New Testament Christology: Some Considerations of Method

Abstract

Recent study in New Testament Christology has become increasingly self-reflective about method. There is good reason to believe that until greater clarity is achieved in this regard, further progress in investigating many of the tangled questions of Christology cannot be made. Increasing doubts about the continued applicability of the historical-critical method in investigating biblical texts, coupled with the exploration of alternative methods of reading texts, may be regarded as symptomatic of this mood of re-examination. Looking to allied disciplines for new life and perspectives, New Testament scholars have begun fruitful probings into sociology and anthropology. Whether this means that history as the fundamental mode in which New Testament scholarship is carried on, is being seriously challenged, and that other conceptual models are competing for the place of primacy, remains to be seen. The publication ofJ. D. G. Dunn's most recent book, Christology in the Making. A New Testament Inquiry Into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, provides a useful test-case for examining the question of method, because it both illustrates the present predicament and exposes some of the most visible fissures in the conceptual substructure of the discipline. The predicament is by no means new, for it has to do with a pair of bedfellows whose relationship has always appeared strange: history and theology. Christology in the Making presents a classic example of history in the service of theology, for the central issues with which the book deals are explicitly theological, yet their resolution and clarification is seen to be historical. This ambivalence pervades the work, and the methodological tension which it creates remains unresolved. It may be, after careful analysis and discussion of the work, that this turns out to be the fatal conceptual flaw of the work. The book is both rich and detailed in its execution. Many provocative exegetical sugges-