There's been a
dialogue going on between a certain Frank Viola and
Ben Witherington which I haven't been following.
Bill of
Bible/History Blog, however, has kindly pointed out that Childs has come up in the conversation, so I popped over to see what was going on. I was delighted to see that Viola gets Childs
right, a fairly rare occurrence in the world these days, and so will share his paragraph:
Brevard Childs, like myself, accepted historical criticism. Childs’ position was that historical criticism is a good beginning, but not a good stopping place. We don’t stop with the historical information of the text. We rather go on to see the fullness of the canon. Thus Childs didn’t deny historical criticism. The problem is that some are setting canonical criticism and historical criticism up as an either/or choice. But that’s a false choice. One can advocate the historical study of Scripture and yet say that historical study needs to be inserted into a larger and richer context, i.e., the existing canon of Scripture which contains a revelation of Jesus Christ.
This being indeed true, a truth much needed to be heard by Evangelicals in the New Testament guild, I followed a link to
an article he wrote and was again thrilled by the opening two paragraphs:
In my personal judgment, many segments of the Christian world today—including much of the emerging church conversation and the house church movement—have lost the centrality of Jesus Christ.
In addition, for many Christians, the Old Testament has fallen out of functional use. Scores of present-day believers do not find anything of spiritual value in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy.
This kind of thing makes my heart thump with joy, so thanks Frank for brightening up my afternoon!
This is where it's at;
this is where the problematic lies for the Church as it grapples with its muddled past and confusing present! If only we can plunge ourselves into the mystery of the Christ of the Old Testament, and not just the New Testament construal ... This is where my heart is and where I want to be pouring my intellectual activity.
