Is the NT the last chapter in a story?

This is the kind of statement I hear made by those of an N.T. Wrightian mould. Which is not a bad thing in itself, but I think care needs to be taken concerning the "status" of these kinds of statements. I think it would be more accurate to say that according to the theology of certain (all?) authors in the New Testament, God's history of redemption was conceived in such a way that they were now standing in the penultimate chapter. That was perhaps the theological message then of the apostles.

But this is a statement of a different order from that which claims that the New Testament itself is, traditio-historically, the final stage of an evolving Heilsgeschichte, in which what the Old Testament started is now brought to conclusion (the position, I believe of theologians such as Gese and Stuhlmacher, who I posted on here). This is to misconstrue the theological function of a canon of scripture within the community of faith. Here are Childs' thoughts on the issue:

The New Testament has its own distinctive tradition-historical development with its own peculiar dynamic and its wide range of diversity. It is not simply a continuation of traditional trajectories from the Old Testament. Indeed a serious confusion of categories results when the canonical unity of the two testaments represented by the Christian Bible is translated into merely historical categories as if the Old Testament flowed by inexorable laws into the New Testament. Rather the New Testament has its discrete historical context, its traditions were treasured by different tradents, and its central force stems from another direction than that of the Old Testament. Thus the New Testament is not a midrash on the Old, nor is it simply the last chapter of a story. Even the term 'Heilsgeschichte' calls for careful nuancing since it represents a theological judgement respecting continuity and is not simply a claim for empirical historical judgement (Biblical Theology, 212).

Though I'm sure N.T. Wright would make this kind of distinction (I don't remeber him doing so, but then I've only read his historical-critical work, which - I hasten to add - doesn't automatically translate into biblical theology), a get the feeling that a lot of his fans don't, especially emergent types for whom "story" has become the central theological category, at the expense of other biblical forms such as psalmody, law, and wisdom (e.g. listen to Brian McClaren's sermon: "Which story do you live in?")

It is considerations like this that led me to call my blog "Narrative and Ontology." (See the most fascinating chapter of Childs' Biblical Theology, "From Witness to Subject Matter.")

Update: The blog Theological Ramblings of an Anglican Ordinand provides us with some useful N.T. Wright quotes showing us the nuance in Wright's approach:

Worldviews may be studied in terms of four features: characteristic stories, fundamental symbols; habitual praxis; and a set of questions and answers.

In other words, narrative is one element in a more complex whole.

And while we're on the topic of Tom Wright, Richard links to a sermon of his on Ps 98 (scroll to the bottom of the page).

Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham

This is cute. I've never had too much contact with Billy Graham (apart from a tract I read when I was 18, which rocked my world, as I wrote here). What impresses me most in the few Youtube clips I have seen is his mixture of firmness and conviction with gentleness and obvious love.Thanks to Steve Thorngate for the link:

Go to Halden's blog

I've found myself linking to inhabitatio dei so much recently that I think I might as well tell people straight out to subscribe to him in a reader and keep up to date yourselves. I'm not a systematic theologian at all - though I yearn to be - so a lot of what Halden writes just goes over my head. But when I do grasp where he's coming from I see flickerings of light that not only point the way I want to be going but also warm up the dark recesses of a soul hungering for a bit of quality in its walk with God. Sounds pretentious, I know, but we're holistic, integrated beings so I don't think one can look down too much on the cerebral athletics that these systematic types spend their time practising.

If there's one thing I'd like to see more of on his blog it would be exegesis. Isn't it the case that whatever one holds concerning the "divine reality," the "substance" of faith, it is mediated through Scripture as a vehicle? Sometimes I wish that the intricate contours of Scripture could play a more substantive role in his theorizing about protology and eschatology, Hebraic and Greek ontology, the function of gender in the ministry, or the correct stance of the church vis-á-vis the world. Perhaps this is the place to cite a criticism Brevard Childs made of T.F. Torrance concerning his work on the relation between faith and science:

Although I have tried reading several of his learned books on this subject, I do not feel that I understand him well enough to offer a critical assessment and I shall leave this tasks to others. My disappointment in his writings in this area is that whatever I do understand of his approach does not cause me to return to scripture with a fresh illumination of the biblical text, which in my judgement, is a crucial task of dogmatics.

Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 406.

