Theology of the Old Testament

Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy

Walter Brueggemann, Rebecca J. Kruger Gaudino

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780800699314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451419788
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This paperback edition of Walter Brueggemann's monumental work makes his important volume available at a lower price.

One

Retrospect 1: From the Beginning to the End of a Generative Period

Entry into the study of Old Testament theology, like the study of any discipline, begins with the awareness of the governing questions of the discipline.1 No intelligible study begins de novo but must be situated in past and present ongoing conversations. Old Testament study receives its shaping, governing questions from two sources. First, the discipline has a long history in the church and in the academy, and the gains and scars of that history continue to linger and exercise strong influence on current discussions. Second, the discipline continues to be practiced by contemporary scholars who in varying ways and degrees are attentive and responsive to new questions that arise out of contemporary contexts, problems, and possibilities. Advances in the discipline can be made only by taking into serious and critical account both that long history of shaping questions and new questions arising out of contemporary contexts. The identification of these questions is indeed a perilous matter, in some measure a subjective articulation. I shall nonetheless begin with an attempt to identify in turn both sets of inquiries with which we must be concerned.

Beginnings in the Reformation

It is not obvious at what point a consideration of the history of scholarship in Old Testament theology should begin.2 For our purposes, we may begin with the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. That beginning point may be taken as legitimate for several reasons. First, Old Testament theology, in its modern intention, has been until recently almost exclusively an enterprise of Protestant Christianity—until very recently, of German Protestant Christianity. Second, the Reformation itself may be understood as an effort to emancipate the evangelical reality of the Bible from the reductive insistences of church interpretation, and that text, more or less emancipated from church interpretation, has become the subject and problematic of Old Testament Theology.3 The extent or desirability of such emancipation continues to be a matter of important dispute. Third, in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation, though not simply as its consequence, a seismic change occurred in the epistemological content of the European intellect in which the present discipline was shaped. That change featured a departure from the long-regnant medieval Christian epistemological domination to what we will subsequently characterize as “modern” epistemology. For all of these reasons, we may take the sixteenth-century Reformation as our beginning point.

The Reformation proceeded as a response to the “gospel truth of the Bible,” without primary or defining reference to the dogmatic assumptions and controls of established church interpretation. The key insight of Martin Luther concerning the graciousness of God apart from the church’s administration of a sacramental system and from the church’s expectation of a religio-moral quid pro quo in relation to the sacraments is well known.4 Luther was first of all a biblical interpreter. His great and revolutionary insight, though in the service of and informed by his personal theological struggle, arose in his attentive and scholarly study of Scripture. Luther asserted that the “evangelical substance” of biblical faith is not and cannot be contained in the habituated, accustomed, and reductionist reading of church theology that made God simply an integral part of a church-administered system of salvation. While Luther’s theological accent and its political ramifications are widely recognized, for our purposes it is important to notice the interpretive-hermeneutical pivot point that was crucial for Luther: namely, that the Bible is a voice of revelation not to be confused with, encumbered by, or contained in any human categories of interpretation that make the voice more coherent, domesticated, or palatable. Such a recognition of the liberated, liberating reality of revelation, odd and unencumbered as it is, had as its match Luther’s defiant and energizing courage to identify this peculiar faith-generating and faith-driven affirmation. This was, for all of the work of God’s Spirit, a theological act of interpretation and imagination. Luther’s intellectual, interpretive courage set the work of biblical theology in a wholly new direction.

The political force of the Reformation (insofar as Reformation might enact a political and cultural revolution) is complicated and cannot be reduced to a single cause or explanation. It is possible, nonetheless, to assert that for all of the political interests and interpretive vagaries that came to be associated with the Reformation, its chief advocates shared Luther’s primary passion that Scripture have its own voice, to be heard in its own liberated radicality. This “voice of the Bible” speaks its truth and makes its claim in its own categories, categories that are recurringly odd and unaccommodating. The substance of that truth is God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the God known decisively and uniquely in Jesus of Nazareth. The Bible bears primal witness to and discloses this God, without any intellectual, epistemological accommodation to any other categories, including those of the (Roman) Catholic Church whose children those Reformers were. The Bible is to be understood “as Scripture” in the community that gathers in response to the claim that here God is decisively disclosed.5 Thus the Bible is a revelation, and Scripture study is an attempt to receive, understand, and explicate this revelation—hopefully to receive, understand, and explicate this revelation in all its oddity, without reductionism, domestication, or encumbrance.6

For purposes that will become apparent, it is important to note that the Institutes of John Calvin, the most formidable and influential codification of Reformation reading of the Bible, was not offered as a systematic theology designed to counter or compete with older medieval systems.7 It was rather offered as a guide for the reading of Scripture evangelically. That is, Calvin did not write so that the faithful would read “away from the Bible” into a coherent system (as the Institutes have often been taken), but so that the faithful would read “into the Bible” and into its evangelical claim, which Calvin shows to be pertinent to and definitional for every aspect of life, both personal and public.

The practical effect of the Reformation, as far as the Bible is concerned, is to let the Bible have its own voice, without regard for or indebtedness to any established category of church interpretation. In this sense, the Reformation was indeed an act of interpretive emancipation. Luther and those who came after him in the Reformation perforce established categories of and criteria for reading that are not negotiable. They insisted with great passion, however, that their evangelical modes of Bible reading were not imposed but in fact arose from the substance of the biblical text itself. As we shall see, this practice of devising categories of interpretation that appear to be given is an ongoing issue in Old Testament theology.

