The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

James Hanson

Abstract

Traditional ways of understanding the relationship between the First and Second Testaments of the Christian Bible have proven untenable both theologically and historically. Theologically, they have had at their foundation a supersessionistic stance over against biblical Israel and Judaism, and have often proffered an unsustainable claim of triumph over evil and suffering. Historically, historical-critical interpretation has rendered a straightforward reading of the First Testament as pointing toward the coming of Jesus problematic. This article proposes that seeing the relationship between the Testaments in light of the literary and theological rubric of God's endangered and reaffirmed promises overcomes many of these problems. It yields a fruitful basis for a biblical theology that acknowledges that both the story of Jesus and the church and the story of Israel and Judaism involve a mix of faithful response to God's promises, fundamental struggle with their endangerment, and common hope for their reaffirmation.

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That the Christian church began as a particular expression of the faith of biblical Israel has proven to be a source of great riches as well as a tremendous challenge for the church throughout its history. Since the first generation of Christians, the task of understanding and explaining the church's relationship to Israel and, later, Judaism has been a

significant component of Christian theology. Sadly, the character of much of this reflection has been defensive, polemical, and supersessionistic, as the church came very early on to view the continued existence of Israel in the form of Rabbinic Judaism as a threat to the gospel and to its own existence rather than a sign of God's continued faithfulness to Israel. The consequences of this way of understanding the relationship between the two traditions have been well documented (e.g., Flannery).

The last few decades have seen an increasing recognition on the part of scholars and the church (in many quarters, at least) that this basically supersessionistic attitude toward Judaism has been destructive both in terms of relations with Jews and Judaism and to the credibility of the church's own witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Historians, biblical scholars, and theologians have documented much of the tragic history of the relationship, have done much to "rediscover" the Jewish roots of the Christian tradition, and have begun to formulate the Christian faith in ways that directly reflect these new perspectives. But while there is much yet to be done in all three of these areas, the constructive task--that is, the task of incorporating a positive understanding of Israel and the Jews into the church's theology--is the area most in need of further attention.

A crucial aspect of this task involves defining the relationship between the First and Second Testaments of the Christian Bible. And doing so involves coming to terms with two basic observations. On the one hand, the church, even after it became a Gentile phenomenon, has at every significant turn in its history reaffirmed, sometimes in the face of overt opposition, that the "Old" Testament Scriptures, and hence the story of Israel, are an indispensable part of its authoritative writings and, along with the "New" Testament, form a/the prime source for its theological, ethical, and liturgical reflection and practice. But on the other hand, the traditional formulations of the relationship between the Testaments (e.g., prophecy-fulfillment, typology) have come under fire in recent times both because they support and reflect the church's supersessionistic stance over against Judaism and because critical biblical scholarship has called the historical basis for the traditional relationship into question. In the light of all this, the question of how, precisely, the church ought to understand the relation between the two Testaments clearly belongs among those contemporary theological issues that stand in urgent need of rearticulation.

A first step toward addressing the issue is to recognize that it actually involves two questions. The first is about the warrant for the church's "adoption" of the First Testament: By what right do Christians, especially since the church very quickly became and remains almost exclusively Gentile, read the First Testament and consider it their "own"? And the second concerns interpretation of the texts themselves: By what means, or how should the church read the First Testament in relation to its central message? In what follows, I will briefly rehearse some of the traditional answers to these questions, and then turn to the particular proposal I wish to put forth.

The Traditional Understanding of the Relationship

Clearly one of the reasons that the church has held on to the First Testament so fervently is that the Second Testament itself simply cannot be understood apart from the story of God's dealings with Israel. One of the most important rhetorical goals of practically every author in the Second Testament is precisely to assert and demonstrate the integral connection between the gospel and the story of Israel. That is, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, as well as the existence of the church, represented for the early church not just the continuation, but a new chapter in--indeed the climax of--the story of Israel as that people elected by the one God to work out God's creative and redemptive purposes for the world. As Nils Dahl has insisted, the first Jewish "Christians" turned to their Scriptures initially not out of apologetic motives, but to fill out for themselves the very content of the conviction, born chiefly of the resurrection, that the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah promised to Israel.

A foundational example of this process is the famous early creedal formula Paul cites as he tackles the issue of the resurrection in the Corinthian community: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures ..." (1 Cor 15:3-4). Remarkable about this creed is that, for one thing, it does not specify precisely how Christ's death and resurrection are "according to the Scriptures," but rather simply declares that the connection between the Scriptures and these events is an essential part of professing the gospel. Also noteworthy is that "Christ" here functions not as a title with fully fleshed-out content, but as a name, as a presupposition to the formula; the creed serves to fill out the meaning of the term, and the content emerges from reflection on both the Scriptures of Israel and the events of Jesus life and the early church:

   The basic conviction that the death and resurrection of Jesus had happened
   in accordance with the Scriptures had the double effect that the events
   were understood in light of the Scriptures, and the Scriptures were
   interpreted in light of the events [Dahl: 67].