And while I'm on the topic of polemics, here's Halden's latest goody:

I’ve written quite a few polemical sort of pieces on this blog, some of which, in retrospect, end up being quite bitting [sic]at points. More often than not I think this is warranted and appropriate. Christian love should never come to be equated with rhetorical nicety or saccharine friendliness. Too often, I think, our attempts at caution, precision, and measuredness reflect a sort of false humility that refuses to allow theological subject matter to obviously matter to us in our disagreements with one another. If I and someone else can utterly disagree about certain fundamental implications of the gospel and carry on as if our disagreement is no big deal, what does that say about how seriously we take the gospel? How often does our politeness really just indicate the degree to which we view theology as a role-playing game rather than a life and death endeavor. There’s far too little fear and anger in theology. And far too much etiquette.

Mossad almost got Dr. Mengele

For those who don't know, Dr. Mengele was the personifaction of evil.

Here's the brief NYT report, Agent Says Israelis Let a Nazi Escape:

Israeli agents who kidnapped the Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 found the notorious death camp doctor Josef Mengele but let him get away, one of the operatives said Tuesday.

The operative, Rafi Eitan, now an 81-year-old Israeli cabinet minister, said that he and other Mossad agents located Mengele in a Buenos Aires apartment with his wife at the time of Eichmann’s capture in 1960. But the operatives decided that trying to seize him would risk sabotaging the capture of Eichmann, who was being held in a safe house before being whisked out of the country.

Mr. Eitan’s comments indicated that the Israelis were closer to Mengele than had been previously thought and shed light on why they decided to abandon an attempt to catch him.
“When you have one operation, you’re taking a certain level of risk,” he said. “If you’re doing a second operation at the same time, you double the risk not only for the second operation but for the first one, as well.”

A free commentary on Matthew/Mark!

Honestly, I couldn't believe this when I read it. I figured there's got to be snag. But no, Logos are in the process of preparing a new commentary series, the Cornerstone Biblical Commentary (9 vols). In order to get publicity they are simply offering the commentary of Matthew/Mark for free. Go here for the details. I've downloaded it and it looks like it'll be a useful supplement to my growing digital library. One of the authors is the blogosphere's very own Darell Bock (who also edits the whole). I'm not much a New Testament person, but I've been told by Chris Tilling that he's a highly respected scholar. I look forward to reading what he has to say about prophecy and fulfilment in Matthew!

By the way, I really am trying not to sound like a salesman here. It just goes to show that the difference between form and content is not something that can be identified by genre alone.

Israel's worldview?

Chris Wright, in his fascinating book Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (about which I have written a book review), outlines Israel's "worldview" in his opening chapter.

He defines a worldview thus:

A worldview is a comprehensive set of assumptions that a person or culture makes in answer to several fundamental questions that face humans everywhere. (17)

The questions include the following:

1. Where are we? (What is the nature of the universe and this planet on which we live? How does it come to be here and has it a future?)
2. Who are we? (What does it mean to be human and how, if at all, are we distinct from the rest of the living creatures we live among?)
3. What's gone wrong? (What is the cause of the way things are, which we instinctively feel is not the way they should be? Why are we in such a mess?)
4. What's the solution? (What, if anything, can be done to put things right? Is there a hope for the future, and if so, hope in what or whom and by when?)

Wright goes on to outline the "worldview of Israel in Old Testament times" (a phrase I find problematic):

1. This world is part of the good creation of one single living God, whom we know as the LORD. It wholly belongs to this God (no part belongs to other gods), and the LORD is sovereign over all that exists "in heaven above, on the earth below and under the earth."


2. "We" in the wider sense are human beings made in the image of the creator God, made for relationship with God and one another.


3. What has gone wrong is that we human beings have rebelled against the creator God, in moral and spiritual disobedience, and this has brought evil consequences into every aspect of human life, including the individual personality, our relationships with one another, with our physical environment and with God.


4. The solution lies with the same creator God who has addressed the problems of the nations of humanity by a historical project of redemption, beginning with the choice of Abraham, the father or our nation Israel. This will eventually extend to include the blessing of all nations and a new creation.

Does that hold water? What do people think?

