RECONCEPTUALIZING OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY David J. A. Clines 1. The Project The discipline of Old Testament theology has had a long and rich history; in this century alone several comprehensive statements of Old Testament theology as a whole have been published, and they have rightly enjoyed a considerable esteem. It is at the foundation of the present project, however, to argue that the discipline as a whole is due for reconceptualizing. Several major intellectual tendencies, from within as well as from outside the disciplines of Old Testament studies and theology generally, make this an appropriate moment for considering how the discipline may perhaps be re-invented. From my point of view, the names of the tendencies that seem most significant—moving from the outside to the inside of the discipline—are postmodernism (especially under its banners of indeterminacy and deconstruction), the deconfessionalization of biblical research, the new historical and literary biblical criticisms, and the newly developing ethics of interpretation and contextualized theology. Another way of generalizing about what I would like to imagine as the ‘new’ Old Testament theology is to cast it in terms of decentering the Old Testament. Traditionally the Old Testament has been thought of as more or less a unity; even when the diversity of its ideas has been recognized, that diversity has often been regarded as lying beneath an overarching unity. In one phase of the discipline, a few decades ago, there was even a vigorous debate about where the ‘centre’ of the Old Testament lay; by most contributors to the debate, it was taken for granted that there was a centre, even if they could not agree on what it was. I do not think that such enquiries are foolish, but they do imply a certain conceptualization of the nature of the text, of texts in general, and no doubt also of the nature of reality in general, a conceptualization that should no longer be regarded as obvious or obligatory. I want to explore what can be said about Old Testament theology when the Old Testament is radically decentered. I think it might be best if I lay out my approach in the form of theses; though they may be controversial, they are not meant to be polemical, and I do not insist that my way is the only possible way. 2. Its Principles 1. The name ‘Old Testament theology’ itself needs a replacement. This is not so much because of the well-known difficulties inherent in the term ‘Old Testament’ but because of the conceptualization of the discipline as ‘theology’. From my observation of what people actually do under the heading of Old Testament theology I conclude they that are really interested in the ideas in the Old Testament, whether or not they are ‘theological’ in a strict sense. For example, an OT theology may discuss Hebrew cosmology or the social institution of prophecy or conceptions of the end of the world. Such ideas have a theological dimension to them, of course, but the ideas themselves are open to discussion—up to certain point— without necessarily involving theological opinions. I am for the deprivileging of theology as a category in understanding OT thought. I would like to see the discipline conceived as the study of OT ideology—of which theology of course forms an important part. I don’t mean ideology in the more social-political sense D.J.A. Clines, 4. Proposal, p. 2 (though I think that is itself another dimension that has not yet been given serious recognition), but ideology simply in the sense of the study of ideas. I am not in the least interested in eliminating the theological from the study of the Old Testament, or by a process of reduction transforming it into something else (such as an expression of power relations or a neurosis), but rather in putting theology on the same footing as several other categories— such as economics or power or class—through which to approach the ideas of the OT. I am, I should add, not very happy with the term ‘ideology’ itself to describe my project—because of its range of meanings; what I am really talking about is ‘thought’—but that does not sound very impressive these days. 2. OT theology needs to be deconfessionalized. It will be the last sub-discipline within OT studies to be deconfessionalized, for obvious reasons, but it desperately needs to be. By deconfessionalizing I do not mean ruling out of court readings and evaluations of the OT from within the perspective of a confessional (commonly Christian) commitment, but the elimination of the assumption that such is the obligatory or even the preferred stance. In a pluralist world, and especially in the academy—viewed as responsible to the society that funds it—it seems wrong to continue with the conception that OT theology is essentially a branch of Christian theology. That seems to be the position of most of the standard textbooks of OT theology, and the influence of the German university system in which faculties of theology are to a large extent under the control of the church is clearly marked. The control of the discipline of OT theology by the needs of the church has had a distorting effect on the discipline. That hardly needs to be argued, but until OT theology (or rather, its reconceptualization) is done—on a major scale—in another mode, we will hardly know the extent of the damage. Perhaps the most notorious matter on which the OT has been distorted by Christian theology is that of the nature of the deity. It has been the tendency of a (largely German-oriented and largely Protestant) OT theology to conform the OT representation of Yahweh as closely as possible to that of the God of Christian theology; even when somewhat radical re-evaluations of the OT portrait of God have been attempted (as for example over the suffering of God), they have immediately been pressed into the service of a reconstruction or enhancement of Christian belief. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it evinces the same tendency to normalize the deity Yahweh to the Christian God-theFather. I should like to essay in this project (inter alia) a representation of the Hebrew deity that leaves entirely on one side the question whether it is at all compatible with that of the Christian God, or whether the OT’s view of God can be made serviceable at all for Christian theology. It seems to me astonishing that such an undertaking has not, so far as I know, been attempted. 