1 Scripture and scriptural theology. The Scripture testifies and lives the originating, foundational and life-giving originality of the Word of God-revelation, which has its center and its vertex in Jesus, the crucified risen, Lord of the cosmos and of history. But, being a concrete library. It is being expressed over several centuries, in various languages, in various literary genres that imply both in faith, a divine gift, and in the community of faith, the fruit of communion, and also a divine gift, an interpretation of the believer that cannot avoid the fatigue of reading biblical books, with the historical-literary criteria with which it is possible to open, read and understand any ancient book by the contemporary reader. All this with the vivid awareness that they are the work of the Spirit, who remembers and gives to the Lord, through those pages, that the Church of all times has never placed on the same level as the others, although they are also venerable to the extent they are in line with the pages of the Bible. Special veneration deserve the four gospels.
2. Epistemology of biblical theology.- The problem remains open: even more so, only in this century has it been carefully studied, although results that have achieved universal consensus have not yet been reached. There have been attempts in the Catholic field and in the Protestant field that deserve attention and about whose scope G. Segalla has written very interesting pages in a work that we are pleased to quote (La teología biblica, Roma 1989, 14-42).
There is an eagerness to recognize and underline the following desire: biblical theology tries and must arrive at a unitary model, which can find its unity in the subject of biblical theology, which is the theologian, and in the methodology, which cannot be other than that of faith. “Only a theological methodology that considers the Bible as the word of God addressed to the believer in the Church can arrive at a biblical theology. But such a methodology that starts from faith and arrives at faith, and that considers the task of interpretation as an ecclesial task, will have to use the available methods to study the texts under the historical, literary, hermeneutical profile, so that possible to approach the “truth” of biblical revelation. Precisely because it is a global methodology, which gives reason and form and meaning to the various methods used, relativizes them all in relation to the text, which is the absolute… That is why we must not absolutize history in a positivist sense (against positivism of all kinds); we must not absolutize the letter (against all kinds of fundamentalism); not even the spirit must be absolutized, separated from the letter (against all mysticism and exoteric spiritualism, dangerously open to subjectivism); nor is there – even the meaning has to be absolutized (against all absolutizing hermeneutics). In any case, the theological methodology has to be historical (to respect the relationship of the traditions with the historical referent); it has to unite “the letter and the spirit”, since the word of God has been embodied in a concrete text; and it has to reach, beyond the sense, the meaning for me, for the Church, for the world. And all this complex methodological process has to look at the “truth”. what is the living God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. he wants to tell me about himself, about his mystery, about his mercy and justice with man; what does he say about man, about the history of the world”. And we add: what does it say about the action of the Church of each of the believers in order to make known above all things Jesus of Nazareth, Lord, revealer of the Father and generous giver of the Spirit; and propose, facilitate, promote those historical conditions and those vital dynamisms that make room for and facilitate a visible and significant life in faith” Let us conclude the quote: “This “truth” has to be sought as “organic truth”, that is, as unique truth in the truth of its historical expressions; a truth that is ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ. It is to this ultimate truth, Christological-eschatological, although based on creation, that all work of biblical theology must approach, showing through arguments the only living God who already reveals himself to us in the Old Testament and completely in his Son Jesus Christ.”
3. Criteria.- From this we can deduce the importance of the “heart”, the “center”, peacefully possessed and lived by simple believers, by the entire Church as such, although not always critically. Second, the unity of the Bible is constitutive and is verified as the meaning of the relationship with the various data, external to the same biblical theology, such as the life of the community and consequently the same pastoral action. There is in the Bible a unity that bases and promotes a unity in the history and in the life of each believer. Thirdly, we must convince ourselves that “history remains, on the one hand, the absolutely essential element of a biblical theology and, on the other hand, it never allows the elaboration of a definitive system of truths in the sense of a logic that excludes our correction within the tensions.
L, Pacomio
Bibl.: JJ Ferrero Blanco, Initiation to biblical theology, Herder, Barcelona 1967. P Grelot, Bible and theology, Herder, Barcelona 1979; E. Rasci, Biblical theology: renewal and influence in theological formation, in R. Latourelle, Vatican II Problems and perspectives, Follow me, Salamanca 1989, 10211068.
