The biblical theology of H. H. Rowley, 1890-1969.

Harold Henry Rowley was born in Leicester on March 24, 1890, as the fifth of six children born to Richard Rowley, a foreman in one of the shoemaking factories that characterized the most prominent local industry.

His mother was Emma Rowley (nde Saunt), and his early education was at Wyggeston School, Leicester. (1)

Religious Upbringing

During childhood and youth, Harold Rowley attended, along with his parents, Melbourne Hall, the Baptist Chapel in Leicester that had been opened in 1881 under the energetic leadership of the celebrated preacher E B. Meyer. When Meyer left Melbourne Hall in 1888 for a London pastorate, the oversight of the chapel passed to William Young Fullerton. Fullerton had been a student of Pastor's College in London (later renamed Spurgeon's College) founded by C. H. Spurgeon, and in 1907-08 he had accompanied C. E. Wfison on a fact-finding tour of China to assist in planning future mission work. This visit appears to have been directly relevant to the shaping of Rowley's interest in Christian missions in that land. Fullerton remained the senior minister at Melbourne Hall until he was appointed home secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1912. As a result, his ministry overlapped closely with Rowley's years in its fellowship. In the preface to his Louisa Curtis Lectures delivered at Spurgeon's College in 1948 on the subject of "The Biblical Doctrine of Election," Rowley paid particular tribute to Fullerton. He noted his great personal indebtedness to him over an eighteen-year period and expressed his feeling that it created a direct link back to the person of C. H. Spurgeon himself.

Under Fullerton's ministry at Melbourne Hall, the influence of E B. Meyer was still strongly felt since he had become established as an outstanding leader, not only of Baptists, but of all the Evangelical Free Churches. (2) He was a leading figure in the establishment of the Free Church Federal Council in 1896. Cooperation between all shades of evangelical opinion had greatly increased in promoting a wide range of national policies covering education and social action to counter moral abuse and exploitation. United action by all evangelical churches, irrespective of their historic denominational ties, had become an important aspect of this.

Since Rowley himself left no detailed account of his own inner spiritual pilgrimage, it is useful to note those distinctive emphases that both Meyer and Fullerton contributed to Baptist life and thought. They reappear strongly in Rowley's writings.

Meyer was a close friend and associate of the American evangelist Dwight L. Moody--among the closest of his English supporters. The two men had first met in 1873 when Moody preached in the Priory Street Church in York that Meyer served as pastor. This was at the beginning of Moody's first evangelistic campaign in Great Britain.

Meyer shared with Moody a deep distrust of excessively formal, inward-looking, churches where faith was lacking in practical spiritual outreach. Rather than use the title church for the new meeting place of the Christian fellowship in Leicester, Meyer preferred the simple "Melbourne Hall" (it was located on Melbourne Road) when it opened in 1881. The theme of a "servant church" whose commission was a worldwide mission is repeatedly and strikingly taken up in Rowley's writings. His scholarship became uniquely associated with studies of the biblical portrait of the Suffering Servant of the Lord in Isaiah 53.

Like Moody, Meyer believed passionately that all true worship should lead to a serious quest for practical holiness. In the late-nineteenth century this conviction led him to take a central role in the growth and development of the Keswick Movement for the renewal and revitalization of Christian spiritual life. (3) As Meyer was responsible for introducing Moody to the Keswick Conferences in England's Lake District, so similarly Moody introduced Meyer to the Northfield Conferences in the United States which were likewise aimed at deepening the spiritual life. A strong bond of friendship and understanding grew between Meyer and Moody, and also with A. J. Gordon, which was to have long-lasting consequences in the twentieth century.

In view of Meyer's emphasis on education and "practical holiness," it is not surprising to find that the word "relevance" appears several times in the titles of the books and articles that flowed from Rowley's pen. He felt keenly the importance of the Bible's message to the contemporary mission of the church and the needs of society. That a continuity of purpose related the message of the Old Testament to the Christian Church of the New provided him with all the justification he needed for directing his scholarly abilities toward seeking a fuller insight into this first part of the biblical canon.

Academic Career

Harold Rowley entered the Baptist College in Bristol in 1910 and graduated B.A. (Theology) in 1913. In parallel with this, he had also entered the lists as an external student of London University and obtained their pass-level B.D. degree in 1912. He was awarded a Baptist Union scholarship, but the outbreak of war in 1914 prevented his venturing abroad to study in Germany, which is what he would normally have been expected to do. Instead, he went to Mansfield College, Oxford and began research there under G. Buchanan Gray. He widened his skills as a linguist, being awarded the university's Houghton Syriac Prize in 1915. During this time, he maintained his association with Melbourne Hall and held firm to his intention of missionary service overseas.

He undertook a brief period of war service with the YMCA in Egypt until ill health-a problem which was to trouble him again later compelled his return to England. After briefly ministering to a Baptist church in Wells, Somerset, he sailed in 1922 for China to become a missionary of the Baptist Missionary Society. His first appointment was as associate professor of Old Testament in Shantung Christian University.

He subsequently resigned from that appointment in 1929 in circumstances that related directly to the missionary aims and commitment of the university. The regional authority in China, eager to promote education but sensitive to the cultural threat of zealous Christian missions, had required universities funded from abroad to declare their aims openly. For tactical reasons, the Christian University in Shantung had hedged over making such a declaration--even though their primary aim was Christian evangelism--and Rowley thought this was lacking in Christian integrity. (4) He resigned and returned to England. However, he never gave up his sense of call to Christian mission. Besides important writings on the subject, this call led him to serve twice as president of the Baptist Missionary Society in later years.