As Paul van Buren has pointed out more recently, it was just this process of interpretive movement back and forth between the Scriptures and contemporary events that actually created the "Old Testament"--that is, it created the particular reading of Israel's Scriptures that informed/ formed the church's gospel. As van Buren puts it,

   [T]he church did not inherit its Old Testament.... In discovering the
   gospel "according to the Scriptures," Peter and his colleagues, by that
   very process discovered the Scriptures that would be the church's own, the
   reading of Israel's Scriptures that made them ineradicably the church's Old
   Testament [86-87].

In so doing, the church would seem to have vouchsafed the gospel's inextricable relationship to the First Testament.

But the recognition of the integral connection between the gospel and Israel's Scriptures is not the end, but rather the starting point for reflecting on the relationship. This is especially so in light of the historical and theological developments of the first centuries of the church. First, the interpretation of the gospel that eventually brought most of the Gentiles into the church also had the effect of rendering much of the central content of the First Testament--especially the Mosaic Law--moot. When, by the second century, the church had become predominantly Gentile and Hellenistic, and the context of the debate over the Mosaic law was no longer Gentile inclusion (as it was for Paul) but the law's very relevance, the question was inevitable: What does it mean to have as authoritative scripture a book, most of whose contents were ignored at best, or used polemically (against the Jews) at worst? This question led, in turn, to a second: What does it mean that this part of Christian scripture was also being read by a rival community in a way that called into question the central claims of the church?

The result of wrestling with these questions was a construal of the relationship between the First and Second Testaments that, in broad outline, obtained until the modern period and is still influential today. This construal has three closely related features worth highlighting here. First, it sees the First Testament as posing a problem to which the Second Testament provides the answer. That is, the First Testament sets forth the background for God's redemptive intervention on behalf of humanity and creation; it becomes Acts I and II in a three- (or four-) part "drama of salvation." In Act I, God created the earth and its inhabitants out of and for love and communion (Gen 1-2); in Act II, humans rebelled against their creator, bringing about a new situation of discord and death (Gen 3) and creating the need for God to rescue humanity. In Act III, God performs such a rescue by sending Jesus the Son to die on the cross and be raised; and in what can be seen as Act IV (or as the second scene of Act III), God completes this act of redemption when Jesus returns again in glory. As Kendall Soulen has so helpfully shown, this understanding of the unity of the Bible came to form the traditional "canonical narrative," that is, the overarching framework within which the Bible was to be read (the rule of faith, embedded in the creeds and liturgy).

Now on the one hand, it was in this way that the church preserved the unity of the Testaments against the very live and appealing option, most closely associated with Marcion, that held that the First Testament has to do with an altogether different God. In the face of this claim, the traditional canonical narrative affirms that the God of Israel, as attested in Israel's Scriptures, is the one God who created and sustains all that exists, who creates humans to be in a special and unique relationship to God and to the rest of creation, in God's own image, and that it is this self-same God who acted in Jesus Christ to rescue humans, and all creation from the consequences of their disobedience to God. As I will discuss further below, however, this construal, for all its strengths, not only ignores or minimizes most of the history of God's dealings with Israel, but it also renders the continued existence of Israel unnecessary and even illogical.

The second principal aspect of the church's traditional formulation of the unity of the Testaments is perhaps the most familiar. The First Testament contains the writings of divinely inspired figures whose primary purpose is to foretell the coming of God's redemption through God's Son. That is, the First Testament is related to the Second in terms of prophecy and its fulfillment. Though this reading of the Scriptures of Israel most likely came about as a result of the first Christians "searching the Scriptures" and interpreting them in light of the events--i.e., interpreting the prophecy in light of the fulfillment--as much as vice-versa, the presentation of the gospel in terms of the movement from prophecy to fulfillment is already established in most of the Second Testament writings (see, e.g., Matt 1-2; Acts 2). Like the traditional canonical narrative, the prophecy-fulfillment idea has served in important ways to support the truth and shape of the gospel.

These first two aspects of the church's understanding of the relation between the Testaments are embedded firmly in the church's creeds and liturgy (Soulen; van Buren); they are nicely illustrated in the "Nine Lessons and Carols" service that King's College Cambridge puts on every year. The service begins with Genesis 3, in which, according to the service, "God tells sinful Adam that he has lost the life of paradise"--the problem. The next three deal with prophecies of the coming savior, Genesis 22), in which "God promises to faithful Abraham that in his seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed"; and Isaiah 9 and 11, which foretell the coming of the savior and foreshadow his peaceful reign, respectively. Then come the announcement of Christ's birth (Luke 1), the birth itself (two from Luke 2), the visit of the wise men (Matthew 2) and finally, the "unfolding of the mystery of the incarnation" in John 1. Seen in this light, the relationship between the two seems self-evident: a proper reading of the First Testament leads inevitably to the coming of Christ. (Another very similar, but more elaborate example of this is Handel's Messiah.)

