Gathering in the Power of the Resurrection: Jesus Sends His People to Serve the World

God unveils His plans to help all human beings in a series of events which is spread out over centuries and millennia. Yet the focus of this world-historical process of salvation is contained in one brief span of time: the birth, life, teachings, actions, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This magnificent undertaking, in which God rescues His world, is finalized in the ascent of Jesus and feast of Pentecost, and is a microcosm of the millennia-long global process of salvation.

Or, perhaps, the global process is a macrocosm of the life of Jesus: His time on earth writ large.

Either way, the three or four decades during which Jesus lived as a physical human being on earth are a hinge point, the inflection between the millennia before His incarnation and the millennia after His resurrection, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice describes:

Those who followed him would begin to act as if every life is worthy. The community of people called Christians would minister to the sick and disabled and build hospitals, pursue universal education, spread teaching through universities, and lift up the poor in faraway places, “for they would inherit the earth.”

Life with Jesus includes a balance between the individual and the corporate. Each person has her or his own unique and personal relationship with God. Yet the fullness of faith can be lived out only in community.

God calls people to unity, not to uniformity. Individuals retain their own distinctive qualities and make their own independent decisions, while being interdependent with their fellow disciples and fully dependent on God.

Rice chooses to continue the thought in the first person plural. God gathers people together. He turns a bunch of individuals into a “we” — following Jesus is a team sport, not an individual sport.

Nothing in our human existence has been quite the same since that fateful Sunday so long ago. We join Johann Sebastian Bach in saying (as he wrote at the beginning of his compositions), “God help me.” And we glory in the belief that our Lord answers. But we too often fail to say, as Bach did at the end of his magnificent works, “(Everything) To the Glory of God.”

While the individual retains her or his individuality, and while the community of disciples forms its own corporate self, direction ultimately comes from God.

Followers of Jesus pray for His guidance, and work to set aside their own notions. The task of the self is to set aside the self: not to annihilate the self, but rather to preserve it and to have it play a secondary role to God’s direction. Among Jesus followers, the desire of a leader is to point to God’s leadership. So Moses, a leader, prays to God, asking for His leadership and guidance:

In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them. (Ex. 15:13)

A leader is an intermediary, a mediator, a priest: she or he speaks to God on the people’s behalf, and speaks to the people on God’s behalf:

When the people cried out to Moses, he prayed to the Lord. (Numbers 11:2)

Disciples refer to this setting aside of self as “dying to self,” a jarring metaphor which captures the demotion of one’s own priorities. To give away one’s time, attention, money, and energy is to give away one’s life. And to give away one’s life is to die.

Every hour spent shoveling snow for a physically disabled neighbor, every hour spent helping a child learn to read, every hour spent listening to a person in distress grieve, is an hour of one’s life that has been given away.

Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch was reading a book by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. In that book, Byron marked passages which made precisely these same points:

Church is God’s people intentionally committing to die together so that others can find his kingdom. Just as God had given away his Son, he was now asking me to give my life away.

In that same book are phrases which point to God’s vision of how He desires to use community. Whichever word is used to label it, it’s not about the building of an institution. The end is too easily confused with the means. God gathers people in order to scatter them: He sends them out to build His kingdom.

It was interesting that in all His teaching, preaching and ministering Jesus never really talks about the Church and He did not establish or plant a church. All He talked about was the Kingdom.

The dialectic of gathering and scattering is the creative cycle in which God trains disciples and uses them to reach out to the rest of the world.

But God is not only about uniting and sending: He is also about reuniting. He is not only about assembling and then distributing: He is also about reassembling. This is why the word “reconciliation” is significant in the New Testament. God will bring together those things — those people — whom the world’s brokenness has separated. He will reconnect those people whom the forces of sin have disconnected:

There is hope for your future, declares the Lord, and your children shall come back to their own country. (Jeremiah 31:17)

Jesus works atonement and restoration. Those who’ve been revitalized by the power of Jesus gather together and yet do so for the purpose of reaching out to others. In the midst of all this creative energy, God restores broken relationships. The petition, “Thy kingdom come” refers to this healing dynamic.

God’s Multidimensional Activity: The “Word” Is More than Ink on Paper

The phrase “Word of God” refers to a rich concept with many dimensions. It refers both to Jesus, who is the living Word, and the Scriptures, which are the written Word.

