The need for "Godly exegetical instincts": George Adam Smith as case study

A major implication of the "canonical approach" as conceived by Childs and then developed by Christopher Seitz is that theologically viable exegesis is not just the preserve of practitioners of one tightly defined hermeneutic.

In their conception, the diverse parts of the Bible witness to a single theological reality, a reality which constitutes the "ontological unity" of Scripture. As such, if an interpreter is connected with and focussed on this theological reality, he or she has the ability to develop what Seitz calls “godly exegetical instincts” (243). Equipped with these instincts, one is protected against making exegetical moves which dramatically distort the text.

One such interpreter whose instincts were honed by his acquaintance with the regula fidei of Christian faith is the historical critic George Adam Smith. Smith's commentary on the Minor Prophets (1896) recasts their canonical ordering into a chronological sequence. Seitz notes how this exegetical move poses a theological problem for him: is God really like Amos says? (131) According to Smith's critically reconstructed Amos: God is a god of almost pure judgement. How does this God relate to the God of the prophet Hosea, with his different message?

Seitz continues:

Smith is not content with a simple law-versus-grace distinction, nor will he say that Hosea brings something forward that Amos simply did not know. Amos is a true prophet and his account of God is true; God is as Amos says he is. What Smith is struggling with is a penetrating account of the theological reality of God, spoken of in one way by one prophet and spoken of in another way by a successor, but both men speaking truly. It is the subject matter of prophecy—the God to which the prophets refer—that concerns Smith. Even though the prophets may be distinctive figures to be ranged on a historical grid, they are affiliated at a level deeper than even their own grasp of the matter. Smith is convicted of this, and it is this specific theological gravity that keeps his reading drawn within the orbit of older concerns for affiliation, now in a new model that would threaten this aspect in other hands.

… The question is … : Why does Hosea form the lens through which our understanding of God—in relationship to Israel, the nations, time, and creation—is focussed? Why does his particular, comprehensive witness serve best in introducing first Joel and the Amos? Smith finds persuasive the arguments of historical criticism for the priority of Amos before Hosea. But in the end, it is the theologically expansive witness of Hosea that serves to illuminate the more partial account of Amos, in Smith's conception. In this manner, though he works with a fresh model of historical sequence, Smith has intuitively retained the insights that the canonical form itself sought to enforce (131-132, third emphasis original).

This brings us to the key ingredient of the canonical approach as understood by Childs (see my article “Childs as Critical and Faithful Exegete,” though be careful with what I wrote in section 2! I'm rethinking that bit) : the witness of Scripture to a single divine reality. Seitz puts it thus:

My basic argument here is that the canonical form, when it is appreciated, even on the other side of historical accounts of priority, anteriority, and posteriority, serves to guard these kinds of crucial theological insights. The prophets are related, not in some easily reconstructed historical or sociological sense, but in the nature of their activity as spokesmen for God. … It is God himself who sees to the affiliation proper to his character, mediated through his servants the prophets (134, emphasis mine).

Propotional exegesis in the Minor Prophets

In my last post, I claimed that a canonical approach to Biblical exegesis, at least in the sense in which Brevard Childs and Christopher Seitz understand it, does not lead to flat, synchronic reading. Rather, it requires what Seitz called proportional interpretation, "a balancing act."

In relation to the Book of the Twelve (the Twelve Minor Prophets), the example given in my last post was the necessity of distinguishing the different types of juxtaposition found within the Twelve and between the Three (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel). "Proportionality" also needs to be maintained when correlating the general with the particular. Thus, regarding Jonah, Seitz says:

[b]oth the specificity and historicity of Jonah's world of reference, and the larger design within which one is to comprehend that, are guarded in a canonical reading, allowing Jonah to speak from within the witness of the Twelve (148, emphasis mine).

Here is a more detailed quote on Obadiah:

Working simply on the basis of Obadiah as in independent work, Childs and others point to the careful way in which Edom retains a distinctive historical specificity, but at the same time has been brought into explicit association with a larger theme—the day of YHWH—in respect of all national powers.1 Neither side of this association has been blurred in the final form of the book. The Day of YHWH theme, whatever else it may be in Obadiah, and in association with Edom, in prominent in the book of the Twelve as a whole. Indeed, for many it is the chief theme under which any number of different editorial moves have been organized in the final form of the collection. Without endorsing this view, it remains a valuable if partial insight. What may be said about the profile of Edom and the nations within Obadiah as a single witness holds true as well for the theme of the Day of YHWH in Obadiah, on the one hand, and in the surrounding witnesses of the Twelve, and the other. That is, the integrity of both realities must be guarded and not merged. (137, emphasis mine; Seitz references Collins, Mantle of Elijah, 70.).

