Om gudsbildens gåtor. Rapport från ett forskarliv

Abstract

Tryggve Mettinger, professor of OT studies at Lund University 1978-2003, sketches his development. In the first part he deals with his work on the notions God in the Hebrew Bible, notably his investigations of the divine names, of the exilic theology of divine presence (the theologies of Shem and Kabod, the Name and the Glory), of anicon- ism in the ancien Near East, and of dying and rising deities. Over time he has been more inclined to see a degree of cultural continuity between Canaan and Israel.

The second part presents Mettinger’s theoretical tenets, especially his epistemological stance. Kant’s distinction between the world of empirical phenomena and the transcendent world is found still valid. God himself is not a topic for the scholar of religion. Human belief in God, however, manifests itself in texts, rites, and iconography, and these are empirical data. Karl Popper is embraced for his stress on falsifiability as a basic criterion for sound scholarship and also for his view of the research process as a series of «conjectures and refutations». Mettinger also places himself in the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, stressing the social basis of the production of metaphor, even of metaphors of the divine. He also points out his reluctancy towards some of the tenets of postmodernism.

The third part deals with his youth, studies, and research up to 1978 when he took over the chair at Lund University. He sketches his valuable experience of growing up in a home where Pentecostal faith was conducive to a strong interest in the Bible and its world. In highschool, his teacher of religion and philosophy was Ernst Percy, an outstanding New Testament scholar who was out-manouvred in competitions for university chairs a number of times. Mettinger also comments on the reception of his unorthodox study of the so called Servant Songs.