Many biblical theologies go wrong when they fail to take account of the genre of the Bible and privilege one of its many genres—whether narrative, law, or hymn—over the others. I have spent much of the last decade writing The Genres and Formulas of the Hebrew Bible: A Glossary which will be coming out in two volumes (Poetic Genres and Prose Genres) by Cascade Books early next year, and that has led me to contemplate the question of the genre of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and of the Bible as a whole. The Bible is clearly sacred, and any analysis of the Bible which minimizes this is fatally flawed. God’s communication to us is also via anthology: in the poetry of praise, we come closest to glimpsing something of God’s immanence; the narratives culminating in the Gospels reveal God’s economic actions on our behalf (and their interwoven plot lines and beautiful characterizations through vivid dialogue reveal so much about our ancestors in the faith); Lamentations gives theological voice to our mourning and Song of Songs to our desire; laws and epistles range from governing Israel and local congregations to all peoples at all times; wisdom sayings show us the ways of virtue and vice; prophecies and apocalyptic assure us that the wicked will be punished and the righteous rewarded; and the poetic, prophetic, proto-apocalyptic speech of Isaiah 25 proclaims to us, “He will swallow up death forever.” We should not privilege one genre over another, but rejoice in this anthology of anthologies.
A theology of a sacred book must reverence its object as sacred. We do not need a Jesus who is sexist by virtue of being male, as critical theory proclaims, but an impeccable Jesus, a Jesus morally incapable of sin. We do not need, as process theology proclaims, a changing God who one moment regards the creation of humans as very good and at another moment literally regrets having made them; what we need—and what, hallelujah, we have—is the simple, immutable, omniscient God of classical theology whose promise we can rely on. I shall deal with the frequent objection that one should not import terms and concepts not found in the Bible (a grammar of Biblical Hebrew rightly uses “noun” and “verb” despite these words or concepts not appearing in the Old Testament). The first divine exercitive, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), implies the essence/existence distinction explicitly articulated by Aquinas (lightness can be spoken of before it exists), and from Genesis 1 onwards, the biblical texts and their genres are suffuse with ontological implications consonant with classical theology. As evangelicals, we should use the categories of classical theology to analyze this sacred anthology theologically.