Introduction
The third part of this volume is concerned with the possible futures of New Testament theology. In the previous chapter, we examined one such alternative future and found that this postmodern, non-foundationalist approach does not provide a coherent or secure foundation, especially one that fulfills the kind of linguistically based approach that we are seeking. James Barr’s (1924–2006) helpful comments and intimations notwithstanding, we must still address the question of the productive use of linguistics in New Testament theology. As a result, in the next three chapters, I attempt to outline how what we have learned regarding the history and development of modern linguistics might influence the conceptualizing – or perhaps better, reconceptualizing – of New Testament theology in a way that faithfully recognizes and appropriates the developments and insights of modern linguistics, corrects the identified deficiencies in various other theological proposals that have already been discussed, and incorporates the best practices of the tradition of New Testament theology. My goal is to provide a linguistically based and informed approach to New Testament theology so that it retains those elements of the theological tradition that are linguistically sound while providing a reconceptualization that recognizes the fundamental insights and advances that have been made over the course of the last century of modern linguistic thought. In this chapter, I will lay the foundation for such a linguistic approach. In the next, I will propose basic components of a linguistic model for New Testament theology. Once this linguistic methodological framework has been described, I will, in Chapter 8, treat a particular example of a well-known topic in New Testament theology, the Son of Man, as an instance of how to proceed within such a framework. Much further work remains to be done before arriving at a New Testament theology as is envisioned here, but these three chapters are put forth as a way of attempting to form the first steps in such a reconceptualization.
A Dearth of Proposals Warrants a Linguistic Approach
Before I turn to a linguistic proposal regarding New Testament theology, I want to return to several of the books that offer methodological assessments of New Testament theology. As I have mentioned in previous chapters, there have been several works that have discussed the methodological fortunes of New Testament theology in more detail than is sometimes found in the introductions or other pertinent chapters of New Testament theologies themselves. These methodological volumes share with this one the concern over developments within the field of New Testament theology, with a view toward correcting and advancing the discipline. However, such studies rarely offer significant accounts of the way forward in New Testament theology, and none that I have found offers a modern linguistic proposal. Most are predominantly descriptive, either assuming the proposal they are going to advance or simply not making one. For example, Peter Balla in his Challenges to New Testament Theology is not concerned with offering a new way forward in New Testament theology but offers a rebuttal of challenges to it by reasserting its historical and theological basis.Footnote 1 This is the same basis that I have previously identified, although I have nuanced it so as to see it locked within a pre-linguistic model. Dan Otto Via similarly is concerned in his book with describing the fortunes of New Testament theology through the ages, as seen in its major figures.Footnote 2 In the final chapter, in which he addresses questions of hermeneutics and postmodernism, Via hints at some of the potential linguistic issues when he addresses the question of postmodernism. He mentions Frederic Jameson’s work on poststructuralist linguistics and Jacques Derrida’s (1930–2004) views on the severing of the signifier and signified and the shaping role of language.Footnote 3 However, Via does so in a chapter, his last of substance, in which he disputes and then dismisses the notion of postmodernism, in which these and other thinkers are located. Edward Klink and Darian Lockett are content to describe and then present five different views of biblical theology. Their purpose is simply descriptive.Footnote 4 Thomas Hatina also offers a thorough discussion of the history of New Testament theology but attempts to bolster what he calls the dialectical approach (as opposed to foundationalism) by returning to the incorporation of religion (see Räisänen below, whom Hatina seems to follow in this regard).Footnote 5
Two of these volumes go further, however, and attempt to offer a way forward that is not simply the way of the past but a new path. It is worth examining these two briefly. The first, in which Heikki Räisänen (1941–2015) subtitles his Beyond New Testament Theology as a Story and a Programme,Footnote 6 is mostly a story, with a history of the discipline from Gabler to the present, mentioning many of the scholars treated elsewhere in this book. Out of this, Räisänen outlines his program, starting with principles and then moving to a model. The model, a section of only fourteen pages (plus notes) in a book of 206 pages, includes seven dimensions (and a category for biblical examples), several of them informed by recent developments in intellectual thought, but none of them related to language and linguistics.Footnote 7 These dimensions recognize the dialectic that occurs between tradition, experience, and interpretation;Footnote 8 draw upon the experience of religion as discussed by Peter Berger (1929–2017) and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986);Footnote 9 note the lack of “core experiences” in the New Testament;Footnote 10 affirm that the New Testament conveys interpretation of religious experience, as described by Luke Timothy Johnson;Footnote 11 recognize that humans create and experience a “symbolic universe”;Footnote 12 include a critique Daniel Patte’s notion of a semantic universe used in his work on Paul; and conclude with a warning about reductionism. There are many things to consider in this very brief sketch of a way forward in New Testament theology, but even apart from its lack of addressing linguistic questions, it lacks a sense of cohesiveness and certainly of substantial argumentative development.
In the second work, A. K. M. Adam recounts the history of New Testament theology as a product of modernism (which it clearly is, as noted in previous chapters), whereas he seeks to argue for a “nonmodern” New Testament theology. He devotes the last chapter of his book on Making Sense of New Testament Theology to outlining the “prospects” for such a non-modern theology.Footnote 13 As a step beyond historical criticism – with which Adam has an ambiguous relationship of either rejecting or assuming or acknowledging – Adam wishes to utilize a literary approach to interpretation. He uses the notion of “making sense,” grounded in the ideas of such postmodern and even poststructural interpreters as Jonathan Culler, Richard Rorty (1931–2007), Jeffrey Stout, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and Stanley Fish.Footnote 14 Adam’s notion of “making sense” is one that assumes that we constantly interpret things, such as the New Testament, according to our interests or purposes within the contexts of social communities. Although he hints at the problems of language, he does not explore them. Instead, he merely sets the stage for them, by admitting that preunderstanding precedes interpretation. He seems more concerned to dispute what he calls “transcendental criteria” for determining a meaning that he seems to equate with historical criticism.Footnote 15 Adam introduces other criteria for doing New Testament theology. These include: (1) criteria that are part of what it means to be New Testament theology, (2) aesthetic criteria, (3) ethical or political criteria, and (4) theological criteria. Adam may not wish to have a transcendental view, but he appears to take an essentialist view when he defines the internal criteria of what it means to be New Testament theology as directly dealing with the New Testament and theology.Footnote 16 He even entertains the idea of misreadings, which implies right and wrong readings, and finally settles on a kind of theological-canonical approach to reading.Footnote 17 Adam undoubtedly raises some interesting hermeneutical issues, and even hints at some linguistic issues, but he presents no linguistic criteria or even an explicit acknowledgment that linguistic problems must be addressed in doing New Testament theology. This is even though he nevertheless introduces the notion of making sense of what one reads and thereby demands some linguistic model for making that sense.
