New Testament theology

802 Pages·1986·2.492 MB·English

by  Morris, Leon

New Testament Theology
Leon Morris
Table of Contents
Title Page
Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
Part one The Pauline Writings
1 God at the center
2 Jesus Christ our Lord
3 God’s Saving Work in Christ
4 Life in the spirit
Part two The synoptic gospels and Acts
5 The gospel of Mark
6 The gospel of Matthew
7 The gospel of Luke and Acts: the doctrine of God
8 The gospel of Luke and Acts: the doctrine of Christ
9 The gospel of Luke and Acts: the salvation of our God
10 The gospel of Luke and Acts: the Holy Spirit
11 The gospel of Luke and Acts: discipleship
Part three The Johannine Writings
12 The gospel of John: the doctrine of Christ
13 The gospel of John: God the Father
14 The gospel of John: God the Holy Spirit
15 The gospel of John: the Christian Life
16 The epistles of John
17 The revelation of John
Part four The general epistles
18 The epistle to the Hebrews
19 The epistle of James
20 The past epistle of Peter
21 The second epistle of Peter
22 The epistle of Jude
Conclusion
Copyright
About the Publisher
Share Your Thoughts
Abbreviations
Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian
BAGD Literature, ed. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, 2d ed., rev. F. Wilbur Gingrich
and Frederick W. Danker (Chicago, 1979)
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
Chmn The Churchman
ExpT The Expository Times
HTR The Harvard Theological Review
IB The Interpreter’s Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick, 12 vols. (Nashville, 1952-57)
IBD The Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3 vols. (Leicester, 1980)
IBNTG C. F. D. Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek (Cambridge, 1953)
The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. George A. Buttrick and Keith R. Crim, 6 vols.
IDB
(Nashville, 1976)
Int Interpretation
James Hope Moulton and George Milligan: The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament
MM
(London, 1914-29)
The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown, 3 vols.
NIDNTT
(Grand Rapids, 1975-78)
NTS New Testament Studies
RTR The Reformed Theological Review
Hermann L. Strack und Paul Billerbeck: Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und
SBK
Midrasch, 4 vols. (München, 1922-28)
SJT The Scottish Journal of Theology
Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament,
TDNT
10 vols. (Grand Rapids, 1964-76)
Theol Theology
TynBul Tyndale Bulletin
WTJ The Westminster Theological Journal
Preface
The aim of this book is to provide a compact introduction to the theology of the New Testament. The
subject is a big one, as the existence of several massive volumes testify, but I have not sought to add
yet another large work. Rather I have tried to steer a middle course between being unhelpfully brief
and being too long and technical for the student or the interested layman. If such readers are
stimulated to tackle the larger works, I will be well rewarded. In pursuing my aim I have not gone
deeply into the controversies that interest the scholarly world, though I hope I have written with
reasonable awareness of what scholars are saying. I have simply tried to set out the principal
theological teachings of the books of the canonical New Testament as I see them, without trying to
interact with scholarly theories. I would prefer to have provided more adequate documentation, but
that too would have lengthened the book unduly.
Unless otherwise noted, I have used the New International Version for quotations from the Old
Testament. I have made my own translation for quotations from the New Testament; this gives the
reader the advantage of seeing what I understand the meaning of the Greek to be and, of course, the
disadvantage of the limitations of a personal translation. I encourage the reader to check my readings
against the standard translations.
I express my gratitude to ANZEA, the publishers of the forthcoming Festschrift for D. Broughton
Knox, for permission to use my contribution to that work, “The Apostle Paul and His God.”
Leon Morris
Introduction
Although New Testament Theology is the title of a large number of books, its precise meaning is far
from obvious. Part of the problem stems from different ways of using the word theology. Thus Rudolf
Bultmann has a notable two-volume work entitled Theology of the New Testament in which he
discusses a good deal of the New Testament. Two of his major sections are entitled “The Theology of
Paul” and “The Theology of the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles,” but his other major
divisions are “Presuppositions and Motifs of New Testament Theology” (in which he includes the
chapters “The Message of Jesus,” “The Kerygma of the Earliest Church,” and “The Kerygma of the
Hellenistic Church Aside From Paul”) and “The Development Toward the Ancient Church.” This
appears to mean that, although his book title refers to theology “of the New Testament,” he finds
theology in only two places, the Pauline and the Johannine writings. He expressly differentiates the
teaching of Jesus from theology, for his opening sentence reads, “The message of Jesus is a
presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.”1 It
would seem from this classification that most of the New Testament is not theology, and in any case it
seems that there are two theologies, and not one.
W. G. Kümmel, by contrast, has a book whose full title is The Theology of the New Testament
According to Its Major Witnesses: Jesus—Paul—John. This appears to mean that there is such a thing
as the “the” theology of the New Testament, though a doubt remains because, while there is a chapter
called “The Theology of Paul,” the other chapter headings lack this key word (“The Proclamation of
Jesus According to the First Three Gospels,” “The Faith of the Primitive Community,” etc.). In any
case he disenfranchises most of the writers. It cannot be said that Kümmel deals with the theology “of
the New Testament.”
A similar comment can be made about Hans Conzelmann’s Outline of the Theology of the New
Testament. The table of contents indicates that the treatment is in five parts: The Kerygma of the
Primitive Community and the Hellenistic Community, The Synoptic Kerygma, The Theology of Paul,
The Development After Paul, and John. If we take this outline seriously, only one part deals
specifically with theology.
Donald Guthrie approaches the subject thematically. He takes the great subjects dealt with in the
New Testament and surveys the contributions made by all the writers to each of his themes.2 We could
continue this survey indefinitely. It seems that almost every New Testament theologian sees his task
differently from the way it appears to other practitioners of the art. Gerhard Hasel points out that of
the eleven who produced New Testament theologies between 1967 and 1976 no two “agree on the
nature, function, method, and scope of NT theology.”3
It is clear that “theology” may be understood in more ways than one. Geoffrey W. Bromiley
defines it briefly in this way: “Strictly, theology is that which is thought and said concerning God.”4
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary sees it as “The study or science which treats of God, His nature
and attributes, and His relations with man and the universe.” Clearly it refers to disciplined thinking
about God, and we might understand it in this sense: “A coherent system of ideas that interpret in
logical fashion matters relating to God.” Perhaps it would be better to say, “…that in principle is
capable of interpreting…,” for our theologies are not always as coherent and effective as we would
wish. But they do represent our attempt at setting out in orderly fashion our understanding of God and
his revelation in Christ, and of what all this means for his worshipers. “New Testament theology” will
then be that understanding of matters relating to God that is expressed by, or underlies, or may be
deduced from, the New Testament. It will not necessarily always be expressed in set terms by the New
Testament writers, but it will be implied in what they have said, for what they say always has as its
basis their understanding of the ways of God. It we take the term “New Testament” seriously, we will
resist the temptation to discard passages or books that we see as of inferior importance or even
unauthentic. Everything in the New Testament is part of the thinking of the early church, whether it
goes back to Jesus himself or to one of his followers.
The question inevitably arises concerning how far we are to repeat what the New Testament
writers have said and how far we are to interpret it. Is our primary concern with “what they meant” or
with “what they mean”? There is no substitute for pursuing the former question. We must make a
sincere attempt to find the meaning the authors conveyed when they wrote their books in their own
historical situations. But, of course, as we do so some element of interpretation is inevitable. We read
these writings across a barrier of many centuries and from a standpoint of a very different culture. We
make every effort to allow for this, but we never succeed perfectly. In this book I am striving hard to
find out what the New Testament authors meant, and this not as an academic exercise, but as the
necessary prelude to our understanding of what their writings mean for us today.
We must bear in mind that the writers of the New Testament books were not writing set
theological pieces. They were concerned with the needs of the churches for which they wrote. Those
churches already had the Old Testament, but these new writings became in time the most significant
part of the Scriptures of the believing community. As such, they should be studied in their own right,
and these questions should be asked: What do these writings mean? What is the theology they express
or imply? What is of permanent validity in them?5
It is with questions like these that this book is concerned. This work is not a history of New
Testament times, nor an account of New Testament religion. Nor does it proceed from a view that the
New Testament was written as theology. As I have just said, the New Testament writers wrote to meet
the needs of the churches of their day as they saw them. But what they wrote should not be understood
as a series of random reflections. Behind all these books is the deep conviction, the deep theological
conviction, that God has acted in Christ. In other words, there is theology behind all the New
Testament writings. We cannot write a theology of Peter or James or even of Paul, for in no case do
we have sufficient material, or even an indication that the writer is giving us what he sees as most
important for Christian theology. They are all occasional writings. But these writings are theologically
informed, and we do well to take seriously the ideas expressed or implied in them.
Another problem arises from the very nature of the project. William Wrede long ago maintained
that “the name New Testament theology is wrong in both its terms,”6 and many scholars since his time
would agree. Wrede argues that we should take into consideration the whole of early Christian
literature, not simply the books in the canon, and further that the New Testament is concerned with
religion rather than with theology. Indeed, he thinks that the subject would be better called “early
Christian history of religion” or “the history of early Christian religion and theology.”7
But is the tide really wrong in either aspect? It is, of course, possible to write a theology of the
early church, taking into consideration all the early literature available. But the church has always
given the canonical writings a special place,8 and there seems no real reason why these writings
should not be studied together,9 with no more than passing references to other early literature. The
church has always regarded the canonical books as “inspired” (however the term has been
understood). It is to these books and no others that Christians refer when they wish to establish
authentic Christian teaching.10 Wrede puts little difference between the canonical writings and other
early Christian literature: “No New Testament writing was born with the predicate ‘canonical’
attached. The statement that a writing is canonical signifies in the first place only that it was
pronounced canonical afterwards by the authorities of the second- to fourth-century church, in some
cases only after all kinds of hesitation and disagreement… Anyone who accepts without question the
idea of the canon places himself under the authority of the bishops and theologians of those
centuries.”11 But this is too simple. Specifically it overlooks the fact that no bishop and no theologian
(or even council) seems ever to have assumed the right to make any book canonical or, for that matter,
uncanonical.
What seems to have happened was something like this: Some of the faithful are perplexed. They
are finding that in some churches books like 2 and 3 John are not read as sacred Scripture, whereas in
others they are. Some are reading books like 1 Clement. What is the right course? What should they
do? The question is referred to an authority, a bishop or a theologian or a council. When the decision
is given, it is in some such statement as this: “These are the books that have been recognized in the
church.” For example, when Athanasius gave his well-known list of the books of the New Testament
(the first official list that has our twenty-seven books, no more and no fewer), he referred to the
authentic books as those “delivered to the fathers,” and he went on to list them as those “handed down,
and accredited as Divine.”12 He did not decree that henceforth they were to be canonical; he said that
they had been received as such, and the formula was always something like that. No Christian or group
of Christians seems ever to have taken upon himself or itself the authority to add any book to the
accepted list or to delete any book from it.13 If we take seriously the idea that God guides his church,
we must see in this an indication that these are the books that he means his people to have. It is a
striking fact that, at a time when there was no machinery for imposing a decision on the world-wide
church, exactly the same twenty-seven books were practically universally accepted.14 We should not
see the canon as an arbitrary arrangement brought about by some bishops and theologians. It holds a
special place in the Christian scheme of things,15 and there is not the slightest reason why it should
not be studied by itself for that reason.
Wrede’s second point is that “theology” is the wrong word; he insists strongly on a historical
approach (cf. Morgan’s reference to “the theological method of interpreting the tradition by historical
methods”).16 It is, of course, possible to study the New Testament in this way, but I cannot agree that
it is the only way. I simply do not know enough about the history of the early church to attempt it,17
and I marvel at the confidence with which some approach the task. The historical approach is a very
uncertain approach, because our knowledge of the history of the early church (as opposed to our
conjectures and deductions) is so meager. The Gospels are not concerned to give us a history of the
life and times of Jesus of Nazareth. They tell us what is important for our salvation, and the history is
more or less incidental.18 With the information at present at our disposal it is simply not possible to
give anything like an accurate historical account of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and of the first days
of the church that resulted from his life and death and resurrection. Scholars dispute about how much
of the Gospels goes back to Jesus; there are endless discussions about the authenticity of this or that
saying and about that or this incident. If we are to insist on accurate history before we can speak of
theology, we are in a sad case indeed.19
We see Wrede’s concern for history in his contention that “in the last resort, we at least want to
know what was believed, thought, taught, hoped, required and striven for in the earliest period of
Christianity; not what certain writings say about faith, doctrine, hope, etc.”20 I share Wrede’s desire
for information about what was believed and thought and so on (though I do not see how that desire is
to be gratified without some startling new source of information), but I strongly dissent when he
declines to take an interest in what the New Testament says about faith and doctrine and hope. I do
very much want to know what it says about such things. Those whose area of expertise is history are
certainly free to pursue history. But theology is a distinct discipline, and it may be pursued even when
we are not certain of the historical details surrounding the documents in which it is enshrined.21 To go
into the precise times at which given doctrines emerged and the exact early Christians who first
enunciated them would be interesting, but it is not what I see as biblical theology. As Bernard Weiss
put it long ago, “Biblical theology cannot concern itself with the critical and specialized investigations
regarding the origin of NT writings, because it is only a historical-descriptive science and not a
historical-critical one.”22 Theology is concerned rather with faith and hope and love, with sin and
salvation, with life here and now, with our hopes for the hereafter, and above all with God and with
what God has done in Christ.23 The approach that insists on a close historical study of the way the
New Testament writings reached their present form is inadequate.
This is not to deny that there is development of thought in the New Testament. There is certainly
development, even if we are not in a position to trace that development with any exactness. But in any
case the task of theology is descriptive, rather than historical. It is concerned to say what the
theological teachings of the various writings are, not to explain when and how their various authors
got them. Christians are concerned primarily with a group of books in their canonical form, rather
than with how they got into that form.24 The theologian, of course, must have some concern for
history. The New Testament documents emerged at a given time and in a given culture, neither of
which is ours. We must go back to that time and ask our questions in the light of that given culture if
we are to make sense of the documents. What I am eschewing is the attempt to trace in detail the
sequence of events in the early church and the way the documents came to be in their present form as
the necessary prelude to theology.
Because New Testament theology is basically occupied with the final product, not with working
out the steps along the way, it seeks out what is distinctive of the early Christians over against what
Judaism or Hellenism or first-century society in general believed. It is reasonable to expect that the
Christian community had some things in common with each of these others and some things peculiar
to itself. Individual Christians surely had their own personal emphases (just as they do today). It is
important to see what is distinctive of Christians, both as a group and as individuals. In this study I
will attempt something of an overview of the thought of each—that is, of Christians as a whole and as
individuals—and attempt to discover both what is distinctive and what is common to all. The great
Christian affirmations should emerge.
I am more respectful of Wrede’s insistence on the concern of the New Testament writers for
religion. But as I see it, religion and theology go together, or should do so. Each is impoverished
without the other. A purely pragmatic religion, with no considered theology behind it, is unsatisfying.
At the same time a theology that does not issue in right religious practices is not worth much.
Theology, as the New Testament writers see it, necessarily issues in right attitudes and right practices,
and that toward both God and other people. But where the theology and the religion with which it is so
closely bound up can be distinguished, this book is concerned with the former.
