A reader recently asked what areas of study I felt needed attention in the academy presently. This post and the next are going to address that topic.

From my vantage point, primarily as one who works in the Gospels, I can see the need for intense work in those books. I feel that the Church still wrestles with how the Gospels should be understood and applied. So I would love to see more work done on the Gospels in all areas. My own interest is in the interplay of theolgy, history, and narrative. (In November of 2006 I read a paper at the national ETS meeting on this topic; I hope to turn it into an article at some point in the near future.) For example, narrative criticism is a growing field in the study of the Gospels. What does it allow us to do theologically with the Gospels which we could not do before? Answering questions like this will help us make sense of the Gospels and live by them more faithfully. These issues then intersect with wider doctrinal teachings like inspiration and inerrancy, and these connections need to be clearly discussed and understood. One tension point is the narrative liberties (if I could coin a phrase) authors take with chronological order. What does this mean about the way they understood their task? How does this affect our understanding of "history" as it plays out in the Gospels? Questions like this strike at the heart of what we understand the Gospel authors to be doing, so they are exceedingly important.

In order to understand the Gospels well (and any part of the NT for that matter) we need to know the cultural and historical background well. So there is a large need for synthetic studies that trace various concepts and ideas throughout the background literature and make application of this background to the NT. The Gospels are wide open for these kinds of synthetic studies, as there are numerous concepts at play at any point in them. For example, in Jesus' teaching about himself and his role in God's Kingdom, we find that he deftly combines different themes and ideas and theologically organizes them into a coherent whole. Lots of work could be done figuring out exactly how this type of theology works.