This excellent review of New Testament Theology and its Quest for Relevance: Ancient Texts and Modern Readers, by Thomas R. Hatina, appeared last week in Church Times.
Theology from the Bible alone
New Testament theology is a slippery subject to define. Thomas Hatina, a Canadian New Testament scholar, devotes many pages to an attempt to do so, and for this purpose offers a survey of its history, intended to help students to see how it has evolved, and what its future might be.
He observes that its emergence towards the end of the 18th Century was a characteristically Protestant phenomenon, reacting against the dogmatic approach of the Roman Catholic Church towards the scriptures, according to which, though they contained everything necessary for salvation, they must be interpreted according to methods and rules prescribed by the Church. Protestant scholars argued that, on the contrary, a unified and objective account of the Christian faith could be obtained from the Bible alone.
Both unity and objectivity turned out, of course, to be elusive: different traditions in Protestantism diverged considerably from one another as a result of their particular interpretations of scripture. Yet Hatina judges that the project has been “a valuable experiment in religious autonomy”.
Apart from offering a guide for students (complete with “Discussion questions” at the end of each chapter), Hatina argues strongly against regarding this as a purely academic subject. New Testament theology is a discipline pursued within a community of faith and sustained by the conviction that study of the scriptures can yield a foundation and a paradigm for faith. It must, in other words, continue to be relevant to the life of believers and to the world in which they seek to practise their religion.
He chooses to work with an analysis that discerns two types of this theology. One, the “foundationalist”, assumes that the words of scripture alone suffice for the task, and, if rightly, interpreted, provide the required relevance and objectivity – an assumption, he argues, that has fallacies, and has led historically to serious misuses of the Bible to support such things as slavery and apartheid.
As an alternative, he argues strongly for the “dialectical” type, which brings the biblical material into dialogue with modern assumptions. For both types, the historical-critical method, particularly as a tool for recovering the Historical Jesus, is a primary resource; but only the second offers serious engagement with the world as it is.
It is to the requirements for this engagement that Hatina devotes most attention. The study of other religions, for example, should precede and be a condition for the theological enterprise, not an adjunct to it; similarly, the modern disciplines of sociology, linguistics, etc., are a necessary part of one’s equipment, lest one fail to recognise one’s own prior assumptions. Those, for instance, who have been trained to search for the earliest material concerning Jesus in the NT on the grounds that it is historically the most reliable must ask themselves why they should regard this as especially authoritative in matters of faith. Hatina makes a good case for broadening the subject beyond the parameters usually adopted now.
All of this has to be stated in very general terms, an inevitably generates language rich in abstraction. Post-modernism, for instance, Fortna describes as “an anti-foundational modality engineered from a systematically defined foundation that presumes the delimitation of all data”. The student must be prepared to cope with much writing of this kind; but perseverance will bring a reward: one may be helped to understand better the possibilities, as well as the frustrations, inherent in a “quest for relevance” in NT theology.
Canon Anthony Harvey is a former sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey.
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