The dynamic of Holy Scripture: verbum and res.

Jason Goroncy of the beautiful blog Per Crucem ad Lucem has posted a quote by Walsh and Keesmaat On the Dynamic of Holy Scripture. If I'm reading the quote correctly, I see them as essentially saying that the Scriptures were constituted by a dialectic between received, authoritative tradition and the creative imagination of later Biblical tradents, employed to related these traditions to their contemporary situations. They say

As we read through the biblical story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns.

This patter of "stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation" ought then to be repeated in our age. The fact that the Bible is an "an unfinished drama" frees us to interpret it with a similar amount of creative freedom.

Having soaked my self in the thought of Brevard Childs over the last couple of years, I find myself coming to a different conclusion. On the one hand, these thoughts are reminiscent of the classical Christian categories of "typology" or "figural interpretation." The difference, however, is that typological or figurative (or allegorical) extension - both in the Bible and in Church tradition is not so much a matter of creative freedom but of discerning the common substance that bridges the temporal gap. In Isaiah, for example, Assyria and Babylon are constantly juxtaposed as reflecting the same ontological reality, despite their (canonically preserved!) historical distinctiveness. In the same token, the second Exodus from Babylon is not just a creative re-construal of a received tradition for a new historical situation, the language of Isaiah witnesses to the occurrence of an event that participates in the same kind of redemption as the first Exodus, as well as every other act of God since (the Resurrection is an Exodus, and not just an event which can be imaginatively seen as such). It is the “substance,” the ontological reality which binds together the diverse formulations and reformulations found in the Bible and it is the quest for the substance - the attempt to “pierce” the text to what lies behind it (Childs spoke of the Bible becoming a theological "transparency" for such gifted interpreters as Karl Barth) - that ought to characterize theological (and indeed any sachgemäß) exegesis.

This links up their phrase: “the Bible [is] an unfinished drama … .”

Is the Bible an unfinished drama? As far as I can see, it contains everything from Creation to New Creation (in both Testaments respectively). What is left open is the way in which we are to perceive this drama at work in our own lives, but again, achieving this has less to do with imaginative reconstruals of inherited tradition and more to do with learning to see the unity within the diversity. And the guideline for doing so is the canonical shape given to Israelite tradition by faithful tradents engaged in exactly this kind of process.

For those who may be interested, I've summarized (or rather am in the process) Christopher Seitz's excellent book Prophecy and Hermeneutics here, which says similar kinds of things.

A New Testament scholar whose profound thoughts move in this direction is Paul Minear. I've collected my quotes and thoughts on his book The Bible and the Historian here (in particular Christian eschatology and historical methodology: the case of John).

Brueggemann on "canonical interpretation"

Canonical interpretation never gives an absolute grid for interpretation. It only permits us to find a reading through which we can be faithful. There is no eternal interpretation, so single "meaning." There is only timeless literature and timeful readings, and these together comprise canonical interpretation.[*]

I wonder how Childs' concept of the Holy Spirit, the coercion of the text, and the significance of the regula fidei fit into this?

[*] W. Brueggemann, "Canonization and Contextualization," in Interpretation and Obedience. From Faithful Reading to Faithful Living (Minneapolis, 1991), 119-142; here, 131.

What is "canonical theology"?

This is the question Halden posed a while back, and he has some great thoughts to share on the subject, in particular in response to Walter Brueggemann. I, for my part, wrote the following short response:

Hi Halden,

I'm delighted that you have taken up this issue. I think that as long as we affirm that Scripture is our primary witness to God, then the “canonical approach,” in particular as Childs has envisioned it, still provides us with the most viable and challenging set of propositions. The problem is, as you have observed, that the name “canonical approach” has been adopted by so many that it is hard to know what it is exactly (see Schultz's article for something of the diversity amongst Evangelicals alone, let alone its more liberal fans, e.g. Rendtorff). The problem is exacerbated when Childs is consistently misrepresented . I struggle to find worthy interpreters (an aquaintance of mine has just written his doctorate on the subject. He writes that the Childs of the secondary literature is a "Frankenstein." Seitz is a refreshing and stimulating alternative). Brueggemann, for example, sometimes leaves me speechless. I often have the feeling that he simply wants to stick Childs in his pre-packaged box in order to make his own proposals easier to articulate. I've posted a series of rants and dialogues here. For a great critique by a great OT scholar, go here).

I've struggled to understand Childs myself over the past year or so (he's been practically the sole focus of my blog!). He's not easy, primarily because his thinking is so global (and because I have no formal training in theology!). As Seitz has pointed out in the best analysis yet (“The Canonical Approach and Theological Interpretation,” in Canon and Biblical Interpretation), Childs is often critiqued from opposing ends of the theological spectrum (e.g.some say he's too synchronic, some say he's too diachronic [e.g. Rendtorff on his Biblical Theology]). In my opinion, the trick is to locate Childs in his own “universe,” as it were, in order to understand his perception of both the nature of the text and the nature of its substance (its subject matter, Sachverhalt, res). It is from these concrete particulars that Childs works. They provide him with his orienting coordinates, rather than a commitment to a transcendent position outside of both church tradition and the textual witness. In this sense, ironically, I believe that it is Brueggemann, with his pre-commitment to “de-construction” (whether post-modern, psycho-analytic, or Marxist—his main dialogue partners), rather than Childs, who subordinates Scripture to an alien ideology (see possibly the best critique ever by Jewish scholar Jon Levenson in the Harvard Theological Review: “Is Brueggemann a Pluralist?”, in which he compares the two scholars). Childs actually takes the “risk of faith” that Brueggemann only manages to aestheticise. Out of his concrete and particular faith Childs draws a series of hermeneutical conclusions that have tremendous power. I personally think this is the correct way to proceed, as Christianity is marked by particularity. Answering the numinous question of “how we determine methods of theological interpretation”, as you put it, involves taking into account both the dogmatic and textual/historical dimensions of the reality in which we live.

