2005

Post-reformation
Church tradition and interpretation
Historical criticism
Metanarrative of modernity, p. 14. (last 8 lines)

Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth, Walther Eichrodt, Gerhard von Rad

Karl Barth--1st World War--suspicion toward the progressivism

faith
historical criticism

Albrecht Alt--
The God of the fathers not linked to places but to persons
12 tribes--fluid


Compare with Rainer Albertz, Norman K. Gottwald
Martin Noth
Covenantal agreement--proclamation of the law--holy war, and therefore
distinctiveness of Israel.
Albright directly denounced the dominant development hypothesis that
claimed that Israels great theological self-understanding was late. .
(Rainez Albertz continues this view, volume 1, 64) .He insisted that
everything important for Israels faith was already present, in nuce, already
in Moses. (Brueggemann, 24). (G. Ernest Wright has same idea: Thus
Wright insists that Isarels monotheism was already inchoately present from
the Mosaic period. (Brueggemann, 25).

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Eichrodt, Wright, von Rad
Confessing mode
Faith

Eichrodt
Eichrodt considers the Old Testament as a self-contained entity exhibiting, despite
ever-changing historical condition, a constant basic tendency and character. That is,
Eichrodt acknowledges the historical dynamic and change in the text that has
preoccupied the last century of critical scholarship. Against that, however, Eichrodt
dares to identify what is a constant basic tendency and character.1
Eichrodts program is to explore how all of the varitions and deelopments of Israels
religion can be seen to be in the service of a single conceptual notion, covenant.2
his one idea was covenantal relatedness.3
being with4
this covenantal relation is bilateraltwo sided.5
Eichrodts accent on covenant did not happen in a vacuum, but in a world that was
coming to see reality in terms of interactionism.6

Von Rad
The substance of Old Testament theology, as von Rad presented it in volume 1,
consists in a recital of Gods mighty deeds that had been worked in Israels past.
These might acts continued to claim Israels imagination and to evoke Israels trust
and confidence. Israel trusted that the God who had delivered, led, and given land
would continue to act in the same ways in the present and into the future.7

In the second volume, von Rad explores the old. Behold, I am doing a new thing. In
this second volume, von Rad explores the theme of continuity and discontinuity
between Pentateuchal and prophetic traditions, or the tension between the old
articulation of which he had made so much, and the fresh rearticulation of the
tradition in a new time and circumstance. In this way von Rad shows how the
prophetic voice in Israel takes up and utilizes the Hexateuchal tradition and also
mounts a critique against the old tradition.,.... thus witnessing and giving voice to the
God of Israel who is always restlessly and vigorously at the front edge of Israels
life.8
It was soon observed that a theology of mighty deeds allowed no room for the
wisdom materials of the Old Testament in which God did not act. Indeed, one way to
handle the problem of wisdom was to treat the sapiential materials of the Old
Testament as substandard, largely borrowed, and largely utilitarian, so that they hardly
qualify as elements of Israelite theology.9
In
1 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute,
Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 27.
2 Ibid., 28.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 29.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 34.
8 Ibid., 36.
9 Ibid.
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Wright
God Who Acts

Both Eichrodt and von Rad, as well as Wright, understood biblical faith as a faith
over against its environment: either the Israelites in a Canaanite context, believers in a
sea of positivistic developmentalism, or confessors amid a challenge of paganism.10

Langdon Gilkey has pointed this out.

The outcome of this discussion is that act of God is either understood in a nave,
commonsense way that fails to satisfy critical scrutiny, or it becomes a very large
philosophical notion (as in Paul Tillich or Gordon Kaufmann) that has no discernible
connection to what is recited in the Old Testament.11

It was Barrs great contribution to biblical scholarship to show that it is not a word
but a sentence--words in context--that has theological significance. Barr sought to
demystify much that had tried to claims special privilege as theological discourse, and
he insisted that theological discourse in the Old Testament must be understood as
intelligible; that is, it must be taken for what it says, with no hidden advantage of
privilege.12

Sociological Approach
Norman K. Gottwarld

Rhetorical Approach
James Muilenburg
Phyllis Trible
Power and Rhetoric

Ricouer: In front of the text

Brevard Childs
The interpretation of the material will vary in relation to the particular context in
which it is placed. Because there is often an interrelation between different contexts,
one can expect to find areas that reflect a common design for several different
contexts. The search to discover the original historical contexts for the various parts of
the Old and New Testaments is essential for a number of historico-critical disciplines,
such as literary, historical, and comparative religion analysis. However, it is also true,
as the adherents to the school of "newer criticism" in the field of English literature
have continued to point out, that an interpreter can approach the same material and
use only the final stage of the literature as a legitimate context. The results will vary
greatly depending on whether the context includes or excludes the diachronistic
dimension. (Brevald Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis)

The Canon as the Context for Biblical Theology

Again, to speak of the canon as a context implies that these Scriptures must be
interpreted in relation to their function within the community of faith that treasured
10 Ibid., 39.
11 Ibid., 43.
12 Ibid., 45.
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them. The Scriptures of the church are not archives of the past but a channel of life for
the continuing church, through which God instructs and admonishes his people.
Implied in the use of the canon as a context for interpreting Scripture is a rejection of
the method that would imprison the Bible within a context of the historical past.
Rather, the appeal to the canon understands Scripture as a vehicle of a divine reality,
which indeed encountered an ancient people in the historical past, but which
continues to confront the church through the pages of Scripture. The churchs prayer
for illumination by the Holy Spirit when interpreting Scripture is not a meaningless
vestige from a forgotten age of piety, but an acknowledgment of the continuing need
for God to make himself known through Scripture to an expectant people. Because the
church uses the text as a medium of revelation the interrelation of Bible and theology
is constitutive in the context of the canon. (Brevald Childs, Biblical Theology in
Crisis)

The canonical approach to Old Testament theology rejects a method which is

unaware of its own time-conditioned quality and which is confident in its ability to
stand outside, above and over against the received tradition in adjudicating the truth or
lack of truth of the biblical material according to its own criteria.13

Then again, a canonical approach envisions the discipline of Old Testament theology
as combining both descriptive and constructive features. It recognizes the descriptive
task of correctly interpreting an ancient text which bears testimony to historic Israels
faith. Yet it also understands that the theological enterprise involves a construal by the
modern interpreter, whose stance to the text affects its meaning. For this reason, Old
Testament theology cannot be identified with describing an historical process in the
past (contra Gese), but involves wrestling with the subject-matter to which scripture
continues to bear testimony.14

He is aware that: A pre-critical method which could feel free simply to translate
every statement of the Bible into a principle of right doctrine is no longer possible.15
And Augustine, Luther and Calvin - to name but a few - all worked with a far more
sophisticated understanding of the Bible than the term pre-critical suggests.16

13 Brevard S Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (London: SCM

Press, 1985), 12.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 13.
16 Ibid., 1314.
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