The third component of the traditional understanding of the relationship between the Testaments arises largely from the fact that the picture presented by the first two did not go unchallenged, i.e., from the recognition that the First Testament still served as the Scriptures for the physical descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people. The refusal of most Jews to embrace the gospel, and their continued use of their Scriptures with a very different interpretive center (the Mosaic Law), necessitated a response from the church to defend its own claims to the Scriptures (e.g., Justin Martyr's DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHO). This is a complicated question with historical, theological, and literary dimensions that are hotly disputed (see Serial; Gager; Ruether; Davies), but I think it is safe to say that, at a minimum, the seeds of a full-blown replacement theology are sown in the Second Testament; they are tilled in the first centuries of rivalry, and they come to full fruit in the Constantinian "triumph" of the church in the fourth century.

Working together, these three aspects of the church's hermeneutic provide a neat, logical, and in many ways very compelling construal of the unity of the Christian Bible, one that has not only provided a logic by which to incorporate the First Testament, but has illumined aspects of the human condition before God in profound ways through two millennia. It answers the two principal questions posed at the beginning of this section in this way:

* By what right does the church read the First Testament? Since it has responded to the gospel of Jesus Christ, it has replaced the carnal descendants of Abraham and Sarah as God's elect, and thus the First Testament is properly the Church's book, for Christians are now the people of God.

* By what means does the Church read the First Testament? By constructing a narrative framework that places the First Testament in a position to function as preparation for and background to the Second Testament and the story of redemption through Christ. Within this framework, much of the First Testament has functioned in a typological or prefigurative manner, or as a shadow-like version of the truth God revealed in the gospel (Frei: 39).

Problems with the Traditional View

Recent work in history, theology, and biblical studies has been helpful in pointing out the flaws in this traditional reading of the canon. I will only touch on a few key points. Historically, of course, the supersessionist logic of the standard canonical narrative has contributed mightily to the coarse relations between Christians and Jews, characterized perhaps most perversely by the notion that the Jews, because of their rejection and murder of the Messiah, were to survive as a "witness people"--witnessing to the truth of the gospel by their suffering (Flannery).

Christian theologians have been moved to reexamine the theological roots of supersessionism, not only by this history, but also, and just as importantly, for reasons internal to the Christian confession. The "flaw in the heart of the crystal," in Soulen's phrase (25), is that supersessionism undercuts the coherence of the Christian gospel in a number of fundamental ways. Most obvious is what it does to the character of the God Christians confess; as Bruce Marshall puts it, "If Christians suppose that this God has revoked his promise to Israel, then we suppose that when this God declares a promise permanent and irrevocable, he may be lying" (88-89). Soulen also exposes this doctrinal problem, but focuses more on the concomitant, and in some ways more fundamental structural problem: namely, that the standard canonical narrative renders the First Testament "largely indecisive for shaping conclusions about how God's purposes engage creation in universal and enduring ways" (31). God's dealings with Israel become the limited, carnal background to the cosmic, spiritual foreground of the four-part drama of salvation (creation-fall-redemption-final consummation). Finally, theologians have called attention to the failure of the triumphalistic tones of supersessionism to ring true for a world that has just come through its bloodiest and most destructive century--one in which the church has had to take its humble place alongside the many other claims to truth, religious and otherwise, that our context makes it impossible to ignore (see, e.g., Hall).

Biblical studies has a curious and paradoxical relationship to our question. On the one hand, historical-critical work on the Bible has been able to contextualize the writings of the Second Testament in such a way that its "anti-Jewish" aspects can be accounted for by the rivalry between the early church and the synagogue; this work has supported some of the theological reflection on the question (Gager, Ruether, Cook). The conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders, for example, when seen from this perspective, was essentially an intra-familial matter that only later, from the perspective of the largely Gentile church, rejected by the synagogue, was shaped into an attack on Judaism as a religious system. Moreover, historical--critical exegesis of the First Testament has at least seemed to hold out the possibility of giving voice to the distinctiveness of the "Hebrew Bible" apart from its connection to the Second Testament.

On the other hand, the historical-critical paradigm has raised at least as many questions as it has addressed. For one thing, as most recently Jon Levenson has argued, it has been practiced largely by Protestant Christians who were anything but neutral, interest-free observers of the data; their historical reconstructions of ancient Israel were saturated with latent (and sometimes overt) anti-Jewish sentiments, and their "historical" work presented a picture of Judaism in decay and primed for the renewal by a (largely de-Judaized) Jesus (1993b: 10-28).

The other interesting piece of the puzzle is that historical study of the Bible has had, as Dahl puts it, "a double, apparently self-contradictory result" (71). We have seen already how it is precisely historical study that makes it clear that one cannot read the Second Testament apart from the Scriptures of Israel as they were interpreted in the first century (Dahl; Juel; van Buren). As Dahl puts it, "Reminiscences and interpretations of these Scriptures are woven into the passion narratives and the entire New Testament testimony to Christ in such a way that one cannot untangle the threads without destroying the design and the whole fabric" (71). But on the other hand, historical-critical study of the First Testament has revealed that the authors wrote to address issues in their own time and place, thus rendering problematic the traditional prophecy-fulfillment scheme (Seitz: 35; Matthew's use of Isaiah 7 as a prophecy of the virgin birth is a famous example).