On his return to England, Rowley resumed his Semitic research into the Aramaic of the Old Testament, and he was awarded the Oxford University B. Litt. degree for a thesis, later published as The Grammar and Vocabulary of the Aramaic of the Old Testament. (5) The implications of the research were, however, not purely linguistic, since they related closely to the book of Daniel and bore directly on the question of the arguments for the late (second century B.C.) date of that book, as evidenced from comparative studies of its grammar and vocabulary. This early entry into the critical study of the book of Daniel was to remain an important interest.

So far as his subsequent teaching career was concerned, Rowley took up an appointment in October 1930 as assistant lecturer in Semitic Languages in University College, Cardiff, where he became a colleague of Theodore H. Robinson (1881-1964). In 1935, he moved to become a full professor in the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and moved again in 1945 to a distinguished professorship in the University of Manchester from which he retired in 1959. It was a matter of pride to him that he would be serving in the same University Department where the distinguished Methodist A. S. Peake (1865-1929) had taught, and that he would be a colleague of T. W. Manson (1893-1958). During these Manchester years, he embarked on an extensive range of publications on the Old Testament that achieved international recognition and acclaim. By the time of his death in 1969, he had become the author of publications that covered a wide field of Old Testament scholarship.

A brief look at these publications shows how Rowley's expertise was marked by a singular desire to achieve a reasoned comprehensiveness that accommodated as much of the available evidence as could be marshalled. He believed that there could be a recognized consensus among leading scholars that would establish guidelines for others to follow. This belief led him, at times, to be unduly sharp with those who he felt had stepped outside this consensus.

Rowley's writings display a strong concern to unite the insights and seriousness of historical critical methodology with a strong evangelical commitment to the Christian faith. Scholarship could assist the preacher in using the Bible as a guide to Christian education and growth. As a consequence, he actively promoted the publication of a range of textbooks directed towards the needs of lay persons as well as other scholars. In fact, his writings can be divided in two categories. Some focused on the critical investigation of specific problems of a historical and literary character. These were chiefly in the form of essays, initially published separately and then later integrated into books. His other books were, with few exceptions, essentially surveys of contemporary scholarship aimed at a wide readership.

<B>H. H. Rowley's Biblical Theology</B>

Although Rowley began his work in academic teaching in Great Britain in 1930, it was after the Second World War that his writings attracted the attention of the wider theological world. The turning point was the publication of <ITL>The Re-discovery of the Old Testament</ITL> in 1946. (6) He had published his first book, Aspects of Reunion, in 1923 (7) in which he reflected on the nature and mission of the church. His understanding of it--as a fellowship of believers called of God to a worldwide mission-was similar to F. B. Meyer's view. He evidently shared much of the skepticism regarding the enduring value of the established denominational allegiances that had become quite firmly defined by the end of the nineteenth century.

Since I have already published a comprehensive review of Rowley's contributions to the study of the Old Testament, (8) it is more useful, in the present essay, to concentrate upon his particular interest in the subject of biblical theology. The most explicit focus on this is seen in his 1956 book, The Faith of Israel, (9) which formed the basis of the James Sprunt Lectures given at Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, a year earlier. In brief compass, Rowley set out many of the central themes that appeared at greater length in his numerous essays and books.

Rowley was a great bibliophile. He loved books and felt it a great privilege that he owned a large library. He joked that he got all the exercise he needed walking from one bookcase to another. He was exceptionally generous in securing books for scholars abroad, often at considerable personal expense. He believed strongly that books were the indispensable tools of his trade as a scholar.

The introduction of an annual bibliographic book list by the Society for Old Testament Studies was largely the result of his initiative in the early 1950s. It aimed to cover as wide a field of publications on the Old Testament as could be achieved and marked one of his lasting contributions to scholarship where such aids have now become an accepted feature.

In The Faith of Israel, the cloak of the professional scholar and researcher is, to some extent, discarded in favor of using his great store of knowledge to present an account of the faith of the Bible as it had served to shape his own faith. It is something of a personal account of his reasons for devoting his life to the study of the Old Testament. We find in it an instructive combination of careful critical, literary, and historical methodology united with a passionate confession of faith that the Bible contains a unique revelation of God. This needs to be preached as well as taught since it has an eternal relevance for all humankind as a message of hope and redemption. It is useful to focus on those subjects that were central and repeated themes of Rowley's publications, noting their relationship to his strongly held evangelical convictions about the nature of the Christian message.

When Rowley was a student, a disturbing period of controversy existed over the reception of historical-critical methodology in Baptist circles during the early decades of the twentieth century. By 1946, many of the most keenly fought of these controversies were in the past and appeared, at least for a time, to have been resolved in the acceptance of a moderate critical approach. (10) Baptists like T. H. Robinson and H. Wheeler Robinson (1872-1945) had established an enviable record for scholarship in the Old Testament field so that the need was to move forward. Historical and literary criticism needed to be used, discerningly mindful of the essential nature of the Bible as the revelation of God's purpose for humankind. On the few occasions when he ventured to uncover what he saw as the errors of a misguided conservatism on critical issues, he was forthright in repudiating it. He saw it as wholly in agreement with his evangelical commitment to the Bible that he should not hide from an honest and well-informed examination of its problems. Since a real history lay at the heart of the Bible, to have denied such critical investigation would have been tantamount to conceding that its record of redemption may not be true after all.

