Ancient Typology in Genesis 22?

As is known (in certain quarters at least), B. S. Childs wanted to develop a 'biblical theology' of the entire Bible grounded in a close exegesis of the texts themselves. In other words, he wanted our broader dogmatic claims about God and the world to be justifiable in terms of the Bible texts. Here he is faced with the problem of the particularity and foreignness of the text. How can one move beyond the horizon of the Old Testament to our own day?

In his writings in general one can see that his response to this problem is heavily influenced by Hans Frei's work on figurative reading, i.e. pre-Enlightenment Christianity saw the biblical text as describing the real world, which experience tells us is "single world of one temporal sequence" (Frei, 1974: 2). Therefore, Christianity was driven to assume that there must in principle be one cumulative story in the Bible to depict it. The unity within the diversity was assured by means of typology, "a way of turning the variety of biblical books into a single, unitary canon"by weaving the various biblical stories together into a common narrative "referring to a single history and its patterns of meaning" (2).

My question is whether Childs is arguing that this process was already taking place at the redactional level of the text, such that contemporary figurative reading is in essential continuity with the way the text came to us in the first place. In his OT example of "exegesis in the context of biblical theology" (Genesis 22.1-19) in his 1992 Biblical Theology, he makes what I consider to be a key statement to his whole understanding of the 'canonical process':

It is my contention that this multifaceted text has been shaped through its lengthy development in such a way as to provide important hermeneutical guidelines for its theological use by a community which treasured it as scripture. By carefully observing how the editors dealt with elements which they deemed unrepeatable (einmalig) but which they reckoned to be representative or universal in application, a basic hermeneutical direction is provided by which to broaden theological reflection beyond the Old Testament" (1992: 326; italics mine).

He illustrates this by reference to 'canonical clues' in the text which point to the dual dimension of the final form of the text as incorporating both particularity and universality within itself. The story of Abraham is unique, yet its editorial connection to the repeated trope concerning the promise of seed connects the story to a broader framework which can be seen to encompass us; the editorial addition of the superscription "God tested Abraham" likewise connects a unique occurrence to a more generalisable principle, one that echoes throughout scripture and again can be seen to encompass us; the word play on "the LORD sees" and "the LORD is seen" could refer to a kind of expansion of the unique story to Israel's broader experience of God in that place; finally, resonances with Levitical sacrificial rites, somehow, 'typologically' connect Abraham's experience to Israel's later cultic system.

My question is: is Childs trying to find evidence of Frei's work within the text itself? Is the redaction history of the text an example of typology in process? For me, the key phrase in the quote above is that this move within the text provides a basic hermeneutical direction, which we should imitate in the context of the final form.

Quote of the day ...

“These are the fountains of salvation, that he who thirsts may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone the teaching of godliness is proclaimed. Let no one add to these; let nothing be taken away from them. For concerning these the Lord put to shame the Sadducees, and said, Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures.”

Athanasius

(This quote was found on an interesting website dedicated to 'the canon of Scripture', on which, amongst other things, you can get ancient canon lists quoted in full)

"In Accordance with the Scriptures" #3: Jesus and the Plan of God

Though you can read this post independently, it's part three of a sub-thread starting here and then here.

So what does it mean when Paul asserts that what he received of first importance was that Christ had died and been raised in accordance with the scriptures 1 Corinthians 15? Seitz claims that we need to get the sense of direction right:

"It was not so much that a straight line pushed forward from the Old Testament to Jesus' death and resurrection and could compel faith on those terms - which it failed to do in the instance of Judaism. ... Rather, in the light of Jesus' death and resurrection, the inherited scriptures were seen from a different angle. They did not predict his death and resurrection in some straightforward manner - the creed does not say that. Rather, his death and resurrection accord with, are congruent with, scripture. This accordance is not about scattered proof texts, but about a much broader skein of convictions. In a word, these involve God: the agency of God, the relationship of God to Jesus, and the present life of Jesus in relationship to the Father until the Second Coming. ... To speak of God raising Jesus is to ask how such raising fits into a larger scriptural depiction of God's plans with the world" (pp. 52, 55).

This becomes clear when one follows Paul's larger argument in 1 Corinthians 15. But more on that next time ...

(sorry, time's short: I've just discovered that I'm to be the tutorial assistant for Hebrew, which means more work [aaagh] and more money [mmmmm]!).

