442 - What Christians Believe About the Bible

What Christians Believe About the Bible
By Donald K. McKim
Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 1985. 192 pp. $8.95.

This book delivers more than its title promises. The author, an associate professor of theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, seeks to meet the need for a one-volume work that explains "the basics of the various contemporary views about the nature of the Bible." This goal is admirably achieved. McKim presents his materials under two major rubrics, "Ecclesiastical Traditions" and "Theological Positions." The former includes classical and contemporary Roman Catholic views on the subject matter, as well as Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist alternatives. This grounds the discussion under the second rubric in the history of its own development. Here McKim focuses upon ten "theological options" that are available today, all of which "have their own ways of understanding the nature of Scripture and its appropriate interpretation." The list includes liberal, fundamentalist, scholastic, neo-orthodox, neo-evangelical, existential, process, story, liberation, and feminist theology. A chapter of the book is devoted to each of these contemporary theological movements.

The "surplus" that the book affords the reader is found in the careful way the author has contextualized his specific topic. McKim recognizes that the understanding of theological doctrines in general and the

444 - What Christians Believe About the Bible

doctrine of Scripture in particular depends upon broader theological, philosophical, and cultural issues as well as upon the method of doing theology in each case. Each of the chapters thus presents a description of the theology under consideration as a whole, with attention being given to the intellectual and social forces that have shaped if not spawned it. The result is that the book may be read with profit as an introduction to contemporary theological movements, with the doctrine of Scripture serving as a heuristic device. Students of theology in college, seminary, or the church will profit greatly from it.

McKim concedes in his Introduction that the limited scope of the book has not permitted him "to deal with hermeneutics or the process of biblical interpretation in these theologies." He is faithful to this concession until he comes to liberation and feminist theology. Here the traditional issue of biblical authority comes into focus only in the praxis of biblical interpretation and thus demands the attention McKim gives to it. The truth, of course, is that doctrines of Scripture function as a part of the interpreter's preunderstanding and that biblical authority remains merely formal until it becomes actual in biblical interpretation. The hermeneutical issue is thus not an addendum to the doctrine of Scripture but intrinsic to it.

Advocates of one theological position or another treated in this volume will no doubt quibble about nuances of interpretation. Others, like myself, will wonder why Bultmann and his program of existential reinterpretation of Scripture was passed over in favor of Tillich. Yet within its limits the book is an adequate and fair introduction to the positions presented. McKim makes no effort to critique these theological options, and thus there is no concluding summary in the light of his own theological commitments, which one knows from his other works belong to neo-evangelical theology.

Thomas W. Gillespie

Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey