Forum Post #2 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1 – Understanding the Nature and Goal of OT Theology

This month we will be looking at Chapter 1 of Sailhamer’s Meaning, “Understanding the Nature and Goal of OT Theology.” In this chapter, S. gives us his opinion on what direction a proper theology of the OT should take. In doing so, he is also giving us important guidelines on his own approach.

For S., the task of any kind of biblical theology is to “state God’s Word (the Bible) to the church clearly and precisely” (63). In particular, theology “intends to state what should be heard as normative for the faith and practice of the biblical reader” (63). Thus, theology is not concerned with past religion, but with how God’s Word is to be heard and responded to today. To get here, S. discussed two issues with his readers: 1) How a theology based on revelation is different than one grounded on religion; and, 2) How theologies have been presented throughout the centuries.

Theology, Revelation, and Religion

There is a major difference between a theology that is based on revelation and a theology based on religion. For the vast majority of evangelical Christian scholars (of which S. identifies himself), revelation is “an act of God in which he makes his will known” (59). Religion, on the other hand, is “the human response to an act of divine revelation” (60). An OT theology, then, based on revelation is going to be one which is grounded on a study of divine revelation as it is presented in the OT itself. An OT theology grounded on religion will be a study of how humans have responded to God’s revelation.

One major implication of this difference is the authority with which theology can speak. A theology based on religion is nothing more than a human effort to make sense of past human activities. It says nothing in particular about who or what God actually is, but instead seeks to know how past peoples and cultures understand the divine. The opposite, a theology based on revelation, though also a human effort, is also an attempt to “speak on behalf of God’s revelation”, and should be handled with the same sensitive care that one handles the Scriptures themselves. In so far as revelatory theology “gets it right”, it speaks with the authority of the Scriptures. It is a theology that can actually demand something of us, just like the Scriptures do.

The Presentation of OT Theology

Sailhamer identifies five major “presentations” of OT theology in this chapter – four explicitly and one (his own) somewhat implicitly: systematic (which fits the content of the OT into predetermined categories), historical (which in some way takes Israel’s history as the organizing principle), central theme (which identifies a central theme and presents the message of the OT in terms of this theme), and “no central theme” (which posits that any attempt to identify a single central theme for organization would distort the message of the OT), and textual (which focuses on the text of Scripture). [I think one could argue that his approach is a kind of ‘no central theme’ approach.]

Sailhamer’s textual approach to OT theology grounds theology in a work of God – the revelation of God in the written text of the Bible. It treats the OT as revelation itself, not as a written record of revelation. That is, revelation is in the text itself – revelation is not played out in historical acts recorded and witnessed to in the Bible. What is revelatory is the text, not the events which are recounted in them. Being textual, theology “assumes the necessity of a serious study of the OT” (63). It is the end result, the capstone of much study and labor.

In the end, “Because it focuses on the text of Scripture, the aim of this kind of OT theology is not Israel’s ancient religion as grounded in the Sinai covenant. Its aim is Israel’s ‘new covenant’ with God as grounded in the message of the OT prophetic writings” (66).

Summary

In sum, an OT theology “must seek to make the message of the OT as clear and precise as possible to whatever audience it might have” (65). It must be able to show how the parts fit the whole, and how the whole fits together with a coherent message. For Sailhamer, it is important to note that the authors of Scripture, especially the Pentateuch, were theologians that work out their message through the arrangement and shaping of the textual material (64). Thus, the rest of the Meaning of the Pentateuch is going to be a study of the Pentateuch approached “in terms of the shape and mode of presentation reflecting its theology” (64).

Questions to Ponder

1) Do you think Sailhamer is taking the right approach here? By limiting himself to the shape of the Pentateuch is he missing out some important points gleaned by a more historical approach (e.g. Walt Kaiser, Promise-Plan)?

2) When we read through the OT, are we reading what the actual religion of Israel, or are we reading God’s critique of Israel’s beliefs and what they should have been?