If we search for a role model whom Rowley endeavored to follow, we should undoubtedly have to look to A. S. Peake, who had earlier taught biblical studies in Manchester. As a scholar whose roots lay in Primitive Methodism, Peake had warmly embraced critical scholarly methods and had become an energetic and prolific author. In advocating that the devotional study of the Bible could never be separated from serious critical study of it by the Christian, Peake had set a powerful example of scholarly evangelicalism. Rowley felt privileged to honor Peake's name and to build on his work by editing, along with Matthew Black, a complete revision of the one-volume Bible commentary Peake had edited in its original edition. (11)

The Missionary Task of the People of God

Rowley's missionary concerns revealed themselves at an early stage with the publication in 1939 of Israel's Mission to the World. (12) This was followed in 1945 by The Missionary Message of the Old Testament. (13) In these books, Rowley showed his conviction that the message of the Old Testament is embodied in the calling, educating, and commissioning of a community of God called Israel. Accordingly, not only is the Old Testament directly linked to the New, but a doctrine of election is central to both. It is through the election of a people that the knowledge of God is revealed. Rowley's concern with the subject reappeared in fuller compass in The Biblical Doctrine of Election (1950) (14) and also provided the basis for important chapters in The Unity of the Bible (1953) (15) and The Faith of Israel (1956).

In the Old Testament, God is the God of Israel, but, in the context of the overall revelation of the Bible, this cannot be the basis for a narrow religious nationalism. Nor can it justify acceptance of a purely ethnic view of religion. It is simply the way God chose to reveal himself in history through the election and tutoring of one people through whom the divine purpose for all peoples can be mediated. Through Israel, the knowledge of God is introduced to all humankind. So there is from the outset in the Old Testament a missionary goal that only gradually unfolds as the story of Israel progresses. One important consequence of this was that it led Rowley to advocate a far higher estimate of the importance of post-exilic and late Jewish contributions to the biblical revelation than was customary of the scholarship of the period. In retrospect, Rowley's perspective on this issue has increasingly come to the fore in the context of scholarship.

For Rowley, the Old Testament pointed forward unerringly to the New and to the birth of the Christian church, which continues the task Israel began. The idea of election is central to both Testaments. It is not the self-delusion of a weak and struggling nation, nor simply a doctrine without practical demands in response to its claims. Rather, it is an awareness of a divine purpose revealing itself in historical events that makes them guides to further events. Election can never be a cause for human self-praise but rather demands commitment toward establishing a just and righteous world order. To be engaged in fulfilling this purpose, as every Christian must be, may, and probably will, involve self-denial and suffering. This focused Rowley's attention on the biblical portrait of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53--a subject that was enigmatic in its complex nuances, but one which Rowley believed lay at the very heart of Christian faith and to which he devoted a great deal of attention. (16)

The Historicity of the Biblical Story

In Rowley's student years in Bristol and Oxford, the field of archaeological research in the biblical lands of the Middle East was still in its infancy. It was popularly perceived as bearing the potential to transform the entire face of biblical knowledge. Already in the nineteenth century, the recovery and decipherment of writings from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia had caused an immense public stir. The cautious voice of the Oxford biblical scholar S. R. Driver (1846-1914), in the Schweich Lectures of 1908 given under the auspices of the British Academy, (17) had anticipated the possibility of a whole panorama of new discoveries shedding an entirely fresh light on the Old Testament. By 1920, the field of biblical archaeology, as it was customarily described at the time, appeared to represent the most inviting field of new research for the scholar to contemplate.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that when he was invited to contribute to the same lecture series in 1948, Rowley chose as his subject From Joseph to Joshua: Biblical Traditions in the Light of Archaeology (1950). (18) In the preface, he told how even while he was still a missionary in China he had reflected on the problems of establishing the history of Israel's beginnings from the time of the exodus from Egypt to the conquest of Canaan. He had composed a letter to Stanley A. Cook of Cambridge on the subject but had never posted it. The publication of these lectures provides testimony to Rowley's orderly mind and patience in bringing together multifarious pieces of evidence and focusing them on a specific subject. In this case, the subject is the beginnings of Israel as a nation. Like a detective, Rowley, out of seeming confusion and contradiction, could assemble a balanced set of possibilities. From among these, he then could set out his own solution to the problem.

These lectures may appear to be so essentially historical as to mark another side of Rowley's interest, which had begun in his student years in Oxford. Yet, the historical conclusions set out at the close of the book related closely to his theological interests. They were soon taken further in ground-breaking essays from his pen and formed a central basis for his reconstruction of The Faith of Israel. Moses had been the leader of a group of fugitives from the slave gangs employed by Pharaoh. The Ten Commandments formed the charter of faith that formed his great legacy to the emerging nation that looked back to him as its founder. These rules of life established the inseparable bond between ethics and religion. They have remained the moral foundation of all human society. So, in brief compass, runs the outline of Rowley's presentation of Israel's faith. His task as a scholar was to research, defend, and proclaim this.

In the light of more recent research, the details of Rowley's historical reconstruction are of less interest than his broader conclusions about the relationship between the biblical story and the practicality of reconstructing an actual history at the heart of it. Rowley felt justified in concluding that there was an essential core of facts behind the biblical story. Moses was a genuine historical figure and biblical truth was, at its foundation level, a historical truth. God had indeed revealed himself through the struggles of an ancient people.

In view of the weight of biblical tradition that ascribed authorship of the Ten Commandments to Moses, Rowley concluded that this claim also could be accepted with reasoned confidence. The positions reached in these lectures, must certainly have been simmering in Rowley's mind for many years and formed the basis for his reconstruction of the rise and development of the faith of the Old Testament.

Certainly the larger issue concerning the underlying core of historical reality in biblical narratives was an issue of central importance to him. It elevated archaeological research to a special place in defending the claim of the Old Testament to record a real history, which was, in fact, nothing less than the record of God's dealings with humanity. Accordingly, this burgeoning discipline of research deserved a major place among the biblical sciences. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Rediscovery of the Old Testament in which Rowley suggested that it was the primary resource that made a rediscovery of the Old Testament possible.

Rowley's years in Manchester overlapped with the first discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the region of Qumran and the initial work in explaining their significance for Jews and Christians. First discovered in 1947, they brought to light new, if often enigmatic, knowledge concerning the Jewish War of 66-70 A.D. and the sectarian Jewish movements that lay behind this. (19) They also shed light on the origins of Christianity. Rowley welcomed the discoveries enthusiastically, seeing in them the kind of hoped-for new resource that archaeology had long promised.

