Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible. - book reviews

In a recent review of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Commonweal, May 7, 1993), I commented that its failure to use critical biblical scholarship left me less disturbed than a New Testament scholar ought to have been. I noted that critical scholarship had not managed much real history or authentic theology, and had certainly not helped transmit the faith to the next generation. Perhaps charmed by unaccustomed candor from the guild, or provoked by such unseemly spite, the editors of Commonweal rewarded me by assigning three books, requesting that I clarify that cryptic comment in more considered fashion and with live targets.

Contemporary biblical scholarship considered from some angles seems to be in good shape. There are certainly more people with Ph.D. degrees in biblical studies than in any previous era. Regional, national, and international conventions proliferate and prosper. New journals are announced or appear every year. So many dissertations, monographs, books, and articles are being produced that literally no one can even count much less be accountable for the yearly production. Measured quantitatively, the business of biblical scholarship is booming. And from any perspective, the great gains of knowledge and understanding made available by such industry is impressive. The century's armies of researchers have not been lazy. The results of new discoveries and the reexamination of older holdings have made available an unprecedented wealth of knowledge about the biblical world. Inscriptions, coins, artifacts, texts known and newly discovered have been deciphered, edited, translated, and published. Scholars today have unimaginable amounts of information available as close as the computer keyboard. Measured quantitatively, biblical knowledge floods the earth.

Other perspectives, however, suggest that all is not well. As in other boom industries, disquieting amounts of fraud and fakery appear. Overproduction itself depreciates value. More than that, however, there are growing signs that the energy and activity seem increasingly without direction. What is all this learning about, to what is it directed, for whom is it any benefit?

The problem is not simply that too much is written for anyone to read, or that the pressures of academic advancement encourage premature publication with an inevitable decline in quality. These are signals that prompt a more fundamental question: Is any genuine conversation taking place? Does it have any point? Does all this machinery of scholarship simply create "product," or does it contribute to human wisdom concerning history or life before God? Jon Levenson identifies my own growing discomfort precisely in his introduction: "At the heart of [the] crisis lie the loss of a transcendent goal for learning and the weakening of the communities and practices that can sustain the faith and belief upon which all learning - and not only biblical studies - depends." An important factor in evaluating the present condition of biblical studies is its shift in social location away from the church and synagogue to the academy, and increasingly to an academy shaped by opposition rather than allegiance to traditional faith. That shift removes biblical scholarship from any readership for whom questions and answers about the texts have genuine existential significance, and leaves thousands of scholars dancing for no apparent reason around a very small book.

The long struggle of "the historical critical method" for "free inquiry" liberated from the control of dogma and then of organized religion, has been accomplished. Many scholars now teach in secular academies and those who do not have their work largely defined by questions shaped by academic inertia rather than by the life of a religious community.

But as Levenson acutely observes in several of his essays, the liberation has been ambiguous and uncertain. It is true that a variety of new methodological approaches (structuralist, literary, social-scientific) dignify many practitioners with academic seriousness. But some form of "theological" motivation continues to drive a great deal of biblical scholarship even when it is explicitly disavowed. It is a form of theology, however, weirdly separated from the faith or practice of living communities, and frequently comes camouflaged as "history."

The contribution of Levenson's book is its careful analysis of this ambiguity. Writing from a Jewish perspective, he acutely observes consistent features of Christian biblical criticism that help account for the odd fact that so many educated and liberated intellectuals can come to so little consensus. The first is its theological tendentiousness, which frequently appears as an implicit anti-semitism. What Levenson means is that the construal of history always turns out to vindicate Christian claims in sharp contrast to those of Judaism. The second is the way the category of "history" has become entangled with that of theology," with disastrous results for both modes of knowing. Levenson's final essay on "Exodus and Liberation" exposes the conceptual confusion underlying much liberationist interpretation that seeks to put "history" to the service of "theology." He shows the different sorts of challenges posed for reflection by the "Moses of history" (whoever he might have been) and the "Moses of the text." What is most refreshing about Levenson is that he actually seems to know the difference!

In "The Eighth Principle of Judaism and the Literary Simultaneity of Scripture," Levenson brilliantly demonstrates the difference between an "historical awareness" concerning the texts, and the use of a historical paradigm to control their interpretation. The rabbis were capable of recognizing historical development in texts, but that did not confuse them concerning the unitary authority of Torah as a whole, nor disable them from interpreting it creatively and "critically" within that synchronic construal. The rabbis did not attempt to "fix" the history of Israel as a norm for life. Rather they allowed diverse and contradictory texts to speak variously to the living of life before God. Engaging these texts, they continued a conversation that in principle resisted "fixing" or closure. Such a relationship between community and texts, quite apart from the anti-Semitism built into so much Christian "biblical theology," helps make clear why "Jews," as Levenson entitles another essay, "are not interested in biblical theology," for such Christian "biblical theology" has in the last century seldom proceeded without attempting to base itself on some sort of historical "fixing."