Derrida at SBL

Semester has begun again at uni. Although I'm technically not a student at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhems-Universität Bonn, I still visit their seminars to:

1. improve my German;



2. get to know an entirely different theological culture which has deeply influenced biblical academia since the 19th century (I mean, of course, the culture of 'higher criticism'). Last year I hung out with the Protestants (the faculties are denominationally ordered here, unlike in England, where we're all thrown into the same class room), this year I'm going to hang out with Catholics, who look far more interesting (L. Hossfeld runs the OT department. He's worked closely with Zenger on the Psalms and is interested in synchronic approaches to the Bible).

The two seminars I've decided to visit are "Die Psalmen im Neuen Testament" ("The Psalms in the New Testament") and "Das Alte Testament und seine Transparenz auf Christus hin" ("The Old Testament and its Transparency to Christ"). The second looks especially interesting, given the intellectual climate found in Bonn and the nature of my doctorate, which has something to do with reading the Old Testament as the Word of God.

So much for personal details. Iyov has started a thread on Bible translation and has posted an interesting link to a tribute to Derrida, found on the SBL (Society of Biblical Literature) website. It's worth a read if you think postmodernism is about believing what you want to believe. Here's an interesting quote from the article:

"Derrida, who never once associated himself with the much-abused term "postmodern," tended to regard newness with suspicion. Newness is too prone to make a straw man of "old"-ness, and to demolish old world orders to make new ones (often with catastrophic results). Commenting on Jesus's saying about new wineskins and new cloth (Matt. 9.14-17; Mk 2.18-22; Lk 5.33-39), he recommended a more humble, less apocalyptic form of "newness." Newness should be aware that it is always repatching and reweaving old cloth. "

Attached at the end of the article is a fascinating audio recording (mp3) of a public dialogue with Derrida at 2002 SBL Annual Meeting: "On Religion: An Interview With Jacques Derrida". He's asked questions by Yvonne Sherwood, John D. Caputo, and Kevin Hart, on topics to do with prayer, the relationship of deconstruction to Christianity and, my favorite, his interpretation of two midrashim found in Genesis Rabba.

Tomorrow I'll continue the "in accordance with scripture" sub-thread.

"In Accordance with the Scriptures" #2: One possible understanding

What does the Nicene Creed mean when it says, “and the third day he rose again according to the scriptures”? The phrase means: consistent with the plain-sense claims of the Old Testament. So why doesn't the Creed simply say “and he rose again in accordance with the Old Testament”, seeing that the Creed is late enough to presuppose a two-testament canon of scripture? Seitz points out that it is here, more then anywhere else, that we see the exegetical character of the Creed. The phrase is derived from 1 Corinthians 15:4 - 3, where Paul says:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures

Although other lines from the Creed are based on the claims of scripture, both New Testament and Old, this line is a direct quotation. In this sense the line is unique in the Creed, as it quotes from New Testament scripture a confession grounded through Old Testament accordance.

But what does the phrase "and he rose again in accordance with the scriptures" actually mean?

One usual explanation is that the episodes conjoined with the phrase (i.e. Jesus' death, burial, resurrection) were the ones most demanding careful defense in the face of criticism from faithful Jews who claimed that their scriptures spoke otherwise. In the face of a scriptural legacy everywhere seen to be God's very word, the Church was faced with the challenge of what to do with Jesus. In this sort of climate, the Creed asserts that the stickiest moments in the life and ministry of Jesus were fully congruent with the Old Testament and its presentation of the Christ to come. Isaiah 53:5 - 12 had spoken of an expiatory death; Hosea 6:2 and Psalm 16:10 are likewise pressed into service as proof texts from the Old Testament, demonstrations that Jesus' death and raising were "in accordance with the scriptures".

Seitz doesn't dispute this way of understanding the character of scriptural accordance, but he does believe that it is exegetically too narrow and theologically too functional a view of the matter. The problem with the idea that the congruence between Jesus' resurrection and the plain sense of scripture is a matter of collecting scattered proof texts is that it fails to understand what is at stake in Paul's larger argument in 1 Corinthians 15, where the phrases appear.

Stay tuned to find out why!

Rape and Murder in Königswinter

Hannah was 14 years old. She lived in Königswinter, a picturesque village on the Rhine, neighbouring my home town of Bonn. On the evening of the 29th of August this year, on the way home from her boyfriend and few hundred yards from her parents' house, a 25 year old Czech bus-cleaner threatened her with a knife, gagged and bound her, and dragged her onto the premises of the company he worked for. In a bus, he raped her. Afterwards he dragged her in front of the bus, where he cut and stabbed her repeatedly until she bled to death.

