The Ethics of Interpreting the Bible: Why Does Childs Matter?

September 24, 2003

Why Does Childs Matter?

For my first tedious monologue, I owe you an account of why we’re starting with Brevard Childs’s book on the Biblical Theology Movement. It could be a long story — I wrote part of my dissertation about it — but I’ll try to keep it short. Anderson’s essay addresses much the same problem as Childs’s book.

Trevor, or anyone, jump right in as soon as you feel like it.

Childs’s book appears at the convergence of several lines of cultural and disciplinary tension. For ages, biblical interpretation was guided primarily by various modes of theological authority: sometimes the blunt instrument of institutional coercion, but much more often the social sense of what one might or might not say about the Bible. (That’s a gross oversimplification, but I hope you’ll bear with it; we can work out its nuances in conversation, if you’d like.) In the wake of the Enlightenment, however, the practice of historical inquiry assimilated probability theory to its criteria for judgment; David Hume’s essay On Miracles provides a handy example of this way of reasoning. Judgments of historical likelihood then came into conflict with judgments based on theological authority, a conflict that occupied much of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Presbyterian trials over biblical inerrancy. The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial — in which American hero, eminent orator, and three-time Presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan was held up to ridicule by Clarence Darrow and the Scopes defense team — can serve as a rough signal of this change in social climate. By the early twentieth century, the socially-dominant currents in Protestant theology affirmed a free historical criticism of the Bible, and the less-powerful conservative remnant retreated to the margins.

Through the middle of the twentieth century, historical criticism exercised its confidence and critical capacities to the fullest. As a reaction against strictly historical analysis, some interpreters resolved to practice a sort of historical scholarship that sought to make explicit the connections between the results of sound (historical) biblical interpretation and theological teachings. Some people referred to this as a Biblical Theology Movement, though the theologians involved pursued no coherent organized agenda. They engendered the sense that one could have one’s historical cake, and theologically eat it too.

Childs wrote at a time when that premise seemed to be falling apart. The felt need of some theological dimension to biblical interpretation persisted, perhaps even increased, but neither biblical scholars nor theologians seemed able to provide the goods. Biblical interpretation had encountered what Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard have analyzed as a crisis of legitimation: the basis for regarding a particular interpretation as sound (or unsound) no longer relied on clear criteria that most participants in a discussion could be counted on to share.

That’s the situation we’re talking about in this seminar. What makes a particular interpretation of the Bible sound, in the sense of “the right one to offer”? Childs hoped that a renewed Biblical Theology could justify the ways of theological God to historical humanity — but his hopes have persistently been frustrated.

I’ll come back tomorrow or a day or so later with observations based more closely on the text of Childs’s argument — but I offer this as a context-setter and, I hope, conversation-starter.

Posted by AKMA at September 24, 2003 10:40 PM

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