Hayes – Prussner Old Testament Theology: Its History and Development
September 2, 2010
This book is more history-focused than Gerhard Hasel’s Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, yet it seems to have a similar aim. Prussner shows how Old Testament theology developed and advanced at each different point. Along the way he includes some brief discussions on the philosophical mileu which he believes contributed to the advancements in OT theology. The work is not as conservative as Hasel’s work. The author appears to give more credence to the historical-critical developments than Hasel does.
The work progresses from J.P. Gabler’s address up to the present age. He chooses to describe the progression in terms of segments of history rather than trajectories of ideas. For example, there is a chapter on the 18th century developments followed by a chapter on the 19th century developments. Each chapter contains moderately lengthy essays on different scholars and their own contributions. There is some attention to identifying scholarly trajectories, but the emphasis is on the historical development.
The book is a plodding read, and is mainly useful as a reference work, because of the fact that this grew out of a Ph.D. Dissertation – yet it is of excellent quality as an overview. The bibliography is excellent in this book, though there have been many developments since the book’s writing. It seems that Leo Purdue’s The Collapse of History, and later Reconstructing Old Testament Theology after the Collapse of History attempt to fill a need for a more recent work of this sort, though Purdue approaches the matter from a much different perspective. I would say that any student of the graduate level in the field should read this book.









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This book is somewhat dated (almost 20 years old in 2010). Yet, the analysis of the field is still quite useful, for the problems (questions) are still basically the same. Still, several major OT theologies have been published since this book was written. Brueggemann’s work takes a radically different approach from the one proposed here, bypassing several of Hasel’s “issues”. He does this by making use of rhetorical criticism, a perspective which Hasel’s work fails to note. Hasel’s work does well to describe and categorize the works of theology which he analyzes. Every course on Old Testament theology I have taken (4 now) have used this book as a textbook in some way.

Brett McCracken has written a book about Hipster Christianity
Conspiracy theorists rejoice! 



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