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Biblical theology in its simplest form is the effort to state what is the theology of the Bible or the theology found within the Bible. Although that may be understood narrowly as referring to what the Bible says about God, more often biblical theology is concerned with a broader range of theological concerns, seeking to give an account of Scripture’s statements about numerous topics. It differs from systematic and constructive theology in the way that it does not turn to other sources, such as experience or tradition to construct theology, although such sources may have some implicit role to play (and indeed the discussion today is raising various questions about the place of such aspects of the theological enterprise in the formulation of biblical theology). Rather, biblical theology seeks theological formulation in some constructive, holistic, and unified manner of what one finds in the Bible.

Background. The twentieth century saw the discipline of biblical theology go through various swings and changes, increasing and decreasing in popularity. The earlier tendency to articulate a biblical theology much as if it were a history of Israelite religion (a tendency that grew out of the origins of biblical theology in the Enlightenment as a historical discipline), shifted in the post–World War II period under the impact of the theologians Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. In the United States and Europe, vigorous endeavors to set forth the theology of the Bible or of one of the Testaments or of some particular biblical topic multiplied. The emphasis on history did not disappear, but it no longer determined the structure of any particular formulation. The developmental notions that were earlier present and tended to bring forth a reading of the Old Testament pointing to its archaic, primitive character gave way to readings of the theology of the Bible that assumed and sought to demonstrate the Bible’s immediacy and accessibility for modern faith and the forms that theology takes in preaching, personal piety, and social action.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, the broad sway of biblical theology, especially on the North American scene, and the apparent consensus about its character broke down for reasons from within the field of biblical study, well described by Brevard Childs in his Biblical Theology in Crisis (1969), and from within the broader fields of systematic theology, suggested, for example, in a now famous essay by Langdon Gilkey, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language” (Journal of Religion 41 [July 1961]: 194-205). Gilkey challenged the intelligibility of fundamental axioms of contemporary biblical theology, particularly its effort to build faith upon historical events that are accepted as the revelation and activity of God. Childs pointed to the many ways in which widely accepted assumptions that undergirded the broad emphasis upon biblical theology had come under severe question. These assumptions included an overemphasis upon history as the category of divine revelation and uncertainty about what that history consisted of; an insistence upon the unity of the Bible at a time when much biblical study was sharpening up the sense of its diversity and its multiple, if not contradictory, voices; a claim for a distinctive way of “biblical” thinking that rested upon poor linguistic procedures; and an apologetic claim for the uniqueness of biblical religion in the ancient world that could not be sustained in the face of the increasing knowledge of that world and its impact upon the Bible. Childs described a growing sense that the broad sway of biblical theology, within American biblical studies particularly, had had its day and was now gone. His own analysis reinforced that fact even though he desired to chart a new way for biblical theology.

The dominance of biblical theology that was apparent in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States indeed disappeared in the succeeding decades. New modes of analysis, such as literary criticism and social history, that were less interested in the theological dimensions of the Bible—if not hostile to them in some respects—came into currency and still command much attention. History of religion studies, which had been eclipsed in the movement toward biblical theology, came back to the forefront. Despite all of this, however, the sense that the Bible, with God and Jesus as its central subject matter, is in very basic respects a theological document and one that shapes the theology of the communities of faith that adhere to it, has meant that the effort to formulate a theological understanding of Scripture has continued to occupy the attention of interpreters of the Bible. Indeed, the last quarter century of the twentieth century saw a spate of works in Old and New Testament theology.

Some Approaches. A look at some of the more comprehensive efforts at biblical theology and the options they suggest identifies possibilities and issues that confront the biblical theologian. In several works, history provides the fundamental datum or framework for biblical theology. Although he never wrote a biblical theology and his views changed in the course of his lifetime, G. Ernest Wright wrote a seminal volume, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital, in which he argued that “the primary and irreducible assumption of biblical theology is that history is the revelation of God.” Wright means that biblical theology is “first and foremost a theology of recital,” a confession of faith in which the redemptive and formative events are recited. The task of biblical theology is to lay out and interpret those events and to make the appropriate inferences from them, such as the election of Israel, the covenant relationship, and the unity and meaningfulness of universal history. Wright’s exclusive focus on history, to the neglect of nature as well as the wisdom literature, has been criticized frequently, yet the historical emphasis has been carried forward in a quite different fashion in the work of Gerhard von Rad. His two-volume Old Testament Theology is built around a historical framework, but that framework is not the event-determined history of which Wright spoke. It is the history of Israel’s traditions, of the various testimonies to the power and activity of God, that are the subject matter of biblical, or in this case, Old Testament theology. The actual history is often inaccessible, but theology is built upon the interpretation or understanding of that history, not the history itself. The result is a biblical theology that is, in effect, a sequence of testimonies, often radically different. The diversity of the Scriptures is lifted up. One does not seek to blend all these testimonies into a single unified perspective, even though they often hold much in common.