So what is the “reality” within which Childs operates?

As far as I can see, his starting and finishing point is Barthian: God reveals himself, and that is what matters. He reveals himself by breaking into human history, consciousness, and reality, and that which is revealed is the sole significant content of the witness to this revelation, its one true love and the reason for its being. The reality itself is what matters, and it is God's will that this reality should be made know through the vehicles of human testimony. The human witness is thus a vehicle of revelation, a historically and culturally bound subject who functions to point beyond himself to something transcendent, though always done out of his or her own particularity. Out of this movement of God through human vehicle to recipient (the elect), we have a history, a real history in the usual sense of the word, of relationship between God's people and God. It is a relationship of promise and calling, as well as failure and judgement. Through the various media of divine revelation (prophets, priests, kings, sages, children, redactors, temple, text, cult, tradition …) a progressive revelation takes place in which God's people are pushed to recognise God and his ways ever deeper (the “I will be who I will be” in the Exodus, and not just God Almighty, for example). This history is outside the text, spans our present context, and reaches into the future to the consummation of all things. This is the true context of the modern exegete, though his or her stage in the narrative is admittedly different to that of earlier stages of God's economy (different are the means of revelation [two-testamental Scripture, apostolic tradition] and the apprehension of the “reality” [God in Christ]). The calling of the theological exegete is to live in this reality, to be transformed by it, and to witness to it for others. That is why we read the Bible: in order to understand its true subject matter, its true “substance,” or, as Thomas Aquinas and Calvin put it, its res. For Childs, then, true theological exegesis is always a matter of reading the text in light of its referent: we have to “pierce the text to its substance,” so that, for example, the word of Jeremiah becomes a vehicle for another word, which is the full reality testified only partially to by himself (hence, also, Childs' preference for a form of Christian allegory, with its assumptions of textual referentiality, over Jewish midrash, which really does treat the text as self-referential. See my post here.). This movement is circular: we understand the part in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the part (as the fragmentary witness is latterly fused with “its full ontological reality”).

Within this dogmatically construed history/reality, God's witness has taken on a particular shape, one that is relevant for our stage in the divine economy. It is the particularity, indeed the peculiarity of this odd witness that is key for Childs' approach. He doesn't appeal to Derrida, he simply analysis the Bible and Church Tradition to the best of his limited abilities and comes to certain conclusions. “Scripture,” in other words, is no general category of phenomena, in the light of which our particular species called “Bible” ought to be read. Rather, Scripture refers to this unique bequest, replete with its own form, shape, and demands.

So what is the nature of this witness, produced by this odd history?

Childs talks of traditions-become-text, over a long period of dialectical engagement between community, text, and res. God spoke once through his elected channels, this word was efficacious and registered itself among the elect. In other words, the witness (in whatever of the forms mentioned above) was a living vehicle, one that “pressed” for deeper fulfilment in time. Those who stood under its authority perceived with hindsight the fullness of the message, that, for example, Assyria was only a type of a fuller reality represented by Babylon and later Satan's kingdom, that the land was just a foretaste of something far more eschatological. This growing understanding was registered in the structure of the traditions themselves, ultimately taking more literary form. The process was thus kerygmatic, achieve its goal by hermeneutical manoeuvres. Witnesses were read in light of the fuller reality, and shaped appropriately, by subordination, relativisation, emphasis or simply juxtaposition (etc. etc.). As the tradition became stabilised (more or less, it is fairly irrelevant that this was never fully completed) in the form of an authoritative Scripture, it is logical that the final form that documented the fullness of this divine history/reality (hence my blog name, Narrative and Ontology). Yet even in this finalised, stable literary form, they still bear this full history of revelation that gave them birth, and still maintain within themselves the thread of “apostolic” continuity between the original witness, now buried under the redactional layers or lost to a now alien culture. This history constitutes the texts for what they are. If you ask, what kind of text is the Bible, this is part of the answer, and a refutation of Childs' approach must partly take place at this level. This history, this “ontology of scripture” (if that's the right phrase), has hermeneutical implications. We are to read the text according to its own being, as it were. Concretely, we are to read the text in relation to its substance, guided by the shape that has been given to the literature which functions as a regula fidei, a boundary marker for revelation, a kanôn, one with both positive and negative functions.

One thing is key to all this: the canonical process is marked by what Childs calls a Sachkritik, a criticism according to substance. That means that the redactors who shaped the traditions into what they became were doing so under the authority of the original word and were shaping the whole in light of what came before. The Psalms were paired with each other because they witnessed to a single reality, despite their diversity. It is the substance that guided the process and it is the substance that should concern us. Thus, post-modern attempts to playfully let texts rebound off each other are excluded. This also excludes that which Childs has falsely been accused of himself, namely treating the canon as “a stable universe of coherence and meaning,” as you put it. The unity of the canon does not lie at the level of the text, as if it can all be fit into a seamless dogmatic whole. The unity of the canon consists in its referent, that which the texts are about, in their various ways. The unity is “ontological,” as Childs ceaselessly put it (Brueggemann seems to refract the discord he finds in Scripture into the deity itself).

All this is contained in the single genre designator: Witness. I reckon Childs could have called his famous introduction an Introduction to the Old Testament as Witness. It's just that “scripture” describes the peculiar way in which it came to fulfil this function, the particular form it came to take. That the term on its own, understood without the content I've outlined above, can otherwise have a fairly innocuous meaning, can be seen by comparing it to Brueggemann's definition. For him, the text as witness does not mean witness to this peculiar ongoing reality with its peculiar historical results. It means, to quote him from his “ABC of Old Testament Theology,” the text as “linguistic utterance.” He thus proceeds by close analysis of words and sentences in their grammatical constituents, pitting propositions against each other with out taking into account, or at least respecting the authority of, a prophetic redactors decision to relativise one insight by subordinating it to another (for example in Qohelet).

