Old Testament Theology

Israel's Life

John Goldingay

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780830879236
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Studies

In this third volume of his critically acclaimed Old Testament Theology John Goldingay explores the Old Testament vision of Israel's life before God. The first volume focused on the story of God's dealings with Israel, or Israel's gospel. The second volume investigated the beliefs of Israel, or Israel's faith. Now the spotlight falls on the Old Testament's perspective on the life that Israel should live in its present and future, including its worship, prayer and spirituality, as well as its practices, attitudes and ethics before God. Goldingay sees three spheres of life giving order to Israel's vision: its life in relation to God, its life in community and the life of the individual as a self. Within these frameworks he unfurls a tapestry that is as broad and colorful as all of life, and yet detailed in its intricate attention to the text. With this final volume John Goldingay has given us the third pillar of an Old Testament theology that is monumental in scope and yet invites us to enter through multiple doors to explore its riches. Students will profit from a semester in its courts, and ministers of the Word will find their preaching and teaching deeply enriched by wandering its halls and meditating in its chambers.

1

INTRODUCTION

Gospel, Faith, Life

The first volume of this study of the theology of the First Testament sought to describe Israel’s gospel: not its history as we might reconstruct it on the basis of sources within the First Testament and without, but its history as the First Testament wanted people to remember it and learn of it. Volume two sought to describe Israel’s faith: not what Israelites actually believed as we might infer it from within the First Testament (which records much critique of what Israelites actually believed) and from archaeological discoveries (which also indicate that their religious practice was not what the First Testament says it should have been), but Israel’s faith as the First Testament reckons it should have been and should be. Analogously, volume three studies Israel’s life: not the life Israel actually lived (which is also often critiqued) but the life the First Testament reckons Israel should/could live or should/could have lived.1 Over a period of centuries during the Persian and Greek periods (and perhaps earlier, and perhaps later), the Judean community allowed or arranged for a set of Scriptures to accumulate. The compilation expressed a collection of perspectives on that life, with the implication that they should guide the community in the present and in the future. This volume seeks to encapsulate that vision in the implausible conviction that it implies a vision for the Jewish and Christian community and the world in the twenty-first century.

One might reckon that in the study of Scripture the vision and its implementation is ultimately what counts; what matters is not merely what story we tell or what we think, but what life we are living.2 The First Testament implies something of that sort in expounding Yhwh’s expectations at such length in the teaching that dominates the Torah. In keeping with this, Judaism is often said to be interested in orthopraxy not orthodoxy.3 “Our dogmas are allusions, intimations, our wisdom is an allegory, but our actions are definitions.”4 Yet even for Judaism praxis rests on some theological convictions.5 It is often said that within the First Testament, commandment depends on narrative, though this is an oversimplification.6 But the Torah frequently points to rationales lying behind God’s commands, rationales that might inspire us to obey them.7

“The test of each story is the sort of person it shapes,”8 and (as the authors of that comment would grant) the sort of community it shapes. “The practice of community establishment and maintenance was at the center of the social ethic of earliest Christianity”9 as it had been of the First Testament’s social ethic. This encourages reflection on what happens if we look at the First Testament through spectacles prescribed by thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and James W. McClendon. Israel (we will then find ourselves noting) has a shared story; a destiny, to reveal God to the world; a way of life, which is to be the means of that, as it is characterized by virtues such as faithfulness, decisiveness, compassion, discernment, visionary realism and an openness about failure and wrongdoing, along with means of dealing with these; forms of worship, festivals, disciplines and rites that give expression to the way of life and the virtues, and encourage their cultivation; and forms of leadership that also encourage their cultivation.

McClendon, whose threefold organization of his Systematic Theology overlaps with mine,10 thus dedicated his first volume to ethics. This emphasis fits with the focus on ethics implicit in liberation theology11 and with the fact that “the central issue of postmodernity is the possibility of ethics, that is, right action.”12 “Postmodernity implies that… we should be doing theology rather than talking about how to do it”;13 that is all the more true about worship, ethics and spirituality. At a Society of Biblical Literature panel discussion of my first volume, Jon D. Levenson perceived in its focus on “gospel” the usual Christian underestimate of the “law.”14 I am still struck by the fact that the First Testament begins with “gospel” and sets “law” in its context, and I do not expect necessarily to satisfy a Jewish interpreter that I get the law “right,” but I recognize that considering Israel’s gospel and its faith is not complete until we have considered the worship, prayer, practices, attitudes and life that issue from them and dominate the Torah itself.

