Here is a paragraph that gives New Testament theology and exegesis a good name. It comes from a lecture later published as an essay by J D G Dunn. It is worth reading slowly, and twice – as biblical exegesis, this is faith seeking understanding.
So too with our hope of Christ's coming again. There is an uncertainty about it which pervades all human prediction about God's future purpose. It is the language of vision and metaphor. It is therefore, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, as is all human speech about God. But it is the best we have and we should neither be embarrassed about it nor should we abandon it. For it tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future is not random and pointless; God's purpose still prevails and drives forward to the climax of his-story. It tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future has a Christ-shape and a Christ-character. The future will not come to us as a total surprise. For the God we encounter at the end of time will be the God who encounters us at the mid-point of time, God in Christ. And the Christ we encounter at the end of time will be the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, the Christ we encounter in our worship, in the Spirit, in Christ and through Christ to God the Father. We believe that this Christ will come again. "Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus."
I've read J D G Dunn's work on the New
Testament since his first book, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's one
of the great blessings of my life and times that I have lived when some
of the finest New Testament scholarship has been producing such
original, high quality studies in the New Testament, and that so much of
it is so readily available. Dunn's new book, a major study of Oral Tradition and the Gospels is published in a few weeks. In a month or so N T Wright's two volumes
on Paul will be published – I've waited a long time for this (1680 pages!) instalment of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.
I was perhaps a bit hard on 'spiritual reading' and 'spiritual writing' in the previous post, not much though. My own alertness to the presence of God is more often heightened when I too wrestle with the text and theology of the New Testament, and read a paragraph like that one above by Dunn. It is a conclusion to an academic essay, a conclusion securely tied to critical scholarship applied by one whose own faith is rooted in the text of the New Testament, and to the experience of God in Christ through the Spirit to which the New Testament bears witness. Dunn, in his preface to Jesus, Paul and the Gospels is up-front honest about this, speaking of "[my] conviction both that recognition of a vital religious experience was an important way in to understanding how Christianity flourished and that one's own religious experience was a vital part of critical interaction with these ancient scriptures".
That is such a heartening sentence, and places first class biblical scholarship not over and against, but alongside a faith that seeks understanding. In such an hermeneutic the text is allowed to interpret the interpreter. The same convictional foundation underlies N T Wright's work. Mind you I smile when I think that the first book of N T Wrght's which I read in 1986 was a slim, elegant and exciting Tyndale Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, total 190 pages!
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