to the progression of revelation and historical
understanding of and in the text. What the OT can be is a source for is
better understanding the first person of the Trinity and the divine character,
for better understanding human fallenness, for better understand the history of
God=s people and God=s
efforts to redeem them, for better understanding Israelite hopes about their
kings and coming kings and about their eschatological future, especially when
we get to the exilic and post exilic prophetic and apocalyptic material in the
OT. 

Even most Medieval
Church Fathers were not totally willing to go beyond their famous Latin couplet
which read AThe New
is in the Old concealed. The Old is in the New revealed.@.
This couplet implicitly recognized that a flat reading of the OT as if it were
the same sort of document, even a Christian document, as the NT is, is an
historical mistake. One had to take into account the progressive nature of God=s revelation.

It is worth adding
as well that we need to recognize that much of the use of the OT in the NT is
homiletical in character.  This should be
seen as a pastoral >use= of the text, and thus not be viewed as
serious exegesis of the text, for it does not change the meaning of the text,
nor does it give us permission to suggest all Biblical texts have a
multiplicity of meansCrather
like ink blots into which we can read our own meanings.  Put another way, these pastoral and
homiletical uses of the OT are not trying to tell us what the text meant or
means so much as show us how it can be used for Christian purposes.  They presuppose an already extant relatively
fixed sacred text accessible to their audience such that if they choose to do
something creative with the text this is not seen as supplanting but rather
only supplementing the historical and contextual meaning of the text.  This has nothing to do with their belief in
some sort of sensus plenior or fuller sense to the text, a later concept in any
case.  Rather it reflects their belief
that the text can be used and applied in various ways in their own Christian
context.  To give but one example, Paul,
in 1 Cor. 9.9 quotes Deut. 25.4 about not muzzling oxen as they tread the
grain, so they can get some personal benefit from their hard labor. He then
applies this to Gospel preachers like himself, knowing full well that that text
is not about ministers of the Gospel
and their right to be remunerated or taken care of whilst doing the hard work
of ministry.  

K. NT Theology and
Ethics and the Christian Bible

As Jaroslav
Pelikan makes perfectly clear, there was never a time when the Christian
community combined the Hebrew OT with the Greek NT to make a single book.  Rather, once it had agreed upon the shape of
its New Testament it adopted a version of the OT in Greek to serve as its
OT.  This is perfectly clear from an
examination of the early codexes like Codex Siniaticus.  Christian Biblical Theology (as it was
originally done when there was a book of two testaments), involved an all Greek
canon, which of course is not at all the canonical basis of Biblical Theology
today which uses the Hebrew Scriptures along with the Greek NT.^[34]   The term Biblical Theology today would not
mean the same thing it did when there first was a >complete= Bible, and in any case that sort of
approach to Christian theology including NT theology threatens to undo, muffle,
or produce a false harmony or blending of the discreet witness of the Hebrew
Scriptures which has its own Jewish voice, and the equally discreet NT
Scriptures which has a largely Jewish Christian voice. 

We cannot start
with Biblical theology and then try to fit NT theology into that Procrustean
bed.  Nor can we start with the theology
in the Hebrew Scriptures and see the NT books as simply a renewal or extension
of that theology or those covenants mentioned in the OT.  Historically this is not how the NT writers
viewed things, nor should we.  We must
start with the discrete testimonies of the individual testaments, and take our
cues from the NT writers as to how Christians should approach the Torah.  This is an historical approach which sees
Biblical theology and Biblical ethics as something which must be done after,
and on the basis of the detailed study of the theologies and ethics of the OT
and NT.  NT theology, and for that matter
NT ethics, as it will be studied in these volumes will not involve a canonical
approach nor will it assume a Biblical theological or ethical approach as its
starting point in the normal way those adjectives (canonical/ Biblical) are
used in discussions today.  Rather, we
will allow the various NT writers to have their own say on their own terms in
this volume and then we will try to see what a synthetic view of the
theologizing and ethicizing of the various witnesses looks like in our  second volume.

It seems clear
enough that the eschatological perspective shared by all the NT writers led
them to conclude that they were living in the age of the new covenant, the
final covenant between God and humankind. 
This eschatological perspective led them to the conclusion that former
covenants were now, or were becoming obsolete, because the better and final one
had appeared (see e.g. Galatians 4 or Hebrews).   This did not mean that the OT became
irrelevant to Christian teaching or reflection (see 2 Tim. 3.16).  But what it did mean is that the OT would now
be viewed not so much on its own terms, but in the light of the Christ event
which came after it.