Admittedly, part of the background to that point about postmodernity is its doubt whether anything can be said about God; all you therefore have left is ethics.15 The problem then is that ethics does depend on theology as well as vice versa.16 “Dogmatics… has the problem of ethics in view from the very first,” but conversely “the ethical question… cannot rightly be asked and answered except within the framework, or at least the material context, of dogmatics,” which thus “guards ethics against arbitrary assertions.”17 To put it more strongly, it is questionable whether “something called ‘ethics’ exists prior to or independent from ‘doctrine.’ ”18 Likewise, lex credendi lex orandi, the way you believe is the way you pray, or the way you pray is the way you believe. The way you pray, the hymns you sing, indicates (frighteningly) what you believe and shapes what you believe. Doctrine needs to be singable; songs need to be believable.

Karl Barth titles one of his chapters “The Life of the Children of God,” and tells us that he owes the title to Adolf von Harnack, who said that if he were to write a dogmatics, that would be his title for the entire work. For Harnack, Barth comments, that meant replacing dogmatics by personal confession, so that the “proper object of faith is not God in His revelation, but man himself in believing in the divine.”19 The same is true for a rigorous postmodernity. But if we know that there is a metanarrative, a gospel, and that there is truth, a faith (even if we also know that we have only glimpses of either), then these come first. But our life can also feature—as volume three.

1.1 God, Community, Self

McClendon also suggests a three-strand analysis of Christian ethics, involving “our embodied existence,… our communal structures,… and the ongoing engagement of God in our individual and social lives.”20 He notes that the interweaving of these is important; the realization of God’s goal for the community’s life depends on the spirituality of the individual and vice versa. Analogously, Bruce C. Birch sees the Torah as relating to community, moral identity and divine will.21 I have taken a framework such as this for my broader analysis of the life Israel was invited to live. It was a life in relation to God, a life in community and a life as a self; it involved living with God, with other people and with oneself. Broadly, it involved worship and prayer, ethics and spirituality.

This section does not seek to outline the contents of this threefold life but to consider the interrelationship of its different aspects: of a focus on God, community and self, of the relationship of community and individual, of ethics and worship, of worship and spirituality, of prayer and ethics, of ethics and spirituality.

A Significant Order

In understanding what it means to be human, whereas the modern world starts with the autonomous individual, and the postmodern world (at least in theory) starts with the community, the premodern world could be reckoned to start with God. This might seem naive, given that our human understanding has to start with us. But in the order of being, God comes first. God’s reality undergirds the reality and significance of humanity, and the community’s reality undergirds the reality and significance of the individual.

It is either no coincidence or a nice coincidence that the Decalogue moves from questions about God in its first four statements, to questions about the community and about behavior in its next five,22 to a question about the inner dynamic of the individual in its tenth; succeeding pages of the Torah expand on these. Right attitudes to Yhwh link with right relationships in the community and right attitudes in oneself. Right attitudes in oneself link with right attitudes to Yhwh and to other people. None of these stands on its own. They form a whole.

Genesis has already pointed to a similar awareness. It starts with God. Neither the human individual nor the human community comes first; the reason for creating human beings relates to God’s purpose. They are created to subdue the earth, to serve the garden. Then, “rather than beginning with the possibilities of individuality and autonomy—two concepts at the heart of Western values—the family etiology of Genesis begins with the human community.”23 One might even argue that the attitude to the significance of the individual when the narrative eventually comes to it (see Gen 3–4) is rather gloomy.

