The Drama of Doctrine, free online.

I just accidentally came across this fascinating looking book by K. Vanhoozer while searching for something else. His comments on some of the complexities of Childs' approach are interesting and informed and his comment on situating the canonical process within in a "theo-dramatic context, that is, the context of God's own speech and action" (218) has caught my attention. I'm doubtful about his comments on the similarities between Childs and S. Fish ... but this is all the result of 5 minutes reading. I certainly intend to look at this book in more detail.

Literary and Canonical Approaches

I'm grateful to have Dave Beldman as a dialogue partner. He has recently posted an essay in which he looks at the possible implications of newer literary approaches to biblical interpretation, especially as these impact historical critical theories concerning the development of texts. He asked me to compare this literary approach with Childs' canonical approach, as I have recently outlined it in my last thread. Though I answered him in the comments (here), I've touched my response up a bit in order to post it here.

Though there are many similarities between a canonical approach which privileges the final form of the biblical text and literary approaches which work with the assumption of unity, Childs explicitly distances himself from such approaches. The difference is in the starting point.

Childs starts from a theological premise, rather than an aesthetic or literary one: the God of creation has elected for himself a concrete people and has chosen to relate to that people in space and time (see here). This historical relationship has brought the text of Scripture into being , a text whose function within God's economy is to point to Him and his ways (see forthcoming thread). Just as our four different gospels are diverse textual witnesses to the one Gospel outside the text, so the whole of scripture testifies in diverse ways to the reality of the one God, the Gospel, or Jesus (or however you wish to define the text's ultimate subject matter). This kerygmatic function of the text means that its reality is not self-contained. Though one can posit a world 'in' the text as a useful hermeneutical tool, it is not the case that the world in the text exhausts the truth of the text. That text is part of a greater whole which points beyond itself to what really matters: 'divine reality', Jesus, or whatever. This is how I understand Vanhoozer's statement about theological interpretation: it is interpretation oriented to the knowledge, not of the text (literary approaches), nor of historical circumstances (historical critical approaches), but of the God who called the text into being in the first place (JTI vol. 1, Intro).

As a result, interpretation which is to do justice to the nature of the text must be theological. A literary approach, which looks at structure and rhetorical devices can only be one step in comprehending what the text is about. We need to be piercing 'through' the text to its ultimate subject matter. This subject matter is outside the text (I'm not sure I would say 'behind' ... ), it is the ultimate subject matter of the text, what the text is really all about, and is not reducible to the level of the text itself.

This has implications for heremeneutics. A realization that the text is a 'witness' and not the reality itself frees the Christian from what Childs calls 'biblicism', the need to reduce the reality of God to the level of the text itself. Because the Bible is not about itself but about God, it is OK if there are contradictions and disjunctions at the surface level, and I mean real contradictions, not just artfully placed ones that actually fulfil some subtle literary purpose. The unity of the Bible is not a literary unity, but rather a theological unity. It lies in the subject matter to which the text points. The one Gospel to which the four gospels point is where the unity should lie, not in attempts to reconcile contradictions amongst the gospel witnesses themselves.

As such, focusing on the text in the literary fashion that Josipovici recommends is just one part of the overall activity of theological exegesis. The literary approach of Josipovici is useful only to the degree that it helps us understand the kerygmatic intentionality of the text of Judges or Job. Using it as a tool to iron our tensions is fine to the degree that it gives an adequate account of the text itself (as I'm sure you will agree). But I think it bears pointing out that a theological approach, at least the one that Childs recommends, requires attention to the kerygmatic/canonical intentionality of the text, and this in turn means attending to the historical dimension. Escaping from the real world into a narrative world is, according to the theological premise of Childs, to contradict the foundational assumptions of a God who dwells with us (not that Josipovici is necessarily doing this, though many narrative theologians such as Frei and Linbeck come close). History and commitment to a certain type of authorial intentionality are necessary parts of exegesis oriented to knowledge of God. That the unity of scripture is outside of it means we are not required to get rid of editorial additions and surface level contradictions.

Childs wryly notes the theological agnosticism present in much narrative theology. It is possible for theologians from both the extreme right and extreme left of the discipline to do narrative theology, coming to similar conclusions, while sharing fundamentally different views about the actual world in which we live.

