New Testament Theology is...
#This essay was originally written for Professor Kavin Rowe’s Spring 2023 seminar on New Testament Theology. I am posting it without edits or revisions other than reformatting; while I do not see the substance as needing any significant revision, there are no doubt minor word choices I would make differently if writing today. No doubt, also, I would expand on some topics more — particularly the Christian understanding of history — if I were writing to a less restrictive page count than Professor Rowe imposed upon us! But such a restriction was an immensely useful exercise, and I am a sharper thinker and writer for it. — TBC
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New Testament Theology is the synthetic, canonical interpretation of the New Testament according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith. Without the perspective and purpose of faith there is no canonical collection to be called “the New Testament” in the first place — to say nothing of the writings in that collection — and without the principle of faith there is no defending the concept of “theology” (or “canon”). A definition of the discipline without faith is implausible — perhaps even impossible.
Obviously, all three of these prepositional phrases — according to the principle of faith, from the perspective of faith, for the purpose of faith — must be elucidated, as must be the terms “synthetic” and “canonical” along the way. Accordingly, that task will occupy the bulk of this essay. In the concluding pages I will outline the shape of the constructive proposal implicit in the above definition.
I.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith is the most important element and depends on making the movement of faith or trust. Every act of interpretation presupposes an act of trust. Trust can never be reduced to an abstract affirmation of “the facts” but is always, inescapably, trust in a person. The question is therefore never “what do you believe?” so much as “whom do you trust?” — and New Testament Theology consists essentially in interpreting the New Testament according to its own answer to this question.
In a sense the great achievement of twentieth-century science and philosophy is to demonstrate the inescapability of trust in all knowledge. What Ernst Troeltsch identified in historiography as the principle of criticism — the necessity of making probabilistic rather than binarily definitive judgments about past events — was shown within decades of Troeltsch’s death in 1923 to go, like Bertrand Russell’s turtles, all the way down. Starting in 1927, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” showed the limit to precision and completeness in observation to be unavoidable — part of the quantum mechanics revolution demonstrating an inescapable randomness and indeterminacy at the deepest layer of physical reality. By 1931 Kurt Gödel had definitively proved his “incompleteness” theorems demonstrating that no mathematical-logical system could be constructed so perfectly as to not require at least one axiom underivable from within that system. And Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, articulated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), that the meanings of words depend substantially on their function within certain “language-games” spelled the death of a logical-symbolic understanding of language. Karl Barth spoke more rightly than he could have known in 1921 when he insisted on being more critical than the critics.
Postwar philosophical and sociological developments extended the scope of this fundamental principial uncertainty to all of daily life and thought. The hermeneutic tradition in philosophy extending back to Schleiermacher through Dilthey and Heidegger reached its apex in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960), which definitively exposed the Enlightenment’s scientistic “prejudice against prejudices” as a methodological fantasy in the humanities. No interpretation is possible without the interpreter bringing him or herself into the “fusion of horizons” which constitutes the act of interpretation. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) similarly upended the notion of linear “scientific progress” as a modernist myth: “settled” science does not evolve like the Ship of Theseus, seamlessly replaced bit by bit until it is entirely updated and overhauled, but rather occasionally finds itself shipwrecked on new kinds of data and in need of total reconstruction using new materials. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential The Social Construction of Reality (1966) described the extent to which the first-person experience of reality is influenced by “society” even as that same society is acted on by persons — a line of reasoning startlingly confirmed in subsequent decades by experiments in neuroscience demonstrating “intersubjectivity”: I really am something like the sum of the five people with whom I spend the most time.
All these insights, of course, can be and have been horrendously misapplied, particularly in the Nietzschean-Freudian style of certain postmodernists, who took them as license to unleash a sweeping relativism of values and adopt a suspicious posture toward all claims of truth. This application, however, is exactly wrong. What they really represent — particularly germane, and suggestive, for questions of theology — is the indissolubility of trust within knowledge. If no text can be “objectively” interpreted, if no interpreter can avoid being influenced by persons and social constructs, if the experience of reality is itself in a way dependent on how one seeks to observe it — then it becomes supremely important whom one chooses to trust or take to be reliable. I cannot choose by fiat how I construe reality, nor can I verify every point of my construal by direct experience; my life is too fragile and potentially short for that. Accepting that there is no singularly, objectively “right” way to construe reality does not guarantee that I cannot hit on a wrong way to construe reality, with potentially tragic results. I have never been hit by a car, nor seen anyone else hit by a car; my construal of reality is lacking (a radical empiricist, or someone wishing for my death, might say) key data; I must nevertheless trust my parents, my friends, and my fiancée who implore me to heed the danger of vehicular homicide and stay attentive while out on my road bike, rather than performing an experiment (on) myself with potentially deadly results. To wrong ways of construing reality, reality itself responds with cold, hard, frequently painful resistance.
