Joe Cathey has put up a poll asking what his readers think the center of Old Testament theology is.  His choices are covenant, holiness of Yahweh, God’s self-revelation, communion, or none of the above.  I voted for none of the above, because I do not think it is any of these.  But none of the above suggests that I prefer another center, which is not that case.  Instead, I do not think there is a center to OT theology.
The practice of OT theology is actually two different practices that are related.  The first is merely a descriptive task, which outlines the theology of the different books of the OT.  The second task is a creative task, in which we try to systemize the theology of the whole OT by finding a single rubric that provides the key to understanding the Old Testament.  While I am very much in favor of the first task, the second task seems to me to be not only an impossible task but also not a desirable thing to do.

Finding the center of the OT is a standard way of organizing a book on OT theology.  But it is not a necessary step.  Of the two great OT theologies from the last century, only one of them sought a center.  This was Walther Eichrodt’s Theology of the Old Testament, which identified covenant as the unifying feature.  But Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology did not need such a center, instead focusing on the development of the theology.

The problem with covenant as a center is readily apparent: wisdom literature does not deal with the idea of covenant.  In fact, covenant is inappropriate in wisdom literature, since wisdom is a universal feature, while covenant is a particular one.  Eichrodt himself seemed to understand this, which is why wisdom literature received such poor treatment in his book.

A center for OT theology cannot be found within the text itself.  This much is clear from the multitude of studies which have tried and failed to find such a center.  This center can be created, however, and whenever someone writes a theology with a center this is what they are doing (whether they recognize it or not).  And it might be possible to create a theology that did justice to the whole Old Testament.  But such a theology would be, to a certain extent, external to the OT itself.  It might make some people happy, but it would be artificial.

What stands behind this search for a center is the conviction that the OT presents us with one theology that we can find and elucidate.  Increasingly, however, we have come to recognize that the OT contains not one theology but many.  The theology of Isaiah and the theology of Jeremiah were different.  Song of Songs is different than Psalms.  And wisdom literature is certainly different from anything else in the canon.  When we try to reduce all these various voices to one voice, we squash the diversity in the Bible and do not do justice to the text itself.  Usually, we end up interpreting one set of texts in the light of another set that we view as primary.

Why we would want to do this is not clear.  Why not let the Bible speak for itself?  Why not allow the various voices in the text to each have their own say, unfettered by what other texts say?  This seems to me to make the text much more useful, since it would allow it to speak to a variety of situations today.  True, finding a center would help us to tame the text, but to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the Bible is not a tame book.

Recent OT theologies have been following this pattern.  Most notable is Walter Brueggemann’s  Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.  It seems to me that we should be seeking centers of OT theology, instead of reducing the text to one center.  Covenant serves well for the priestly writings, but not for other texts.  Let’s not force the text to fit into our preconceived notions of what constitutes theology.

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