1 Biblical Theology and the Problem of Modernity Von Wredestrasse zu Sackgasse A.K.M. Adam In recent years, biblical theology has been pronounced moribund, declared to be "in crisis," and generally found wanting. The evident problem is not so much that no one wants to do biblical theology as that no one seems capable of living up to the demands of those who theorize about biblical theology. Proposed theologies are too harmonis- tic, too diffuse, too apologetic, or too uncritical. There seems to be nothing left to do but debate what biblical theology should be, if only we could have some. Is biblical theology a near-dead horse, still subject ' to occasional floggings at the hands of hard-nosed historical critics, subject to attempts at resuscitation by theologically-inclined scholars - or can these bones live? . The answer I propose in this essay is, "Yes, they can live. But first we must re-examine the nature of biblical theology's near-fatal afflic- tions." A careful consideration will show that quite probably, those who have been trying to get the old grey mare back on her feet again have been consulting the wrong veterinarian. I suggest that the travails of modern biblical theology come from the contradictions which inhere in the effort to attain satisfactory theological results while respecting modernity's rules; anyone who desires different results will have to do what is, for modern biblical scholars, unthinkable: to abandon the effort to construct a biblical theology on a historical foundation. Now, "modernity" in this context does not refer to the quality of being particularly recent (though the dominance of distinctly modern benchmarks for interpretation is a relatively recent phenomenon). "Modernity" designates a specific interpretation of what is to be done in a given discipline; it is a label for a set of assumptions which under- lie and regulate an enterprise. There are admittedly as many different kinds of "modernity" as there are people who think about modernity, and to that extent my thesis is too ambiguous.' The "modernity" to which I am pointing will not be found in self-conscious stylistic reflec- tion on biblical studies (perhaps just to that extent, Joseph O'Leary