There is therefore finally no alternative between a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of trust — and while the hermeneutic of trust may still get me killed if I trust foolishly, the hermeneutic of suspicion is all but guaranteed to lead to my destruction. So why should I not admit to myself whether or not I trust the New Testament and — if yes — embrace a comprehensive hermeneutic of trust for it? Trust “the New Testament,” I say, but I am really trusting a whole array of persons. Some of them translated and edited the Bibles and Greek New Testaments in which I read the text. The trustworthiness of their product depends in turn on a long history of ecclesiastics and caretakers who recognized these books as texts in and through which God speaks, and who collected them together as the definitive, normative textual corpus of the word of God. Those churchmen (and women) trusted both that the apostles, or their trusted assistants and associates, had written these books, and trusted the authors themselves to have written faithfully — to have been trustworthy witnesses to what they had seen and heard, to what God wanted them to write. Text-critical history can with real confidence establish the most probably original form of the text, for errors do creep in and persist even among persons of good faith; it can tell us all sorts of interesting and potentially useful things about the history of those texts’ transmission; it can even provide good evidence that certain persons are not trustworthy tradents — but it cannot finally determine whether an author is positively trustworthy.
At bottom — as at the top — is the person of Jesus. Deciding whether I trust the apostles’ portrayal of Jesus presses inexorably the question of whether I trust Jesus himself: for the Jesus of apostolic history demands to be received as the Christ of faith. A Jesus of suspicious, critical historical reconstructions may make less-sweeping claims — or no claims at all. The Jesus who emerges from a hermeneutic of trust does not and cannot make less than the absolute claim of faithful allegiance. “Choose this day whom you will serve…”
Interpreting the New Testament according to the principle of faith means that I first accept the absolute claim of this Jesus on my faith and trust, and then accept the claims of the apostolic writers about the immediate material implications of my faith in Jesus. It means that I interpret their writings on the presumption of coherence and sensibility, rejecting interpretations that assume they did not know what they were talking about or failed to communicate their meaning effectively. It means also that I interpret them synthetically, not seeking to make points of different emphasis or expression between writers (e.g., Galatians 2 and James 2) into principles in ultimate and irreconcilable tension — adherence to one of which must become the real badge of faith — but rather to discover a capacious, inter-canonical coherence between their writings. It similarly means that when seemingly intractable problems of history emerge from the text, I seek the maximally charitable and trusting interpretation. It means that I accept the possibility of divine causality as the simplest explanation for the miraculous, rather than bracketing it because, like Lessing, I (alas) no longer experience such miracles in daily life. Most of all it means that I accept, as a presumption of my exegesis, the whole chain of reasoning that runs from “he is not here; he is risen, just as he said!” through “God has made him both Lord and Christ” to “I am the first and the last, and the living one” — an inescapably theological chain of reasoning; which is to say that in doing New Testament interpretation I should and will always find myself at least embroidering a corner of the glorious garment of New Testament Theology.
II.
Interpreting the New Testament according to the perspective of faith, therefore, means situating myself in the community of interpretation that is formed by faith in Jesus: the church. This is true in two dimensions (if not more). For one thing, if I adopt a hermeneutic of trust toward the Jesus who speaks to me in the pages of the New Testament, I will discover that his proclamation of the kingdom (Matt. 4:17) led immediately to gathering a band of disciples around him (Matt. 4:18ff) to listen to his teaching (Matt. 5:1ff) and live according to it (Matt. 7:24ff). There is no individualistic response to “repent and believe the good news” that satisfies how Jesus expects my faithful allegiance to be expressed. For another thing, if I understand myself to be interpreting “the New Testament,” I am immediately under the rule — the κάνων — of the church. The community of Jesus’ followers has selected — or better, recognized — in advance for me that set of writings which enjoy authoritative status in it, and given it the name “the New Testament.” They did so according to the principle of faith: on the basis of trust in Jesus and the apostles who wrote about him. The enduring existence of this community, formed by faith and operating according to the principle of faith, is the only reason to interpret the New Testament as a “New Testament” rather than as the (no doubt very interesting) “early Christian literature” which William Wrede preferred to interpret. In combination, the Christian community and the New Testament canon in which it functions authoritatively form the perspective of faith.
At this point, some — paradigmatically Wrede — might object that the Christian community is far too much of a mess, historically and contemporarily, for the ecclesiastical judgment of canonicity to have any enduring value. The so-called “process of canonization” was a polemical and exclusivist exercise from the beginning, meant to draw sharp boundaries between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” that are historically unjustifiable. Furthermore, the “canonical” literature itself underwent a process of development and alteration as the post-apostolic communities sought (and created) authoritative guidance on issues that could not have been foreseen by Jesus or his apostles. How can such a self-evidently flawed rule remain not only valuable but indeed authoritative?