To play on a term from Karl Barth, we need a Zusammensehen and not a Zusammenklappen (Barth, Einführung).

The need for proportional exegesis

What is proportional exegesis? Proportional exegesis is exegesis which takes into account all the dimensions of the text and gives them their proper due. The so-called "canonical approach," as conceived by Brevard Childs and developed by Christopher Seitz, attempts to do this - contrary to many misrepresentations of the approach as pure synchronic method (it's not even a "method"). In his book Prophecy and Hermeneutics, Seitz mentions three dimensions of the Biblical text, especially as they relate to the canonical shape of the Twelve: the historical, literary, and theological. I have commented on this in more detail my post The canonical shape of the twelve Minor Prophets.

Maintaining these three dimensions in proportion (there are no doubt more, feel free to suggest) requires a lot of subtlety on the part of the interpreter, what Seitz calls a "balancing act." For example, the distinction between the collection of the three Major Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) and the Twelve must be taken seriously. According to Seitz, for the Three, “different orders can exist, and the present arrangement is such that the integrity of the individual books is what matters, not their inner relationships or particular order” (91). The Twelve, on the other hand, have been preserved in a different way. “On the one hand, like the Three, they have their own integrity as a single independent work. Unlike the Three, however, they manifest a twelvefold internal character that is clearly marked and is an essential feature of them/it” (91).

Seitz goes on,

The question now is not one of whether historical particularity is a feature of Israel's prophetic witness in general or of the Minor Prophets in particular; it most surely is, and the superscriptions appear calibrated to make this aspect clear formally. What is at issue is how one handles this dimension of the witness in a proportional way and in accordance with the formal character of the witness (92, emphasis mine).

The implications this should have for the interpretation of the Psalms should be clear. In my interpretation of Psalm 24, I will be attempting to avoid the extremes of traditional form criticism on the one hand, which seeks only to interpret the Psalm within the context grid of some context external to the Psalter (though see Millard, Komposition, for a form critical analysis of the Psalter per se), and so-called "canonical approaches" (different to the one described above), which treat the Psalter as a book like any other, consisting of chapters strung along a plot line.

For similar thoughts by Brevard Childs on the need for proportionality in interpretation, see my post Two Testaments, four Gospels: The theological significance of juxtaposition. See also my post on Diachrony and Synchrony in a "canonical approach."

The final form of Scripture and the issue of readership

... the concept of final form is closely connected with the issue of readership. An important corollary to the designation of a written corpus as Scripture is that these writings function as Scripture for someone. They have been ordered toward a present and future audience who receives its identity in some way from Israel's past story which is lost if a new story is reconstructed apart from the received narrative form. Thus to suggest that the major force involved in shaping Israel's prophetic history derives from readings retrojected as literary constructs runs in the face of the final form of Scripture which is eschatologically oriented toward the goal of instructing every future generation of Israel in the reality of God who continues to act on its behalf.

Childs, “Retrospective Reading of the Old Testament Prophets,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 108:3 (1996), 362-377; here, 377.

Historical criticism and the Reformation

[A]s much as some have sought to describe the historical-critcal method as ingredient in the Reformation, and its indispensable genius, gift and fruit, this conclusion is far from clear. For the disentangling of general Renaissance and Enlightenment cultural developments from appeals to things like sola Scriptura is exceedingly fraught and requires multi-volume treatments in the history of ideas with deep learning and enormous sensitivity to the challenge to hand. As time passes, and one comes to terms with the exegesis of men like Luther and Calvin, it seems clearer that they inhabit a universe quite distinct, if not unbridgeable, from the one that historical-critical methods bequeathed us in their heyday. Indeed, what would 'the Reformers' really make of projects like dating the Yahwist, or the Q phenomenon, or even anodyne accounts of the history of Israel or the Greco-Roman milieu - areas in which we know more than the prophets or apostles themselves, for what that may be worth.

C. Seitz, "The Canonical Approach and Theological Interpretation," in Canon and Biblical Interpretation, 102.

For those who don't know, by the way, this is the greatest defense and clarification of Childs' approach that I know of. Get hold of it and read it again and again until you understand it!

A canonical approach to the Twelve Minor Prophets

I've argued elsewhere that Christopher Seitz's conception of a "canonical approach" to Scripture (like Childs') is not a form of postmodern interpretation which brackets out all questions of historical development or authorial intentionality. It is a complex phenomenon, involving historical, literary, and theological considerations (see, e.g. my post Continuity in tradition-history). Below, see 1st) his summary of the final form of The Twelve as the product of intentional juxtaposition and 2nd) his understanding of the nature of the phenomenon:

1) Canonical Shaping of the Twelve:

It is "clear that the placements of later books next to earlier ones is an intentional move, arising from the canonical process itself, and is not a reader-response imposition by readers tired of older approaches and looking for new ones. Just as YHWH's roaring from Zion ends Joel and begins Amos, Amos ends with a promise of Edom's (9:12), and Obadiah unhesitatingly describes it. Jonah provides an occasion not of Israelite but of Ninevite repentance, which makes the prophet sore but which reminds the reader that God is not above relenting over evil powers like Edom (whom he has punished in Obadiah already) or even the powerful nation of Assyria. He can treat them with the same patience and kindness he has lavished on his own people, in different ways and dispensations, in Hosea, Joel, and Amos or in the context of Edom's destruction of Obadiah (17-21). Micah establishes the limits of God's patience, now toward the preserved remnant of Judah, strikingly at the exact middle point of the Twelve as a whole (3:12)—a prophecy that bore repeating in a later conflict over Jeremiah's similar preaching against the temple and king (see Jer. 26:18)" (p. 237).

2) The nature of the phenomenon:

"We know that as a historical datum, very soon after the final prophetic book (Malachi?) took shape, the Twelve are regarded as a collection (Sirach, Qumran). Indeed, in Sirach the existence of the Twelve is something of a cliché: it is referred to as a given, without argument or assertion. The literary evidence for internal editorial affiliation, linkages, and intentional juxtapositions is becoming increasingly clear as scholars turn to this sort of inquiry. And I have tried to probe into the theological coherence of the twelve-book collection that may be the intended consequence or, indeed, the originating engine, driving the historical and literary dimensions of canonical shaping "(217, emphasis original).

Jonah and the nations: a "figurative" reading

What is the correct context for interpreting the Book of Jonah, the context that gets us to the substance of its witness? The classic historical approach would locate it in its post-exilic setting and come up with something along the lines of Blenkinsopp: the forgiveness of the evil Assyrians represents "the breaking of the bond of divine causality" inside the prophetic office (Seitz, Prophecy and Hermeneutics, 147). What about its canonical/literary context, however? I've posted on Seitz's understanding of typology, both as inner-biblical literary technique as well as prophetic hermeneutical intention. What would it mean to read Jonah as a book “figured into” a larger divine history? Seitz offers the following thoughts on how the canonical “universe of associations" into which the book of Jonah “has been figured and within which it establishes its ongoing prophetic address as the fifth witness of the Twelve” (147) creates a different picture of divine forgiveness and the nations:

Yhwh is “slow to anger”—but he his also “great in might, and YHWH will by no means clear the guilty” (Nah. 1:3). Of Assyria it was ultimately said, “for upon whom has not come your unceasing evil?” (3:19). Jonah ended with a question about divine compassion. Nahum ends with a question about worldly power and its capacity to look divine grace in the eye, as well as an episode of true repentance, and then carry on according to its own dark designs. Here Nahum is telling no detached theological truth, but is speaking of the way of worldly power as it moves through the chapters of history. And Habakkuk sees a worse chapter coming than the one about which he registered his initial complaint (1:2).

Prophetic intertextuality

In my post Biblical figuration as literary technique I pointed out that Biblical figuration is, well, a literary technique. The next question is why? What was the hermeneutical intention animating the creation of such literary associations? For Seitz, the term figural denotes the way in which the prophetic tradents wished to direct our attention towards the effect of their juxtapositioning of later and earlier witnesses.

Literary associations are not made for reasons of esthetic matching or for smoothing out possibly rough literary transition (if such had been the intention, we would struggle to spot secondary editing and derivative association in the first place, quite apart from interpreting its possible hermeneutical significance). Rather, these associations are made on the basis of theological convictions concerning God's character through time, God's sovereign purposes with the nations, God's deliverances of judgment and of mercy through time, and God's eschatological determinations derived from protological announcements and anticipations in the events of his historical life with Israel (250).

