J. I. Packer has observed that Christians do not have license to ignore theology; insofar as we are Christians, we must think theologically, however good or bad, informed or misinformed that thinking may be. The same is true, he would add, of biblical study. What is striking and disturbing today is the gap—the gulf—between the formal academic disciplines of theology and biblical studies and the practice of those disciplines in the life of the church. Rather than attempting an account of how we got in this fix, I would like to point to some Exit doors. I am writing not as a scholar but rather as an interested reader. The books under review deserve extended scholarly engagement; what I am offering instead is an incitement, a provocation challenging others more qualified for the task to recognize the enormous opportunity represented by such books.
Where three are gathered
Miroslav Volf has been until recently professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and has now accepted a position at Yale Divinity School. He is familiar to readers of Books & Culture as the author of Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. His new book, After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinity, is a translation from the original German edition, which was in turn based on Volf’s Habilitationsschrift (the so-called second doctoral dissertation in the German system) at the University of Tubingen, supervised by Jurgen Moltmann. Volf’s book is the first volume in Eerdmans’s series Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age, under the general editorship of Alan G. Padgett.
After Our Likeness makes a case for a particular understanding of the nature of the church, as exemplified in the free church tradition. But Volf makes that case in a most unusual way: in an ecumenical dialogue with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and the Orthodox Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas. Volf’s own “point of departure” in this conversation, he explains, “is the thought of the first Baptist, John Smyth, and the notion of church as ‘gathered community’ that he shared with the Radical Reformers.” And throughout, Volf grounds his exposition in Scripture.
As its subtitle suggests, After Our Likeness is particularly concerned with the way in which contending ecclesiologies are related to differing understandings of the Trinity. Conceived one way, Trinitarian persons and relations underwrite a church structure characterized by “a pyramidal dominance of the one (so Ratzinger)”; seen from another angle, “a hierarchical bipolarity between the one and the many (so Zizioulas).” Against these perspectives Volf poses a view of Trinitarian relations—and thus of the ecclesial community—as “a polycentric and symmetrical reciprocity of the many. It should be clear from this summary why Volf’s academic peers will be reading his book—and indeed, in November of 1997, when the book was just off the press, a session at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature was devoted to After Our Likeness. (See also the fine review by John W. Stewart of Princeton Theological Seminary in the Christian Century, May 20-27, 1998, p. 541.)
But what about the rest of us? Why should a pastor or a professor of political science, a high school vice principal or a student on her way to becoming a medical missionary, a historian or a religion writer for the local paper—why should anyone, in short, who is not on a theological faculty bother to open this book? Who else would have any interest in following abstruse arguments about the Trinity? Who else has time for lengthy analysis of Catholic, Orthodox, and free church ecclesiologies?
The question betrays a strange and antibiblical assumption that certain matters are reserved for designated “thinkers” (rather as, historically, many lay Catholics had the notion that the priests and religious were living the spiritual life for them). Obviously a book such as Volf’s requires an educated reader; that is not the issue. The poli-sci professor has no doubt read Foucault and John Rawls. The medical-missionary-in-training, apart from her demanding medical education, has mastered a programming language that is far less forgiving than Volf’s prose. No wonder so many contemporary Christians, especially among evangelicals, are functionally non-Trinitarian. They leave those fine points to the seminary crowd.
Above all, Volf’s book should be read outside the academy because it embodies a way of relating to other traditions that is exemplary for the church today. Volf does not merely mention the Catholic and Orthodox positions as represented by Ratzinger and Zizioulas only to show why they are wrong. No, he enters deeply into their traditions and seeks to understand them from within. Here “dialogue” is no buzzword but rather a living reality. And while he continues to maintain the superiority of the free church tradition, his understanding of church and Trinity is modified by his encounter with Ratzinger and Zizioulas. In short, the very way in which the book is written enacts Volf’s understanding of the church as “a community of mutual giving and receiving.”
Whose book is the Old Testament?
