Wednesday 19 August 2009

Review of Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology by Richard Briggs

A Continuous Probing of Discontinuity:
A Grateful Outsider Reads Richard Harvey’s Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology

Richard S. Briggs

Introduction

Over twenty years ago my own easy-going and untroubled atheism – a very English kind of civil disinterest – was confronted by the claims of Jesus Christ. I had no desperate problems to deal with, no guilty past to lay to rest, and no sense of longing for something more profound, but nevertheless, within a few weeks of arriving at University as an undergraduate and encountering Christian believers who lived zealously and joyfully for their God, I signed up. And in profound discontinuity, my world was turned upside down. I plunged into long and mostly happy years of mission, church work, evangelism, theological study, and even church leadership. I drifted towards theological education. And thus it was that I eventually arrived at being a New Testament lecturer at a Christian college, raising my eyes from the narrow pages of doctoral intensity to survey a room full of young people eager to know what it was all about. At which point I began to realise, yet again, how little I understood what it was all about. I had my own frameworks and favourites: parables that I had found personally life-changing; verses which summarised key truths; and the book of Romans which, I had been taught, supported the great Reformation edifice of justification by faith. But somewhere between trying to offer an overview of Paul’s letter to the Galatians to fresh-faced undergraduates in ‘Introduction to New Testament’, and teaching an introductory class on Romans, it finally dawned on me that one of the great driving engines of the New Testament was the vexed question of how to understand God’s new action in Jesus amongst the Gentiles in terms of the frameworks handed down from God’s familiar action amongst the chosen people: the Jewish believers who had been centre-stage from the very beginning. At which point, the New Testament came alive in my hands as a book of engaged and identity-shaping theology, a discovery which remains with me in my present context teaching the Old Testament to Christian ministers in training.
I recount this story by way of introduction to my own reading of Richard Harvey’s Mapping Messianic Jewish Theology, in part to make it as clear as I can that I come to his work from far afield. Where he writes as a participant-observer, I am an observer only, albeit an observer whose day job involves serious and persistent attention to the very same texts which make up the Tanakh. Where his own identity is deeply implicated in the issues and themes he explores, my own identity has been forged in a very different world: believer against atheist; Protestant against Catholic; evangelical against liberal - all these have been at various times identity-shaping issues for me (though less so now in some cases), but I have always been Gentile, and I teach the scriptural text mainly to Gentiles who will minister to Gentiles, for many of whom, indeed, there is no awareness of the Messianic Jewish Movement (MJM) at all. My own awareness is indebted to Richard Harvey himself: it was my privilege to be his colleague as I first taught those New Testament classes, first stumbled through Romans, first found myself pausing over ‘what advantage has the Jew? ... Much in every way’ (Rom 3:1). I have learned much from him, even and perhaps especially in the midst of disagreement, but always profoundly challenged to think better, more seriously, and more determinedly for the glory of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So I am an outsider to this discussion, but an immensely grateful one, and I shall mark my outsider status here in small but significant ways such as maintaining the terminology of my own traditions: reference to ‘Jesus Christ’, for example, when talking of Messiah Yeshua, or the labels ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’, which I retain in spite of long years debating this issue with Richard, for theological reasons to which I shall come towards the end.



Richard S. Briggs is the Director of Biblical Studies and Hermeneutics at Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham University, where he teaches the Old Testament to those training for Anglican ministry.

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