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The Crisis In Biblical Theology
By Bernhard W. Anderson

"As we move into the 1970's, . . . we find ourselves in a baffling new theological situation. Behind us is the period of 'the revival of biblical theology' which was heralded prophetically in the first pages of THEOLOGY TODAY. Behind us too, are the swirling changes of the 1960's which radically called into question the meaning of religious language in a secular world, and which shook the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with revolutionary impact. In this new situation, the question rises whether biblical theology has a future. Already some are speaking of 'the death of biblical theology.' "

THEOLOGY TODAY was launched in 1944 when the world was still engulfed in total war. In the language of the initial devotional preface to the first issue, it was the season of "God's Terrible Springtime," when "fresh winds of God" were blowing with devastating and renewing fury. Speaking for the Editorial Council, President John A. Mackay declared that the purpose of the journal was to sponsor "a rebirth of vital Christian theology"; specifically, he said, "the Bible, which was rediscovered by the Reformation, must be rediscovered again."¹ Significantly, the initial issue contained an article by Paul S. Minear entitled, "Wanted: A Biblical Theology." And the concluding article by Holmes Rolston was devoted to the Römerbrief of Karl Barth, the Swiss pastor who in 1918 sounded the call to rediscover "the strange new world within the Bible."

Yet, as we move into the 1970's, just over a quarter of a century later, we find ourselves in a baffling new theological situation. Be-

Bernhard W. Anderson is Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Creation versus Chaos (1967) and the widely-used textbook Understanding the Old Testament (second edition, 1966).
¹ Editorial, "Our Aims," THEOLOGY TODAY, Vol 1, No I (April, 1944), pp. 3-11.

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hind us is the period of "the revival of biblical theology" which was heralded prophetically in the first pages of THEOLOGY TODAY. Behind us, too, are the swirling changes of the 1960's which radically called into question the meaning of religious language in a secular world, and which shook the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with revolutionary impact. In this new situation, the question rises whether biblical theology has a future.² Already some are speaking of "the death of biblical theology."

I

An obituary of the biblical theology "movement" is presented by Brevard S. Childs in his recent book, Biblical Theology in Crisis, particularly in Part I entitled "Remembering a Past."³ Although appreciative of the influence of biblical theology upon churches and seminaries in the period following World War II, Childs declares that this "unified movement," which he regards as distinctively American, collapsed because of weaknesses from within and pressures from without. He outlines several planks of the "unified consensus" (for instance, "the unity of the whole Bible," "the revelation of God in history," "the distinctive biblical mentality") and maintains that all of these were tried in the balance and found wanting in scholarship and relevance.

In the second part of the book, entitled "Seeking a Future," he expresses the hope that biblical theology, having died as a vital force in theology, will be resurrected in the form it once had before the rise of historical criticism introduced "a sharp break with the church's exegetical tradition." This emerging form, which he illustrates in the third part of his book entitled "Testing a Method," is one which takes the canon seriously as the proper context for making ethical decisions. "The status of canonicity," he says, "is not an objectively demonstrable claim but a statement of Christian belief. In its original sense, canon . . . is the rule that delineates the area in which the church hears the word of God."⁴ Thus the task of

² See the perceptive article by Langdon Gilkey, "Theology in the Seventies," THEOLOGY TODAY, Vol XXVII, No 3 (Oct 1970), pp. 292-301.
³ Brevard S Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Westminster Press, 1970), pp. 1-87.
⁴ Ibid , p. 99. The use of the Bible in making ethical decisions is summarized in these words (p 132) "First, the Biblical theologian attempts to sketch the full range of the biblical witnesses within the canonical context that have bearing on the subject at issue. Secondly, he seeks to understand the inner movement of the various witnesses along their characteristic axes when approached from within the context of the
canon ."

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biblical theology is to study the Bible as a sacred book, whose texts are to be understood in the framework of faith in Jesus Christ.

We are still too much involved in our immediate past for hind-sight to provide clarity. It is a bit surprising to hear that "the old-style biblical theology" of the '50's had the massive and unified strength of "walls" which developed internal cracks and finally collapsed "like a Maginot line" under the artillery fire of radical critics.⁵ Those of us who lived through the period know too well that all theology-biblical, systematic, philosophical--came into difficult straits in the decade of the 1960's when religious language became problematic in a secular world, and when a morally sensitive student generation demanded a theology which arose out of, and was relevant to, action in the contemporary situation. If the new generation was "a younger generation in revolt against the Biblical theologians," as Childs states, it was also one that expressed radical discontent with all the traditional structures of theological education and called into question the Christian tradition which, in some essential sense, is anchored to events of the past.⁶

