RBL 05/2013 Feldmeier, Reinhard, and Hermann Spieckermann. Translated by Mark E. Biddle. M. Eugene Boring Brite Divinity School TCU Fort Worth, Texas

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RBL 05/2013 Feldmeier, Reinhard, and Hermann Spieckermann God of the Living: A Biblical Theology Translated by Mark E. Biddle Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011. Pp. 612. Cloth. $59.95.

1 RBL 05/2013 Feldmeier, Reinhard, and Hermann Spieckermann God of the Living: A Biblical Theology Translated by Mark E. Biddle Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, Pp Cloth. $ ISBN M. Eugene Boring Brite Divinity School TCU Fort Worth, Texas Reinhold Feldmeier is Professor of New Testament at the University of Göttingen; Hermann Spieckermann is Professor of Old Testament in the same university. Each has published extensively in his academic field. Each understands his academic and theological responsibility to include the Bible as a whole. The authors have chosen the opening words of this substantial volume with care, declaring without fanfare that the title book s title holds promise for the program of characterizing the content of biblical theology in the form of a doctrine of God (1). The German title Der lebendige Gott would more mechanically be rendered The Living God, a designation for God found in all sections of the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. The English translation of the title, though not literal, is accurate and likewise chosen with care. This same opening paragraph explains that God of the Living is the sole, virtually axiomatic definition of God in the mouth of Jesus (Mark 12:27 par.). The conclusion of the book explicates this title at length, in concert with Ps 118, exegeting the Gospel text as affirming that Jesus terms this one God of the Old and New Testaments as God of the living the only, almost axiomatic definition of God found on his lips in the Gospels (520).

2 The book wants to characterize not summarize or analyze the content of the Christian Bible as a biblical theology. Again, the more mechanical rendering of Gotteslehre in the German title would be Doctrine of God, and again, the translator s rendition is accurate and appropriate. For the authors, biblical theology is its doctrine of God. The Bible is a book about God, and not only that it is a book in which the one God of the Bible wants to be acknowledged as the God of all people, including the readers of the Bible and the readers of this book about it. Structure and Content. The detailed five pages of the German table of contents provides a helpful synopsis of the structure and coherence of the book, unfortunately reduced to a one-page motto-like list in the English translation. The book s two major parts are devoted respectively to the biblical God s character in the personal sense (eschewing ontology) and God s saving activity in which God s character is revealed and made effective. Part 1, Foundation, comprises six chapters: (1) The Name and the Names ; (2) From LORD God to Father God ; (3) The One as the Unifier ; (4) The Loving One ; (5) The Almighty ; (6) Spirit and Presence. Beginning with an explication of the Tetragrammaton as dialectically combining God s holiness and God s nearness, God s will-to-relationship, these six chapters move through God s character as Father and Son to God as Spirit, imposing only the minimum of schematization necessary to explicate the subject at all. Part 2, Development, comprises twelve chapters: (7) Word and Creation ; (8) Blessing and Praise ; (9) Justice and Justification ; (10) Forgiveness and Reconciliation ; (11) Hiddenness and Wrath ; (12) Suffering and Lament ; (13) Transience and Death ; (14) Eternity and Time ; (15) Commandment and Prayer ; (16) Covenant and Promise ; (17) Salvation and Judgment ; (18) Hope and Comfort. The authors explain that these twelve topics of part 2, each of which is two-dimensional, are to some extent independent essays that could be read in any order. It is also clear that they have a general correlation to the canonical creation-to-eschaton structure. Each of the chapter-essays presents a close reading of particular biblical texts. We do not get abstract explanations into which texts are fitted but intensive work devoted to helping the reader come within hearing distance of the texts. The reader who works through these essays becomes aware of how much work has already gone into the exegesis that facilitates this hearing and can only be grateful. Via Negativa. There is no way the essays as a whole, or any one of them, can be summarized, any more than the Bible can be summarized. Nor is it negative criticism to

3 say that God of the Living frustrates attempts at categorization just as did Barth s Römerbrief; it is difficult to say just what this book is. In each case, the only wisdom is Tolle lege. It may be helpful, however, to point out the distinctive approach and content of this book by listing and briefly discussing a series of things it is not. The book is not an abstract summary of biblical doctrine. It is neither a systematic harmonizing of the theology of the biblical texts nor a schematic analysis of their tensions and contradictions. Each chapter is a compressed exegetical close reading of selected biblical texts. Yet even this cannot be an arbitrary or grab-bag selection of texts; the only systematic center of focus must be God. The book is not an anthology, not a juxtaposition of a theology of the Old Testament with a theology of the New Testament. Though the hands and emphases of each author can sometimes be perceived, God of the Living is an integrated unity in which the authors jointly take responsibility for the whole, the product of years of teamwork and dialogue. There are no minority reports appended to each chapter. There is no claim that the Bible as such is a book of uniform theology. The manifest tensions within biblical theology are not handled in terms of progressive revelation, as though the Old Testament were only a long prelude to the true revelation of God in the Christ-event. For both authors, Jesus Christ is the key to the whole Bible that is, the God of Jesus Christ, who is manifest not only from Matt 1:1 on but from the first page of the Christian Bible to the last. There is no playing off a theological approach against a historical approach, nor are there defensive caricatures of either perspective. The book is thoroughly historical. Its historical conclusions that form the basis of its theology may be more skeptical than conservative readers can be comfortable with, such as reading most of the Old Testament as representing the postexilic theologies of Israel. Likewise, the early forms of these theologies are traced from primitive beginnings prior to and outside Israel; theology and Religionsgeschichte are not seen as alternatives. But historical data are presented within a confessional framework. Historical study is preliminary to theological engagement with the Sache of the text. The risen Christ, God-the-Holy-Spirit continues to be present with the people of God, and the burning heart of the Emmaus road is authentic hermeneutic. Ultimately, as the Bible understands it, the burning heart is also the understanding heart (11; cf. Luke 24:32, 45). The authors declare that the book is for insiders, to help them understand their Bible and their faith. Here is neither defensiveness nor smugness. Without being overtly evangelistic, the very process of explicating the theological core of biblical faith communicates the Bible s own claim that the One God of the Bible is already the reader s God, indirectly and implicitly inviting response and

