The past is always with us. Or so it seems. The question is, whose past is it and what meanings can it afford for today? Even with reams of data, a tradition of literal transmission, a constant sense of commonality, can we honestly believe that the past is really meaningful today in important matters?

The scholar believes that the past is meaningful at least in large measure. The world of scholars is an investigative world that assumes meaningfulness. Despairing of applicability, the task of scholarship is largely altered, refocused on the present and future, trimmed of its determinative principles and constants. But what distinguishes moderns from ancients may well be a change in the perception of the past. Ancients believed that the past set the pattern for all time, that a story of beginnings enacted the reality we know and so be it forever. Not so with those moderns whose primary scientific values are oriented to the predictable future, and who often relegate the past to, well, simply history. History is left in third place in a scheme of values, behind concerns about the present and the future. Thus, attempts to recover the past take on a new dimension, one of less importance and less consequence, even if of some interest for the curious. Additionally, to say the past is meaningful is less a matter of conviction than of assumption that something of the past can be recovered, however tenuously.

This issue of tenuous applicability of the past both fits a modern departure from regarding the past as normative, as well as from the belief that changing circumstances make perception of meanings from the past largely inaccessible today. What people talked and wrote about then carried many assumptions that we can only guess at today, and what drove the authors to write was likely, as today, deeply enmeshed in local ideals. The task of scholars of the past has become many times more difficult once they recognize that the past is both less important and less accessible than once thought. Oscar Wilde may have put it best when he quipped, “The only debt we owe to the past is to correct its mistakes.”

Since the Bible is embedded in the ancient past, as well as being sacred trust, modern biblical scholarsmust face a challenging reality of pursuing biblical meanings for applications in today’s world. A first part of the task is in evaluating traditional interpretations that may have been, and probably were, anachronistic even when generated in contexts notably different from that of the biblical writers. Scholars often surprise people when they identify how late in coming were many “traditional” interpretations and applications of biblical messages. When using terms such as Christian and Jew, for instance, biblicists may be forgetting that their understandings are shaped much after the time of the Bible, hence are really quite foreign to the biblical base when what came to be diverse traditions were simply part of the same household of belief albeit with diverging emphases and tensions, as is quite normal in any extended community.

Similarly, morality based on biblical precedents often fails even remotely to relate to the issues in the biblical text, thus leaving the moral mandates a creation not of any biblical author but of later moralists with an ability to convince people by biblical similitudes, however wide of the mark these similitudes actually may have been. Today, moralists are much more inclined to judge morality in terms of intentions and circumstances rather than universal norms, although many are caught in the net of trying to do both.

When trying to do both, moralists may benefit from the realization that statements of authoritative universals of any sort may well lack historical verifiability. Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims today find a renewed challenge when studying their Scriptures to find authoritative answers to their questions. By and large, they have become less dependent on a Scripture-based norm and more responsive to personal motivation and inspiration when reading Scripture. This way of viewing Scripture may be less benefit to the official interpreters than to the faithful believers, and one might expect a certain push-back from authority figures seeking to preserve institutional foundations in the Bible for their authority, much as kings claimed divine rights to govern. But to the extent that this push-back defies the realities of modern scholarship and awareness, the institutional authority figures release their followers from subscribing to their pronouncements as simply lacking in credibility.

This, then, is a core challenge to biblical theologians today: how do scholars at once honestly examine meanings in the biblical context and at the same time help inspire readers today to base their trust in the Bible on credible foundations. No biblical theologian should seek to so undermine the credibility of the biblical texts that readers would abandon the Bible as a source of inspiration and motivation. Nor should biblical theologians seek to limit the inspiration of biblical reading to the privacy of one’s prayer life. Rather, biblical theologians face the challenge of at once recognizing the tenuousness of interpreting the biblical texts today–the elusive presence, as Samuel Terrien puts it–and helping release moderns from unrealistic constraints that simply are the creation of interpreters addressing needs and perceptions along the way in the history of theology. When such local interpretations are taken to be authoritative in source and universal in application, a true injustice is the result and Biblical faith is rightly undermined.

Biblical theology has languished in the face of this challenge. True believers on one side have been unable to free themselves from a sense of blind loyalty to the past, ill-founded as it is in whole or in part. Many seeking moral guidance from Scripture have lost their faith in the ability of the Bible to address their needs, often due to an unrealistic belief in the magical powers of the Word of God. Institutional defenders have found straying from established forms to be highly threatening to core constituencies, and efforts to modernize had to be turned back lest the ancient regime lose its powers of cohesion. Somewhere amid all these shipwrecks, biblical theology needs to be at once challenging, productive, and honest. It needs to challenge a simplistic belief that God’s Word answers all our needs and questions. It needs to find meanings that actually contribute to a better, inclusive life for people today. And, it needs to be based on the hard realities of our own inability to know ourselves, one another, or the past with any degree of certitude. Lacking these, biblical theology is the product of someone’s creation, lacking in truth and viability.

This issue of BTB offers new initiatives that will help the aspiring biblical theologian. Clinton E. Hammock invites readers to assess the role of Isaiah 56:1–8 as a transitional effort to reshape Judean survival strategies. Mario Aguilar’s study of 1 Maccabees in the light of social archaeology of memory casts a new light on this part of the biblical tradition. D. W. Odell-Scott points out interpolations within 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 that bear the mark of later thinking on the subject at hand. Together, these studies advance the cause of helping to build an energized biblical theology for the future.

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