Theology Today - Vol 41, No. 4 - January 1985 - BOOK REVIEW - Meanings:The Bible as Document and as Guide

478 - Meanings:The Bible as Document and as Guide

Meanings:
The Bible as Document and as Guide
By Krister Stendahl
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 244 pp. $14.95.

This book is a collection of a dozen scholarly communications and dictionary entries from the 1950s and '60s, plus two papers each in a

480 - Meanings:The Bible as Document and as Guide

lighter rhetorical but not theological vein from the 1970s and '80s. The author is the newly appointed Bishop of Stockholm, who served as dean of the Harvard Divinity School for more than half of his nearly thirty years there. Unlike many such collections this one is well worth acquiring. There is a spirit of wicked fun in even the most sober entries, which reminds one that not everyone is disqualified for the ministry by the fact that cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

Each paper (some done originally in Swedish or German) provides a mixture of critical scholarship and wisdom about the kind of writing the Bible is, its scope, and its limitations. It is a book of the church which, by its canonizing process, created it-having first received the Masoretic canon (in Stendahl's Lutheran tradition) from Israel. The rabbis viewed this collection as complete because prophecy was no more. The next three hundred years of church life sorted out the written testimony of the apostolic age which best described the "something new" that had happened.

The Faith and Order meeting of the World Council of Churches in Montreal in the summer of 1963 pondered a draft that said that the church lives sola traditione, by tradition alone. It did not pass. But as a historically adequate statement, in the light of contemporary biblical studies it is an obvious --- statement, a platitude. It is obvious that on this-analysis, Scripture is tradition … a special amount of tradition set apart in a special way … neither all the earliest tradition … nor the greatest spiritual achievement of the early tradition…. The contemporary sophisticated equivalent to the outmoded dream of the simple teachings of Jesus is the pure kergyma…. Why could it not be that they really finally got the point in A.D. 150, or at Trent, or at Augusburg, or at some other points in time and space?

This paragraph is from an essay entitled "One Canon is Enough" (pp. 60f.), first contributed to the 1967-71 deliberations of a commission established by the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity. It is part of Stendahl's holy iconoclasm from within the Lutheran family which is suspicious of "using the word 'Gospel' as if it were almost a personal power-doing, acting walking around on its own-severed from God and Christ" (p. 56); which thinks that, "When Christian preaching is defined as an ever-repeated proclamation of the kerygma, then the NT evidence and preception have been seriously skewed" (p. 51); which holds that, "In the 'sacramental acts' of the church, the Christians experience the grace and power of the new situation that they had met and accepted when first approached by the kerygma" (p. 178).

The collection's main thesis is that the books of the Bible have many meanings, even as the NT has many kerygmata. The biblical scholar's chief calling is to disclose what the various books meant to the people who wrote them--a descriptive task. Theologians and preachers have the equally arduous task of determining what that meaning means to believers of subsequent ages. The Bible's role as normative for Jewish and Christian existence is what makes it a classic. Stendahl welcomes the enrichment provided by methods of literary criticism (new criticism, structuralism, etc.) but fears that in the process the sense of the

482 - Meanings:The Bible as Document and as Guide

"normative expectation" has been lost or overlooked. In his modern reediting of earlier papers he tries never to lose sight of this function of the Bible.

The Quis et Unde? essay on Matt. 1-2 from a volume of essays in honor of Joachim Jeremias (1961), which many readers know only from Raymond Brown's extensive use of it in The Birth of the Messiah, is reprinted here, as is the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (1962) entry, "Biblical Theology: A Program." A new introductory essay, "Meaning," serves as an extended note on the latter, There is, an essay on the Sermon on the Mount which identifies it as "messianic license" telling people what they are allowed to do, not what they must of can do. The Sermon is actually "a rebellious manifesto which gives to disciples of Christ the right to break the law in the name of Christ" (p. 94). A -fascinating analysis of the Sermon on the Mount in that portion of the Book of Mormon devoted to Jesus' teachings (delivered as. guest of the Latter Day Saints) discloses the recasting of Matthean material there in Johannine categories. Geographical, historical, and concrete elements are suppressed or flattened out in the retelling. "The revealer [Jesus] and his commandments are dishistoricized, and the address to Christian followers is made-more clear" (p. 105). Stendahl praises the Latter Day Saints as perhaps that community, Christian or deriving from the Christian tradition, which speaks most positively and in non-anti-Semetic ways about Jews, but observes that the elimination of the Pharisees from the Book of Mormon may not be all to the good. "Once this critique of the foibles and pitfalls of pious people is gone, and once Jesus is made into revealer demanding 'faith in me,' the internal criticism in the religious community has disappeared from the image of Jesus, and perhaps from the community itself" (p. 110f.).

For those who are best acquainted with Stendahl's essay "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," reprinted in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles, his "Sin, Guilt and Forgiveness in the New Testament" which fleshes it out will be the most rewarding piece. He worries early in the book about possible repetition of favorite themes in the collection. This reviewer caught it only in "New Testament Background for the Doctrine of the Sacraments," a leisurely piece that does not take seriously enough the second century evidence that the author has elsewhere demanded attention to. Like every essay in the book, however, it has its memorable features. People acquainted with the oral essays of this purveyor of biblical wisdom will find that genre here, but also a rigorous scholarship of the finest kind, like that of his Peake's Commentary entry on Matthew.

Meaning is a splendid valedictory from the professorial Stendahl. We await from the homeland he so dearly loves the strong voice of the episcopal Stendahl.

Gerard S. Sloyan
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania