Biblical Theology

The God of the Christian Scriptures

John Goldingay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830873142
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Imagine someone who has spent a lifetime listening deeply and attentively to the full range of Scripture's testimony. Stepping back, they now describe what they have seen and heard. What emerges is a theological cathedral, laid out on the great vectors of Scripture and fitted with biblically sourced materials.This is what John Goldingay has done. Well known for his three-volume Old Testament Theology, he has now risen to the challenge of a biblical theology. While taking the New Testament as a portal into the biblical canon, he seeks to preserve the distinct voices of Israel's Scriptures, accepting even its irregular and sinewed pieces as features rather than problems. Goldingay does not search out a thematic core or overarching unity, but allows Scripture's diversity and tensions to remain as manifold witnesses to the ways of God.While many interpreters interrogate Scripture under the harsh lights of late-modern questions, Goldingay engages in a dialogue keen on letting Scripture speak to us in its own voice. Throughout he asks, "What understanding of God and the world and life emerges from these two testaments?"Goldingay's Biblical Theology is a landmark achievement—hermeneutically dexterous, biblically expansive, and nourishing to mind, soul and proclamation.

1

GOD’S PERSON

Alexander Pope declared that “the proper study of mankind is Man,”1 which seemed a more secure enterprise than trying to study God. But “the proper study of God’s elect is God.”2

The word God is so familiar that it can seem to be a word of unequivocal meaning and reference, but in the ancient world it signified different things to different people, and in the modern world one cannot assume that people who use the word God mean by it the being or the kind of being that the Scriptures speak of.3 The point is implicit when people ask, e.g., whether Muslims worship the same God as Christians. In connection with the First Testament, it is one reason for continuing to use the name Yahweh rather than replacing it by an ordinary word for “the Lord” or “God.” It is as Yahweh that God is the one who created the cosmos, is ultimately sovereign over everything in the heavens and on the earth, has been revealingly, persistently and self-sacrificially involved with Israel in a way that embodies love but also toughness, is committed to bringing Israel and the world to their destiny in the acknowledgment of him, has embodied himself in Jesus, makes himself known in the Holy Spirit and will be God to eternity as he was God from eternity.4

One could see this identity emerging from Psalms 96–100. Yahweh created the entire cosmos and is to be acknowledged by all the nations and worshiped by all creation. He has established his sovereignty in the world and intends to rule its peoples fairly. Along with his own people, these other peoples have reason to rejoice in the prospect of that rule and in the burning up of his foes. His actions on Israel’s behalf are expressions of a commitment and faithfulness that are significant for the whole world, and they are thus reason for the whole world to rejoice. He is good, and his commitment and faithfulness go on forever. Yahweh’s deity is such that “gods” is only a courtesy title when applied to any other beings.

When God reveals the name Yahweh to Moses, he attaches to it the phrase ʾehyeh ʾăšer ʾehyeh (Ex 3:14), which suggests the promise that he will be “the God who is there”5 in the sense that he will be present and active in different ways and different contexts in whatever ways these contexts require. He is thus the living God. That fact constitutes a starting point for thinking about God that marks a contrast over against lifeless gods and images (e.g., Jer 10:14; Acts 14:15), though the contrast with images should not make one sit light to the theological seriousness of the Scriptures’ declarations that God has face, eyes, mouth, ears, nose, back, hand, finger and feet (to the “confusion of all spiritualisers”).6 God is a real person and is really alive.

In this chapter we will look at God’s moral character (section 1.1) and at his metaphysical nature (section 1.2), then at his ways of expressing himself in the world, which come to be focused in talk of the Holy Spirit (section 1.3), and at his mind or message, which comes to be embodied in Jesus (section 1.4).

1.1 GOD’S CHARACTER

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-temperedness, generosity, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and restraint” (Gal 5:22-23). For such qualities to be the Spirit’s fruit, one would expect them to be the Spirit’s own qualities, and one would expect them to be the Spirit’s qualities only if they are God’s own qualities. And indeed they are. The Scriptures do describe God as loving, compassionate, gracious and forgiving, though they also describe God as capable of being wrathful and as not inclined simply to ignore our wrongdoing. So God acts in judgment, but the greater centrality of the first kind of characteristic in God means that he does so rather unwillingly. The combination of the two kinds of characteristics also points to the need for God to be flexible about the way he acts in different contexts.

Loving, Compassionate and Gracious

“God is love.” This declaration cannot be reversed into “love is God”; “God is love” means “God is the One who loves.”7 His love finds expression and definition in sending his Son into the world “so that we might live though him,” and also (in that connection) so that he might deal with the negative features about us, by being “the expiation for our failures” (1 Jn 4:8-10). If God’s love thus issues in a concern to give us life, this fact constitutes a hint that God’s original creation of life was an act of love. Humanity’s waywardness then meant that God’s love had to proceed to clean us up if we were to participate in his life. We were dead in our wrongdoing in the sense that we were doomed to death, after which there would be nothing worthwhile and possibly something very unpleasant. So whether or not we realized it we had no hope. It was then that God made us alive with Jesus “because of the great love with which he loved us” (Eph 2:4-5).

Among the corollaries of God’s love (in Eph 2:4-8) are, first, that the act of love in sending Jesus was an expression of God’s being “rich in mercy” toward people who would otherwise be on the way to experiencing God’s wrath, and who indeed are already experiencing it. Mercy (eleos) is the Septuagint’s equivalent of the First Testament’s distinctive word for steadfast love or commitment (ḥesed); in substance, the distinctive New Testament word for love (agapē) is equivalent to that First Testament word. In mercy and in such love God thus takes action that makes it unnecessary for him to continue showing wrath to people.