I wrote a post on the way Childs' understanding of the formation of the text provides the grounds for broadening theological reflection beyond the horizon of the Old Testament here. Here we have something of the marriage of history and theology that theological exegesis needs to maintain.

(For the record, I think Sternberg does a good job of providing a literary approach which takes seriously the historical world 'behind' the text. Childs cites him approvingly.)

The Theological crisis of Biblical Criticism

Stefan recently linked to Michael Bird's review of J. Barton's book The Nature of Biblical Criticism. Michael's concern is the role historical-criticism should play in the Church's appropriation of Scripture. He believes that traditional historical-critical theory does not take into account the post-modern critique and suggests that other methodolgies are needed, especially if one is to read the ancient texts in an ecclesial context. To quote:

What is really needed is a realistic epistemology of how we know things from texts, a literary theory explaining how texts do things to readers, a hermeneutical explanation for how authors communicate through the signs/symbols of language, and a definition of history and historiography.

Anthony Thiselton, N.T. Wright, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Scot McKnight are recommended reading for each of these areas.

I'm all for a reappraisal of the way humans know, the nature of texts, the nature of reading and definitions of history (the last being a central concern of Childs'). However, as far as theological reading is concerned, I'm not sure whether the proposed areas of research really get to the heart of the crisis which the church is currently facing, and has been facing for quite some time now. The following thoughts on this issue are taken from C. Seitz's book, Figured Out.

Vanhoozer and Wolterstorff talk of the contemporary crisis as a hermeneutical one. In their works they attempt to address topics such as divine speech, inspiration, and authorship. This is done from the perspective of general hermeneutics (the philosophy of language; speech-act theory). Seitz wonders to what degree they focus on the long-standing problem of the relationship between the two testaments of Christian Scripture. To quote:

"Hermeneutics as a science of reading and interpretation could simply speak about matters of authorship, reader, text, inspiration, divine speech, and so forth, in the manner of Vanhoozer and Wolterstorff, and never once address the difference between Old and New Testaments on historical, theological, canonical, literary/genre, or specified audience/ecclesial grounds. The Bible would be one big book, whatever its differences, and the problems of talking about author or reader or text could go on in general terms without much regard for the divide separating two distinct literatures (Old Testament, or Tanak, and New Testament). And we could still plausibly argue that a hermeneutical crisis existed and buffeted the field and not be wrong.” (pp. 13, 14).

Seitz goes on to point out how a series of crises already existed in biblical studies before the advent of post-modernism and post-critical theology. They focused not on general hermeneutics (text, reader, author, world) but on quite specific matters: the historicality of individual writings, literary methods and their compatibility, dating texts properly, social-historical reconstruction, the history of religion and so forth. Always sitting close to these questions were serious subisidiary or even more up-front concerns. Is there unity to Christian scripture? How is the Old Testament Christian scripture? In what way does the New Testament function as scripture, especially given its fourfold gospel record and what would come to be known as "quests for the historical Jesus" behind this fourfold account?

These questions persisted and were never completely banished from the field. Seitz believes it is proper to call these theological, and not just hermeneutical questions:

"They have to do with the way in which the testaments, each in its own specific historical and canonical way, bear witness to God. In the middle of the last century and for many decades into our own, these questions did not just hover near the fray but were first-order questions demanding first-order answers if the discipline was to have any integrity as a historically oriented one still tuned to the life of the church and an earlier history of interpretation." (14)

Seitz concludes:

"The turn to hermeneutics as a general discipline, then, has not so much offered a resolution of older theological questions, historically considered, as it has changed the subject. We may wish to judge that a good thing, but in so doing there would have to be an admission that what has counted in the history of biblical studies for the past century and a half as central was misguided from the start. The field posed the wrong questions, it would have to be concluded, and therefore got wrong answers and ended up in its present desuetude - call it a "hermeneutical crisis" - as a consequence. A cursory comparison with Westermann's Essay on Old Testament Hermeneutics, produced at a period of general critical (methodological) consensus, shows an array of concerns untouched in recent hermeneutical discussions, and any accounting of our present crisis is obliged to say why this is so." (14, 15)

I should just add that John's post on this topic has started an interesting conversation with Dave from Tolle Lege.