Customer Reviews

Beyond New Testament Theology: A STory and a Programme

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This was assigned reading for a PhD seminar I had. The author lists in his Introduction his criteria for evaluating NT theologies since JP Gabler. Räisänen's sympathies are clearly with the "history of religions" approach to NT theology, particularly as defined by W. Wrede more than a century ago. The primary reason seems to be that collapsing the second step (finding what is normative/applicable today) into the first step (understanding the texts in their setting) always seems to distort what scholars find in the NT and early Christian documents. Räisänen tests NT theologies by his criteria so consistently that his own theology proposal at the end of the book came as little surprise to me.
The volume of the works Räisänen covers would take half a lifetime to digest. Histories of NT scholarship from native English-speakers will tend to skew their presentation toward English & American scholars, so Räisänen's perspective brings great balance for folks who are limited to English works and the select few continental works that have been translated. A word of caution to conservative/evangelical readers: scholars who argue for historicity and/or essential unity in the New Testament documents do not receive much respect from Räisänen.