Summary Of Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy By Brueggemann

Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy by Walter Brueggemann

Book report by John-Paul Harper (12999008)

The major concern of Brueggemann’s book is to map a new approach to doing Old Testament theology that is both appropriate to the present postmodern context and provides something of a bridge between the church’s confessional approach and the academy’s traditional historical-critical approach. He argues that the substance and underlying process behind the formation of the Old Testament is best explained by the concepts of Testimony, Dispute, and Advocacy. By this he firstly means that the theological claims of the OT take the basic form of testimony and therefore, in the first instance, appeal neither to history in any

In this atmosphere Karl Barth refused the acceptable and reasonable discourse of “the cultured despisers of religion” and challenged “natural reason” as the beginning point of faith. He exposed objective scholarship as theory-laden and cried out that the reigning methods of liberalism flew in the face of the subject they purported to study, namely “the Holy God who cannot be grasped in such conventional and autonomous categories”. Barth emphasized the importance of rhetoric and that the God of the Bible is given only in, with, and under the text itself. Since Barth, scholars have tended to be “double-minded” or “bilingual”, at some level accepting the epistemological assumptions of modernity, but at another accepting normative theological claims that threaten at times to impose on the biblical materials. Alt and Noth, following Barth, put forward the thesis that Mosaic Israel from its inception operated with distinct theological assumptions, thus challenging the reigning developmentalism of an earlier era. Albright and Wright’s work in the United States in many ways paralleled this, insisting on the uniqueness and singularity of Israel’s faith in

Brevard Childs mounted a different challenge, suggesting that the movement was not “theological” enough and that interpretation should proceed not according to the schema of historical criticism, but rather according to the “canonical intentionality” of the text. Furthermore, James Barr challenged Old Testament theology’s poor linguistic method, suggested that Israel’s recital was closer to “story” than “history”, and observed the priority of God’s speech over act in the Old Testament text. At the same time, Leo Perdue’s The Collapse of History challenged the naive modernist epistemology of the privileged Euro-American interpreters of Scripture which tended to assume that the “facts” were always innocently available. Between 1970 and 1990, Brueggemann identifies sociological and rhetorical analysis as two significant developments within Old Testament interpretation. The former, pioneered by Gottwald, insisted that Israelite faith was not a disembodied set of ideas, but that all its statements of meaning were deeply enmeshed in material realities like demography, technology, and economics. This implies an implicit element of risk in normative theological claims with which the contemporary interpreter must wrestle. Secondly, scholars like Muilenburg have increasingly realized the significance