The Doctrine of God

A Global Introduction

Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780801098574
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493410255
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In recent years, the doctrine of God has once again become a central focus of theological discussion and debate. In this ecumenical, international, and contextual introduction, internationally respected scholar Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen offers a global survey of understandings of God in Scripture, Christian history, and contemporary theology. This new edition incorporates developments in theological research over the past decade and has been substantially updated throughout.

Part 1
The Texture of Historical Developments

The first part of this book discusses the rich narrative of biblical testimonies of God and the ways they are interpreted in contemporary scholarship. This is followed by a lengthier historical survey of theological interpretations of God. Alas, such a historical survey has to be selective rather than comprehensive. The special focus of this discussion is the meaning and implications of what in academic theology came to be called classical theism. Both its meaning and diversity of interpretations will be highlighted.

1
Biblical Narrative and Testimonies of God

For Orientation: God-Talk in the Bible

Who is God according to the Christian faith? What characteristics does God possess? What distinguishes the Christian God from other gods? The simplest way to address these questions is to guide the inquiring person to the Bible. After all, Christian churches at all times have claimed to found their faith on the biblical revelation. Yet declaring that the Bible is the guide to the doctrine of the Christian God—as if a careful reading of the biblical text coupled with a thorough and systematic classification of relevant passages would answer all questions about God—is a claim in need of qualifications.

First, the Bible is not a collection of ready-made doctrines, even though preachers and teachers of the church since ancient days have often handled the Bible as though it were. Rather, the Bible is a compilation of testimonies about God from various contexts and perspectives. Most of the Bible, and certainly the Old Testament, is in the form of stories, testimonies, chronicles, worship hymns, questions to God, and so on. Therefore, it is only by carefully listening to the narrative of the Old Testament that we gain a perspective on who God is. This issue has not always been acknowledged by Christian theologians. The reminder of John Goldingay, an Old Testament theologian, merits attention:

Christian theology has not regularly talked about God in narrative terms. The creeds, for instance, are structured around the persons of Father, Son, and Spirit, and systematic theology has often taken God’s trinitarian nature as its structural principle. Before the revival of trinitarian thinking in the late twentieth century, systematic theology often emphasized the fundamental significance of attributes of God such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and perfection.1

Second, as a book written and edited by a number of people over many centuries, the Bible cherishes a plurality of voices. It is not a homogeneous book, nor is it supposed to be read in a univocal way. Take for instance the existence of four Gospels or two sets of historical books covering basically the same materials (Samuel-Kings and Chronicles). The Christian church claims that there is a common core, a set of shared convictions among the legitimate plurality, rather than a cacophony of disconnected voices. At the same time, the church seeks to embrace the whole diversity of biblical revelation’s voices, testimonies, and insights. An apt illustration of the Bible would be a symphony with numerous melody and harmony variations.

Third, God’s revelation in the Bible has a developing, growing, evolving nature. When we open the Bible and start reading about God the Creator in Genesis, we do not have all the perspectives we have by the end of the book of Revelation. To do justice to the Bible’s view of God, we need to be patient and follow the various streams that run through the canon.

For our purposes here—a book about systematic rather than biblical theology—the task of looking at the biblical data is even more demanding. Systematic theology should always take a hard look at the biblical data, but by nature its task is to go beyond—hopefully not against—the biblical revelation and then, at the end of the day, to double-check whether theological ideas are in harmony with biblical orientations. Systematic theology asks many questions about which the biblical revelation is silent. With regard to the doctrine of God, take these for example: How do we address God the Father in an inclusive way? What is the influence of particular worldviews and philosophies on the doctrine of God? How can we speak of the Christian God in a way that relates to other living faiths?

Old Testament: Jewish Monotheism

God through the Lens of Narrative, Testimonies, and Disputes

The Old Testament’s narrative and nonsystematic presentation of God is profoundly honored in the leading American Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann’s theology. Having stated that the “primal subject of an Old Testament theology is of course God,” Brueggemann issues a statement very similar to the one by Goldingay cited above:

But because the Old Testament does not (and never intends to) provide a coherent and comprehensive offer of God, this subject matter is more difficult, complex, and problematic than we might expect. For the most part, the Old Testament text gives us only hints, traces, fragments, and vignettes, with no suggestion of how all these elements might fit together, if indeed they do. What does emerge, in any case, is an awareness that the elusive but dominating Subject of the Old Testament cannot be comprehended in any preconceived categories. The God of the Old Testament does not easily conform to the expectations of Christian dogmatic theology, nor to the categories of any Hellenistic perennial philosophy. . . . The Character who will emerge from such a patient study at the end will still be elusive and more than a little surprising.2

In keeping with the narrative, dynamic understanding, in the Old Testament “God is known by what God does.”3 This simple yet profound insight forms the whole structure and leading motif for the first volume of Goldingay’s Old Testament Theology. In that narrative,

• God began;
• God started over;
• God promised;
• God delivered;
• God sealed;
• God gave;
• God accommodated;
• God wrestled;
• God preserved.4

Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament expresses the same approach by employing court terminology, as expressed in the subtitle of his magnum opus: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. “Israel’s Core Testimony” (the title of part 1) comes in three forms, all of them directly or indirectly related to what God does: testimonies in verbal sentences (testimonies to God’s mighty deeds), testimonies in adjectives (testimonies to what God is like when one considers his actions), and testimonies in nouns (testimonies concerning how to name the God who acts and saves).

Let us follow the methodological desiderata of these two Old Testament scholars and seek to paint a dynamic and lively picture of who God appears to be in the first part of the Christian Bible, which is Israel’s Tanakh (aka Old Testament). A fitting place to begin is the central Old Testament idea of God, that is, strict monotheism, a core conviction of all three Abrahamic faiths.

The Emergence of Jewish Monotheism

The term monotheism (from the Greek monos, “one,” and theos, “God”) is best illustrated in the famous Shema, Israel’s “confession of faith”: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). Quite early, the Israelites left behind henotheism—the belief that other gods exist but that only their God is to be worshiped—and embraced monotheism. Whatever other influences there might have been, there is “no doubt that the great monotheistic religions, including Islam, owe their theological understanding primarily to the witness of the biblical texts.”5 Notwithstanding continuing scholarly disputes about historical details, including whether the Israelites ever were polytheists (believers in several gods), most scholars of religion accept the early existence of monotheism among the Israelites.6 What really made Israel unique among the neighboring nations such as the Hittites and the Edomites, who worshiped their own gods, was Israel’s uncompromising acknowledgment of only one God. That is more than the general idea of a “high God.” Part of Israel’s preser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Texture of Historical Developments
• Part 2: God in Contemporary Theological Interpretations
• Part 3: The Christian God among Religions
• Epilogue
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover