Morris - New Testament theology

The aim of this book is to provide a compact introduction to the theology of the New Testament. The subject is a big one, as the existence of several massive volumes testify, but I have not sought to add yet another large work. Rather I have tried to steer a middle course between being unhelpfully brief and being too long and technical for the student or the interested layman. If such readers are stimulated to tackle the larger works, I will be well rewarded. In pursuing my aim I have not gone deeply into the controversies that interest the scholarly world, though I hope I have written with reasonable awareness of what scholars are saying. I have simply tried to set out the principal theological teachings of the books of the canonical New Testament as I see them, without trying to interact with scholarly theories. I would prefer to have provided more adequate documentation, but that too would have lengthened the book unduly.

Unless otherwise noted, I have used the New International Version for quotations from the Old Testament. I have made my own translation for quotations from the New Testament; this gives the reader the advantage of seeing what I understand the meaning of the Greek to be and, of course, the disadvantage of the limitations of a personal translation. I encourage the reader to check my readings against the standard translations.

I express my gratitude to ANZEA, the publishers of the forthcoming Festschrift for D. Broughton Knox, for permission to use my contribution to that work, The Apostle Paul and His God.

Leon Morris

Although New Testament Theology is the title of a large number of books, its precise meaning is far from obvious. Part of the problem stems from different ways of using the word theology. Thus Rudolf Bultmann has a notable two-volume work entitled Theology of the New Testament in which he discusses a good deal of the New Testament. Two of his major sections are entitled The Theology of Paul and The Theology of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles, but his other major divisions are Presuppositions and Motifs of New Testament Theology (in which he includes the chapters The Message of Jesus, The Kerygma of the Earliest Church, and The Kerygma of the Hellenistic Church Aside From Paul) and The Development Toward the Ancient Church. This appears to mean that, although his book title refers to theology of the New Testament, he finds theology in only two places, the Pauline and the Johannine writings. He expressly differentiates the teaching of Jesus from theology, for his opening sentence reads, The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself. It would seem from this classification that most of the New Testament is not theology, and in any case it seems that there are two theologies, and not one.

W. G. Kmmel, by contrast, has a book whose full title is The Theology of the New Testament According to Its Major Witnesses: JesusPaulJohn. This appears to mean that there is such a thing as the the theology of the New Testament, though a doubt remains because, while there is a chapter called The Theology of Paul, the other chapter headings lack this key word (The Proclamation of Jesus According to the First Three Gospels, The Faith of the Primitive Community, etc.). In any case he disenfranchises most of the writers. It cannot be said that Kmmel deals with the theology of the New Testament.

A similar comment can be made about Hans Conzelmanns Outline of the Theology of the New Testament. The table of contents indicates that the treatment is in five parts: The Kerygma of the Primitive Community and the Hellenistic Community, The Synoptic Kerygma, The Theology of Paul, The Development After Paul, and John. If we take this outline seriously, only one part deals specifically with theology.

Donald Guthrie approaches the subject thematically. He takes the great subjects dealt with in the New Testament and surveys the contributions made by all the writers to each of his themes.

It is clear that theology may be understood in more ways than one. Geoffrey W. Bromiley defines it briefly in this way: Strictly, theology is that which is thought and said concerning God. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary sees it as The study or science which treats of God, His nature and attributes, and His relations with man and the universe. Clearly it refers to disciplined thinking about God, and we might understand it in this sense: A coherent system of ideas that interpret in logical fashion matters relating to God. Perhaps it would be better to say, that in principle is capable of interpreting, for our theologies are not always as coherent and effective as we would wish. But they do represent our attempt at setting out in orderly fashion our understanding of God and his revelation in Christ, and of what all this means for his worshipers. New Testament theology will then be that understanding of matters relating to God that is expressed by, or underlies, or may be deduced from, the New Testament. It will not necessarily always be expressed in set terms by the New Testament writers, but it will be implied in what they have said, for what they say always has as its basis their understanding of the ways of God. It we take the term New Testament seriously, we will resist the temptation to discard passages or books that we see as of inferior importance or even unauthentic. Everything in the New Testament is part of the thinking of the early church, whether it goes back to Jesus himself or to one of his followers.