There is much to be gained from all these works that I have mentioned in this section. They have their own perspectives on the history of New Testament theology and have various ways of categorizing and describing the history of this discipline. Their ways differ from the one that I have presented in parts one and two of this volume, because none of them has apparently recognized the centrality of language in New Testament theology. As I stated earlier, New Testament studies, of which New Testament theology is a part, is a textual discipline, and if it is a textual discipline then it is a linguistic discipline. However, consideration of linguistic issues is surprisingly lacking in not only the New Testament theologies that have been produced, but in those works that critically examine the enterprise and propose some ways forward.
I challenge New Testament theology to become informed by modern linguistics so as, at the least, to infuse the discipline with the most important insights over the last century or so regarding language and, possibly, to advance it in significant ways as it moves from its previous rationalist and comparative-historical bases to potentially new avenues of exploration and insights. I am in no way meaning simply or categorically to disregard the previous efforts of New Testament theology based upon these antecedent periods of thought, as they are largely responsible for delivering the discipline to us in its current state, as we have seen in the works discussed in the chapters above. As linguist Francis Dineen states, in a paper on the relationship of linguistics to other disciplines, “The methods and findings of modern linguistics therefore do not, because they cannot, falsify the descriptive categories of classic philosophy or traditional grammar”; however, these previous approaches “are shown to be inadequate.”Footnote 18 In other words, advances in thinking about language do not mean that previous descriptions of language do not have some validity, but that methods have developed further so as to show that these findings are now in need of greater explanatory adequacy. Because questions of language are fundamental to the discipline of New Testament studies, it too should avail itself of the insights of the most important recent developments in modern linguistics as an appropriate step forward in New Testament theology. There are many potential insights available from modern linguistics. In Chapter 3, I offered a brief history of modern linguistics as a means of establishing a foundation for further discussion. That discussion takes place in this chapter. In this chapter, I establish the need for linguistically reconceptualizing New Testament theology by showing the lack of linguistic knowledge in contemporary theological thought. I then offer some broad principles regarding what linguistics is and what it is not in relation to New Testament theology. These are principles that would generally find assent among a broad range of linguists. This provides the basis for my positive proposal for linguistically reconceptualizing New Testament theology in Chapter 7.
Matters of Language and New Testament Theology
The role of language in life is hard to deny. One of the undeniable constants of humankind is the use of language. As linguists William O’Grady and John Archibald state, “Language is at the heart of all things human. We use it when we’re talking, thinking, reading, writing, and listening. It’s part of the social structure of our communities; it forges the emotional bond between parent and child; it’s the vehicle for literature and poetry. Language is not just a part of us; language defines us.”Footnote 19 And thus it has always been so.Footnote 20 This makes it difficult to understand why it is that the role of language in New Testament theology has not been properly recognized and incorporated.Footnote 21 There is no denying that New Testament theologies are written in various languages and that they often make statements about instances of ancient languages. However, as the surveys of New Testament theologies in previous chapters reveal, few of them focus upon questions of language, and even fewer are concerned with how modern linguistics might affect the performance of their theological task. There are many possible reasons why this is the case – such as a lack of awareness of the issues in modern linguistic studies and their implications for the study of theology; a natural reticence to undertake the rigors of having to master a new body of theoretical literature; a sense of being overwhelmed by the apparent diversity within modern linguistic thought; or perhaps even the failure to see its relevance. All of these are understandable reasons, each of which is implicitly addressed in the sections that follow.
If the history of thought about language that I have offered, especially in Chapters 1 and 3, as well as in Chapter 4, is close to being accurate, however, then New Testament theologians cannot avoid questions of language and, thereby, questions of modern linguistics. New Testament theology is a linguistic discipline, in that linguistic judgments are constantly being made about texts, their meanings, and their influence, as well as about how these texts and their interpretive categories relate to each other, and these judgments are then being interpreted and expressed by means of understandings of language. As we observed in discussing the rationalist and comparative-historical periods within language study, whether New Testament theologians realize it or not, these remain the predominant orientations to thinking about language in their major works. For the most part, those who do New Testament theology have consciously or unconsciously adopted, or perhaps inherited, these approaches to language. There are a few exceptions that we have noted above, but even among these there are few that have fully embraced the significance of modern linguistics for performing their task. While we do not wish to disregard the contributions of these New Testament theologians in enabling us to get to this point in the discussion, their failure to consider modern linguistic perspectives has resulted in some serious shortcomings in New Testament theological thought that should be remedied, not just on a micro-scale, such as in dealing with individual words, but also on a macro-scale, such as how New Testament theologies are conceptualized, organized, and executed. The question is not whether one wants to recognize the importance of language and, with it, linguistic thought, but whether one understands the theories of language that one is using when one is undertaking to write New Testament theology.
One of the major difficulties, I believe, in coming to terms with the importance of modern linguistics is that it requires a significant and conscious shift in one’s orientation to language from that held by most New Testament scholars. A modern linguistic orientation requires that we shift from one paradigm of thought to another.Footnote 22 Instead of thinking rationalistically or comparatively or historically or traditionally, one must think linguistically. For some, such a statement may not make sense, because they are unaware of what thinking linguistically might mean. In this chapter, I wish to introduce some of the basic notions of what it means to think linguistically and see how New Testament theologies may be seen in this light. Linguists themselves, however, reveal that modern linguistics is less a thing that one can simply define and, by doing so, bracket out of consideration, than it is an approach, a way of doing things in relation to language.
Language is a complicated topic, and its study is equally complex, to the point that defining linguistics is difficult, apart from saying that it is the “study of language,”Footnote 23 or, as many still say, “the scientific study of language.”Footnote 24 We must be careful in defining what we mean by saying that linguistics is a scientific study of language, so as not to give the impression that it provides direct access to objective (and purportedly indisputable) characterizations of language. Linguistics has some characteristics of the so-called hard sciences in some of its empirical concerns, its attempt to test hypotheses, and its tendency to generalization,Footnote 25 but also characteristics of the humanities in its concern for language as a uniquely human cultural product.Footnote 26 The most important dimension is to recognize its dependence upon a methodological approach in which theory influences data gathering and description, with various methods used in the task (as noted in the next chapter).Footnote 27 More pertinent, perhaps, is what is meant by language. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) distinguished between langage, language (or speech) in the abstract; langue, language as a system of elements; and parole, instances of the use of language (human speaking).Footnote 28 Since Saussure, language has been defined in a variety of ways, although not all linguists are even concerned with defining language. As a result, distinctions in types of language are sometimes made, such as natural vs. non-natural language, language vs. dialect, and standard vs. non-standard language. Others define language in terms of the various areas of linguistics, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the like. Still others are concerned with its motivations, such as whether it is mechanistic, behaviorist, social, functional, or mentalist.Footnote 29 This leaves the field of linguistics appearing pretty complex.
Linguists themselves have also been concerned with the apparent diversity of their discipline, to the point where one might legitimately raise the question of whether linguists can agree on anything, and if they cannot, how one can expect those outside of linguistics to understand it, to say nothing of make use of it in their own work. Acknowledging this challenge, linguist Richard Hudson undertook a survey to determine the elements upon which linguists can agree.Footnote 30 The major areas of agreement are three. The first is that linguists agree that there is a linguistic approach to language, characterized by empirical study with the goal of describing the structures and functions of language in terms of a theory that is able to explain why language does what it does. The second is that linguists agree that language is both an individual and a communal entity, in which individual language users function as part of a language community. Within this, language users vary their expression according to a variety of factors, such as use and context. The third area of agreement, concerning the structure of language, probably commands the least agreement. Nevertheless, linguists are agreed that every language has a complex syntax that has a close relationship with meaning, but that must take such factors as context, shared beliefs, and pragmatic function into account. Some of the common ideas that I will return to are the importance of a linguistic approach, the role of theory or method, the importance of both individual and community, the importance of context (I will introduce the concept of register below and more fully in Chapter 7), and the relationship of grammar and meaning. For the sake of discussion, and reflecting my own orientation to linguistics, I will define language as a communally shared but individually used social semiotic system for human communication using phonological and/or graphological means.Footnote 31 The importance of this definition is that it recognizes the place of language as a shared system of communication within human life and activity, including those of the ancient world of the New Testament and those in academic disciplines such as New Testament studies, and within it New Testament theology.
So far as I can determine, there is not a single New Testament theology, at least that I have surveyed, that reflects what I would consider a thoroughgoing modern linguistic approach to language, even among the four New Testament theologies that do reflect aspects of modern linguistics (see Chapters 3 and 5).Footnote 32 This does not mean that linguistic matters are not raised in these New Testament theologies – they are, at both the micro- and macro-levels of discussion. I am not concerned here with the almost apparently random reference to a grammatical category or even a traditional or modern Greek grammarian, although references to the latter are surprisingly relatively few.Footnote 33 I am concerned with more explicitly language-oriented issues. As a major example, virtually every New Testament theology deals with certain wordings and concepts, such as “son of God” or “justification,” which merit linguistic investigation. More noteworthy perhaps is that several of the New Testament theologies treat individual Greek lexical items, often in an odd mix with English or German concepts.Footnote 34 Most of these theologies are written within the German tradition, and unfortunately more than a few of their discussions of these words read like ThWNT/TDNT entries.Footnote 35 These discussions, more often than one might expect, sometimes reflect the kind of lexical fallacies that are found in Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament theology and perpetuated in theologies since, the source of Barr’s criticism of theological lexicography.Footnote 36 There are even some New Testament theologies that still make some of the major lexical errors that Barr warned against, such as seeing the Greek καιρός as representing “a specially appointed and significant moment in God’s dealings with humanity.”Footnote 37 I need not examine each example, except to note that the appearance of such lexical fallacies in works that have been published since 1961 or thereabouts reflects the failure to appropriately adopt a modern linguistic approach to New Testament theological study.
Since 1961 and the publication of Barr’s major work, there have been major advances in Greek lexicography, including the publication of several major works on New Testament lexical semantics and lexicography,Footnote 38 and revision of Bauer’s Greek lexicon by adding meanings to its glosses (BDAG),Footnote 39 even if retaining its traditional lexicography. The most important complete modern linguistic lexical project, however, is the publication of the Louw-Nida Greek lexicon based upon semantic domains, which first appeared in 1988.Footnote 40 So far as I can see, whereas many New Testament theologies use BDAG, there are only three citations of Louw-Nida in total in the New Testament theologies that I have examined that appeared since its publication (and one reference to Silva’s volume on lexical semantics).Footnote 41 One cannot help but note that these can hardly be said to constitute a linguistic orientation to lexicography within even these New Testament theologies. For those New Testament theologies written after 1961, there were abundant opportunities and scholarly sources in lexical semantics even within the field of New Testament studies so as to distinguish words from concepts, establish various sense relations among lexemes, treat the words of a language as part of the language system, draw upon the concept of semantic domains, and allow theological statements to grow from the use of language rather than reading theology, often an entire theology, into a single instance. This appropriation of lexical semantics would have marked a significant step forward in New Testament theology.
There are, furthermore, only a relatively few New Testament theologies that appear to have sustained discussions of problems related to language apart from individual words, even though, as I have outlined above, any discussion of the thought of the New Testament – what New Testament theologies purport to be about – is by definition a problem of language. Some of the theologies have sections devoted to explicitly language-related matters. There may be more, but here are some I have noted: Werner Georg Kümmel (1905–1995) contains sections on “The present as the time of salvation,” “Indicative and imperative,” and “The future and the presence of salvation.”Footnote 42 Ladd includes a small section entitled “Indicative and Imperative.”Footnote 43 Leonhard Goppelt (1911–1973) has sections on “The Future and Present Coming of the Kingdom” and on the love command.Footnote 44 Guthrie provides a brief section on binding and loosing and, in a chapter on “The Future,” includes a section on “The Future Coming of Christ.”Footnote 45 Peter Stuhlmacher has a section on the love command.Footnote 46 Thomas Schreiner has an unmarked section on the indicative and imperative.Footnote 47 Beale has a major chapter entitled “Christian Living as the Beginning of Transformed New-Creational Life: The End-Time Indicative-Imperative Pattern and Ongoing Return from Exile.”Footnote 48 Finally, Blomberg briefly treats “The Present and Future Kingdom.”Footnote 49
It is noteworthy that all four of the New Testament theologies that have aspects of modern linguistics (see Chapter 3) have sections on language-related matters. Caird has a chapter on “The Three Tenses of Salvation,”Footnote 50 in which he at least indicates that linguistic questions are raisable concerning an important dimension of theology. He also recognizes that “Language is in essence a medium of communication,” although he says nothing more linguistically, having previously distanced himself from “literary critics and structuralists” because of their supposed abandonment of authorial intent.Footnote 51 Strecker has a section on “Indicative and Imperative in Ecclesiological Context,” a chapter on “The Future of the Free,” and one on “Directives of the Son of Man – The Sayings Collection.”Footnote 52 Philip Esler includes subsections on “Language and Dialogue,” “Applying Intercultural Communication to the New Testament,” “The Positive Nature of the Communication”; a section on “Defending History against its Cultured Despisers”; a subsection on “Applying This Communication Model to the New Testament Writings”; and a section on “The Literary and the Nonliterary in Light of Performative Utterances and Speech Act Theory.”Footnote 53 Udo Schnelle entitles his first chapter “Approach: Theology of the New Testament as Meaning-Formation,” in which he has a subsection on “How History Is Made and Written,” with several sections dealing with the past and present, including “Language and Reality” (a section in the philosophy of language, as Schnelle explicitly states), along with a further section on “Language and Shape of Early Christology: Myth, Titles, Formulae, and Traditions.”Footnote 54 Schnelle’s index has an entry for “past, the,” which refers to “temporality, history and,” all of the references of which are in his first chapter noted above.Footnote 55
If one were to anticipate a place where New Testament theologies made clear their orientation to language, it would be in extended discussions of language-oriented topics.Footnote 56 Some important language-related topics are definitely introduced in these New Testament theologies, such as the relationship of theological concepts to time (past, present, and future), and hence the tense system of the language; the relationship of actions to reality (indicative, imperative, directive), and hence the mood system; and even larger questions that reflect more theoretical questions about the relationship between language and reality, questions typically outside of mainstream linguistics and more in the area of philosophy of language. Apart from one possible exception, discussed below, what surprises me about these sections is not that they do not refer to modern linguistics, which they almost universally do not so far as I can tell, even in sections on explicitly language-dependent topics, but that they do not appear to refer to works on language per se at all except in two places, both of them incidental and not central to their argument and discussion of the larger linguistic topic. Beale has a citation of the rationalist grammar of Daniel Wallace on the function of an adverbial participle and Schnelle cites Friedrich Blass (1843–1907) and Albert Debrunner’s (1884–1958) comparative-historical grammar on the meaning of the perfect tense-form.Footnote 57 The listing of all of the sections above illustrates that there were numerous opportunities for New Testament theologians to indicate and reflect their linguistic understanding in their treatment of topics that would appear to require, if not demand, a linguistic approach.
