Book-length collections of a scholar’s previously published essays normally attempt to get a wider audience for them than they initially received.  Sometimes it’s not clear if they deserve that audience, but Kavin Rowe’s most assuredly do.  The George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament and vice-dean for faculty at Duke Divinity School has written widely in the areas of New Testament, Theology and Hermeneutics, and this anthology is a delight to peruse.  Sixteen chapters are grouped into three larger Parts, entitled “Biblical Studies and Theology,” “The New Testament, Grammars of Life, and Religious Comparison,” and “Christianity and the Human”.

The first chapter (“What If It Were True?) may be the most important in the book. Responding to a recent call for New Testament studies to be merely descriptive highlights the difference between mere knowledge and genuine understanding.  The latter arises only when one allows at least for the possibility that truth claims in a text require a response to them. Rowe works through John 3:15-17, Romans 10:9, Galatians 4:4-6, Mark 8:27-29, and Revelation 1:8 to show that “Jesus of Nazareth can either be the Jewish messiah or not,” and the response to that dilemma “can never be other than a lived response” (p. 18). Neutrality does not exist, despite those who desire that it did and call for it.

 Someone who understood this was Rudolf Bultmann.  For all the necessary criticisms of his work, Rowe recognizes in “The Kerygma of the Earliest Church,” that for Bultmann the early church’s proclamation is “God’s word addressing man as a questioning and promising word, a condemning and forgiving word” (p. 29, quoting Theology of the NT, 2:240).  With Richard Hays, in “Biblical Studies,” Rowe applauds the rediscovery of “the Theological Interpretation of Scripture” movement, recognizes that biblical studies and systematic theology need each other, and decries the views that still think they must be kept separate, as if they even could be.  In “New Testament Theology: The Revival of a Discipline,” he discusses Hahn, Wilckens, Stuhlmacher, and ultimately I. H. Marshall as positive models of Neutestamentlern who, unlike Strecker, Gnilka, Vouga, Caird and Esler, allow theology its appropriate place and influence, without blurring the goals of the two disciplines.

The remaining four chapters of this first Part continue the quest for the integration of these fields of study.  While Brevard Childs never described his “canonical criticism” as a Trinitarian hermeneutic, that is precisely what Rowe thinks led to its development (“The Doctrine of God Is a Hermeneutic”).  Leading Patristics scholar Jaroslav Pelikan wrote the first volume in the Brazos commentary series but did reception history rather than a truly integrative work (“What Is a Theological Commentary?”). A true unity in interpretive practice will be dialectical but it will promote the common goal in both disciplines of worship (“For Future Generations”).  The growing Trinitarian understanding of God throughout biblical revelation “pressures” interpreters not to dismiss the original sense of the text but to expand it in light of what later revelation has taught us was going on at that original time (“Biblical Pressure and Trinitarian Hermeneutics”).

The four essays in Part II deal with what we can learn from people and their religions quite different from us and our own and how we can learn it.  Interreligious dialogue requires, above all, making friends, hearing others’ stories and sharing our own.  When they are not alive anymore, we can simulate the same thing with their writings.  Case studies with Greco-Roman religion in general and Stoicism in particular illustrate the possibilities.  And we must remember that we can learn at least as much from where we differ as from where we agree, so we dare not shun the former enterprise, awkward as it sometimes can be, for the sake of solely focusing on the much more comfortable latter undertaking.

Rowe, finally, turns to the fascinating topic of becoming fully human.  Despite numerous doctrinal tomes seemingly to the contrary, the New Testament’s foundations are found not in a series of propositional affirmations about people but in the person of Jesus.  Look at him to see what we were meant to be and what we will be in our glorified humanity in the eschaton.  The imago dei in the New Testament is foundationally Jesus the human.  Texts unpacked include Romans 5:12-21, 2 Corinthians 3-4, Colossians 1:15-20, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 3:23-38, and Matthew 25:31-46.  What humanity means offers surprises at every turn, requires interdisciplinary study and leads to the recognition of the unity of life.  Developments in the first Christian millennium are furthered especially by Robert Louis Wilken’s magnum opus, The First Thousand Years.

Working through Rowe is no easy task, but it pays great dividends.  Here is someone who has thought long, hard and creatively about multiple disciplines, can maneuver through the exegetical trees but still recognize the theological forests.  A key theme throughout his work, even if never stated in so many words, is that far from being a detriment to serious scholarship, believing obedience to the God of Scripture actually places one in a location from which one can both know and understand the Bible most clearly and interpret it most legitimately.

There is almost nothing I can point to in these essays and say, “There, that’s something I disagree with,” and so much I find myself in enthusiastic agreement with.  (The one exception may be that I think Rowe misunderstood what the mandate of the Brazos commentary series was—much more reception history than fully theological interpretation.) Still, the discussions remain at the theoretical level a little bit longer than I find helpful.  My concerns, as with the Theological Interpretation of Scripture more generally, have to do with limits.  Where, if ever, in the Old Testament, is it legitimate to say, “this passage has Father, Son and Holy Spirit in mind.”  If ever, how do we know?  If never, but if we simply realize that God was a Trinity even when he was not recognized as such, what do we do with that realization in interpretation.  Which Psalms, if any, were Messianic.  If some, how do we detect them?  Which ones that have been suggested as such, if any, do we exclude?  Is typology then the best way to explain the New Testament’s use of some of them, or multiple fulfillment, or something else?

Of course, Rowe might respond that asking those questions is asking for different essays than he set out to write, which may be true.  But if it’s proper to expand on the original intent of Scripture, and yet within limits, I’d like to know how to expand on Rowe’s original intent and with what limits.  That said, and notwithstanding the rather outrageous price of $70 for the book, I highly recommend these methodological musings as marvelous stimuli for mulling over some of the most important macro-level questions all biblical scholars and theologians ought regularly be asking.

Craig L. Blomberg, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of New Testament
Denver Seminary
December 2024