The Hebrew term is dabar, which can be translated not only as ‘word,’ but also more broadly as ‘thing’ or ‘matter’ or ‘situation.’ God’s Word is therefore more than a strictly linguistic concept.

The Greek term logos points beyond ‘word’ to the actions of speaking and conversing. God’s Word is active and interactive.

The concept of the “Word of God” is central in the thought and writings of Martin Luther because of its multidimensionality. As Frank Seilhamer explains:

Because it is so crucial a doctrine it becomes a motif which recurs repeatedly in nearly all Luther’s work. Whether he is writing about the Scriptures, the Sacraments, Christian vocation, education, or sexual union in marriage, his concept of the “Word of God” is there undergirding his conclusions and providing the basis from which he argues and advises. To the great Reformer the “Word” is not a label plastered on a Book, or on a tradition, or on an ecclesiastical proclamation from the hierarchy of the church, though it could be in any or all of these. The “Word of God” is a living Force, a Power, an act of God, that speaks to and is normative for every conceivable life situation.

Because of this phrase’s broad semantic field, it also points to the concept of incarnation. “The Word became flesh.” It was not merely a linguistic phenomenon which became flesh, but God’s activity which became flesh, and His desire to interact and converse with human beings.

The “Word of God” is for Luther one of his master terms like “grace” and “faith.” And like these it is a concept that is many-sided. Only when he is misread and misapplied can one think his understanding of the “Word” to be narrow and restricted, i.e., to be applied to the Scriptures alone. When seen against the background of his voluminous writing, one cannot fail to be impressed by the rich, dynamic, spiritually throbbing Power inherent in his concept of the “Word,” as well as to be captivated by the wide range of experience and action in which Luther is able to see God operative in his “Word.”

So it is that “the Word” includes more than the text itself, but also interpreting, applying, expounding, preaching, etc. — and more: the encouragement and counsel that one Christian might give to another in conversation.

If the “Word” were merely a linguistic item, then “In the beginning was the Word” would be a poor ontology indeed. But “in the beginning” was God’s thought and action, physical and metaphysical, and a conversation, perhaps first among the persons of the trinity, and then with humans.

The Midrash and the Sermon: The Exploration, Interpretation, and Application of Text to, in, and about Ever-Changing Cultural and Social Environments

In a spiritual context, texts are found in a hierarchy of authority: at the top are the absolute, inerrant, inspired, divine texts; next are those which are inspired and authoritative; one step lower are those which embody, express, and codify dogma and doctrine; lower still are interpretive texts; near the bottom are Streitschriften which express debatable and polemic opinions.

In non-spiritual contexts, similar hierarchies may be observed.

In some spiritual traditions, the top level of this hierarchy is closed, ossified, and finalized. The collection of texts which are absolute, inerrant, inspired, and divine is a closed collection: nothing will be added to it; nothing will be subtracted from it. This is the case with Judaism and with Christianity, and perhaps with other religious traditions.

This solidification of primary text necessitates the ongoing development of secondary texts, as Johannes Wachten notes:

Als Offenbarungsreligion mit abgeschlossener Offenbarung muß das Judentum, wollte es nicht untergehen, die ihm am Sinai offenbarte Torah — und zwar sowohl die »schriftliche« als auch die »mündliche« — zur Anpassung an die sich wandelnden Lebensumstände immer wieder neu interpretieren.

In Judaism, the finalization of the Tanak, was one of several factors which began the development of the Talmud. The finalization of the Talmud, in turn, triggered the growth of midrash, as Johannes Wachten writes:

So entstand mit der Zeit ein ständig zunehmendes halachisches und haggadisches, das heißt ein rechtlich verbindliches und ethisch motivierendes Traditionsgut, aus dem sich bis zum Ende der talmudischen Epoche (Ende des fünften / Anfang des sechsten Jahrhunderts) und in den ersten Jahrhunderten der nachtalmudischen Zeit bis in frühe Mittelalter hinein das umfangreiche Korpus der rabbinischen Literatur entwickelte.

In Christianity, likewise, the closure of the canon of the New Testament necessitated the development of an interpretive and kerygmatic tradition.

The expansive collection of commentaries and homilies which has accreted within the Christian tradition is immense and wildly variegated.

In this way, the collected mass of midrash within the Jewish tradition has some similarities with Christian tradition of sermons.

