The Bible ought to
say something about God, about his works, about Christ and salvation. But in order to do this it must take up just that which Childs forbids, a ‘vantage point outside the text’; for only so is it in a position to make estimative judgements, to make decisions about truth. (Holy Scripture, 137)I'm really driven to wonder to what extent Barr actually made an effort to understand Childs, rather than just attempt to write him off.
4 comments:
What do you think of Barr's argument in “The Concept of Canon and its Modern Adventures,” in Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 49-74.
At the very start he offers a critique that strikes at the heart of canonical
hermeneutics, whether practiced by Childs or anyone else. He argues that to interpret the Bible as a single (canonical) book is to interpret it anachronistically, and introduces a bifurcation of meaning; on the one hand you have the discrete grammatical-historical meaning of the original author, and on the other the "biblical" meaning, the meaning when this text or book is interpreted in light of the whole.
Now I find myself both disagreeing with Barr and agreeing with him. I agree with him that there is a bifurcation of meaning when we interpret texts canonically. I disagree that this is a bad thing, provided ultimate divine authorship.
How do you think Barr would respond?
Hi Tommy, thanks for the thoughts. I'm pretty much with you - i.e. exegesis has to reckon with levels of meaning, though I think there has to be some kind of connection between them (bifurcation sounds too disconnected to me). This is what Childs has argued all along. The arbitrator of the spiritual sense is the literal sense of the text, which is not necessarily the "grammatical-historical." The literal sense is the "literary" sense created by the final form of the text, and so, if one accepts redaction criticism, is greater than then the meaning of the individual parts when disconnected from each other. Barr seems to be cast in the mould of modernity, with its focus on history. I get this even from his article "The Literal, the Allegorical, and Modern Biblical Scholarship" (in which he again seems to miss Childs' point). As a result, although he agrees that one needs to go beyond the text to its substance, the avenue for doing so is the historical intentionality of the author grounded in space and time. Not that I'm a Barr expert or anything ...
Thanks for the clarification. I found your description helpful, particularly this:
"The arbitrator of the spiritual sense is the literal sense of the text, which is not necessarily the "grammatical-historical." The literal sense is the "literary" sense created by the final form of the text, and so, if one accepts redaction criticism, is greater than then the meaning of the individual parts when disconnected from each other."
Barr, of course, will never except anything short of grammatical-historical meaning as the meaning.
You're probably right about Barr. I've not read enough of him to know. In his article on allegory (mentioned above), however, he argues that much critical study has been more akin to allegory due its rejection of the literal sense (God created God in 6 days) and its focus on the spiritual (what did that mean for the author? What are his cultural influences?). He's clearly using a differnce definition of "literal sense" here, which so misses the point of the article by Childs which he is criticising I can only shake my head in wonder. Childs has made a similar interesting parallel between critical scholarship and allegory, which I've summarized here. In fact, I have a whole thread on this here.
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