This may work as a distillate of the canonical scriptures in their final form, but I doubt many historical Israelites would have answered all these questions in the same way. Having said that, I'd like to think that their partial viewpoints at particular times in their history would have adumbrated something like this. This worldview (if that's the right word ...) is the product of the prophetic shaping of Israel's traditions, and as such is primarily a canonical/theological rather than a historical/sociological phenomenon. In this, Christ Wright differs from Tom Wright's use of the term. Hence my problem with the phrase "worldview of Israel in Old Testament times" (though Wright does qualify this in footnote 3).

P.S. This will be the subject of our Bible study this coming Thursday. Ich bin gespannt zu sehen was daraus wird!

P.P.S By some extraordinary coincident, Jon of The Theological Ramblings of an Ordinand has posted on the same issue today, seen from the angle of N.T. Wright (who really is a legend). He also links to an mp3 lecture by Chris Wright.

Book Review: Old Testament Ethics for the People of God

The following review was originally posted at Chrisendom.

Christopher J. Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004)

The title alone is enough to make you baulk at the scope this volume attempts to achieve. This isn't just a description of the ethics of ancient Israel, nor is it a description of the ethics found in the literary deposit of this community: “the Old Testament.” It is an attempt to locate the ethics of both within their true Sitz im Leben, the lived contemporary reality of the true Israel, the Church. Before we even enter its pages, then, one can expect at the outset an attempt to integrate historical critical, literary, philosophical, and theological concerns in a synthesis of the like rarely encountered in the guild of biblical studies. If Wright has succeeded will remain to be tested by those with an adequate knowledge in all these areas. Critique by specialists in only one area will run the risk of confusing the particular with Wright's broader vision.

A three-dimensional approach to OT ethics such as this, which strives both for descriptive accuracy and theological normativity, cannot be content to tell us “what the OT said.” A model is needed in order both to integrate the parts and span the horizons, and this is the task Wright's first section: A Structure for Old Testament Ethics. He takes the now well-known route of “world-view” analysis (á la N.T. Wright) in order to provide a context in which to make sense of and correlate the mass of OT ethical material. Though he often talks of “what an ancient Israelite thought,” it is clear that the world view he has in mind is the one presupposing the entire OT canon – an entity with its own hermeneutical and theological integrity (see footnote 3). If one poses this totality the four “world-view questions” (Where are we? Who are we? What's gone wrong? What's the solution?), we come up with an “Israelite” answer along the following lines: we are in God's creation, created for relationship in the image of God, the created order is in a state of fallenness due to our rebellion and so God's solution has been to initiate a historical project of redemption. The “we” in the narrow sense is Israel, elected to be the means of God's redemption in the world. As Wright goes on to explain, this “we” can be expanded in different directions: either paradigmatically to stand for humanity as a whole, eschatologically to stand for the redeemed community of the eschaton, or typologically to refer to the church.

Wright identifies three primary “actors” in this world-view who stand in triangular relationship to each other: God, Israel and the Land. This so-called “ethical triangle” provides Wright with a framework for sifting through the diverse OT material as well as a foundation for expanding the OT material beyond its original horizon.

These three “pillars of Israel's faith” are padded out in the following three chapters. Accordingly, the “theological angle” provides us with the “fundamental axiom” of OT ethics: “ethical issues are at every point related to God—to his character, his will, his actions and his purpose” (23). Wright takes us through the OT's presentation of God's identity, particularly as it is manifested in the narrative accounts of his actions. This activity, salvific in nature, provides a foundation for ethics. God takes the initiative (e.g. the exodus), his people respond, and obedience flows out of thankfulness for this action. These actions are combined with God's speaking (e.g. at Sinai) in order to bring about his purposes for creation through Israel. Wright sums up the heilsgeschichtliche context: “Old Testament ethics, based on history and bound for a renewed creation, is thus slung like a hammock between grace and glory” (35). In the meantime, our actions should be grounded in a knowledge of this God as we emulate him by “walking in his ways.”

The “social angle” references Israel on the triangular grid. Wright points out that within the aforementioned meta-narrative, redemption has a social dimension. In Gen. 12:1-3 God responds to the fall by choosing a nation, which was to pattern, model and be a vehicle of this redemption. In terms of the application of OT ethics, then, our hermeneutical procedure must take very seriously the communal nature of the people of Israel. We must not jump from isolated principles to the present, but rather first locate that principle within its original social context. Only then can we draw an analogy with present “Israel,” before going on to see the implications for the world at large. Yet the distinctive nature of this nation as opposed to the other nations mustn't be lost. This nation has a unique experience of God, which gives its history a didactic quality. Through it we learn about God (the “theological angle”) and we learn how to live (the “social angle”). In short, Israel is God's paradigm, an important concept for Wright as he attempts to make Israel's ethics ours. According to Wright, a paradigm is

a model or pattern that enables you to explain or critique many different and varying situations by means of some single concept or set of governing principles” (63).