Biblical 'figuration' as literary technique

According to Seitz, the Biblical text bears “witness to a process of tradition-building” (72) in which a particular conceptuality concerning time and providence was at stake. This conceptuality was inherently theological and it was the task of the tradents of the Biblical tradition to pass it on to the next generation. Given this fact, what was the best means available to the tradents for capturing, preserving, and communicating this conceptuality? According to Seitz, Israelite prophecy, including its Wirkungsgeschichte within the community, is inherently figural. The term figural denotes both a literary phenomenon and a hermeneutical intention. Today I quote Seitz on figuration as literary phenomenon, tomorrow as hermeneutical intention.

As literary phenomenon, figuration is

the means by which temporally distinct witnesses have been intentionally associated in the material form of their canonical presentation. The way this has been achieved is diverse in application. Entire books have been crafted in order to deliver their intention in association with prior, written witnesses. The effect is by no means monolithic, due to the reciprocal way in which a fresh witness affects and is affected by its association with (literarily) prior and later books. On other occasions, editorial linkages establish connections between books with a prior history of development. Technical studies are available that provide speculations about the nature of the various moves that now correlate the witnesses of the Twelve Minor Prophets … (249).

For a related and fascinating post from a New Testament perspective, see my Christian eschatology and historical methodology: the case of John.

Bauckham as canonical interpreter?

Here is a quote from New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, which nicely parallels my comments concerning Seitz and the Old Testament in my post Tradition-history: a two-way movement.

In one of the few Markan narratives that John also tells, John, like Mark, has Jesus saying, “It is I” (i.e., “I am” [εγώ ειμι]; Mark 6:50; John 6:20). In John this becomes the second of the Gospel's theologically potent series of seven absolute “I am” sayings (4:26; 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19; 18:5, 6, 8). For readers/hearers of Mark, this series would not only develop the christological significance of the “I am” sayings they already knew in Mark 6:50 but also inform their understanding of the “I am” saying in Mark 14:62. In ways such as this, it would be possible to argue that John provides readers/hearers who already know Mark with a much fuller and more developed christological and soteriological interpretation of the Gospel story, but one which had clear continuity with the Markan Christology and soteriology they already knew. They would not perceive John's interpretation of Jesus as correcting or invalidating Mark's, but as extending and deepening it. … With the benefit of John's explicit interpretations of the few “signs” of the Jesus which he has carefully chosen for his highly selective Gospel narrative, they could also read with fresh perception the “many other signs” (John 20:30) that Mark records. While the fourth evangelist surely meant to lead his readers further and deeper into the significance of Jesus and his story than Mark's Gospel had done, he need not have intended them henceforth to leave Mark aside and to read only his own Gospel. He did not aim to replace Mark, but to write a different kind of Gospel: one which, by selecting far fewer traditions, left space for the reflective interpretation that is the distinctive characteristic of the Fourth Gospel. [*]

That, quite simply, rocks!

[*] R. Bauckham, “John for Readers of Mark,” in The Gospel for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (ed. Richard Bauckham; Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998), 169-170; cited in Seitz, Prophecy, 180-181

Tradition-history: a two-way movement

Although this post can be read on its own, it is part of a longer thread analysing Chris Seitz's Prophecy and Hermeneutics (go here for an overview).

According to Seitz and Childs, the canonical approach is predicated upon some conception of theological continuity within the development of the Biblical tradition. Within this framework, later tradents of the sacred tradition were

seeking to hear the original word, overtaking them and enclosing them, in the context of a new set of circumstances, constraints, hopes, and divine judgments (129).

What are the hermeneutical implications of this for those interpreters today who want to grasp the word itself, the living word active throughout the process?

The theological continuity between traditions means that one can read older traditions in light of their later development, and thus gain a fuller understanding of their original witness (Childs would have said that the old is infused with its “full ontological reality”). The prophetic word of the past lays claim to the future,

without ever ceasing to be relevant on the terms of its original delivery. The dynamic character is fully on view, but the bridge being built enables us to move in two directions and not just one. The book of Joel shows a present generation enacting the repentance (2:12-29 … ) called for in the days of Hosea (… Hosea 14.1 …). In so doing, one is drawn back into the world of Hosea to learn again what the character of God is truly like. More than this, one is given the chance to stand before the mystery of God's ways and the penetrating insight offered through the canonical witness of Hosea to that, which had gone unheeded or was only partially comprehended in the days of the first delivery (125-126, emphasis original).

