Scripture

Many Christians in the modern period have worked with inadequate notions about what “scripture” is. They have often thought of the Bible as a rule book, a manual for human behavior, a source for scientific or historical facts, a constitution for modern structures, including the church, or even a sex manual. In order to proceed with an adequate theological interpretation of the Bible, Christians need to develop an adequate notion of what theological scripture “is.” Chapter 2 offers different and various ways of imagining the nature of scripture, as cathedral or space we occupy rather than a foundationalist source for ready-to-hand knowledge.

Church

Chapter 7 begins by exploring what it means when Christians confess to “believe in the church. It proceeds by differentiating the church from the “kingdom of God” and comparing it to similar terms, such as the “household of God,” and the “body of Christ.” The gender of the church is explored, with arguments that Christians think of the church as male, female, neuter, androgynous, or intersexed. The English word “church” is a translation of the ancient Greek ekklêsia, a political term referring to the citizen assembly that made final decisions by democratic procedures in the ancient city. Thus the ancient political meanings of ekklesia, which included freedom, equality, and democracy, should inform postmodern theology and practice in Christian churches and denominations. Portraits of the church in the New Testament, however, should encourage Christians to reject modernist ideologies of family, nationalism, and capitalism. While avoiding Christian supersessionism over Judaism, Christians today must also avoid the oppressive politics of some forms of Zionism. Christians may also experience the church as a refuge in a sometimes hostile world. Finally, the book concludes with the church as a sacrament of eschatological hope for the future, an expectation of the coming kingdom of God.

Knowledge

Before getting to the construction of actual Christian theology, issues of epistemology must be addressed. How do we know what we know? Can Christian doctrine and scripture provide guidance for a faithful construction of human knowledge? Chapter 1 addresses several issues in the philosophy of knowledge and demonstrates that the New Testament can indeed furnish raw materials for postmodern epistemology. But it also insists that no knowledge can be had for any of us apart from the precarious activities of human interpretation.

Human

The Bible, taken in its ancient historical context, says little explicitly about the nature of the human being, certainly not in any kind of scientific or philosophical way. It provides no explicit “theological anthropology.” Yet the New Testament, if read with care and creativity, may be seen to teach that the human person is a product of social and cultural construction; that the body, though a unity in some sense, is also made of various parts; that the self is social. The New Testament may help Christians accept the necessary finitude of human beings as a good, not as a flaw of human existence. It may come as a surprise to many people to see what may be learned from an innovative reading of the Bible about human sexuality and desire. Moreover, the value of some very traditional doctrines not popular with most modern people, such as the doctrines of original sin and predestination, may also be rediscovered for our time. And certainly the New Testament is rich for imagining the meaning of salvation and the resurrection of the body—even the “deification” of human beings—for Christians in the 21st century.

Introduction

The modern scholarly task of “biblical theology,” “theology of the Old Testament,” or “theology of the New Testament” may be historically traced from around 1800 and through the 20th century. Its goal was both to describe the theology contained in the Bible but also to use that historical construction as a foundation for modern Christian theological appropriation of the Bible. The task, though, led either to bad theology, bad historiography, or both. A robust, Christian, orthodox theology must move beyond the limits of modernism and practice more creative, innovative readings of scripture.

Spirit

When the subject is the Christian view of the holy spirit, it is even more difficult to find an orthodox doctrine of the spirit if the Bible is read only through the method of modern historical criticism. Read historically, the Bible does not teach a doctrine of the trinity, and the Greek word for “spirit,” pneuma, refers to many different things in the New Testament. Moreover, the pneuma was considered in the ancient world to be a material substance, though a rarified and thin form of matter. Yet those ancient notions of pneuma may help us reimagine the Christian holy spirit in new, though not at all unorthodox, ways. The spirit may then become the most corporeal person of the trinity; the most present person of the trinity; or alternatively, the most absent. The various ways the New Testament speaks of pneuma—that of the human person, or the church, of God, of Christ, and even of “this cosmos”—may provoke Christian imagination in new ways once the constraints of modernist methods of interpretation are transcended. Even the gender of the spirit becomes a provocative but fruitful meditation for postmodern Christians.

Christ

A view of the nature of Jesus Christ that rises to the level of full Christian orthodoxy, as expressed in such creeds and definitions as the Apostles’ Creed, and the statements of Nicea, and Chalcedon, cannot be responsibly derived from the New Testament if the constraints of modern historical criticism are obeyed. But robust and faithful views of the nature of Christ may be read from the New Testament, and even from the Old Testament, when the text is interpreted via lenses of creative, Christian interpretation, led by the holy spirit, and interpreted with the guidance of love. Moreover, though constructions of “the historical Jesus” may be used for theological reflection, the Jesus of Christian faith is the Christ of Christian creed and confessions, not the Jesus of modern historical research and construction.

God

Even if ancient biblical writers did not have the philosophical training to have anticipated later Christian doctrines such as the transcendence or immanence of God, divine simplicity, even the doctrine of the trinity, postmodern Christians should not be constrained by those historical limits from reading the New Testament to arrive at robust, though sometimes complex, theologies of the nature of God and of what it means to say, in the 21st century, “I believe in God.”