Why I don’t like “biblical” theology as a category

This article by Michael Bird prompted the following thoughts. As soon as one reads a text as scripture there are all kinds of assumptions at play, such as the authority of the text as scripture, its divine origin (however one wants to work that out), and its coherence with the rest of scripture and with reason. The historical study of ancient texts cannot make any such assumptions. This means that inevitably a theological reading of a text as scripture will often differ from a historical exegesis of a text. This of course does not mean that a historical exegesis of a text is irrelevant to a theological reading, there can never be a simple 1 to 1 parity.

A Great Blog to Follow

The writer of the foreword to my first book All Things in Common: The Economic Practices of the early Christians, and my spiritual brother, Edgar Foster keeps a blog of his theological reflections. It’s a very learned and interesting blog covering everything from textual criticism to early Christian history, to Hebrew Bible exegesis to medieval philosophy and theology, always scholarly and a great resource, I highly recommend it.

Healing

In dealing with theodicy, a scriptural data set that needs to be taken into account is Jesus’s healings. The reason for this is that with these healings, we get Jesus’s own reaction to human suffering. Some accounts portray the motivation as ‘pity’ (e.g. Luke 7:13 with Jesus rising the only son of a woman from the dead,  Matthew 14:14 with the healing of sick people in the crowd, Matthew 20:34 with his healing of the blind man). The word used for being moved pity is σπλαγχνίζομαι bascially means being moved as to one’s inward parts, kind of like how one might say “that hit me in gut”.

So what are we to make of these accounts? I think there are a few things we can say:

Not wanting any to Perish

In the previous post we examined some scriptures that are commonly used to defend exhaustive Divine foreknowledge, now let’s look at some that imply the opposite. There are many, but let’s look at three: Jonah 3:4–10; 2 Kings 20:1–6 (Isaiah 38:1–5); and 2 Peter 3:7–9.  Starting with Jonah:

All things work together for good?

In the previous two posts I laid out some problems with the idea of divine foreknowledge and predestination with regards to theodicy. But what about the Bible? What about those verses which seem to imply, or even insist on, God’s exhaustive foreknowledge? Verses such as Isaiah 44:7–8; 46:8–10; Romans 8:28–30? Let’s take a look at those verses: