I decided to expose my ignorance in a new post rather than a comment. My initial thoughts (supported by not enough reading and reflection) are
As an Englishman I was interested in the different paths taken by the US from Europe. This meant a lot of the "history" was unfamiliar to me and I have been trying to relate it to my own church experience (which is also really from after Child's book). I was particularly interested to read of the hope of the Biblical Theology Movement to move beyond the divides between fundamentalism and liberalism - here in the UK we seem to be more divided than ever on these issues.
On a light note I found the confusion in chapter 1 between England, Scotland, Britain and Europe amusing.
The use of "history" as a foundation for the movement is interesting as is the idea of the "unity" of the Bible. Neither seem very strong foundations, particularly as Childs seems to find little or no common ground on what is meant by either term within the movement .
The meaning and intent of "History" in scripture always seems to be problematic especially given the very different cultural understanding between us and the Biblical authors. It has been suggested by some of our Lecturers that this is an area in which scripture has been much abused (generally by Liberals against Fundamentalists).
Both concepts seem to depend on what I feel is the real power issue which is selectivity. Who chooses the text? I believe that the selectivity in the choice of texts was a key criticism by James Barr (although I have been told that Walter Bruderman has a good response).
Surely selection of texts is a key ethical issue for us today. I have heard the claim that most ministers have less than 10 texts on which they preach (no matter which text they say they have used). We have a common lectionary that is selective in that it does not use a large portion of the Bible, who decides what is in or out? Obviously selectivity is key to any search for unity in the scripture.
The discussion of the canon is also interesting. I worked for the United Bible Societies for many years and so became aware of some of the variety of canon in use in the various chuches - something Childs does not seem to take account of.
Just a few fairly random notes from someone who is a) not quite sure what is needed and b) who is trying to get to grips with what it means to do your learning and exploration in public rather than in the privacy of a traditional seminar group.
When we select and use scripture in our churches and lives then ethics are central. Maybe the selectivity is required to provide a way to get a manageable handle on life.
However, I question the ethical use of power behind the selection when for example we preach from scripture against minor "sins" (in terms of affected lives) like euthanasia or gay Bishops but leave alone the "major" sins such as thesystem of which we are a part leaving millions sufferring from poverty, aids, slavery or land mines.
Dave
Here are some points that may bear on our discussion as we try to work among the complexities of our topic:
Childs observes that the Biblical Theology Movement held, more or less, to several broadly-shared premises. They assented to some sort of salvation-historical perspective (God working through history to bring humanity closer and closer to Christ), to the uniqueness of the Bible as a religious text and of its outlook as a &ldqu;;mentality,” and a sort of intrinsic unity to the Bible. These premises, according to Childs, just didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Much of Scripture expresses no particular interest in salvation history; wisdom literature, for instance, and the novelistic narratives of the Old Testament and (ina certain way) Acts don’t really contribute much to a salvation-historical theme. All the New Testament looks forward to Christ’s coming at the end, but some texts place relatively little emphasis on that. And what sort of &ldqu;;history” is meant? Can we honestly look around ourselves and suggest that the world is advancing spiritually from its condition a hundred years ago?
The claim that the Bible is unique likewise derives most of its power from people who are already convinced; dubious readers can usually find strong points of comparison between the Bible and other religious (and non-religious) literature. The supposition of special qualities inherent to Greek and Hebrew “mentalities” yields under careful linguistic and philosophical analysis.
And the unity of the Bible seems to amount to what an expositor wants. Any unity that satisfactorily subsumes equally such varied texts as Genesis, Leviticus, Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jonah, Matthew, John, Romans, Hebrews, 3 John and Revelation will always? almost always? reflect a good portion of the interpreter’s determination to find unity.
The specific characteristics of Biblical Theology as a “movement” matter less than they do as symptoms. Once biblical interpretation became firmly defined in relation to history, as an academic discipline, little time passed before interpreters sensed that historical interpretations of the Bible might be academically correct without being spiritually edifying. They intuited a lack, and set about various ways of remedying that lack. Childs notes that their preferred means of replacing what was lacking ran aground, often by means of the very academic historiography that engendered that sense of lack in the first place.
Childs proposed interpreting Scripture as canon, as a theologically-bounded totality whose proper (in this context, we may stretch to say “ethical”) interpretation lies in an ecclesiastical context. This helps bolster the theological flavor of biblical interpretations, but their version of proper biblical interpretation entails certain problems, too.
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.
It looks as though religion-online is indeed up again, though I’m downloading and saving furiously to make sure we’re covered in case of outage.
For our first shared readings, we direct your attention to Brevard Childs’s Biblical Theology in Crisis, particularly Parts One and Two (and of those, we’ll be particuarly interested in the shape of the “crisis” that Childs describes, and the terms in which he sees a way out — so Chapters Two to Six will give the heart of the matter for our purposes).
Childs’s contemporary Bernhard Anderson wrote a complementary article for Theology Today entitled, “The Crisis in Biblical Theology.”
These two starters serve the useful purpose of pointing toward the unrest among biblical interpreters as the twentieth century’s adoption of historical-critical interpretive norms became a fait accompli in many parts of the church and academy. In a few days, AKMA and Trevor will begin discussing that dissatisfaction and its context, at which point y’ll must feel quite welcome to join in. Feel free, indeed, to leap in before we do, if the Spirit moves you.
This will be the main page on which our discussions of the ethics of interperting the Bible take place. I’m writing this entry both to set a friendly tone of greeting, and to test-drive the page layout. Let’s see how this works.