Theologie des Neuen Testaments, Band 3: Historische Kritik der historisch-kritischen Exegese. By Ulrich Wilckens

Abstract

This third volume of Wilckens’s New Testament theology falls, as he admits, outside that genre represented (controversially) by the six books or ‘part-volumes’ of vols. 1 (2002–5) and 2 (2007–9). Volume 1 (in four books) presents a ‘history of early Christian theology’, and the more ‘dogmatic’ (his word) and thematic volume 2 explains the hermeneutical principles which allow him to present the results of historical exegesis as the foundation of normative church doctrine. It clarifies the ‘inner connections’ in the ‘elemental themes’ of the New Testament, 11 of which get a chapter each in 2, 2. Volume 3 is in effect an appendix, delivering what was promised (and its conclusions anticipated) in the Introduction to the whole work (2002) and sketched in a short book, Kritik der Bibelkritik, in 2012. It is a ‘critical history of (New Testament) historical criticism’ designed to make a case: the roots of modern biblical criticism can be found in the Enlightenment’s reaction against the confessional divisions of Christianity responsible for the wars of religion. Its rational criticism of dogma, and of some of the Bible’s science, history, and morality, did not often entail disbelief in God but led to a historical study of the Bible independent of religious belief. This removed normative talk of God from biblical scholarship. Wilckens considers that disastrous for the Christian church, and his multi-volume work seeks to overcome it by building the methods, debates, and conclusions of his historical scholarship into a frame which, unlike most New Testament theologies, is explicitly theological. This book-length epilegomena, like Bultmann’s shorter one, provides some history of scholarship but also makes more room for the alternative stream that he himself advocates, presenting his readers in conclusion with an Either-Or: either a scholarship which acknowledges the reality of God and the historical resurrection of Jesus, or one that does not.