In short, the depth and seriousness of the problems involved in the question of the unity of the Christian canon seem clear enough to warrant a rethinking of the question. The traditional reading is untenable for both external and internal theological reasons, and the historical-critical approach has brought with it as many questions as it has answered. Biblical theology still is, thirty years after Brevard Childs' famous book, in crisis. And it is in the midst of this crisis that we address the questions posed at the outset: If God's covenant with the Jews is eternal, if God's promises to the Jews are irrevocable, as Christian theology must, for reasons cited above, acknowledge in the present context, by what right and in what sense do Christians claim the Scriptures of Israel as "their own"? As Seitz puts it, what is the "point of connection" between the First Testament and the church (69)? And second, if the traditional narrative is untenable, and the predominant approaches of the last couple of centuries have failed, how should Christians do so?

A New Canonical Narrative

In a brief essay entitled The Crucified Messiah and the Endangered Promises, Nils Dahl put forth a proposal for how to view the relationship between the two Testaments of the Christian Bible in light of these challenges to traditional understandings of the unity of the canon. Dahl recognized the impasse that historical--critical study formed, as well as the danger of the triumphalistic aspects of more traditional approaches, and suggested that a link be sought in the rubric of "the endangered and reaffirmed promises of God." In what follows, I will attempt to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this idea and suggest ways in which it might be developed.

Christians and the Story of Israel: Spectators or Participants?

Dahl's proposal actually deals more explicitly with the second of the two questions posed above: the question of a helpful interpretive framework. But clearly there are implications in what he says for the question about where Christians "get off" claiming the First Testament as their own (especially as his ideas are developed by van Buren). In the present situation, there seem to be three options. The first is simply to acknowledge that the First Testament does not belong and never has rightfully belonged to Christians, nor is it addressed to them. Christianity is such a fundamentally different religion from the forms of religion in the Hebrew Bible that there is no fruitful connection to be made (Levenson 1985). While it must be said that no serious contemporary theologian would proffer such a view, it is, for one thing, at least implicit in much Christian piety and liturgy. I see it myself quite frequently in the understanding of the relationship students bring into classes on the Bible; and Robert Jenson's observations about how much church practice illustrates the secondary if not irrelevant status of the First Testament points to it as well (14). It raises the question whether Marcion won an implicit victory after all.

Divorcing the Second Testament from the First does have the merit of removing a stumbling block in Jewish-Christian relations; Jesus was not the Jewish Messiah, but, in the case of the church, some cosmic redeemer figure sent by God in response to some generalized human need, and in the case of Jesus scholars, a teacher of a life philosophy in the tradition of Hellenistic philosophical movements (Cynics, Stoics, etc.). But, as suggested above, the Christian faith would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible without a clear connection to biblical Israel.

A second option is to view the Hebrew Scriptures as, in Paul van Buren's phrase, "somebody else's mail," that is, to see Christians as essentially spectators to a story that is not their own, but is nevertheless crucial for understanding their own story. In this view, Christians receive "permission" through Christ to "look over the shoulders" of the original addressees of the Scriptures, but must acknowledge that they are not its intended audience, nor is its story about them. This view addresses the supersessionistic tendencies of the traditional hermeneutic, and it is certainly in this spirit that van Buren offered it (as we will see below, he later changed his view). But it breaks down when one tries to make it cohere with central Christian claims that Christ is both the Jewish Messiah--that is, the figure who comes in response to biblical Israel's hopes and longings--and the one through whom Gentiles have obtained full access to the God revealed in and through Israel's history, a promise also integral to the story. It does not admit, in other words, of a development of either a coherent Christian theology or a viable understanding of the church's relation to Israel.

The third option is both the most compelling and the most in line with both the origins of christology and subsequent Christian tradition, but also the most difficult to formulate in a way that addresses the concerns highlighted above. That is the claim that, in Christ, Gentiles have full access to the God of Israel:

   If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according
   to the promise [Gal 3:29].

   So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth were without
   Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the
   covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now
   in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the
   blood of Christ.... So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you
   are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God [Eph
   2: 11-20].

   You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people,
   in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of
   darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you
   are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have
   received mercy [1 Pet 2:9-10].

The claim of full inclusion in the people of God belongs, in other words, to the core of the proclamation of Christ that the God of the covenant with the people Israel has acted in Jesus Christ on behalf of the world. And, as Paul (and others) were so adamant to show, this was God's plan from the beginning:

   For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on
   behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises
   given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God
   for his mercy [Rom 15:8-9].

When it comes right down to it, this is really the only view that can make any sense at all for Christians. It recognizes that the first believers turned to their Scriptures, as Dahl points out, in response to, and to make sense out of their experience of what God had done in Christ, an experience that was as undeniable as it was potentially unsettling. It was the gospel that emerged as a result of this interpretive process that the Gentiles received as well, promising precisely full access to the God of Israel in Christ (of course there was tremendous controversy over what else the Gentiles had to do). In other words, Christians have the "right" to read the First Testament as their own Scriptures because they have been adopted into the family of Abraham and Sarah. There was an event that set in motion this new perspective, an event Christians cannot but see as revelation.

Everything turns, though, on how Christians understand and formulate this claim, whether the inclusion of the Gentiles involves the replacement of the physical descendants of Abraham and Sarah (as the church soon all too readily concluded), or merely the long hoped-for expansion of God's embrace beyond Israel. If it is the latter, as it must be, it becomes clear that the Gentile church is saying, finally, not that it is "laying claim" to Israel's Scriptures, but that the God revealed in Israel's Scriptures has laid claim to the Gentiles in Christ, and they can no more deny this than deny the very air they breathe.

It is equally clear, then, that this way of understanding the Christian relation to the First Testament need not--indeed, as I noted above, it really cannot--entail the abrogation of God's covenant with Israel. This can be avoided, I think, if we keep three things in mind. First, this giftedness of the access to Israel's God must be the aspect that receives the most theological and liturgical attention, for example, in the form of a fervent response to the summons quoted by Paul: "`Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people'; and again `Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him'" (Rom 15:10--11, quoting Deut 32:43 and Ps 117:1). Second, the church must include in this praise of God the recognition that God's promises are eternal, God's gifts and calling irrevocable, and that this applies not only to the gospel but even more fundamentally to God's covenant with Israel (Rom 11:29). And third, the church must acknowledge without reservation that, while the gospel of Jesus Christ provides warrant for Gentiles to enter into a covenant with the God of Israel, and to read Israel's Scriptures as its First Testament, the basis on which that covenant is formed is not a completed action, but itself contains a promise. That is, there is every bit as much an open-ended quality to the gospel as there is to the Jews' covenant with God (Hall).

The Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod has acknowledged that, in his experiences in Jewish-Christian dialogue, "There is a form of Christianity that does not intend to replace Israel as the people of God but join it as adopted sons and daughters in the household of God" (736). Clearly, the church must strive by every means to be such a form of Christianity.

The Endangered and Reaffirmed Promises of God

I have suggested that Christians receive the "right" to read Israel's Scriptures as full participants in the story through God's claim on us through Christ. By doing so, Christians acknowledge gratefully that they are the adopted siblings of the flesh and blood descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jews, with whom God has made an everlasting covenant. The second principal question must now be addressed in this light: namely, how should Christians read these Scriptures? With this formulation of the warrant, clearly any reading that sees the Scriptures of Israel as merely preparatory, backgrounded, or otherwise superseded by the Second Testament must be avoided. On the other hand, it is perhaps worth beginning with the observation that this formulation will not allow for a simple acknowledgment of the "status" of the First Testament, but contains within it an imperative that Christians actually do read the First Testament and allow it to inform the faith and life of the church, in the same way that one would get to know the story of the family into which one was adopted.

Nils Dahl's proposal that the Christian Scriptures, First and Second Testaments, are united by a story whose central feature is God's endangered and reaffirmed promises, can bear much fruit, for it addresses many of the issues--methodological, historical, and theological--implicit in the interpretive context as I have presented it above, and preserves some of the key continuities between Israel's story and the church. Both the gospel story and the story of the church are set within the larger story of Israel not essentially as a completion or fulfillment of that story, but as a recapitulation of a central theme of that story. The death and resurrection of Jesus, and the triumphs and failures of the church, link up at a very basic and rhetorically powerful level with the general shape of the story of Israel's attempts to live out of God's promises to it.

The Pattern in the First Testament

There is hardly a story in the Bible that does not emanate from a promise of God. Indeed, the very foundation of the story of Israel is God's promise to Abraham in its many and various forms in Genesis (12:1-2; 15; 17:1-22; 22:15-18). This foundational promise is itself given as the result of God's prior promise to Noah that God would never again allow the powers of chaos to overwhelm human life and destroy it (Gen 9:8-17). God's promise to Abraham and Sarah's descendants--that they would form a great nation and inherit the land of Canaan as a permanent home, and that in this way God would accomplish God's designs for all of creation--was God's way of dealing with the situation brought about by the events of Genesis 1-11. And this promise forms the underpinnings for every subsequent act of God on behalf of Israel. The rescue from Egypt, the giving of the law on Sinai, the conquest of the land, Israel's rise to prominence in the region, the return from exile--all result from God's promise to Abraham, and all work together to form a picture of God as one who makes promises and keeps them. As Walter Brueggemann has recently put it, "Without the promise, there would be no narrative," and indeed, referring to the form of the promise found in Genesis 22, "Everything about Israel's life in the world depends on these words having been uttered by Yahweh" (166).

Held in the strictest tension against these promises of God, however, are the threats or endangerments to them, which stem in part, of course, from Israel's own unfaithfulness, but just as often spring from sources external to, or not contingent on Israel or its behavior. These endangerments are no mere trifles, brought in to add dramatic tension to the narrative (though they do accomplish that!), but often threaten the very core of the promises. Such is the case, for example, in the foundational promise to Abraham 1 mentioned above. Interwoven with the promise of land, progeny, and blessing to all the families of the earth in Genesis 12:1-3 are Sarah's barrenness (11:30--indicated even before the promise), the occupation of the land promised by Canaan (12:6), and Abraham's "questionable character" (12:10-16).