I may be being overly harsh with Brueggemann. I was once a passionate Brueggemannanian myself and have read a fair few of his works. I think my greatest disappointment with him, despite his misrepresentation of what Childs is actually doing, actually comes from attempting to live out his approach. I tend to jump into things and I came across him at a time when I was hungry in general for an approach that took into account everything my cultural anthropology course and my experience of life was challenging me with. After a while, however, I felt living his gospel was like eating thin wafers that couldn't keep me going for the long haul, or even help me to witness to any substantial reality to my friends. Childs turned up providentially at the right time, and his approach has proved itself in the doing and living. I guess I could say that the canonical approach, the Childsian version of it, has proved to be a better vehicle of revelation, or rather has enabled me approach the vehicle that already exists in a manner that brings true life.

There is so much that has been left unsaid, and this comment is too long as it is! I've taken the time because, as you know, I respect this blog and your opinions and would appreciate critical response from a dogmatist, someone whose job is to wrestle with the reality beyond the text! Feel free to tear apart what doesn't make sense …

Brueggemann on Childs

Inhabitatio Dei recently asked the question, "who is the greatest biblical theologian of the twentieth century?" The comment thread is long, but two Old Testament names that frequently occur are Childs and Brueggemann (though only Childs can qualify as a biblical theologian, Brueggemann having only focussed on the OT). Ben Myer's comment is particularly worth reprinting:

my impression is that the really great biblical theologians have been OT scholars rather than NT scholars. I can’t think of any NT parallels to the works of von Rad, Brueggemann, Eichrodt, Childs, and most recently Rendtorff’s Canonical Hebrew Bible ... Alongside this stuff, most of the NT theologies seem pretty bland and inconsequential.

Despite my appreciation of Breuggemann's work, the Childs in me can't help but respond critically. I've done so a number of times, here, here and here, all in colleagial dialogue with Stephen. I'd like to take this opportunity to respond once again to some remarkable comments made by Brueggemann about Childs in a recent essay, “The ABC's of Old Testament Theology in the US,” ZAW 114, 412-432. The following is his comments in italics with my response beneath:

His presenting problem has been preoccupation with history and awareness that historical critical methods subject the text to references outside the text that are essentially misleading and distractive for the claim of the text itself. (425)

Again,

His counter to such a historical practice has been an insistence that in ecclesial reading (which is his singular interest), the reference point is not external history but the internal claims of the canon, taken as a whole as normative text. (426).

Childs has indeed criticized a historicizing emphasis in biblical studies which considers that the only reality worth understanding is that of the development of ancient Israelite religion, rather than the theological reality witnessed to by the text. But this does not cause Childs to set up an antithesis between “history”and the enclosed world of the text. For Childs, the primary reality is theological—God in relationship with his people—to which the diversity of Israel's traditions, institutions, prophets and priests have witnessed in varying ways. One part of this history is the “inscripturation” of the traditions and their subsequent shaping for the purpose of guiding later generations of this people in their relationship with this God. The church, as the continuation of this people, is required to seek God through this witness. The textual witness is the means of revelation and thus the object of study, but that does not exclude using historical critical tools to understand it. They are only relativised to illuminate the final form. Historical referentiality can be distracting, but not “essentially” so.

As for his “singular interest” in “ecclesial reading,” this is only true in the sense that he believes the text and the community for which it was written cannot be separated—which I think is fair enough. Given Brueggemann's broader critique of Childs, however, it is clear that this statement carries the connotation that Childs' reading is only interested in dogmatics and not the text. This critique, however, is based upon weak understanding of Childs' concept of the text as witness to a reality that encompasses it, i.e. its role within the economy of God, a far more theologically sophisticated understanding than Brueggemann's “text as linguistic testimony.”

Childs is also far more subtle on the issue of intertextuality (“the internal claims of the canon”). Issues of historical context and authorial intention play a consistent albeit complex role in Childs' exegesis, much to the frustration of those who wish to adopt his approach for a post-modern agenda. Key here is Childs' rejection of midrash, which views the text as able to generate its own reality, rather than point to another one (Brueggemann takes the midrashic approach, without commenting on this dimension of Childs' approach).

It is clear that Childs intends to nullify the entire modern period of interpretation and the historical critical project as a failed attempt, insisting rather that one should read as the church read before the Cartesian program of autonomy. (426)

Again, this is a caricature. Not only has Childs consistently referred to the legitimate challenge of historical criticism, taking on board many of the classical conclusions, his entire canonical approach is an attempt to unite historical research with theology, not to replace one with the other. As Levinson has pointed out (in “Is Brueggemann really a Pluralist?”), the whole idea of “canonical process” is predicated on the existence of a diachronic dimension within the text. Given Childs' repeated claim that we cannot retreat to the pre-critical era, I find this statement quite remarkable.

It strikes me that he treats texts very much “in sum,” without any consideration of the internal dynamic of any text, as though one only reads for conclusions. That is, Childs is not inclined to any of the newer “narrative” methods that go “inside” texts, but reads for theological outcomes. (427)

That Childs is indeed interested in the inner dynamic of the text can be seen in his other works (e.g. “On reading the Elijah narratives”). However, given that the issue under discussion is “biblical theology” and not exegesis or a “close reading” per se, it makes sense that, at least at some point, one moves beyond the individual texts to issues of normativity. The complex question is how, and Childs defends that by pointing out that close, narrative readings are only one part of a larger whole, one which involves the recognition of different contexts and different levels of meaning. Perhaps Brueggemann is blinded here by his own assumption that “the text as testimony” requires not much more than a “rhetorical interpretation” of the text, as if that guarantees the revelation of the God that undergirds it. If one is interested in reading the Bible for its subject matter and not just its verbal sense, it would help to stand back and look at the big picture. Update: Thiselton's warning should be taken to heart here: “any suggestion to the effect that a 'canonical' approach is harmonizing or ahistorical rests upon a mistaken mythology generated by critics who have never properly engaged with it” (in “Canon, Community and Theological Construction: Introduction,” 9).

Levenson on Brueggemann and Childs

In the comments thread on his excellent post critiquing Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology, Stephen Cook posts the following quotes from Jewish scholar Jon Levenson's brilliant article, "Is Brueggemann Really a Pluralist?", Harvard Theological Review 93/3 (2000), pp. 265-294.

p. 279) Defending Childs, Levenson writes: "Unlike Brueggemann's, Childs's respect for Judaism is rooted in his Christian faith and not in some hypothetical vantagepoint that is neutral as between the two traditions and therefore able to pronounce them of equal worth. By forthrightly owning his particularism as a Christian, Childs is able to respect and learn from the particular tradition that is Judaism."

p. 282) Defending himself against B.'s charge that his biblical theology is too Jewish, Levenson repeates his long-held position: "'the pulverizing effects of the historical-critical method do not respect the boundaries of religions: the method dismembers all midrashic systems, reversing tradition.' Those are hardly the words of an uncritical traditionalist of any sort, and they are light years away from that of which Brueggemann erroneously accuses me: 'preemption of the text for Jewish reading.'"

p. 294) In the conclusion, re "The Limits of Commonality," Levenson writes, "Whatever the validity of Jewish, Christian, and historical-critical modes of reading, and whatever the degree and the value of the overlap among them, at their deepest levels they are irreducibly different. Critiquing Brevard Childs and me, Walter Brueggemann speaks of "the odd triangle of interpretation in which we find ourselves concerning Jewish, Christian and critical perspectives." A genuine pluralism accepts and attends to "the odd triangle" and does not seek to minimize or dissipate diversity by appeal to commonalties, real or imagined."

A great critique of Brueggemann!

There was a time when I was a passionate Brueggemannian. I never had quite the epiphany Chris Tilling describes, but I had come out of a Cultural Anthropology degree course frustrated with certain elements of conservative Evangelicalism, particularly the philosophical. In the context of friendships with post-modern and N.T. Wright fanatics in Paris, I started reading Brueggemann. Stanly Grenz provided the theological buffer, so that when I was ill off work for a week, I devoured his Old Testament Theology in almost one bite (I was teaching business English at the time and would also read such tomes on the train journies between companies. Spiritually, the French have never really gotten over the Revolution and at heart think that anything to do with God is nothing more than "witchcraft" or "superstition." It was great sitting in a conference room teaching "negotiating English" having one of these huge tomes placed on the side of the table for all to see. My students would cast nervous glances at the things, while politely restraining from making comments. The difference in Germany is fascinating, but I digress ...). I've since read a number of his works and now make a very different evaluation of his work. I've had posted a number of rants, collected here, so I'll refrain from repeating myself here, suffice to say that the turning point for me was a mixture of unanswered yet central questions, personal experience of attempting to live out Brueggemann's approach, his utter misrepresentation and failure to grasp Childs' work, and Childs' far superior work itself.

Which brings me to a brilliant critique of Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology, written by Ellen Davis, published in 1999 and kindly posted by Stephen Cook on his blog Biblische Ausbildung. I agree with every word and hope, given Brueggemann's wide popularity, that this review gets the reading it deserves. Here's a taster paragraph:

Yet it is in the interest of promoting openness in the interpretive conversation that the most troublesome aspect of Brueggemann’s argument arises. He radicalizes the notion of the Old Testament as witness to the extent of asserting that speech, Israel’s religious rhetoric, is the only determinate reality in the Old Testament. “Speech constitutes reality, and who God turns out to be in Israel depends on the utterance of the Israelites or, derivatively, the utterance of the text” (65). In giving rhetoric primacy, Brueggemann repudiates the “essentialist tradition” of Christian theology. Among contemporary scholars, he identifies Brevard Childs as the major proponent of this position, which takes as its basis the church’s doctrinal inheritance and therefore “imports” theological claims not present in the Old Testament. In response to Childs’ reference to “the reality of God” behind the biblical text, Brueggemann responds, “In terms of Old Testament theology, however, one must ask, What reality? Where behind?” Thus Brueggemann states his own emphatically non-essentialist argument: “I shall insist . . . that the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way” (66). In what follows, I hope to show that the non-essentialist argument as Brueggemann presents it here is deeply flawed in both its genesis and its consequence, and that in both respects it runs counter to the fundamental aims that are evident in the larger body of Brueggemann’s work.

“I shall insist . . . that the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way” (66). I shudder when I read that.

Another great critique is Jon Levenson's "Is Brueggemann Really a Pluralist?", Harvard Theological Review 93/3 (2000), pp. 265-294, especially concerning Brueggemann and Childs' claims to respect Jewish exegesis.

I should add that Childs also reviewed Brueggemann's book, to which Brueggemann responded, in the Scottish Theological Review. I have elucidated Childs' critique and Brueggemann's misunderstanding of it my post Ecclesial Context: Brueggemann vs Childs.

[HT: John Hobbins]

Brueggemann audio online

Chris Tilling has shared with us the impact that listening to a Brueggemann lecture on a bus one day had on his theological development. In the comments, links are provided for the Totally Unofficial Walter Brueggemann Page, a great site full of useful links (Brueggemann has even written a few blog posts in his time!). I particularly appreciate blah blah blah's making us aware of a series of online audio material held at a Presbyterian church, in which Brueggemann takes us through the major parts of the Old Testament.

I was a major Brueggemann fan for about three years, from when I read him as part of a post-modern/N.T. Wright circle in Paris to when I started reading Childs last August. There was so much that excited me about these new approaches, especially as they helped me respond to questions that arose in my cultural anthropology degree which conservative Evangelicals were not able to answer. And yet, as always, with each inch that my horizen shifted in one direction, gaps started appearing in another corner. Those gaps remained unsolved until I started seriously trying to figure out Childs, who is the first scholar I have come accross who has dealt with the issue of theological exegesis so comprehensively. I haven't figured out all the answers (of course!), but I feel a Childsian "canonical approach" is so much more substantial than Brueggemann's post-modern approach. The fact that Brueggemann has misrepresented Childs in a number of publications doesn't do much to win my sympathy (but then again, who hasn't done that concerning Childs?).