How do you respond to this? How should you respond to this? I find myself choked, overwhelmed, as if my normal categories can't contain the world anymore. I feel enraged and ask myself what it is I can do in a world like this. And then I feel the fear of knowing that it won't be long until my filters come back into place, and the beauty of the light and the Autumn trees will give me a peace that I know, deep inside, I can never claim to truly own in this world.

There's a groaning in this creation so deep as to unsettle the ground of the earth upon which we stand. I want to weep like Lamentations, and ask myself where is the 'good' that God saw in this creation that he made? I feel the tension between life and death in my own bones, and I want so much to live the way living was meant to be. But I can't, because with every step I know there's death around the corner. Where does the Gospel fit into all this?

Just some Sunday thoughts.

Unconnected to my intention to write this, I listened to the best sermon I've ever heard this afternoon on my i-pod. You can download it here.

"In accordance with the scriptures" #1: Three Aspects of the Phrase

[For the entire series, read in the following order: 2, 3, 4]

In his essay ""In Accordance with the Scriptures": Creed, Scripture, and "Historical Jesus"" (1998: 51 - 60), Christopher Seitz discusses three aspects of the phrase "in accordance with the scriptures", found in the Nicene Creed:

1. It's biblical character. "In accordance with the scriptures" is a phrase lifted bodily from 1 Corinthians 15. Therefore, any sharp separation between creed and scripture, between Bible and tradition, between exegesis and theology, misrepresents the situation.
   
2. It's exegetical scope. While the death and resurrection of Jesus are said by the creed to be in accordance with the scriptures, close reading of 1 Corinthians 15 demonstrates that much more is implied by the phrase than that something singular happened to Jesus, according to scripture. "In accordance with the scriptures" says as much about the present life of the risen Lord, and its relationship to us, as it does about dramatic Easter events once upon a time.


3. It's theological significance. To say that Jesus Christ died and rose again in accordance with scripture means that his identity is tied up with Old Testament statements on the front end, and post-Easter convictions on the other. These accordances, preceding and following his earthly life, cannot now be, nor have they ever been, impediments to understanding Jesus as a figure of time and space. "In accordance with the scriptures" is a shorthand for "in accordance with the reality for which God requires our conformity and our obedience". As Jesus was in accordance with scripture, so the church lives in accordance with the Jesus canonically presented and shared with believers through the work of the Holy Spirit.

The Last Word After the Last but One

Due to my long response to comments below, a quote:

From prison, in Advent 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following lines, in which he expresses the growing relevance of the Old Testament to his faith in this moment of crisis:

"My thoughts and feelings seem to be getting more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament much more than the New. It is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the name of Jesus Christ; it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world; it is only when one submits to God's law that one may speak of grace; it is only when God's wrath and vengeance are hanging as grim realities over the heads of one's enemies that something of what it means to love and forgive them can touch our hearts. In my opinion it is not Christian to want to take our thoughts and feelings too quickly and too directly from the New Testament. [...] One cannot and must not speak the last word before the last but one. We live in the last but one and believe the last, don't we?" (Letters and Papers from Prison, NY 1972: 156f.)

I should add that this post constitutes a continuation of my Authority of Scripture thread which has its roots here. In the course of discussions questions have arisen on the nature of Christian truth and the implications of this for how one reads the Bible. I believe that central to the answer to this question is the question of the authoritative role of the Old Testament as an adequate witness to Jesus Christ on its own terms. The witness is certainly recalibrated in the light of the 'Christ event', but that does not change the substance of what was there all along nor its ability to illuminate for the church today the nature and mission of its Lord. As such, my next few posts will outline the essay by Christopher Seitz: ""In Accordance with the Scriptures": Creed, Scripture, and "Historical Jesus"" (1998: 51 - 50).

A Ramadan Soap Opera

The Guardian has an interesting article here on the latest media craze in the Middle East: "Bab el-Hara" or "The Neighborhood Gate".

" With its tales of brave men and dutiful women in a simpler, long-vanished Middle East, a Syrian soap opera has become the latest rage in the Arab world during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan."

Particularly interesting is what reactions to the soap tell us about the longings of many Arabs in the contemporary Middle East. I also happened to come across an interesting looking blog which responds to the series from a 'progressive, Palestinian feminist perspective': Improvisations. Give it a read!