Rethinking the past for an energized biblical theology. (Presenting the Issue).

The past is always with us. Or so it seems. The question is, whose past is it and what meanings can it afford for today? Even with reams of data, a tradition of literal transmission, a constant sense of commonality, can we honestly believe that the past is really meaningful today in important matters?

What distinguishes moderns from ancients may well be a change in the perception of the past. Ancients believed that the past set the pattern for all time. Not so with those moderns whose primary scientific values are oriented to the predictable future, and who often relegate the past to, well, simply history. History is left in third place in the priority of values, behind present and future values. Attempts to recover the past thus take on a new dimension, one of less importance and less consequence, even if of some interest for the curious.

Post-moderns recognize a further problem with the past. They see the difficulty in recovering meanings from the past as virtually insurmountable. While moderns look to painstaking exegesis of ancient texts, post-moderns often abandon the effort and simply ask what the texts means to individual readers today. In this approach, the past has no meaning at all beyond being the occasion for personal reflection.

The issue of tenuous applicability of the past fits the current departure from regarding the past as determinative, a position reinforced by the belief that changing circumstances make meanings from the past largely inaccessible today. What people talked and wrote about earlier carried many assumptions that we can only guess at today, and what moved the authors to write was, likely, deeply enmeshed in local ideals.

The task of scholars has become many times more difficult once we recognize that the past may be both less important and less accessible than once assumed. Oscar Wilde may have put it best when he quipped, "The only debt we owe to history is to correct its mistakes."

Since the Bible is embedded in the ancient past, as well as received to day as a sacred trust, modern biblical scholars face a formidable task of pursuing biblical meanings for applications in today's world. We must first recognize the problems with the texts themselves, addressing complex multiple editing and transmission over changing circumstances. Then, we must address the question of meanings, recognizing that words are conventional symbols that assume diverse meanings when circumstances change.

A third task is in evaluating traditional interpretations that may have been, and demonstrably typically were, anachronistic even when generated in contexts notably different from that of the diverse biblical writers. Scholars often surprise people when they identify "traditional interpretations" as dating back to the recent rather than the ancient past. When using terms such as Christian and Jew, for instance, commentators today may be forgetting that our understanding of these terms have been shaped much after the time of the Bible and hence are largely foreign to the biblical usages. What came to be diverse traditions were simply part of the same household of belief, albeit with diverging emphases, as is quite normal in any extended community.

Similarly, morality based on biblical precedents often fails even remotely to relate to the issues in the biblical text, whose circumstances were unlike our own. This leaves moral mandates out of context or a creation not of any biblical author but of later moralists with an ability to convince people by biblical similitudes, however wide of the mark these similitudes actually may have been.

When trying to relate contemporary concerns with ancient biblical texts, moralists may benefit from the realization that statements of authoritative norms may well lack historical verifiability. Educated Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, today face these realizations when studying their Scriptures to find authoritative answers to their modern-day questions. Moderns tend to put less weight on scriptural norms and are more likely to see the Scriptures as enriching personal motivation and inspiration, rather than as a rule of law.

This way of viewing Scripture may be of less benefit to the official interpreters than to the faithful believers, and one might expect a certain push-back from authority figures seeking to preserve institutional foundations in the Bible for their authority, much as kings claimed divine rights of monarchy to govern. But to the extent that this push-back defies the realities of modern scholarship and awareness, institutional authorities release their members from subscribing to their pronouncements as simply lacking in credibility. Effective leadership today requires convincing people rather than laying shaky divine mandates on them.

This, then, is a core challenge for biblical theologians today: how do scholars at once honestly examine meanings in the biblical context and at the same time help inspire readers today to base their trust in the Bible on credible foundations? No biblical theologian should seek to so undermine the credibility of the biblical texts that readers would abandon the Bible entirely. Nor should biblical theologians seek to limit the inspiration of biblical reading to the privacy of one's prayer life.

Rather, biblical theologians face the challenge at once to recognize the tenuousness of interpreting the biblical texts today--the elusive presence, as Samuel Terrien puts it--and to help release moderns from unrealistic constraints that simply are the creation of authors or interpreters addressing needs and perceptions along the way in the history of theology. When such local interpretations are taken to be authoritative in source and universal in application, falsehood is the outcome--often supporting local prejudices rather than advancing any legitimate end--and biblical faith is rightly undermined.

Biblical theology has languished in the face of this challenge. Some true believers on one side have been unable to free themselves from a sense of blind loyalty to the past, ill-founded as it is in whole or in part. Many seeking moral guidance from Scripture have lost their faith in the ability of the Bible to address their needs, often due to an unrealistic belief in the magical powers of the Word of God. Institutional defenders have found straying from established forms threatening to positions of power, and efforts to modernize have been turned back lest the ancient regime lose its stability. Somewhere amid all these shipwrecks, biblical theology needs to be at once challenging, productive, and just.

It needs to challenge a simplistic belief that God's Mind is known, and its expression in Scripture answers all our needs and questions. It needs to find meanings that actually contribute to a better, inclusive life for people today. And it needs to be based on the hard realities of our own inability to know ourselves, one another, or the past with any degree of certitude. Lacking these, biblical theology is the product of someone's imagination, lacking in truth and viability.

This issue of BTB offers new initiatives that will help the aspiring biblical theologian. Clinton E. Hammock invites readers to assess the role of Isaiah 56:1-8 as a transitional effort to reshape Judean survival strategies. Mario Aguilar's study of 1 Maccabees in the light of the social archaeology of memory casts a new light on this part of the biblical tradition. D. W. Odell-Scott points out interpolations within 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 that bear the mark of later thinking on the subject at hand. Together, these studies advance the cause of helping to build an energized biblical theology for the future.