I've dealt fairly intensively with the Childs vs Brueggemann question over the past year, particularly in dialogue with Stephen, a keen Brueggemanian, and have collected my posts together here.

Update: Those interested in free online audio introductions to the Old Testament, I'd highly recommend the detailed one given by Christine Hayes at Yales University, available on iTunes. I comment on and link to it here, with an additional comment here.

Update 2: Thanks againt to becoming Peresh for another link to a sermon by Brueggemann on Isaiah and the mission of the Church. There are also a number of other sermons by, e.g., Brian McClaren and Steve Chalke (the only other names I recognise). When will I have time to listen to all this?!

Thread Summary: Responses to W. Brueggemann (not personally, of course!)

The following is a summary of all posts dealing with the theological exegesis of Walter Brueggemann:

1. A post on Childs on Brueggemann on the OT
2. "Ecclesial Context": Brueggemann vs Childs
3. Postmodernists believe in objective reality too!
4. Brueggemann on Childs' Isaiah
5. Brueggemann's critique of Childs
6. What is Childs trying to do?
7. Brueggemann on Childs

What Childs is Trying to Do

I've done a fair bit of blogging today! I'm currently having two nice conversations with a new contributor by the name of Deane. Here, we are discussing the theological significance of the fourfoldedness of the gospel witness. Here, we are discussing whether Seitz's approach is fideistic (the issue is framed in terms of 'christological' readings, and I notice that inhabitatio dei has a post on a christological reading of the Psalms. This blog rates as one of my favourites, though I rarely have time to keep up with what is written :( ). Check 'em out and tell us what we're doing wrong!

Given this ongoing dialogue, I haven't time to post anything new. Instead, I've decided to post part of one of my responses in a dialogue concerning Childs and Brueggemann (from yesterday). They are not necessarily the most eloquent prose in the world, as they were rattled out in the process of thinking, but I think they have enough coherency and integrity to validate a separate posting.

Once again, a bit thanks to all contributors!

When talking of Childs, I'm primarily concerned with theological method: if one were to read the text as a Christian, how would one go about doing that? One way of seeing it would be to take the position of 'progressive revelation'. As one commentator has put it: "Israel's faith is developing along a certain trajectory, which reflects lessons they are actually learned from God.” Childs is working out what he sees as the implications of this process. This process has left a material mark on the text itself, such that we can see this progressive insight unfolding. Older traditions were seen in new ways, their implications were being worked out and comprehended within broader contexts. However the process happened, it was consciously 'theological'. As such, given the temporal, developmental nature of this process, it would make sense that later redactors, who belong to this process, would have better insight into what God is doing. The traditions and texts they edited were done according to this theological intentionality. This editing process was not “innocent” (no one claims or believes that), it was “ideological”. But it was ideological in the good sense of straining to hear God's word as it is being worked out in the history of his people. You and I stand at this point in time, at a point temporally later than what was taking place within the text. As members of the one people of God, travelling with him on the journey, it makes sense that we should submit to the fullest version of God's word: the final form of the text, which is an intentional theological project. The final canonical shape does not hide its diachronic dimension, and thus its 'brokenness', but by virtue of the theological intentionality used to shape it, a theological judgement has been rendered concerning the meaning of the earlier traditions. This judgement was far from “innocent”, it was “ideological”, but ideology is not intrinsically bad. It can be good. Childs' claim is that if the Bible is authoritative (a word Brueggemann understandably avoids), something to which we should submit despite our personal mores, we have no choice but to bow to the voice of the final form. This voice is not coherent in the sense that there are no contradictions. Coherency exists, not at the level of the text, but at the level of the theological reality to which it points. This is an important point which Childs' critics consistently fail to grasp. It is the combined voice of conflicting traditions that point in different and difficult ways to the one God. Childs doesn't avoid this tension by projection the contradiction into the Godhead himself. He maintains it and 'struggles' with it (a favourite word of his). The methodological point is that the final form must be the arena in which we negotiate the Bibles meaning, and this is the case by virtue of the nature of the text as in intentional theological project, and by virtue of the function of scripture in the church as authoritative norm, and by virtue of the eschatological nature of history in which we stand 'here' and not 'there', somewhere behind the text in a now lost ancient Israel

Brueggemann rejects this 'must' on the basis that we are all subjective, so who can prove it 'objectively' anyway? He makes a theological judgement on the basis of a secular philosophical theory. It's a category error and simply doesn't follow. Childs nowhere claims objectivity to ground his position. He simply presents arguments about the nature of the text and Christian faith, arguments which Brueggemann consistently avoids. The only response Brueggemann has recourse to is to blindly insist that Childs is indeed trying to base his arguments on a naïve claim to objectivity. It order to back up this misunderstanding of what Childs is actually trying to do, he goes on to caricature Childs as a “canonical commentator.” This is just a weak way to have an argument.

In sum, normativity can be gained on grounds other than epistemological objectivity. I would have thought Tradition and the Spirit would play a role.

Brueggemann's Critique of Childs

Yesterday I posted a review article by Brueggemann on Childs' Isaiah: A Commentary (you can download the pdf file there). Today I wish to review Brueggemann's evaluation of Childs' theological approach.

Before we can evaluate Brueggemann's response, it is important to understand Brueggemann's own agenda. Like Childs, Brueggemann is interested in a 'theological reading' of the Bible. In order to develop his own proposal, Brueggemann takes human consciousness as his starting point (see my post here, where I defend this). He's basic organizing principle is an observation concerning human subjectivity: we are not always 'present' to ourselves, rather we we are inextricably entwined in our social and cultural contexts. Our view points are always subjective construals of an external reality, made by the force of our imaginative capabilities. Objective knowledge is an impossibility, rather all we have are competing interpretations negotiable by nothing other than the norms bequeathed us by our respective traditions.