3. Each writing in the Old Testament should be treated as an entity in its own right. There is nothing wrong in trying to generalize about the ideas of the OT as a whole, as has been done traditionally in OT theologies. The fact that this approach has almost always led to a levelling of the data is not a great objection to it, since generalizations tend to do that anyway. I just think that in these days the time for synthetic work like that is no longer right. I suspect also that the inclination toward treating the OT as a unity has been for the most part theologically motivated, and it is time that orientation was given a rest. Only one substantial attempt to treat the writings of the OT separately for an OT theology is known to me (that of G. von Rad); the project of Rolf Rendtorff, currently in progress, has some analogies, in that he is reading the OT sequentially; but he is not comparing one writing with another. The practical execution of this prescription will of course show how problematic the concept of a ‘writing’ within the OT is. There is no problem with Obadiah, but there is with almost everything else. I would myself work (for this purpose at least) with the ‘final form of the text’, which will take care of Amos and Isaiah and a few other texts; but shall I accept the traditional grouping of the Pentateuch as one writing and the critical-scholarly grouping of D.J.A. Clines, 4. Proposal, p. 3 the Deuteronomistic History as one writing? Or should I treat Joshua and Judges, for example, separately? And is Psalms one writing or 150? What of Proverbs? There cannot be a right or a wrong about this matter; any decision will be to some extent arbitrary. 4. This must be a comparative ‘theology’ of the Old Testament. Of course the writings in the Old Testament are in the Old Testament. Their preservation within this collection (I shall not be using the term ‘canon’ very much) is a fact of their existence, and the ideas of each writing must be considered in relation to all the other writings with which they are bound up. So I conceive of Old Testament theology these days as a conversation (sometimes perhaps a conversation des sourds) among differing, sometimes conflicting points of view. This is fact how I structure the course I have given for some years on OT theology, with each writing that we examine being laid alongside each other writing to bring out their distinctive voices. A typical examination question for that course is, ‘Compare and contrast Genesis and Proverbs’; and that is the spirit—if not the actual programme—of the project I am here describing. 5. The textuality of the texts should be respected. I mean that the ideas of the texts cannot be read off the page, unproblematically. Where we are at now in our understanding of textuality, I think, is to recognize that texts are constitutionally imperfect vehicles for expressing ideas (to use the conceptualization of the modern period for a moment). The twin nubs of this recognition are indeterminacy and deconstructibility. That is, first, the tendency of texts is toward the indeterminacy of multiple meanings (whether or not the making of meaning is put entirely to the reader’s account). Second, texts have more than a tendency (it might be better said that they are fated) to deconstruct themselves, undermining the oppositions on which they rely or subverting the positions they affirm. Writing OT theology in a mode that engages with these perceptions will be a challenge, one that has hitherto hardly been essayed. 6. The Old Testament’s ideas need to be analysed not only for their historical setting, but also for their cultural setting in ancient Israel. It has been traditional to interpret the Old Testament against its (reconstructed) historical background—historical in the sense of political history and intellectual history. Now it is time for Old Testament thought as a whole to be reprocessed in terms of its (reconstructed) cultural setting, that is, in terms of the social, class and gender relations of its writings in their origins. The question, Who wrote this text?, has to give way to the question, What kind of a person wrote this text?—that is, to the question of the class or group interests represented by the text. The undifferentiated ‘community of faith’ that figures in many accounts of Old Testament theology must now be replaced by more carefully delineated (and certainly multiple) interest groups as the producers of the texts. 7. The Old Testament should become the object of theological reflection rather than a source for theology. I am arguing that to adopt the ideology of the text—which is what happens if the text is treated as a source for theology—is an ethical fault. In order to be truly critical, it is necessary to judge the text of the Old Testament by some standard that lies outside it; and in order to be ethical in reading and using the text it is important to subject it to the same kind of theological and ethical evaluation we would give to any text. On the whole, however, most studies of the Old Testament’s theology and ethics have not been critical in this sense, but have either remained descriptive or have in some way approved of or adapted or otherwise ‘redeemed’ the text. As a result, what we lack in the discipline is an engagement with the theology of the Old Testament. If the Old Testament agrees, more or less, with the interpreter’s own theology, it is endorsed; if it does not agree, it is described. It is rare to find any evaluation of the theology of the Old Testament, any judgment. I regard such judgment as the ethical responsibility of any scholar of the Old Testament. D.J.A. Clines, 4. Proposal, p. 4 8. The role of individual scholars, with their own social and cultural and religious locations, has to be acknowledged (perhaps even foregrounded) in a future ‘theology’ of the OT. The day of the theological rule quod semper, quod ubique, et quod ab omnibus has gone for good. No statement or evaluation of the thought of the Old Testament can have any validity (however interesting it may be) outside the circle of the author. Like all scholarly work, the present project cannot be urbi et orbi (which was, I claim, an underlying conceptualization of the unitary Bibelwissenschaft in which I was brought up). It will need to be modest even though passionate, pluralist even though committed. 3. The Product What I envisage as the end result of this project is two rather substantial volumes. No doubt there will be other shorter productions, but I do not intend to defer the major task itself by writing preliminary sketches and samples. I think I know what I want to do, and I have some sense of the structure of the work. What I am clear about is that for each one of the Old Testament writings (however defined) there should be some analysis of the structure of the work’s thought (I don’t of course mean a quest for some determinate centre or main theme); that thought should be set forth as the construction of some interest group or other; it should be compared and contrasted with other writings of the Old Testament (not just those it is historically or generically germane to); the problematics of that thought’s internal coherence should be tested and exposed; and the ideas should be evaluated according to a scale of values that are not its own but—my own (since how else could I be ethically responsible?). What I am not so clear about is what the order of writings treated should be, or how far the process of comparing and contrasting can be carried out without becoming tedious. I do envisage that there will be lots of solid nitty-gritty work in this publication, but that the big picture will always dominate. I hope that the principles and orientation of the work will exemplify a new style of doing biblical scholarship. March 1992