Meredith G. Kline

Meredith George Kline (1922–2007)

Meredith George Kline was born on December 15, 1922, in Hempstead, on Long Island, New York, and he died on April 13, 2007, in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Almost everything between those two points was lived inside the classroom and the Reformed church. He was a scholar before he was anything else, and the shape of his life reflects it: few dramatic reversals, a steady accumulation of learning, and a body of work that unsettled more than its quiet author seemed to intend.

His formal education was thorough and unusually wide. He studied at Gordon College in Massachusetts before moving to Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he took his divinity degree in 1948. At Westminster he sat under the men who were then defining confessional Reformed scholarship in America, among them Cornelius Van Til, John Murray, and Edward J. Young. He was ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a small denomination formed in 1936 by those who left the main Presbyterian body over the modernist controversy, and he remained in that communion for the rest of his life. He then pursued doctoral work at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, a Jewish institution devoted to Semitic languages and Near Eastern studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1956. It was an unusual choice for a Reformed seminarian, and it proved decisive. At Dropsie he learned the ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures that would later supply him with his most controversial arguments.

Kline began teaching Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1947, even before finishing his own degrees, and he served there for roughly two decades. In 1965 he moved to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, where he taught for many years, and he also taught at Westminster Seminary California after its founding in 1980. He held no great ecclesiastical office and sought none. His life in the church was that of a teaching elder whose pulpit was the lecture hall, and generations of Reformed pastors received their Old Testament from him.

His formation was shaped by a particular inheritance. From Westminster he received the covenant theology of Geerhardus Vos, the Princeton biblical theologian whose work on the progress of revelation lay behind much of Kline's thinking. From his years in the Near Eastern field he took an eye for how ancient treaties, law codes, and royal inscriptions were actually built. The meeting of those two streams, Reformed covenant theology and the comparative study of ancient documents, was the work of his career.

That meeting also brought him into friction with his own tradition. Kline argued that the structure of the biblical covenants closely resembled Hittite suzerainty treaties of the second millennium before Christ, and that this bore on the dating and unity of Scripture. He argued, too, for a reading of the early chapters of Genesis that many conservative colleagues found troubling, and for a doctrine of the Sinai covenant that critics charged separated law from grace too sharply. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the wider Reformed world did not condemn him, but they disputed him, sometimes sharply, and some of his students and admirers carried his positions further than he did. He answered his critics in print and went on teaching. He never left the communion that questioned him, and by every account he regarded the questioning as part of the work.

Kline married Grace Dorothy Hollingsworth, and he was devoted to her through a long marriage. They made their home on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where he spent his last decades continuing to write while his health declined.

His Writing and Its Influence

Kline's first major book came out of his dissertation years. Treaty of the Great King, published in 1963 and developed from articles that had appeared in the Westminster Theological Journal, argued that the book of Deuteronomy follows the form of second-millennium Hittite suzerainty treaties: preamble, historical prologue, stipulations, blessings and curses, witnesses. If that form was fixed in the Late Bronze Age, he reasoned, then Deuteronomy could not be a late composite, and the covenant at Sinai could be read as what it claimed to be, a treaty between a sovereign Lord and his people. The thesis drew on the work of the Near Eastern scholar George Mendenhall, and it entered a conversation already underway in biblical studies, but Kline pressed it further and more confidently than most. It remains the book by which he is best known.

By Oath Consigned (1968) carried the covenant reading into the doctrine of the sacraments, treating circumcision and baptism as covenant oaths that invoke judgment as well as promise blessing. The Structure of Biblical Authority (1972) applied the same method to the question of the canon, arguing that Scripture is itself the written form of the covenant document, and that the idea of a canon grows out of the treaty form rather than being imposed on it afterward. In 1977 came Images of the Spirit, which developed his account of the glory-cloud and the Spirit as the visible presence of God and sought to show how the image of God in humanity relates to the divine glory. His largest late work, Kingdom Prologue, drew together his reading of Genesis and its covenantal framework. Throughout, he wrote densely and without concession; his prose rewards patience and punishes skimming.

His most debated proposal concerned the creation days. In a 1996 article in the Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith journal, "Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony," he argued for what he called the framework interpretation, in which the six days are a literary structure rather than a chronology, and the account is concerned with the heavenly archetype of the creation rather than the sequence of its emergence. This position drew sharp opposition from Reformed colleagues who defended a more literal reading, and the argument over it continues in the churches he served.

His influence has been uneven but real. Through his students at Westminster, Gordon-Conwell, and Westminster Seminary California, his covenantal method shaped a generation of Reformed teachers, and his writing on Deuteronomy, the sacraments, and biblical theology has been taken up, qualified, and extended by scholars such as Peter Gentry and Stephen Wellum, and by Old Testament interpreters well beyond the Reformed world. The treaty analogy, in various forms, is now a standard element in evangelical introductions to the Pentateuch. Yet some of his readers have followed his reading of the Mosaic covenant toward conclusions he did not draw himself, producing disputes over law and grace in which he is cited by both sides. His reception is therefore still unsettled, and the evaluation of his proposals, particularly his dating arguments and his treatment of Genesis, remains an open and contested question among scholars of every persuasion.

Who should read Kline: Readers with some training in Old Testament study who want to see what happens when the structure of the covenants is taken seriously as the key to the whole of Scripture. He is especially useful for pastors and students in the Reformed tradition, and for anyone puzzled by how the biblical writers understood law, oath, and kingdom. He is not for casual devotional reading, and he will frustrate those who want short answers or settled conclusions. His writing demands attention, and his arguments are better argued with than simply accepted.