Adolph Schlatter lived at the turn of the 20th century and taught New Testament and Theology, Church History and Metaphysics; he was a keen churchman, and much loved pastor. The shadow cast by Harnack was long enough to keep him on his mettle and the young Bultmann had not yet made his mark, though his challenges would soon occupy formal theology. Schlatter was known for his work on God’s action in the world. He is a New Testament scholar who worked closely in the Old Testament and especially Genesis 1-3. Nowhere does Schlatter work to establish the philosophical warrant for his using the Old Testament doctrinally, to account for how God might be said to act in time and space. There is a natural movement between Old and New Testaments and into the doctrines of Christian believing and living. Schlatter takes it as a given—at the level of metaphysics—that in order to know who God is and how he acts, in ‘creation, preservation, and in all the blessings of this life’ one reads as closely as possible the sentences about this activity as the Old Testament sets them forth. One feels nothing of the later environment of the history of religions; or of theories of development in authorship of the Pentateuch or in comparative Near Eastern studies of creation accounts. And yet there is nothing of the air of creationism or defensive apologetics either, and in this he is rightly regarded a sophisticated forerunner of Karl Barth. There is just the exhilarating task of letting scripture—OT and NT—have its theological say, tracking as closely as possible the way in which it says that according to its own idiom.
I found myself asking: how can Schlatter do this? And why has it been my instinct as a teacher of the Old Testament to believe it has the capacity to speak of God as God is, and not as a God en route to some subsequent recalibration or development? Why has it become almost impossible for one to speak of the ‘ontological trinity’ in the Old Testament? Or, of the eternal word Jesus Christ bound up within the words, and sentences and paragraphs of the Old Testaments? And why would I sense the absence of this as a great loss, and so read a Barth or a Schlatter and discover in them something of the same tacit knowledge, of God’s word and self, which animated the earlier history of biblical interpretation, in figures as diverse as Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin and Luther?
I believe the answer lies in the way a kind of Prayer Book worship I was exposed to in my upbringing as an Episcopalian functioned to reinforce what was in the early church called the rule of faith. This same kind of exposure could account for why Schlatter was able to use the Bible the way he was, and also remain committed to preaching, pastoral care and the no doubt messy counsels of German Protestant church life and mission, before the onslaught of two world wars.
The rule of faith made certain threshold claims about the character of God in that time before the formation of a second testament of scripture, one whose name and authoritative character as a ‘New Testament’ drew for its inspiration the sole scriptural witness handed to disciples of Jesus Christ from the bosom of Israel, what would in time be called the Old Testament. The rule of faith, whatever else it may have been and however we understand its actual usage, insisted that the Risen Lord of Christian worship, Jesus Christ, was one with the named LORD of the scriptures. This Lord and creator had given his name, the name above every name, to Jesus, so that at his name, every knee would bow, to the glory of the Father. The triune God was the LORD of Israel in reality and in promise both. In turn, this confession assured that one now knew how to read these scriptures, as setting forth Christ in a wide variety of ways: not just in prophetic promise pointing beyond itself, but also primarily inside its world, as a type and a figure, alongside the new covenant church itself, prefigured, in judgment and in blessing, in Israel herself.[xi] For no other reason than this would it have been felt apt to speak of Christian ministers as new covenant priests with a High Priest Jesus Christ, or of promises related to the name of Israel’s God among the nations now having to do with naming in Christian baptism, and so forth.
It would be possible to enlarge on this theme, but the basic point should be secure. My own conviction is that precisely these threshold assumptions about God, established by the rule of faith, have their liturgical reinforcement in the Prayer Book worship of Anglicanism, and have governed my own theological instincts at levels as difficult to detect as what I sensed in Schlatter. When in the worship of Morning Prayer one says or sings a canticle, as the Jubilate Deo or the Venite, these fancy Latin names never disguised the fact that we were citing specific words from an Old Testament Psalm and by so doing were introducing ourselves at the very start of worship, at the threshold of our attending to our lives before God, to the only God with whom we had to do in Jesus Christ. The rule of faith was never anything more or less that the doxological affirmation with which these Old Testament psalms were concluded: ‘Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.’ Here we encountered, in succinct form, the logic behind prayers of this same ordered worship, addressed to the Father, in the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. No one was being called upon here other than the one Lord of the Old Testament’s scriptural declaration, understood, from the standpoint of our inclusion in Jesus Christ, as the LORD, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.
Read the whole of Chris Seitz The Anglican Crisis in Interpretation and the Two Testament Voice of Christian Scripture