These standard objections are in part answered — or at least responded to — by the principle of faith. A posture of suspicion will always be inclined to interpret any evidence of the church’s messiness as warrant for the church’s invalidation, as much when it comes to the first as in the twenty-first century. Many of the scholarly judgments about the development and alteration of the canonized writings rest — at some level in their own genealogies — on maximally suspicious interpretation of odd details in the texts, presuming that the various redactors and editors were simultaneously so brilliant as to hide their work from subsequent generations and so incompetent as to leave self-evidently contradictory and messy texts for nineteenth-century historical critics to discover. (The notion that pre-Enlightenment exegesis was wholly “pre-critical” and naïve is undermined by reading Origen, Jerome, or Augustine and seeing them employ — sometimes advance upon — the critical tools of their days. The difference is in the first place a hermeneutic of suspicion rather than trust.)
But equally important is the institutional analogy to the principle of faith: the perspective of faith. Any community that orients itself around reading has judgments about what texts are central to its life and thought, as well as what kinds of readings are acceptable and appropriate. The question is how implicit or explicit those are. And though the history of the canon is as messy as that of the church, the judgments about central texts and acceptable readings appear to emerge quite early and straightforwardly. The “rule of the truth” identified by Irenaeus at the end of the second century was not a criterion for canonizing the New Testament writings; rather it was a kind of aural lens through which the church focused its habits of listening to divine truth, and through which it listened to “early Christian literature” to discern the voice of God instructing them in a living and active way. Here is the place for the crucial insight of Brevard Childs that the canonical process included the transmission, even editing, of the canonical writings, precisely because those who transmitted them did so in response to hearing the living voice of God speaking in them. The rule of the truth and the canonical writings formed a hermeneutical spiral that invited deeper recognition and better comprehension of both as true and canonical. The church is the community that lives in — lives out — that hermeneutical spiral.
Of course, in the present situation there is not one “church.” The prayer of Christ in John 17 that all his followers would be one has so far been answered only in a mystical sense if at all. Which church am I to trust to provide the perspective of faith from which I interpret? While no answer seems likely to be truly satisfactory this side of the eschaton (one thinks of Robert Jenson’s remark about the “impossibility” of doing theology in the situation of a divided church), a few principles seem to flow from the above. Trust the providence of God placing one in a particular tradition. Trust a church that seeks basic doctrinal and ethical conformity with the generations that recognized the canon of Scripture: orthodox Trinitarianism, Chalcedonian Christology, the basic pattern of New Testament ethics. Trust a church that seeks to submit itself to the New Testament and live out what it hears the voice of God speaking. Most of all, trust a church that preaches Christ, the crucified and risen One.
Interpreting the New Testament from the perspective of faith means that I am freed to begin my investigation of the canonical writings with the deposit of theological teaching laid down in the rule of the truth. It means that I accept the church’s historic judgment about ruling out — and ruling in — certain categories of readings on explicitly theological grounds; Marcion’s read of Paul is right out. It means joyfully identifying my scholarship as from (and for) the church, rather than some other, less cosmically significant community of interpretation. The beginnings of New Testament Theology are in the basics of Christian theology, not in some other discourse; and the basics of Christian theology are found in the Christ’s church.
III.
The third phrase flows directly out of the second. Interpreting the New Testament according to the purpose of faith means not only situating my interpretation in the church but for the church. What is the church’s task in interpreting the New Testament? It is listening to the voice of God in order to be given life and governed by it. It is the unfolding of the sacred text for the upbuilding of the members of the body in faith.
The Kantian ideal of the disinterested scholar, excising her own interests when coming to a text in bold pursuit of the truth wherever it might lead, was in its best form a noble fiction. Even a valuable fiction, perhaps; there can be no doubt that the historical-critical posture uncovered real insights into the text and history of Scripture, with which all who seek to be intellectually honest must reckon. Yet far more often the fiction was exposed within a generation or two as a vicious lie. The “life of Jesus” research of the nineteenth century produced (in the memorable image of Albert Schweitzer) a succession of scholars staring down deep wells, seeing their own faces dimly reflected, and triumphantly declaring that they had discovered the real Jesus — Who looked, after all that labor, just like them. The enormous philological and linguistic scholarship that produced Kittel’s Dictionary turned out to be not only based on disastrously misguided semantic theory (memorably skewered in James Barr’s 1961 The Semantics of Biblical Language) but also shot through at numerous points with the pernicious strain of racialized anti-Judaism that infected German biblical scholarship from at least the late nineteenth century right up to 1945. Because it is done by human beings and not by God, scholarship usually turns out to have an “interest” — especially when it is declared most energetically, as in the classic historical-critical mode, that all interests have been put aside.