Israel as paradigm helps the Church today implement what was true then to a new situation now.

The final essential element in Israel's world view is the Land, providing us with an “economic angle.” When understood within Israel's story, we see that the promised land is a theological entity, part of the pattern of redemption. The understanding of the land as both divine gift and divine tenement, for example, has what Wright calls “enormous paradigmatic power” for the appropriation of Israel's economic ethics. Within the divine economy, we see that the welfare of the land and its inhabitants functioned as a “covenantal measuring gauge,” signally the quality of the relationship between God and his people.

Following the belief that “God's relation to Israel in their land was a deliberate reflection of God's relation to human kind on the earth” (183), Wright moves on in the following two chapters to work out the implications of this “redemptive triangle” for the ethics of ecology and economics in general. In the case of ecology, for example, he discovers parallels to the affirmations made at the narrower level concerning Israel in the land of Canaan: “divine ownership (the earth belongs to God, Ps. 24:1) and divine gift (the earth he has gifted to humanity, Ps. 115.16)” (103)—the so-called “creation triangle.” This double claim becomes the foundation for Wright's ethical reflection in the following two chapters. The fact that a concern for ecology is largely foreign to the authors of the Bible demonstrates how we can paradigmatically appropriate the Bible's principles for issues beyond the Bible's original horizon.

The most intriguing chapter is the sixth, in which Wright, having now illustrated ways in which the Bible can be paradigmatically appropriated, rises once again to theory in order to discuss two others ways of appropriating the OT: the eschatological and the typological. By means of fascinating triangular diagrams, he shows how these different methods are distinct yet complementary. Paradigmatically interpreted, for example, the land becomes the earth as it is now: cursed. Eschatologically, the past becomes a template for the new, and so we have a foretaste of the new creation. Typologically, for the apocalyptic community caught at this point in the “in-between-time,” the land is now fulfilled by the koinonia, the fellowship of believers. This complex interrelationship is then demonstrated exegetically in relation to the jubilee (Lev. 25).

The rest of this main part of the book is dedicated to further ethical issues: politics and the nations, justice and righteousness, law and the legal system, culture and family and finally the way of the individual. The volume is rounded off in Part 3 with a historical overview of the church's wrestling with this question, a bibliographic overview of the contemporary attempts to deal with the question of OT ethics from a confessional standpoint and a detailed discussion of hermeneutics and authority in the OT. A final appendix presents us with some broad perspectives which Wright finds helpful for setting the “Canaanite question” within it the context of broader biblical considerations. Though Wright doesn't feel he has solved the issue, he feels these considerations help “contain” them.

In response, I can only echo a critic's comments on the blurb at the back of the book: this book is “truly a magnum opus and should be at the top of the reading list for any student, teacher, minister or layperson interested in the relevance of the first part of the Bible to modern ethical issues.” Issues that have dogged the church since its inception are taken up once again and re-articulated in a clear, logical and thorough manner, taking into account the latest developments in rhetorical, literary, and, to a degree, canonical criticism. Whether Wright's conclusions become the consensus opinion of the next generation obviously remains to be seen, but I can't imagine future discussion of the issue ignoring the well-thought out arguments laid out in this book.

Update: As if by coincidence, David Congdon of The Fire and the Rose has this same day posted a detailed look at "missional hermeneutics," the subject of Chris Wright's other magnum opus: The Mission of God. Check it out!

The text-critical challenge to theological exegesis

In my post The unity of Scripture in its diverse transmission, I raised the theological challenge of the textual diversity of Scripture. The early church depended largely on the Greek translation of the Hebrew, and, as becamse increasingly clear, the two diverged quite a lot. How does Childs' "canonical approach" deal with this?

From Childs’ perspective, the issue of textual tradition is derivative of the concept of canon, as it was only when the

“formation of the literature had reached a final stage of development within the canonical process [that] concern for the text of the literature emerge[d]." (Introduction to the Old Testament, 94).