Because of the great degree of variation among the individual texts in these traditions, it is easy to assume that they have nothing in common. But, as Johannes Wachten explains, a more nuanced and perceptive reading reveals commonalities among this diverse collection of texts:

Bei deren vorwiegend kompilatorischem Charakter mit einer fast enzyklopädischen Stofffülle treten feste literarische Formen stark in den Hintergrund. Auch wenn sie leicht übersehen werden, lohnt ihre Erforschung.

It is important to note that this dynamic plays out in a similar way in both the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition. The text-centric nature of Judaism, and rabbinic Judaism, points to the fact that Protestantism is not the only, and not the first, tradition to be text-centric.

Some scholars have hypothesized a “Protestant bias” in which a text-centric approach is seen as projected by Protestantism onto other traditions. These scholars argue that it is a Protestant innovation, and a uniquely Protestant trait, to give text an important and central role in the tradition. These scholars point to Luther’s text-centric approach, and to the introduction of the printing press at the time of both the Lutheran Reformation and the Radical Reformation.

An understanding of the role of text in Judaism, and in rabbinic Judaism, points however to a text-centric pattern in religious traditions long antedating Christian Protestantism.

Trends and Movements: The Vocabulary of Faith

On a regular basis, people discuss churches, para-church organizations, denominations, and movements among church leaders. The vocabulary of these conversations is familiar, yet bears examination. What are these words, and what do they mean?

Consider these words: Main Line, Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist. These are frequently-used words, and people often have a ‘gut feeling’ about what they mean. Yet it becomes clear, when people are called upon to provide precise definitions of these words, that there is substantial ambiguity.

The word ‘Protestant’ is found almost always capitalized. ‘Fundamentalist’ and ‘Mainline’ and ‘Evangelical’ are found both capitalized and with lower-case initial letters in various writings.

Evangelical is an adjective derived from the Greek word meaning ‘Gospel’ and has been used among Jesus followers for around 2,000 years. In its most literal and basic meaning, it is almost synonymous with ‘Christian,’ yet it has come to be used in a different way, to denote a specific subset of Christians.

Protestant refers to individuals and groups in the sixteenth century who objected to, or disagreed with, the Roman Catholic church. It came also to refer to later groups who opposed or diverged from Roman Catholicism. Sometimes it is used in an extremely broad sense, to refer to anything or anyone who is not Roman Catholic. But it is also used in a much narrower sense, to refer to a specific group of radical reformers who were a subset of the larger set of reformers in the 1500s. In this latter context, e.g., some Lutheran theologians insist that they are neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant.

Fundamentalism is and was a movement that emerged largely in North America, although present elsewhere, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The movement arose in response to various theological trends which were diverging from traditional Christian teaching — in this way, the movement can be seen as a defensive action. It began with the identification of five “fundamental” teachings within Christianity. These five concepts were well established within the norms of historical Christian thought. In this way, at its root, fundamentalism was originally inclusive: individuals from a variety of traditions and denominations could give assent to these five fundamentals. These five theses constituted a platform for mutual recognition, a sort of minimum standard: a person who acknowledged the five fundamentals could be understood as a Christian, and as a relatively non-heretical Christian. Over time, however, the movement began to be less inclusive. Mere assent to the five fundamentals — although such assent might prove that a person was tolerably Christian — was not enough to make a person a part of the fundamentalist movement. Eventually, instead of creating a broad basis or consensus for a range of denominations and theological viewpoints, fundamentalism came to denote a well-defined and small subset within the larger range of Christianity’s forms.

Mainline is a word used to label a group of churches, primarily in the United States. The word is used primarily to list organized institutional churches, while the other words — fundamentalist, protestant, evangelical — can also be used to describe theologies or individual believers. The ‘mainline’ denominations tend to be those which were well-established as institutions, had large numbers of members, facilities like church buildings, schools, and colleges, and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries enjoyed a generally respected status in American society. The late twentieth century saw a decline, both in numbers and in social prestige, for mainline churches.

Given the meanings and histories of these four words, the complexity of their use becomes apparent. Many mainline churches have a historical doctrinal basis which would embrace the ‘five fundamentals’ and so, in the mid 1800s, mainline churches could be seen as possibly friendly toward fundamentalism. Now, however, ‘mainline’ and ‘fundamentalist’ are often seen as opposing movements.