Levenson's aligning of the dominant "historical model" of scholarship to distinctively Protestant theological preoccupations is perceptive, and a useful reminder that, like Judaism, the Catholic tradition has never demanded or even required "history" as an indispensable epistemological key to theology. The greater part of the Catholic tradition of interpretation recognized the limitations of that mode of knowing called the historical (valuable in its own way but never able to escape the probable), basing its theology on the Irenaean tripod of rule of faith, canon of Scripture, and apostolic authority. If to my taste that tradition paid far too little attention to the revelation of God in human lives and events, it at least did not attach its teaching to the fragile vessel of historiography posing as theology.

Burton Mack and Brevard Childs demonstrate in their books, though in markedly different ways, the pertinence of Levenson's critique, and show how, for all its sophistication, contemporary biblical scholarship often misses either real history or authentic theology by confusing the two enterprises.

Mack's The Lost Gospel represents an extension and popularization of his earlier Myth of Innocence (Fortress), by taking as its premise that there is no "big bang" at the origin of Christianity - no heroic Jesus, and certainly no "resurrection experience" - but only a loose congeries of movements and cults associated with Jesus or "the Christ," that only progressively (especially under the impetus of Mark's Gospel) found a shared "Myth of Origins" and therefore normative shape. His starting point is not startlingly different from that of many of his colleagues. He has simply made the grounding of a shared method explicit and therefore challenging. Mack should be applauded for developing this premise with such consistency that its fundamental wrongheadedness can be appreciated.

It is important to remember that Mack wants readers to perceive him as the soberest of hardheaded historians - no flight to faith, here, no fantasies of theology. Let's follow, then, his argument. First, the "Lost Gospel" is not the discovery of a new document, but the decision to treat that material in the Gospels found in Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark - traditionally designated Q (for Quelle = source) as though it were the most important clue to Christian origins. Mack would like to find in it the story of a community associated with the "Jesus movement" somewhere in Galilee over a period of thirty years after the death of Jesus: indeed, he claims to trace the development of that community structurally and ideologically from a loose table-fellowship that traded Jesus-quips as an expression of countercultural consciousness and collegiality to an increasingly beleaguered and apocalyptic sectarian claimant to the heritage of Israel.

To find this, the following assumptions are necessary: (1) the material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark come from the same source; (2) what we now have from that source is all it ever contained; (3) the original form of that source can be reconstructed by omitting the alterations and emendations made by Matthew and Luke when they used it as a source; (4) the document thus reconstituted contains the sole literature of a specific social movement-they read nothing else and held no other beliefs than were in this composition; (5) it is possible to demarcate stages in the redaction of Q according to the principles of literary analysis: materials of Q1 with Cynic-type sayings (that is, sayings that resemble those of the popular Hellenizing philosophical movement of that name) cannot intermingle with Q2 with its rules and rejection motifs, and certainly not with Q3 with its mythologization; (6) these stages of redaction, in turn, correspond exactly to stages in this hypothetical community's "development"; (7) this movement is evidence for the earliest form of Christianity, untouched by rival groups such as the "Jerusalem Church" or the "Christ Cult"; (8) it was the "Christ Cult" that mythologized the death and Resurrection of Jesus; (9) Mark's Gospel combined these streams with the Christian "Myth of Innocence."

So mesmerizing is this progression, and so similar to the procedure of well - respected researchers - say, in the Johannine literature - that only when the dust clears is it apparent that the entire show has been the purest flimflam. Not only has no positive historical evidence been adduced for this supposed movement in this supposed place and in this supposed progression, but the argument has been based on the most arbitrary sort of judgments concerning communities and texts, and on the suppression of contrary evidence (from Paul and Acts, for example not to mention compositions such as Hebrews and James). Most of all, it simply shifts the question of "origination" to an even more obscure level: if there is no "founder" or "founding experience," how do we account for so many and such diverse communities gathered in this name?

Mack's is not the sort of historical analysis that stands up to close scrutiny. It is closer to a kind of historical imagining that is itself mythic in character. Mack should also be thanked for making this clear in his epilogue. For after his dismantling of the church's myth of origins by means of his "historical method," he makes clear that he would prefer his reconstruction to have normative effect. He repeats the substance of his final chapter in Myth which blames all the sins of the West and especially America, and especially Ronald Reagan, on the normative Christian gospel. Society would be much better off if Q were taken as normative, with a "Jesus movement" characterized by the Cynic counterculturalism of the early days. Meager history reveals itself as thin theology.