This pattern continues throughout the three main cycles of the ancestral narratives in Genesis. The story of Abraham and Sarah comes to focus, of course, on Sarah's inability to conceive and fulfill the promise of progeny, such that Sarah is led to ridicule the promise with laughter. The subsequent cycles center around whether the next generations can survive their fratricidal tendencies, and beyond that, the stories of Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers certainly lead readers to question the viability of God's plan (Levenson 1993a). Moreover, as Jon Levenson has shown, the Genesis narratives, as well as subsequent sections of the First Testament, contain at their core the motif of the "death and resurrection of the beloved son," in which the one singled out for glorification is also singled out for humiliation before his story is over (Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, etc.). His observations bear our and support the idea of the endangered and reaffirmed promises very nicely.

In the Exodus narrative there is a marvelous intertwining of the external opposition to God's promises to Israel in the form of Pharaoh and internal opposition in the form of Israel's lack of faith. The focus comes to fall exclusively on the latter after the actual rescue, and is, of course, a major theme of the wilderness narratives in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, in stories that manifest Israel's lack of faith at every turn. Paradigmatic is the Golden Calf (Exod 32), which leaves God in such a state of anger that God is ready to blot the Israelites out. Likewise, the Former Prophets' history and the pre-exilic prophets (e.g., First Isaiah, Amos, Hosea) interpret and predict the threats to the promise in light of Israel's turning away from God and the covenant. The interplay between promise and endangerment is especially clear and compelling in the story of David, which contains not only a new and even more elevated form of God's promise to Israel in Nathan's oracle (2 Sam 7), but also displays plainly the way in which David's subsequent behavior leads to devastating results (2 Sam 11-20; 1 Kgs 1-2). The rest of the Deuteronomistic History interprets the splitting and eventual destruction of the kingdom as a result of Israel's relentless unfaithfulness. Finally, the pre-exilic prophets offer some of the most scathing, even vitriolic pronouncements against Israel, likening it to an unfaithful wife (Hosea), or rejecting even its worship of God (Amos, Isa 1-2), and foretelling its imminent destruction.

It is hardly surprising that the Pentateuch and pre-exilic prophets focus on Israel's unfaithfulness as threats to God's promises, since those parts of the First Testament were collected and edited in the wake of Israel's exile experience, and thus form an amazing and powerful self-critique. An unfortunate feature of Christian appropriation of Israel's Scriptures has been the tendency to see Israel's story as a history of failure, and faithless Israel as the prelude to the church, which has responded with the requisite faithfulness and reaped the consequent rewards (Ruether). But an equally important source of endangerment, expressed mostly in post-exilic writings but not absent from the rest (e.g., Exod 4:24-26), arises from things seemingly outside of Israel's control. The speculative wisdom tradition comes to mind immediately, of course--Job, Ecclesiastes, many of the Psalms; also the book of Lamentations, and even some aspects of the prophets. Here it is often God's own self that is taken to task for apparent lapses in covenant faithfulness-as in Psalm 89, where God is accused of reneging on God's promises to David; Psalm 44, which accuses and derides God for having forgotten what God did for and promised to Israel in the past; or in Job, which is filled with expressions of the hurt and confusion that arise when pain and suffering defy understanding and explanation.

Thus the tension between God's promises of life and blessing and their endangerment in the reality of suffering and confusion is fundamental to the biblical narrative. Indeed, one of the strengths of approaching the Scriptures with an eye for this pattern is that the artful, compelling, and especially realistic way in which these two aspects are held together comes into view.

The third, equally central, element of the pattern, the reaffirmation of the promises, arises out of Israel's experience that God ultimately makes good on what God has promised, whatever the source of and however seemingly devastating the endangerment.

Again, the Genesis narratives are foundational, both because they shape Israel's understanding of God as a promise-maker and promise-keeper, and because they so clearly evince the whole pattern. So after apparently many years of dealing with the shame and hopelessness of barrenness, during which God's promise of progeny was reduced to a running joke, the narrator of Genesis relates, finally, "The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him" (Gen 21:1-2). A more straightforward depiction of God as faithful promise-keeper is not to be found.

Likewise, the remaining two cycles see the promise emerge intact, even, as noted above, in the face of willed and attempted fratricide, challenges to God's goodness and sovereignty, and doubts about God's willingness to forgive. And the closing chapters of the book clearly serve to keep the interplay among promise, endangerment, and reaffirmation to the fore. First, in chapter 49, Jacob blesses his twelve sons, laying out this interplay clearly in Israel's "future." Then there is the scene in which Joseph's brothers come to him, fearing for their lives; Joseph's response appears to be a programmatic statement of how God intends to deal with the challenges to the promise that come from God's covenant partners: "Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today" (50:19-20). In other words, here is a reminder both that the promises of God are being affirmed--the promise of progeny explicitly, but implicitly the promise of blessing, since Abraham's descendants literally did save the world--and that this took place in spite of human efforts to subvert it. And finally, in the last verses, Joseph (who, in this cycle, speaks for God) proclaims the promise anew, with emphasis on the piece that has yet to see fulfillment: "God will surely come to you, and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob" (50:24).