PACOMIO, Luciano, Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary, Divine Word, Navarra, 1995
Source: Encyclopedic Theological Dictionary
SUMMARY: I. History: 1. The beginnings: Bible and theology; 2. From theology to critical reason; 3. From doctrine to history (Gabler and Bauer); 4. From history to its interpretation (F.Ch. Baur); 5. From history to religious history; 6. From religious history to the “kerygma”; 7. From the “kerygma” to methodological pluralism. II. Method: 1. The historical-critical method; 2. The theological method; 3. Hermeneutic principle and structure. III. Theology of the OT.: current orientations: 1. Crisis of the theology of the OT; 2. Methods in use: a) The descriptive method, b) The dogmatic-didactic method, c) The diachronic method, d) The selective method of the thematic center; 3. Conclusion. IV. Theology of the NT: current orientations: 1. The historical-kerygmatic orientation; 2. The “salvation history” orientation; 3. The historical-positive orientation; 4. The systematic orientation; 5. Old and New Testament. V. Towards a biblical theology?
I. HISTORY. To know immediately what it is about, we begin with a provisional definition of biblical theology: it is “the unitary understanding expressed in a doctrinal, critical, organic and progressive synthesis of the historical revelation of the Bible (or of the OT and the NT) in around their own categories, in the light of personal and ecclesial faith”. To understand their problems we must first of all know their history.
1. THE BEGINNINGS: BIBLE AND THEOLOGY A. The path towards biblical theology was paved by the humanists (Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus), who favored a return to the original texts of the Bible. On the wave of humanism, Luther was able to propose his principle of “sola Scriptura”, which gave the decisive impetus. But he, although he wrote translations and commentaries on the Bible, never composed a biblical theology. Only after about a hundred years he came to the word.
The predecessors of biblical theology were works that swarmed between the years 1500 and 1700, called “Collegia biblica”. They were handbooks of scriptural passages organized according to the theses of the Lutheran symbol of faith or systematic theology. These works did not yet practice any interpretation of the sacred text, but were only instruments at the service of Lutheran dogmatic theology.
The name “biblical theology” was first used by WJ Christmann in 1629; but of his work we have only the title in the catalogues. The first work that we have with this name is that of Henricus a Dienst: Theologia biblica, published in Denver in 1643. But it does not depart from the “Collegia biblica” already mentioned.
The separation of biblical from dogmatic theology was favored by Pietism at the end of the eighteenth century, in the environment of the “Collegia philobiblica” or “pietatis”, where the Bible was meditated with affection. Personal contact with writing was opposed to cold, scholastic theology; for which the need was felt to make a theology drawn from the “only” Holy Scripture (AF Büsching, Epitome theologiae e solis sacris literis concinnata, Göttingen 1756). In any case, neither the practice of “loci theologici” nor pietism distinguished biblical from systematic theology. For the former thought to base theology on Scripture by collecting the texts that proved the truths of the faith; and the latter identified theology with biblical theology, which was eventually to replace dogmatic theology.
2. FROM THEOLOGY TO CRITICAL REASON. With Pietism, biblical theology presented itself as a rival to dogmatics and wanted to replace it. But only with the Enlightenment is biblical theology presented as a critical science of systematic theology. The premises are: deism, for which the ultimate judge of truth is reason; and historical criticism, which uses a rich material made available by philology and by historical research applied to the Bible; in it it was necessary to find rational religion or according to reason. What seemed contrary to reason in the texts was attributed to the primitive mentality and myth, which covered the ideas (CG Heine for the OT and JG Eichhorn for the NT). Not theology anymore, but reason became the criterion for understanding Scripture. Enlightenment biblical theology was thus founded on the authority of reason rather than on the Bible. It was based on the conviction that the truths of reason were contained in the Bible. The aim was apologetic: to make the rationalist men of culture of his time accept the sacred book. The most refined product of this Enlightenment stage is the four-volume work by GT Zachariá (1729-1777) entitled Biblische Theologie (Gottingen-Kiel 1771-1775). Zachariá refutes the previous method of “dicta probantia”. It is not enough to quote the biblical texts. They must be interpreted in such a way as to see what is valid or not in systematic theology. He had understood, then, the need for interpretation and assigned to the interpretive process of the Bible a critical role with respect to theology: “Therefore, forget for a while the doctrinal system of our Church and, through …