The Biblical canon and Biblical referentiality

It is often claimed that Childs' canonical approach rests on the presupposition that the Biblical Canon is a hermeneutically sealed, self-referential unit (e.g. Barr and Barton). To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how anyone could come to that conclusion on the basis of Childs' actual exegetical work, but even in theory Childs has explicitly rejected this misunderstanding. For Childs, the unity of the canon does not exist within a neat "narrative world" that has no connection to the complexities of extrinsic reality (rather like a fantasy novel which we can believe in while reading it but which has limited connection to extrinsic reality). In fact, precisely the opposite is the case! The unity of the canon consists precisely in its extra-canonical referent. This referent is God, and as such it is as complex a reality as one can image (if "complex" is the right word; it makes God sound like a puzzle to be solved ... ). Given the nature of this extra-textual reality, it is necessary that the full voice of the canon be brought to bear in trying to apprehend and respond to it (or Him) adequately. Here is Childs in his own words (in response to Barr's critique of his Introduction; the key phrase here is "the fullness of extrinsic reality"):

“I certainly confirm that Israel's faith was grounded in anterior reality. First in oral tradition and subsequently in written form Israel bore testimony to God's redemptive intervention on its behalf. These events of divine deliverance were not simply recorded, but continually re-interpreted throughout history. Israel actively shaped its traditions while at the same time being formed by the very material being transmitted.

Because of the peculiar nature of Israel's tradition which is reflected in the multi-layered testimony of the canonical text to this sacred history, there is no direct access to the fullness of that extrinsic reality on which the faith was grounded apart from Israel's own testimony. One important purpose of establishing a normative canon was to mark the special relationship of the community to these witnesses.

... The central point to be made is that the nature of Israel's testimony to historical events varies greatly and that extrinsic reality can be represented in innumerable ways ... .” (Childs, “Response,” 53, 56).

Canon and the fullness of extrinsic reality

In response to James Barr's (and thus proleptically to all those who only read Childs through the lens of Barr) accusation that Childs opposes every extrinsic historical reconstruction as a vantage point for interpretation and thus severs the Old Testament from all extrinsic reality, Childs has the following to say:

I certainly confirm that Israel's faith was grounded in anterior reality. First in oral tradition and subsequently in written form Israel bore testimony to God's redemptive intervention on its behalf. These events of divine deliverance were not simply recorded, but continually re-interpreted throughout history. Israel actively shaped its traditions while at the same time being formed by the very material being transmitted.

Because of of the peculiar nature of Israel's tradition which is reflected in the multi-layered testimony of the canonical text to this sacred history, there is no direct access to the fullness of that extrinsic reality on which the faith was grounded apart from Israel's own testimony. One important purpose of establishing a normative canon was to mark the special relationship of the community to these witnesses.

... The central point to be made is that the nature of Israel's testimony to historical events varies greatly and that extrinsic reality can be represented in innumerable ways ... . [*]

The key word here is fullness. Mark it well.

Does anyone else's heart "burn within them" when they read this?

[*]Childs, "Response to reviewers of Introduction to the OT as Scripture," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 16 (1980), 52-60; here, 57 [ATLAS has a free pdf of the responses and Childs' response]

Barr on Scriptural Authority

Anyone vaguely familar with this blog will know that I am a great fan of Brevard Childs. Childs' greatest critic was James Barr, another brilliant scholar who I need to become more acquainted with. One thing I notice, however, when I read his critiques of Childs, is that he seems to consistently miss the point. I can't imagine Childs disagreeing with too much of what Barr said ... at least not the stuff I've read. It's just that Barr's own approach, as Seitz put it, is "myopic." He doesn't get to the substance of what Childs is talking about.