The Book of Daniel

Aside from his 1923 book, Aspects of Reunion, some of Rowley's earliest publications were short essays, published in 1924 in The Expositor, on the subject of "The Belshazzar of Daniel and of History." (20) They marked the beginning of a long series of publications from him on Daniel and the subject of the apocalyptic writings of the Bible and Apocrypha more generally. His Oxford research was on biblical Aramaic, the language in which part of Daniel was written, and he followed up the publication of this with a study entitled Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel: A Historical Study of Contemporary Theories (1935). (21) This, in turn, led to the publication in 1944 of one of his most popular writings The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation. (22) He published two subsequent revisions (1947, 1953). His presidential address to the Society for Old Testament Study in 1950 was on the subject of "The Unity of the Book of Daniel." (23)

To understand Rowley's keen interest in the Book of Daniel and its place in the rise of the unique type of biblical writing called apocalyptic, we have to go back to the nineteenth century and reflect on its place in nineteenth-century missionary thinking. This book, more than any other, holds a key place in the rise of British and American Fundamentalism, as historians such as George Marsden, (24) E. R. Sandeen, (25) and Mark Noll (26) have shown. The reasons for this can be traced to the European continental Reformation and relate to Daniel's vision of four successive world empires, to be followed by the coming of the kingdom of God. All of this was thought to be contained mysteriously in a biblical code which revealed (Greek, apokalupsis=revelation, disclosure) a "calendar of prophecy" that foretold the course of world history.

Since the Napoleonic wars, fresh calculations and expectations regarding the end time and the Second Advent of Jesus had played a prominent role in helping Christians to face unsettling and disturbing world events. The emphasis also encouraged a new missionary enterprise and fostered a growing distrust of the traditional established churches generally and of their divisions into ecclesiastical denominations. Such distrust had certainly influenced both D. L. Moody and F. B. Meyer. Rowley himself cannot have remained outside such powerful influences during his years at Melbourne Hall.

His immersion into a different kind of scholarship and biblical learning in his student years in Oxford must undoubtedly have represented a significant turning point for his faith. Not only did the exposure to a variety of new scholarly viewpoints challenge his youthful faith, but it opened the possibility of recognizing a fresh importance in those biblical writings, chiefly the Books of Daniel and Revelation, with which he had long been familiar. Moreover, nineteenth-century scholars had largely neglected these books.

More than this, it must have appeared to Rowley that such neglect was a consequence of a failure to recognize that these biblical books contribute an important feature to the biblical message. Evangelical Christians had certainly not been wrong in recognizing that the Bible teaches that there is an ultimate goal--a great concluding denouement--to all human history.

What had been missed was an awareness of the complex nature of the imagery that these apocalyptic books employ to declare this. When understood in the light of their own conventions and methods, such books had much to offer to the informed Bible reader. Evangelicals had been wrong to regard them in an unduly literal manner and had placed too much confidence in speculative and unlikely keys to their interpretation, but they had not been wrong to recognize that they formed a part of the great tradition of biblical prophecy. They brought an awareness that all human history is governed by one overarching divine purpose that gives it meaning. False trails of misinterpretation had, in the past, frequently brought such books into disrepute, but this should not mean that a wiser, better informed path to interpretation cannot be found for the present.

Accordingly, Rowley's concern with the linguistic issues of the Aramaic portions of the Book of Daniel was simply one feature of a wider interest in the book. It necessarily involved him in critical discussion of its date and the significance of its recorded visions. In turn, these questions compelled attention to the relevance and significance of the biblical apocalyptic writings generally and, not least, to their relationship to biblical prophecy.

In view of the almost total neglect of these apocalyptic books by German scholars until the mid-twentieth century, it is noteworthy that Klaus Kochz (27) could point to the significant contributions made by the British scholars R. H. Charles (1855-1931) and H. H. Rowley. Similarly, the same scholar's survey of popular ancient and modern interpretations of the book of Daniel reflect further on the dangers that neglect of these books has brought. By relegating them to popular, often eccentric, modes of interpretation, this neglect had created a dangerous gap between scholarship and the wider faith of the post-Reformation church. Rowley's own detailed and thoroughly documented review of the way the four world empires of Daniel had been understood in ancient and modern times, often with dangerous applications to contemporary politics, is instructive.

For Rowley, the biblical apocalyptic writings represent prophecy in a new guise, at the same time retaining the necessary measure of openness to the future, which is the hallmark of all true prophecy. History is not a passion play already written by God from the beginning of time, but an arena of challenge and conflict in which real human choices have to be made. Apocalyptic writings alert the reader to the nature of this challenge and give the assurance of God's ultimate purpose that reveals its meaning and consequences. Apocalyptic books generate a vision of "the goal of history," using imagery in the manner of science- fiction writers to make clear the issues at stake in our contemporary society. Besides the books on apocalyptic, this theme provides the basis for a significant chapter in The Re-discovery of the Old Testament. The reward of finding new ways of understanding two of the most difficult books of the Bible was a singularly important aspect of Rowley's claim that scholarship made possible a rediscovery of the value of the Old Testament for the contemporary Christian.

Moses and the Decalogue 

Rowley's study of the origins of Israel in his lectures from Joseph to Joshua played a central role in the development of Rowley's theological thought. This historical origin was crucial for the biblical scholar to investigate, since it uncovered those events that reflected most directly on God's nature and on the divine involvement with human affairs. His belief in the historicity of the exodus as a real event was of great importance to Rowley. This conclusion had a direct bearing on how he understood the revelation of God to have taken place and how it is mediated through the Bible. An exposition to this effect is to be found in the chapter on "Revelation and its Media" in The Faith of Israel (1956). (28) To use the resources and discoveries of archaeology was one way of bringing scientific and historical investigation to bear on central aspects of the biblical story. Otherwise, it would remain simply a story and nothing more. That real events lay at the heart of the biblical account of the exodus was a truth that carried theological as well as historical consequences. God had acted decisively in human affairs; had shaped the destiny of an ancient people, the Jews; and had given them a leader through whom new insights into the moral order of life had been made known. This leader was Moses.

