The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

What Is Biblical Spirituality? 115
fact that these volumes are translations (by Elizabeth McCabe)
from a French original, L’Ancien Testament, source de vie
spirituelle (1952), in which context “spirituelle” carries
connotations of faith truths rather than living in relation to the
Scriptures. Based on an idea of progressive revelation by God in
the Bible, 10 from Genesis 1 onwards, the Old Testament is
primarily concerned in this view with “theological and moral
doctrine, [… which] teaches man how he is loved by God.” 11 This
approach is clearly pre-Vaticanum II, reflecting nothing of the
classical 1787 distinction by Gabler between the dogmatic and
historical approaches to writing an Old Testament Theology.
Therefore, De la Croix’s contribution is in line with an earlier, now
discarded, tradition within Old Testament Theologies of applying
categories from systematic theology to the analysis of the Hebrew
Bible texts, rather than abstracting categories from the texts
themselves and/or from the scholarly exegetical literature. Not
what the texts in their socio-historical and literary contexts may
have said, and from this, what they can be said to say today, but
dogmatological pronouncements from the texts are presented as if
of the texts.
No hermeneutical processes through which the deductions are
funnelled, are acknowledged. Verses from different sections of the
Bible, all taken literally and a-contextually, are copiously crossreferenced,
at times amplified with references to doctores of the
church; not once, though, is acknowledgement given to an
academic work. In the footnotes, the slightest of hints to ancient
Near Eastern socio-religious backgrounds and authorship questions
may be detected, though very infrequently. For the most part, the
strong impression is given that pure, holy, Christian words are
found in the Old Testament. The category of revelation is prime;
history is read naïvely, from Adam as a historical person onwards.
10 Cf. De la Croix, God and the Soul, viii–x.
11 Ibid., ix