 It means that the OT would be used messianically and ecclesiologically
in ways that would have made non-Christian early Jews uncomfortable and often
unconvinced.  There would be a
homiletical use of the OT which was often both more and other than simple
historical exegesis of the OT texts. 
Indeed those uses fell more into the categories of application and
implication than straightforward interpretation.  Early Jews would see this hermeneutical move
as supercessionism, Christians would see it as completionism, to coin a
term.  The study of the use of the OT in
the NT reflects the struggle in early Christianity for self-definition and
self-understanding in distinction from non-Christian Judaism but also in
relationship with (and in some continuity with) early Judaism.[35]   Non-Christian Jews had their own, different
interpretations of these same texts, and furthermore, there were various forms
of early Judaism taking a variety of views on these texts. There was no one
monolithic early Jewish view or interpretation of such texts.

Since the first
five books of the NT are some sort of narrative, and since there is a narrative
structure to the last book of the NT, and since there is a narrative
substructure to Pauline and Petrine and Johannine thinking in the NT as well as
in Hebrews and other books, it follows that narrative and story become an
especially important category for analyzing the NT.  This in turn raises the question of the
relationship of history, narrative and story. 
What sort of stories do we have in the NT?   Are they fractured fairy tales or are they
historically substantive stories, or somewhere in between?

L.  History and Story in the New Testament

In his recent
crucial book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. The Gospels as Eyewitness
Testimony,   Richard Bauckham
stresses that what we have in the NT is a synthesis of history and story, more
particularly the stories told by eyewitness participants in the events.  The sort of history we are dealing with in
the NT is oral history, later written down, and following the conventions of
ancient oral history telling.  As
Bauckham also points out, for the ancients it was involvement in the pivotal events,
not distance from them, that made them more likely accurate testifiers to what
actually happened and what it meant.  The
Aancient historians knew that firsthand
insider testimony gave access to truth that could not be had otherwise.@^[36]  We should envision then the oral testimonies
of the eyewitnesses coupled with the narrativizing and interpretative work of
the NT writers.^[37]   In other words, not even the narratives in
the NT should ever be treated as literary fictions, and certainly not as modern
literary fictions or even ancient novels. 
That would be to make genre mistakes of the first order in analyzing the
NT material. 

As I have pointed
out at length in What Have They Done with Jesus? ^[38].
what we have in the NT is the testimonies of eyewitnesses, indeed testimonies
that can be traced back either directly or indirectly to the inner circle of
Jesus (which included women), some eight or so figures who were the impetus for
or the authors of what we find in the NT itself.  In other words we should take it seriously
when even a non-eyewitness like Luke tells us that he has consulted the
eyewitnesses and original teachers of the Word in writing his narrative. The
theology and ethics in the NT are grounded in and founded on history and
eyewitness testimony again and again. 
Why anyone ever thought theology could be done for an historical
religion like Christianity without paying attention to the historical detail
and eyewitness nature of the narratives is a mystery.

M.  The Christological Indicative and Imperative

As should already
be obvious, one of my major assumptions, which is really more like a settled
conviction, is that both the theology and ethics in and of the NT are
Christologically focused or centered.  By
this I mean that not only are the ethics connected to the theology such that
the imperative is built on the indicative theological statements, but that both
the ethics and the theology are profoundly grounded in Christ.   Ethically this is so not just because we
have a lot of Christ=s
ethical teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere, but also because
the ethics of Paul and Peter and others are profoundly shaped by the person and
example of Christ, such that we even hear about imitating Christ. Put another
way, what most binds together the NT thought world whether we are talking about
belief or behavior is Jesus Christ.

To some this will
seem perfectly obvious, but in fact so many different attempts to examine NT
theology or ethics do not primarily focus on Christology much less the teachings
and example of Jesus that sometimes it is necessary to state what may seem
obvious to many.  It is Christ who is the
focal point and crystalizing agent of the theologizing and ethicizing that
happens in the NT.  This is not only what
sets it apart from other forms of early Jewish thinking, it is what makes it
Christian in the proper sense of the term. 
Attempts to do NT theology by starting with ideas like divine
sovereignty or eternal decrees or irresistible grace, or for that matter with
ideas like prevenient grace or entire sanctification or the like are in fact
not following the lead and emphases of the NT documents themselves.  It is not primarily soteriology but
Christology which binds the NT together, for in some NT books we have little or
no reflection on salvation properly so called at all. The ordo salutis (order of salvation) is furthermore not only absent from significant portions of the
New Testament, for example the Synoptic Gospels, it is absent as well from most
of the OT too. Those who insist otherwise are imposing later theological
reflection and categories of a systematic sort (and often of a particular brand
of soteriology) on the discussion.  

It is the
Christological vision of the NT writers which caused a Christological
revisioning of monotheism, of ethics, of eschatology, of salvation, of
hermeneutics, of OT prophecy and a host of other subjects.  To take but one example–the language of
salvation in the OT almost always refers to rescue, or a return to normality,
or a regaining of health, which is to say, to very mundane things.  It does not refer to salvation in the
Christian spiritual sense of conversion to a new set of beliefs and
behaviors.  By contrast, most of the
language of salvation in the NT at least alludes to the issue of conversion to
Christ, or subsequent sanctification in Him and his community.

It is not helpful
at the end of day to arrange NT proof texts into pre-existent systematic
theology categories and then construct a NT theology or ethics, or analyze NT
theology or ethics on that basis.  This
puts the >dog= back in dogma and that dog won=t hunt if we are talking about being
fair to the focus and thrusts of the NT itself which are Christocentric and
Christological to the core.    

N. Historical
Jesus vs. Christ of Faith?

When my book The
Christology of Jesus first came out at the beginning of the 90s a panel
discussion of the book was undertaken at the SBL.  To some scholars it was seen as humorous to
talk about Jesus viewing himself in a messianic light. Nevertheless I persisted
and the book has served as a stimulus in the discussion of Jesus= self-understanding.  I remember one angry person coming up after
the panel discussion at the SBL and accosting me with the wordsB AYou=re just a theologian, not a historian,
why not just admit it?  You=re not talking about the historical
Jesus, you are talking about the later Christian evaluation of Jesus.@  
If only history and theology were that easily separated and
distinguished!   But in fact theology and history were intertwined
not just in the lives of Jesus=
followers but also in the life of Jesus himself.  He had theological views, including theological
views of himself.  It does not require an
intellectual or historical slight of hand to come to this historical conclusion.

As for the larger
question as to whether Jesus=s
own teaching should be included in a >NT
Theology and Ethics= study or
volume, this is a much controverted question, which needs a little more
introduction at this point.  Jesus, of
course, was a Jew, not a Christian, even though I am convinced one can surely
say he had a messianic self understanding.  
If, with Wayne Meeks, we say that Christ is the question that prompts NT
theologizing rather than the answer to all theological questions, and you assume there are many layers of
tradition one has to peel away to get back to the historical Jesus, and having done that you arrive at a
Jesus that is rather different than the NT writers envisioned, then the answer
will probably be no, at least when it comes to the actual teaching and ministry
of Jesus.^[39]   But in fact not only Joachim Jeremias but
some very well known NT scholars have also included the teaching of Jesus in a
volume on NT theology and/or ethicsB
L. Goppelt, W.G. Kümmel, G.B. Caird, P. Stuhlmacher, and N.T. Wright to name
but a few.   Clearly they did not see NT
Theology as simply a matter of the theological interpretation of the NT
documents, which of course can be done with any of those documents.  The issue for them was the theology in
those NT documents, and whether Jesus=
theological and ethical remarks and activities should be included as part of
the discussion. At the heart of the discussion is whether one takes a
historical and exegetical approach to this NT material, or whether one primarily
sees theology as an exercise in dealing with abstract ideas and concepts comparing
and contrasting them, and stringing them together in particular ways
(justification leads to sanctification which leads to glorification).

In a recent essay
by Christopher Tuckett, this question of whether the historical Jesus=s teaching and ministry belongs in a
discussion of NT theology is assessed afresh.^[40]  He points to the work of William Wrede and
Robert Morgan, the latter being indebted to the former, where a distinction is
made between a historically descriptive approach of the data and a >committed=
theological interpretation to the data. 
This is sometimes described as a history of religion approach versus a
confessional approach to the data.  Is
doing a NT theology then really just a matter of a committed Christian
theologian, operating from that standpoint, offering an interpretation of the
NT data?  If that is what it is, then of
course it is an in house matter, and non-Christian interpreters need not apply
for the job of interpreting the NT in this way.

