It has now been over 160 years since Johann philipp Gabler (1753–1826) was first credited with having ‘founded’ biblical theology as a discipline in its own right. Some ten years ago, as his 1787 inaugural address at Altdorf was being remembered, several scholars wrote articles which attempted to explore ways in which Gabler's proposals for biblical theology may be retained or, at least, may be interpreted as still relevant for current reflection. As these publications demonstrate, Gabler's methodological proposals have been capable of being interpreted with differing shades of emphasis. Behind such variance may well lie the likelihood that in coming to terms with the significance of forebearers out of the past, contemporaries in the biblical disciplines have found themselves articulating their own nuanced understandings concerning what ‘biblical theology’, if it denotes a task at all, should involve. The present article is no exception, as here I would like to propose a particular way of understanding Gabler. I shall thus (1) rehearse briefly some of the more basic antecedents to Gabler's formulations; (2) describe the contours of his proposals, beginning with his Altdorf address (Antrittsrede); (3) attempt to situate him within the context of late 18th-century German theology; and (4) comment briefly on the significance of his ideas in relation to the task of biblical theology.

The theology of the Holy Spirit waited through the early Christian centuries until the main doctrines regarding the Trinity and the person of Christ had been forged. Even then pneumatology was introduced ‘by the back door’, in Theodore Campbell's phrase, that of how the Son was placed in the Father, Son and Spirit confession. While prayers to the Spirit were not lacking in the earliest liturgies, still, at Nicea the doctrine ‘had been disposed of in lapidary brevity’, as Jaroslav Pelikan has described the credal line, ‘and we believe in the Holy Spirit’. ‘Nor does there seem to have been a single treatise dealing specifically with the person of the Spirit composed before the second half of the fourth century’. After Nicea, however, controversy concerning the Spirit erupted ‘with a vengeance’, producing the same kind of energy that had accompanied the Christological debates. Pneumatomachi, Tropici, and Macedonians, though losers in the fight for orthodox doctrine on the Spirit's nature, had mounted formidable campaigns, as Arians had done over the relationship of Christ to the Father. But disagreement over the Spirit had an even greater impact than Arian opposition in that the filioque remains a principal difference between the Catholic and Orthodox, and now Catholic and Anglican, creeds.

In Book IV of Calvin's Institutes, the ‘external means …by which God invites us into the society of Christ and holds us therein’ consists chiefly in ‘the true church, with which as mother of all the godly we must keep unity’. Like Luther, Calvin could speak of mater ecclesia with an unembarrassed reference to the visible, historical community of God's people. The rhetoric of ‘mother church’ did not long remain a part of Protestant sensibility. The Reformation principle of ‘Christ alone’ has often tended to undermine strong claims for the church; conversely, the critique of institutions has played a key role in the shaping of Protestant identity, at times seeming to be the very point of the Reformation. The distinction assumes classic form in Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith. Protestant Christianity, Schleiermacher writes, ‘makes the individual's relation to the church dependent on his relation to Christ’, whereas Catholicism ‘makes the individual's relation to Christ dependent on his relation to the church’. This intuition would seem to be confirmed by recent ecumenical dialogue, which has fastened on the church's role in salvation as the most likely candidate for a ‘basic difference’ between Catholicism and Protestantism. At the same time, important voices on both sides have been asking whether such a sharp distinction can or should be sustained.

Early in the year 1968 Karl Barth invited me to a discussion that touched upon, among other topics, my second [habilitation] thesis Zukunft und Verheifiung [Future and Promise], which had appeared three years earlier. In it I had attempted to trace the ground of theology eschatologically in God's word of promise, yet without putting the cart before the horse. Barth dressed his inquiry in a comment accented with self-irony. As I recall, it went as follows: ‘Even I began with eschatology and ascribed to it a decisive role for theology. I gave the future priority—but over the years I was forced to realize that I could not maintain this. The more time passed on, the more I became aware that I could not remain standing where I was. Present and past are equally important for theology if theology allows itself to be oriented by God's time. And theology must not confuse this time with one of the dimensions of the human experience of time’. Itsounded as if beginning with eschatology was something like a sin of youthfulness, possibly even like a theological childhood illness which every more or less normal theologian would grow out of in time.