Von Rad’s approach has some similarities to Rudolf Bultmann’s epochal New Testament theology. He also assumed both that the actuality behind the texts was often inaccessible, or even nonexistent, and that the subject matter of New Testament theology is the interpretation of the Christ event as it takes place in different New Testament writings. In his case also, the theology of the New Testament is self-consciously set forth in relation to an analysis of being that is provided by existentialist philosophy. The center of New Testament theology is Paul, both because he is the primary interpreter of the meaning of the Christ event, which was the subject matter of the kerygmatic preaching of the early church, and because his theology is susceptible to an anthropological emphasis. Later efforts at New Testament theology, including the work of Bultmann’s own student Hans Conzelmann, have pressed the theological significance of the close connection between the risen Christ and Jesus of Nazareth in the early Christian community as well as in the New Testament.

Relating more directly to the work of von Rad and contributing significantly to the post-Bultmannian directions in New Testament theology have been the efforts of the Old Testament scholar Hartmut Gese and the New Testament scholar Peter Stuhlmacher, working independently but in conversation with each other, to uncover connections between both Testaments out of the stream of history of traditions. Growth of the biblical traditions begins in the Old Testament and continues into the New Testament. The two Testaments make up a unified, organic whole, according to Gese. Indeed, the history of biblical traditions in the Old Testament is not complete until it reaches the New Testament. This process of tradition history is, in effect, a process of revelation history (Gese).

One way of trying to hold together the diverse theological voices of Scripture is to search for a center around which everything revolves. The most notable and ambitious effort at this approach was that of Walther Eichrodt, in whose theology the covenant is the center and organizing framework of the Old Testament and thus of its theology. Ludwig Koehler’s Old Testament theology sought to center the whole around the concept of God as Lord. In some fashion, most such proposals have claimed that the center of Old Testament theology has to do with God, whether it takes the form of the First Commandment requiring exclusive worship of the Lord; or the self-presentation formula, I am the Lord; or the covenantal formula, Yahweh (the Lord) the God of Israel and Israel the people of Yahweh. From the New Testament side, Peter Stuhlmacher and others have suggested that the Christ of the Gospels provides the center of the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament. The fundamental character of such assertions of the centrality of God, or of God at work in Jesus Christ, as the subject matter can hardly be denied. Less clear is the question about whether such a center really holds together the diverse voices and subject matter of the Testaments.

Somewhat in reaction to that problem, some scholars have proposed to organize the biblical material theologically around certain polarities or tensions that are more comprehensive than a single center and that allow for diversity and tension. Samuel Terrien’s The Elusive Presence constructs a biblical theology around the tension between the presence and absence of God and sees reflections of that tension in the relationship of ethics and aesthetics, word and vision, ear and eye, name and glory. In this effort, he seeks to hold together the historical and covenantal dimensions with the wisdom literature and psalms, avoiding the one-sided theological formulations of earlier efforts. Dialectical approaches to the theology of the Bible are apparent also in the various works of Paul Hanson on apocalyptic, providence, the unity and diversity of Scripture, and the notion of community, as well as in Claus Westermann’s orienting much of his Old Testament theology around the two polarities of petition and praise, salvation and blessing. In some programmatic essays, Walter Brueggemann took a similar approach in devising a proposal for shaping such a theology around a dialectic that can be expressed in several ways: structure legitimation in tension with the embrace of pain, contractual and critical theology, cultural embrace and cultural criticism, creation theology and covenantal theology. His later Old Testament Theology took account of criticisms of such a dialectic as too simplistic, and, while not abandoning the schema altogether, he shifted to focus more on the rhetoric and textuality of the Old Testament presentation of God and Israel and has employed an imaginative metaphor to provide a structure for the whole: the courtroom with its testimony and countertestimony which compel reader/hearer to decide about the truth from what has been heard.

This line of approach seems more open to holding together some of the strains and the diversity of Scripture. Although it is primarily found among Old Testament scholars, they seek to demonstrate its applicability to biblical theology as a whole and not simply to the first of the Testaments.

