An Abstract of my doctoral thesis on Ps 24

The following is an abstract of my doctoral thesis on Ps 24 which Susan Gillingham has kindly offered to publish at the forthcoming Oxford Conference on the Psalms. It focusses on the exegetical dimension, leaving aside the hermeneutical and dogmatic parts of my doctorate. I'd appreciate feedback and questions (and bear in mind that the content of this blog is copyright):

My thesis is an attempt to read Ps 24 in the context of B.S. Childs' “canonical approach,” rightly understood. The first half outlines the coherence of his approach, which is not a method but a comprehensive construal of the particular nature of Israel's religious traditions that factors in the ontological reality its God. 


Turning to Ps 24, I argue that it is a poetically structured reworking of prior authoritative traditions with the goal of constraining future reception of those traditions, accomplished dialectically in the context of Israel's broader theological heritage, with the goal of witnessing to the true theological substance of that heritage. In particular, I argue that Ps 24 attempts to penetrate to the heart of God's ways in the world by drawing on Israel's core traditions of creation, Sinai/Zion, holy war, and the Davidic king and by subtly structuring their interrelations. 


The interpretive crux is the poetic juxtaposition of two portrayals of character: the obedient character of those who may access the fullness of creational life within the temple on Zion, accrued upon completion of the journey of pilgrimage, and the character of the author and guarantor of this life, the Lord, presented as a mighty warrior, about to enter into that very same location. The juxtaposition entails a subtle poetic movement of “actualization,” enacted within the protological/eschatological horizon of creation, whereby the Lord appears to accomplish what is only a possibility for Jacob. The significance of this juxtaposition, however, remains vague at the level of the Psalm alone. An account of Israel's cult along with a “theology of the Psalter” proves the paradigmatic centrality of Ps 24's themes to Biblical faith and strengthens the sense of their interconnectedness, yet it does not resolve the significance of their poetic presentation. 


A significant hermeneutical key is provided by the “canonical marker” לדוד, which asks us to read the Psalm in relation to the theological persona of David, a hermeneutical construct within the Psalter that takes its cue from the Book of Samuel. In Samuel we find that the context that constitutes David's identity mirrors the structure and content of Ps 24. On the one hand, David is an historically particular free agent who, out of love for God and Israel, acts on Israel's and his own behalf in obedience to torah in order to bring it and himself, through battle, to full creational blessing on Zion (2 Sam 6-8). On the other hand, David's story is embedded in a broader eschatological narrative in which David is a vehicle of the true agent of history, the Lord, who similarly acts in order to bring about his own purpose of divine communion with his righteous people in full creational blessing on Zion. As Ps 24 implies, God, through David, is the true subject of Israel's redemption in Zion, though not without its obedience. Given the persistent presence of disobedience, this fulfilment in time remains proleptic and the ancient cycle of Israel's struggle for life and divine judgement/redemption is perpetuated. This same dialectical pattern applies to the “David of the Psalter” whereby, on the one hand, “David” struggles for his own and Israel's life and witnesses to the Lord's intervention in judgement/salvation and, on the other hand, this cycle is situated within the ultimate context of divine reality. 


Ps 24's paradigmatic nature and hermeneutical function for Biblical faith becomes clearer when it is read as the frame and climax of the chiastically structured sub-collection of Pss 15-24. As part of the frame (Pss 15 and 19), it functions to set the remaining Psalms within the context of base realities: obedience to torah for the sake of creation. As the climax of the collection, understood as a series of intensifying parallelisms, it depicts the fulfilment of that reality with an arrival in Zion/new creation itself, albeit an arrival by the Lord with Jacob apparently in his train. 


A final clarification is provided by the Book of Isaiah, itself related to the Psalter, which deals with the persistent problem of Israel's disobedience by reconstituting it by means of the “Servant,” the “father” of 3^rd Isaiah's redeemed “servants.” Thus, similar to 2 Sam 7 and in line with the dialectic of Ps 24, the Lord's creation intentions come to fruition in Zion upon the entry of a newly constituted Jacob, created and led by the Lord. Like Ps 24, however, Isaiah closes with the Lord still poised before the gates, leaving the consummation of Israel's pilgrimage open to the future. 


Finally, in an attempt to clarify the Psalm's theological subject matter in its “economic” and “ontological” dimensions, this reading of Ps 24 is brought into dialogue with patristic and rabbinic exegesis, Jenson's Trinitarian metaphysic of heaven and Farrow's treatment of the Ascension

Third Isaiah, intertextutality, and history

In my post The Biblical canon and Biblical referentiality, I stated that, as far as Childs is concerned, the final form of the canon of Scripture is not a totally hermeneutically sealed unit, such that one can make sense of the parts without reference to extra-textual realities. He certainly credits the final form of the text with far more integrity than many of his colleagues, but nevertheless the meaning of this final form is contoured to a large degree by the particular manner in which it came to existence. This calls for a subtle form of exegesis, one which takes into account the different "levels of consciousness" present within the "final form."
"First, Third Isaiah remains a prophetic collection, both in form and content, which means there is an encounter with actual historical realities, albeit seen in the light of the divine. This dimension dare not be flattened simply into a type of learned scribal activity dealing exclusively with literary texts. Second, not every occurrence of a parallel [with Second or First Isaiah] can be assigned to an intentional reuse. A critical assessment must be made that reckons with the theological substance at stake beyond merely identifying formal parallelism discovered by the perusal of a concordance.1"

Childs' reference to the "theological substance" of the text here highlights another dimension of his concern to respect the historical nature of the text. Christianity claims that the Old Testament is a witness to a divine reality that was ultimately revealed in Christ. This was the concern of allegorical exegesis. Historical Criticism rightly retains this sense of extra-textual referentiality. Rejecting the constraints of the historical dimension and treating the text as a space for free-floating signifiers risks dampening its ability to point beyond itself the the reality that undergirds both past, present, and future.

1Childs, Isaiah, 462. S

How do Isaiah 31:4 and 5 cohere?

Isa 31:4 flatly contradicts Isa 31:5:

4. For thus the LORD said to me,

As a lion or a young lion growls over its prey,

and—when a band of shepherds is called out against it—

is not terrified by their shouting

or daunted at their noise,

so the LORD of hosts will come down

to fight upon Mount Zion and upon its hill.

5 Like birds hovering overhead, so the LORD of hosts

will protect Jerusalem;

he will protect and deliver it,

he will spare and rescue it.

The continuity between the verses is the issue of the Lord's relation to Jerusalem, yet the Lord himself is presented as having two contradictory postures.Verse 4 compares him to an attacking lion in a thoroughly hostile action, whereas v. 5 reverses his relation to Jerusalem by means of a simile of hovering birds that shield against danger. There is no warning in the text for the "jump," so how do we explain and interpret this odd juxtaposition? In his Isaiah commentary, Brevard Childs provides an answer which looks to the broader canonical context, factors the reality of God into the equation, and draws out theological implications:

the key to the tension is first given the parable in 28:23-29, which discloses the strangeness of God's purpose with Israel. This theme is then developed further in both chapters 29 and 30, and continued in chapter 31. The major point is that the Isaianic message does not consist of a tension between pessimistic and optimistic opinions of the prophet, or between competing redactional construals or earlier and later periods. Such a developmental trajectory renders an understanding of the true dimensions of the text virtually impossible. Rather, the issue is a complex theological one that emerged already in the prologue of the book (1:2-3). How is such a lack of understanding of God by Israel possible? Increasingly in the reflective style of the sage, chapters 28-33 focus on the folly of Israel in rejecting the merciful intervention of God, which can only result in utter destruction. Yet from the disclosure of God's revelation of his purpose in creation, there remains an unswerving hope of salvation that is fully incomprehensible to human sinfulness, blinded as it is in folly and arrogance. The prophet does not offer a systematic theological tractate, but a profound struggle with a continuing encounter with God that resonate through the entire corpus as a consistent witness. Israel's judgment and Israel's redemption cohere in God's purpose even when it often appears mysterious and incomprehensible to human logic. [*]

[*] Childs, Isaiah, 233-234.

What does Barth mean by the "faktische Verheißung der Existenz Jesu"?

I'm interested in both translation possibilities and a conceptual clarification. The phrase comes from Barth's KD III §41 p. 68 (I don't own an English translation). Here's the quote:

Das Haupt der Gemeinde ... kann ja das alttestamentliche Zeugnis an sich und als solches noch nicht bezeichnen und mit Namen nennen. Es muß sich begnügen, seine Existenz faktisch zu verheißen und mit dieser Verheißung zum Gehorsam und zur Hoffnung aufzurufen.

