Last updated 27/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
One of the more noticeable features of the landscape of theological studies, broadly conceived, is the trouble-some relationship between biblical studies and systematic or constructive theology. Following the programmatic comments of Colin Gunton, by ‘systematic theology’, I refer to that theology which is concerned (1) to elucidate in coherent fashion the internal relations of one aspect of belief to other potentially related beliefs; (2) to demonstrate an understanding of the relation between the content of theology and ‘the sources specific to the faith’; and (3) to evince an awareness of the relation between the content of theology and general claims for truth in human culture, not least those of philosophy and science. It is with this enterprise, the doing of systematic theology, that biblical studies has come in the last two centuries to have increasingly poor relations.
1 Gunton, Colin E., ‘Historical and Systematic Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge Companions to Religion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3–20 (esp. 11–18)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 This is not to deny that the relation of biblical studies to other theological disciplines is equally problematic. It is rather to find a locus for discussion which, we may hope, will suggest additional, parallel, and analogous conversations regarding, e.g. biblical studies and ethics, biblical studies and Christian education.
3 O'Collins, Gerald and Kendall, Daniel, The Bible for Theology: Ten Principles for the Theological Use of Scripture (New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1997)Google Scholar; Scalise, Charles J., From Scripture to Theology: A Canonical Journey into Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: In terVarsity Press, 1996)Google Scholar. See the earlier symposium, The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical Options, ed. Johnston, Robert K. (Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1985)Google Scholar.
4 Watson, Francis, Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994)Google Scholar; idem, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 1997)Google Scholar; idem, ‘The Old Testament as Christian Scripture: A Response to Professor Seitz’, SJT 52 (1999), 227–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seitz, Christopher R., Word without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998)Google Scholar; idem, ‘Christological Interpretation of Texts and Trinitarian Claims to Truth: An Engagement with Francis Watson's Text and Truth’ SJT 52 (1999), 209–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fowl, Stephen E., Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)Google Scholar.
5 A consequence of such developments is the ghettoizing of biblical studies and an identity crisis for practitioners of this discipline. As Werner G. Jeanrond queries, ‘What can the study of the Bible offer to the diverse interests of students late in the twentieth century? What is the contribution of biblical studies to the academy, to society at large and to the different Jewish and Christian communities? In other words, what is the discipline of biblical studies good for these days?’ (‘After Hermeneutics: The Relationship between Theology and Biblical Studies’, in The Open Text: New Directions for Biblical Studies?, ed. Watson, Francis [London: SCM Press, 1993], 85–102)Google Scholar. Cf. Bockmuehl, Markus, ‘“To Be or Not to Be”: The Possible Futures of New Testament Scholarship’, SJT 51 (1998), 271–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 This way of putting the matter is borrowed from Jenson, Robert W., ‘The Religious Power of Scripture’, SJT 52 (1999), 89–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 The opening paragraphs of this section are indebted to Green, Joel B., ‘Scripture and Theology: Uniting the Two So Long Divided’, in Between Two Horizons: Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology, ed. Green, Joel B. and Turner, Max (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 23–43 (24–7)Google Scholar.
8 McGrath, Alister E., The Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundation of Doctrinal Criticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990), 81Google Scholar.
9 Schorske, Carl E., Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–4Google Scholar.
10 See de Lubac, Henri, Medieval Exegesis, vol. 1: The Four Senses of Scripture (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), esp. ch. 2Google Scholar.
11 Cf. Bartholomew, Craig, ‘Post/Late? Modernity as the Context for Christian Scholarship Today’, Themelios 22 (2, 1997), 25–38Google Scholar.
12 At this juncture, of course, these evangelicals are embracing categories reminiscent of Gabler's work at the turn of the eighteenth century, articulated for modern times in the influential essay by Krister Stendahl, ‘Biblical Theology, Contemporary’, in IDB, 1:418–32. For a recent reassessment of Gabler's work, see Stuckenbruck, Loren T., ‘Johann Philipp Gabler and the Delineation of Biblical Theology’, SJT 52 (1999), 139–157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 This last point is helpfully underscored in Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Culture’, in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Lentricchia, Frank and McLaughlin, Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), 225–232Google Scholar.
