McEntire - Portraits of a mature God : choices in Old Testament theology

For all of my teachers at

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (19861992),

especially my doctoral committee:

Gerald Keown

Marvin Tate

Wayne Ward

3-1. Divine Designations in the Pentateuch

3-2. Divine Designations in the Books of the Pentateuch

3-3. Abraham outside of Genesis

3-4. The Hardening Tradition

3-5. Wilderness Complaint Stories in Numbers

4-1. The Cyclical Stories of the Judges

4-2. The Frequency of Divine Designations in Samuel

5-1. The Frequency of Divine Designations in Kings

5-2. Portions of the Prophetic Literature Addressing the Assyrian Crisis

5-3. Portions of the Prophetic Literature Addressing the Babylonian Crisis

6-1. The Narrative Contours of Ezra-Nehemiah

6-2. Divine Behavior in the Narrative Present of Ezra-Nehemiah

6-3. Divine Actions in the Narrative Past in Ezra-Nehemiah (outside of Nehemiah 9)

6-4. Gods Actions in the Past in the Recital in Neh. 9:6-37

6-5. Divine Actions in Daniel 16

The story of this book reveals the many people who played a role in its development. It began with an essay called The God at the End of the Story. I produced a rough draft of this essay as the fulfillment of an assignment I gave myself while the students in my Old Testament Theology class at Belmont University were writing their own papers. I presented the results to the class and sent a proposal to the Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures section at the Society of Biblical Literature, which accepted the paper for presentation at the 2009 annual meeting. The third revision of the paper was then accepted for publication in Horizons of Biblical Literature. Thank you to everyone who gave attention to and responded to my work during this stage, and specifically to Horizons for its permission to develop the article into what became the first chapter of the book.

I next began work on an essay called Portraits of a Mature God, which was also accepted for presentation in the Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures section and was presented at the 2011 annual meeting. I was later invited to place a revision of the paper in an issue of Perspectives in Religious Studies, the journal of the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion. The most gratifying aspect of the publication was that this particular volume was a Festschrift for the great Baptist prophet Will Campbell. Again, I received much helpful response to this work along the way, and I appreciate the permission from Perspectives to include much of the material from the article in chapter 6 of this book.

Along the way, I was invited to contribute an article to an issue of the journal Review and Expositor on the book of Daniel. The production of that work, The Graying of God in Daniel 16, served to expand my thinking about what the final chapter of this book needed to be. Thank you to R & E for its permission to include parts of that article in chapter 6.

The final piece of the process was my involvement with Fortress Press. Anyone who has done work in Old Testament theology over the past fifty years knows that our field of study could hardly exist without this resource. My editor, Neil Elliott, was indispensable. His patience and expertise helped to bring everyone involved to a common vision of what this book could be, and his advice and careful work with the manuscript made it better in countless ways. In later stages of the publication process, I have been grateful for the professional assistance of Lisa Gruenisen, Marissa Wold, and others at Fortress.

So, whatever comes of this work, knowing that I am responsible only in part for its achievements but in full for its shortcomings, I humbly offer it to the field of study that has so faithfully fed my heart, mind, and soul for the past quarter century.

Surrounding the specific process of the production of this book, I live with the love of my family, the support of my colleagues, and the energizing presence of my students every day. Thank you.

In many ways, the hybrid field that is often called theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, and its particular expression called Old Testament theology, may be moving closer to consensus in describing its purpose. At the same time, there is an increasing number of ways to go about this purpose, so our approaches are diverging at the same time that our purpose may be converging. One of the most serious problems interpreters face in the contemporary era is that they have developed a keen awareness of the multiplicity of portraits of the divine character within these shared sacred texts. The first concern in this opening chapter is to examine two different ways of attending to this multiplicity and the extent to which these approaches are useful to the enterprise of Old Testament theology.

One approach to this multiplicity proceeds by laying out the many differing portraits of the divine character and allowing them to converse with one another. The result is a canonical debate about the nature of Gods character. This approach has been very fruitful, and I will describe some examples more extensively in this chapter. The primary problem with approaches that fall within this category, however, is that, although they would appear to put all biblical texts into play on an even field, some texts inevitably get to speak first and set the agenda. It will become apparent throughout this study, however, that the problems of this practice are often compounded by letting these texts speak last.