The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture

by Brevard S.Childs

Eerdmans,Grand Rapids,2004.332 pp.$35.00 (cloth).ISBN 0-8028-2661-6.

In the preface to his commentary on the entire book of Isaiah (Old Testament Library, Westminster John Knox, 2001), Childs confessed a sense of incompletion. That commentary is an illuminating quest to discover and construe the elements of Isaiah’s text that make the book a unity, but as an exegetical work with emphasis on redactional and intertextual matters it sought “to hear the Old Testament’s own discrete voice and to honor its own theological integrity” (Isaiah, p. 4). The hermeneutical and theological issues raised by reading Isaiah as Christian scripture could not be addressed. The present work takes up that task.

The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, however, is not a kind of companion to the Commentary to be used as a resource for interpreting specific passages in Isaiah. Instead, it is an assault on the whole question of the use of the Bible as Christian scripture, with emphasis on the Old Testament. This theme is a principle that runs through all Childs’ work: Scripture is a literary genre that mandates ways of interpretation appropriate to its identity. His strategy in this work is to follow the exegesis of Isaiah through the history of its interpretation as Christian Scripture. In this way he makes a cross section of Christian interpretation that illustrates its typical features. What he is after is evidence that “there is such a thing as the Christian church’s exegetical tradition” in all the changes and variety in interpretation across the ages (p. ix).

The body of the book is composed of chapters dealing in historical order with important theologians selected because their work offers examples of the interpretation of Isaiah. The foundation for the investigation is laid with a consideration of the interpretive effect of the Old Testament’s translation into Greek and the use of the Old in the New Testament. Then there are nine chapters on figures from the patristic period: Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome, John Chrysostom, Cyril of Alexander, and Theodoret of Cyrus. The medieval period is represented by four: Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra, Martin Luther, and John Calvin. The survey is concluded with chapters on seventeenth and eighteenth century interpreters, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and postmodern interpretation. Each interpreter is given a historical introduction followed by illustrative examples of his reading of Isaiah.

ne of the distinct values of the book is the journey provided along the course of Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. Every chapter is written in conversation with the research on the individual involved. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter are a treasure lode of guidance for further study. It is obvious from the structure of the book that in Childs’ view the principal issues and practices of Christian hermeneutics were developed in the patristic period, debated and refined in the medieval, and blurred in the modern as the genre of the literature as scripture began to lose its defining role in the presuppositions of its interpreters. It is a true irony of modern theological education that students are introduced to biblical study with accounts of the history of interpretation that begin where theological hermeneutics are displaced.

The final chapter gathers the harvest of the historical survey, a list of “discernible characteristic features that constitute and identify a family resemblance within the Christian exegesis of the Old Testament” (p. 300). Childs lists seven features: acknowledgement of the authority of Scripture; recognition that Scripture has both a literal and a spiritual dimension; emphasis that the Old Testament is Scripture as well as the New Testament and seriousness about the relation between the two; persuasion that Scripture is the work of both human authors and divine intention; assumption that Scripture has a determinate reference, a message to which faithful exegesis will respond; intense interest in history and the dialectical relation between human and divine action in its course and events. The seventh feature dealing with the relation between the final form of the canonical text and critical reconstructions of Israel’s history seems to be an expansion of the sixth.

The simplicity of the above list should not suggest that Childs presents these features as simple matters. He insists that every one is intellectually complex and has been implemented by different theologians in a wide variety of ways. That is to be expected when the exemplars of these features represent such variety as Origen, Aquinas, and Calvin illustrate. But there is, he argues, a recognizable continuity of character that identifies interpreters as Christian exegetes across all the changes in culture that Christian history traverses. His excavation of the features of this continuity from the historical record is not only descriptive in purpose; it is normative as well. His hope is that these conclusions “will both illuminate the exegetical endeavors of the past and afford some aid regarding the hermeneutical challenges facing the interpreters of the Bible today” (p. 299). They constitute a kind of regula fidei that sets the broad parameters within which Christian exegetes do their work.

