Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 03:1 (Spring 1999)
Article: Schlatter Reception Now: His New Testament Theology
Author: Robert W. Yarbrough

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SBJT 3:1 (Spring 1999) p. 52

Schlatter Reception Now:
His New Testament Theology

Robert W. Yarbrough

Robert Yarbrough is Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He has translated Werner Neuer’s biography Adolf Schlatter: A Biography of Germany’s Premier Biblical Theologian into English. He has also translated a number of other works written in German, and has recently co-authored Encountering the New Testament: A Historical and Theological Survey (Baker, 1998).

Past reception of Schlatter’s two-volume New Testament theology, now becoming available in English for the first time ever,1 may be readily mapped out. After all, reviews of it have been in print for 70 years or more. But current reception would seem more difficult to characterize, since the English translation has only recently been completed, and there has been no time for reviews to appear.

In any case, to assess current reception of Schlatter’s New Testament theology, first several misconceptions need to be identified. Otherwise, present consideration may be hampered by past misunderstanding. A number of common opinions about Schlatter are at least slightly skewed. For example, George Ladd linked Schlatter directly to the Erlangen school. But this view has almost nothing to commend it.2 Leonhard Goppelt rightly notes that connections between Schlatter and Erlangen are formal and not genetic.3 James Dunn and James Mackey seem to imply that Schlatter’s main distinction is his use of the New Testament to “do” conservative theology.4 This is a distortion, not least because “conservative” is at best a vague and crude characterization of Schlatter’s theological outlook.5 Moreover, it overlooks the fact that the majority of Schlatter’s major scholarly works were rigorously philological and historical, not theological as Dunn and Mackey use the term. To imply that Schlatter primarily exploited the New Testament for conservative theological purposes suggests unfamiliarity with the full Schlatter corpus.

The only English-language monograph yet to appear on Schlatter tries to depict him as post-modern before such a thing as “the great ‘proto-narrative’ theologian of the late 19th and early twentieth-centuries” existed.6 The mind boggles at the attempt to enlist Schlatter, a critical realist who insisted that the historian could see with his eyes and not just through self-tinted gla...

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