Meredith G. Kline - Essential Writings of Meredith G. Kline

W hen I learned that Hendrickson Publishers planned on publishing a collection of essays by my former professor Meredith G. Kline, I could not have been happier. Professor Kline has had and continues to have a tremendous influence on many biblical scholars, theologians, and church leaders, but the republication of these seminal studies will spread his work even further with a new generation of readers.

I, of course, read most of these articles when they first appeared, but reading them again reminded me just how much Professor Klines thinking shaped my own approach to the biblical text. At the time I was an MDiv student at Westminster Theological Seminary (19741977), he was traveling down to teach occasional intensive courses from Boston, where he was professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. I was privileged to take two such courses from him, but his thinking also reached me and my fellow students through our regular professors, including especially Raymond Dillard.

Professor Kline impressed upon us the importance of studying the Old Testament in its ancient Near Eastern context. Perhaps most significantly, he was among the first to draw out the importance of the connection between biblical covenant, so important particularly to the Reformed church community he was a part of, and ancient Hittite treaties (in the present collection, see in particular The Two Tables of the Covenant). Such study deepened and sharpened our understanding of biblical covenants. It also impressed on many in the next generation of his students how important it is to read the Old Testament, borrowing a phrase from John Walton, in its original cognitive environment.

Perhaps most importantly, Professor Kline impressed upon us the need to explore the interconnections between biblical texts and to use our exegetical imaginations to see the organic unity of Scripture. On occasion he could be criticized for reading too much into a biblical passage or metaphor based on other passages, but he encouraged us to go beyond a kind of arid historical-grammatical exegesis and to take into account the resonances of a biblical text within the canon. In a way, he anticipated the interest in intertextuality and canonical criticism that many of us find so helpful today.

Professor Klines work on the opening two chapters of Genesis has also been of major import for the study of these texts, which has once again grown intense among evangelical Protestants in the aftermath of the sequencing of the human genome. His studies going back to the late 50s (see in this volume Because It Had Not Rained) and beyond (Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony) demonstrated to many of us how wrong-minded it was to take these chapters as a straightforward depiction of how God created creation.

Professor Kline wrote during a time when evangelical Old Testament scholarship was at a low. Evangelical scholars were more marginalized than they are now. Fewer evangelicals had doctorates and wrote studies derived from their academic research than at the present. Meredith Kline was a beacon of light in that rather dark period. His work encouraged the students of the next generation, including myself, who were part of a kind of evangelical renaissance in church and academy, to follow in his footsteps. Having been produced predominantly in this period of marginalization, Professor Klines writings deserve a broader reading beyond the Reformed and evangelical audience that will continue to benefit from his work. With great pleasure, I invite you to read these incredibly stimulating and important studies that take us from the creation to the consummation.

Tremper Longman III, PhD
Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies, Westmont College