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of revelation history (Gese).

      One way of trying to hold together the diverse theological voices of Scripture is to search for a center around which everything revolves. The most notable and ambitious effort at this approach was that of Walther Eichrodt, in whose theology the covenant is the center and organizing framework of the Old Testament and thus of its theology. Ludwig Koehler’s Old Testament theology sought to center the whole around the concept of God as Lord. In some fashion, most such proposals have claimed that the center of Old Testament theology has to do with God, whether it takes the form of the First Commandment requiring exclusive worship of the Lord; or the self-presentation formula, I am the Lord; or the covenantal formula, Yahweh (the Lord) the God of Israel and Israel the people of Yahweh. From the New Testament side, Peter Stuhlmacher and others have suggested that the Christ of the Gospels provides the center of the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament. The fundamental character of such assertions of the centrality of God, or of God at work in Jesus Christ, as the subject matter can hardly be denied. Less clear is the question about whether such a center really holds together the diverse voices and subject matter of the Testaments.

      Somewhat in reaction to that problem, some scholars have proposed to organize the biblical material theologically around certain polarities or tensions that are more comprehensive than a single center and that allow for diversity and tension. Samuel Terrien’s The Elusive Presence constructs a biblical theology around the tension between the presence and absence of God and sees reflections of that tension in the relationship of ethics and aesthetics, word and vision, ear and eye, name and glory. In this effort, he seeks to hold together the historical and covenantal dimensions with the wisdom literature and psalms, avoiding the one-sided theological formulations of earlier efforts. Dialectical approaches to the theology of the Bible are apparent also in the various works of Paul Hanson on apocalyptic, providence, the unity and diversity of Scripture, and the notion of community, as well as in Claus Westermann’s orienting much of his Old Testament theology around the two polarities of petition and praise, salvation and blessing. In some programmatic essays, Walter Brueggemann took a similar approach in devising a proposal for shaping such a theology around a dialectic that can be expressed in several ways: structure legitimation in tension with the embrace of pain, contractual and critical theology, cultural embrace and cultural criticism, creation theology and covenantal theology. His later Old Testament Theology took account of criticisms of such a dialectic as too simplistic, and, while not abandoning the schema altogether, he shifted to focus more on the rhetoric and textuality of the Old Testament presentation of God and Israel and has employed an imaginative metaphor to provide a structure for the whole: the courtroom with its testimony and countertestimony which compel reader/hearer to decide about the truth from what has been heard.

      This line of approach seems more open to holding together some of the strains and the diversity of Scripture. Although it is primarily found among Old Testament scholars, they seek to demonstrate its applicability to biblical theology as a whole and not simply to the first of the Testaments.

      One of the most fruitful theological studies of the New Testament has been the work of J. Christiaan Beker on the theology of Paul (Paul the Apostle and The Triumph of God: The Essence of Paul’s Thought). The subtitle of the second volume is somewhat misleading. For while Beker insists on the fundamentally apocalyptic framework of Paul’s gospel (i.e., Paul’s interpretation of the Christian message), his primary approach to the theology of the apostle is in working out “the dialectic of coherence and contingency” in Paul’s thought. By coherence he means “the unchanging components of Paul’s gospel,” and by contingency he means “the changing situational part of the gospel, that is, the diversity and particularity of sociological, economic, and psychological factors that confront Paul in his churches” (15-16). Beker’s dialectic is shaped differently from that of the Old Testament theologians cited above and risks the possibility that the coherence becomes a center and the dialectic disappears. The dangers generally present in such an approach rest primarily in the tendency to reduce diversity and plurality to duality—or in Beker’s case, to a single essence or core—and the concomitant possibility that one pole becomes de facto a kind of ruling or normative one.

      Perennial Issues. This brief survey of approaches to biblical theology has amplified the ways in which the shape and structure of a biblical theology is crucial to its presentation. Is it formed around a center or a polarity or dialectic? Does it take its structure from inner biblical categories, for example, covenant and election (as in Wright and Eichrodt), from the shape and order of the canon, from the sequence of biblical witnesses (as in von Rad), or, as was customary in an earlier time and still merits more attention than is usually given it by biblical theologians, from the categories of dogmatic theology?

      The way in which the unity or coherence of Scripture is discerned in the midst of the diversity of voices is a continuing theological issue that has been approached in different ways: from Eichrodt, who seeks to establish a unitary principle in the form of the covenant, to the proponents of a dialectic or polarity, who claim a kind of middle ground between the awareness of the great diversity of the material and a sense that it holds together but only with tension, to von Rad, who relinquishes the search for a unity on the grounds that it is inappropriate and ultimately to be frustrated because the material is self-consciously a cluster of witnesses from different times and circumstances.

      Less apparent than the problem of perceiving unity within diversity is the hotly debated question about whether a biblical theology should be descriptive, not requiring any position vis-à-vis the material, or normative, implicitly making claims about the nature of reality and the will of God. In a well-known article on biblical theology in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Krister Stendahl argued that the task of biblical theology is descriptive, responsible for determining what the texts meant in their original setting, a possibility open to historical critical study and not presupposing anything about their continuing or present meaning. That concern belongs to hermeneutics and systematic theology. His formulation brought forth an unresolved debate. In some cases, positions have been taken in principle; in other cases, the presentation functions in an implicitly normative fashion (as in Brueggemann). That the latter is often the case is suggested by the reticence to engage in biblical theology on the part of Jewish biblical scholars because of a perception from the literature that normative and confessional stances are both implicitly and explicitly characteristic of biblical theology. That issue is pressed in a somewhat different fashion when one encounters a forthright claim that biblical theology is and ought to be located in communities of reference and faith, a claim found in the work of such theologians as Hanson and Brueggemann. Brueggemann is particularly interesting in this regard because his Old Testament Theology frequently surfaces a Christian perspective, but he also insists that the Old Testament is “resiliently Jewish” (80), by which he has in mind the polyvalence, the ambiguity, the provisionality, and the particularity of the text over against Christian tendencies to see an ordered and more consistent theological perspective. Or, in other words, “the Old Testament in its theological articulation is characteristically dialectical and dialogical, and not transcendentalist” (83).

      Present Challenges. Finally, the biblical theologian is aware of currents in biblical studies today that pose some challenges to the theological enterprise. One of these is the question of whether or not feminist and liberationist readings of Scripture can contribute to biblical theology. The focus of these approaches—on social location, the authoritative or normative character of women’s experience, the resistance to the male domination within the content of the Bible and over the process of transmission and interpretation, and the centrality of outside voices in the theological task—means that biblical theology will have to devise some different ways of working to take account of this challenge.

      It further remains to be seen to what extent the various literary approaches to biblical interpretation and the attention that is being given to the social history and analysis of biblical texts and their location will contribute to the work of biblical theology. Although the domination of historical critical exegesis over theology has been moderated, if not broken, such exegesis was understood by many biblical theologians in the past to work closely with biblical theology, and it indeed contributed to the strong historical thrust that

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