Scripture & Theology

The April 2008 issue of The Journal of Theological Studies is out and, if you or your institution subscribes, available online.

There are several important reviews, but I will highlight just three. First, Walter Moberly submits notes on Neil MacDonald’s under-reviewed Metaphysics and the God of Israel: Systematic Theology of the Old and New Testaments. The title “is stimulating and perplexing in the kind of way that Barth himself can be.”

Second, David Reimer has a slightly longer review of John Collins’ collection of essays on biblical theology. Despite its contents spanning two and a half decades, it demonstrates remarkable coherence. But finally, Reimer judges, “The insistence on the necessity of the Bible sits awkwardly alongside the declaration that its status is about equivalent to that of natural law. One can be grateful to have Collins’s stimulating essays for reflection, while wondering if there might not be more satisfactory ways of explicating this relationship.”

Third, Krzysztof Sonek reviews Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word. The book is a collection of a dozen essays by Francis Martin, a Cistercian monk-cum-academic with a strong interest in uniting traditional and spiritual exegesis with historical-critical understandings. “Martin’s deep appreciation of the role played by the Church Tradition and the analogy of faith in biblical exegesis is indisputable and can be clearly seen on every page of the book.” But, writes the reviewer, “Martin’s work is an example of a confessional approach to biblical interpretation. While Christians of various denominations may learn a great deal from the book about the Roman Catholic Tradition, non-Christians and non-believers may find certain aspects of Martin’s approach too rigid to be used in their own exegetical endeavours.”

The current issue of JTS also contains several noteworthy articles on topics ranging from Origen’s Hexapla as evidence for his exegesis to Richard Hooker’s radical break with sola scriptura to Oliver Crisp’s take on penal non-substitution.

For the sake of space, I will look at just one: RWL Moberly’s “Did the Interpreters Get it Right? Genesis 2–3 Reconsidered.” The essay is the final installment in a running debate between Moberly and James Barr on the theological significance of the fact that the serpent in Genesis 2–3 appears to “get it right,” whereas God’s word in Gen. 2:16–17 appears unreliable at best (cf. 3:5, 7f). The debate reaches back to an initial essay of Moberly’s in 1988 (”Did the Serpent Get it Right?”, JTS 39), and includes Barr’s The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (SCM, 1992) as well as other essays in JTS (vols. 45, 57).

In short, against Barr’s view that the narrative in Genesis 2–3 is unserious, ironic and comic, and that the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is ethically arbitrary and even irrational, Moberly defends a different interpretation. He contents “that the apparent non-realization of God’s warning leads the reader to reread and rethink the meaning of the story and only thus to construe ‘die’ metaphorically” (original emphasis). Barr had criticized this understanding of “die” in Gen. 2:17, and although this will remain a controversial aspect of Moberly’s interpretation, the claim that the author invites us to contemplate a deeper meaning of death upon disobedience is suggestive.

More importantly, perhaps, Moberly insists that the divine command is not so obviously trivial. First, in parallel with Deuteronomy 30, it seems that “the quality of Israel’s existence is at stake.” And second, consistent with some wisdom literature, Gen. 2–3 is partly about the common experience of seeing that God’s word appears not to hold true. Sometimes the wicked prosper. This reading, writes Moberly,

is fully congruent with my contention that the issue at stake in God’s prohibition and the humans’ transgression need not be morally obvious to be genuinely serious. The serpent’s never telling the woman to transgress but rather undermining God’s trustworthiness and truthfulness and leaving her to draw her own conclusions points to the real core of human alienation from God and the real root of disobedience—not that God and humans can no longer converse, but rather the difficulty that the human heart and mind can have in genuinely trusting God as a wise creator and living accordingly.

How one understands such a foundational biblical narrative has ramifications that go well beyond what we can indicate here. (Moberly is not the only one to see important links in the NT with the temptation of Jesus, for example; compare Markus Bockmuehl’s Seeing the Word.) Moberly is to be commended for presenting two interpretive options clearly—his and Barr’s—and for advancing one that does not evade the theological and moral significance of a challenging text.