Certain major deductions were made from this primary foray to uncover the foundations of biblical history. The first of these was, in essence, a literary point arguing for recognition that the Ten Commandments, the most influential and best known of all the documentary units of the Old Testament, originated with Moses. He examined this point further at greater length in an essay entitled "Moses and the Decalogue." (29) Rowley did not accept that either the present Exodus (Exod. 20:2-17) or Deuteronomic (Deut. 5:5-21) listing of these Commandments has been preserved in the precise words and form that Moses had given. The original wording of the commandments was briefer, and was most probably uniformly composed in ten short prohibitions. It constituted a "primary decalogue" (scholars frequently use the German term Urdekalog). Nevertheless, he argued strongly in defense of the Mosaic origin of this primary list of Ten Commandments. Since its theological and ethical demands are so distinctive and revolutionary, it remains unlikely that a later, unknown, innovator had introduced them. Without an overriding objection precluding such an early origin, the importance of the weight of tradition that ascribed them to Moses should be respected and upheld. This Mosaic revelation demanded Israel's repudiation of idolatry and brought a focus that was monotheistic in its essential demand for worship of the Lord as sole God. It also ensured that a strong moral discipline and purpose permeates the entire compass of biblical faith.

Monotheism 

The second of the theological issues that followed from conclusions reached as part of the summary in Prom Joseph to Joshua was that monotheism itself, as a central feature of religious belief, is also to be traced back to Moses. If the Ten Commandments brought disclosure of the moral order for all humanity, then the first of these commandments uncovered the fundamental role religious truth occupies in understanding the divine foundation of the universe. It presents a theological insight of immense significance that lies at the heart of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

Rowley was willing to concede that later revisions and elaborations had overlaid and clarified the bare starkness of the original claim. Clearly, numerous references exist in the Old Testament to the names and titles of other gods that recognize that other nations worship them. Israel had itself been repeatedly tempted to worship them. Yet, whether such deities have any real existence is frequently left unclear. When the question of what kind of reality properly lies behind such names as occurs in the prophecies of Isaiah 40-55, then the decisive answer is given that no such under lying reality exists.

In seeking to take account of this acceptance of other deities for other peoples, Rowley advocated the use the term "incipient monotheism" for Moses' belief that Israel should worship only the one Lord God. Attempts by other scholars to introduce such terms as henotheism or monolatry were inadequate, Rowley believed, to describe the deep inner logic belonging to Israel's claim that the one Lord God was superior to all other divine or human powers.

Rowley affirmed that the claim that the Lord God of Israel is alone the true God of all nations carries with it a necessary missionary imperative. If there is only one deity, then it is the responsibility of those who have knowledge of this one God to teach this truth to all humankind. Moreover, since this true knowledge is inseparably linked--through the Ten Commandments--to the moral order for all human society, then monotheism also carries a high ethical imperative to bring righteousness and justice to all peoples.

In this fashion, Rowley argued that the vital theological insights of the Old Testament, which had shaped his own missionary ideals, must continue to provide an unfinished agenda for the church of God.

The Individual and the Community

The evangelical outlook that shaped Rowley's early years placed great emphasis on the necessity for an individual response and commitment on the part of every believer. Rowley was, after all, a Baptist, and the Christian faith was both personal and universal--not a national faith in the manner that had at one period been true of the Old Testament. Its formative message relates to the history and religion of a nation--ancient Israel. This nation had existed as such for only a relatively brief period, but, nevertheless, this national religion had given rise to a new era in which Judaism had become the religion of a widely scattered group of communities built on ethnic principles. Nineteenth-century scholarship had tended to overemphasize the idea of Israel as a nation in its concern to shape the writing of the history of Israel along lines similar to those that had shaped the writing of the histories of ancient Greece and Rome.

In reality, the concept of a "community of God" in which religious loyalty provides a basic structural element is a constantly changing feature of the faith of the Old Testament. Moreover, it is evident, when seen in retrospect, that a good deal of Romantic nineteenth-century idealism had been unwittingly introduced into the goals set for the task of writing the history of ancient Israel.

When the Bible is read as a single whole, divided into two Testaments, then much of the connection between these two parts devolves on the emerging concept of a "church." (The Greek word ekklesia frequently appears in the Greek translation of the Old Testament to describe the community of Israel). Quite evidently, the shifting realities of Israel's political existence in the Old Testament are to a large extent overcome by the notion of a "covenant" established through Moses which overstepped the boundaries of nationalism in the strict political sense. Accordingly, the notion of the Christian church as a community of the new covenant links up with this and binds the two Testaments together.

All of this was a current of scholarship that was increasingly coming to the forefront during the first half of the twentieth century. It is no surprise, therefore, that it should have drawn Rowley's attention in his own reconstruction of the developing trends of Old Testament faith. The transition from a national faith to a faith that was personal and individual was a vitally important dimension to the intellectual development reflected between the earliest and the latest biblical writings. It was also a dimension of faith that had a direct bearing on the evangelicalism that had shaped Rowley's own understanding of God. The necessity of a personal response to the message of the gospel and the adoption of a lifestyle commensurate with that message were essential aspects of the Christian faith.