Here is a quote by Barr, which, at least read on its own out of context, I can pretty much agree with:

We have seen that scripture emerged from the tradition of the people of God. Now there is no reason why we should say that scripture, i.e. the final written product, is inspired byGod but the stages which led up to it, in which the important decisions were take, the stages of oral tradition and the like, were not inspired by God. So inspiration would have to be understood in the sense that God in his Spirit was in and with his people in the formation, transmission, writing down and completion of their tradition and its completion and fixation as scripture. In this process the final stage, the final fixation, was the least important rather than the most important. Now this helps us with another question: is the authority really the authority of the books as books, or is it the authority of the persons who wrote the book and the persons about whom they are written? Do we believe Romans because, being scripture, it is authoritative, or do we believe it because it was by St Paul who as a person was authoritative? In the way I have put the matter, it is not necessary to make the choice an absolute one. Authority resides in the people of God, or perhaps more correctly in the central leadership of the people of God; but it also resides in the scripture which they formed and passed on to later generations as their own communication, as the voice which they wanted to be heard as their voice. The grounding of scripture is in the history of tradition within Israel and the earliest church.”

Barr,J. (1980) “Has the Bible any Authority”, in The Scope and Authority of the Bible. SCM Press. pp. 63-64

[Hat Tip: Richard, of the helpful blog יהוה מלך).

Barr on Biblical criticism as a "worldview"

Kritik ist kein neutraler Begriff, auch keine Methode, auch kein Forschungsbereich wie die Einleitungswissenschaft. Die Idee Kritik verweist auf die Freiheit. Sie ist keine Methode, sondern die Freiheit, die Ergebnisse der Methode anzunehmen. Man kann sogenannte “moderne Methoden” anwenden, ohne im geringsten vom Geiste der Kritik berührt zu werden. Kritik bedeutet die Bereitschaft, nicht nur Methoden anzuwenden, sondern ihnen zu folgen, wohin immer sie führen mögen. Auf die Bibel angewandt, bedeutet das besonders: die Freiheit, zu exegetischen Ergebnissen zu kommen, die von der früheren theologischen Exegese abweichen. In diesem Sinne ist die Kritik ein Kind der Aufklärung; aber zugleich auch ein Kind der Reformation, denn die Theologie der Reformation war in diesem Sinne ausgesprochen “kritisch.” Die theologische Tradition war nicht mehr imstande, die Möglichkeiten der Interpretation vollkommen zu bestimmen.[*]

Interesting: "Criticism is no neutral category." I'd like to see how Barr's understanding fits within his wider worldview. Compare this to the contrasting statements of Seitz and Childs.

[*] Barr, "Bibelkritik," 31.

A Barr quote which is right but misunderstands Childs

Once again, Barr says something correct and then oddly supposes that this is not Childs' position:

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.

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.

Barr gets Childs right!

James Barr (for an obituary go here) was a bright chap whose work needs to be carefully studied, and I consider it a deficiency on my part that I haven't read enough of him. However, this doesn't excuse the often over emotional ad hominem which characterises his attacks on those who subscribe to a view of the universe other than the one his mild modernism allows. It can often lead to a misconstruing of their actual proposals, as is the case for Childs. However, in his incredibly negative response to Childs' remarkable Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture he does get one thing right, and that is his perception of Childs' indebtedness to historical criticism. The only bit he gets wrong is that he seems to think Childs would be ashamed of the fact! Bizarre. Here's the quote:

Childs's actual operation, however, is far more dependent on historical criticism than his account of the latter would suggest. The operation is bipolar: if one pole is the new canonical reading, the other is the situation reached by traditional criticism. He displays, not what a canonical reading, untouched by historical criticism, would be, but the path by which, starting from current critical positions, one can find one's way to the new canonical reading. The canonical reading here presented makes no sense unless one already has a latish Deuteronomy, a Deutero-Isaiah, and so on. Moreover, many of the paths that lead from one pole to the other are simple historical-critical paths and defensible, if at all, on those grounds; conversely, most of them are liable to the same uncertainties which he has so convincingly delineated for previous critical views. In this respect the author remains entirely a child of the critical movement.[*]

Childs would heartily agree to all this, which should provide those who follow Barr in thinking that Childs wouldn't with pause for thought ... and perhaps pause to actually make the effort to read Childs' work for themselves.