What use then for the historical-critical method in Christian scholarship, or indeed in New Testament Theology? The proper analogy is the one St. Augustine recommended with respect to pagan philosophy: the Egyptian goods asked of Israel’s neighbors on the night of the Exodus. Carried — baptized, even — through the Red Sea, the precious metals and beautiful things can be righteously put to the task of building and beautifying the Tabernacle. The Bezalels and Oholiabs of the Christian academy are free to use whatever materials and tools they find God commanding them to use in their work; God even promises that His Spirit of wisdom and understanding will guide them. But the Egyptian gold can also be molded into a deadly idol. Wrede and Troeltsch were merely being honest: if Moses delays in coming down from the mountaintop, Aaron is ready to submit to a very different spirit and replace New Testament Theology with the history of religious ideas found in early Christian literature. “Look, I threw the gold into the fire, and out came this calf!” is the time-worn protest of scholars affecting shock that their deliberately faithless investigations of the New Testament have produced the dissolution of faith in the pews. That idolatry is nonsensical and self-defeating is, historically speaking, no proof against its indulgence.
Interpreting the New Testament for the purpose of faith means that I pursue biblical scholarship that serves the people of God — and God Himself. It means that I seek interpretations and angles on the text that glorify God and are, to use the patristic language, “fitting” of God’s character and attributes. It also means that I avoid tearing down and plucking up the faith of my brothers and sisters in the church by my scholarship, seeking rather to build up and to plant — understanding myself as at best God’s worker and craftsman; they are God’s field and building. Likewise, it means that I interpret with an eye to the practical effects of similar interpretations that have come before — which necessitates knowing the history of interpretation and accepting that it is possible that earlier, churchly interpreters may have understood the text better than me despite my being “up to date.” It means, I submit, that I accept something like the medieval understanding of multiple senses of Scripture, rather than restricting my investigations to a probably nonexistent singular sense — even as I seek to keep myself and my interpretations more rooted in the “plain sense” than at least some medieval exegetes were willing to do. New Testament Theology necessitates an expansive understanding of the interpreter’s task along some lines; historical and grammatical exposition will not be sufficient, and no scholar has the self-control necessary to stick exclusively to those tasks anyway. Better to expand the task along such lines, then, that explicitly seek to serve and strengthen the church.
IV.
All this has so far resulted in only principles of interpretation. What would a work of New Testament Theology produced according to this proposal, functioning on the principles we have outlined, actually look like?
It would first of all be shaped canonically: not seeking to track a theological idea’s development from historically earlier to later sources, but from canonically earlier to later texts. Start with the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Look from the differing angle of the Gospel of John. See how the Spirit-empowered followers of the Way apply and teach about it in the Acts of the Apostles. Watch how the apostles and their friends — Paul, James, Peter, Jude, John, the writer of Hebrews — discuss it in their letters. Observe finally how it is transfigured in the Apocalypse. To be sure, there is (as Childs recognized) a necessary place for discussing the historical development of the ideas, but let it be done within the context of each text, rather than as a control on which texts are discussed and in which order. Leave the “history of religious ideas” to the departments of religious studies, which are better-versed in that sort of thing anyways; let scholars — theologians — of the New Testament be unapologetically theological.
Then, with the differing canonical perspectives on that theological idea expounded, they should be synthesized. Let coherence emerge between the differing perspectives; not a root coherence that best explains the historical development of the various perspectives, but an apex coherence that best draws their gaze up to a single focus. Such a coherence may not be explicitly found in any of the New Testament texts, nor be plausibly identifiable as what any of the New Testament writers might have specifically thought they meant. Its discernment may require the Scriptural imagination of the theologian or the application of insights from the history of interpretation and theology. (It may even take prayer to discern.) None of this should be cause for theological concern: “For now we see in part and we prophesy in part…”
As the Pauline dictum suggests, New Testament Theology may ultimately be an eschatological discipline. The promise of the historical-critical method was originally that the one true meaning of the text and an accurate, coherent history of development could be arrived at and universally agreed upon, so that a more solid foundation might be laid for Christian reading of the New Testament than was supplied by the New Testament itself. That turned out to be a pipe dream which eroded its own foundations. Turning away from this dream in pursuit of the above vision of New Testament Theology may be better-founded — upon divine promises rather than human self-assurance — but the kind of apex theological coherence described above will certainly be impossible to achieve in a manner that satisfies everyone. This should be no counsel of despair, but rather a spur to perpetual, eager investigation of the canon’s theological import: “For when the perfect comes, the partial shall pass away… Therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”