The Roman Catholic church could be described as ‘evangelical’ in the sense that it acknowledges the message of the New Testament, i.e., the Gospel, and sees Jesus as Redeemer and Savior. Yet the word ‘evangelical’ is often used to describe people, institutions, and theologies which self-consciously define themselves as something other than, and even opposed to, Roman Catholicism, to the extent that it was seen as a great feat to help “Catholics and Evangelicals” make common cause in the late twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the word ‘Protestant’ has endured gerrymandering to the extent that, on the one hand, people are routinely asked to put themselves into one of only two categories: Protestant or Catholic (as if no other type of Christianity were possible); while on the other hand, there is a rather large set of Christian denominations who identify themselves as neither Catholic nor Protestant.

When using one or more of these words, then, readers would be well-advised to pause and consider precisely what they intend to communicate. Consider a sentence like this: “His sermon was less fundamentalist and more evangelical.” Or: “These mainline churches aren’t currently faithful to their Protestant heritage.”

Whoever writes or says such sentences certainly has a meaning which she or he hopes to convey to the reader or listener. But there is a significant danger that the intended meaning might get garbled, because of the ambiguities surrounding these words. The writer or speaker should first stop, and define for the audience what, precisely, is meant by these words.

God’s Presence, God’s Word, and God’s Action

A close reading of the Tanakh — the Hebrew text of the Old Testament — reveals, in the words of scholar Frank Seilhamer, “the Hebrew concept of the extension of the divine Personality,” which finds its analogue “in Luther’s doctrine of the ‘Word of God.’” Between the Tanakh and Luther stands the New Testament, which likewise states that “the word of God is living and active” (Hebrews 4:12).

Seilhamer directs attention to “the Hebrew concept of the extension of the personality, human or divine” —

The “how” of this extendibility has many facets that still need clarification.

What does Seilhamer mean by the “extension of the personality”? His emphasis seems to be on the agency of the person; indeed, agency would seem to be essential to personhood. With humans, this is obvious: people do things. But with the divine personality, there is often a quietly sneaking tendency to view God more as what He is, but less as what He does.

“This subject” of the extension of personality “is important for both Jewish and Christian thought and life,” notes Seilhamer:

Luther’s writings on the “Word of God,” on the other hand, are voluminous. Very few things that he wrote, and he was a most articulate person, were completed without some discussion of the “Word.” The “Word of God” is the footer upon which so much of his theology is built, so it is not surprising that literally shelves full of his treatises, sermson, and various other writings are available to give us an insight into this primary concept.

This truism about Luther’s thought, and about the centrality of text in his thought, is so obvious that it needs no repeating or explanation, as even the most casual reader of Luther’s writings will know. But what is worth noting is the connection between Luther’s concept of the Word and the Hebrew concept of God as active.

God is essentially so active that His presence and His activity seem to be inseparable. He is “personally present and active in the created order.” From the earliest events recorded, to future events yet to occur, God’s Word often is His action: His word creates in Genesis and heals in the New Testament. So a triad emerges: God’s Word, God’s presence, and God’s action. Where one is found, the other two are usually at hand.

The Hebrew “concept of the extendibility of personality” is first more obviously understood “as it relates to man,” and then by analogy, taking the same line of argument further, “the subject of how God, in a similar manner, is able to extend himself and be really present wherever he chooses, and in whatever medium he selects, is” understood:

Both the ancient Hebrews and Luther had a similar basis for their dynamic, throbbing awareness of the real presence of the God they worshipped.

Not only is their awareness “dynamic,” but the presence of which they are aware is also “dynamic.”

For the Hebrews, one of the major differences between God and humans is that God’s functions have a spiritual basis, while human functions have a physical basis. Such a general statement, of course, needs close and careful unpacking, but for the moment, it can stand as expressing the notion that humans are more physical and less spiritual than God. Hence the need for an incarnation. The danger of leaving the statement without closer reading is that it can create the impression that God is only spiritual and not at all physical; such an impression would be mightily wrong.

To see how the Hebrews conceived of God as active, Seilhamer examines who they conceived of human personhood as active. The way in which the text expresses human agency can then be transferred into the way divine agency is expressed:

This essential difference notwithstanding, in the Hebrew’s experience God still functioned in many ways much like man.

The Hebrew phrase nefesh hayyah means living soul, and is often used as a circumlocution for ‘human being’ in the text. “Many of Yahweh’s characteristics and qualities parallel those of” such a nefesh hayyah, but this should not be taken for an anthropomorphism. On the contrary, human beings were conceived in God’s image. But the similarities between God and humans remain:

One of these similar abilities of God was his capacity to “extend” himself in the same way as man could.

God is like man, not because God was imagined in man’s image, but because man is framed in the likeness of God. “Just as man, with all his” soul, “could ‘reach out’ beyond the contours of his body, God, in his ‘totality’ could do the same.

For God, as for his creatures, the “word” was one of the very potent forms of this extension.

“For the Hebrew the ‘word’” was both a verbal — written or spoken — expression, as well as the physical object or event which was connected with that word. It “was one with the ‘thing’ which it was to perform.

The “word” was the power of the personality to do the thing for which the “word” was spoken. The “word” was the person in the action.

God is active: this understanding is central both for the ancient Hebrews and for Martin Luther. Yet a subtle tendency exists to see God as distant, impassive, and disentangled from the world. This tendency leads the believer to suspect that God might only rarely rouse Himself into action, prodded by fervent prayer. Many wrongly assume that God’s activity is found seldom at best in the world.

To the contrary, however, the ancient Semites and Luther point out to us the God is always and everywhere active and in motion. God is continually interfacing with every human being on earth.

To this end Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians that God “began a good work in you” and “will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” This is a concept of God whose continuous action spans centuries and millennia. Paul reminds his readers that “God who works in you.”

God is in ceaseless motion, and so it is good to ask not only about what God is, but also about what God is constantly doing.

The Indispensability of Old Testament Theology: The Insights of Otto Eissfeldt

God has presented a complex text to the human race: roughly three-quarters of it is in a Semitic language and set in a Hebrew context, while a quarter of it is Greek set in the context of the Roman Empire.

Scholars have long wrestled with the task of seeing a whole composed of these two parts.

The term “Old Testament Theology” appears in academic literature. What does it mean? Otto Eissfeldt suggests that it describes “the revelation of God as it has occurred and occurs ever anew for faith in relation to the Old Testament,” and “can never take the form of a historical presentation, because faith has not to do with things past but with the timeless present.”

To fully explore the phrase “Old Testament Theology” would take a long discussion. For the present, it will suffice to indicate that the Old Testament is not secondary or ancillary to the New Testament. The Old Testament stands on its own as a theological document. Neither Testament is complete without the other, as Otto Eissfeldt writes:

Of course, this kind of Old Testament theology, structured on the basis of faith, is influenced throughout by the central faith experience of its author and his religious community, but it is not required that every assertion must be expressly related to this. In other words, Old Testament theology does not always require “fulfillment” in New Testament theology. There are elements in the Old Testament - for example, the psalms that praise God’s majesty as it is unfolded in creation - that can also be direct revelation to the Christian, all the more since such are almost wanting in the New Testament. In this case, the otherwise self-evident schema of placing the religion of the New Testament above that of the Old must be replaced by a schema that sets them alongside each other. Here the Old Testament serves to complement the New.

The Old Testament — or Tanakh — represents a number of absolutely unique developments. On a social level, it placed women on a higher level than had previously been documented in any ancient text; it asserted that even slaves were human beings, and as such had certain rights, and that their masters did not have limitless arbitrary power over them; it expressed a humane attitude toward, and legislated decent treatment for, the poor, the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan.

Indeed, it expressed a privileged status for, and God’s favor upon, the poor, the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan. This was a revolutionary overthrow of the existing hierarchies in the ancient nations of that time.

On a spiritual level, the Old Testament was positively iconoclastic vis-a-vis other ancient religious texts, pronouncing that the possession of earthly and material blessings was not necessarily a sign of God’s favor, and that enduring earthly and physical hardship was not necessarily a sign of His wrath.

The Hebrew word anawim can be rendered as the “needy” (Psalm 9:18), the “afflicted” (Psalm 10:17, 22:26), the “humble” (Psalm 25:9, 147:6, 149:4), or the “meek” (Psalm 37:11) — depending, of course, upon translation. These are the people for whom God has special favor.