By the way, why isn't there a Wikipedia entry for Childs?

[*] J. Barr, "Childs' Introduction," in JSOT 16 (1980), 15.

J. Barr on Verbal and Historical Revelation

A major point I've been trying to make in my posts is the centrality of verbal revelation as a component of Christian theology. This does not mean that God dictated the Bible and the prophets wrote what he said (i.e. verbal inspiration). Rather, it means that whatever we say of God and our world has to be filtered through the lens of that document we call the Bible. Words, texts, seem to be a central part of the way God has made himself known and continues to do so, and it does not seem to be the case that we we can separate 'the divine reality' from the words He uses to reveal himself. J. Barr has shown how this is an intrinsic part of the Bible's own self presentation:

"In so far as it is good to use the term "revelation" at all, it is entirely as true to say that in the Old Testament revelation is by verbal communication as to say that it is by acts in history. We have verbal communication both in that God speaks directly with men and in that men learn from other and earlier men through the verbal form of tradition. When we speak of the highly "personal" nature of the Old Testament God, it is very largely upon this verbal character of his communication with man that we are relying. The acts of God are meaningful because they are set within this frame of verbal communication. God tells what he is doing, or tells what he is going to do. He does nothing, unless he tells his servants the prophets (Amos 3:7). A God who acted in history would be a mysterious and supra-personal fate if the action was not linked with this verbal conversation ... ." (1966: 77, 8; italics my own)

"If you treat [the biblical] record as revelation through history, you commonly speak as if the basis were the doing of certain divine acts (what, exactly, they were is often difficult to determine), while the present form of tradition in its detail and circumstantiality is "interpretation" of these acts, or "meditation" upon them, or theological reflection prompted by them. Thus one may hear the great revelatory passage of Exodus 3 described as "interpretation"of this divine act of salvation, or as an inference from the fact that God had led Israel out of Egypt.

But I cannot make this scheme fit the texts, for this is not how the texts represent the Exodus events. Far from representing the divine acts as the basis of all knowledge of God and all communication with him, they represent God as communicating freely with men, and particularly with Moses, before, during, and after these events. Far from the incident at the burning bush being an "interpretation" of the divine acts, it is a direct communication from God to Moses of his purposes and intentions. This conversation, instead of being represented as an interpretation of the divine act, is a precondition of it. If God had not told Moses what he did, the Israelites would not have demanded their escape from Egypt, and the deliverance at the Sea of Reeds would not have taken place.

... this is how the biblical narrative represents these events. ... " (1963: 197; italics mine)

"... If we persist in saying that this direct, specific communication must be subsumed under revelation through events in history and taken as subsidiary interpretation of the latter, I shall say that we are abandoning the Bible's own representation of the matter for another which is apologetically more comfortable."(Ibid. 201; Pannenberg seems to comment on it here).

A Trinitarian Approach to the Bible

Christopher Seitz (2001) cites the following words of wisdom, spoken at a point in American history when attempts to utilize historical-criticism theologically were in full swing (1964). Can you guess who said them?

"All Christian use of the Old Testament seems to depend on the belief that the One God who is the God of Israel is also the God and Father of Jesus Christ."

"All our use of the Old Testament goes back to this belief. What is said there that relates to "God" relates to our God. Consequently, that which can be known of our God is known only when we consider the Old Testament as a place in which he is known."

"It is an illusory position to think of ourselves as in a position where the New Testament is clear, is known, and is accepted, and where therefore from this secure position we start out to explore the much more doubtful and dangerous territory of the Old Testament ... [This] is not possible, for quite theological reasons. ... Insofar as a position is Christian, it is related to the Old Testament from the beginning."

"In this sense, if one wishes to express the argument in terms of classic theology, our approach to the Old Testament is Trinitarian rather than Christological. The direction of thought is from God to Christ, from Father to Son, and not from Christ to God."

"It should also be noted that, where we have a Trinitarian structure, we can proceed to a Christological one".