So, too, in the ensuing stories, the tension between the original promise and its endangerment finds its resolution, even if temporarily, in an action of God on Israel's behalf: The rescue from Egypt, and ultimate conquest of the land, the return from exile and rebuilding of the temple. Of course, sometimes God needed more than a little prodding--from Abraham, who held God accountable to God's own claims of justice (Gen 18); from the Israelites, who groaned for four hundred years before God heard their cry (Exod 3); from Moses, who had to remind God of the promise to Abraham, and that it would not look good if God "consumed from the face of the earth" the people God had chosen (Exod 32); and from the many who cried to God in their distress through psalms. In these times especially, the close connection between the endangerment and the promise emerges. Overall, though, Israel's testimony is that God is faithful. As Brueggemann puts it:

   Thus in every season of its life, Israel lived with the uttered promise of
   Yahweh in its ears. This promise, which defies every logic but which could
   not be devised by those who reiterated the oath, assures Israel that its
   life, and eventually all of the historical process, is not a cold, hard
   enactment of power and brutality. It is, rather, an arena in which a
   powerful intention for well-being is resolutely at work [172].

The Crucified Messiah and the Endangered Promises

The crux of Dahl's proposal is that this clearly discernible narrative pattern provides a helpful way to link the First and Second Testaments; the resonance between the First Testament narratives and the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is unmistakable. In Dahl's words,

   It was not only due to a more or less arbitrary reinterpretation and
   reapplication that the ancient formula, [1 Cor 15] maintained that Christ
   had died and been raised "according to the Scriptures." Both the way in
   which the early Christians read their Bible and the way in which they told
   about Jesus were informed by the basic conviction that God had vindicated
   the crucified Messiah and that, in doing so, he had reaffirmed the promises
   that he had given to his people as well as Jesus' own message that the
   kingdom of God was at hand [76].

A principal component of a biblical theology based on this motif would involve drawing out in more detail the various ways in which the writings of the Second Testament show themselves to be "informed by this basic conviction." And in fact many obvious allusions, echoes, and even quotations of these stories come immediately to mind. The basic shape of the Gospels certainly bears this out. The driving force of the gospel narrative is the conflict between God's promise of salvation in Jesus and opposition to that promise that leads ultimately to Jesus' betrayal, abandonment, and death--i.e., its driving force is the tension between God's promise and its endangerment (Hanson). Its reaffirmation comes, of course, in Jesus' vindication as Messiah in the resurrection. Both in this broad outline and in considerable detail (e.g., the allusions to Israel's wilderness experience, the faithlessness of the disciples, Matthew's genealogy, which rehearses the ups and downs of Israel's history, the use of lament psalms in the passion narrative), the Gospels show themselves to be steeped in this pattern from Israel's history.

Likewise, Paul's letters imply much of this narrative (Hays); on a broad level, Paul's understanding (and defense) of the "righteousness of God" has its very roots in the idea of God's covenant faithfulness--God's willingness and capacity to make good on God's promises to Israel (Keck). And Paul makes much explicit use of scriptural material that taps into aspects of the pattern. One thinks of course of Abraham in Romans 4; here Paul captures perfectly that sense of trust in the promising God's capacity to reaffirm the promise in the face of apparently overwhelming endangerment. What is more, as Richard Hays argues, Paul's own use of Israel's Scriptures is actually largely (though obviously not exclusively) ecclesiocentric (184-85); in this sense, the pattern is intertwined not only with the story of Jesus, but with the story of the church as well. The Book of Acts and Revelation do this as well, of course, and I will explore below the implications of bringing the church into the story.

The Fruits of the Proposal

Thus on the one hand one can say with some confidence that the pattern of God's endangered and reaffirmed promises is embedded in the earliest layers of Christian reflection on the gospel in light of Israel's Scriptures. It is certainly one way in which it can be said that, in van Buren's words, "It was from Israel's Scriptures that [the church] first learned how to speak of [Jesus]. It learned from the first to speak of him in Israel's idiom" (1998: 65). But the fruitfulness of this pattern is not limited to illuminating the earliest Christian hermeneutic. However significant an issue in itself, clearly the use of Israel's scriptures by the authors of the Second Testament is only one aspect of a biblical theology--and a largely descriptive one at that. Dahl hints at the wider implications of this model in the final section of his essay, when he asks, with typical Norwegian Lutheran humility, whether it would "be too much to say that the Old Testament in our day helps the church come to terms with its own identity" (79). To be able to affirm that the First Testament does indeed function in this way must, as I noted in an earlier section, constitute a hallmark of a biblical theology. How might the rubric of the endangered and reaffirmed promises of God help the church see the First Testament as a source of its own identity?

First, it is a theocentric model. To seek the unity of the Testaments in this pattern directs the Christian community to read the First Testament not only for the ways in which it prefigures or prophesies the coming of Christ, but for the contours of God's relationship with Israel, and thus as a guide for how to read the story of the church. The connections between the story of Jesus and the church and the life and history of Israel are indeed crucial in providing a basis for saying that God's action in Christ is consonant with God's dealings with Israel, but that observation really serves to open up the full range of Israel's literary expression as an end in itself, not simply as a prefigurement of the Second Testament.

