Brian Hamilton

Biblical, Systematic, and Historical Theology II

You’re right, Andrea, to insist on the space between the three disciplines. I’m only hesitant to preserve the space by means of bracketing certain realms of conviction. I’ll agree entirely with this: biblical theology is not going to amass a set of texts pertaining to the Trinity, because biblical theology is more concerned with close and sustained readings of particular texts than with organization with respect to themes. Historically, then, biblical theology takes two forms: biblical commentaries and preaching. Right? The space here is methodological.

But for most of the church’s life, while avoiding thematic summary, biblical commentators did not hesitate to find Christ in passages all over the Old Testament, for example. Is that bad biblical theology? Surely we didn’t ‘arrive’ at true biblical theology only in von Rad and Brueggemann. We have learned better to read the Old Testament from the point of view of the Old Testament in the past 150 years, I think, which has produced profound new insights. But this can’t be allowed to usurp the full role of ‘pure’ biblical theology so long as we’re still doing Christian biblical theology, which works under the conviction that Christ did not come to abolish the law or the prophets but to fulfill them. You’re also right to say that biblical theology doesn’t tend towards ‘completion’ in the same way that systematic theology does—or at least it only tends towards interpretive completion and not a full-bodied expression of the Christian faith. Historical theology, under this aspect, would probably also tend towards interpretive completion, but because the texts aren’t normative it would always push beyond interpretation to critique.

On your last point and question, pressing what it would mean to come to the same conclusions, I was trying to say that we would come to substantially the same affirmations: Jesus is one with God, not peripherally or subordinately but as an equal, “one in being with the Father”; the Son is begotten by the Father; the Holy Spirit is also sent by the Father through the Son to sanctify and lead towards salvation, thus must also be fully divine—etc. We might express them in a different philosophical idiom, but an astonishing amount of the creed is directly biblical rather than Greek. The creed doesn’t come from 4^th century Athens but rather 4^th century Nicaea, which is more like a 4^th century Elkhart—or better Schleitheim—than anything else.

5 March 2007 |
tags: Method