Theology Today - Vol 48, No.1 - April 1991 - BOOK REVIEW - Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity

89 - Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity

Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity

Edited by Roger Brooks and John J. Collins

Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990 242 Pp. $22.95.

This important collection of papers is the result of a conference at Notre Dame in 1980 that addressed the interface between Jews and Christians concerning Scripture interpretation. The mood and intent of the papers are largely conciliatory, though the hard issues are not covered over.

The papers are divided into three sections. In the first section, four papers are offered concerning the name and character of the literary corpus variously termed Hebrew Scriptures, Tanak, or Old Testament. These several discussions share an irenic posture about the pluriformity of the text, recognizing that Jews and Christians read different

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texts and read them differently but can learn from each other and must read in each other's presence.

The second part of the book, which I take to be its most interesting section, offers four essays on the interaction beween Jewish and Christian interpretations, in relation to historical criticism. In this section, the two heavy-weight papers are by Rolf Rendtorff and Jon Levenson. Rendtorff argues with great authority that Jews and Christians can do very much by the way of a common biblical theology, and offers programmatic suggestions for how this might be done. Levenson's paper is complex, but revolves around two polemical points. On the one hand, Christian interpreters of Hebrew Scripture tend to impose Christian categories on the text in ways unacceptable to Jews. On the other hand, Levenson chides Christian interpreters who move away from their confessional position and seek to do "neutral," objective critical scholarship. In doing so, they betray their own proper interpretive locus. Either point is an important one, but they are difficult to take together. Levenson seeks to have it both ways; that is, Christian interpreters must not impose Christian categories of interpretation, and Christian interpreters must not try to be "neutral." The inescapable outcome, which of course Levenson intends, is that Christians must cease to interpret the "Old Testament" at all, for to do it either in a Christian way or in a neutral way distorts the text. Levenson does not recognize, however, that a serious Christian biblical interpretation in principle cannot give up interpretation of the older Testament that belongs definitionally to the Christian enterprise. Thus, what Christians must do Levenson regards as illegitimate in principle. Levenson poses exceedingly important and difficult issues, and the rich suggestions of Rendtorff do not in fact meet Levenson's argument.

The third section of the book is a series of examples of textual readings. In the long run, this part of the book may be the most important, because the way Jews and Christians will learn to read in common (or at least in mutual respect), and without theoretical or polemical absolutes, is by concrete work with texts. What is clear in these essays is that issues in Jewish-Christian interpretation are intruded upon by historical criticism, which has been a largely Christian enterprise. It may be that the issue for Christians is not first of all how to deal with Jewish readings, but rather redeciding about historical-criticism, which lives uneasily with the claims of an interpreting faith community. It is telling and surprising that it may be Jewish-Christian exchanges about the text that make us aware of the problematic character of much of our criticism, not because in its main line it has been anti-Jewish, but because so-called objective criticism is at best an uneasy partner to any serious religious reading.

This is an exceedingly important book, not because it offers solutions to these vexing problems, but because it probes issues that must be addressed. The awareness that Christian-modernist critical

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presuppositions are tendentious, self-serving, and denigrating of much Jewish reading requires us to reformulate the categories of interpretation. Moreover, it is clear that Jewish-Christian exchanges are inevitably asymmetrical. The Christian readers in this collection are characteristically accommodating and conciliatory (which in part evokes some of Levenson's critique). That posture of Christians (which seems very different from Jewish voices in this book) suggests that the issue of Jewish and Christian interpretation requires of Christians not only attention to the substantive meaning of the text, but attention to the long, abrasive, mean-spirited practice of the Christian community. Thus, the issue cannot be approached innocently as an intellectual hermeneutical problem but is permeated with a long history of interpretive imperalism. Christians will have to deal with that long history of interpretation even as the theological meanings in the text are pursued.

Though undoubtedly important, this book is in an odd way unsatisfying. It wants to deal with the problem of Christian supersessionism, the assumption that the New Testament fulfills and supersedes the Old Testament. Supersessionism, to be sure, is a hard, crude, even embarrassing word, and I have no brief for what it entails. That to which the word points, however, is not so easily overcome, for the term is a mechanical way of referring to the normativeness or definitiveness of the Christian proclamation of the gospel around the events of Jesus. Unfortunately, the collection includes no representative of that position that can be expressed urbanely and without heavy-handed arrogance. Indeed, Levenson seems to call for such a Christian voice as an honest voice. Such a voice in the conversation would remind us that the issues in this book are much more difficult than the irenic tone of the book might suggest. The mere assertion of the problem with supersessionism does not move us far at all about the serious theological issue. Provisionally, many scholars have settled for bilingual interpretation, which may lead to schizophrenia, or to the abandonment of one's "mother tongue."

This lack in the book does not detract from its importance. The answers given here are not adequate, but they are as far along as we have come. The book will continue to be important in reminding us that we have painful, unfinished business that is partly interpretive and intellectual, and partly political and historical. The book intends that we shall not continue our work without being aware of and troubled by that unfinished business, even if we do not now know how to finish. Among the gains of this book that will persist is a deep uneasiness that must inevitably haunt Christians who cannot escape either our text or our past.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN

Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia