INTRODUCTION

All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

A CURIOUS NEGLECT

n an essay originally published in 1975, Nils Dahl drew attention to the curious neglect of "God" in

I New Testament studies. I cite his own words:

For more than a generation, the majority of New Testament scholars have not only
eliminated direct references to God from their works but have also neglected
detailed and comprehensive investigation of statements about God. Whereas a
number of major works and monographs deal with the Christology (or
ecclesiology, eschatology, etc.) of the New Testament, it is hard to find any
comprehensive or penetrating study of the theme "God in the New Testament."1

Early in the 1990s I had my own discovery of the paucity of studies on "God" in the NT when I agreed to
write an article on "God" in the Gospels for a dictionary.2 Searching then through the previous twenty
years of New Testament Abstracts, I was able to find only a small handful of publications (and these only
journal articles) that directly treated "God" in any of the four canonical Gospels. This meant an unusually
short bibliography for a large article (something for which, in a sense, one could be grateful!), but it also
reflected the sort of neglect that Dahl decried.
In the following chapter, I consider the state of the matter in the years since Dahl's landmark essay. It is
appropriate to ask again at this point how "God" figures in NT scholarship, especially in the last few
decades. As we will see, there have been important contributions on this topic. Moreover, there are
significant issues that are raised in considering how to address the topic. Before we directly engage these
matters, however, we should explore a bit further what prompted Dahl's complaint.
Considering factors in modern NT scholarship that helped account for the neglect of "God," Dahl
alleged a "pronounced Christocentricity" among scholars, with roots in the nineteenth century, along with a
linked "reaction against metaphysical theology" that goes back even as far as Luther and that was
reinforced in the twentieth century by developments such as "demythologizing" and "existential
interpretation."3 That is, the entirely understandable theological emphasis, from the Reformation onward,
that we can know God properly not from general philosophical premises but only through reflecting on
God's actions toward us (Deus pro nobis) has meant that studies of New Testament theology concentrated
above all on Jesus (Christology) as the principal agent of divine purposes and on divine redemptive
Copyright @ 2010. Abingdon Press.

provision (soteriology), the formation of an elect people (ecclesiology), and the ultimate triumph of God's
redemptive intentions (eschatology). So, whether deliberately or inadvertently, the topic of "God" was
typically subsumed under these other topics and was not often a focus in itself.
Dahl also cited several major scholars of the time, of various critical and theological standpoints
(Bultmann, Cullmann, and G. E. Ladd), as illustrative of the view that there was really little to say about
"God" as a topic of its own in the NT. In this sort of view, the alleged neglect of "God" is simply an
appropriate reflection of the limited place of "God" as a subject in the NT writings. Some of Cullmann's
introductory comments in his classic study of NT Christology will serve as an example of this widespread
scholarly view. Rightly emphasizing that the oldest confessional expressions preserved in the NT focus on

EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 10/30/2018 7:51 PM via SEMINARIO TEOLOGICO CENTROAMERICANO- SETECA
AN: 856734 ; Hurtado, Larry W..; God in New Testament Theology 16
Account: ns023820.campus.ehost2