An Interview with James Dunn
Fortress Press: Your latest book with us, a new edition of The Living Word, still presents a vital and relevant argument today. What is the future of New Testament theology as a discipline? Some say the discipline is a thing of the past.
James Dunn: New Testament theology will have a vigorous life as long as people ask theological questions. Christian theology in particular is rooted in the New Testament. So even when the reality of contemporary Christian presence has moved well away from the teachings and precedents in the New Testament, there will always be a desire on the part of a significant number of Christians to know how Christianity began, to hear afresh Jesus, Paul, and so on—to check later applications against first principles, as you might say. Only those who think of the present as wholly disjoint from the past will doubt or deny that lessons can be learned from the past, that there is a continuity with the past that has shaped and continues to shape the present and without which the present cannot be properly understood.
In addition, as I have argued in The Living Word, there is a living quality about engagement with the New Testament that, despite some advocacy to the contrary, prevents New Testament theology as a discipline from being demoted to a merely archaeological interest in the remote past or a pathological interest in the dead cadavers of past teachings. For myself, New Testament theology also involves theologizing: seeing the New Testament documents as the theologizing of various individuals in the first century, providing classic examples of how new insight/revelation can be drawn from old insight/revelation and flourishes in the present by interacting with the past; and theologizing as twenty-first century Christians engage theologically with the New Testament and other Christian formative traditions to make sense of their own, the church’s and society’s future. I have developed these points in my New Testament Theology: An Introduction.
FP: Is New Testament theology only for Christians?
JD: I do not think of ‘theology’ as a specifically or exclusively Christian concern. Theology begins with an unwillingness to believe that the reality of human beings and human society can be fully explained solely in material terms. Its agenda and subject matter is the exploration of how an openness to a different or fuller explanation of those realities is best articulated and an exploration of how the consequences of such openness bear upon individuals and society, their beliefs, the axioms and principles of social conduct and responsibility. Theology in the specific sense of God-talk is a particular subset of that exploration—the theistic premise regarded as the most appropriate starting point to construct a positive alternative to the purely materialistic explanation of what is—though the openness in many cases will include an openness to the possibility that the theistic premise is itself wrong or misleading. Within theology thus defined, New Testament theology is itself a subset. But since the New Testament is among the sacred books of the world and has therefore been recognized as containing some of the most inspired and inspiring expressions of that exploration, it and the theology it contains and inspires should be of interest to all who engage in such exploration. And since Christianity and the New Testament have had such a profound influence on European culture and its offshoots in particular, engagement with that culture and its ramifications likewise has to give at least some space to the New Testament and its influence, that is, to New Testament theology.
FP: What do you consider the most important trends in the last thirty years of New Testament studies?
JD: In Jesus studies, it is the third quest for the historical Jesus, by which I refer to the recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus as the starting point rather than an awkward historical particularity to be maneuvered round. (I don’t count the Jesus Seminar and related projects as ‘Third’ Quest—more a revived form of the earlier Liberal quest—I call it neo-liberal). For myself I also regard as important the attempt to understand better the oral period of the Jesus tradition and to illuminate the extent to which the oral period shaped the enduring character of the Jesus tradition. The role of John’s Gospel within this whole enterprise is a question that continues to intrigue and fascinate.
As to the letters, the issues raised by the ‘new perspective’ on Paul have begun to be addressed within non-English European scholarship, and the ramifications still need to be fully worked through. The tensions between early Christianity and early Judaism—and how and when they were ‘resolved’ (the ‘parting of the ways’)—remain unclear. The dominance of sociological studies over the last generation is probably beginning to fade, to be followed by rhetorical studies. That is, sensitivity to sociological dimensions and the rhetorical character of the New Testament writings will become part of the exegete’s tools rather than a dominant principle over exegetical work, though feminist and postcolonial perspectives still have a way to run.
The quest for a pre-Christian Gnosticism has shot its bolt but leaves much more open the issue of how to perceive the continuity between the New Testament documents and second century Christianity.
FP: In Paul scholarship, you developed what you called the “new perspective” on Paul. As this idea has evolved for you (if it has), what are the central interests of the field that remain? As others take up your perspective, how have they changed it?
JD: Lots of issues: for example, how most fairly and accurately to characterize the soteriology of the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism; how to appreciate better the both-and of grace and obedience in both Judaism and Paul; how to hold together the different idioms and imagery used by Paul, including forensic, participation-in-Christ, and gift-of-Spirit in the way that Paul evidently did; how to correlate justification by faith and judgment according to works.
My emphasis on the boundary-marking function of the law has met with a lot of criticism, though few critics seem to be willing to acknowledge that Paul’s earliest formulation of justification by faith and not works (Gal. 2.16) was in immediate response to the attempt of Peter to “compel” Gentile believers “to live like Jews.” I probably did not give enough weight to Paul’s christology in my initial formulations of the new perspective and so stress more now the ‘in Christ’ dimension of his soteriology, but as already suggested, the ways in which Paul ties together the two dimensions of his soteriology need further clarification.
To order James D.G. Dunn's The Living Word, click here.
James Dunn: New Testament theology will have a vigorous life as long as people ask theological questions. Christian theology in particular is rooted in the New Testament. So even when the reality of contemporary Christian presence has moved well away from the teachings and precedents in the New Testament, there will always be a desire on the part of a significant number of Christians to know how Christianity began, to hear afresh Jesus, Paul, and so on—to check later applications against first principles, as you might say. Only those who think of the present as wholly disjoint from the past will doubt or deny that lessons can be learned from the past, that there is a continuity with the past that has shaped and continues to shape the present and without which the present cannot be properly understood.
In addition, as I have argued in The Living Word, there is a living quality about engagement with the New Testament that, despite some advocacy to the contrary, prevents New Testament theology as a discipline from being demoted to a merely archaeological interest in the remote past or a pathological interest in the dead cadavers of past teachings. For myself, New Testament theology also involves theologizing: seeing the New Testament documents as the theologizing of various individuals in the first century, providing classic examples of how new insight/revelation can be drawn from old insight/revelation and flourishes in the present by interacting with the past; and theologizing as twenty-first century Christians engage theologically with the New Testament and other Christian formative traditions to make sense of their own, the church’s and society’s future. I have developed these points in my New Testament Theology: An Introduction.
FP: Is New Testament theology only for Christians?
JD: I do not think of ‘theology’ as a specifically or exclusively Christian concern. Theology begins with an unwillingness to believe that the reality of human beings and human society can be fully explained solely in material terms. Its agenda and subject matter is the exploration of how an openness to a different or fuller explanation of those realities is best articulated and an exploration of how the consequences of such openness bear upon individuals and society, their beliefs, the axioms and principles of social conduct and responsibility. Theology in the specific sense of God-talk is a particular subset of that exploration—the theistic premise regarded as the most appropriate starting point to construct a positive alternative to the purely materialistic explanation of what is—though the openness in many cases will include an openness to the possibility that the theistic premise is itself wrong or misleading. Within theology thus defined, New Testament theology is itself a subset. But since the New Testament is among the sacred books of the world and has therefore been recognized as containing some of the most inspired and inspiring expressions of that exploration, it and the theology it contains and inspires should be of interest to all who engage in such exploration. And since Christianity and the New Testament have had such a profound influence on European culture and its offshoots in particular, engagement with that culture and its ramifications likewise has to give at least some space to the New Testament and its influence, that is, to New Testament theology.
FP: What do you consider the most important trends in the last thirty years of New Testament studies?
JD: In Jesus studies, it is the third quest for the historical Jesus, by which I refer to the recognition of the Jewishness of Jesus as the starting point rather than an awkward historical particularity to be maneuvered round. (I don’t count the Jesus Seminar and related projects as ‘Third’ Quest—more a revived form of the earlier Liberal quest—I call it neo-liberal). For myself I also regard as important the attempt to understand better the oral period of the Jesus tradition and to illuminate the extent to which the oral period shaped the enduring character of the Jesus tradition. The role of John’s Gospel within this whole enterprise is a question that continues to intrigue and fascinate.
As to the letters, the issues raised by the ‘new perspective’ on Paul have begun to be addressed within non-English European scholarship, and the ramifications still need to be fully worked through. The tensions between early Christianity and early Judaism—and how and when they were ‘resolved’ (the ‘parting of the ways’)—remain unclear. The dominance of sociological studies over the last generation is probably beginning to fade, to be followed by rhetorical studies. That is, sensitivity to sociological dimensions and the rhetorical character of the New Testament writings will become part of the exegete’s tools rather than a dominant principle over exegetical work, though feminist and postcolonial perspectives still have a way to run.
The quest for a pre-Christian Gnosticism has shot its bolt but leaves much more open the issue of how to perceive the continuity between the New Testament documents and second century Christianity.
FP: In Paul scholarship, you developed what you called the “new perspective” on Paul. As this idea has evolved for you (if it has), what are the central interests of the field that remain? As others take up your perspective, how have they changed it?
JD: Lots of issues: for example, how most fairly and accurately to characterize the soteriology of the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism; how to appreciate better the both-and of grace and obedience in both Judaism and Paul; how to hold together the different idioms and imagery used by Paul, including forensic, participation-in-Christ, and gift-of-Spirit in the way that Paul evidently did; how to correlate justification by faith and judgment according to works.
My emphasis on the boundary-marking function of the law has met with a lot of criticism, though few critics seem to be willing to acknowledge that Paul’s earliest formulation of justification by faith and not works (Gal. 2.16) was in immediate response to the attempt of Peter to “compel” Gentile believers “to live like Jews.” I probably did not give enough weight to Paul’s christology in my initial formulations of the new perspective and so stress more now the ‘in Christ’ dimension of his soteriology, but as already suggested, the ways in which Paul ties together the two dimensions of his soteriology need further clarification.
To order James D.G. Dunn's The Living Word, click here.
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