416 - The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation

The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation
By Luke T. Johnson
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1986. 591 pp. $34.95 ($18.95 pb).

Readers of Luke Johnson's proliferating studies have come to expect a blend of masterful scholarship and raw imagination at once engaging and penetrating. His introduction to the New Testament will not disappoint. Motivating Johnson throughout is a model of interpretation that seeks to appreciate "why the documents were written at all" and "why they look the way they do." At the heart of his "experience-interpretation model" - which includes anthropological, historical, and literary dimensions of symbolic worlds-is the "religious experience" of the "Holy Other" among the first Christians. Something "shocking" happened that radically altered their symbols of Greco-Roman Judaism. The one who by Torah's standards had been crucified as accursed by God was alive as an "awesome force" bestowing his. spirit as God's eschatological power over cosmic systems of repression and guilt and charging the Christians with ultimate claims over the future of the universe. Because God had played the trump card for the world in Jesus, the very story and continuing search for meaning for these Messianists was inextricably tied to the story of Jesus, leading naturally both to Gospel narratives and to letters and an apocalypse in which the clash of "worlds" is resolved in new symbols and new visions of reality. Though Johnson has yet to justify the "non-historical" sequence of his treatment of the books in a non-canonical order, the fresh vantage points into the contour and content of the texts themselves that his model opens up are to date without equal.

David P. Moessner, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Ga.