New Testament Theology in the Last Decade

Abstract

HE last decade has witnessed important publications and vigorous discussion in the field of biblical theology. Interest in this subject had never disappeared, but for nearly fifty years there had been spirited opposition to the claim that biblical theology is the capstone of biblical study. The two works that crystallized this opposition in the New Testament field were H. J. Holtzmann's Lehrbuch der Neutestamentlichen Theologie,' which set the standard of severely scientific attitude, and W. Wrede's incisive monograph, Ueber Aufgabe und Methode der sogennanten Neutestamentlichen Theologie,2 which denied that the field of study was to be called theology or limited to the New Testament. H. Weinel's Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments3 carried forward Wrede's contention that New Testament theology must give way to the history of the religion and working convictions of primitive Christianity. An American classic in this field, E. W. Parsons' volume on The Religion of the New Testament,4 continued the aversion to the word, theology. However, Parsons' work, marred by a glaring failure to discuss Ephesians at all, falls short of Wrede's program. It discusses, with liberal presuppositions, the religion reflected in the New Testament documents; Wrede had contended that the focus should be not on documents but on the faith and convictions of the worshiping and working Church. Yet forces were at work in the thirties that were to lead to a new interest in New Testament theology as part of the total field of biblical theology: 1. Many students found much truth in Karl Barth's insistence, in the preface of the second edition of his commentary, Der Rimerbrief, that the critical scholarship of recent decades had not done full justice to the religious content and significance of the biblical documents. 2. Form Criticism taught students to see that the worshipping, growing, missionary church was the living stream in which the individual documents must be placed. 3. C. H. Dodd, in one of the most important books of the past generation, The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments, demonstrated that there is a common message, a common conviction, concerning the Christ-centered working of God in history; and he made it clear that this common conviction appears in Acts, in the Gospels, and in the Epistles. 4. Dodd and many others also pointed out that history inevitably involves an element of interpretation. Such scholars began to make clear the serious limitations if not distortions that result from a historical method that im-