Job’s culture, too, “did not take the average individual as its basic building block…. In its place stood the value of the family.” Thus Job “has meaning and significance in his world as the embodiment of his family, as its patriarch, its male head who ruled it within and represented it in its dealings with outsiders…. He was not a free agent, but the servant of that larger and ongoing unit which he embodied.” If he exists for its sake, that is even more true of his wife and their children.24 Then, while a devastating aspect of his life’s collapse is its effect on his relationship with his family and community, one major significance of Yhwh’s speech to him is to question the assumption that he is the center of the universe and therefore has a right to understand his place in it.

In light of some loss of confidence in modernity the study of ethics, of the Scriptures and of their interrelationship has seen a “turn to the community.”25 “The text is a product of community…. The biblical text is directed to the formation of community…. The biblical text is made available for its task of community formation by the canon.”26 The First Testament’s sharing the perspective of premodernity is now easier to perceive as a strength rather than a limitation. We no longer see the story of our culture as tracing the emancipation of the individual from the group but as recounting our loss of community and our bondage to the individual. Admittedly this is only a theoretical perspective, a matter on which scholars mostly work alone writing articles and books with our individual name at the head and on the spine. We are not ready to abandon our individualism. Like the Israelites in Egypt, we find our bondage more comfortable (it is the bondage we know) than some journey into the wilderness with a mixed multitude from whom we cannot get away. At best, as a kind of unself-conscious compromise, we like to talk about relationship and being relational, as if this solved the problem; but in such talk, the individual “I” remains the starting point. In a traditional society such as that presupposed by the First Testament, the opposite is the case. When community is the starting point, people look at the world in a similar way and have a sense of group identity and group solidarity. There are downsides to this, but there are significant upsides.

Community and Individual

Awareness of being a community does not imply that people have no individual awareness or that individuals do not matter. From Genesis 2 onward, they do have that awareness, and the stories in Genesis 12–50 concern not just families but individuals interacting with each other and with their families. The Sinai narrative assumes that both the people as a whole and individuals need to commit themselves to Yhwh. While “the entire people answered as one” and “with one voice” (Ex 19:8; 24:3), the Decalogue and the other regulations in between these two statements mostly use the second or third person singular and thus imply the responsibility of individuals for their actions. It is one indication that this teaching is not law, since law does not issue exhortations to the individual. Yhwh’s exhortation to the people as a whole to bring gifts for the wilderness sanctuary is expressed in the plural but then applied to “every person whose heart moves him” (Ex 25:2). The actual word “people” (ʿam) can take either a singular or a plural verb. After the making of the gold calf, it would be logical to infer that the clan of Levi, who subsequently declare themselves “for Yhwh” (Ex 32:26), had not been involved in the making of the calf and in the celebration that followed, but the narrative has not said so; the act is undertaken by “the people.” The covenant is made between Yhwh and the people, corporately and individually. In postscriptural usage, in connection with covenants the stress came to be on covenants that people make with one another or that individuals make with the corporate body; such ideas are at most inferences from the ways of thinking in Exodus 19–34.27

The requirements in Leviticus are meant for “all Israelites” and are not addressed only to people such as priests. Abraham Maimonides observes that whereas among Christians and Hindus there are some pious people, while the rest of the community is given to licentiousness, the entire Israelite community is called to holiness.28 There is no double standard in Israel. The same expectations bind the whole people. Neither are they merely addressed to “all Israel,” the corporate entity, but to “all Israelites.” Everyone has individual responsibility for their obedience and their holiness. “Speak to Aaron and his sons and all the Israelites” (Lev 17:2). “Speak to the Israelites” (Lev 18:2). “Speak to the whole community of the Israelites” (Lev 19:2). “Any individual” (Lev 17:3; 18:6; 19:3). Deuteronomy, in turn, moves somewhat systematically between singular and plural address. Analogously, Jeremiah urges, “turn [plural] each person from his wicked way and make good your ways and your deeds [all plural]” (Jer 18:11; cf. 25:5; 26:3; 35:15). The plural suggests corporate responsibility and regulation while the singular encourages individual acceptance of responsibility.29 In connection with praise, prayer and...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Gospel, Faith, Life
• Part One: Living with God
• Part Two: Living with One Another
• Part three: Living with Ourselves
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Old Testament Theology
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright Page