It is unfortunate and perhaps unfair to include Brevard Childs in such company, for if Childs's decades-long and heroic effort to restore biblical theology" to some coherence and credibility must receive some criticism, and be regarded as a noble venture flawed in possibly mortal fashion, it nevertheless deserves respect as an effort filled with a nobleness of purpose and weight of leaming. Childs represents precisely a biblical scholarship that has consciously chosen to remain within the context of the church's faith and in the service of theology. Its failure, then, to escape the distorting effects of academicism and epistemological monism (historical knowing = all knowing) stands as a particularly sober reminder of their pervasive power.

The present book completes a series of studies that began in 1970 with Childs's Biblical Theology in Crisis (Westminster). In a number of articles and in three other volumes, he has sought to combine historical analysis and theology through an approach that has come to be called "canonical criticism." Moving away from the fragmentation of the Old Testament so typical of the historians of Ancient Israel, Childs sought to preserve the significance of the final redaction of texts as well as their placement within the collection. In contrast to literary critics, however, Childs has also insisted on the significance of the redactional layers revealed by biblical texts, which, he thinks, is part of their canonical character. Childs has therefore sought to unite history and texts in what amounts to a textual history. What he finds theologically important is not a reconstructed history of Israel or of nascent Christianity, but rather the history of the developments of traditions such as they are reflected in the compositions of the Old and New Testaments. He hopes to find in the strands of tradition the development of faith traditions in Israel and Christianity.

The present volume is large both in size and in ambition. After an opening historical survey of biblical theology as a discipline and a sketch of his own canonical approach, Childs turns to "the discrete witness of the Old Testament" and the "discrete witness of the New Testament," in which he rehearses the contents and critical issues pertaining to the biblical traditions. The operative term is traditions. Childs does not deal specifically with compositions, but with themes and developments that run diachronically through various compositions. In one of the most fruitful parts of the book, Childs then exemplifies the spirit of his method by two exegetical exercises on the Akedah ("binding of Isaac") and the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. The truly distinctive aspect of this book, however, is Childs's attempt to make the turn from historical analysis to biblical theology to dogmatic theological reflection. He proceeds thematically through doctrinal topics, from the identity of God through Christ the Lord to ethics. For each topic, Childs pulls together the diverse witnesses of the Old and New Testaments, then synthesizes these witnesses into a "Biblical Theological Reflection," and then "Dogmatic Theological Reflection."

From the start, Childs's work has won admiration and severe criticism. Everyone recognizes him as a fine reader of texts and astonishingly learned, as well as a scholar whose desire to serve theology is genuine. At the same time, more than a few observers have noticed the conceptual shakiness that has attended his massive volumes. Childs has never been able to make perfectly clear what he means. In this volume, he continues to try to clarify and respond to his critics, sometimes with an edge.

And some of the problems inherent in his approach from the beginning here appear in acute form. Most obvious is the academic character of his work. In sharp contrast to his revered teacher, Van Rad, Childs has always begun with the status questionis posed by current scholarship rather than directly with the problems posed by the texts themselves. This has required him to stay abreast of everything written if he is to stay in the conversation on his own terms. But, as noted above, that has become impossible even for so indefatigable a reader. The present volume shows the results: despite including in his text a barrage of names that must be absolutely bewildering to any reader uninitiated into this debate, and despite continuing to supply endless (and valuable) bibliographies on every conceivable topic, Childs in fact has not kept abreast of important developments (e.g., in the literary criticism of the Gospels, especially Luke-Acts), and, in a sign of fatigue, shows some irritation toward recent contributions.

Childs's more significant difficulties are directly connected to his attempt to wed history and theology. The very massiveness of his efforts suggest their futility. No matter how much Childs protests what he wants to do, he never seems able to let go of the historical and engage the theological: even his "dogmatic" reflections tend to fall into reviews of scholarship. This may result from his lacking a genuinely theological imagination; certainly there is more earnestness than brilliance in these discussions. But he never seems to have grasped that what theology engages is the Living God who is encountered in human experience, and that what theology requires for the discernment and interpretation of these encounters is not an account of how compositions or themes developed, much less what scholars have had to say about these things; what theology requires is a living conversation with all these texts in all their diversity and irreducible particularity. Childs's attempt to synthesize witnesses into a package called "biblical theology" actually resists rather than enables such a conversation.

In sum, Mack shows how bad biblical scholarship can get and yet be published by a major press with enthusiastic blurbs; Childs shows how not even noble aspirations and amazing effort can create clear thinking; Levenson shows that even in a dark season there is reason to hope. Perhaps the conceptual confusion of history and theology found in so much biblical scholarship might indeed yet be clarified.

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