The Character and Purpose of a Theological School

We begin that effort by defining the theological school as intellectual center of the Church's life. Though anti-intellectualism within the Church and anti-ecclesiasticism among intelligentsia outside it will object to the close correlation of intellect and Church, their ill-founded objections need not detain us. We content ourselves at this stage with the reflections that to love God with the whole understanding has ever been accepted by the great Church, if not by every sect, as part of its duty and privilege; and that there is no exercise of the intellect which is not an expression of love. If love is not directed toward God and neighbor it is directed toward something else, perhaps even toward the intellect itself in the universal tendency toward narcissism.

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry (1956), p. 107

A Hermeneutics of Trust

"To read Scripture rightly we must trust the God who speaks through Scripture. As Schüssler Fiorenza rightly insists, this God is not a God of violence, not an abuser, not a deceiver. This God so passionately desires our safety and wholeness that he has given his own Son to die for us...

"What, then, of the hermeneutics of suspicion? Is all questioning to be excluded, all critical reading banished? Me genoito. Asking necessary and difficult questions is not to be equated with apistia. When we read Scripture through a hermeneutic of trust in God, we discover that we should indeed be suspicious: suspicious first of all of ourselves, because our own minds have been corrupted and shaped by the present evil age (Gal 1:4). Our minds must be transformed by grace, and that happens nowhere more powerfully than through reading Scripture receptively and trustingly with the aid of the Holy Spirit.

"Reading receptively and trustingly does not mean accepting everything in the text at face value, as Paul's own critical shifting of the Torah demonstrates. Cases may arise in which we must acknowledge internal tensions within Scripture that require us to choose guidance from one biblical witness and to reject another. Because the witness of Scripture itself is neither simple nor univocal, the hermeneutics of trust is necessarily a matter of faithful struggle to hear and discern....

"At the same time, we should be suspicious of the institutions that govern and shape interpretation. That means not only ecclesiastical institutions but also academic institutions. If our critical readings lead us away from trusting the grace of God in Jesus Christ, then something is amiss, and we would do well to interrogate the methods and presuppositions that taught us to distance ourselves arrogantly or fearfully from the text ...

"The real work of interpretation is to hear the text. We must consider how to read and teach Scripture in a way that opens up its message, a way that both models and fosters trust in God. So much of the ideological critique that currently dominates the academy fails to achieve these ends. Scripture is critiqued but never interpreted. The critic exposes but never exposits. Thus the word itself recedes into the background, and we are left talking only about the politics of interpretation, having lost the capacity to perform interpretations."

Richard Hays, Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 197-198.

Paul's theology in Romans

" Above all, what is noteworthy about Paul's theology in Romans is the way the pivotal significance of Jesus' death and resurrection emphasizes the character of God. The theology of Romans is theocentric because it is christomorphic. That is, the understanding of God, which Paul inherited from the Pharisaic Judaism he had once advocated assiduously (Gal 1:14), was reshaped in light of his conviction that God had resurrected the crucified Jesus. For the theology of Romans (as for Paul's theology as a whole), what matters is not what Jesus of Nazareth had done and said in his Galilean ministry, but what God had done in resurrecting him, and thus far only him. If God has done that, then what does that disclose about God that was not known before, and how is this new disclosure related to what is known through scripture, which emphasizes God's commitment to Israel? Such are the questions that propel Paul's theological thinking in this letter. "

Leander Keck, Romans (Abingdon, 2005) p. 37

Paul assumes the worldview of the Psalms

We may well find curious the way the psalmists can abstract, out of all the ambiguities of lived experience, this unambiguous portrayal of the glories of the created order. The psalmists knew famine, disease, violence, and death. And yet, in some of the psalms at least, no trace of evil of any kind is part of the picture. ... To dismiss such texts as naive would only show our own naiveté. Rather, they are an affirmation that ultimately, fundamentally, creation is good, and the Creator deserving of universal praise; that the reality of evil is not ultimate, but secondary and parasitic, a disorder brought about by inappropriate responses to the goodness of the fundamental order.

Stephen Westerholm, A Preface to the Study of Paul (Eerdmans, 1997), p. 15