In choosing the title for these reflections, I have attempted to note not only a transition in the occupant of the Chair of New Testament Language, Literature & Theology in the University of Edinburgh, but also the historic period in which this transition takes place, in the closing years of one millennium, approaching the threshold of a new one. In an effort to engage the interests of a wide circle of readers in various scholarly specialities, I have also chosen to discuss (though only in very limited depth) several major questions, each of which could occupy us for much longer than space here permits. I hope at least to underline their importance, and to sketch a rationale for the positions I shall advocate. I cannot hope that this sketch will persuade anyone not already inclined to my views, but I can perhaps indicate that they are not without reason. If a thorough treatment is not possible here, I shall at least endeavour to be clear, and this may better stimulate the reflections of others.

It is impossible to read the first fifteen chapters of Exodus alongside the royal psalms and Zion hymns in the Psalter without noticing that very different perceptions of Israel's beginnings co-existed in the pre-exilic period. The Moses-Egypt tradition is about a wandering people, deprived of land and status, living under the promise of the protection offered by a nomadic clan-god; whilst the David-Zion tradition, fundamental to so many psalmists, concerns an established nation, a royal state cult which ratifies claims to land and status through its deity ‘housed’ in a Temple. And yet the Exodus tradition is used in a handful of psalms: the question thus arises — what purpose does it serve? Furthermore, why should the psalmists use such an anomalous tradition in this way?

In a book entitled The Christian Pastor and the Working Church, published in 1898, Washington Gladden, a leading figure in the Social Gospel movement, attempts a definition of the field of Pastoral Theology. Gladden's characterisation of pastoral theology as the pragmatic study of the work of the minister and the management of the Church is typical of many definitions, both historical and contemporary:

The relationship between theology and ethics has been largely determined in the modern era by the questions Immanuel Kant posed and the answers he gave. This contains a certain irony because in 1786 at Marburg Kant's philosophy was banned on the assumption that it threatened faith and morals. His demolition of the scholastic arguments for the existence of God were thought to be a threat to Christian faith. Many neo-kantians relished this challenge to theology and moved Kantianism in the very direction the orthodox authorities feared. By 1835 Heinrich Heine wrote an essay for French publication entitled, ‘On the history of religion in Germany'. He argued that Robespierre himself was unworthy of comparison with the revolutionary Kant. Robespierre may have lopped off a few royal heads but ‘Kant has stormed heaven, he has put the whole crew to the sword, the Supreme Lord of the world swims unproven in his own blood’. Perhaps Kant's ethics did not go as far as Heine asserted, but it did result in the marginalization of theology from ethics. Ethics was grounded in freedom alone. Theology could be consistent with ethics, but not determinative for it.

Before the General Assembly of the United Nations Pope John Paul II declared that the quest for freedom points to the existence of ‘natural rights’ that reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law. While this assertion was well received by those in attendance, an important question remains: how are we to reconcile this universal vision of human rights with the current plethora of disputable legislated rights? Ernest Fortin claims the problem is rooted in the fact that modern ‘rights talk’ emphasizes individual subjective rights over the objective reality of human nature, and Alasdair Maclntyre even questions the moral value of human rights because they are all too easily manipulated by those who view them as self-evident truths. When you add to these observations the appearance of such controversial individual entitlements as ‘reproductive rights’, ‘sex rights’, ‘the right to same-sex marriage’ and the ‘right to die’, it is not surprising to hear people calling for a silencing of ‘rights talk’.

Dilthey, in his famous essay, ‘Die Enstehung der Hermeneutik’, first published in 1900, taught us that Matthias Flacius Illyricus, the mid sixteenth-century Lutheran theologian, was the author of the first significant treatise on hermeneutics. Conceding a classic Protestant opinion once articulated by Flacius, he consigned medieval interpretation to what must have seemed a justified oblivion: he simply ignored the period between Origen and John Calvin. Calvin, Flacius, and especially Friedrich Schleiermacher were the main contributors to the rediscovery of the interpretive force of history and language, which Dilthey surely felt was best appreciated by his own philosophy of culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer later tried to show that Dilthey himself was weak on language and misinformed about history, falling prey to the movement that Gadamer opprobriously called ‘historicism’. Gadamer's own view of the development of hermeneutics—with its subjection of historical knowledge to ‘our own present horizon of understanding’, its accent on language, and its debt to Martin Heidegger—shifted the chronology of hermeneutics even closer to the present According to Gadamer, the ‘hermeneutic problem’ was specifically created by the alienation of exegesis and understanding from ‘application’, the importance of which was discovered only by Romantic philosophy and best redressed with the help of a language-obsessed philosophy of being. But as was the case for Dilthey, the crucial moment in the development of hermeneutics remained the discovery of the role of language in ‘meaning’, in the broadest sense, so that texts could only be understood in the grand context of a philosophy of life or, in Gadamerian terms, in the context of a philosophy that functioned as present interpretation.