In this sense, this proposal has in common with much contemporary theology (especially narrative approaches) a keen interest in how biblical narratives render God as a character. What is especially helpful about the motif of endangered and reaffirmed promises is that it recognizes that the story of God's dealings with Israel, and through it the world, is not simply a story about God's gracious and always effective purposes and actions. The pattern gives serious attention to those times when God's purposes and promises have appeared to be thwarted, and have actually been experienced so, as attested especially by Israel's tradition of lament and protest (Brueggemann: 359-403; Blumenthal). This feature of First Testament traditions can provide a helpful and needed corrective to a Christian faith that has often found it difficult to deal with the tension in its own proclamation between a world redeemed by God in Christ and a world still very much in the throes of pain and suffering. As many contemporary theologians point out, there is a tremendous credibility gap that can be bridged only by the acknowledgment that the completion of God's work of redemption lies yet in the future, and indeed that the experiences of life in this world regularly call into question the willingness and/or the ability of God to do so.

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.

Finally, not only does the rubric work well within the present canonical form of the Christian Bible, but its outline corresponds to some of the most important historical forces that shaped the canon. Large sections of the Bible received decisive shape from crises that clearly endangered the promises (the exile, the destruction of the Second Temple), and the canon was in some sense a way of reaffirming God's promises in the midst of these crises.

Problems and Questions

There are obviously aspects of this framework that call for further attention and clarification. Two come immediately to mind, which I can explore only briefly here: the potential pitfalls of any "thematic" approach to biblical theology, and, most important, how to formulate the "newness" of the Christian gospel.

The most basic objection to a thematic approach to biblical theology is that it cannot but be either reductionistic or, on the other hand, too broad to be of use. Eichrodt's Covenant model and von Rad's salvation history are two monumental examples of modern attempts to view the entire Christian canon through a single lens, and both, it is generally agreed, have come up short (Reventlow). Not surprisingly, Jewish interpreters fault such attempts for their failure to account for the centrality of the Mosaic Law in the structure and theology of the Hebrew Scriptures (Levenson 1993b). Even Brueggemann's recent Theology of the Old Testament, in which he tries to account for the full range of Israel's "testimony" concerning its God, and indeed concludes that Yahweh as giver of commands is Israel's "most pervasive testimony" (181), has been criticized for missing the centrality of the close relationship between ethics and ritual (Kaminsky).

What speaks for the present proposal in this respect is that while it has a thematic aspect, it is really more of a framework than a theme. At the same time, it comprises enough content to identify a principal concern of Scripture in a meaningful way. That is, while it certainly cannot encompass every aspect of the Christian Bible, I do not think it forces major pieces artificially under its umbrella. One cannot, for example, read the First Testament through this framework without giving a central place to the role of the law, which is, after all, the central means by which God seeks to bring about what God has promised to Israel and through it to all creation (Levenson 1985: 138-48). The life brought about by observance to God itself forms a narrative, one in which God's promises are both endangered and reaffirmed. Moreover, Israel's--and present-day Judaism's--struggle to be a faithful covenant partner parallels and can inform the church's own struggles to be faithful to its calling.

This leads us directly to the final, and, as noted, certainly the most difficult consideration. Just what, precisely, is the relationship between the stories of God's promises (including their endangerment and reaffirmation) in the life of Israel and "the" Christian story, the story of Christ and the church? Is the latter simply a continuation of the pattern? Or has God indeed acted in some new and decisive way? The twin dangers to avoid here are, on the one side, relegating the First Testament again to the background, as a prelude to or preparation for God's climactic act, and, on the other, emptying the Christian confession of its content. There are clearly discontinuities as well as continuities between the Second Testament and the First, as between the Christian reading of Israel's Scriptures and the Jewish reading. The first Christians who "created" the Second Testament did so in response to their conviction that God had vindicated Jesus, the crucified Messiah, and that in so doing, God's promises found their "yes." This will, and should, inevitably shape the way the church reads its Scriptures, and will inevitably inhibit the capacity of Jews to read the story with Christians. As Jon Levenson puts it, "[I]f the Bible ... is to be seen as having coherence and theological integrity, there will come a moment in which Jewish-Christian consensus becomes existentially impossible" (1985: 143).

In other words, I do not claim that this rubric "solves" one of the great dilemmas of contemporary theology--how to reconcile the irrevocable nature of God's calling of Israel with the central confession of the church that in Christ the God of Israel has acted on behalf of the whole world. Of course, the apostle Paul had trouble with that one, too. But one of the merits of the proposal is that it makes it more difficult to see the Christian Bible as the story of one sibling superseding the other; and it encourages the church to see in its story and in that of Judaism parallel chapters of a larger story that involves both triumph and failure, the promise and its endangerment. In this sense, the motif helps ensure that the dilemma will not soon leave the center of Christian concern, and that the church has good reason to affirm, in Paul van Buren's words, that it was "God's providential will to bring two bearers of Israel's tradition into the present" (1998: 8).

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James Hanson, Ph.D. (Princeton), author of THE ENDANGERED PROMISE: CONFLICT IN MARK (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000), is Assistant Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN 55057-1098 (e-mail: hansonj@stola.edu). He wrote this article while in resicence at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton.

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