The treatment of "Individual and Community" in The Faith of Israel (30) directly following the chapter dealing with "The Nature and Need of Man" was altogether central to Rowley's understanding of the Bible's message. The relationship of all humankind to God must ultimately be a personal and individual one. Yet, in the Bible, each person is a member of a larger society--family, tribe, and nation--and each person's destiny is bound up with the destiny of the larger group. This feature of the Old Testament enabled Rowley to explore its insights in regard to these changing social groups. The punishment of Achan's family along with the individual culprit represents a striking biblical instance of an entire family suffering punishment for the wrongdoing of one of its members. (31) Therefore, Rowley argued, a necessary realism existed about the way the Old Testament recognized that individuals may suffer on account of others.

Such aspects of the realism of the Old Testament provide a basis for an explorationof two themes that play a significant role in the shaping of Rowley's biblical theology. The first of these concerned the experience of human suffering and the various attempts to present a systematized understanding of a concept of divine retribution. All too often the impact of sickness and personal misfortune fails to comply with any reasonable notion of justice or deserved retribution.

While the prophets could, fairly comfortably, lay the blame for plagues and national disasters on the wrongs and injustices perpetrated by the wicked within the nation, such a doctrine failed to comply with the experience of individuals. The story of Job marks an exemplary biblical example of the concern to set important limits to the notion of retribution as a guide for understanding the complex nature of human life. All that the Bible can do is to draw attention to the problem and to exclude the belief that a simple concept of personal guilt or wrongdoing can be used to explain all the many faces of suffering and misfortune that occur.

Focusing on the problem of individual suffering in a world ordered and upheld by God opens the door to recognizing that individuals are bound up with the community in which they are placed. So, in a remarkable series of biblical stories, Moses is denied the reward of entering the promised land on account of the sins of the people. The prophet Jeremiah, in many respects one of the key biblical figures in highlighting the personal and individual nature of humankind's relationship to God, must undergo the pain and suffering that overwhelm the community of which he forms a part. The righteous may suffer along with the wicked. Once this truth is perceived, then the door lies open to identify and face the deepest insight of all that the Old Testament has to offer: the innocent may suffer for the guilty!

Rowley dealt extensively, and on more than one occasion, with one of the most memorable and thought-provoking passages of the entire biblical canon: the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. From the early days of Christianity, this figure has been seen as a prefiguring of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. (32) The subject was important for Rowley as more than a biblical illustration of the truth that human suffering may have an atoning value. Isaiah 53 is the last of four passages in Isaiah 40-55 that scholars, at that time, singled out from their setting on account of their portrayal of the work of one who is described as "The Servant of the Lord." A feature that had proved baffling to scholars was the apparent ease with which the experience of an entire community could be described as happening to a single individual person. The title of "Servant" was unquestionably one that was vested in Israel as a people, yet the misfortunes overtaking this servant could be described as though they belonged to only one of their number. The "Servant" appeared to be both a community and an individual in it.

Rowley's solution to this apparent mystery was to argue that it was a recurrent feature of the Old Testament to identify communities, and even entire nations, as though they formed a single entity. The notion of "corporate personality," as it was described, was held to be a highly distinctive way in which ancient communities perceived themselves. Rowley was not the originator of this much-discussed but highly questionable argument concerning the thought world of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it was one he employed and explored in a distinctive way.

Whatever the anthropological or psychological merits of this claim, Rowley felt assured that it resolved most of the apparent tensions present in Isaiah 53. Combining group and individual features accorded with the realities of life. The individual is bound up with the group in such a way that the sufferings of the former may fulfill an atoning purpose for the latter. More than any other prophecy, this unique portrayal of the suffering figure of Isaiah 53 prepares the way for the interpretation of the mission of Jesus of Nazareth.

Aside from his full and detailed survey of the wide range of scholarly attempts to explain the meaning of this difficult passage, Rowley also offered a detailed study of the connections between this prophecy and the figure of the coming Messiah. (33) Was there any evidence that Jewish scribes and scholars before the time of Jesus had made a connection between the figure of the Messiah and the Suffering Servant? After surveying all the available literature, he concluded that there was not. It was uniquely the contribution of Jesus and the early Christian community to have made such a connection. They achieved a remarkable new insight into the nature and necessity of atonement as the ground for a relationship between God and humankind.

One further aspect of Rowley's attention to the nature of the relationship between the individual and the community deserves attention. A primary point of reference for the Old Testament is that the Lord God is the God of Israel and is in some sense a national deity. Nevertheless, all human relationships to such a God must ultimately be personal and individual. As a result, a degree of tension exists between the two. In many instances, the Old Testament itself recognizes that only some in the nation respond faithfully and wholeheartedly to God. The concept of a remnant emerges--a faithful minority whose response to God is sincere and who thereby single themselves out as the bearers of a unique commission to the rest of the nation. They become, by the very nature of this task, precursors of the Christian church.

Out of this, Rowley saw an important connection between the Old and New Testaments. Although the Old Testament is a literature about an ancient people called Israel, it is not simply a national literature in any narrow sense. This collection of writings highlights in a positive way the tensions between the individual and the larger group. In the long period of historical development covered, a marked shift of emphasis occurred away from the larger group to bring a sharper focus on the individual. In the two biblical books to which Rowley appears to have felt a particularly strong attraction--Job and Daniel--clearly this sense of individual challenge and response is much to the fore. Both tell the stories of figures facing adversity whose faith is tested to the utmost limits. Yet, both are heroes of faith. They are heroes not because they find the answers to the problems posed by their misfortunes but because they find that God's presence remains real and evident, even in the extremes of their adversity.

The Nature of Holiness

Among all the biblical concepts that relate to the pursuit of virtue and the good life, one of the most difficult for the modern reader to grasp is that of holiness. Nevertheless, it has survived, with some difficulty, in the modern world. The revitalization of the spiritual life by encouraging study conferences and devotional assemblies with holiness as its aim had been a strong ambition of F. B. Meyer. In America, similar conferences figured prominently in the work of D. L. Moody. Christian growth could freely be described as growth in holiness. Yet, what does such holiness imply?