As such there is an analogy to the considerations in my thread on the two testamental nature of Christian scripture, where I claimed that the integrity of the individual testaments should be held in critical tension with the one divine reality to which they testify. The same analogy is found in my thread on the literal and spiritual sense of scripture, where I claimed that the fundamental focus of Christian interpretation is on the spiritual sense, while still tied to and held in critical tension with the literal sense in its integrity.

And so it is in this case: Biblical theology does not attempt to remain at the textual level, as this would be to miss the key which unites dissident voices into a harmonious whole. Instead, the attempt should be made to hear the different voices in relation to the divine reality to which they point in diverse ways. To fail to grapple with this underlying substance of the two witnesses, and thus to collapse the spiritual and literal senses into one meaning, is to commit the sin which Childs calls “Biblicism.” Biblicism is the attempt to remain at the time conditioned level of the text while attempting to read the Bible theologically. This move can be seen in attempts to simply adopt the particular interpretive methods of various New Testament authors as normative for today, as well as in the attempt to elect one text tradition as more authentic or somehow spiritually deeper. Such a move is to misunderstand the theological relation of the text’s authority to its function as kerygmatic witness (see Childs' Biblical Theology, 85).

It should be added that if one text tradition is to be preferred, then Childs has argued for the MT. His argument, however, is not so much based on inherent properties of the translation, as the theological need to maintain the "ontological unity of the people of God" (Israel/church).

This is the final post in my thread on the divine and human authorship of Scripture. My next thread will look at the Christological content of the Bible.

Thoughts on the nature of "midrash" and "aggada"

Over at the newly established blog Sefer ha-Bloggadah, a rabbi makes the following succinct denfinition of the nature of midrash and its relation to halakha:

Midrash is the life blood of the halakhic system. I don't think that midrash was made by the sages in order to re-enliven Judaism, I think it was part of the great body of work and was never a separate thing. Today we think of midrash as good post-modernists do, busily locating ourselves here and there in relation to our matrices of self, but the rabbis had no such self-consciousness about that. For the sages, midrash was all of a piece with Torah (in the larger sense of the word). It was true in the finest sense of truth, which is why modern midrash is often so bad - it's written as if it were a novel or a story, when it's really more like a fairy tale, written through archetypes and the power of a lack of details that comes with stories told and retold for generations with plenty of room left for us to fill in ourselves - and to fill ourselves in. Midrash is meant to tell us about values, as opposed to rules. Rules are secondary in the sense that they come afterwards. The rules express the stories told in midrash. The midrash tells us about our relationship with God, Halakha only tells us the recipe - it's as different as remembering the smell of my mother's wheatbread baking, and baking the bread from the recipe she gave me. One is my bones remembering love, and the other is how to make that love live for my son.

I found that very helpful, in particular this bit:

"it's really more like a fairy tale, written through archetypes and the power of a lack of details."

It reminds me of a comment made by Brueggemann in his book The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. I forget the exact words, but he compared midrash to Freud's psycho-analyism, claiming that Freud was more influenced by his Jewish roots then he cared to admit. And for Brueggemann, the comparison was not meant to be derogatory, as he always revels in the "Jewishness" of the "great deconstructors" (Freud, Marx, and Derrida).

A certain Sarah shares the following thoughts on the significance of aggadah:

As a literary sort, I have my own answer as to why Aggadah is valuable: the narrative structure of a parable can compel analysis and inquiry in a way entirely different from a straight-up midrash halakhah or talmudic discussion. Humans express deep truths through narrative art, and whether or not a story really happened has very little bearing on whether it is affective or honest. The traditional project of aggadah is a way to engage in the most deeply human of projects, to insert rabbinic meaning into the canonical text and thus re-enliven it. And by our rereading of these aggadot, inventing and reenvisioning our own interpretations, may we come to engage in all these facets of the aggadic process.

I particularly found the following interesting:

"The traditional project of aggadah is ... to insert rabbinic meaning into the canonical text and thus re-enliven it."

I'd love to understand the logic that binds the the two together - text and tradition - into a meaningful whole. Not that I think the logic is lacking ... but I'd love to see it developed. I'm attempting to think through such issues in relation to the Christian use of a rule of faith, allegory, and a hermeneutic of love. I'll soon be reviewing a book on Biblical authority, a collection of essays on the subject from Jewish and Christian perspectives. I look forward to discovering areas of convergence and divergence.