I must say that
this claim bothers me as a historian. While every interpreter of the NT has a
point of view of course, and that point of view needs to be taken account of, I
do not think we should assume that non-Christian scholars or others are
incapable of assessing even the theological data within the NT, and doing it
accurately.  I do not think we should
assume, for example, that a scholar like Prof. A.J. Levine, my good friend and
colleague in NT studies at Vanderbilt, who is a committed Jew, is incapable of
producing a fine volume on NT theology.  And
this is because it is not primarily about her point of view; it is primarily
about critically and correctly assessing the theological or ethical evidence
within the NT.  You don=t have to be a Christian to do
that.  So, I must reject the definition
which suggests that doing or studying or writing about NT theology is a task
only for a committed Christian theologian. Just as I don=t
see the historical Jesus as a threat or a problem for NT theology, nor do I see
non-Christian scholars as a threat or a problem if they seek to understand and
write about the NT theological and ethical data. In fact, we have much to learn
from them.                                           

Of course one of
the real problems with excluding the words, deeds and ministry of Jesus from a
discussion of NT theology and ethics is that Jesus=s
own life and teachings are sometimes quoted, often alluded to, and the life
pattern of the historical Jesus often seen as a paradigm for Christians to
follow by the NT writers themselves. And how exactly are we to conceive
of the function of the four canonical Gospels if they were not intended to
teach Christians how to think theologically and ethically as at least part of
their function?  Apparently, the
Evangelists assumed Jesus=
life and teachings were fundamental resources for Christian theologizing and
ethicizing in their communities. 

Tuckett wants to
make the very limited claim that the voice and teachings and life of Jesus
belong as part of the conversation about NT theology and ethics and that the
historical Jesus and his ministry and teaching can act as something of a norm
as we seek to make theological value judgments about the NT data.  Just how limited a claim he wants to make can
be shown by the following quote:

[O]ne cannot equate Christology
with Jesus= own
teaching; one cannot substitute the historically reconstructed Jesus for
Christian claims about Jesus. Indeed, it can be argued that, in some respects,
a Jesus who is too continuous with later Christian theology could in fact be no
longer suitable as the focus figure for that theology. A Jesus who had already
formulated some ideas about the positive meaning of the cross, who knew already
prior to his death that that death would surely be reversed by >resurrection=
and who perhaps claimed a uniqueness over and beyond that of any >normal=
mortal, would be a Jesus for whom the agony of Gethsemane and the cry of
dereliction on the cross would be a sham; it would be a Jesus whom no Christian
could claim plumbed the deepest depths if human despair and godlessness…and
who could then be the agent who brought about >reconciliation= or >redemption=…in the most profound sense claimed
by Christian theology.^[41]

My response to
this assessment must be mixed. While Tuckett is right that we cannot simply
equate the messianic thinking and expression of Jesus about himself with the
later full orbed Christology of the NT writers we do need to think that the
former prepared for and provided some of the substance for the latter.  In other words we must think of a developing
continuum, not a dichotomy as if the Easter event somehow cut the followers off
from the historical Jesus and his teachings and ministry. To say these things
manifest some continuity is not to suggest that we could simply equate the
teaching of the historical Jesus with the later teaching about Jesus in some
sort of identity statement.

Of course it is
true that later rumination on Jesus led to insights and the understanding of
the truths about Jesus which in various cases Jesus never spoke to or of during
his ministry. For example, Jesus never says anything directly about the
virginal conception, though he does insist that the heavenly Father is his
father at numerous junctures. Or again the historical Jesus never says Aone must confess that Jesus Christ is
the risen Lord, and by this means you can be saved@.  There are of course aspects of later
theologizing about Jesus which do not find an analogue in the things we know
the historical Jesus actually said. 
However, I would strongly disagree with Tuckett=s
remarks in regard to whether Jesus made some positive remarks about the cross
and about vindication beyond death in advance of his death. It is very likely
he did do this, and this is not a surprise since before him some of the
Maccabean martyrs also said remarkable things about the atoning merit of their
coming deaths, and how God would at least vindicate their cause (and themselves
at the last resurrection presumably). 