Again, von Rad is Seitz's foil. In von Rad's attempt to bridge the gap between earlier and later tradition, including the New Testament, by means of a critically reconstructed, non-canonical theory of prophecy's “forward thrusting” movement, the bridge

self-destructs once it has arced from the past into its next phase (125, emphasis removed).

Next in the series I will post a parallel insight from the New Testament, furnished by Richard Bauckham.

Continuity in tradition-history

As I mentioned in the most recent post of my thread analysing Seitz's Prophecy and Hermeneutics, Seitz's canonical approach does not exclude the historical dimension of the text. The "canonical approach" is not a repudiation of historical criticism but rather an adaptation of the older tradition-historical model. In Seitz's words, it wishes to

take into consideration the effect of the final form of the text, once the prehistory has been appreciated and interpreted (130).

It is important for this approach, however, that there is theological continuity between the layers of tradition. In contrast to von Rad, Seitz does not believe that later tradents (or “traditionists”) were “manifestly misdrawing” an earlier tradition in order to extract its doxa (to quote von Rad, p. 250). Rather,

they are seeking to hear the original word, overtaking them and enclosing them, in the context of a new set of circumstances, constraints, hopes, and divine judgments (129).

Again,

In the spirit of the original prophecy, [the] canonical shaping has sought to hear God's word overtaking the generations designed by God for just such an apprehension (Zech. 1:6). Such an understanding of time is better calibrated to the intentions of the author of time and to the canonical portrayal that is providentially under his care, beginning with the original prophetic witness and carrying on through the process of development and consolidation until the witness receives a stable canonical form in the book of the twelve (134, emphasis mine).

Here we see that the continuity is theological—Childs had said “ontological”—and it is guaranteed by the ultimate author of Scripture, God, its subject and object. Again, von Rad's weakness was the theological discontinuity in the message of the prophets that his approach seems to imply:

His work was a brilliant and insightful effort to connect prophecy to the wider canonical achievement by means of a tradition-historical conception. This came at the cost, however, of seeing the abiding characteristic of the prophets as their “forward leaning” capacity, based upon a reconstruction that isolated the prophets from one another … The prophets build a bridge into the New Testament by means of constant change and adaptation of their message, of such a nature that it is unclear how their original deposit is meant to maintain its force within a meaningful providential design and as an integral part of the Old Testament as Christian Scripture (150, emphasis original).

My next post in the series will look at how Seitz thinks the texts ought to be read, when understood as witnesses to divine reality in terms of their present form.

The canonical portrayal: It's hermeneutical concerns

This thread continues my theological analysis of Seitz's recently published Prophecy and Hermeneutics. For an introduction and overview of the thread thus far, go here.

According to Seitz,

the hermeneutical concerns of the canonical portrayal of the prophets can be understood as tuned … to questions of religious apprehension, but less in the name of identification with the prophetic personality and more in terms of the message of the prophetic corpus as a totality (85).

In other words, not only the original prophetic message but also its reception and further interpretation were orientated to a theological referent. This means, first of all, that the text has a diachronic depth-dimension which must be respected and taken into account when doing exegesis. One must take into account, for example, original intentionality. Thus, it is one thing to claim that Jonah is a chronologically late book. It is another thing, however, to evaluate this reality. For Seitz, it is especially crucial to assess a later author's possible intention to create a work of prophecy

in relationship to prophecy as this is known and received in his own day, that is, prophecy as a stable literary legacy” (142, original emphasis removed).

If so, the result would be that the prophetic author wanted us to associate his text meaningfully with other literary works in a specific canonical context. It is failure to take this dimension of prophecy as a historical phenomenon seriously that mars von Rad's account:

von Rad ignores as a properly historical dimension the final form of individual prophetic books—and also the prophetic canon itself—as communicating a crucial dimension of prophetic history” (49).

Seitz's emphasis on intentionality also excludes pure reader-response approaches to Scripture, for him a form of scepticism which supplies “linkages in front of and not behind the material form of the witness” (240).

The role of the diachronic dimension in Seitz's approach will be looked at in my next post.