In the Old Testament, the notion of holiness is directly related to the temple and to the performance of rituals. Neglect of the physical constraints of holiness could be punished with the most dire consequences. In the light of this mixed understanding of holiness in the Bible, it is striking that the Sermon on the Mount prefers the adjective perfect (Greek teleios) in preference to holy (Greek hagios).

Protestant approaches to the Old Testament have regarded the presence of ancient Israel's extensive body of regulations aimed at maintaining and promoting a ritual holiness through the offering of sacrifices as an embarrassment. The conventional response to this feature has been either to allegorize the institutions and activities of the cult, following the example of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews, or to regard the "ceremonial" (or "ritual") law as separate and distinct from the "moral" law of the Ten Commandments. By the mid-twentieth century, most Christian scholars had further increased the sense of distance from this feature. They pointed to a progressive development of the concept of holiness, noting that it was gradually moralized under the influence of the great prophets (cf. Isa. 5:16).

Clearly, Rowley felt this issue to be an important one. He saw it as a central contribution of the prophets to the uniqueness of Old Testament faith that they had been responsible for this moral reinterpretation of the concept of holiness. He saw the issue to be one of central theological importance since it concerned the relationship between the rituals of Israel's religion and its moral and personal demands. (34) The key word for understanding what the Old Testament teaches was seen to be conveyed by the term "inwardness." It further extended the relationship between the individual and the community. Outward conformity to actions and the demands of worship were worthless if they did not correspond to an appropriate inward and personal attitude. The prophets had opposed offering sacrifices to the Lord, not because such sacrifices were thought to be wrong in themselves, but because, if they were not matched by an inner attitude of contrition and devotion, they were meaningless. They did not work mechanically.

Rowley first took up this issue publicly in a series of debates in the Expository Times (35) over the question of whether animal sacrifices can have had any value at all in the eyes of God. He defended the claim that they had fulfilled a necessary purpose in teaching a sense of the costliness of all humankind's attempts to be "at one" with the deity. (36)

Rowley's last major book, Worship in Ancient Israel: Its Forms and Meaning, (37) continued his concern with the true nature of worship as a personal and individual search for a relationship to God. Rowley brought together many of the insights and theological emphases that had shaped his own thinking over a long period.

During the most active period of his teaching and writing ministry, a considerable change had been introduced in studies of ancient ritual and cult, partly as a result of the influence of the great Norwegian scholar Sigmund Mowinckel. From regarding the temple as burdened with notions of taboo and physical contamination, Mowinckel had stressed its importance as a school of prayer and its sacrifices as rooted in community rituals that promoted social and political cohesion.

Building on this, Rowley could offer a more theological and personal understanding of the meaning and value of worship than he could have achieved by simply recording the lists of festivals and offerings that were stipulated. He saw in the Old Testament the formative groundwork of all that was most valuable in Christian worship. Prayer had gradually taken precedence over ritual, and the corporate sharing of praise and thanksgiving had become an experience of widened horizons in generating a sense of moral purpose and world vision. So worship in ancient Israel was an essential part of the preparation for Christian worship. As the Old testamentcommunity of God made it a forerunner of the New Testament church, the structures of worship in the Old Testament laid the foundations for the New Covenant.

The Unity of the Bible

Throughout his life, it was important for Rowley that he was in possession of a Bible consisting of two Testaments and that he was not simply the advocate of a Hebrew Bible. Only in relative terms was his focus primarily on the Old Testament. He devoted much effort to the study of the Inter-testamental literature, and he advocated a positive attitude toward the post-exilic development of Judaism. The developments of this period had provided a necessary bridge to the rise of Christianity. His theological studies were essays in biblical theology. Many of his most characteristic books, including those on apocalyptic, covered material in both Testaments. In The Biblical Doctrine of Election (1952) and The Unity of the Bible (1953), he focused on themes that held a prominent place in both Old and New Testaments.

Critics of his work can, with some justification, point out that even his studies that sought to be directed specifically to the Old Testament, as in the cases of The Faith of Israel and Worship in Ancient Israel, were strongly influenced by his own Christian faith. For him, the importance of the Old Testament was chiefly to be found in that it had paved the way for the rise of Christianity. A more positive estimate of his writings must point out that, for him, the relationship between the two Testaments was essentially a historical one. This relationship rested on the contention that fundamental themes, concepts (as for instance monotheism), and trends that first emerged in the Old Testament reached their fruition in the New. The relationship between the two parts of the canon was a genetic one, comparable to that of parent and child.

Rowley in no significant way denigrated or undervalued the importance of Judaism and the contribution Jewish scholars had made and were making to the study of the Hebrew Bible. The opposite was the case. He saw his own work, however, as primarily an exercise in Christian ministry and teaching, and his task as the exposition of the "Old Testament," rather than of the "Hebrew Bible" in a nonconfessional context. He believed that the two approaches could and should be related to each other, and he saw no strangeness in his own approach. He remained convinced of the importance of the larger missionary vision that one day all nations and peoples are to participate in the kingly rule of God.

When surveying the long list of Rowley's writing on a popular theological front, there appear to be serious gaps and many evaluations in which he adopts a strong position without waiting to justify it in detail. These arose from his strong belief that it is readily possible for the modern reader and interpreter of the Old Testament to leap directly from its pages straight into the modern world. Words like "relevance," "re-discovery," and "message" became very much a part of his presentation during the 1940s and '50s.