One of the most fruitful theological studies of the New Testament has been the work of J. Christiaan Beker on the theology of Paul (Paul the Apostle and The Triumph of God: The Essence of Paul’s Thought). The subtitle of the second volume is somewhat misleading. For while Beker insists on the fundamentally apocalyptic framework of Paul’s gospel (i.e., Paul’s interpretation of the Christian message), his primary approach to the theology of the apostle is in working out “the dialectic of coherence and contingency” in Paul’s thought. By coherence he means “the unchanging components of Paul’s gospel,” and by contingency he means “the changing situational part of the gospel, that is, the diversity and particularity of sociological, economic, and psychological factors that confront Paul in his churches” (15-16). Beker’s dialectic is shaped differently from that of the Old Testament theologians cited above and risks the possibility that the coherence becomes a center and the dialectic disappears. The dangers generally present in such an approach rest primarily in the tendency to reduce diversity and plurality to duality—or in Beker’s case, to a single essence or core—and the concomitant possibility that one pole becomes de facto a kind of ruling or normative one.

Perennial Issues. This brief survey of approaches to biblical theology has amplified the ways in which the shape and structure of a biblical theology is crucial to its presentation. Is it formed around a center or a polarity or dialectic? Does it take its structure from inner biblical categories, for example, covenant and election (as in Wright and Eichrodt), from the shape and order of the canon, from the sequence of biblical witnesses (as in von Rad), or, as was customary in an earlier time and still merits more attention than is usually given it by biblical theologians, from the categories of dogmatic theology?

The way in which the unity or coherence of Scripture is discerned in the midst of the diversity of voices is a continuing theological issue that has been approached in different ways: from Eichrodt, who seeks to establish a unitary principle in the form of the covenant, to the proponents of a dialectic or polarity, who claim a kind of middle ground between the awareness of the great diversity of the material and a sense that it holds together but only with tension, to von Rad, who relinquishes the search for a unity on the grounds that it is inappropriate and ultimately to be frustrated because the material is self-consciously a cluster of witnesses from different times and circumstances.

Less apparent than the problem of perceiving unity within diversity is the hotly debated question about whether a biblical theology should be descriptive, not requiring any position vis-à-vis the material, or normative, implicitly making claims about the nature of reality and the will of God. In a well-known article on biblical theology in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Krister Stendahl argued that the task of biblical theology is descriptive, responsible for determining what the texts meant in their original setting, a possibility open to historical critical study and not presupposing anything about their continuing or present meaning. That concern belongs to hermeneutics and systematic theology. His formulation brought forth an unresolved debate. In some cases, positions have been taken in principle; in other cases, the presentation functions in an implicitly normative fashion (as in Brueggemann). That the latter is often the case is suggested by the reticence to engage in biblical theology on the part of Jewish biblical scholars because of a perception from the literature that normative and confessional stances are both implicitly and explicitly characteristic of biblical theology. That issue is pressed in a somewhat different fashion when one encounters a forthright claim that biblical theology is and ought to be located in communities of reference and faith, a claim found in the work of such theologians as Hanson and Brueggemann. Brueggemann is particularly interesting in this regard because his Old Testament Theology frequently surfaces a Christian perspective, but he also insists that the Old Testament is “resiliently Jewish” (80), by which he has in mind the polyvalence, the ambiguity, the provisionality, and the particularity of the text over against Christian tendencies to see an ordered and more consistent theological perspective. Or, in other words, “the Old Testament in its theological articulation is characteristically dialectical and dialogical, and not transcendentalist” (83).

Present Challenges. Finally, the biblical theologian is aware of currents in biblical studies today that pose some challenges to the theological enterprise. One of these is the question of whether or not feminist and liberationist readings of Scripture can contribute to biblical theology. The focus of these approaches—on social location, the authoritative or normative character of women’s experience, the resistance to the male domination within the content of the Bible and over the process of transmission and interpretation, and the centrality of outside voices in the theological task—means that biblical theology will have to devise some different ways of working to take account of this challenge.

It further remains to be seen to what extent the various literary approaches to biblical interpretation and the attention that is being given to the social history and analysis of biblical texts and their location will contribute to the work of biblical theology. Although the domination of historical critical exegesis over theology has been moderated, if not broken, such exegesis was understood by many biblical theologians in the past to work closely with biblical theology, and it indeed contributed to the strong historical thrust that was present among them. At least some literary approaches are resistant to a theological reading of biblical texts, seeing it as extrapolating theological content in a way that is unfaithful to a text’s presentation of itself. Finally, the effort of the social historians and scientists—or those who use their methods—to read the texts through the lens of social history is a priori not conducive to a theological interpretation.

PATRICK D. MILLER