The Promise-Plan of God

Exploring the difficulty in determining the true nature, method, scope, and motivation for biblical theology, this book proposes the promise of God as the centre of Old and New Testament theology and applies the solution to each of its eras.

Recognizing the major crisis in biblical theology, namely the inability of the discipline to restate and reapply the authority of the Bible, Walter Kaiser offers a solution to the unresolved issues of definition and methodology in biblical theology. A proper understanding of biblical theology, explains the author, “shows us an inner centre of plan to which each biblical writer consciously and deliberately contributed; however, this inner biblical unity, which biblical theologians traditionally have been loathe to adopt for fear of gratuitously imposing a grid of their own devising over the text, is a centre that is inductively supplied and confirmed by the text of Scripture itself. That centre is the promise of God.” This book is a complete revision of Walter Kaiser’s Toward an Old Testament Theology. Extending the discussion into the New Testament, Dr. Kaiser now offers a biblical theology of Old and New Testaments.

In Part I of his book, Dr. Kaiser discusses the inherent difficulty in determining the true nature, method, scope, and motivation for Old Testament theology. In Part II, he applies his solutions clearly and methodically by chronologically discussing the Old Testament eras from the Pre-patriarchical (Prolegomena to the Promise) to that of the Post-exillic (Triumph of the Promise). In Part III, Dr. Kaiser now explores the central theme of the promise of God in the New Testament story. A special section examines the connections between Old and New Testament theology. “This textbook is different,” says Dr. Kaiser, “in that it takes the Bible’s own system of organization as the solution to the very issues that have perplexed us the most, while also strictly observing the historical sequence of divine revelation.”

432 pages