From this starting point, Brueggemann wants to propose a reading that is 'theological' in that it is 'pastoral'. In other words, for a Bible to be relevant to a epistemologically limited church, it needs to reflect that church. The Bible too must be broken, partial and conflicting. The Bible functions as the place where we come to be deconstructed, shown the impossibility of the finality of our truth claims, as regardless of what we say they will be subverted by an alternative, competing voices.

Childs makes a different proposal. He suggests that the Bible is not as contradictory as Brueggemann claims. Rather, when one reads it according to its kerygmatic ('canonical') intentionality, one can discern particular theological moves at work within the text, organising and sifting the material in order to make broader theological claims. He believes that the Bible is designed to function as a guide for faith and conduct, shaped in such a way that its final literary form is able to function as an authoritative norm. This is a claim about the nature of the text itself, which he backs up with theological arguments concerning scripture and the ways of God in the world.

One can see that Childs' proposal is antithetical to Brueggemann's, in that he is making claims for theological normativity. The Bible "coerces" our interpretations of it (or it "urges itself upon us", to use the language of my post here), it is authoritative and as such we must bow before it. Elsewhere, Childs makes clear that he is not operating with a naive concept of 'objectivity', as if his claims simply 'fall out of this sky' without any intermediating work on the part of the interpreter (note Brueggemann's crude caricature of Childs' approach on p. 25, comparing him to Aaron). Childs explicitly characterises the nature of theological engagement as one of "struggle", in which each generation must commit itself to the task of being faithful within the theological boundaries that have been set for it. His is just one proposal, at this point in time, a self-confessedly partial attempt to comprehend the nature of God, his scripture and his church.

Brueggemann's response to Childs' concrete proposals concerning text, church and God is to simply assert that all humans are subjective and therefore Childs' proposals can't be binding on the church (I will leave aside his only concrete criticism of the canonical approach concerning the tension of the diachronic and synchronic [23-25] for later, if people are interested). Throughout the review, you can see the following logic being played out again and again:

1) Truth claims are only normative if they can be objectively demonstrated.
2) Childs is human, therefore nothing he says is objective.
3) Therefore, the canonical approach is at best only one helpful idea among others.

Thus we see that, despite his appreciation of what Childs has contributed, Brueggemann constantly draws attention to the fact that Childs is a subjective human like anyone else. Childs is operating with an interpretive agenda, his canonical approach is a mighty act of interpretive imagination, his perspective has been legitimated only by the power of his argument (i.e. not by the coercion of the text), he is culturally situated, his main virtues are 'passion, resilience and steadfastness' rather then an ability to figure out the material at hand.

These observations are fine as they go. I'm sure Childs would agree with them (despite Brueggemann's claims to the contrary). The problem, as I see it, is that Childs' very subjectivity, i.e. his humanity, is the reason why Brueggemann rejects his canonical proposal as a genuine proposal for the church, one which could even become normative. Brueggemann seems to be working with the assumption that something can only be normative if one can objectively demonstrate that something is "given" in the text. Since this is epistemologically impossible, Childs' project is doomed to failure from the start (to quote: "Yet Childs ... proceeds as though his interpretive finesse were simply a "given" in the text itself", p. 25).

But surely this is to mix up two categories? It's one thing to say all truth is subjective (Childs agrees, thus obviating Brueggemann's need to keep pointing this out), it's another thing to say that a particular suggestion about that reality is not binding by virtue of this subjectivity. What makes a theological heremeneutic normative is not whether it can be objectively demonstrated, but rather how well it gels with the text as authoritative and Christian tradition (the kerygma). The best way to evaluate Childs' proposal is not to set up the impossible requirement of objective certainty but rather to engage in the content of his argument and come to a decision based on it. This is something I haven't seen Brueggemann do. Instead, he repeats that Childs is subjective and as such his proposals cannot be taken as prescriptive for theological interpretation.

In order to back up his claims concerning Childs' subjectivity, he goes on to make a series of hideous caricatures. He claims, for example, that Childs simply believes that meaning 'falls out of the text' without the need for interpretation. Childs' apparently naive belief that his interpretations do in fact correspond to reality leads to the accusation that he believes his interpretations have 'canonical status', that he somehow sees himself as a 'canonical commentator'. Brueggemann goes on to present Childs as someone who believes that his interpretation is "beyond criticism, as though it were an unquestioned given in the text itself". The fact that Childs thinks he may be right is enough for Brueggemann to claim that Childs believes he can't be questioned. Childs' attempt to see the text for what it is, and to make the audacious claim that maybe it really is so, is enough for Brueggemann to accuse him of thinking he is pure, innocent and detached. Finally, Childs' attempt to understand Isaiah 66.23-24 as making an ontological distinction is dismissed on the basis that it is simply a "rhetorical venture", with no attempt on Brueggemann's to explain why it might not be more.

A final example of Brueggemann's rejection of Childs' claims by virtue of the fact that Childs is a mere human is his rejection of Childs' talk of "coercion". Why is Childs wrong to talk of the text coercing his interpretation? Because other scholars disagree with him. But what kind of standard is that to judge the acceptability of a proposal for theological exegesis? It seems as if Brueggemann believes that meaning really must just 'fall out' of the text before it can be accepted as authoritative, an impossible standard to meet which thus protects his own position that there can be no norms.

I made the claim recently that Brueggemann's starting point is anthropocentric, in that his epistemological theories provide a "critical norm" against which to measure any truth claims made from the side of theology. In his zeal to protect his theory that nothing is normative, nothing is final, that the Bible really is a irreducible collection of contradicting texts, he has set up a modernist standard of truth by which to measure all competing claims. Anyone who claims to have figured out an element of the text is doomed from the outset to fail by this standard. Brueggemann has reified postmodernism into an ontological statement about reality, something postmodernism was never designed to do (see my post: Postmodernists Believe in Objective Reality too!)

