John Goldingay (Fuller Theological Seminary) is well established as a discerning theological interpreter of scripture with an evangelical bent, but with a generous spirit that invites readers to fresh ways of thinking and hearing the text. In his first volume, Old Testament Theology: Israel's Gospel, he probed the rich narrative materials of the biblical text. In the present volume he offers a thematisation of these same materials around rubrics that are congenial to the text itself, without undue attention to either more conventional biblical categories or to the familiar impositions of Christian systematic theology. It is evident that Goldingay, to a very great extent, is able to give himself over to the text and to be led by its disclosure to fresh and imaginative interpretation. Readers are offered an immense amount of material, but material that is articulated according to Goldingay's sensitive interpretative capacity.

The book is organised into eight long chapters. While the book contains no explicit subsections, I suggest the chapters may be usefully organised into three subsections – my judgement, not that of the author. After the introduction, the first two chapters consider in turn ‘God’ and ‘Israel’. In these pages Goldingay presents a full and complete summary of texts concerning the character of YHWH and the derivative character of Israel as YHWH's ‘family . . . covenant people . . . chosen . . . kingdom . . .servant . . . disciple . . . home’. Because I have spent so much effort on the character of YHWH in my own exposition, I am especially interested in Goldingay's decision concerning ‘Two Sides of YHWH's Person and Activity’. Working from the analogy of the maddening experience of being the parent of a teenager, YHWH is presented as wrathful, ‘but not from the heart’; God's anger is ‘suspended love’, ‘mercy withheld’, but it is ‘about to be shown again’. The outcome, according to this account, is that YHWH is ‘ultimately salvific’. Goldingay's conclusion is not reached easily, evidencing his own dis-ease with the conclusion he finally must draw:

We may, with Goldingay, settle for that. But quite clearly how we settle that question has much to do with the angle of vision and social location we occupy in the history of woundedness. An outcome for Israel, given this unsettling reality of YHWH, is that Israel is sometimes only ‘left-overs’, the author's nice term for ‘the remnant’.

The middle chapters of the book, chapters 4 and 5, seem to me to exhibit Goldingay at his best as an expositor. Under the rubric of ‘nightmare’ he deals with sin and judgement with a remarkable catalogue of terms and motifs. He poses the difficult questions of ‘averting’ the nightmare or of ‘overcoming’ the nightmare of judgement. This remarkable exposition is fuller than any I know in Old Testament theology. In the corresponding chapter on ‘the Vision’, he considers the hope of Israel that is rooted in the transformative capacity of YHWH to make new. It occurs to me that these two chapters, while generically on ‘nightmare and vision’ are, in the Old Testament, about ‘exile and restoration’, so that Goldingay's paradigm is deeply shaped by the course of events in the history of Israel.

The final three chapters permit Goldingay to move beyond the YHWH–Israel connection to larger issues that have increasingly occupied Old Testament theology. The rubrics of ‘humanity’, ‘world’ and ‘nations’ give latitude for many issues, most particularly the peculiar contribution of wisdom traditions and, most especially, the pervasive and haunting issue of theodicy. Along the way there is a great deal of good, sound exegetical work that will be of enormous value. One of the problems in such a study is that specific textual work gets subsumed under the rubric and then is assessed in terms of the larger theme. It would be a mistake to do that here, because Goldingay's exposition is, on it own terms, rich and suggestive without reference to any organisational scheme for the material. Of particular interest in his discussion of the nations is YHWH's relation to ‘superpowers’. Goldingay does not, for the most part, take up contemporary theological issues; but it is clear that he sees the crucial connections that are readily made between ancient superpowers and our own.

I may identify three features of the book that are especially important. First, Goldingay is a generous evangelical Christian; because he is an evangelical, it does not surprise that at the end of each major section he offers a brief comment on how he reads toward the Christian Gospel. These comments, brief as they are, are suggestive without being coercive or exclusionary. Second, because he is a generous evangelical, Goldingay is attentive to Jewish claims in the text. Alongside Goldingay's own clearly Christian commitments there is, in my view, no suggestion in the direction of supersessionism. Goldingay sees well that Christians must read along with Jews. Third and most remarkably, Goldingay carries on a continuing conversation with major systematic theologians, notably Pannenberg and Moltmann and, most especially, Karl Barth. It is clear that Goldingay, having mastered the critical apparatus, thinks like a theologian and intends his book to be taken with theological seriousness. On all counts I applaud what he has been able to do.

The only critique I want to voice is that it is too much; at many points his list of headings for a topic overwhelms and reads rather like an ad seriatim list rather than a coherent argument. That, however, is a small matter, an approach required by Goldingay's resolve to be comprehensive. He has digested and relayed to the reader an extraordinary mass of textual material. He has faced into the principal theological claims of the text and, in shrewd and imaginative ways, has shown it hangs together in a tensive, dynamic process that reaches no settled ground.

My favourite statement of Goldingay comes in his discussion of ‘image of God’ wherein he addressed the temptation of human beings confusing themselves with God, the image passing for ‘the real thing’. He insists on the sharpest distinction and avers that God ‘cannot be lightly or directly or easily apprehended, except with the utmost care not to offend or violate’. And then he concludes about that defining differentiation:

Goldingay witnesses powerfully and faithfully to the ‘not us’ God who continues to vex and save, threaten and restore. It is no wonder we will not finish the interpretative task. Goldingay has moved us decisively along the way in a task that cannot be completed.