14 Kelsey, David H., The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 90, 91Google Scholar.
15 Barth, Karl, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 1Google Scholar.
16 Cf. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (2nd edn; New York: Crossroad, 1990)Google Scholar.
17 Childs, Brevard S., ‘Toward Recovering Theological Exegesis’, Pro Ecclesia 6 (1997), 16–26 (19)Google Scholar.
18 For this way of thinking, I am indebted to Marcus, George E. and Fischer, Michael M. J., Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
19 Jenson, , ‘The Religious Power of Scripture’, 98Google Scholar.
20 McClendon, James Wm. Jr., Systematic Theology, vol. 1: Ethics (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1986), 31Google Scholar.
21 See esp. Haskell, Thomas L., ‘Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric versus Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream’, in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145–173Google Scholar. It is also true that others who reflect on the historical enterprise are less self-critical in their defense of the old historicism—e.g. Windschuttle, Keith, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: Free, 1996)Google Scholar.
22 This is helpfully discussed in Dykstra, Craig, Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices (Louisville, KY: Geneva, 1999), 151–157Google Scholar.
23 This is developed in Thiselton, Anthony C., New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (London: Collins; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992)Google Scholar.
24 See Green, Joel B., ‘In Quest of the Historical: Jesus, the Gospels, and Historicisms Old and New’, CSR 28 (1999), 544–560Google Scholar.
25 Briesach, Ernst, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (2nd edn; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 323Google Scholar. Other voices were available, including that of Droysen, Johann, who recognized the creative role of the historian (cf. Breisach, Historiography, 268–290)Google Scholar, but these were voices in the wilderness.
26 Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1993), 285Google Scholar. See also Melberg, Arne, Theories of Mimesis (Literature, Culture, Theory 12; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Stock, Brian, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Parallax Re-visions of Culture and Society; Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1990), 80Google Scholar.
28 See especially, White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1987)Google Scholar. Cf. the assessment of White's influence in the symposium, ‘Hayden White: Twenty-five Years On’, in History and Theory 37 (1998), 143–193Google Scholar.
29 Lowenthal, David, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 214–218Google Scholar. On these and related issues, see also de Certeau, Michel, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Veyne, Paul, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
30 Cf. Green, , ‘Scripture and Theology’, 40–42Google Scholar.
31 Wuthnow, Robert, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 1–22Google Scholar.
32 The important assumption with which I am working here grows out of critical engagement with Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of habitus—that is, a set of dispositions that incline people to behave in certain ways (cf. esp. Language and Symbolic Power [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991]Google Scholar; idem, The Logic of Practice [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990])Google Scholar. For Bourdieu, these dispositions are acquired through a gradual process by which they achieve the status of second nature, so that they operate at a preconscious level and, importantly, may be transposed to new sociocultural settings where they might generate different sets of behaviors. Though this is not the focus of Bourdieu's inquiry, I am interested in the capacity of Scripture to reform our imaginations and dispositions.
33 Cf. Martin, Troy W., Metaphor and Composition in 1 Peter (SBLDS 131; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992) e.g. 144–61Google Scholar; among others, Achtemeier, Paul J. notes that 5:13, with its reference to Babylon, forms an inclusio with the opening verse (1 Peter [Hermeneia; MN: Fortress Press, 1996] 354)Google Scholar. Closely allied, as Reinhard Feldmeier notes, is the metaphor of ‘alien’ (Die Christen als Fremde: Die Metapher der Fremde in der Antiken Welt, im Urchristentum und im 1. Petrusbrief (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1992).
34 Concerning the Jewish experience of the diaspora in this period, cf., e.g. Collins, John J., Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (New York: Crossroad, 1983)Google Scholar; Feldman, Louis H., Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Levinskaya, Irina, The Book of Acts in Its Diaspora Setting (A1CS5; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996)Google Scholar.
35 Cf., e.g. Martin, , Metaphor and Composition, 150–161Google Scholar.
36 Volf, Miroslav, ‘Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation between Church and Culture in 1 Peter’, Ex Audilu 10 (1994), 15–30 (18–19)Google Scholar.
37 As in, say, Elliott, John H., A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
38 Wright, Christopher J. H., ‘Old Testament Ethics: A Missiological Perspective’, Catalyst 26 (2, 2000) 5–8 (6)Google Scholar.
39 Eco, Umberto, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Advances in Semiotics; Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1979), 7Google Scholar.
