Scripture & Theology

Where I have some evaluative comments of my own to intersperse, these shall be in bold italics.

Canon and Biblical Interpretation (2007)

By volumes 6 and 7 Tony Thiselton has stepped in to the breach in contributing the Introductions. Thiselton may be wrong to see too easy alliances between Childs and James Sanders (canon formation according to the need of the communities) or Walter Moberly ( a canonical ‘way of reading’). To what extent can it really be said (7) that Childs’s Exodus commentary anticipates Jaussian reception history according to which: ‘The literal sense is not merely the semantic or linguistic level of meaning alone, but an actualisation of the text for each successive generation of the community of faith based on the linguistic meaning in its canonical context’? For Childs surely the reality lies between text and res as one which is the active partner. As Thiselton reports Seitz, it is about text and truth while allowing both to surprise us, to take the initiative. Thiselton is honest enough to admit he has not been able to read Chapman, Chris Wright and Stephen Dempster. He does well to warn the reader that Lemcio’s ‘Gospels good and theocentric/ Paulines bad and Christocentric’ is at best übertrieben. Thiselton as a hermeneut makes sure in his concluding comment to remind us that plurality of interpretations need not mean Babel or incoherence, but that Bakhtin-like, it leads us from one frequency into the fullness of the rainbow (my metaphor!)

Childs’ essay (already published in Pro Ecclesia 2005) begins with an outline of the theological bankruptcy of the use of the canon idea in Anglo- Saxon circles and ends with a discussion of German scholarship. There is a reference to the important essay by Söding in Th Rev 2003 where he worries about Dohmen’s tendency to miss out the realities by too much attention to author, text and reader. The ‘new Germans’ (mostly Catholic with Janowski, Rendtorff and Oeming also mentioned) have been interested in theology, church and the canon (not merely its formation) as well as Jewish reading. Yet perhaps attention to hermeneutics does not guarantee a theological reading, especially one which would pay attention to Christology and judgement, and using the canonical approach as one hermeneutic for reception amongst others just will not do.

Chris Seitz echoes this point when he writes: ‘The area calling out for greatest clarity,at least in the guild of biblical scholarship, is just what is meant by the turn to theological interpretation.’ (104) One is reminded of the words of Jesus : ‘we piped but you did not dance’. There is pressure from the plain sense and not just the odd proof text towards ‘finding the Trinity therein’. The text is our ‘adversary’ as other, its wildness in its overweeningness, as we struggle to make these connections. Seitz insists on the text of the OT being something akin to that of the Hebrew bible since it is something the Church has received. There might be some unclarity about where canonical closing stood at the time of the NT: was it two-part, threepart or four-part?(96) Seitz makes the point that for the LXX to count, Augustine had to defend a theory of inspired translation. Last he takes aim at the speech-act theory as being too abstract and dehistoricising and also at Richard Hays’s project for allowing the NT to swallow the OT.

Farkasfalvy’s essay is a sound and cogent account of how in the second century the four-fold gospel stopped a Marcionite reduction of Christianity to an idea. E. Lemcio re-visits the ground for which he finds few dialogue partners, that the four Gospels need to be the major partner in our theology of and from the NT: it isn’t, e.g. all about Jesus’ death and resurrection. In fact Jesus’s death was not all that significant. What did matter was his manifesting the Father to the world. It gets bolder on p138: ‘He was not sent in order to die. Neither his death nor resurrection achieved anything…. This prophetic calling tends to be obscured when the richly textures text is overlaid and flattened by a royal or messianic Christology, as Croatto has recently argued.’ (141)

Stephen Evans’ essay is about whether the question of pseudonymity matters very much. But he thinks 2 Peter was by Peter, just as all the NT books were written by those who thought of themselves as apostles. Kierkegaard gives him a clue here.

Stephen Chapman argues for a canonical view of inspiration which takes the Incarnational analogy very seriously as has Peter Enns in his Inspiration and Incarnation. He does not seem aware of James Barr’s criticism of Barth’s use of the analogy in The Old and New in Interpretation and the agreement of PR Wells on this (James Barr and the Bible) He admires Vanhoozer for abandoning speech-act theory of inspiration (185) and for coming round to seeing canonization as the providential process of becoming Scripture.