The concept of the anawim blossoms in the New Testament in the teachings of Jesus (Matthew 5:3-12; Luke 14:7-14), and in the letter written by James (2:1-9). So it is that the Old Testament is foundational for the New, according to Otto Eissfeldt:

This applies above all, as Karl Holl has justifiably stressed (“Urchristentum und Religionsgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie 2 [1924/25] 387-430), to conceptions regarding the relation of God to sin and the sinner. The New Testament idea of a God who offers himself to the sinner is actually foreign to the Old Testament. But it is equally correct and worth noting when Holl adds this conclusion: “Indeed, in the question of evil, Judaism came to a similar recognition never attained elsewhere among humankind. Recalling only Isaiah 53 and the anawim in the Psalms - Judaism broke through the conventional wisdom which held that the best person must also be the most fortunate. Just the reverse: precisely the most pious can suffer the harshest troubles. The unfortunate one does not necessarily despise God; he may stand closer to God than the one who gains everything.” With respect to overcoming evil, the Old Testament must here be placed alongside the New.

Eissfeldt outlines a mode of thought which he calls “religious pragmatism” or “theological pragmatism,” a view in which “the way of the world can be evenly calculated in such a way that piety and fortune, conduct pleasing to God and success - or the reverse, sin and suffering - always go together.” Eissfeldt argues, convincingly, that such a view “corresponds in no way at all to what can be recognized at the high points of Old Testament religion as the nature of faith. There, faith always entails struggle and daring, and precisely where an incongruity between piety and fortune is discovered and must be overcome, faith displays itself in its full power.”

Thus, Eissfeldt urges the reader to

Compare Holl’s statements with what was said above concerning the religious pragmatism of the Old Testament’s historical books.

It is high praise indeed to say that the Old Testament contains, in chrysalis state, but also in a more developed concept, the Theologia Crucis which is both an essential part of, and an enduring mystery regarding, the Gospel as presented in the New Testament.

The Creative Tension Inside Theology

One of the mysteries confronting the reader of the Old Testament is a question about the status of the assertions it makes - assertions made more often by implications rather than by explicit propositions: not the assertions made about concrete history, but rather the assertions it makes about spirituality, about the relation between God and man, assertions which are often indicated rather than stated, assertions which are indicated by the structure of the religion of the ancient Hebrews.

Is the Old Testament showing eternal truths, or truths that were true only for that time, or showing that it was true that those things were presented as truths - whether or not they actually were truths? In these questions lurk both a slippery slope toward the heresy of Marcionism, and another slippery slope toward a woodenly dogmatic and hyper-literal reading of the text.

Phrased another way, one can ask if the faith of the Old Testament is the faith of the New Testament. Or is it a separate faith? Exploring this question, Otto Eissfeldt writes:

The tension between absolute and relative, between transcendence and immanence, is the current problem of theology. For biblical scholarship, this general problem is reduced to a particular one: history and revelation. It is with this problem that the study of both Testaments, of the New just as of the Old, has to grapple, and a new solution must be found that applies fundamentally to both. However, particular matters in the Old Testament differ from those in the New, so that a treatment restricted to the Old Testament is legitimate. The question, then, is whether the religion of the Old Testament is to be understood and presented as a historical entity like other religions of antiquity, and thus in terms of the history of Israelite-Jewish religion, or as a religion which is, even if in some limited way, the true religion, the revelation of God, and thus - so the term will be understood here - as “Old Testament theology.”

So there are two approaches. The first approach looks at the text as a source regarding the history of religion: What did people believe? What were the doctrines and practices? Did that belief change or develop over time? The second approach sees the text as a source of theological truth: Which spiritual insights can the reading find in the Old Testament? How does God reveal Himself in the text?

Obviously and fittingly, the historical approach tends to use past tense verbs, while the theological approach tends to use present tense verbs.

The two approaches certainly interact with each other. Can they be harmonized? Otto Eissfeldt suggests that, finally, they can even be united:

Despite every distinction between the two approaches, the historical and the theological, it is nonetheless finally the case that, seen from a higher vantage point, they form a unity - and they do so not just to the extent that its importance to us as the source of revelation, rather than only or even primarily as the object of historical knowledge, accounts for the extraordinarily urgent historical investigation of Old Testament religion. Rather, beyond all this, we are confident that it is the one identical truth for which knowledge strives and by which faith is grasped. Knowing and believing belong, as we have seen, to two parallel planes, and they must meet each other in infinity - but only in infinity. Within the finite realm the two approaches form a unity only to the extent that one person can master them.

Eissfeldt seems, perhaps, to suggest that the wisest course is to pursue both approaches, and to strive to discover the organic unity of which each displays an aspect.