A second corollary of God’s love is that God is rich in grace. “By grace you have been rescued” from that wrath, and raised up with Jesus “so that [God] might demonstrate the extraordinary riches of his grace”; because “it is by grace that you have been rescued.” In substance grace (charis) is arguably another equivalent to that First Testament word for commitment, though in more straightforward linguistic terms the First Testament has its own word for grace (ḥēn). Paul’s use of charis combines the Hebrew ideas of ḥēn and ḥesed, since ḥēn suggests something more occasional that is shown by a superior to an inferior, while ḥesed suggests an ongoing commitment.8

Third, God’s action of love is an expression of God’s generous goodness (chrēstotēs)—a word used in the Septuagint to refer to the quality of goodness in God (e.g., Pss 25:7; 31:19 [MT 31:20]; 34:8 [MT 9]). Fortunately for us, God is generous rather than fair (Mt 20:1-16), like a landowner who behaves like a strange “patron,” foolish, prodigal and disturbing.9

The words in Ephesians that describe the outworking of love fit with the Scriptures’ first great systematic statement of who God is, which comes from God’s own lips as an act of reassurance and challenge when Israel has been involved in gross unfaithfulness to him:

Yahweh, God compassionate and gracious, long-tempered and big in commitment and steadfastness, keeping commitment for thousands, carrying waywardness and rebellion and shortcoming, but he certainly does not acquit, attending to parents’ waywardness upon children and upon grandchildren, upon thirds and fourths. (Ex 34:6-7)

There was nothing very new about this statement: such qualities are ones that are “shining in heaven and on earth.”10 Yet its importance is reflected in the way its expressions reappear elsewhere.11 They recur most systematically on Moses’ lips in addressing Yahweh in a subsequent similar context of Israel’s rebellion against Yahweh (Num 14:18). They reappear again in Israel’s prayers, with an emphasis on their positive side (e.g., Neh 9:17; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; see also Joel 2:13, and with irony in Jon 4:2), and then in a fearful twist where the emphasis lies on the negative (Nah 1:2-3, with more irony). The positive side appears again in John’s description of Jesus as “full of grace and truthfulness” (Jn 1:17); in other words, Jesus was the very embodiment of God as God described himself at Sinai. In substance, both sides appear when Paul declares that God’s putting things right is revealed in the gospel, and that this revelation happens against the background of God’s anger being revealed (Rom 1:17-18).

The declaration that God’s love meant a willingness to remove our defilement (1 Jn 4:8-10) also concurs with that first great systematic description of God at Sinai, where one crucial expression of Yahweh’s grace and truthfulness lies in carrying waywardness. Thus “it is God himself who atones for the sins of his people. . . . Atonement is not humanly possible. It is possible only for God. God atones by transmuting human guilt into divine suffering.”12 As a hymn puts it, God’s love is the “love that will not let [Israel] go”; 1 Corinthians 13 and Song of Songs 8:6 are illustrated in Yahweh’s involvement in Israel’s history.13

Carrying Waywardness

Grace is the very essence of the being of God. . . . This is, of course, the secret of the forgiveness of sins. . . . [Forgiveness] meets us, not in spite of, but in and with all the holiness, righteousness and wisdom of God. . . . For God Himself is in it. He reveals His very essence in this streaming forth of grace. There is no higher divine being than that of the gracious God, there is no higher divine holiness than that which He shows in being merciful and forgiving sins. For in this action He interposes no less and no other than Himself for us.14

There is a cost for Yahweh in being involved with us. Paying the cost goes back to the Beginning. When human perversity reached its peak, Yahweh “regretted” having made human beings at all (Gen 6:6-7). While the word for “regret” (nāḥam) can denote having a change of mind about some intention, and having a change of mind need not have emotional connotations, that Hebrew word for “regret” does regularly have emotional connotations, and when applied to something that has already happened, it can hardly simply mean “have a change of mind.” The expression denotes God’s sadness about creation. In case there is any doubt, Genesis goes on to make the point explicit: “It hurt him to his heart” (Gen 6:6). A related noun has been used of the pain that motherhood will bring to Eve and that work will bring to Adam (Gen 3:16-17).

John follows up the description of Jesus as full of grace and truthfulness with an account of John the Baptizer’s pointing to Jesus as the lamb of God who “carries” the world’s sin (Jn 1:29). It is conventional to understand him to describe Jesus as “taking away” the world’s sin, which he does, but the verb airō would more commonly suggest that he was “taking” or “carrying” the world’s sin, which is the point Exodus makes.15 At Sinai, it is the waywardness of Israel in particular that Yahweh implicitly speaks of carrying, but the way Yahweh’s qualities are indeed “shining in heaven and earth” would imply that this carrying applies to the world as a whole. John the Baptizer makes that point explicit. The world is the kosmos, so his comment about carrying applies directly not so much or not only to each individual’s sin but to the sin that characterizes the world as an entity, the world into which Jesus came, which was made through him, but which did not recognize him (Jn 1:9-10), the world that God almost destroyed but did not.

The expression “lamb of God” comes only here, and there is no lamb that “carries” or “takes away” sin in the First Testament, but there are passages either side of Exodus 34 with which these phrases resonate.16 In Exodus 12 God prescribes the daubing of a lamb’s blood on a family’s door to protect it from the Destroyer acting in judgment on Egypt for its rebellion against God. In due course Jesus’ death for the world’s sin will come at the time when the Jewish community is reenacting that event, and Paul will declare that Jesus our Passover lamb has been sacrificed for us (1 Cor 5:7). The other side of Exodus 34, Yahweh lays down another aspect of the way God’s grace and truthfulness will work itself out in connection with carrying or taking sin. It happe...