Brueggemann on Childs' Isaiah

I'm currently thinking about the relative merit of Brueggemann's approach to "theological interpretation" in relation to Childs'. Having gone through a passionate Brueggemann phase, I'm coming round to seeing Childs' canonical approach as the most viable option for the contemporary church.

Tomorrow I'm going to comment on a review by Brueggemann of Childs' Isaiah commentary, in which I hope to illustrate some of the points I made in my post "Ecclesial Context": Brueggemann vs Childs.

By way of preparation, you can read the article here (pdf file). It takes a while to download so please be patient!

The bibliographic reference is as follows: "Canon Fire: The Bible as Scripture", by W. Brueggemann, Christian Century, 118 no 33 D 5 2001, p 22-26.

Postmodernists Believe in Objective Reality too!

In recent conversations with Stephen from Emerging from Babel, the question has arisen as to the adequacy of postmodern theory in helping us formulate a theological hermeneutic. My purpose here is to argue that the claim that the Bible as an external reality can shape our response to it (Childs' "coercion of the canonical shape") does not contradict the epistemological critique of postmodernism.

My thoughts are taken from James K.A. Smith's book, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (2000), specifically the chapter entitled: "The World as Limit: A Phenomenological Criteria".

Postmodernism claims that all articulations of truth function within the specific conditions of human finitude. A great way to signify this is Heidegger's use of the term Dasein ('there-being'; being-there, at a particular point, and not everywhere). Our perspective, shape by our context, inhibits us from ever being able to comprehend anything within the world exhaustively. My knowledge of an object cannot be adequate to the object itself. As such, there can be no normative interpretations.

But to deny that there are no normative interpretations is not to deny that there are no interpretive norms. There is an external reality, there is a given/gift - creation (and in this case God's gracious gift of the Bible) - that every interpreter encounters. This reality stands before our interpretations and is binding upon every construal. It is the phenomenological criterion of every construal, what Smith calls an 'empirical transcendental' (i.e. the world as given and experienced). The 'Bible' is not mine to be manipulated, it is rather the norm that judges my interpretations. The Bible does not prescribe a single "correct" interpretation, but it does preclude an infinite number of interpretations.

The idea that truth is 'subjective' does not mean that it can be whatever we want it to be. Rather, it means that 'truth' is dependent on the uncovering role of Dasein: "All truth is relative to Dasein's being - not "left to subjective discretion".

Two quotes:

"These empirical transcendentals urge themselves upon a plurality of interpreters and resist capricious construal, allowing for a plurality, but not an infinite number, of interpretive possibilities. ... Interpretation is not merely a subjective appropriation: it is a subjective construal of an objective reality."

These thoughts are relevant to the Childs/Brueggemann debate. I hope they can provide us with more precision as we stake out our respective positions.

"Ecclesial Context": Brueggemann vs Childs

As Stephen makes his second post on the Childs/Brueggemann debate (clearly taking Brueggemann's side), I make my first. Our common text is Childs' review article of Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament, in which Childs castigates Brueggemann and Brueggemann responds eloquently. My point of entry for evaluating this short dialogue is their common use of the phrase "ecclesial context". Though they both insist that they are taking this context seriously, they understand the phrase very differently. As such, the two talk past each other, and Brueggemann fails to register the full force of Childs' critique.

I should point out that I'm reading this dialogue in light of my broader understanding of Childs' work. He has another shot at Brueggemann in ch. 17 of his The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture, as well as pp. 313 - 317, which you can, amazingly, read for free here! Thanks again to Daniel for this.

Both Childs and Brueggemann are concerned about the theological function of the Bible within the church. They agree that the text is confessional, in that it is a testimony to God, and that it is the duty of the church to submit itself to this testimony. As such, the context of their reading is in some sense "ecclesial": interpretation by the church and for the church. But how do they understand the relationship of the Church to its Scriptures?

For Brueggemann, the church represents the contemporary context within which interpreters are situated. It is the reality out of which we do our interpretation. For Brueggemann, this reality becomes the framework that determines how the text should be read theologically. The reality of the church is a broken one, marked by competing interpretations as different elements make their bids for power. Theological interpretation, then, should highlight the 'little', marginalised texts and give them a voice, such that they subvert the dominating texts of the Bible.

Childs, on the other hand, emphasises the church as the addressee of the text. God is the source of the Bible's word, and He wants to communicate with us. The direction of movement is different for Childs. Instead of moving from church to text, he emphasises the move from text to church. Theological interpretation is a response to a prior word which comes from the outside and which constrains our interpretations, pointing us in a certain direction.

In reality, the two scholars recognise both realms: Childs talks of interpretation as a dialectic between tradition and text, Brueggemann talks of the ability of the text to broaden our horizons and help us imagine new possibilities. But I think that ultimately Brueggemann's approach doesn't do justice to the confessional nature of the text before us nor the demands of Christian theology. I think that their differences, and ultimately Brueggemann's weakness, has to do with their starting points.

Let me explain.

Brueggemann's starting point is anthropocentric. He looks at the church, diagnoses its condition, and prescribes a hermeneutic that he believes will enable the Bible to speak to the church. A broken church needs a broken text, one which reflects the reality of our daily experience. His hermeneutic takes this context as its starting point. He constantly refers to this context as "church practice", "the reading among serious believing communities", "the drama of liturgy" and "the pastoral reality of the church". Just as we experience both God's presence and absence, Brueggemann seeks to do justice to these conflicting testimonies in the text. This conflict is his central organising metaphor, as he allocates each position to an unresolvable dialectic between 'core' and 'counter testimony'. Just as our daily experience is contradictory, so the texts are contradictory, and necessarily so, because for Brueggemann it is dangerous to be certain about anything. The irresolvable tension between texts would seem to be God's way of ensuring that we never come to a standstill. Instead, the Bible functions in the church as the place to which we constantly come to be deconstructed and reminded of our particularity.

