The Revival of Biblical Theology

One of the most significant changes in theological study during the last quarter century has been the revival of interest in the theology of the Bible.

EARLE HILGERT, Associate Professor of New Testament Literature, Potomac University

One of the most significant changes in theological study during the last quarter century has been the revival of interest in the theology of the Bible. A generation ago theological thought was largely dominated by liberal religious thinkers who did not see the Scriptures as a primary basis for the formulation of Christian theology. But today a parked change has come, and many of the leading theologians of the world once more are concerning themselves seriously with Bibli­cal theology.

To understand correctly the present interest in Biblical theology it is necessary first to con­sider briefly the factors that contributed to its decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As is well known, one of the leading principles of the Reformation—its "formal principle"—was that the Scripture is the only foundation of the Christian belief. This meant that in the orthodox Protestant theology of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centu­ries the theology of the Bible and the theology of the Christian Church were virtually synon­ymous. Although, of course, there were many differences of opinion in the religious thinking of these centuries, the Bible remained the norm of Protestant theology.

With the nineteenth century, however, a radi­cal change appeared, which resulted in dis­crediting the possibility of Biblical theology. While it is not possible in the scope of a few paragraphs to describe the causes of this change in more than a cursory way, a number of im­portant contributing factors to this trend must be mentioned.

The first of these factors was the philosophi­cal trend toward rationalism that characterized much of the theological thought of the eighteenth century. The rationalistic theologians saw the Bible as a purely human book; they sought to explain its miracles as the result of completely natural forces. Thus Jesus' walking on the water was explained as His having merely walked along the shore, which looked to the storm-tossed disciples as if He were on the sea. The multiplication of the loaves and fishes was said to be accomplished by sleight of hand, the disciples passing bread and fish to Jesus, which they had hidden in a cave. Jesus' resur­rection was made plausible by saying that He had only swooned on the cross and not died. Al­though such theories were honest attempts to make the Bible believable to the skeptical minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu­ries, they encouraged many thinkers to con­clude that the theology of the Bible also was a purely human phenomenon, and that as such it could not be normative for modern man.

Another important factor in the decline of Biblical theology was the point of view char­acteristic of the school of thought that con­cerned itself with the history of religions. In many ways an outgrowth of rationalism, this school was given its impetus by the German theologian-philosopher Friedrich Schleierma­cher (1768-1834). For him the essence of reli­gion lay in a feeling of absolute dependence on God. As such a feeling is to be found in all reli­gions in varying degrees, he concluded that Christianity, in relation to other religions, is only relatively superior and does not enjoy ab­solute superiority as the only true religion. Such a point of view led many Christian scholars in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth cen­turies to attempt to explain Christian origins in terms of the pagan religious environment of the New Testament and the early church. They saw the variegated hues of the Hellenistic religious world as the seedbed from which sprang the leading motifs of early Christian thought and doctrine: thus, for instance, the idea of a Sav­iour descending from heaven to earth was thought to be derived from a "savior-myth" found in a number of ancient Oriental reli­gions; the Christian sacraments were considered to have been drawn from Hellenistic mystery cults; ideas concerning the end of the world were understood to have come into Chris­tianity by way of Judaism from the religion of ancient Persia. The high point of the "history of religions" school was reached in the early years of the present century under the leader­ship of two German scholars, Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920) and Richard Reitzenstein (1861­1931).

The Theology of Evolution

A third significant factor to be considered was the theory of evolutionary development as applied to the history of Israelite and Jewish re­ligion. As is well known, Darwin's theory of biological evolution, broached in the middle of the nineteenth century, has had incalculably far-reaching effects in almost every field. His theories have created an atmosphere in which one almost involuntarily thinks of history as a process of development of human thought. But already, at the beginning of that century, the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel (1770- 1831) had propounded a philosophy of history which asserted that historical development fol­lows a set pattern: at first there is an action; this in turn is opposed by a reaction. According to Hegel, this dialectical chain reaction forms the basic pattern of history. This philosophy was adopted by Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) and his students to explain the history of Israel. They saw in the Old Testament evidences that Israelite religion had not been monotheistic from the beginning, but that gradually over the centuries, after the entry into Canaan, a process of development had taken place: originally polytheistic, Israel had come to worship one main god, though recognizing the existence of others, and not until about the time of the Babylonian captivity had monotheism come to predominate.

In the case of the New Testament, the same dialectical process had already been employed by F. C. Baur (1792-1860) of the University of Tubingen. He saw the tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians as the leading motif of the New Testament and attempted to recon­struct early Christian history on this basis. Fol­lowing the Hegelian pattern, he understood the primary action to be Jewish Christianity as represented by the early church centered at Jerusalem and led by James, the Lord's brother. The reaction to this he thought to see in Gen­tile Christianity as led by the apostle Paul. The synthesis between these he considered to be the formation of the ancient Catholic Church in the second century. Having established his framework, Baur assigned the various parts of the New Testament to the periods he thought each book best represented: thus he thought that only the epistles to the Romans, the Co­rinthians, and the Galatians were authentically from Paul, as they betray the Jewish-Gentile tension in the early church most clearly. The other epistles he assigned to a later period, and as the Johannine literature seems to show a rapprochement between these opposing par­ties, he assigned it to the middle of the second century.

Such extreme development views concerning Israelite and early Christian history seemed to exclude any thought of theological unity in Scripture. On these presuppositions it ap­peared impossible to speak of a Biblical the­ology; rather, scholars concerned themselves with a series of developing theologies and spoke of the "theology of the writer of Deuteronomy," the "theology of the pre-exilic prophets," the "theology of Paul," and the "theology of John," each one of these and several others represent­ing successive stages in the development of the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

Biblical Theology Neglected

Under these conditions it is not surprising that during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and the first part of the twentieth, the learned religious world paid comparatively little attention to Biblical theology. It was considered an outmoded discipline no longer possible to the enlightened scholar. Conse­quently Biblical scholars of this period tended to turn their interests toward the study of hu­manistic disciplines that might throw light on the strictly human characteristics of the Bible: its language, literary structure, and its histori­cal background. Thus it is no accident that these years were the heyday of the study of Koine Greek, the common language of the Hel­lenistic world, which Adolf Deissman (1866­1937) and others demonstrated from the pa­pyri to have been also the language of the New Testament. Their work threw a flood of light on the meanings of obscure words and expres­sions in Biblical Greek. Also during this period great strides forward were made in the study of the Bible manuscripts and the reconstruction of the history of the New Testament text, un­der the leadership of such scholars as C. R. Gregory (1846-1917), H. von Soden (1852­1914), and Eberhard and Erwin Nestle (1851- 1913; 1883- ).

This was also a time when many influential trends in the higher criticism of the Bible took shape. Of particularly far-reaching effect was the development of form criticism—the analysis of Biblical materials into various literary forms and the attempt to determine the historical situations that had called forth these different literary types. Particularly prominent in this movement were Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) in the Old Testament field and Martin Dibelius (1883-1947) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884- ) in that of the New Testament. But Bible theol­ogy attracted little interest.

In the second part of this article we shall dis­cuss the factors that in recent years have brought about a return to the study of the theology of the Bible by many of the world's leading Biblical scholars.


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EARLE HILGERT, Associate Professor of New Testament Literature, Potomac University

July 1959

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