Faktisch can mean different things: "factual," "actual," "objective," "literal," "virtual," "effective," "de facto," "in practice." It seems here that Barth is talking about the reality of Jesus Christ as something that transcends the particular and partial presentations of him as we find them in the various strands of the New Testament. He's bigger than the New Testament and can be witnessed to adequately enough by the Old Testament too (if only in a different "idiom"). As such, Barth could be talking about the Old Testament's witness to the reality of Jesus as such. The problem is that here the word faktisch is an adverb modifying the verb (he doesn't say "faktische Existenz"). It would seem that he is talking about a quality of promise, rather than a quality of existence. The promise itself is "faktisch." Or maybe I'm just being too pernickety. Perhaps translating with a kind of adverbial phrase could make faktisch apply to Existenz after all. One possibility would be: "It must be content with promising his existence in terms of its substance [rather then literally identifying Him]."

Incidentally, it would seem that this (apparently) "Barthian" emphasis on the adequacy of the Old Testament as a direct witness of Jesus is not shared by all Christian theologians. In his "Translator's Introduction" to the work of another Barthian, Heiko Miskotte (When the Gods are Silent), J. W. Doberstein makes the following criticism:

It is not a primary function of a translator to criticize a book which he has translated. I cannot conceal the fact, however, that I do not share one of its basic points of view, namely, its completely Barthian orientation. Though the author is certainly right in insisting that the Testaments must not be isolated from each other, he, following Barth, sees no real redemptive progress from the Old to the New Testament, but rather tends to regard them as two concentric circles which revolve around an identical centre. There would seem to be no qualitative difference between the Testaments, only a difference in manner of presentation. This results in the typically Barthian confusion of Law and Gospel. (1967, p. x)

I have to say, this is one of the things I really like about Barth (and it is picked up with vigour by Brevard Childs; cf. his Biblical Theology; cf. also Seitz, Word Without End). Could someone explain what Doberstein means by Barth's "confusion of Law and Gospel"?

Update: Howard of Sans Contexte has kindly supplied the following quote by Barth in the comments:

"...There are still far too many things which I cannot understand in the counter-thesis, advanced with varying degrees of sharpness and consistency by these authors, that the Gospel and the Law differ and are even antithetical in significance and function.

I do not understand (1) with what biblical or inherent right, on the basis of what conception of God, His work and His revelation, and above all in the light of what Christology, they can speak, not of one intrinsically true and clear Word of God, but of two Words in which He speaks alternately and in different ways to man according to some unknown rule."

Psalm 24 in early Christian exegesis (in commemoration of Ascension Day)

Yesterday was Ascension Day, and as promised in my post on Resurrection Day, I will here give an outline of the reception of a Psalm that has, traditionally, had a special place in this festival. My source is E. Kähler's excellent Studien zum Te Deum und zur Geschichte des 24 Psalmes in der Alten Kirche (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1958).

The oldest undeniable reference to Psalm 24 (Kähler wonders whether it lies behind 1 Corinthians 2:8) is in the Apocalypse of Peter, in which Peter, during the Transfiguration and the appearance Moses and Elijah (Matt 17), asks Jesus where the other righteous are. As answer, he receives a vision of Paradise filled with believers. In this vision, the righteous—who are identified with the righteous of Ps 24:6— are kept in a kind of “pre-Heaven” as prisoners. A dramatic scene then enfolds, in which Jesus and the two prophets ascend first into this “First Heaven” and then take the righteous further upwards into the true Heaven, the Second Heaven, in order to consumate their salvation. This ascension creates “great fear and horror,” implying that some kind of celestial resistance needs to be overcome. This occurs with the calling out of Ps 24:7: “Open wide the Gates, you princes.”