The witness of the Book of the Twelve

As part of my ongoing analysis of Seitz's Prophecy and Hermeneutics (see the summary of and intro to the thread so far here), I offer, in the most spartan form possible, a list of key theological realities testified to by the combined witness of the Book of the Twelve, realities perceived only when one goes beyond the fragmentary witness of the individual prophets (pp. 214-216):

-God's history is an organic whole, rather than episodic and disconnected;

-the nations other than Israel have a different, but parallel, place in God's economy;

-there is an ideal stance vis-à-vis God consisting in prayer and discernment;

-God is patient, but not patient without limit.

This, according to Seitz, is the theological telos to which all the prophets found in the Twelve, in all their individuality and historical particularity, are wishing to point us. Yet how did he get there? Is it enough to confess that all the prophets witness to “the selfsame divine reality”? On that score, Seitz concludes, “all are first and all are last, at one and the same time” (149). Yet how do we coordinate this varied witness and identify their kerygmatic core? For this we need to look closely at the nature of the Biblical witness, the subject of my next post.

History and ontology as the subject of Scripture

This post continues my analysis of Christopher Seitz's recently published Prophecy and Hermeneutics. Each post can be read on its own, but it may be best to read them together. For an overview go here.

Seitz's central theological category for thinking about the subject matter of Scripture is “time.” His understanding of time, however, breaks with the traditional Enlightenment model which understands time in terms of “discrete and particularized periods” (35). For the earlier critics since Gabler, “Time becomes history, with a special character and with tremendous expectations placed on it theologically and more generally” (35). Though Seitz wishes to maintain the theological significance of time, he rejects this Enlightenment model and strives to return to an earlier model:

An interest in temporality had of course always marked interpretation of the Bible as a theological and dogmatic endeavor, but it was directly related to more decisive claims about the character of God. … Time was previously understood according to not just economic but also immanent and ontological considerations, and these were seen as subsisting together in , and revealed by, a complex network of scriptural senses (35).

This more ancient understanding of time is more in line with that of the Bible, which wishes to witness to the “history of the prophetic word in Israel and the world, under God's providential care and final purpose” (219). This has hermeneutical implications for the late-modern interpreter. We need to go back to school, as it were, a rediscover

a form of historical interpretation of the prophets that will … try to comprehend just how the prophetic canon is offering its own very sophisticated version of history (72).

Seitz's thesis about the nature of Biblical history is that it is inherently figural. The Bible does not overly emphasise the particular nature of temporally discrete periods, rather it coordinates them according to “a theological account of the significance of history, seen from the perspective of several centuries” (50). I will discuss the hermeneutical implications of this insight into the “coordinated” nature of the text in another post. For now, I want to focus on the broader “comprehensive theological account” afforded by the Bible's canonical view of history as the goal of exegesis.

According to Seitz, the messengers of God's word are “participant[s] in a drama larger than [themselves]” (245); they belong to “to a larger history and sweep than they as individuals were able to recognize at the time” (242). The function of secondary levels of tradition is to “figure” these “elected agents” into this larger theological reality. The deeds, words, and events of the prophet's lifetime are understood within the broader context of God's providence, within “a larger history of God's ways with his people” (190).

I will focus on the way in which the Bible does this in a later post. My next post will give examples of the theological reality to which the “consolidated witness” (17) of Scripture is pointing.

P.S. For a more philosophical analysis of the problem of "time," especially as understood by the Venerable Bede and the Enlightenment, see the two fascinating posts by Tim F. of The Moving Image. The first is Rome Paper Part 1, the second Scripture and History. I posted a tantalizing excerpt here.

Seitz on the divine authorship of Scripture

This is the first installment of my analysis of the presuppositions undergirding Seitz's book, Prophecy and Hermeneutics. For the introduction, go here.

Though Seitz never specifically thematizes the divine authorship of Scripture, it is a basic presupposition of his approach, as stated near the end of his book:

The very notion of a canonical process assumes a doctrine of inspiration that spills out from the prophetic word once delivered, as God superintends that word towards his accomplishing end (240).

To use terminology familiar from Brevard Childs' work, there is a force at work in the generation of Scripture, “the word of God,” mediated by a concrete channel, the historical prophet, guided by the will of a “superintending God” towards and eschatological goal: his “accomplishing end.”

What more does Seitz have to say about this reality? Check out the following formulation:

A word is uttered. It is the prophet's human word. Yet it is released, publicly, with a claim to be God's word, and to be that word it will have to move through time—even times of silence and darkness—and finally come to pass (252).

