I. Howard Marshall - New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel

B efore we can discuss how to write the theology of the New Testament, we need to say something about the legitimacy and possibility of the enterprise.

The New Testament as an Object of Study

The most vocal contemporary critic of the enterprise is Heikki Risnen, who makes four points to show why it must not and cannot be done.

First, Risnen claims that the historical and the theological must be kept separate. He argues that it is not the job of New Testament scholars as New Testament scholars to deal with theology; rather their sphere is history. The New Testament scholar can write a purely descriptive account of the early church, but nothing more. To write theology is to be prescriptive, and the New Testament scholar as such has no authority to prescribe anything to anybody.

Second, Risnen also argues that the nature of the material confines us to writing a history of the religion of the early Christians. Here he is going back to the limited agenda set up a century ago by William Wrede.

Third, a study confined to the New Testament documents is said to rest on an artificial limitation; it is determined by a canonization process that represents a later theological decision and has no basis in the early history of the church.

Fourth, there is so much contradiction between the documents that a theology of the New Testament in the sense of a unified theological outlook common to the documents cannot be extracted from them.

Risnens arguments have been subjected to detailed and largely convincing criticism by Peter Balla. Balla responds to his first point by arguing that there is no good reason why the theology of the first Christians cannot be the object of historical study, and that such historical study can be pursued without starting from a churchly standpoint or concluding with a statement of what the church ought to believe. The first of these two rejoinders is sound, but more needs to be said about the second one later.

Perhaps the simplest and most convincing response to Risnens second point is to note that no fewer than ten major presentations by highly competent New Testament scholars of widely differing theological persuasions have appeared in the last few years. It is hard to believe that they were all united in doing something that is fundamentally illegitimate, and the existence of their works demonstrates that the enterprise is possible!

The Problem of the Canon

More weight attaches to Risnens third point. At the outset there is the question whether the set of twenty-seven documents that are grouped together as the New Testament form a unified collection, one that is capable of being meaningfully distinguished from other documents of the period and is an appropriate object of study. Is it proper to examine the New Testament documents in their own right? Is it right to exclude, say, the apostolic fathers or the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter from consideration? We can assemble some five arguments in favor of doing so, the first four of which appear to me to be sound.

First, these documents were recognized by later Christians as forming a collection of Scriptures akin to the collection of writings accepted by the Jews as their Scriptures. The shape of the collection and the core of its contents were essentially determined by no later than the end of the second century, although it took until A.D. 367 before we have the first extant statement of the list of books that was subsequently accepted almost universally as canonical. We may grant that this process of gathering together these books and erecting a fence around them took place over a lengthy period of time after the books were written and that the books were not deliberately composed as a unified collection. Nevertheless, the fact that a consensus developed concerning them strongly supports the view that the early church was right to recognize that they had certain characteristics, which indicated that they formed a unity.

Second, the documents are the work of the earliest followers of Jesus, who were themselves, or stood in close relationship to, some of the original actors in the birth and growth of the church, and they all belong to the first Christian century. There is thus a basis for seeing a possible unity in the relatively limited area and time within which they were composed.

Third, the New Testament documents constitute virtually the whole of the surviving Christian literature of the first century, although some of the apostolic fathers (1 Clement; Didache) probably belong to this period. The fact that there may be some overlap between the dates of the latest New Testament books and the earliest apostolic fathers (and other Christian literature of the same period) does not call in question the existence of the identifiable hard cores of both bodies of literature, just as a border dispute over the possession of Kashmir does not mean that the countries of India and Pakistan cannot be regarded as distinguishable entities. The basic distinction between first- and second-century Christian literature remains a valid one, even if the boundary is not sharply defined except by canon makers.

Fourth, there is a manifest unity of theme about the New Testament writings in that they are all concerned in one way or another with Jesus and the religion that developed around him. To be sure, this does not necessarily imply that they all say the same things about this common theme and are in agreement with one another. Nevertheless, a corpus of writings with the same central theme must constitute a legitimate object of study.

Fifth, it has sometimes been argued that the writings show a quality of Christian thought that is not matched in the later literature. Clearly this is a subjective verdict, and there could be a case that some of the second-century writings (e.g., the Epistle of Diognetus) stand very close to them in spirit and quality, but as a broad verdict the statement is defensible. Even so, I would not want to put much weight on this argument.

Our claim, then, is that it makes sense in the light of canonization to ask whether there is a common, basic theology in the set of books that the early church canonized.

To adopt this procedure, of course, does not lead to excluding other works outside the New Testament from consideration. In elucidating the content of the New Testament and in reconstructing the history of the period it is essential to make use of all other relevant sources, including other early Christian literature. This approach was especially characteristic of Ethelbert Stauffer, who placed the New Testament in the context of what he called the old biblical tradition and appeared on occasion to be in danger of regarding this extracanonical material almost as if it were canonical.

Problems of Occasionality, Diversity and Development

Turning now to Risnens fourth point, we have to face a number of difficulties in our study that arise out of the nature and history of the documents under investigation.

First, the New Testament library does not contain any ready-made textbooks of theology. None of the books is written specifically as a theology in the sense of an account of the authors understanding of God and the world and their relationship to one another set out systematically in some detail. At least some of the writings are occasional or situational in that they were individually written on specific occasions to particular groups of people and give us what the writers thought to be relevant to these audiences. This is true, at least, of the letters of Paul. It is commonly thought that the Gospels were also written for specific individual communities, although this view may need some qualification. And it is patent that Paul regarded some, if not all, of what he wrote to individual congregations as material that could be useful to other congregations. But even if the books were more than narrowly occasional, it remains true that none of them is a full and systematic exposition of its authors theology. It may, therefore, be impossible to analyze some of the writings with a view to determining the content of the authors theology, and there may be occasions when it is doubtful how far the author even had a formed theology. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the task is not in itself an argument against the attempt to reconstruct theology from works that are not specifically theological.