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The Servant Lord and his Servant People
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
The ‘themes’ of church conferences are often no more than umbrellas which, if they conveniently gather together the business to be discussed, also tend to shelter the discussions too effectively from sunlight and storms. Fortunately, the more cloying slogans are generally short-lived, and therefore harmless. Truth will out in the long run even if it does not appear at a given ecumenical meeting. On the other hand, if a conference theme does express a biblical truth uncommonly well, the fact that the meeting is soon over may render that insight quite prematurely out of fashion. Perhaps it is no service to a really good idea for it to be made the watchword of an international conference. Yet there is the possibility that time, place and thinking may coalesce in such a way that the insights of a congress may become a permanent gain for Christian thought.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1959
References
page 115 note 1 A new work, Jesus and the Servant, by Hooker, Morna D. (S.P.C.K., 1959)Google Scholar has come to the writer's attention since this article was set in type. Miss Hooker argues that Isaiah 53 makes no doctrinal contribution to New Testament Christology above and beyond the general New Testament use of the whole Old Testament servant motif. There is, Miss Hooker claims, no ‘servant figure’ in either the Old Testament or other Jewish writings with which Jesus could have been ‘identified’. Rather the meaning of the ‘servant songs’ is one with the pattern of suffering and exaltation characteristic of Israel's history, as that pattern is interpreted by the prophets. The writer is warmly appreciative of Miss Hooker's careful study, and especially of the progress she makes toward showing the connexion of the servant motif with the history of God's people interpreted as kerygma; he cannot quite agree, however, with her systematic elimination of Isaiah 53 from a position of doctrinal influence in the New Testament apart from a few late passages, i.e. in 1 Peter.
page 124 note 1 cf. Bultmann, Rudolf, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1, p. 197.Google Scholar
page 124 note 2 cf. Gen. 36.6; Tobit 10.10. 2 Macc. 8.11, and also, on this whole question, Grobel, Kendrick, ‘Soma as “self, person” in the Septuagint’, in Neutestamentliche Studien für Rudolph Bultmann, Alfred Töplemann, Berlin, 1954, p. 52.Google Scholar
page 125 note 1 cf. the handling by the Septuagint Translators of the Massoretic text at Ps. 39.6; Job 6.4, 33.24, 40.32, and the references to ‘my servant Job’ in ch. 42.