We see that for Seitz this word has certain characteristics: it has a divine source yet human vehicle, historically conditioned yet history creating. This fact calls for a subtle hermeneutic which gives each dimension its proper “proportionality” (91). On the one hand, the divine author of the word is also the “author of time” (50), and through his history with his people he is endeavouring to witness to his own dimension of time, “God's time” (73). On the other hand, he speaks through historically conditioned people-in-community, prophets and their disciples. The disciples of the prophets registered the original word within the context of their own different theological horizon (Seitz says, “in the context of a new set of circumstances, constraints, hopes, and divine judgments,” p. 129). This new understand of the original prophetic witness is, with the advantage of hindsight, theologically more profound, and has been registered in the editorially expanded and canonically shape literature that was later to become Scripture. For Seitz, the nature of the redactional expansions is signficant. They were not corrections to a failed prophecy according to an alternative agenda. Rather, the living author of the word has ensured that these new generations were “overtaken” and “enclosed” (129) by the creative power of his original word. The community

sees the original word pressing forward toward a horizon that God alone means to illumine, with recourse to the original word of his own, divulged by the work of the Holy Spirit in a new day (241).

We thus see that the historical prophets, though fully grounded in our “profane history,” are not exhausted by that history. The canonical process that is generated by Holy Spirit, operating out of an originally spoken word, strove to understand the prophets as figures within a theological history, “within the providential design of God's unfolding work” (46). They witnessed to revelation in their time, but they themselves are part of an unfolding progressive revelation.

In my forthcoming posts, we will see how Seitz unfolds these two dimensions of the text: the human and the divine.

[See also my post: Barr on scriptural authority and my thread on The authority of Scripture]

Seitz's Prophecy and Hermeneutics

Many thanks to Baker Academic for providing me with a review copy of the extremely important book by Christopher Seitz: Prophecy and Hermeneutics: Toward a New Introduction to the Prophets (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). As Childs has said in the blurb, Seitz is proposing a “profound paradigm shift”, offering “a magisterial overview of the entire field” and outlining “a new and brilliant hermeneutical synthesis of biblical prophecy that restores the centrality of the canonical Scriptures to the church.” Childs was not one to lavish praise without cause, so this review alone should be motivation enough to give it the attention it deserves.

SBL has also provided us with two book reviews, both of which give a fair enough summary of the outline and content, strengths and weakness, of Seitz's volume. However, I have one issue with both of them, namely, they haven't penetrated to what I consider to be the heart of the “canonical approach” (as Childs and Seitz understood it). Julia O'Brian's review touches on this in her final paragraph. She says,

In my judgment, speaking confessionally requires speaking explicitly confessionally, explaining and situating one’s theological convictions. For that reason, I longed for Seitz to name more specifically his understanding of the Christian faith and of the Bible, as well as how the final shape of the Prophets matters to both.

O'Brian has hit the nail on the head, and it will the the task of this thread to make make this dimension of Seitz's approach clear. At no point in his volume does Seitz make a programmatic presentation of his dogmatic assumptions and the way they shape his hermeneutic. As such, this thread will be more of an analysis than a review, in which I sift through the corpus of his essays in order to uncover the engine driving the whole. First, I will look at Seitz's understanding of the text's “substance,” which is God, who is both the living object and subject of Scripture's witness. I will then look at the particular form of the vehicle by means of which this God has elected to reveal himself. We will see that by starting with the substance of Scripture, our focus on its form and function will bring us full circle to the reality the evoked it in the first place.

The analysis will be divided according to three major subheadings:

1. Authorship: Human and Divine

2. Divine Reality (plus some examples)

3. The Witness: understood synchronically (and diachronically; along with the hermeneutical implications of both)

Extra thoughts: Figuration as literary technique

Figuration as hermeneutical intention.

Jonah and the Nations: A Figural Reading

The Canonical Shape of the Twelve

The need for proportionality in exegesis

Proportional interpretation of the Twelve

The need for "Godly exegetical instincts": George A Smith as case study

Along the way I will be paying special attention to Seitz's vocabulary, as his own conceptuality can enable a deeper penetration of the reality Childs himself was struggling to describe.

F. Watson on reading and re-reading the Old Testament

The following is an eloquent quote by Francis Watson in response to Christopher Seitz's rather stinging critique of his Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (which I haven't read yet). I have to say, I find the exchange in the Scottish Journal of Theology rather odd, as Watson's response seems to simply affirm all of Seitz's points and claims that they were there all along. It seemed fairly Childsian to me, though Seitz's summary of Watson's take on Childs would have led me to think otherwise. Watson makes one comment on von Rad which I would critique, but that is for another post.