Christopher Seitz was until recently professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School; since the completion of Word Without End: The Old Testament As Abiding Theological Witness, he has moved to the University of Aberdeen. Word Without End is a wide-ranging collection of essays divided into three sections: “Biblical Theology,” “Exegesis” (here the focus is on Isaiah), and “Practice” (including subjects such as “The Divine Name in Christian Scripture” and “Sexuality and Scripture’s Plain Sense”). The essays are unified by a “canonical” approach to Scripture, following Brevard Childs; that is, while not rejecting many of the findings of historical criticism, the canonical critic works with the unity of Scripture as transmitted by the church.
As with Volf’s book, Word Without End may sound like strictly academic fare. Certainly it should be read widely by scholars in biblical studies—and, one hopes, theology. (One of Seitz’s recurring themes is the divorce between theology and biblical studies and, within biblical studies, between Old Testament and New Testament scholarship.) But it is also a book that should be read widely by pastors and laity, regardless of their occupation.
What the church especially needs to hear now is the theme announced in the subtitle: the abiding theological witness of the Old Testament. Although the evangelical churches with which I am most familiar define themselves first and foremost by their faithfulness to the authority of Scripture, many of them have in effect a canon within the Canon, and the Old Testament is largely excluded. The Psalms are part of the slimmed-down canon, and there are occasional forays into Genesis and a handful of other Old Testament books, but there is almost no overarching sense of the full scope of Scripture, of the relation of the Old Testament to the New, of the God of Israel to Jesus Christ.
In part this may be a consequence of biblical scholarship’s embrace of the historical-critical method with its fragmenting practices; certainly that is true at the seminary level. In part it is a consequence of the Holocaust and a general unease about Christian “appropriation,” as it is sometimes called, of the Jewish Scriptures. Beyond these oft-cited explanations, I suspect that other forces are at work. It would be interesting to hear candid conversations with church members talking about their sense of the Old Testament. Many, I think, would describe the world of the judges and the kings and the prophets as utterly foreign to them.
“In my judgment,” Seitz writes in his summing up, “the question facing the field of biblical studies today is whose book is the Old Testament and why is it being read in the first place?” His answer is in one sense deeply “conservative,” in that he reaffirms the classic Christian reading of the Old Testament, but Seitz’s conservatism, if that is the right word, is deeply informed by wide learning and superbly sensitive interpretation of Scripture.
Seitz is right about the centrality of that question—”whose book is the Old Testament?” Much of the best current work in biblical studies and theology is wrestling with this question, which in some cases extends to a rethinking of “Jewish-Christian relations.” Among these important works are R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Fortress, 1996) and Walter Brueggemann’s magisterial Theology of the Old Testament (Fortress, 1997), both of which should be read in dialogue and debate with Seitz.
Breaking bread
When we break bread in the Lord’s Supper, we are doing a simple thing and participating in a profound mystery. The church suffers whenever the false dichotomy of “intellectual” versus “practical” is accepted. No, it is not necessary to understand perichoresis in order to be saved. And yes, we must beware (as Volf is) of facile Trinitarian analogies. But if we believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as revealed in Scripture, we are obligated to work out—in community, in dialogue, and with the Spirit’s guidance—what that means, mysterious as it will always remain. And if we genuinely believe that the Old Testament is the Word of God, we cannot treat it as an antique, to be given a place of honor on the mantle, where it will accumulate dust.
After Our Likeness: The Church As the Image of the Trinityby Miroslav Volf Eerdmans 314 pp.; $28, paper
Word Without End: The Old Testament As Abiding Theological Witnessby Christopher R. Seitz Eerdmans 355 pp.; $28, paper
The questions that Volf and Seitz address are not remote from the life of the church. How should the local church relate to other churches? How is our faith in the Triune God reflected in our worship, in our teaching, in the way we understand the sacraments? Does our church receive the witness of the whole of Scripture? These are questions that pastors and deacons, Sunday school teachers and adult ministries teams must deal with. There is no discontinuity between theory and practice here; the two should be inextricably interwoven. “The church is born through the presence of Christ in the Holy Spirit,” Volf reminds us, and in the simple, familiar gestures of worship, we celebrate that unending miracle.
Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