It is true, of course, that biblical theology has been conditioned by the realities of the American scene, such as the tension between conservative and liberal forms of Protestantism and, even more, the apologetic attempt to make room for Christian faith in an increasingly pragmatic, naturalistic, and scientific culture. Nevertheless, the biblical theology of the past was not an American phenomenon exclusively. Indeed, it is noteworthy that not a single major Work in biblical theology appeared on the American scene, with the exception perhaps of Paul Minear's The Eyes of Faith (1946), which did not find a wholehearted reception among theologians, or G. Ernest Wright's widely influential monograph God Who Acts (1952), which was never developed into a full-scale work of biblical theology.⁷

Rather, in this area Americans have been dependent to a great

⁵ See Chapter 4, "The Cracking of the Walls' Childs refers to various critics of biblical theology, especially James Barr whose book, The semantics of Biblical Language (1961), "struck with such incisive and devastating criticism that the defenses appeared like a Maginot line facing a new form of blitzkrieg" (p. 71).
⁶ See Christianity and Crisis, April 14, 1969, which contains the testimony of the "new theological student" and a responding essay by John C Bennett.
⁷ G Ernest Wright's recent book, The Old Testament and Theology (Harper and Row, 1969), resumes in lecture form the discussion initiated in his God Who Acts Biblical Theology as Recital (SCM Press, 1952, 7th impression, 1964). Though admitting to exaggerations in the earlier work, Wright still maintains the same position essentially. In his recent book, however, he does not propose the shape of a biblical theology, but discusses theological issues and treats a few major biblical themes.

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degree upon the leadership of biblical theologians of Europe. This is clear in the New Testament field, where Rudolf Bultmann and his students (now in key New Testament posts) have had a commanding influence. It is also true in the Old Testament field, where the major works on Old Testament theology by Walther Eichrodt and Gerhard von Rad have prescribed the fundamental alternatives for theological debate. However, in Europe too, biblical theology is in crisis. In 1965, the French theologian, Edmond Jacob, himself the author of an outstanding work on Old Testament theology, began his Franz Delitzsch lectures on "Basic Questions of Old Testament Theology" by announcing that the "Golden Age" of Old Testament theology is over. We now stand at a turning-point, he said, when it must be decided whether to go beyond the achievements of Eichrodt and von Rad into a comprehensive theology of the Old and New Testaments or whether to retreat into the analysis of the separate parts.⁸

II

Back in 1944, John A. Mackay declared that "now more than ever, following the fierce scrutiny of the years, the essential unity of the Book stands out in bold relief." Today it is not easy to make this statement. In the intervening years biblical theologians have struggled valiantly to grasp the unity of the Bible and specifically the relationship between the two testaments. New Testament theologians, insofar as they have followed the lead of Bultmann, either have largely ignored this problem or have tended to invoke a law-gospel dialetic.⁹ Old Testament theologians, however, have boldly tackled the issue. Walther Eichrodt finds the unity of the Bible in the theme of the covenant, that is, the relationship between God and people in an ongoing history which, under divine initiative, moves toward the Kingdom of God. His method is to take a cross-section of this dynamic movement so as to display the structural unity of Israel's faith and its integrity vis-a-vis the religions of antiquity.

⁸ Edmond Jacob, Grundfragen alttestamentlicher Theology (Kohlhammer Verlag, 1970) Jacob refers, on the one hand, to the judgment of R C Dentan (Preface to Old Testament Theology, 2nd ed. [1963], p. 83) that the "Golden Age" provides an opportunity to assimilate, criticize, and confirm what has been achieved, and, on the other, to tile judgment of James Barr in his review of Gerhard ion Rad's Theology of tile Old Testament (Expository Times 73 [1961], p. 146) that no more great books of this kind will be written and that we should turn to detailed exegesis and discussion of methodology.
⁹ See Bultmann's lead essay, "The Significance of tile Old Testament for the Christian Faith," and the ensuing symposium in the Old Testament and Christian Faith, B W Anderson, ed. (Herder and Herder, 1969).