Here's a quote I like:

Despite its one-sidedness, the 'discrete witness' model is a serious attempt to articulate an important element in the phenomenon of the Christian canon. As the Lucan Emmaus Road story shows, the Christian reading of Jewish scripture as 'Old Testament' is a re-reading of a scripture that is already read and known, in the light of the completed event of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. (The story also shows that the risen Jesus cannot be recognized as such except on the basis of a scripture re-read as testimony to the suffering and vindication of the Christ; so there is no question of any one-way, undialectical movement from the New Testament to the Old.) In the light of Easter Day, the law and the prophets can be seen as preparing the way for what has now come to pass. But this only becomes apparent retrospectively: the prophets themselves had only the haziest knowledge of the future event to which, for Christian hindsight, they bore witness (1 Pet.1.10-12). Christian Old Testament interpretation is therefore a re-reading, a second reading that clarifies and re-orders the first reading. A re-read text (a novel, for example) is a text read in the light of a prior knowledge of the whole - a knowledge as yet unavailable to the first-time reader. The second reading does not simply repeat the first reading, but neither does it erase it; it preserves within itself the knowledge that, although the end or goal is now known, that was not the case at first. Old Testament texts should therefore initially be interpreted within a pruely Old Testament context, with distinctively Christian concerns temporarily bracketed out. The 'discrete witness' that emerges in this way is only a preliminary and provisional witness whose scope will be clarified and expanded by the second, explicitly Christian reading. But the initial preliminary and provisional witness remains an indispensable foundation for the re-reading. (220-230)

I couldn't agree more, and neither could Brevard Childs (the jab about the "discrete witness" of the Old Testament is aimed at Childs). This review was written in 1999, so perhaps Watson has changed his mind now, having read Childs' later work and articles. Though having said that, there is nothing here that isn't already in his Biblical Theology ...

See my related posts: Luke 24:13-35 and the dogmatics/exegesis relation and Reading in a revised frame of reference

Seitz on "biblicism"

To say that we are not apostles means that we cannot approach the Old Testament as did Jesus and the apostles, as though their reading can be naively our own . . . Childs calls this sort of move ‘biblicist’ because it likewise ignores the intruding witness of the New Testament and an accurate assessment of its role as canon: which is to serve as a testimony to Jesus Christ and not a guidesheet for Christian exegesis of the Old Testament.

Word Without End, 107.

Bibliography for the figural reading of scripture

This is Christopher Seitz's recommended reading, printed on p. ix of his outstanding book, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture.

I've only read the article by Childs, which is exciting as ever, but I intend to work through the rest in due course. Any thoughts on the others?

J. Barr, "Allegory and Typology," in Old and New in Interpretation (Harper & Row, 1966), 103-48.
B.S. Childs, "Allegory and Typology within Biblical Interpretation" (unpublished paper delivered at the University of St Andrews, April 2000).
H. Crouzel, "The Interpretation of Scripture," in Origen (ET; T&T Clark, 1989).
R. Greer, Theodore of Mopsuestia: Exegete and Theologian (The Faith Press, 1961).
___, Broken Lights and Mended Lives (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).
A. Louth, Discerning the Mystery (Oxford, 1983).
T.E. Pollard, "The Exegesis of Scripture and the Arian Controversy," BJRL 41 (1958-9), 414-29.
M. Simonetti, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (T&T Clark, 1994).
K. Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method (de Gruyter, 1986).
J.W. Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third Century (SCM, 1985)
___, "Allegory," in Encyclodpedia of Early Christianity (2d ed.; Garland, 1998)
Frances Young, "Exegetical Method and Scriptural Proof: The Bible in Doctrinal Debate," Studia Patristica 29 (1989) 291-304.
___, "Allegory and the Ethics of Reading," in The Open Text. New Directions for Biblical Studies? (F. Watson, ed.; SPCK, 1993)
___, "Typology," in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder (S.E. Porter, P. Joyce, D.E. Orton, eds.; E.J. Brill, 1994) 29-48.
___, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

I note that R. N. Longnecker's Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Paternoster Press, 1992) isn't on the list. I randomly bought the book at the age of 19 (?) from a Doulos ship and still haven't got round to reading it. I hear he's critical of patristic interpretation ... Is that why he's excluded from this list?