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The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology
Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson
This is one of the principal advantages of doing Christian biblical theology in the light of Jewish-Christian dialogue. The full acknowledgment of the uncompleted nature of God's redemption in Christ is a key component in fruitful Jewish-Christian dialogue; it forces Christian theology to be more honest in what it can claim. And it can learn to read its Second Testament for the many often overlooked places where it expresses just this aspect of God's character--including, of course, through Jesus himself.
Clearly, the overarching goal of Scripture is to present God as one who is true to promises made, one who is faithful; but such a picture of God receives credibility only when the affirmation of God's life-giving designs for creation emerge out of life as it is experienced, rather than out of an attempt to deny that experience.
Highlighting the "darker" aspects of God's character can also help prevent the endangerment of the promises from being attributed solely to Israel, to whose supposed typological unbelief the church has traditionally been seen to provide the faithful anti-type. No one who knows anything about the course of the church's history can say with a straight face that it represents the triumphal realization of God's redemptive designs in the light of the failure of the Jews. As many have pointed out, Christian theology can never be the same after Auschwitz. Dahl expresses well how this aspect of the rubric can be helpful; for in the First Testament especially,
we learn to read the story of the people of God as a story of losses as well as gains, a story of corruption and reforms, of false security and lacking faith, the story of a rebellious people whom God in his mercy has not totally abandoned. Such is also the history of the church, a continuation of the story of God's endangered promises [79].
Emerging from the above are yet more ways in which this proposal addresses some of the deficiencies of other frameworks for the unity of the Christian Bible. Clearly, it answers Soulen's objection that traditional readings "render the Hebrew Scriptures largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God's purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways" (31). The proposal calls for full engagement with the fate of God's promises to Israel, both in the First Testament and in the continuing life of Judaism. Moreover, it resists the spiritualization of God's dealings with Israel that Soulen and others have attributed to the traditional Christian reading of Israel's story. At stake are the character of God and the fate of God's promises; and these issues play out and become available for reflection precisely in the concrete life of Israel and in the continuing life of Judaism and the church. The Second Testament does not simply answer the cosmic and universal problem of human existence posed by Genesis 1-3, but continues the story of God's endangered and reaffirmed promises to Israel in a new chapter. In this way, the "scandal of particularity" so central to both Judaism and Christianity is preserved.
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