John Goldingay: Do We Need the NT?

John Goldingay

Do We Need the New Testament? Letting the Old Speak for Itself.
Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2015.
Available at Amazon.com

This book, mostly a collection of lectures by John Goldingay, allows Goldingay to play the part of provocateur by pushing back on doctrines of scripture that are too NT-centric and schemes of hermeneutics that overly christianize the OT.

To begin with, Goldingay hates the descriptor “Old Testament” because “old” implies obsolescence and “old” is only used to describe the mosaic covenant in contrast to the new covenant, not Israel’s scriptures. So he prefers the designation “First Testament.” I’m sympathetic here.

On whether we need the NT, Goldingay’s answer is, “Yes, of course, we need the New Testament Scriptures, but they don’t supersede the earlier Scriptures. We need the First Testament for an understanding of the story of God’s working out his purpose, for its theology, for its spirituality, for its hope, for its understanding of mission, for its understanding of salvation and ethics.”

There is an interesting essay on the Book of Hebrews where Goldingay claims that the book has inadvertedly had a negative impact on Christian views of the OT. I wonder what David deSilva, Craig Koester, Luke Johnson, and Andrew Lincoln would say to this?

The best chapter was the final one on theological interpretation. Goldingay believes in theological interpretation because the only reason why the Bible exists is because it talks about God and God’s people. And Goldingay believes, contra John Collins, that the Bible does have a singular and unified story. But Goldingay complains that bland generalizations like “The book of Jonah is all about Christ,” is trite and inaccurate. He thinks the Bible is theocentric because Christ himself was theocentric! He doesn’t see a lot of hope for trinitarian readings of the OT since “Yahweh is God – period; therefore Yahweh is Father, Son and Spirit.” To say otherwise obscures the theological significance of OT pronouncements about God. On the Rule of Faith, Goldingay notes its attraction, but argues that it can only be used analytically, it can help us see what is there, but it cannot determine what is allowed to be there. To sum up his point: “So my argument is that theological interpretation needs to be wary of being christocentric and being Trinitarian and following the formulations of Christian theology and the Rule of Faith. The God of the First Testament became incarnate in Jesus, but reading the Scriptures, and the First Testament in particular, in those ways easily generates readings that are unfaithful to the theological significance of texts that have other things to say than ideas that fit easily with Christology, the doctrine of the Trinity and the Rule of Faith.” I take the point, but I think it’d be pushing a big rock up a steep hill to argue that the apostles and church fathers took that approach.

If I had to sum up Goldingay’s  main point it would be this: theology is great, but do theology while letting the Old [First] Testament be itself.

In the end, I certainly don’t agree with everything Goldingay says, but it is a short, interesting, readable, and provocative book for everyone concerned with how to read the Old [First] Testament as Christians without reducing it into an allegory of Christian beliefs.

Interestingly enough, Joel Green, an academic dean at Fuller Seminary, one of Goldingay’s colleagues, has written a fine book on theological interpretation. It would be a fun day at Fuller Seminary to get both guys together for a debate on the subject: How shall we read the Bible?