New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ

New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ

Thomas R Schreiner

Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, 2008, 976pp.

 

It seems obvious what we mean when we say “Paul teaches” or “Jesus says”, but what do we mean when we say “the New Testament teaches”? The New Testament is a small library of books by several authors—authors who, it is popularly argued, apparently did not share each other’s manuscripts or they would be more in agreement with one another! While they share a common subject and a common context, is there really a coherence to this group of texts to the point at which we might say “This here is the teaching of the New Testament”? For example, influential Durham scholar James Dunn has argued that the New Testament is more diverse than unified—more a cacophony than a harmony. Many scholars remain persuaded of his case.

Showing that Dunn is not right is not as easy as it looks, and yet achieving this is a significant act of service to the churches of Christ as they seek to live under the authority of the New Testament. In his major new book, New Testament Theology, Thomas Schreiner gives an account of the theology of the New Testament that both recognizes the subtle nuances of the different voices and also discerns the central thematic coherence. He does this while also recognizing that the New Testament is itself part of a larger canon, and is, together with the Old Testament, part of a larger unity. At the same time, Schreiner does not arrogantly suppose that his word is the last one on the subject, or that no more ‘New Testament theologies’ could be written after this; he insists that “the NT is authoritative and consistent … it really is possible to write a NT theology, even though no NT theology can ever plumb the depths of the message therein” (p. 888). In fact, from my point of view, it was a highlight of the book that its author’s humility and diligence—his sense that this labour is a ministry to his fellow believers—was readily apparent. New Testament Theology is an accessible (if lengthy!) book written for pastors and lay people with a minimum technical fuss.

As Schreiner sees it, the New Testament is unified along two complementary axes. The first of these is that the New Testament is a book about the fulfilment of the promises of the God of Israel. And yet, there is still an expectation of more from God. He writes:

The thesis advanced in this book is that NT theology is God-focused, Christ-centred, and Spirit-saturated, but the work of the Father, Son, and Spirit must be understood along a salvation-historical timeline; that is, God’s promises are already fulfilled but not yet consummated in Christ Jesus. (p. 23)

The brilliance of this is not immediately obvious, if, like me, Graeme Goldsworthy’s stuff has been your bread and butter for years. Schreiner has read his Goldsworthy (and others, I might add), and puts him to good use, as you can see.1 The New Testament is a book about God, but it is a book about the works of God within human history in the life and death of Jesus Christ. It’s theological, but it’s biblical theological. These events, from which we discover the God who is Father, Son and Spirit, are made meaningful because they are a fulfilment of the ancient promises to the people of Israel. They fit into that matrix. But, as Schreiner repeats again and again, there is a ‘not yet’: believers still await a further completion of God’s work in the world. They live in the ‘overlap of the ages’. You see, the New Testament is also a profoundly eschatological book.

Charting salvation history in this way makes a good deal of sense because it comes from showing how deeply dependent the New Testament is on the Old Testament—in just the way it tells us it is. The authors of the New Testament never tire of talking about the Old Testament, even though it was written in a different language, and sometimes they had to quote it from memory because a scroll wasn’t close to hand. Schreiner has not overlaid on the Bible some dispensational scheme, or posed a dichotomy between law and grace, or come up with a neat schema of covenants. He is a much better reader of the Bible than that.

The second axis is found in the subtitle of the book: ‘Magnifying God in Christ’. Here’s Schreiner again:

… the grounding theme of NT theology is magnifying God in Christ … God is magnified and praised in revealing himself through Christ as God fulfills his saving promises. (p. 120)

By ‘magnifying’, Schreiner has chosen an archaic way of saying ‘glorifying’. This theme—the theme of the glorification of God—utterly permeates the book. It is, to be sure, the organizing principle of all theology for Schreiner. So it is with the doctrine of God (“The supremacy of God over all things means that nothing is more important than glorifying God”—p. 128), with theological anthropology—

To live for the sake of the kingdom is simply another way of saying that human beings live for God’s sake—for his glory. He is to be the sum and substance of human life and to take priority in everything (p. 123)

—sin (“… sin exists when people fail to thank and glorify God”—p. 144) and the purpose of mission (“The ultimate purpose for mission is the glory of God, so that his name will be magnified among all peoples”—p. 144).

But is this emphasis on God’s own self-glorification (learned from Jonathan Edwards via John Piper) right? I do have my reservations. The desire to move from a man-centred theology to a God-centred theology is laudable. However, the tendency is for the creation, and human beings in it, to completely dis­appear from view. Furthermore, isn’t the priority God’s love as his defining characteristic? A properly biblical and theological account of God’s character would certainly nuance God’s desire for his own glory with his love—his self-centredness with his other-centredness. If God is for his own glory, it is also true that his glory is refracted through his creation—and especially through human beings, who are the image and glory of God. The incarnation of Christ teaches us that God is not glorious in splendid isolation and self-regard, but shares his glory with those he has made.

Schreiner is, I’m happy to say, largely careful to give a Christological account of God’s self-glorification, which protects his theology from these traps. Schreiner grounds the glorification of God in the history of God’s dealings with human beings in Christ. God is magnified, in his depiction, in Christ—that is, as people are redeemed and share in his glory. It is an interesting thesis that is stimulating and enlightening. Think, for example, how prominent the theme of ‘glory’ is in John’s gospel, and how it is linked so often with the cross of Christ. As Schreiner puts it, “The heart of NT theology is the work of God in Christ in saving his people, and such saving work brings praise, honor, and glory to God” (p. 128). Yet, I am not entirely convinced that this always arises from the emphasis of the texts themselves, and not from the Edwardsian tradition.

Schreiner has (quite properly, in my view) determined to handle his material thematically, rather than give a successive account of each New Testament book. Organizing the material by themes enables the author to make connections and draw insights that show the inner coherence of the New Testament. But, if anything, Schreiner has not been thematic enough. Within each topical section, he returned to giving an account of what each book or author had to say on a particular topic—often more descriptively than analytically. More bravery at this level may have revealed surprising correspondences between the writers, but Schreiner is a cautious scholar, not given to flights of fancy. The best sections of the book, in my opinion, are when Schreiner addresses Christian experience and hope through New Testament eyes (see especially his chapter on ‘Faith and Obedience’).

With terrific indexes, New Testament Theology can operate as a reference work, though it can also be read easily from cover to cover, despite its size (over 900 pages). There are times when Schreiner doesn’t go as deep as the subject matter deserves, and offers more assertions than arguments—especially about why he disagrees with others. But this is excusable, given the purpose of this particular book. For example, his section on righteousness in Paul is a compressed version of material he has written on expansively elsewhere. I noted that he has changed his mind on the meaning of the righteousness of God since his Romans commentary.2 However, New Testament Theology is a remarkable and stimulating work that (as Brian Rosner from Moore College puts it) helps us to answer that perennial question, “What is the New Testament about?”

Endnotes

1. There is an interesting Appendix at the back on the recent history of biblical theology.

2. I preferred his former view (that righteousness means to God’s covenant faithfulness) to the new one—that is, that righteousness is a forensic or legal term—which does not seem to fit with the biblical-theological thrust of the current book.

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