Post-Reformation Biblical Interpretation

The post-Reformation period of biblical interpretation may be summarized in two facets. First, the Reformation evoked in Roman Catholicism what has come to be termed the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent resisted the Reformation effort to free biblical interpretation from the interpretive authority of the church (the very interpretive authority that the Reformers regarded as a decisive cause of distorted reading). The Tridentine formulation of authority is that Christian truth is rooted in two sources, Scripture and tradition.8 “Tradition” means the accumulated substance of church teaching, thus providing that the Bible will be heard and understood in the categories of Catholic church faith, the very categories that Luther understood to be the means whereby the evangelical claim of the text had been silenced, denied, or distorted.

When the polemics of Trent are understood in context, it is evident that Trent was correct in its formulation; though in that polemical situation, Reformation Christianity could not accept the claim as practiced in the Roman Catholic Church. It is nonetheless the case that Scripture cannot be understood apart from the ongoing role of communal tradition.9 Not even the principal Reformers thought that Scripture could be held apart from an ongoing interpretive community with already declared interpretive assumptions. In the midst of the sixteenth-century polemics, however, such a common acknowledgment would have been unthinkable. Rapprochement on this crucial point is only now an available option in ecumenical conversation.

Second, in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation and in the presence of Tridentine polemics on both sides, it is usual to speak of the hardening of Protestant biblical interpretation. Such interpretation, in the generations after the breakthrough of the Reformation itself, moved away from and toned down the radical emancipatory notion of the Bible voiced by Luther and his cohorts. While later generations of Reformation interpreters continued to reiterate the slogans of the early Reformation concerning sola scriptura, that is, Scripture apart from the interpreting authority of the church, in fact those slogans, in both Lutheran and Calvinist versions, were readily situated in hardened systems of orthodoxy that rivaled Trent’s closed formulation in their certitude and lack of porousness. In the work of such theologians as Martin Chemnitz, Matthias Flacius, and Francis Turretin, the Bible came to be located in Protestant systems of faith that kept the form of Reformation radicality, but that froze the substance of interpretation in a way that seriously jeopardized and compromised the “freedom of the gospel.”10

The ongoing community of interpreters, on the whole, found the Bible’s “oddness” excessive, and did what it could to counter and reduce the oddness. Thus it is unwise for our purposes to claim too much for a Reformation understanding of the Bible, unless at the same time we recognize that the oddness of the Bible (more or less) on its own terms was a greater challenge than the ongoing institutional church could tolerate. This rather hasty “settlement” of Reformation questions, in both Roman Catholic and Protestant responses, raises for us a principal problem of Old Testament theology: the difficult relation between the Bible and church theology; in other words, between text and reading community.11 It is clear that the large notion of “Rule of Faith,” a term used both for the Bible itself and for the church’s confessional rules of interpretation, intends to hold together Bible and church interpretation, or perhaps even to cover over the tension that belongs to our work of scholarship in Old Testament theology.12 It is equally clear, however, that no amount of careful formulation can completely conceal the deep problematic of the Bible’s relation to church faith. The Reformation itself, especially in Luther’s work, was a remarkable moment of emancipation—one might call it an epistemological spree—but it could not be sustained. Matters were quickly compromised, perhaps inevitably so in order to make the Bible institutionally palatable and useful.

Thus emerged a struggle for the control of interpretation among (a) the orthodox, who sought to enlist the Bible in a defense of Reformation doctrine; (b) the rationalists, who adhered to newer modes of autonomous learning that eventuated in Deism;13 and (c) the pietists, who resisted both hardened orthodoxy and autonomous rationalism.14 If these interpretive struggles are taken seriously and understood as efforts that, while perhaps misguided, were by the lights of their practitioners acts of good faith, we can see that exceedingly important and difficult issues were under discussion and in dispute. It is clear, in short, that the approaches of orthodoxy, rationalism, and pietism put very different questions to the Bible out of very different concerns from very different social locations. Thus it does not surprise us that these interpretive perspectives arrived at very different readings of the text. What may seem to us rather picky issues were in fact very large issues about power and confidence in a world known to be deeply at risk.

It is clear that these parties to the conflicted conversations about interpretation represented and embodied continuing propensities in interpretation. Thus, those we now call rationalists continue their work in “the guild,” intending that their “objective” research should not be curbed by fideistic limitation. The “orthodox” continue to be those who come at the text through the categories of church creeds and assumptions. While our main issues will concern the dispute between rationalists and the orthodox, the pietistic tradition continues to operate at a more popular interpretive level, unwilling to be drawn into the subtleties of the other two parties. These old quarrels are yet with us, and the stakes continue to be regarded as high.

As a result of such passionately disputed interpretation, the churches of the Reformation, the first natural habitat of biblical theology, were not hermeneutica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Summary of Contents
• Contents
• Preface to the 2005 Edition
• Preface to the 1997 Edition
• Abbreviations
• One - Retrospect 1: From the Beginning to the End of a Generative Period
• Two - Retrospect 2: The Contemporary Situation
• Part I - Israel’s Core Testimony
• Part II - Israel’s Countertestimony
• Part III - Israel’s Unsolicited Testimony
• Part IV - Israel’s Embodied Testimony
• Part V - Prospects for Theological Interpretation