God Becoming Human: Incarnation in the Christian Bible by Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann

Abstract

Reviewed by: God Becoming Human: Incarnation in the Christian Bible by Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann Rebekah Eklund reinhard feldmeier and hermann spieckermann, God Becoming Human: Incarnation in the Christian Bible (trans. Brian McNeil; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2021). Pp. xix + 457. Paper $80. Originally published in German as Menschwerdung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), God Becoming Human is a companion to the two authors' book Der Gott der Lebendigen: Eine biblische Gotteslehre (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); in English as The God of the Living: A Biblical Theology [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011]), but it easily stands on its own. It is an exploration of biblical texts through theological lenses, but the two [End Page 498] authors give attention to historical-critical matters along the way, such as the literary history of Genesis and the "History of Religions" approach to the historical Jesus (an approach that the authors concisely refute on pp. 243–46). The makeup of the book signals the respective specialties of its authors in Old Testament (Spieckermann) and New Testament (Feldmeier). Part A covers the "prehistory" of the incarnation in OT texts from the creation narrative through the roles of various mediators ("messengers," kings, priests, prophets, and God's "anointed ones"). One helpful section on "the end of the mediators" takes up the question of why the role of the mediator is discredited and cast aside in Deutero-Isaiah. Another section provides a useful summary on "God's anointed ones" in postexilic literature. The final chapter of part A is an interesting exploration of the Servant figure and the suffering righteous one, but the chapter reorients toward finding traces of resurrection rather than incarnation; it concludes, somewhat surprisingly, with a brief section on John the Baptist. Part B begins with a section on the Jesus of memory and the Christ of faith, with a presumption of essential continuity between the two (readers interested in the recent application of memory studies to the Gospels will not find that theme here). This section initially continues the emphasis on the resurrection but quickly shifts to the origins of claims about Jesus's preexistence and incarnation. Conceptions of incarnation are explored in the Pauline letters, the Synoptic Gospels, the Johannine tradition, and the later NT (with sections on Acts, Colossians and Ephesians, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and Revelation). This summary demonstrates how much territory this book covers; for example, it offers a terse summary of Paul's christology in just under twenty pages. The book aims at an overview of the witness of the whole of Scripture and is not a detailed study of any individual book. The driving force of the book is not the incarnation per se but God's loving desire, often expressed through human mediators, to be in relationship with the creatures made in God's image. To that end, part A often summarizes narratives and themes in the OT, but always with an eye to how they contribute to the tension between God and God's willful creatures. This theme is not quite as prominent in part B, which reads more like christology, but it still supplies the underlying logic. For scholars who are interested in the interaction between Christian theology and Christian Scripture, this is a model example of how to put the two into conversation with each other. As a book interested in the interplay of OT and NT, and in the essential reliability of Scripture's witness to Jesus as the incarnation of God, it could fruitfully be read alongside Richard B. Hays's Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), which was published two years before the German edition of this volume but is not listed in the bibliography. Larry Hurtado (whose 2003 book Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003] does appear in the bibliography) is another apt conversation partner. While the book is generally well integrated, inclusion of the discussion of the title "son of man" or "Son of Man" in relation to Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Synoptic Gospels seems a bit disconnected. Oddly, Hebrew words are transliterated while Greek terms are not; English translations are typically...