How does one evaluate Brueggemann? Instead of asking whether the 'lived reality' of the church is really all that bad (I think it is), we should ask whether his proposal theologically lives up to the kerygmatic nature of the texts he is interpreting and the the core beliefs that constitute Christianity.

Childs has provided a challenge to Brueggemann on these points, and offers an alternative which would aim to be 'theocentric' in focus. Rather than the Bible being an inert object, subject to the will of interpreters seeking texts they deems relevant, the Bible has traditionally been understood to be a vehicle of God's communication to the Church from the outside. There is a 'theocentric' force which exerts coercion on its readers, who are quickened by the Holy Spirit. Faithful interpretation involves a response to this theocentric force. The challenge of “wrestling with Scripture” lies in the struggle to acquire the capacity to receive its message. Yet this requires that there is a "semantic" given, something within the text which the reader discovers and submits to. This in fact constitutes the Bible's nature as 'scripture' and is safeguarded by its canonical shape.

Childs backs up his traditional understanding with claims about the nature of the text itself. The texts were formed with the intention "of serving communities of Israel as an authoritative guide of faith and practice". This 'canonical intentionality' involved a shaping of the traditions and texts in a profoundly hermeneutic way. The new literary contexts served to guide future generations into a deeper understanding of their God and his will. Thus, certain traditions were forced into the background and others highlighted; some were placed in contrast, others blended together. However one reconstructs the stages of development, the shaping activity was confessional, such that the structure of the final form of the text provides the boundaries in which the kerygma may be heard. The final form should be submitted to not because it is 'better' or more original or even more profound per se, but because it was designed to function as a critical norm for the community of faith on how the tradition functions authoritatively for future generations of the faithful.

Brueggemann's response to this is revealing for how much he sticks to his anthropocentric starting point. Rather than arguing that these canonical constraints do not exist, he reiterates the fact that 'in the lived reality' of the church mistakes can be made, limitations reached, and suppression practiced. As such, he believes that Childs proposal is, by definition, only one more subjective construal of the facts. By claiming that this is the way the Bible functions, Childs is apparently assuming at the outset that he is right, reinforcing his 'imaginative construal' with the rhetoric of 'canonicity'.

But this response simply serves to reify Brueggemann's own position to a point beyond reproach. It is to take an anthropological description of human fallibility and elevate it into a norm for critiquing theological claims about the way God communicates, despite our infallibility. Childs does not deny the fallible human reality that Brueggmann describes, but he nevertheless claims that there is a voice graciously speaking through that weakness and he proffers his response. The validity of his response should be tested in light of its coherency with the text of the Bible and the kerygma of the early church, before it is rejected as just another 'imaginative construal' among others and not a faithful response to the God of creation. In short, it seems as if Brueggemann makes theology out of social observation rather than out of a first order commitment to scripture.

If Childs' suggestions concerning the nature of the biblical testimony are correct, then it would seem that Brueggemann has done that for which he has accused his historical critical predecessors. That is, he deconstructs the biblical presentation in order to realign it it along another, foreign axis, in this case the axis of core vs counter testimony. This is, of course, to change the message that the Bible communicates. In addition to that, it would seem that the identity of the God of Brueggemann's Bible takes on a very different form. In his system, there can be no move beyond the surface of the text to its true subject matter, which is God in Christ. The God of the Bible is forever unknowable as he is unstable and capricious, something before which the only appropriate response is confusion. It is here, in the identity of the God to which the Bible witnesses, that we see how high are the theological stakes in this discussion.

I'm painfully aware that this summary is overly simplistic. I invite all and sundry to be open to me and tell me I'm missing the point, or that I'm being illogical, or even that I'm on the right track. I'm still learning and appreciate a bit of feedback.

Update: Stephen Cook of Biblische Ausbildung has posted a brilliant review of Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology by Ellen Davis.

A Post on Childs on Brueggemann on the OT

I'm delighted to see that Stephen from Emerging from Babel has posted a detailed, clear and well thought out response to Childs' critique of Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament. Stephen quotes some very significant sections of Childs' essay and then attempts to illustrate how Childs' approach fails to come to terms with the genuine theological diversity present in the Old Testament, with its consequent failure to meet the pastoral needs of the contemporary church. His primary accusation is that Childs 'harmonizes' what should remain an unruly text, and he does this with the Book of Ecclesiastes as his case study.

This is a great post and well worth a visit, especially as it illustrates the classic critique of Childs that is found amongst a lot of scholars today. Needless to say, as a 'Childsian' I don't feel that his critique has really got to the heart of what Childs is about, and I have responded in his comments about this (particularly what it means to speak of 'Qohelet' in the first place, and the implications of this). Despite this, if you're interested in how do exegesis 'properly', especially if you context is 'ecclesial', then give him a read (and, of course, what I consider, in my humble opinion, to be my necessary corrective in the comments section ... ).

This has inspired me to wright my own response to this little dialogue between Brueggemann and Childs (Brueggemann responded to Childs' critique in the article), which I hope to post as soon as possible. My starting point will be the confusion caused by their use of the common term 'ecclesial context', which they actually understand very differently.

This article can be found in The Scottish Journal of Theology 53 no. 2 pp. 228 - 33 (2000), "Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament. Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy." followed by "A Response to Professor Childs".

• On a slightly different note, I'd just like to link to inabitatio dei's absolutely fascinating post on the ontological implications of the resurrection. I'm still trying to find time to read through it, but he says mouthwatering stuff like:

" The resurrection invites and requires theological-ontological discourse, but this discourse must constantly be referred back to the event which birthed it. The resurrection always sends us back to the ontological drawing board, demanding that we constantly revise our notions of being in its light."

Why do I dig stuff like that (I ask myself, wishing I could uncover the weird clock that makes me tick)?