4 acknowledgement of this claim. This is reminiscent of the restrained eloquence of Hans Dieter Betz s low key but clear declaration in the preface to his thoroughly historicalcritical Galatians commentary, that as a theologian he also knows what Paul is talking about (xv). This is not an easy book, and it does not try to be. In the textbook sense, it is not a beginner s book, though serious beginners may find more help here than in marketoriented oversimplifications claiming to make Bible study easy, fun, and relevant. The book respects the reader, as does the Bible, engages big issues sin and salvation, the meaning of the world and life, God and assumes that those who tackle them are willing to work and stretch. Hebrew and Greek abound on virtually every page Hebrew text transliterated, Greek text in Greek font. The translations provided, or the context, makes the book accessible to the linguistically challenged, but the presence of the actual language of the biblical authors is a constant reminder that biblical interpretation is a matter of cross-cultural communication, that Paul and Isaiah did not sound like our next-door neighbor, that there is a difference between our world and the strange new world of the Bible pointed out by one of the authors Göttingen predecessor (Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, 28 50). The book, written by Lutheran professors, does not restrict biblical theology to the Protestant canon. The Masoretic Text is treated with respect, but there is also refreshing and eye-opening use of the LXX, in terms of both canon and text. One ought not to be surprised Göttingen has been the world center of LXX studies for a century and the LXX was the Bible for first-century C.E. Mediterranean Judaism and the early church. The book does not impose a modern agenda on study of the Bible nor encourage its readers to do so. To be sure, Spieckermann and Feldmeier, like all human beings, have a particular agenda. Let the one without an agenda cast the first stone (the source of this maxim is unknown to me). The authors are (post-?)modern liberal Protestants. They believe in human liberation; they oppose exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants by the rich and powerful; they support equality, liberty, and justice. This is not said here casually or snidely. Yet, without being compelled to explain that they also support the values of modern Western democracy, they encourage a reading of the Bible that seeks to hear the Bible in its own terms, rather than using it as resource to be mined for our values or a barrier that must be overcome. The book does not ignore the uncomfortable, but prominent, elements in the Bible such as salvation, judgment, the wrath of God, and lamentation. The biblical God is at the center; human beings live before this God, who knows them, loves them, and wants them to acknowledge the God who speaks in the Bible as their God. God is also their judge. This is

5 powerfully illustrated in the opening paragraph of their chapter Salvation and Judgment : In 1770 the enlightened cathedral chapter of Saint-Lazare in Burgundian Autun renovated its church and, in the process, had the Romanesque Tympanon with one of the most extraordinary portrayals of the Last Judgment plastered over since this portrayal no longer suited the times. This procedure at the apex of the French Enlightenment is symptomatic of a paradigm shift in modernity. In contrast to an earlier period, this shift reversed the forensic relationship between God and humans. No longer must human beings, as sinners, give account before the throne of their God, but God must justify himself in view of the suffering of the world, for example before the forum of human reason. Even theologians sometimes perceive the concept of human responsibility before the divine judge as unreasonable heteronomy over autonomous humanity. (469) The plaster has now been removed, and the Tympanon of Autun even casual visitors may find themselves addressed by it. This book is in step with the restoration, removing not a little plaster. The book has nothing explicit about meaning for today, no side glances or allusions to contemporary issues. It concentrates, fiercely, on the text of the Bible, which emerges with something to say in its own right. The book is thus important for preachers and teachers, not only of the Bible, but of ethics and systematic theology, for all who are concerned with the meaning of the term God and wish to hear something more than the echo of their own voice. This volume will deservedly find a home in the libraries of institutions and on the desks of their scholars, in some pastor s studies (but in few offices), whence, it is to be hoped, it will encourage teachers and students, in academy and church, to formulate a holistic biblical theology of their own, and will provide resources for doing so. Baylor University Press, and the translator Mark E. Biddle, are to be commended for making the book available in English almost immediately on publication of the German volume.

BOOK REVIEW. Thomas R. Schreiner, Interpreting the Pauline Epistles (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2nd edn, 2011). xv pp. Pbk. US$13.78.

BOOK REVIEW. Thomas R. Schreiner, Interpreting the Pauline Epistles (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2nd edn, 2011). xv pp. Pbk. US$13.78. [JGRChJ 9 (2011 12) R12-R17] BOOK REVIEW Thomas R. Schreiner, Interpreting the Pauline Epistles (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2nd edn, 2011). xv + 166 pp. Pbk. US$13.78. Thomas Schreiner is Professor