What are B.S. Childs' weaknesses?

This is the question I was recently asked by John Lyons of Reception of the Bible. Here's a provisional answer.

Childs is simultaneously the most stimulating and most frustrating Biblical scholar to read, especially when one first discovers him. The fact that, in my opinion, he is one of the most misunderstood scholars is not surprising, given both the content and the context of his work (he's often been associated with the wrong intellectual currents, e.g. French post-structuralism). I first started reading him properly about two years ago, with the intention of starting with the “grandfather” of “theological exegesis,” before moving on to more contemporary thinkers. I soon discovered that one cannot “just start” with Childs and then put him to the side. His thinking and influences are so comprehensive (umfassend), that you really need to read the whole before you can start appreciating the parts. In that sense, reading Childs' “canonical corpus” requires a similar hermeneutical stance to the one he proposes for the Bible! His later work provides an invaluable perspective by which to correlate everything which has gone before and, in my opinion, Karl Barth's approach to Scripture as “witness” provides the golden thread. One finds echoes of his earliest thoughts from the Sixties in his final publications, and when one pieces them together one can avoid the odd psychological theories that have been devised by his critics in order to make sense of a proposal only partially perceived (interestingly enough, his critics often apply a sort of “source critical analysis” to Childs' “canon,” dividing his books into different phases which are then judged to stand in no relation to each other. The result is a “schizophrenic” Childs [Brett] who “doesn't know his own mind” [Barr], divided into, e.g. "the authorial-intentional Childs" and "the post-structural Childs").

Given this integrated nature of his approach, I find it difficult to critique him. In the process of discovering him, there are all kinds of criticisms that come to mind: what about the diachronic dimension? Wait, how is that a “synchronic” reading? Isn't Childs' too “conceptual”? Wait, doesn't he focus too much on the particularity of the text? How can one affirm both the literal sense and the dogma of the church as exegetical context? How can one at times bracket out historical questions, and at other times let them be decisive? How can one abandon historical critical speculation and at the same time make one kind of critical construal constitutive for interpretation?

For me, every time I find something to criticise, Childs addresses the issue from another angle. My notes are full of cross-references and colour coding in an attempt to figure out what is going on. I'm amazed how easy it is to use “Childsian” exegetical categories to describe this process of reading his own work. In the process of Zusammensehen (syn-opsis, the term is Barth's), where each part is constantly compared with another, a fuller vision of the the subject matter (res) with which Childs himself wrestled and to which he wished to direction has slowly emerged. I've needed to read other works by Barth and Diem in order to understand some of Childs' basic assumptions (information about "reality," as Childs might put it), and now, near the end of the process, I find that my horizon has been expanded beyond what I could have hoped for and in directions I wasn't expecting.

In short, I'm still too involved in the process of figuring Childs out to be able to properly criticise him. It's ironic, given that he is one of the most controversial and heavily critiqued figures of the 20th century! But, as far as I have been able to ascertain, his critics have either not had the benefit of reading the parts in light of the whole (or have not wanted to: Barr et al ignore his Biblical Theology), or have been so repulsed by his proposals that they haven't been able to bring themselves to properly understand the arguments that he uses to get him there in the first place. As Daniel Driver has concluded in his recent doctoral dissertation, the Childs of the secondary literature is a “Frankenstein,” one who has almost nothing to do with the living scholar whose proposals are still waiting to be registered by a world ignorant of his actual work.