At a period when a new generation of scholars sought to formulate and reconstruct the methodology and structure of a new kind of biblical theology that was attuned to modern critical restraints, he eschewed the details of such a task. The truths he found in the Old Testament bore a direct and unquestionable importance for all ages of human society. They were historically justified as facts. How this relevance is imparted is unclear and is to be discerned. It frequently appears to rest largely on a reaffirmation of the ethical realism and integrity of all true religion. So recognizing and highlighting this ethical urgency and priority in the Bible is held to provide a path of bridge building between the biblical world and our own. There can be, therefore, a "re-discovery" of the Old Testament, made possible by modern historical-critical scholarship--a task in which Rowley believed that he was honorably engaged.

(1.) The personal details of Rowley's life are taken from Proceedings of the British Academy 56 (1972): 309-19. Cf. also James Barr, Dictionary of National Biography 1961-70, ed. E. T. Williams and C. S. Nicholls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 898b-99b.

(2.) F. B. Meyer's strong, if sometimes controversial, leadership among Baptists is described by I. M. Randall, "Mere Denominationalism: F. B. Meyer and Baptist Life," Baptist Quarterly 35 (January, 1993): 19-34; cf. also Randall, "Incarnating the Gospel: Melbourne Hall, Leicester in the 1880s as a Model for Holistic Ministry," Baptist Quarterly 35 (October, 1994): 393-406.

(3). Cf. C. Price and I. M. Randall, Transforming Keswick (Carlisle: OM Publishing, 2000). Meyer's influence is especially noted on pp. 128-32.

(4.) The details are reported by Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), 310-13.

(5.) H. H. Rowley, The Aramaic of the Old Testament: A Grammatical and Lexical Study of its Relations with Other Early Aramaic Dialects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929).

(6.) H. H. Rowley, The Re-Discovery of the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth Press, 1946).

(7.) H. H. Rowley, Aspects of Reunion (London: Allen & Unwin, 1923). For the particular significance of this book as a reflection of features that link Rowley to the Melbourne Hall tradition, cf. J. F. V. Nicholson, "H. H. Rowley on Aspects of Reunion," Baptist Quarterly 38 (October, 1999): 196-99.

(8.) R. E. Clements, "The Biblical Scholarship of H. H. Rowley (1890-1969)," Baptist Quarterly 38 (April 1999): 70-82.

(9.) H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel: Aspects of Old Testament Thought (London: SCM Press, 1956).

(10.) Cf. K. W. Clements, Lovers of Discord: Twentieth Century Theological Controversies in England (London: SPCK, 1988); for Baptists, see especially pp. 106-29.

(11.) A. S. Peake, Commentary on the Bible, ed. H. H. Rowley and M. Black (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1962).

(12.) H. H. Rowley, Israel's Mission to the World (London: SCM Press, 1939).

(13.) H. H. Rowley, The Missionary Message of the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth Press, 1945).

(14.) H. H. Rowley, The Biblical Doctrine of Election (London: Lutterworth Press, 1950).

(15.) H. H. Rowley, The Unity of the Bible (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1953).

(16.) H. H. Rowley, "The Servant of the Lord in the Light of Three Decades of Criticism," The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952; 2nd rev. ed. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1965), 1-60.

(17.) S. R. Driver, Modern Research as Illustrating the Bible, Schweich Lectures, 1908 (London: Clarendon Press, 1909).

(18.) H. H. Rowley, From Joseph to Joshua: Biblical Traditions in the Light of Archaeology, Schweich Lectures, 1948 (London: Clarendon Press, 1950).

(19.) Cf. H. H. Rowley, The Zadokite Fragments and the Dead Sea Scrolls (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952).

(20.) H. H. Rowley, "The Belshazzar of Daniel and of History," The Expositor, 9th ser., vol. 2 (1924), 182-95; 255-72.

(21.) H. H. Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel: A Survey of Current Opinions (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1935; reprinted 1959).

(22.) H. H. Rowley, The Relevance of Apocalyptic: A Study of Jewish and Christian Apocalypses from Daniel to the Revelation 2nd ed. 1947; 3rd ed. 1953 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1944).

(23.) H. H. Rowley, "The Unity of the Book of Daniel," Prom Moses to Qumran (London: Lutterworth Press, 1963), 247-80, originally published by Hebrew Union College Anniversary Publication, pt. 1 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1952), 233-73.

(24.) George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: OUP 1980), 43-62.

(25.) E. R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism 1800-1930 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970).

(26.) Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the American Mind (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1994), 109-45.

(27.) K. Koch, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, Studies in Biblical Theology, Eng trans. M. Kohl 2nd set., vol. 22 (London: SCM Press, 1972), 49-52.

(28.) H. H. Rowley, op. cit., 23-47.

(29.) H. H. Rowley, "Moses and the Decalogue," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 34 (1951-52): 81-118; reprinted with revisions in Men of God: Studies in Old Testament History and Prophecy (London-Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1963), 1-36.

(30.) H. H. Rowley, The Faith of Israel, 99-123.

(31.) Ibid., 100.

(32.) Cf. note 17 above.

(33.) H. H. Rowley, "The Suffering Servant and the Davidic Messiah," The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays, 61-94; first published in Oudtestamentische Studien 8 (1950): 100-36.

(34.) H. H. Rowley, "Ritual and the Hebrew Prophets," in Men of God, 111-40; previously published in JSS 1 (1956): 338-60; and in Myth, Ritual and Kingship, ed. S. H. Hooke (Oxford: OUP 1958), 236-60.

(35.) H. H. Rowley, "The Religious Value of Sacrifice," Expository Times 58 (1946): 69-71; also "The Prophets and Sacrifice," Expository Times 58 (1947): 305-07.

(36.) Cf. H. H. Rowley, "The Meaning of Sacrifice in the Old Testament," in Men of God, 67-110; previously published in Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 33 (1950-51), 74-110.

(37.) H. H. Rowley, Worship in Ancient Israel: Its Forms and Meaning (London: SPCK, 1967).

Ronald E. Clements is emeritus professor of Old Testament studies, Kings College, University of London.