244 - Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development

Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development
By John H. Hayes and Frederick Prussner
Atlanta, John Knox, 1985. 290 pp. $15.95.

For a number of years, English-speaking students of Old Testament theology interested in the history of this discipline have had to rely on the brief and now severely dated treatment by Robert Dentan (Preface to Old Testament Theology), first published in 1950 and revised in 1963, or have had to wade through Hans-Joachim Kraus's two massive tomes (Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments; Biblishe Theologie: Ihre Geschichle und Problematik). Now within the past year, three major works on the subject have appeared in English. H. G. Reventlow (The Authority of the Bible in the Modern World) and John Rogerson (Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century) have studied particular periods in the history of biblical studies, while in this volume John Hayes and Frederick Prussner survey the entire history of Old Testament theology.

As Dentan's volume was originally part of his Ph.D. thesis at Yale, so the work currently under review had its origin as part of Prussner's Ph.D. thesis at the University of Chicago in 1952. After Prussner's death in 1978, his colleague at Emory, John Hayes, undertook to revise and expand the work to include developments over the past thirty years. This division of labor is somewhat apparent in the book. Thus, the first four chapters review work in Old Testament theology from Luther (and the "Other Reformers") to 1950, while the fifth and final chapter deals with developments from the 1950s to the present. This is not to suggest, however, that Hayes's work is merely tacked onto Prussner's. Hayes has thoroughly revised the early chapters in light of more recent studies of

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the various historical periods, giving the book an overall coherence and making it eminently readable.

The book begins, as most of us would, with Johann Philip Gabler and his inaugural address at the University of Altdorf in 1787. But rather than treating Gabler as radically distinct from his environment, the authors seek to locate him in the context of previous developments in biblical study, stemming ultimately, they assume, from Luther. This starting point is probably arbitrary, since Luther as interpreter of Scripture is no more radically distinct from Occam and Faber Stapulensis than Gabler was from Heyne and Eichhorn. After treating developments from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century (chaps. I and 2), the authors offer comprehensive surveys of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the third and fourth chapters, concluding with the "Biblical Theology Movement." The fifth and final chapter, as suggested earlier, seems to reflect Hayes's own contribution. It is divided between a survey of individual scholars and a discussion of various topics of importance within the discipline.

The great value of this work is its comprehensive coverage of Old Testament theologians across the better part of four centuries. Scarcely anyone who wrote something with the words "theology" and "Old Testament" in the title has been omitted. Anyone interested in reading a few pages on, say, Ludwig Friedrich Otto Baumgarten-Crusius, or Johann Christian Friedrich Steudel now has a place to go in order to learn of their contributions to Old Testament theology! But while the book is encyclopedic in its coverage, it does not consist merely of individual entries in the manner of an encyclopedia. It arranges its treatment of individual scholars in terms of the relationships among them, in theological approach and method. Thus, Old Testament theologians in the nineteenth century are treated as rationalists, idealists, supernaturalists, and moderate conservatives. These approaches to Old Testament theology are also situated by Hayes and Prussner in the context of intellectual and specifically theological developments going on around or immediately before them. This intellectual locating is also among the real merits of the book. The authors understand that Old Testament theology has never been undertaken apart from wider movements of thought and that understanding these movements is essential to understanding the history of Old Testament theology.

Not always so explicit in this book is the realization that movements of thought are not the only forces acting upon scholarship. Reference is made, for example, to the depreciation of Judaism and the Old Testament, particularly in Germany just before and after the turn of the century. But no explicit reference is made to the events in Europe around 1870, or 1914, that had a decisive impact on the study of the Old Testament. To cite an example not mentioned by Hayes and Prussner, when Herrmann Gunkel writes, in Heldentum und Kriegesfrommigkeit im Alten Testament in 1916, that "as long as a Volk preserves faith in itself and its future, as long as the spirit of heroic self-sacrifice for the

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good of the fatherland remains alive within it, then it is, even under the most severe circumstances, invincible," this has to be understood in a context wider, and more concrete, than that provided by "romanticism." Similarly, the emergence of biblical theology in the seventeenth century may owe as much to the Thirty Years War as to movements of thought associated with Lutheran orthodoxy.

Still in a critical vein, one may wish to raise questions about the classification of some Old Testament theologians J. C. K. von Hofmann, for example, is classed with E. W. Hengstenberg in the "Conservative Reaction" to Hegelianism in the nineteenth century. True, they were both conservatives (not just theologically), but they were vastly different in their conceptions of Old Testament (or biblical) theology. Von Hofmann could be more appropriately compared with Steudel, in relation to both their pietism and their "salvation history" orientations. In this same connection, it is surprising that the importance of Johann Tobias Beck is neglected, given his extensive influence in the nineteenth century both as a pietist and as a "salvation-historian."

Since the book follows a historical chronology rather strictly, and because its authors regard the autonomy of biblical from systematic theology to be wholesome and necessary, it sometimes neglects theological starting points shared by various theologians. It does not note, for example, that Johannes Cocceius, J. C. K. von Hofmann, and Otto Procksch all root their biblical (or Old Testament) theologies explicitly in a doctrine of the Trinity, so that the history of salvation proceeds from the relation between the Father and the Son. This could have been seen more clearly had von Hofmann's relation to Schelling's philosophy been noted, rather than considering him simply as a conservative reacting to Hegel. Unfortunately, Procksch is given only cursory treatment by Hayes and Prussner. Given the originality of his own work, and the extent of his influence on both Eichrodt and von Rad, does Otto Procksch really deserve less space than that given to E. J. Young?

Hayes and Prussner do not begin with a clear statement of what the problems in Old Testament theology are, nor conclude with a clear idea of where it ought to go. For that reason their book lacks the clarity of focus one finds in the work of Hans-Joachim Kraus or Hans Frei (The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative). The strength of this book is its analysis of the impact of historical-critical scholarship on Old Testament theology. Its weakness is in its theological assessment of what Old Testament theologians have done, and of what Old Testament theology ought to be. Biblical theology began as an attempt to reform dogmatics. Hayes and Prussner have contributed enormously to our understanding of what Old Testament theology has become in the interim.

Ben C. Ollenburger
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey