This collection of essays is an exhilarating read. Organized into four intriguing categories, “Horizons,” “Stopovers,” “Feuilletons,” and “Declarations,” the volume collates four newly published essays and twenty-six previously published works spanning thirty-nine years of scholarship by C. Clifton Black, the Otto A. Piper Professor Emeritus of Biblical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. The selection of essays is culled from his vast authorship (the author, coauthor, or editor of twenty books and more than two hundred essays, articles, and reviews). The reviewer is tempted to suggest this volume as the “essential Black,” but doing so would not only neglect commentary work but also leave the reader wanting more, with subsequent volumes easily imagined. Being primarily a collection of previously published work, the strength of the collection is to be judged not only by its constituent parts but by the intention of the compilation itself. Far from being a vanity volume, Black offers an erudite “canon” for exegetical and theological reflection to current and future practitioners of the interdisciplinary task.
By organizational category, “Horizons” comprises four essays that outline the various religious studies tasks of biblical theology and its modality as a spiritual discipline, which is dialogic and fueled by prayer. “Stopovers” contains sixteen exegetical essays of clearly demarcated scope (specific destination, if you will), but taken together, journey through key theological territory in the biblical text (for example, synoptics, the “Lord’s Prayer,” “creation” as theological Mitte in the New Testament, “sin” in the synoptics, “death” in Romans 5–8, “church” in synoptics and acts, doctrine, ecclesial formation, and mission in Johannine texts). This section includes thematic exegetical forays as well (Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, the King James Bible, embodied healing, audience resistance, the lectionary, and hospitality). In the third section, “Feuilletons,” or light literature, Black surprises the reader with intriguing essays on Johnny Cash, Christian bookstores, and the death of a beloved border collie, among other incisive essays. The reader might be forgiven for supposing these essays to be of less significance. They are offered through the author’s self-deprecating categorization, though each is imbued with theological depth, pathos, and human relevance indicative of a public intellectual. The last section, “Declarations,” consists of five essays culminating in christological confession. Perhaps it is here in the concluding essay that the reader finds Black’s perspective crystallized: “If you lower your riveted defenses and let these texts get hold of you and go to work on you, they will change your life and the way you reckon everything” (397).
Black, a past president of the American Theological Society (2022–2023), identifies in the preface as “a churchman first, whose scholarship has been practiced in service of the gospel” (x). Concerned for the future of biblical theology, Black writes, “Biblical scholars are going to have to be trained to think not only historically but theologically, from stem to stern, with all that implies both philosophically and confessionally” (25) and “scriptural theology stands in dialectical tension with real-world worshipping community with whom it is perpetually conversant” (33). Biblical Theology arrays a scholar’s nearly forty-year engagement over the full breadth of the theological discipline, from detailed philological and historical work, to theological breviary and assessment, to erudite and penetrating application in the life of the faithful.
Herein lies the specific contribution of this volume. In it, the reader is led through the length and breadth of the scholarly and pastoral desiderata of the discipline. At times, Black is unflinchingly critical when either the academy or the church becomes unmoored from a focus on the raison d’être of the biblical text. Most often, his scholarship is incisive, judicious, and even conversationally revelatory. Occasioned within each section are moments of deep pastoral sensitivity, personal vulnerability (subject to the theological task), and penetrating wit. These rare finds among similar volumes of collected essays encourage reading the oeuvre as theological exposition rather than approaching the collection simply as an anthology. Biblical Theology should be seriously considered for undergraduate and graduate study; exegetical, homiletical, theological, and practical study; as well as libraries committed to theological depth and cultural conversation.