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Von Rad, on the other hand, rejects Eichrodt's emphasis upon the conceptual and structural elements of Israel's faith, maintaining that in the Old Testament "event has priority over logos." Accordingly, he presents Old Testament theology as a Heilsgeschichte, or a history of traditions, in which the saving events of the past were reinterpreted at each new juncture as Israel was driven forward, under divine initiative, toward the promised future. Von Rad maintains that the Old Testament has no center; rather, its disconnected reinterpretations of tradition lean forward to the New Testament where the focal point is God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Here are two radically different, and seemingly mutually exclusive, ways to deal with the problem of the unity of the Bible. Part of the crisis in biblical theology is that we are torn between these alternatives. It is noteworthy that G. Ernest Wright, after an initial period of sympathy with von Rad's emphasis upon the recital of the magnalia Dei, has opted for the vertebrate theology of Eichrodt, a vigorous "descendant of the Swiss Reformed tradition." Von Rad's presentation, he suggests, reflects the (Lutheran) Reformation conception of "the preaching moment, when the word of God is heard afresh, is reactualized in an always new situation, in the moment when the community is renewed as God's people."¹⁰

III

Personally, I would like to live a bit longer in this state of crisis. The tension is relaxed too easily by the emphasis upon "the role of the canon in creating and maintaining the unity of the Bible," in the words of Childs.¹¹ It is undoubtedly true that the theological problem of the canon deserves more attention than has been given to it in the past. But to appeal to the canon as the guarantor of the unity of the Bible, in the face of the complexities which biblical theologians have been wrestling with, resolves the problem by a kind of tour de force. This proposal avoids the question of the nature of the church, which asserts and lives by the canonicity of Scripture. In addition, it short-circuits the hermeneutical question of how biblical texts, found within the canon, speak to us today-a question

¹⁰ The Old Testament and Theology, p. 52. Wright asserts that Eichrodt's work is badly in need of recasting"; but he maintains that the emphasis upon the structural elements of the covenant has been supported by recent Old Testament research. In this connection, see the book by Delbert Hillers, also a student of W. F. Albright, Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969)^.
11 Op. cit. , p. 39.

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to which representatives of the so-called "new hermeneutic" have been addressing themselves. Childs' stress on the canon finds some support in the recent book by H.J. Kraus on Biblical Theology: Its History and Problematic Character.¹² Kraus also objects, in a neo-Barthian fashion, to going behind or beyond the biblical text into some sort of a "history." God's Word, he insists, comes to us as graphé, as written text in a canonical context. Unlike Childs, however, Kraus is more disposed to move beyond texts to a consideration of major biblical themes or "Perspectives of Biblical Theology."¹³

The renewed emphasis upon the canon is important, provided that we keep in mind the dangers of biblicism from which the gospel has set us free. "The canon is not the word of God tout simple," Ernst Käsemann rightly observes. "It can only become and be the Word of God so long as we do not seek to imprison God within it; for this would be to make it a substitute for the God who addresses us and makes claims upon us." Käsemann goes on to say, referring to the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11, that "faith always stands in the continuity of divine action and only sectarianism seeks to detach itself from this history." This continuity of God's presence with his people, however, is not easily grasped; for "it is necessary to distinguish between the continuity of the divine action and that of human tradition, even though it is church tradition."¹⁴ These thoughts, when enlarged beyond the confines of the New Testament to include the whole Bible, indicate the perennial crisis in biblical theology. The Scriptures indeed bear witness to God's active and purposeful involvement with men, but this witness comes to us in the multiplex forms of scriptural traditions.

IV

This does not mean, in my judgment, that biblical theologians are wrong in affirming that the Bible bears witness to "a single drama of divine and human action," as H. Richard Niebuhr once put it.¹⁵ To be sure, the continuity of divine action cannot be easily grasped in any single formula, whether that of the covenant, word of God, acts of God, Kingdom of God, or even the canon it-

¹² Hans-Joachim Kraus, Die biblische Theologie Ihre Geschichte und Problematik (Neukirchener Verlag, 1970).
¹³ lbid. , pp. 378-79.
¹⁴ Ernst Kasemann, "The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church, Essays on New Testament Themes" (SCM Press, 1964), pp. 105f^.
15 H Richard Niebuhr, The Meaning of Revelation (Macmillan, 1960), pp. 135f.

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self. Just as a drama includes the diversity of different times, different personalities, and different points of view as the plot develops, so the unfolding drama of the Bible includes the wide diversity of human traditions in the ongoing story which is embraced within the beginning and end of God's purpose. Moreover, the diversity of Scripture is a positive advantage in a pluralistic culture, where men respond in differing situations to the demands and promises of human history. And above all, the language of the biblical story has a self-involving, poetic quality which enables men to know, whoever they are and wherever they are, that they are related-as Amos Wilder puts it-to "the Great Dramatist and Story-teller, God himself."¹⁶

Biblical theology has been, is now, and will always be in a crisis. But as long as the Bible continues to be the primary witness to the presence of God in the world and to his faithfulness which over-arches human history, like a rainbow of promise, from beginning to end, biblical theology will have an important and indispensable place in the total theological enterprise.

¹⁶ Amos Wilder, The Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 64f. Wilder discusses the "new speech" of Christianity, which has self-involving, dramatic power.