Editorial

With the October issue we complete a two-part exploration of the past, present, and future of biblical theology—or, framed more broadly, the theological interpretation of Scripture—in marking the seventieth anniversary of the journal Interpretation, which throughout its history has contributed in such significant ways to the enterprise. This issue features major essays by six internationally renowned scholars whose primary focus has been New Testament studies, and who have been major participants in conversation about what it means to engage Scripture theologically.

The lead essay, by Robert Morgan, provides an informative, incisive orientation to more than two centuries of intensive discussion of biblical theology, highlighting the shift in more recent work from a historical to a literary paradigm for New Testament theology. He accents the way in which a scholar’s commitments and aims—whether religiously prompted or not—shape the questions and results of biblical-theological investigation. In much theological interpretation of Scripture, the scholar’s theological commitments remain implicit. Morgan observes that New Testament theology “aims to be intelligible and credible to various audiences. Because its methods are those of secular scholarship, it can remain an ecclesial theological discipline while working alongside biblical scholars with different interests. The way in which New Testament theology has combined its secular methods with its religious aims allows the religious elements to remain implicit.”

With keen wit, C. Clifton Black creates an imaginary interview with himself, through probing questions and edgy responses exposing many of the problems and dilemmas encountered in more than two centuries of work on biblical theology. In a manner that anticipates Joel Green’s essay, Black makes a case for a “scriptural theology” that combines descriptive and normative theological tasks and takes seriously the traditions of theological interpretation of Scripture that have intervened between the first and twenty-first centuries. Each generation, he urges, “must learn afresh” to “read Scripture theologically and to reason theologically out of Scripture. We listen to the tenor of each scriptural voice, in harmony or discord with its fellow choristers; we locate their tones in the symphony of Christian tradition; we strike the chords evoked by a new audience.”

The essay by Sandra Schneiders continues her decades-long exploration of the possibilities of a biblical spirituality that does not divorce theologically interested study of the Bible from the faithful living of one’s life. In Schneiders’s account, while the biblical theologian seeks to achieve “discursive knowledge of . . . the theology expressed in the Bible,” the purpose of “biblical spirituality is transformative participation in the spiritual dynamics in Scripture.” With help from the analogy of the orchestral symphony (and its composition and performance), Schneiders holds that the primary concern of biblical spirituality is not analysis, description, or explanation but performance. Yet she also opposes the notion that biblical theology and biblical spirituality are separate and unrelated activities and that those who engage in one cannot engage in the other.

Reinhard Feldmeier focuses inquiry on the presentations of God in the four Gospels and argues that each binds theological affirmations about God to ethics: Christ-followers live in “correspondence to God.” Feldmeier finds in Mark an emphasis on the one God, to whom God’s people are bound in love; in Luke, a strong link between divine and human mercy; in Matthew, the perfection of divine love in human love of neighbor; and in John (and the Johannine tradition), love as the divine character, “not [as] some general religious proposition that would also be reversible—a divinization of the love between human beings. On the contrary, the formula ‘God is love’ sums up the insight that the Father, by giving his ‘only Son,’ has created a relational space in which separation from God is overcome, and believers have passed over from the sphere of death into the sphere of the divine life.”

Joel Green’s essay casts light on large and important questions about the purpose and character of biblical theology—or, in his reframing, theological interpretation of Scripture—through the focusing lens of a particular theological image from the New Testament, the ascension of Jesus. After addressing the perspectives of historical-critical analysis and neuroscience, Green shows that a fresh theological reading of the ascension narrative in Acts 1:9–11 finds meaningful direction through thoughtful engagement with later theological interpreters such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus.

Finally, M. Eugene Boring provides a helpful survey of significant publications in biblical theology that can inform the study, teaching, and preaching of pastors and teachers of the church. Boring’s selective tour through an increasingly complex landscape shows that an array of resources are available to assist preachers and teachers charged with the task of bringing the Word to life in the twenty-first century. Deep, thoughtful engagement with the theological riches of Scripture will enliven contemporary communication of the biblical witness.