One of the areas of theological reflection that I have been thinking about lately is the interface between what we think the Bible is and what it says it is. Evangelicals have come up with very clear formulations of what they think the Bible should be, or rather, what an inspired, authoritative book should look like. Inerrancy debates are looming up all over the place, and part of the debate is exactly about one’s presupposition of the nature of Scripture. Although “inerrancy battles” are mostly fought within evangelicalism, I have come to realize more and more that the assumptions that often fuel the epistemological, pre-suppositional and theological fire of these discussions are not privy to fundamentalists and a certain cross-section of evangelicals. The same question-begging assumptions come from the academia, and the presently raging debates are bringing these to light in more nuanced ways.

James Kugel in his How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now concludes his chapter on the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) with what scholars see as the incompatibility of the human elements they find in a text that is taken to be divine. After showing why scholars think that the command not to make any images was inserted at later period (which does not imply that it did not exist early on), he writes the following:

[The Decalogue’s] very form now appears to most scholars to assimilate them to the covenant stipulations found in old Hittite and other ancient Near Eastern treaties. This fact itself raises disturbing questions about the divine origin of these laws. For why should God, in this crucial act of binding the people of Israel to Himself, have chosen to rely on an utterly human set of conventions instead of going about things in some very different, divine sort of way? (p. 259, my emphasis)

Read more »

I am slowly working my way through John Goldingay’s Old Testament Theology: Israel’s Gospel. He is a very thought-provoking writer, and I look forward to reading all three volumes. Incidentally, I am still reading Bruce Waltke’s OT Theology, but, for some reason, it has not resonated with me as I thought it would (although I have benefited from Waltke’s insights).

Anyway, Goldingay used an analogy of God as a lion to reflect on the nature of theology (and more specifically Old Testament Theology), and I would like to quote it here. I specially liked this analogy because it also says something about testimony and preaching in a way I had not thought of before.

Let us imagine that God is like a lion, as the Old Testament says (e.g.. Lam 3:10; Hos 5:14; Amos 3:8). Testimony is then like telling people you have met a lion. Preaching is like inviting people to come to meet a lion. Theology is like reflecting on your meeting with a lion. It will involve some distancing, though during the process of reflection the lion may suddenly pop its head round the door. This reflection will be open to conversation with scientists who have read books about lions and people who have watched nature programs on television, whether or not they have met a lion or are sure they exist. Indeed, there are many scientific ways to seek to understand a lion, and many angles from which to do so: there are the angles and the categories of the zoologist, the geographer and the economist. In a parallel way, there are many angles from which to seek to understand the metaphysical lion. There are the angles of the systematic theologian and the philosophical theologian, the New Testament scholar—and the Old Testament scholar. The nature of the beast is such that no one angle and no one set of categories will reveal everything. The conviction of this theologian is that there is insight to be gained by looking at the metaphysical lion from the angle of the Old Testament and focusing resolutely on that. Whether this is so must emerge a posteriori. (2003, p. 20, emphasis mine)

I have been working through Bruce Waltke’s Old Testament Theology. I have been an admirer of Dr. Waltke since I read his book An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax with M. O’Connor. I just finished Part One which covers the basis, task and method of biblical theology. Chapter 6, the last chapter in this section, talks about the center of the bible giving us an overview of Old Testament theology.

I have enjoyed the book so far. Although Dr. Waltke is a conservative scholar, he is very unpredictable and it is a mistake to presuppose where he will stand on a given issue. One thing is quite clear though, he takes the bible seriously and wants his readers to know God personally. I will not be reviewing this book since Art Boulet has been doing a great job reviewing each chapter of the book in his “Wednesdays with Waltke” (Dr. Waltke himself is interacting with his reviews). But I will probably be sharing some thoughts on aspects of the book that I find particularly helpful. Right now I am curious to see how Dr. Waltke will develop his idea of the center of the Old Testament which he says is the message “that Israel’s sublime God, whose attributes hold in tension his holiness and mercy, glorifies himself by establishing his universal rule over his volitional creatures on earth through Jesus Christ and his covenant people” (144).