PRACTICING THE GOSPEL IN A POST-CRITICAL WORLD: THE PROMISE OF THEOLOGICAL EXEGESIS

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2004 by Green, Joel B

The argument I want to put forward is a straightforward one. I want to insist that, if we are to engage in a genuinely theological exegesis of Christian Scripture, then both disciplines, biblical studies and systematic theology, must change.

In making such a claim, I grant that, when I describe "biblical studies" and "systematic theology," I am referring to two aggregates of interests and practices that resist narrow definition. I further grant that those who practice biblical studies and those who practice systematic theology may find in my presentation that their work has been, at least to some degree, caricatured. By way of response, I offer two reflections.

First, I recognize that aggregates are masses held together by something, by some adhesive agent that invites examination. Within theological schools, although the departments of biblical studies and theological studies may share a relationship of mutual respect and even support one another as representatives of what are often known as "the classical disciplines," the assumptions and practices they represent are constitutive of two different, stable, epistemic communities, each regulated by standards of excellence and aims that are generally mutually exclusive. Only rarely does one find mutual respect giving way to the sort of integrative work or interdisciplinarity where fresh epistemic trails are blazed, where the concerns of, say, systematic theology actually shape the ways in which biblical studies is conducted. More pervasive has been the suggestion that it is the task of the student to search for paths of integration among the thickets of a curricula whose presuppositions mask, perhaps even hinder, integration. More pervasive are those scholars who are trained according to accredited standards that guard the one discipline from what are typically regarded as the naïve or colonizing efforts of the other. From the side of biblical studies, the consequence of such developments is the ghettoizing of biblical studies and an identity crisis for practitioners of this discipline. As Werner G. Jeanrond remarked already a decade ago, "What can the study of the Bible offer to the diverse interests of students late in the twentieth century? What is the contribution of biblical studies to the academy, to society at large and to the different Jewish and Christian communities? In other words, what is the discipline of biblical studies good for these days?"1

My second response is that my purported caricature of systematic theology is perhaps less inculpatory than common perceptions of systematic theology among biblical scholars, and the same may be said of my alleged caricature of biblical studies when compared to common perceptions of biblical studies among systematicians. Biblical scholars often look disapprovingly at systematic theology as an exercise in philosophical abstractions, endlessly organizing one aspect of the Christian belief system in relation to another. John Goldingay, for example, thinks of systematic theology as a discipline that emerged in a Greek context with the task of working out the gospel's significance in the framework of Greek thinking, with ideas taking the place of the story of Scripture. Presumably, this concern with analytical and systematic synthesis lies behind John Goldingay's stark assertion, "If systematic theology did not exist, it might seem unwise to invent it. . . ."2 Antipathy toward the other discipline is not solely from the side of biblical studies, however. As theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas remarked to me some years ago, "New Testament scholars ought to be lined up and run off of a cliff!" Whether Hauerwas intended to echo biblical images of Gehenna is unclear to me, but the reverberations were nonetheless sonorous. Although I am sure that one could find countervailing evidence, an ongoing, unscientific inventory among my colleagues in the areas of theological studies at the various institutions where I have taught has yet to identify a systematic theologian who admits intimacy with the Journal of Biblical Literature.

Granting, then, that I am painting with a broad brush, I want to urge that the consequent mural nonetheless retains representative value. Let me repeat, then, my proposal: If we are to engage in a genuinely theological exegesis of Christian Scripture, then both disciplines, biblical studies and systematic theology, must change.

I. RETHINKING BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

As I press forward the need to rethink biblical and theological studies, I will tackle three "-isms": foundationalism, objectivism, and propositionalism. These, I will suggest, have been woven tightly into the fabric of modern biblical and theological studies, though in our present, postcritical era, these have begun to unravel.

It is widely agreed that "biblical theology" has operated with the methodological distinctives put forward at the end of the 18th century by Johann Philipp Gabler.3 He sketched a three-stage process by which one might move from historical analysis of the biblical texts to a biblical theology: (1) careful linguistic and historical analysis; (2) engagement in a synthetic task, the purpose of which was to identify those ideas common among the biblical writers; and (3) arrival at the timeless and universal principles of the Bible. If one were to engage in dogmatic theology, one would begin with these transcendent ideas so as to adapt them to particular contexts. In this way, the Bible (especially the NT) was positioned as the fountainhead of all theology-indeed, as theology's epistemic foundation. With variations, this essential process has carried the day for many interpreters up to the present-both with respect to the necessity of taking the biblical texts objectively, freed from the shackles of Christian doctrine, and with regard to the presumed priority of the meaning of the biblical texts thus rendered. One thinks of the now-famous articulation of the task of biblical theology by Krister Stendahl, who distinguished between "what it meant" and "what it means"-and so, between biblical studies and theology,4 a distinction that has reached axiomatic status in the field. Heikki Räisänen insists that Gabler was right in his programmatic distinction between the historical and theological tasks of the exegete, for example, just as Peter Balla affirms in his reassessment of the field that the task of NT theology is distinct from systematic theology; for Balla, the NT is viewed as "source" for theology but is not itself "faith seeking understanding."5 In his introduction to a "biblical theology of the New Testament," Peter Stuhlmacher outlines his own three-stage hermeneutic: (1) historical analysis of the biblical texts; (2) historical reconstruction of the relationship among these elements; and (3) interpretation of this reconstruction for its relevance to the present.6 Indeed, contributions to the genre "a theology of the New Testament" in the past three decades generally signify the ascendency of this way of construing the theological mission of biblical scholars, almost invariably pointing to the foundational, "descriptive task"-in Stendahl's words: "[O]ur only concern is to find out what these words meant when uttered or written by the prophet, the priest, the evangelist, or the apostle-and regardless of their meaning in later stages of religious history, our own included."7