Early in March 1617, King James followed what he himself described as a ‘salmon-like instinct’ and made his first (and last) return visit to his native Scotland since his departure fourteen years previously on the death of Queen Elizabeth. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of his coronation, at the age of fifteen months, as James VI of the northern kingdom. Among the events in Edinburgh to celebrate the visit was the Whitsun eucharist in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood Palace. The sermon was delivered by the King's favourite preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely.

In recent study of the nature of NT interpretation, considerable attention in certain circles has been given to the possibility that there is one metaphor that is particularly appropriate for articulating what NT interpretation involves. It is the metaphor of performance. The purpose of this paper is to describe and develop this proposal and to give an assessment of it. To my knowledge, this is a task in biblical hermeneutics that has only just begun. If we ask why this is so, one possible answer lies in the fact that the proposal comes in the main from systematic and patristic theologians and therefore from outside the guild of biblical scholars. The consequence is that our customary division of labour inhibits us from attending with sufficient care to what our neighbours are saying even when it bears directly on our own work.

In my work as a theologian educating future pastors and teachers, I am concerned that too many of my students make no greater claim of Christ than that he was a ‘spirit person’, and construe his work as some variation on personal spiritual mentoring. Such reductionistic tendencies in understanding the person and work of Christ clearly owe more to certain iconoclastic voices in academia and current cultural sensibilities than they do classic Christian understandings of God and redemption. Whatever their source, such minimalist views can only weaken the Church's ministry. Fortunately, two other trends may supply helpful resources for a response. First, interest in the doctrine of the Trinity has re-emerged, across the theological spectrum. Similarly, new discussions have emerged around the doctrine of the atonement, such as the explicit feminist critiques of vicarious substitution theories or the promotion of prophetic/political models typical of members of the Jesus Seminar or responses to these and other issues. I propose to address this Christological reductionism by combining these two trends, adopting aspects of some new approaches while critiquing others. In so doing, I am motivated less by the desire to produce theological innovation than to demonstrate the theological integrity and pastoral value of several classic Christian traditions. Specifically, I will offer a constructive theological proposal connecting the Trinity with the rubrics of prophet, priest and king to explain Christ's diverse atoning work.

Stanley Hauerwas likes to be regarded as a theologian. He writes about ethics, and ethics is commonly thought to be about decisions. But he believes that the fundamental decision is God's decision to be in relationship with his creation and his people. He believes that out of the Christian narrative come particular habits and practices that shape the lives of Christians in a distinctive way. He believes that Christians proclaim the sovereignty of God and the imitation of Christ by the practice of peaceable engagement with the world. These convictions earn his ethics the epithets of theological, narrative, and nonviolent.

How might Karl Barth's engagement with the question of the relationship of the church to Judaism during the Nazi era help us today as we seek to revise that relationship? It is obvious that we cannot simply repeat his statements today. But the reference to Barth would be unproductive if it consisted solely in the assertion that the opponent of anti-Semitism at that time was in fact in league with his adversaries. Protestants all too willingly take on an air of self-importance, imagining the distant past to be the proverbial night in which all cats are gray. It would also be insufficient to find in this theologian some good initial ideas, to the extent that they agree with one's own views, in order then, when one differs from his thinking, to identify all the logical flaws that one believes to have been successfully overcome. In neither case would we learn anything, but only confirm our own position. If our encounter with a teacher of the church is to be fruitful, we must enter into a conversation in which we are not only the questioners, but also those who are questioned. True, such a teacher, whom we may critically question, is only an authority subject to the Word of God. But a proper teacher of the church is an authority under the Word of God, and his or her question to us, therefore, is whether we, as we move ahead, are following the Word of God as attested in the Bible or only our own authority.

A distinction was proposed in old Protestantism, by Johannes Musaeus among others, but not then generally adopted: that the authority of Scripture is a ‘double capacity: one to judge other writings and teachings…, another to bring about the assent of faith…’. Recognition of this distinction and separate discussion of these capacities is, in my judgement, necessary to resolve many modern perplexities about Scripture. The present essay is concerned for the second sort of scriptural authority, precisely in its difference from the first. We will begin with the simple fact that the church reads Scripture, in expectation of faith.