Here is the relevant text, with allusion to Ps 24 underlined:

And behold, suddenly a voice came from Heaven and said: “This is my dear son, with whom I am pleased, and my commandments …” And an extremely large and sparkling white cloud came over our head and took up our Lord and Moses and Elijah. And I quaked and was horrified. And we looked upwards and Heaven opened up and we saw people in the flesh, and they came and greeted our Lord and Moses and Elijah and ascended into the Second Heaven. Then the word of scripture was fulfilled: “This generation seeks him and seeks the face of the God of Jacob.” And great fear and horror occurred in Heaven. The angels grouped together so that the word of Scripture would be fulfilled: “Open wide the Gates, you princes.” Following this, the Heaven which had been opened was closed again.”[*]

This understanding of the Psalm remained incredibly fruitful throughout the history of the early church, within all the major theological centres (Palestine, Alexandria, Carthage, South Gaul, Rome, Asia Minor). For the sake of space, I will simply list the main variations and emphases as found amongst the major theologians of these schools in this period:

• For Justin, in his dialogue with the Jew Trypho, our Psalm functioned as a prophecy of Jesus' ascension. He read it in connection with the other major Christian proof texts: Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7:13. The Isaiah passage seems to have furnished him with the answer to the question as to why Jesus experienced resistance before the gates of heaven. He arose in the from of the suffering servant, as so was not recognised by the keepers of the gate.


• For Irenaeus, Jesus is not recognised because he was “in the flesh.” He also interprets the dialogue between gate keeper and those requesting access as being between angels of the lower realms and angels of the upper realms.


• Tertullian is the first to categorise the Lord demanding entrance as homo (“man”).


• Hippolytus is the first to categorise the Lord as soter (saviour), a term with ecclesiological and political overtones.


• Interestingly, the Gnostics also had a similar interpretation, which in itself is not un-Christian. They identified the identity of the Lord with Psalm 22:6: “But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by mankind and despised by the people”


• Origin applies the standard Christian eschatological interpretation to his allegorical interpretation of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem, understood as his entrance into the “true” Jerusalem. The city is astounded at his entrance and asks, “Who is this?” Again, the confusion is due to Jesus' incarnation.


• In the time of Athanasius, this standard interpretation had become so established that he could simply assume it when interpreting other texts, e.g. the motif of incarnation and exultation in Phil. 2:5-11. For Athanasius and those like him, the Psalm had become “a means of making events which would have otherwise been impossible to know about both conceivable and tellable.”


• Later Church Fathers added their own interpretations. Augustine interpreted the mythological language ethically, while Ambrosius talked of the Lord's entrance into the human soul. Nevertheless, the basic schema remained the same.


• As far as I can see, one Church Father who took an innovative but later popular route is Gregory of Nyssa, for whom the Psalm was a supplement to the written gospels themselves, reporting events not contained therein. In a sermon on the Psalm, Gregory understands the two-fold questioning (vv. 7 and 10) as representing two different events, and two different locations. The first concerns Christ's descent to earth, where he went on to conquer the gates of Hell (hence his identification as “mighty warrior”). The second refers to the gates of heaven, where he returns, having completed his mission. In order to access to the first, he became incarnate. On his return journey, however, he remained incarnate, thus the inability of the angels to recognise him on his return.


• This “Harrowing of Hell” motif finds its most significant development in the Gospel of Nicodemus (as I posted on here, thanks to Vox Stefani). According to this account, two righteous Jews who had been resurrected from the dead shortly after Jesus' own resurrection give eyewitness reports on how their resurrection actually took place. In short, Jesus entered Hell and there was a call to open the gates. Satan responded by locking them in fear. The enslaved saints inside cried out again for the doors to be opened. Satan's partner, inferus, asks “Who is the king of glory?” King David, in his function as prophet, answers with Ps. 24:8 and repeats the demand to open the door. Inferus binds Satan and, so it seems, lets Jesus in. Jesus enters, establishes his “war trophy” (Siegeszeichen), which is the cross, and then takes all the saints to Heaven.

[*] My translation, based on the German translation by E. Hennecke, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (1924). Cited in Kähler, Te Deum, 54.

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).

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).

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.

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.

My take on "verbal revelation"

I recently quoted James Smart, who claims that

revelation is in the text itself, in the words ... It is through these words and no others that God intends to speak to us, and, when he does, we know that there is no other kind of inspiration than verbal inspiration.

Criticisms were made in the comments. Particularly insightful were those of Bob Macdonald:

Torah is not text but engagement with the one to who the text points. The medium is neither the messenger nor the source of the message (emphasis mine).

I agree with both points of view. They don't contradict each other, rather, they are pointing to two different dimensions of the issue. Smart's comment refers to the place where revelation is accessed now, whereas Bob's comment refers to the revelation itself. Revelation itself is, as Barth put it, the reality of God-with-us (Immanuel), and this is hardly a text but a living reality.