Childs’ hope and purpose do not mean that he advocates compromise or withdrawal from critical study of the Bible, a charge he has to reject repeatedly. A look at the Isaiah commentary alone is adequate rebuttal. He is rather calling attention to the fact that Christian exegesis responds to dimensions of the text to which historical critical exegesis as such does not attend, factors such as: the social purpose for which biblical literature was compiled and composed, the constant reference of its texts to the reality of God, the interpretive effect of the interrelation between the collected works, the underlying unity that runs through the diversity of the literature, and the scope of the whole as one book. The apprehension of such factors is confessional and theological, but no less critical in interpretive discipline.

What is at issue is the nature of the exegetical task being undertaken. “It is one thing to attempt to understand the Old Testament as the sacred scriptures of the church. It is quite another to understand the study of the Bible in history-of-religion categories”(p. 321). It is because “sacred scriptures of the church” were the governing genre of the biblical texts for them that Christian exegetes are marked by a family resemblance. Bible and Church are interdependent entities. It is academically proper and culturally inevitable that the Bible is interpreted as defined by other genres. But it is in the “setting-in-life” of the Church and its mission that interpretation true to its ultimate genre can and should be practiced. It is appropriate that Childs concludes his book with confession of faith in the one holy catholic and apostolic church.

There are aspects of the book that, for me, detract from its effectiveness. In the treatment of his exemplary theologians, more space could have been devoted to accounts of the way Isaiah was interpreted and less to argumentative discussion with research on the theologians. The account of the modern period in effect skips from George Adam Smith to Walter Brueggemann, and omits consideration of important theological appropriations of the Old Testament in the twentieth century. In the final chapter, the sections on the family resemblance of Christian exegesis of the Old Testament are sometimes overlapping and lack clear delineation.

But such matters do not seriously compromise the contribution of the book. The historical perspective that the book puts on the theological appropriation of the Old Testament by Christians is immensely important. In a way it rounds out the virtual library of publications from Childs that has made him an incomparably significant figure in biblical criticism and theology. If this book is his publishing valedictory, and there are indications in the dedications of both the commentary and this book that it might be, then it is the occasion for a salute to him for his valiant “struggle” to lead many through the modern hermeneutical wilderness.

James Luther Mays, Professor Emeritus
Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
Richmond, Virginia

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New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel

by I.Howard Marshall

InterVarsity,Downers Grove,2004.765 pp.$40.00(cloth).ISBN 0-8308-2795-1.

The genre of New Testament theology has been dominated by, and has lived under the shadow of, Rudolf Bultmann’s magisterial Theology of the New Testament (German original, 1948). Other New Testament theologies followed in the next forty years but, apart from the work of Leonhard Goppelt, they paled in the light of Bultmann’s brilliant though flawed synthesis, leading many to wonder if this historically Protestant project had run its course. Since the 1990s, however, there has been a resurgence of New Testament theology. Klaus Berger, G. B. Caird, Joachim Gnilka, Ferdinand Hahn, Hans Hübner, Georg Strecker, Peter Stuhlmacher, François Vouga, and Ulrich Wilckens have written, or are in the process of writing, significant New Testament theologies, often in new and refreshing ways. This renewal of the discipline suggests that the long shadow of Bultmann is finally receding.

I. H. Marshall’s New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel is part of this renewal. Written with the needs of students and pastors in mind, it stands within the Evangelical tradition represented by the New Testament theologies of George Eldon Ladd and Donald Guthrie, although it organizes and presents its material differently. It is deeply indebted to, and appreciative of, the works of Stuhlmacher and Hahn, but it does not attempt to reproduce the magisterial syntheses that they have achieved.

Marshall is aware of the difficulties that any scholar, even a great scholar, faces when writing a New Testament theology. What is the goal and purpose of such a work? How should the material be organized? Should the theology of Jesus be part of such a work? How is New Testament theology related to systematic theology? In Marshall’s view, “the aim of students of New Testament theology is to explore the New Testament writers’ developing understanding of God and the world, more particularly the world of people and their relationship to one another” (p. 23). Consequently, a New Testament theology is not a history of the early church; nor is it a study of the religion of early Christianity, although elements from both disciplines will and should be found in it. Rather, it is a genuine work of theology inasmuch as it should present what the New Testament says about God, Christ, and the Spirit in relationship to the world of human beings.