The major exception, and it is indeed to be noted, is Esler’s New Testament theology, already summarized in Chapter 3 but recapitulated here. Esler refers to Saussure as a representative of a semiotic model of communication, but Esler rejects this model and endorses a process model of communication.Footnote 58 Esler makes it clear that he approaches the discussion of models of communication, not from the standpoint of linguistics, but from the standpoint of communication studies. John Fiske, whom he follows, distinguishes between these two major models. Fiske characterizes the process model as concerned with “the transmission of messages … and is concerned with how senders and receivers encode and decode, with how transmitters use the channels and media of communication.”Footnote 59 This is opposed to the semiotic model where communication is “the production and exchange of meanings. It is concerned with how messages, or texts, interact with people in order to produce meanings.”Footnote 60 Fiske makes an important observation: “The process school tends to draw upon the social sciences, psychology and sociology in particular…. The semiotic school tends to draw upon linguistics and the arts subjects.”Footnote 61 Esler clearly rejects linguistics and adopts the social-science approach to communication.
As already noted above as well, however, Esler does introduce the ordinary language philosophers, J. L. Austin (1911–1960) and John Searle, and speech-act theory.Footnote 62 But even here, the use of this linguistic-pragmatic theory is not made in the context of modern linguistics, as not a single other major modern linguist or modern linguistic approach is cited. Reference is made in the context of whether the Bible is a literary or non-literary text. Esler conducts this discussion as a literary and philosophical one, responding to the 1946 work by literary scholar W. K. Wimsatt (1907–1975) and philosopher Monroe Beardsley (1915–1985) on the intentional fallacy,Footnote 63 the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and literary scholar Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) on literary vs. non-literary texts,Footnote 64 and cultural critic Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) on dispensing with the author,Footnote 65 citing literary scholar E. D. Hirsch in support of his view.Footnote 66 Esler, arguing that the Bible is a non-literary text, concludes by drawing upon the literary scholar Iser as his model for communication, in which there is a “communicator” and a “communicatee”;Footnote 67 despite stresses upon the relationship, their interaction is the basis of communication. Esler thus concludes that “This chapter’s argument justifies maintaining authorial intention as an essential feature in New Testament interpretation.”Footnote 68
Esler is to be commended for exploring the range of scholars he has consulted regarding the issue of authorial intention. However, despite his invocation of Austin and Searle and speech-act theory to defend the performative nature of non-literary language, Esler’s treatment can hardly be seen as a robust use of modern linguistics. It is true that speech-act theory has become a part of the field of linguistic pragmatics and is sometimes used as an attempt to understand the semantic/pragmatic divide on the basis of performative language (although it is far from being the only way forward in this debate).Footnote 69 However, speech-act theory has also garnered significant criticism for failing to provide a solution to the semantic/pragmatic conundrum. Speech-act theory is based upon a truth-conditional semantics that not all linguistic models follow, has failed to address adequately indirect speech acts, has not been able to generalize a theory of context, confines itself to the level of the clause, and emphasizes types of clauses and their verbs, with the result that speech-act theory in linguistics has moved significantly beyond Austin and Searle.Footnote 70 But this is all beside the point for Esler’s discussion, because Esler is not using speech-act theory as part of a robust modern linguistic model and does not wish to do so, which he could have done in establishing a rigorous linguistic model of communication. He instead uses speech-act theory in support of authorial intention, and thus as part of a primarily literary and philosophical discussion that wishes to dispute the influence of Wimsatt and Beardsley.Footnote 71 So far as I can tell, Esler never returns to this debate once he has established that the New Testament is a non-literary text, and that authorial intention is secure.
Thus, even Esler, despite his introduction of Austin and Searle, as well as a few other figures, does not exemplify a modern linguistic approach in his New Testament theology. This is clearly a missed opportunity, where he could have reformulated his entire approach based upon a Saussurean semiotic theory, perhaps incorporating the communication model of Jakobson, and established a firm linguistic ground for his textual and theological analysis.
What Linguistics Is and Is Not: A Basic Linguistic Orientation
As one can see, there are numerous places within New Testament theologies where they could make their understanding of language clear, especially if they were utilizing more recent modern linguistic thought rather than simply (tacitly) adopting a form of traditional grammar represented by rationalist or comparative-historical language study. I have tried to offer some directions about how some of this might have been accomplished in the summary of lexical and grammatical topics above. However, one must perhaps also acknowledge that one of the major hindrances is that New Testament theologians do not know how to formulate a linguistic approach to language. Such an approach is more than simply citing the occasional grammar on a question of verbal aspect or the like, but it requires a linguistic orientation to language. Many think of linguistics simply in terms of a few basic grammatical categories, when it involves much more. It represents a different perspective on language. In this section, I provide both the basic elements of what linguistics is and some indications of what it is not.
What Linguistics Is
There are at least six common elements to a linguistic approach to language, each of which should arguably have a place in New Testament studies, including New Testament theology. I present the six with brief explanations and then a range of examples of how the New Testament theologies I have examined seem to address them. I must be selective in my evidence, but the limitations I cite are reflective of the failure noted above to find a clear linguistic orientation in any of the New Testament theologies surveyed.
(1) Empirical.
A linguistic orientation is empirical, by which I mean that it is explicitly concerned with the data of language use (not empiricist, in the sense that sense data are definitive for understanding). In other words, the object of study is first and foremost language, and not something else, such as theology, history, or the like. The empirical basis of language study has been a constant struggle throughout the history of modern discussion, as seen in Chapter 1. The empirical orientation, at least in theory, allows all those who study to have potential access to the same body of data, even if they identify different facts regarding language, study it from different frameworks, and arrive at different conclusions. New Testament studies, and New Testament theology in particular, has often been theological and not robustly empirical, as Barr made clear in his criticism of much biblical theology of the last century, where theological pre-judgments interfered with identifying the linguistic evidence, to the detriment of the entire discipline. A ready example is the verbal system of Greek. The use of the tense-forms in Greek provides empirical data that must be explained (e.g., how many tense-forms there are, their semantics, their relationships to each other within the Greek verbal system, etc.), regardless of the interpretive framework adopted, without necessarily assuming the meaning of the data.Footnote 72 Interpretations have varied through out the history of language study, but now tend to agree that Greek is an aspect-prominent language and that temporality must be understood in relation to verbal aspect within the verbal system. One would expect New Testament theologies, at least since the 1990s when this discussion became a major issue, to recognize that their conclusions about how to understand the Greek tense-forms have consequences for their theological interpretation. Caird himself, in his discussion of the “three tenses of salvation,” in which he speaks of salvation as past, present, and future, becomes mired in the problem with such an equation. He recognizes that “we must be on our guard against a grammatical absolutism which ignores the ambiguities of the Greek tenses.” By this he means that “It will not necessarily be the case that all past verbs refer to salvation as an accomplished fact and all future verbs to the final consummation.” He chooses to distinguish between the “surface meaning” of the tense-form and how it is used in context as a means of resolving this problem. Nevertheless, Caird refers to a past tense,Footnote 73 a present, and a perfect tense that captures “an event in the past with continuing effects in the present.” He also notes how problematic it is to refer to the future.Footnote 74 Caird’s perspective reflects the rationalist, time-bound understanding of the Greek verb, but he also recognizes the problems with such a perspective, in which there is a mismatch between the assumed meaning of the tense-form as temporal (often based on their formal labels) and how it functions. However, Caird does not have a category, even from the comparative historicists (Aktionsart) to say nothing of the aspectologists (verbal aspect), to address the problem. This very problem is what led to the development of views of the tense-forms as concerned with the kind of action rather than the time of action, and then led to development from the comparative historicists to the aspectologists.Footnote 75 Nevertheless, Caird shows no evidence of knowing any of the recent discussion of verbal aspect that would clarify his reference to the semantics of the tense-forms, the role of verbal aspect, or their interpretive significance. Schnelle’s invocation of Blass and Debrunner’s definition of the perfect indicates that he adopts the framework of the rationalists/comparative historicists, again indicating a lack of recognition of the discussion that has occurred within a modern linguistic framework.Footnote 76 Recent developments in the study of aspect, among other topics, demand that New Testament scholars, including those writing New Testament theologies, revisit their understanding of the Greek verbal system, as it has potential implications for their understanding of their oft-posited temporal framework of New Testament theology.
(2) Descriptive not prescriptive.
Linguistics describes the use of language; it does not prescribe how the language should be used. Linguistic prescriptions may have their place in teaching grammars, but not in linguistic description. Linguistic description is not about evaluating language use and holding it to another standard, whether that is so-called classical or Attic norms or various Semitic language hypotheses. Further, language change is observed as inherent in language development and not necessarily to be equated with language corruption or failure to communicate adequately, especially when compared to another language variety as the standard by which language is judged.Footnote 77 The language of the Greek New Testament represents various registers and idiolects of koine Greek, which is not better or worse than other varieties but is a functional variety of language to be described according to its varied uses and whether it is appropriate to its situation.Footnote 78 By contrast, prescriptive approaches characterize the traditional grammar of the rationalists and the comparative historicists, including their firm rules of language change. One of the problems of New Testament theologies is that they offer theologically prescriptive solutions to language-oriented problems. Examples of this are frequent, such as Conzelmann’s discussion of ἐν Χριστῷ. Rather than linguistically examining this prepositional phrase in terms of such things as the locative sense of the preposition being metaphorically expanded in contexts with a non-physical (personal) location,Footnote 79 he states that there are two proposed theological solutions, one juridical and the other mystical. When he finally turns to a discussion of the phrase itself, the discussion is already framed in terms of these two choices.Footnote 80 Walter Schmithals similarly considers the phrase “into Christ.” Rather than beginning with an analysis of this translation of a Greek phrase (approaching it similarly to the one above), he immediately considers it a baptismal phrase regarding the body of Christ and hence the church.Footnote 81 He never discusses the Greek formulation. As a final example, in focusing upon the question of whether baptism is necessary for salvation, Blomberg admits that Acts 2:38, “repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit,” is grammatically problematic.Footnote 82 However, apart from a brief treatment of the preposition εἰς,Footnote 83 the solution offered is not linguistic but literary and theological. New Testament theologies, no doubt inadvertently because of their nature, end up taking a prescriptive view of language, because they tend to answer linguistic questions with theological statements. A linguistic approach would begin by linguistically explaining the data and then using these data to form theology.
(3) Theory-based.
The empirical data of language do not present themselves to the observer apart from a theory for observation. Theories of language vary widely but have in common that they provide a means of identifying what counts for evidence in a linguistic description. The result is that one cannot simply invoke a previously held or even cherished understanding without knowing and evaluating the theory of language that it represents. Rationalist linguists viewed the Greek verbal system as based upon an inherent rationalistic logic often related to fixed temporal categories, while comparative historicists viewed the system as at least as much focused upon the ways that actions might occur in the extra-linguistic world even as found in related languages. As helpful as these categories may have been in arriving at an understanding of the Greek verbal system, one sees that these macro-theories have influenced various specific linguistic theories. Modern linguistics introduces a greater variety of theories to attempt to describe data. I discuss these theories in the next chapter, where I show some of the possibilities for their use in New Testament theology. The problem of failure to have a theory in mind, even if it is a basic modern linguistic one, is evident at several points in Blomberg’s New Testament theology. In one instance, he refers to verbal aspect, a category of modern linguistics, but he then defines the instance of the verbal form (in this case an imperative) with a category not from aspectual theory but from traditional grammar; in another instance, he simply appeals to a particular type of use of the imperfect verbal form that is also associated with traditional grammar.Footnote 84 In both instances, he cites a rationalist grammar in support, without reference to any work of modern linguistics or aspect theory. There appears to be confusion over theories of language here, or, perhaps more likely, confusion over the need for a theory of language. Even holding a traditional theory and making that clear would be more helpful – in that it would clarify the approach being taken – than no theory or a mix of theories that are in many ways incompatible with each other.
(4) System-oriented.
One of the most important ways in which linguistic data may be described is in terms of system. The concept of system implies unity with diversity and individuality with coordination, with the system of language comprising a set of sub-systems that capture the language potential. Rationalists saw language as a rationalistic set of propositions, while comparative historicists saw it as a set of discrete elements comparable across languages. Modern linguistics seeks to view each language as a system, in which the system represents what the language can potentially express. The organization of the system is based upon the data of the language, rather than a prescribed set of categories, whether based upon rationalistic logic or comparative-historical generalization. The Greek verbal network of systems represents a coordinated edifice that includes tense/aspect, mood/attitude, and voice/causality (and others) among its several systems. The Greek nominal network of systems represents a similar coordinated edifice in which case, gender, and number function in relation to each other. The notion of system stands behind the linguistic adage “meaning implies choice,”Footnote 85 in which meaning reflects a choice within a given language system. In Greek, the aorist tense-form is the default tense-form, so within its verbal system there is little that commends the choice of the aorist tense-form, whereas the choice of the perfect tense-form is prominent because of its unusualness (however these may be defined). Those who emphasize the choice of the aorist are therefore failing to recognize, at least from a linguistic standpoint, the systemic nature of the Greek language. Similarly, the other tense-forms are systemically marked in relation to the aorist. Blomberg appears to confuse the nature of the Greek verbal system when, appealing to a rationalist grammar (and the rationalist logic is apparent), he claims that “given the (infrequent) use of the aorist participle of pisteuō, John’s very frequent choice of the present tense with this verb must make its aspect significant.”Footnote 86 It is not the lexical item or its frequency in relation to another, but the Greek verbal system that makes the usage systemically significant. The Greek article constitutes another system within Greek, arguably one that has been greatly misunderstood. One clear finding that has emerged is that it is not an indicator of definiteness, that is, to indicate a specific definedness of the entity.Footnote 87 If definiteness is the correct category to use, then it is established based upon factors other than the use of the article. However, there are numerous New Testament theologies that still label the article the “definite article” and equate it with definiteness, to the point of finding it necessary to note uses that are anarthrous that may still be definite.Footnote 88 The confusion over the definiteness of the article (or not) leads to interpretive confusion over determining subjects and predicates in some constructions, such as 1 John 4:8, ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν, where the article determines the subject as God (if both nominative elements had the article, then the first in order would typically be the subject).Footnote 89 Some go further and overlook that there is a discourse function of the article. Blomberg notes that most uses of christos in Mark appear with the article (five of its seven), so he uses this to indicate that the titular sense is present in Mark 1:1, which is anarthrous.Footnote 90 This overlooks the function of the article. Recognizing that language is constructed according to systems within systems is a fundamental notion from which to begin to describe the uses of language.
(5) Formal and functional.
The systemic structure of language represents both formal and functional categories, with these related to each other in various ways, from those models that focus primarily upon the forms of language to those that emphasize the functions of language and those that attempt to mediate the relationship between the two (see Chapter 7). Much traditional discussion of the Greek of the New Testament has been formal in nature, with lexical-incremental morphology that tends to view morphemes as individual formal units with a corresponding additive meaning.Footnote 91 Modern linguistics has retained attention to form but expanded its semantic description, by recognizing that meaning is an encompassing concept that may relate to the individual elements of language but move beyond these elements – such as morphemes – to higher levels such as syntactical units, the clause, and beyond to include an entire text within its context. In this sense, meaning is as structural as the forms of language. Whereas many approach the study of Greek as an exercise in choice of forms, a more appropriate way to view language is as an attempt to make choices of meanings that are then expressed in wordings, rather than thinking of wordings as resulting in meanings, even if this is how our description and analysis occur. The task of the interpreter is to determine these meanings based on the wordings within the text. As an example, cases in Greek are part of a system, in which there is a relationship between the individual form, such as nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative, and their meaning. Even those grammars that identify almost limitless numbers of “meanings” of a given case, such as the genitive, implicitly assert, even without their explicit recognition of this, that there is something that distinguishes the meaning of the case, and hence draws all these disparate meanings under the one formal category. However, it is often the situation that the relationship of form and meaning is lost when various “meanings” of a case (or of a tense-form or other system within Greek) are debated as if they are independent of the case meaning itself. Blomberg notes that in the wording δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ “grammarians have debated at length over the centuries whether the genitive theou should be understood as subjective, objective, source, or descriptive/possessive ….”Footnote 92 He is right that the debate “seems overblown,” but not because these are competing “grammatical categories” that intersect (category is ambiguous in this context, but seems to confuse form and meaning),Footnote 93 but because they are various contextual modulations (insofar as they are legitimate semantic categories) of the meaning of the genitive case.
(6) Social and contextual.
Although there are numerous modern linguistic approaches that begin with and even emphasize the forms of language, many of them also have an important place for the functions of language within social contexts. Language has meaning because it is a social semiotic system of shared and traded meanings. Whereas rationalists viewed language according to the tenets of logic, and comparative historicists viewed it in relation to its past and its relationship to other languages, modern linguists tend to view each language as realizing its own functional features in relation to its social contexts, even if there are common elements among various languages. This means that propositional and a-contextual views of language, especially those that attempt to derive theological principles directly from texts, must further consider the fact that language is not primarily, or at least only, a propositional or information-producing entity, but a functional and social one designed to accomplish the communicative purposes of its users. In this sense, Esler is correct, although he does not go nearly far enough. In his initial chapter, Stuhlmacher includes several principles regarding the task of theology. Several of them are related to grounding its study in historical context. At one point, Stuhlmacher asserts, “In order to gain a true hearing for the New Testament testimony in its original historical form, the method of biblical theology must correspond to the biblical texts and help them express themselves in their own language.”Footnote 94 For Stuhlmacher this means the use, not of modern linguistics as representing the most recent scholarly paradigm regarding language, but of “the historical-critical method used by all historical disciplines.”Footnote 95 The historical-critical method, as a product of the Enlightenment, utilizes traditional grammar, represented by the rationalists and comparative historicists, as its fundamental approach to language. Stuhlmacher has issued a valid call, even if he does not appropriately answer it himself.
A further major insight of modern linguistics is the importance of the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. This concept is so important that I devote an entire section to it in Chapter 7. Nevertheless, these six characteristics are sufficient to provide a distinctly different view of language than was held by those of previous periods, although many within the field of New Testament theology do not appear to have appreciated that the perspective on language has changed, and with it how one approaches language linguistically.
What Linguistics Is Not
In light of these six characteristics identifying what linguistics is, it might be useful to identify what linguistics is not in relation to its modern study. I identify six features and show that a number of New Testament theologies seem to assume that what linguistics is not is what discussion of language is for New Testament theology.
(1) Modern linguistics is not related to the ability to speak, write, or use many languages.
For some, being a linguist means being able to speak, write, or use many languages. This is not to be equated with being a modern linguist. This kind of view no doubt originates in the western world that tends to be monolingual, whereas much of the rest of the world, as well as the history of the world, is multilingual.Footnote 96 Multilingualism, and monolingualism for that matter, is not a matter of being a linguist but of one’s context, having the good fortune to be born or reared (or perhaps other circumstances) in an environment in which one is required to communicate in multiple languages. However, most language users, as already noted above, are very unreflective on the use of language. Therefore, just because a biblical scholar or a New Testament theologian may have facility in multiple languages, including the biblical languages, the person cannot be considered a modern linguist. That person is perhaps multilingual, but not necessarily a modern linguist. To be a modern linguist, or at least to have a linguistic orientation, one must consciously think linguistically about language, including not just the language that one uses, but the languages with which one is primarily concerned, especially the Greek of the New Testament but also biblical Hebrew or Aramaic. Similarly, just because a resident of first-century Palestine or a Jew from the diaspora was multilingual does not mean that such language users – who were the norm, not the exception – had any special insight into language, and they especially did not use their languages in particular or special ways. The Holy Ghost Greek hypothesis has long been debunked in scholarship, but a multitude of various other subtle theories are still foisted onto the New Testament authors concerning their use of Greek, especially in relation to Semitic languages, that reflect linguistic improbabilities regarding language.Footnote 97 An example treated in more detail in Chapter 8 is various explanations of the Greek wording ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, usually translated as “the son of man,” a wording discussed in virtually every New Testament theology. This phrase is often said to be unnatural Greek, but it is perfectly normal and even typical Greek nominal group wording. The confusion over the issue of multiple languages often manifests itself in New Testament theologies, where one language is used as a window into another, as if the use of one language were a transparent device for understanding an underlying meaning found in another. Rather than respecting the language system of each biblical language, the two seem to be conflated in some works, whereby statements about Aramaic are seen as the solution to problems in Greek or Greek is understood in terms of the supposed underlying Aramaic.Footnote 98
(2) Modern linguistics is not studying the history of a language.
Footnote 99 We have already seen that modern linguistics is not primarily concerned with answering historical questions regarding language, even if it attempts to understand language within its historical context. Historical linguistics remains a legitimate part of modern linguistics, but it is not its central concern.Footnote 100 Many of the questions raised by contemporary historical linguists are similar to those of comparative-historical language study, although now seen through the eyes of modern linguistics.Footnote 101 Besides the major reference grammars of New Testament Greek reflecting historical and related concerns, many historical questions are still asked of the Greek of the New Testament, such as its relationship to earlier Indo-European languages, its similarities to or differences from other related languages, and comparisons of it to the Greek language of other periods. More specifically, one sometimes finds statements about individual elements of Greek (neglecting the system of language) in relation to the development of other languages, such as an individual tense-form (such as the aorist), a case (the genitive in relation to an ablative), or a voice (the middle or passive). Statements regarding Greek meanings in light of its Indo-European development, comparisons with Sanskrit on such matters as the case system, and evaluative judgments of New Testament Greek in relation to Attic Greek or Byzantine Greek, or even Hebrew or Aramaic, all reflect historical concerns. Such observations, however, run the risk of being selected to make theological points. An example is when the interpretation of Heb 6:6 and the verb ἀνακαινίζειν is evaluated in light of the Hellenistic tendency to prefix verbal forms and hence is said to have the same sense as the unprefixed form.Footnote 102
(3) Modern linguistics is not studying the etymologies of words.
The ancients were fascinated with words as much as contemporary biblical scholars. But even though they were writing about their own language over 2,000 years ago, they knew very little about the history of their language, including its words. As a result, Plato offers the following tortuous etymology of the word for human, ἄνθρωπος, based upon a letter and ending dropping out:
The name ‘man’ (ἄνθρωπος) indicates that the other animals do not examine, or consider, or look up at (ἀναθρεῖ) any of the things that they see, but man has no sooner seen – that is, ὄπωπε – than he looks up at and considers that which he has seen. Therefore of all the animals man alone is rightly called man (ἄνθρωπος), because he looks up at (ἀναθρεῖ) what he has seen (ὄπωπε).
As imaginative as this explanation might be, it tells us nothing about the origin of the word, but it also tells us how little information we have about the origins of words (or even their contemporary meanings). Even if we did, it would not necessarily indicate anything about its current meaning, as words occupy various meaningful relations with one another in the language system. Barr made this point, along with the useful corrective that theology does not occur at the word but at the word-group and sentence level (and beyond). This does not mitigate linguistic transparency, in which Greek as a language with some agglutinating characteristics often forms words whose composite meaning is the product of its parts. This is not the history of the word but its transparent synchronic features, which themselves must be tested. The lexicon must, therefore, attempt to capture the senses of the words of a language and arrange them in meaningful sense relations according to their semantic domains or ranges. This is true whether one argues for lexical monosemy, in which each word has an abstract minimalist meaning modulated by context, or polysemy, in which words have multiple meanings that are then distributed in a variety of contexts.Footnote 104 This does not stop Schnelle, however, from including a complex etymology in his discussion of the problems of history, reality, and language. He notes that German Sinn, which is translated as “meaning,” and English sense share the same Indo-Germanic root sent-. He then says that this root “basically means to take a particular direction to go along a particular way,” which he links to the Latin sentio as “feel, perceive,” sensus as “sense, perception, understanding,” and sententia as “meaning, purpose, thought,” as well as Old High German sin and sinnan as “strive for, desire.”Footnote 105 He seems to think that this has something to do with meaning-formation (although he does not say exactly what that is), when in fact it simply confuses the issue by introducing data that are not pertinent to his discussion.
(4) Modern linguistics is not traditional grammar.
The legacy of traditional grammar – the name given to the accumulation of language study from the advent of western language study to the present, with emphasis upon rationalism and comparative historicism – is grounded in the use of Latin as the scholarly language of the western world.Footnote 106 As a result, many linguistic labels remain in Latin, even if the languages so labeled are not historically related to Latin, as in the Semitic languages with reference to cases and tenses. The labels are not even necessarily appropriate for Greek (Latin has a six-case system, whereas Greek has four or five; and Latin has a different verbal system than does Greek). The major tenets of traditional grammar are: priority given to written over spoken language (as noted above); the lack of representativeness of the extant corpus due to the vagaries of history; emphasis upon regularized and standardized forms of the language (including a tendency toward prescriptivism); the tendency to read the categories of one’s metalanguage into the language being studied (with English and German having dominated language study more recently); the imposition of standards of logic foreign to natural language usage (a legacy of the rationalist period); the allowance of other disciplines to direct the interests in studying language, especially with theological and historical concerns taking priority; and a tendency to examine language atomistically rather than systemically, with concern for individual elements taking priority over their relations. Modern linguistics, on the other hand, requires an appropriate means of studying epigraphic languages that appreciates the limitations of the written evidence regarding the vernacular;Footnote 107 recognizes the limitations of the corpus and generalizes accordingly; focuses upon language use in context; develops an appropriate metalanguage that reflects the language being studied; thinks in terms of language as system rather than as logical puzzle or historical development; places priority upon a linguistic orientation and treats other areas as secondary to such concerns; and retains Saussure’s notion of valeur, that is, that elements within a system get their value in opposition to other elements within the same system.Footnote 108 New Testament theologies, where they do explicitly reveal their inclination toward language, tend to reinforce traditional grammar. Leon Morris (1914–2006) endorses a traditional grammatical perspective on Greek verbs when he assigns and then emphasizes temporal values, but more importantly when he does not differentiate their relative significance as part of an intertwined system but argues directly to theological conclusions.Footnote 109 Beale seems to envision the world of interpretation as consisting of “grammatical-historical interpretation” (associated with traditional grammar) versus non-language approaches, such as a “biblical-theological approach” or “canonical interpretation,” both of which are theological rather than linguistic in orientation.Footnote 110
(5) Modern linguistics is not the ability to translate.
A high value is often placed upon translation as a means of assessing language knowledge, especially in the teaching of biblical languages. This transfers into most other areas of biblical studies, where translations are offered as surrogates for interpretation. Translation may be one means of gauging understanding, but it is certainly not the only one and probably not even the most useful. Too often the emphasis is placed on the translation in relation to already recognized renderings of the text, a tendency that levels diversity in interpretation. Issues of concern in translation often reflect the concerns of the receptor text more than the source text. The rendering of the Greek present tense-form becomes an issue of whether it is to be rendered by the English simple or progressive present, failing to note that this is only a matter of English, not Greek. The implications of such an approach often extend further, so that the lack of such a distinction in Greek is seen as requiring an explanation, sometimes along the lines that Greek must conflate its tense-forms.Footnote 111 An example often given is the verb οἶδα. This is a perfect tense-form with stative verbal aspect, but because of how it is often rendered in English with a present tense, it is often said that this perfect form is in fact a present tense-form.Footnote 112 This is an issue in English translation, not in Greek morphology or verbal semantics. In this example, the meaning of the Greek perfect tense-form is obscured or even misconstrued by an English rendering. As the linguist Henry Gleason (1917–2007) states, “Translation can obscure some features of meaning and falsify others. A contrast in meaning is not relevant unless there is also a contrast in forms.”Footnote 113 New Testament theologies are full of translations of various passages, often based upon established translations, which themselves are interpretations of the biblical text. Beale seems to substitute translation (and theology) for linguistic description in his analysis of Heb 4:10 (it may also be a problem with conflating several languages and failure to recognize language as system). He states that this passage:
seems at first glance to indicate that the ‘rest’ has begun to be experienced in the past. Nevertheless, it is more likely that this is an expression of the so-called prophetic perfect, whereby a biblical author sees the future as being so certain to occur that he speaks of it using a past tense, as though it had already happened.Footnote 114
In a footnote, he continues: “In [Heb] 4:10 the verb ‘he has rested’ (katepausen) is an aorist, which designates past time in this context, and the preceding phrase, ‘the one who has entered’ (eiselthōn) likewise in context is best taken to indicate past time. However, both are used with a perfective perfect sense, as just explained.”Footnote 115 This is a debate over translation and theology, not a debate over Greek, as the term “prophetic perfect” does not belong in Greek linguistic discussion; its place in translation is also highly contentious.Footnote 116 An even more straightforward example appears in Blomberg, when he apparently cites with approval the opinion that the Greek word χάριν “may mean both ‘because of’ and ‘in order to cause,’” when he means that it may be translated in those ways.Footnote 117
(6) Modern linguistics is not to be equated with other, similar disciplines.
Modern linguistics has much in common with many other disciplines, not least because many of these disciplines are themselves language-dependent. Some of the more obvious related disciplines are literary studies, translation studies, the teaching of languages, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, psychology, law, and especially theology.Footnote 118 In many instances, the relationship between the disciplines is productive for all involved. The teaching of languages is greatly aided, perhaps even requisite upon, a strong linguistic foundation. The field of translation studies, even though it has traditionally not been a part of general or theoretical linguistics, has various schools of thought that are related to schools of linguistic thought in that they share similar orientations to language. Sometimes the boundaries between the disciplines become blurred, as in sociolinguistics, which is concerned with the wide variety of forms of language – dialects, registers, etc. – based upon various social and societal factors, including social status and position, geography, education, gender, and context. Some disciplines have developed their thoughts regarding language in ways that parallel, as well as overlap, modern linguistics. The field of ordinary language philosophy, often attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and Austin, among others,Footnote 119 has stressed the speech functions of language, a development also found within various functional schools of linguistics (as discussed above). Theology is the field that has probably had the largest influence on language issues in the New Testament, because theological questions, often closely linked to questions of history, are frequently thought to be the most important questions regarding the study of the New Testament. In such instances, allowing other disciplines, especially theology, to set the agenda for a linguistic approach to the Greek of the New Testament cannot help but skew the priorities of each discipline, to the detriment of linguistic observation and explanation.
Esler and Schnelle seem to fall into this trap. Each of them is rightly concerned with placing New Testament theology within its larger intellectual context. Half of Esler’s theology is concerned with important issues, including the history of New Testament theology in relation to the concept of history, a social science-based theological approach to communication and interpretation that focuses upon philosophy and psychology, especially concerning the individual and collectivism, a reaction to Derrida and Gadamer grounded in the literary scholar Hirsch and others, and a defense of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). However, as already noted above, at the several places where Esler could make a “linguistic turn” to modern linguistics, such as his model of communication or his discussion of the functions of language, he instead swerves in a different direction. Rather than it being a linguistic discipline, he makes New Testament theology into a social-scientific discipline, by which he emphasizes sociological and anthropological theory, or a literary and philosophical discipline, emphasizing various ways of arguing for authorial intention. I do not doubt that social-scientific criticism and its models have much to offer New Testament theology, but insofar as New Testament theology is a linguistic discipline, one cannot neglect linguistics in one’s approach to it. Schnelle also offers a multidisciplinary introduction to his New Testament theology (as summarized in Chapter 3), in which he focuses on the relationship of New Testament theology to what he calls meaning-formation.Footnote 120 Throughout this section, Schnelle recognizes the problems of history, that there is a process involved in making history, that there are problems with bringing the past into the present, that one needs to deal with sources, and even that history is mediated by language. Although he endorses the notion that historical meaning-making occurs through narration,Footnote 121 he approaches the topic primarily through philosophy and sociology.Footnote 122 At the point where Schnelle acknowledges that history is mediated by language, he could have taken the arguably necessary step of stating what the implications of such an approach would be in terms of how one views language and the models of language that one adopts, such as a constructivist one as in Systemic Functional Linguistics (upon which see Chapter 7). This would have been very compatible with the meaning-formation view he takes, as he is familiar with the work of both Berger and Luckmann, the two sociologists who developed social constructivism.Footnote 123
Thus, although there are many opportunities for New Testament theologies to adopt the basic principles of modern linguistics, at numerous places they seem to show that they are not aware of or not interested in pursuing such linguistic interests.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have further turned from a critique of the history and practice of New Testament theology offered in Parts I and II and begun to construct a new way forward, a linguistic way forward. I note that there is a dearth of constructive proposals for New Testament theology, especially in relation to language or linguistics. This chapter begins to redress that deficiency by assessing the treatment of matters of language within New Testament theologies. Although matters of language are raised in various places and in various ways, there is a clear lack of what might be termed a linguistic approach in New Testament theology, whether we are examining it as a discipline or in its individual manifestations. However, one can readily see that there is an important need for informed study of language within New Testament theology, thereby establishing a ground for subsequent discussion. I have provided some of the basic concepts of modern linguistics – concepts that most linguists, regardless of their approach, would endorse – as a means of orienting the New Testament theologian. I recognize that it is asking too much for every New Testament theologian to become a linguistic specialist. However, that does not obviate the necessity of acquiring a basic linguistic orientation, which involves fundamental notions concerning what linguistics is and what it is not. So much seems to be relatively straightforward, and even commonsensical. If we can agree on the foundations of a linguistic approach to New Testament theology, then we can begin to reconceptualize how appropriate linguistic models might be developed that will allow us to reconfigure New Testament theology as a discipline. I lay out the basic components of a linguistic model in aid of such a reconceptualization in the next chapter.
