I recently began reading Volume One of Old Testament Theology by John Goldingay.

In the Introduction to the work, he presents his trajectory for evaluating the Old Testament and gives some needed attention to providing foundational instruction regarding the nature of theology and Old Testament studies. His comments prove to be keen and valuable insight for anyone interested in understanding and/or doing theology or Old Testament studies. His words also fall safely upon the hearts of those who have chosen to think critically about (versus being critically against) theology, the Bible and the God we all respect and love.

1. “I do not care for the phrase ‘Old Testament’ which we inherit from some time in the patristic period, because it rather suggests something antiquated and inferior left behind by a dead person.” (p. 15)

2. “By theology I mean such an analytic, critical and constructive exercise, a discipline or a set of disciplines that developed through the interaction between Middle Eastern and European thought in post-New Testament times, particularly after the Enlightenment.” (p. 17)

3. “The development of theology was not a development required by the nature of the Scriptures, but an accidental result of the journey of the gospel into Europe.” (p. 17)

4. “Old Testament theology seeks to formulate the inherent nature of Old Testament faith in the analytic, critical and constructive categories that help us interact with it in our own age.” (p. 17)

5. "Systematic theology involves a further level of one's evaluative or critical stance in relation to Scripture. It does that in practice, whether or not it does in theory, in deciding what parts of Scripture are more or less important and/or more or less true. Even if it does not actually declare that Scripture is wrong, it omits scriptural material in a way that constitutes a practical declaration of this kind. (p. 18)

6. “…interpreters evaluate the Old Testament (or anything else) on the basis of what they believe already. In the past this was less obvious because, for example, modernity or pietism gave different reading communities a common evaluative framework that felt self-evidently true.” (p. 19)

7. “…I want to try to subject my framework of thinking to the Old Testament’s. I am betting that this is more likely to generate new insight than if I operate the other way around.” (p. 19)

8. “Let us imagine that God is like a lion, as the Old Testament says (Lam. 3:10; Hos. 5:14; Amos 3:8). Testimony is then like telling people you have met a lion. Preaching is like inviting people to come to meet a lion. Theology is like reflecting on your meeting with a lion. In a parallel way, there are many angles from which to seek to understand the metaphysical lion. There are the angles of the systematic theologian and the philosophical theologian, the New Testament scholar-and the Old Testament scholar. The nature of the beast is such that no one angle and no one set of categories will reveal everything.” (p. 20)

9. “…there is virtually unacknowledged conflict between the church’s metanarrative and that of the Old Testament (and the New Testament, actually, but that is another story). I refer not to churches that do not claim to stick too close to Scripture, but to churches that do so claim. The point is well illustrated by the nature of the creeds, which may (or may not) have been appropriate situational responses to the contexts in which they arose but do not form a reliable guide to the contents of biblical faith.” (p. 22)

10. “It is quite logical that the Christian church ignores most of the Old Testament and then thinks that Jesus is all that matters, because a main significance of the Old Testament is to show us that God has a broader agenda than we think when we focus exclusively on Jesus.” (p. 26)

11. “ ‘Gospel’ does not come into being only with the coming of Jesus. In speaking of Jesus’ story as ‘gospel,’ the early Christians were thinking of his story in terms that had already applied to Israel’s story. (p. 28)