I would also
suggest that the historical  Jesus
absolutely did claim some sort of uniqueness that placed him in a category well
beyond an average or ordinary or normal mortal, while still remaining fully
human.  Indeed, it is likely that this is
one of the things that got him killed, as a result of what he said before Pilate
and probably before the Sanhedrin too. 
We will say more about this in the next chapter.  Here it must suffice to say thisB the historical Jesus and his teaching
must be seen as part of the proper subject matter of a study of NT theology and
ethics, and not just because it is the stimulus for later post-Easter Christian
thought and expression. At the same time, one must view these matters from a
historical point of view recognizing similarity, and also development and
difference between the ways Jesus expressed himself and the ways later
Christians spoke about him. My point would simply be that a proper way to view
this is as a matter of addition, not subtraction, and certainly not substitution,
such that the historical Jesus is replaced by the Christ of faith. Later NT Christological
reflection about Jesus went beyond what he said and did but it did not go
against it, nor did it distort the cut and thrust of what Jesus said and how he
presented himself.

In his recent
study entitled Christ is the Question, Wayne A. Meeks makes the
following perceptive observation: Athe
way the Bible is used in theology depends on the way the reader construes the
BibleB that is,
what one takes the Bible essentially to be.@^[42]  This is exactly right.  The Bible is not the tale of the evolution of
abstract ideas like >atonement= or >the
Trinity=.  It is rather a disparate collection of
various sorts and genre of documents whose aims are historical, theological, and
ethical, not to mention cultic or religious, whose meaning is effected or
determined by the genre of the material it is found in, and whose function is
constantly related to: 1) a living faith community with an ongoing historical
existence, including a community that has experienced what can be called
salvation history; and 2) as a result of 1) has told their stories about this
life and these events in the form of various narratives. Not all the Bible is
narrative in its literary form, by any means, but all the Bible, even its rules
and laws, are related to theological concepts like covenants, and thereby to
larger narratives about the interactions between God and his people, and indeed
with the world.

O. Sacrifice of
the Intellect?

 Sometimes I am asked the question as to
whether it requires the sacrifice of the intellect to believe what the Bible
says about one or another subject.  My
response is that one does not need to have a frontal lobotomy either to believe
what the NT says or to attempt to practice what it calls us to do.  In fact it requires not the sacrifice of the
intellect but rather the sanctification
of the intellect, the renewal of the mind discussed in Rom. 12.1-2 if one is to
understand much less apply this material. 
One needs to use the full extent of one=s
intellectual capacity to grasp some of this material. Spiritual things are
spiritually understood, especially when one is talking about some of the more
profound aspects of theology or ethics found in the NT.   One thing I am sure of as we begin this
foray through the NT witnesses looking at theologizing and ethicizing– Jesus
himself made an indelible impression on his followers.   This is one reason why these volumes are
called The Indelible Image. I believe that we will understand the NT to
the extent that we understand Jesus, and vice versa.  These two things are inevitably and
inextricably intertwined, as is history and theology and ethics.  We should not be surprised at this fact.  If God indeed incarnated himself in the person
of Jesus then obviously theology and history have become one in a very real and
personal sense.   We must keep all these
things in mind as we begin our theological and ethical pilgrimage through the
NT.

In order to make
this volume as readable as possible and take the >stuffings= out of usually stuffy theological and
ethical discussions, I have kept the footnotes to a minimum and I have eschewed
using a lot of technical jargon, though some is unavoidable. Since this work is
based on my commentaries, the reader who wants lots more references and
bibliography and esoterica can turn to those commentaries for the details.  These volumes are based on my previous twenty
five years of exegeting the NT, they do not simply repeat what is in those volumes,
though a good deal of overlap is inevitable since in assessing and presenting
the theology and ethics of the NT witnesses we are dealing with exegetical
issues. 

One last
thing.  You need to use your imagination
while reading this volume. So consider the following before you turn to the
first full chapter. Think for a minute of the image of a small choir rehearsing
for a big performance of a Masterwork. 
Each one must know her own individual part well, and each one must also
be able to sing in tune, and in harmony with the other singers. One of the
reasons to be especially diligent is because the Creator of this music is going
to perform with the choir as the chief soloist on this night.  And of course all of the choir is excited and
wants to please the composer turned performer. This is all the more so since
the piece in question is the musical biography of the soloist himself-B the most famous solist in all the
world.   They will do their best to
represent the soloist well and blend in with his interpretation of his own
music.  They want him of course to be the
dominant voice, and they are present to help highlight his voice and music.