The Theological Riddle of History

The antithesis between [the gospel] and modern idealism arises, not because Jesus and primitive Christianity were less human than humanitarianism, but because they were infinitely more so. The primitive Christians found the revelation of God in an historical figure so desparately human that there emerged within the early Church a faith in men and women so deeply rooted as to make modern humanitarianism seem doctrinaire and trivial. The New Testament does not present a complex chaos of conceptions about God and man from which one or another may be picked out and proclaimed as ultimate and true because it satisfies the highest idealism of this or of all ages; it presents a concrete and definite solution of the problems of life and death, of right and wrong, of happiness and misery in a form which consistutes a challenge to all thought and to all ethical idealism. The New Testament presents the solution in a unique event, in a particular history of human flesh and blood. The New Testament is therefore neither a collection of thoughtful essays nor an attempt to construct a system of ethics. It bears witness to a unique history, and it discovers the truth in the history.

Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey, The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), pp. 180-181

On the Future of New Testament Studies

"Our journey began by suggesting a diagnosis of a discipline that is now widely felt to lack agreed criteria not just for appropriate methods and results, but in many cases about even the very subject to be studied. What future can there be for scholarly New Testament studies amid the ruins of so many "assured results" of the past? Two initiatives in particular, I suggested, may hold promise for a reenergized, common conversation about the New Testament: first, to investigate the implied readership and the implied readings that arise from its engagement with the text; and, second, to harness the New Testament's plural and diverse effects as a resource for renewed reflection on its interpretation. I have argued, in other words, that the question of the implied readers is linked, both exegetically and historically, to that of implied readings. More specifically, both of these questions are illuminated by the study of how the apostolic voices were in fact remembered, heard, and heeded in the early postapostolic period--and vice versa."

Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study

(Baker, 2006) pp. 229-230

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