But how does one get at and present this theology? Marshall dismisses two approaches as erroneous: 1) the indiscriminate use of the New Testament writings as if they all expressed the same thing; and 2) the imposition of a later framework of systematic theology upon the material as if it were the framework of the New Testament. Moreover, although he understands the value of other approaches, such as comparing the manner in which different New Testament writings approach specific theological topics or tracing the historical growth and development of the theological ideas of the New Testament, Marshall chooses to examine the theology of each of the writings of the New Testament individually in order to determine to what extent their diverse theologies cohere so that one can speak of the unity of the theology in the New Testament. If the first task of New Testament theology, then, is to catalogue the theology of the various writings, the second is to compare these theologies in order “to establish the extent and nature of the unity and diversity” (p. 30) in the New Testament. The subtitle of Marshall’s work aptly summarizes these tasks: “Many Witnesses, One Gospel.”

Marshall organizes the New Testament writings into four groups: 1) The Synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles; 2) The Pauline Letters; 3) The Johannine Literature; and 4) Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, and Jude. He includes the message of Jesus within the first group as an integral part of the theology of the Synoptic Gospels because he views the message of these Gospels as essentially faithful to the message of Jesus. Marshall studies each of the Pauline letters individually, in a chronological scheme, before presenting a Pauline synthesis. Apart from the Pastorals, which he judges as faithful to the Pauline tradition, he views these letters as coming from Paul’s hand. The third category includes the Book of Revelation, in addition to the Johannine Gospel and Epistles, a decision that some will question given the distinctive theological vision of Revelation. The writings of the fourth category, as Marshall acknowledges, are the most difficult to integrate into the overall project since these writings, apart from 2 Peter and Jude, are not related to each other in a way comparable to the writings of the first three parts.

Marshall’s approach is clear and straightforward. He reviews “the theological story” of each writing before proceeding to a statement of its “theological themes.” His analysis of “the theological story” provides an insightful summary of the content of the writing under discussion and will be especially helpful for those who are not familiar with the content or argument of the New Testament writings. Thus this volume functions as a kind of theological introduction to the New Testament. It is in his second step, his analysis of the “theological themes,” that Marshall is most directly engaged in the work of New Testament theology. This analysis, however, is disappointing precisely because it tends to focus on themes rather than establish the inner theological coherency of the particular writing. This is a result, in part, of Marshall’s distinction between “theological story” and “theological themes,” raising the question whether it would not have been more profitable to integrate these two steps. Marshall employs footnotes sparingly but judiciously, and he concludes each chapter with a bibliography that will be helpful to students and pastors.

The most innovative aspect of this work is Marshall’s comparison of the theologies of the different writings with each other in order to determine if we can legitimately speak of an underlying unity in the theology of the New Testament. A series of chapters that build upon one another compare the theology of the writings in each part with those that have preceded it. Thus, after explaining the theologies of the Synoptic Gospels, he compares their theologies with that of the Acts of the Apostles. After studying the Pauline Letters, he compares the theology of Paul with the theology of the Synoptics and Acts. After investigating the Johannine literature, he compares the theologies of John, Paul, the Synoptics, and Acts. Finally, after his presentation of Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, and Jude, he compares these writings with the theologies in the rest of the New Testament. Although he readily highlights and acknowledges the theological tensions between these major blocks of material, Marshall finds an underlying unity in the theology of the New Testament writings. The cumulative effect of these chapters, then, is to establish the one gospel proclaimed by its many witnesses.

At the end of his work, Marshall provides a summary of the diversity and unity of the New Testament. He argues that “there is a significant core of agreement and identity within the theologies of the individual constituents of the New Testament” (p. 717). This can be seen in four stages common to all of the writings: 1) There is a situation of human need because all have sinned and are under God’s judgment; 2) God’s saving act is accomplished through Jesus Christ whose death and resurrection must be preached to the world; 3) Those who respond positively enjoy the new life of the Spirit, as individuals and as members of the community of the church; and 4) God will bring the redemptive act of Christ to its completion at the parousia and final judgment, when evil will be destroyed.

Marshall’s work is the fruit of a mature scholar who is able to identify unity in diversity. His work is conservative in nature, and it avoids daring reconstructions. It views the writings of the New Testament as missionary in nature and as deeply rooted in the theology of the Old Testament. His work is another indication that the discipline of New Testament theology is alive and well.

Frank J. Matera
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

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