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New Testament Theology - Communion & Community

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

Philip Esler, Professor of Biblical Criticism at the University of St Andrew’s, states in the Introduction that “the motivation for writing this book is his belief that the New Testament is a fundamental resource for the maintenance of the Christian life.” His aim in this book, therefore, is to provide a way of reading the New Testament so as to maximise its impact on living the Christian life today.

Pursuant to this, he presents a “model of dialogue between those first Christ-followers … and ourselves”, which would lead to there being a genuine dialogue (‘communion’ is the word he uses) between the writers, readers and hearers of the New Testament documents and ourselves in the twenty-first century. However, for that to become real, for the New Testament to be a useful resource for living Christianly in our modern world, he asserts that we must recognise the huge cultural and temporal divide between us and the first Christ-followers. We must recognise that they were completely different to us, writing and believing in a completely other moral cultural and religious context. If we can do that, then genuine ‘communion’ becomes possible.

He takes several chapters to demolish possible objections to this principle of interpretation, before moving on to some sections of the         New Testament, from which he can illustrate the model in action. Key to this part of his presentation is a lengthy and very useful discussion about 1 Corinthians, chapters 10-14.

Readers of this review would be forgiven for wondering exactly which ivory tower Philip Esler has lived in up to the moment of writing this book, because the model he presents is scarcely different from the efforts taken by all faithful expositors of Scripture to hear accurately what the New Testament writers were saying, how they would have been heard by their first readers and hearers and what were the circumstances which led to their writing as they did. Nevertheless, it is good to read what we do as a normal part of our everyday sermon work being presented and defended in so thorough and scholarly a fashion.

This is a very thorough piece of scholarship, encouraging an approach to New Testament theology which is second-nature to expositors, but foreign to far too many church leaders. It would therefore repay reading by all who make it their task to expound the New Testament. However, it is not an easy read, made more difficult by the notes being gathered at the end of the book, and by SPCK adopting US spellings for some words, presumably with an eye to the much larger market-place in the USA.