Nevertheless, what does it mean to say that “God is with us”? What is the nature of this reality? Our dogmatic assumptions must shape our approach to the text.

In the Bible, God's self revelation is seen as progressive (Exodus 6:3). The “one to whom the text points” is a profound being (Andrew Louth puts it eloquently here), one that needs to be sought. He certainly reveals himself suddenly and without expectation—and still does!—but he also hides himself and wishes to be found. In the Old Testament he is to be sought at specific places: cultic centres and ultimately the temple. He also reveals himself through the laws of the universe (the burden of Wisdom literature), through his written Torah, through the example and teaching of elders, priests, and parents. Within this universe, text is at least one medium of revelation.

Within this unfolding story of the Bible, however, we see that texts take on more and more significance. Moses receives his revelation directly from God, but he writes it down and the text becomes the vehicle of ongoing revelation and guidance (see my post, God, Moses, and Scripture). According to Jer 36, Jeremiah has his prophecies written on a scroll which survives to speak to new generations. C. Seitz summarises the implications of this chapter as follows:

the chapter tells of the victory of the Word of God. The king can kill prophets who speak God's word (see Jer 25:23); he can debar God's spokesman from the temple (Jer 36:5); he can callously burn God's word in a brazier until the entire thing is consumed (Jer 36:23). But the prophet lives to speak the word anew, and the scroll is recomposed (Jer 36:32). And more to the point: the new scroll will outlive the divine spokesman and the evil generation headed by Jehoiakim. In the end, God's word cannot be thwarted (ZAW 101:1, 1989, p. 14).

Indeed, Seitz sees a parallel between Jeremiah's scribe Baruch and Moses's successor Joshua:

just as Joshua brough new tables of the tôrāh to a new generation in a new day, so too the scribe Baruch symbolizes the survival of a new scroll from the prophet Jeremiah which will address a new generation of faith “in all the places to which (it) may go” (Jer 45:5) (p. 18).

He concludes that in Jer 45

we see a foreshadowing of the movement of prophecy into a new mode, as clarified in a later rabbinic dictum: “Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise” (B. Bathra 12a).

We need to add to this our growing understanding of the nature of Biblical tradition itself, which went through a process of textualization or “inscripturation.” We see this in particular in the case of the “Book of the Twelve.” The “reality of revelation” within time and space to particular prophets is one thing, but within the context of God's economy of salvation it seems that the witness to this original Word has been enriched and expanded so that its true dimensions, understood with the advantage of hindsight (e.g. exilic redaction), find literary (“verbal”) expression in the final form of the text.

This is the conclusion of a scholar not known for his commitment to “synchronic” reading: Jörg Jeremias. See his comments on the literary (though not "historical" - in the narrow sense of the word) interrelation of Hosea and Amos:

The book of Amos very probably never existed without Am 7:10-17, and 7:10-17 very probably never existed without its hermeneutical key in Am 7:9. this verse urges the reader not to perceive Amos as an isolated prophet but to relate his message to the message of Hosea. They are to be seen as two messengers with one common message … .

The curiosity of the modern historian about the specific and singular elements in one prophet was quite alien to the traditionists. They did not want the words of either Hosea or Amos to be read with historical interest for a distant past but with a current interest in their words as a help for present problems. They were asking about the one message of God by two messengers (but without creating something like Tatian's harmony of the gospels). … (1996: 181, 182-183)

(I've posted a similar quote by Jermias in German, in Canon and the essence of prophecy)

This is simply a brilliant way to express the key concern of Childs' canonical approach. See also my thread on New Testament scholar Paul Minear, who holds that the Bible's view of “reality” should challenge that of the historian's - with hermeneutical implications.

The decontextualisation of prophecy: "Second Isaiah"

Having looked at how Amos and Hosea were actualized in order to function as Scripture, we turn to Isaiah 40-55:

3) A collection of prophetic material has been detached from its original historical moorings and subordinated to a new theological context. The classic example of this canonical move is so-called "Second-Isaiah." Critical scholarship has made out a convincing case for dating chapters 40—55 (some scholars include the remaining chapters of the book as well ) to the period of the Babylonian exile. Yet in their present canonical position these chapters have been consciously loosened from their original setting and placed within the context of the eighth century prophet, Isaiah of Jerusalem. Moreover, the original historical background of the exilic prophet has been drained of its historical particularity— Cyrus has become a theological construct almost indistinguishable from Abraham (cf. Rissane)—and the prophetic message has been rendered suitable for use by later generations by transmitting it as a purely eschatological word.