The Christian theologian, accordingly, becomes involved in his subject. Morgan points out that
“a theologian does not have the same freedom as a historian. He cannot say that this was how the
tradition understood Christianity, but that it is not a live option for him. If he is to remain a Christian
theologian, he must be able to claim continuity with the tradition, and that means weaving the pattern
of his own position with threads received from the past.”25 In some measure all Christians are
involved in this task of identifying the threads in the New Testament and weaving them into a pattern.
It may be that none of us will be completely successful; we are not big enough and our grasp is not
comprehensive enough to accomplish the task. It may even be that some will see the task as an effort
to reconcile the irreconcilable.26 But at least what we are trying to do in a study like this is to come to
grips with the teaching of the whole New Testament. We are trying to be, not Paulinists or followers
of John or of the Synoptic theologians, but theologians of the New Testament.
This leads to a further problem confronting anyone who would write a theology of the New
Testament these days—namely, a widespread recognition that there are considerable differences
among the writers of the various New Testament books. Some argue that there can be no such thing as
a theology “of the New Testament”; they prefer to think of a number of “theologies.”27 They see the
differences among the writers as so considerable that they can talk only of contradictions, and, of
course, if there are contradictions, it is useless to seek a common theology.
But, while we recognize the differences, we must also recognize that there is a unity. If there had
not been some kind of unity, the various books would not all have been accepted into the one canon.
For all their differences the writers of the New Testament books were all recognized as Christians, as
were the many other believers who did not write books. There was something that marked Christians
off from other people, and that something was recognized by both the Christians themselves and the
outsiders who viewed them. There was a recognition among the Christians that God had acted in Jesus
of Nazareth, especially in his death and resurrection. There was a recognition that what God had done
demanded from them an attitude of trust (their word was “faith”) and a resulting life of service—
service to their God and and service to other people.
A good deal depends on what we are looking for. In bringing out his thought of unity in the
diversity of the New Testament, A. M. Hunter draws attention to the use of a variety of phrases: in the
Synoptic Gospels, “the kingdom of God”; in Paul, “being in Christ”; and in John, “the Logos
becoming incarnate.” He proceeds, “Now isolate each of these phrases, and observe what is likely to
happen. Your study of the Kingdom of God may take you back through Judaism to the Old Testament
and perhaps even (as it did Otto) to primitive Aryan religion. Your study of the Pauline formula ‘in
Christ’ may take you back to Hellenistic mysticism (as it did Deissmann). Your study of the Logos
may take you back through Philo to Plato and the Stoics.”28 There is no real connection between
primitive Aryan religion, Hellenistic mysticism, and Philo, Plato, and the Stoics. It would be easy to
conclude that the three expressions quoted have nothing to do with each other. But that would be too
hasty a conclusion. As Hunter goes on, “When Jesus said, ‘The Kingdom of God has come upon you’
(Luke x.9) and Paul ‘If any man is in Christ, there is a new creation’ (2 Cor. v. 17) and John ‘The
Logos became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John i. 14), they were not making utterly different and
unrelated announcements; on the contrary, they were using different idioms, different categories of
thought, to express their common conviction that the living God had spoken and acted through his
Messiah for the salvation of his people.”29
This means that we should not hastily assume that different forms of expression necessarily point
to irreconcilable contradictions. There is such a thing as “unity in diversity,” and where it exists we
should seek it out. I do not mean, of course, that Hunter’s example proves that all the diversities in the
New Testament will, on examination, resolve themselves into a satisfying unity. We are at the
beginning of the enterprise. We do not know where it will lead. All I am saying is that what Hunter
has done shows plainly that there can be a basic unity when some of the New Testament writers are
using their natural thought forms to express ideas that on the surface are not closely related. We must
not pass over the diversities, but it is important also that we do not neglect the unity.
We could perhaps draw an illustration from our own experience. In a congregation of like-
minded Christian people we commonly find differences. Some members are better informed and are