Childs on Jesus and Isaiah 53

Childs' Isaiah commentary can be a dense work. It's a distillate of everything he's written over his career, packed into the restricted dimensions of a single volume Isaiah commentary. Today I read his thoughts on "The Suffering Servant and Christian Theology" (422, 3) and was again challenged to rethink some of the basic assumption I bring to both the Old and New Testaments. Here are his thoughts, what do you think?

The theological category used for [the] interpretation [of Isaiah 53 in the NT] was not primarily that of prophecy and fulfillment. Rather, an analogy was drawn between the redemptive activity of the Isaianic servant and the passion and death of Jesus Christ. The relation was understood "ontologically," that is to say, in terms of its substance, its theological reality. To use classic Christian theological terminology, the distinction is between the "economic" Trinity, God's revelation in the continuum of Israel's history, and the "immanent" Trinity, the ontological manifestation of the triune deity in its eternality. Thus, for example, the epistles of Ephesians and Colossians argue that the creation of the universe cannot be understood apart from the active participation of jesus Christ (C0l. 1:15ff). Or again, the book of Revelation speaks of "the lamb slain before the foundation of the world" (13:8). In a word, in the suffering and death of the servant of Second Isaiah, the self-same divine reality of Jesus Christ was made manifest. The meaning of the Old Testament servant was thus understood theologically in terms of the one divine reality disclosed in Jesus Christ. The morphological fit between Isaiah 53 and the passion of Jesus continues to bear testimony to the common subject matter within the one divine economy. Of course, in a broad sense, isaiah 53 does continue to function as prophecy since the chapter is bracketed within the eschatological framework of an unfolding divine economy.

To summarize, the servant of Isaiah is linked dogmatically to Jesus Christ primarily in terms of its ontology, that is, its substance, and is not simply a future promise of the Old Testament awaiting its New Testament fulfillment. It is significant to observe that in Acts 8, when the eunuch asked about the identity of the Isaianic servant, Philip did not simply identify him with Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, beginning with the scriptures, "he preached to him the good news of Jesus." The suffering servant retains its theological significance within the Christian canon because it is inextricably linked in substance with the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is and always has been the ground of God's salvation of Israel and the world (423).

The nature of Biblical prophecy?

In his commentary on Isaiah, Childs notes the trouble chapter 46 has caused interpreters. The fall of Babylon through Cyrus in 539 did not follow historically the predictions of Isaiah. The great city was not levelled, nor were the Babylonian gods dishonored and replaced. A traditional response, which works on a theory of direct historical referentiality, claimed that the events must be directed to the later conquest by Xerxes. Redaction critics, on the other hand, attempt to isolate later literary levels that developed in an attempt to actualize the original prophecy, especially in the light of its failure to materialize as predicted.

Childs rejects both approaches and claims we need to do justice to "the unique nature of a prophetic proclamation" (361). But just what is this nature? I quote part of his answer below. It's dense and challenging. I'd appreciate feedback on his claims, either in the form of an explanation, a challenge or an affirmation of his point.

Biblical prophecy is not simply a description of a coming historical event made in advance, shortly to be visible to all. Rather, Isaianic prophecy interprets the effects of God's entrance into human history. It embraces a different dimension of reality, which only in part coheres with empirical history. The eschatological appeal of God's rule involves a vision of divine intervention that indeed enters human history, but is not exhausted by any one moment. The quality of God's salvific presence is not limited to one specific event in time and space, but embraces the whole of God's announced purpose for creation, which moves toward consummation. The nature of correspondence between word and event can only be measured in terms of this ongoing divine plan toward ultimate restoration of God's creation. Prophecy thus speaks of a quality of future event. It is not a clairvoyant projection of the events within the unredeemed experience of human history (362).

These comments should be compared to related ones by Jörg Jeremias. Check out too the article by Ronald Clements on the subject of prophecy and fulfillment. I hope to post on this at some point in more detail.

Update: See Wilhelm Vischer's take on the issue, which sounds close to Childs.