Tag: Brevard Childs

Daily Gleanings: Articles (5 June 2019)

Benjamin Giffone has an interesting article in the most recent issue of the European Journal of Theology, entitled “Technologising of Word and Sacrament: Deuteronomy 14:24–26 and Intermediation in Worship.” According to the abstract,

This paper explores the effects of introducing intermediating technologies into worship, through the lens of media ecology. Just like ‘writing is a technology that restructures thought’ (Walter Ong), so other human technologies restructure the meaning of worship. The codex permitted a defined scriptural canon to be promulgated and accepted in the early church. The ancient Israelites were required to offer both raw materials (live animals) and offerings that were transformed through human labour and technology (grain cakes, wine). Deuteronomy 14:24-26 introduces the intermediating technology of trade into the sacrificial process. The invention of unfermented grape juice in the nineteenth century and its use in the Eucharist necessitated the use of individual cups. These intermediations transform the worshippers’ understanding of communion with God in both positive and negative ways. Scripture and church history offer contemporary churches resources to wrestle with the transformative effects of electronic technologies on worship and engagement with Scripture.

Benj also offers to send the full article to those who request it by email if they can’t access it already through an existing subscription or database.

Cambridge Core has an interesting essay by Collin Cornell on intersection between Brevard Childs and Julius Wellhausen. Cornell’s fuller essay on the topic is also openly available from the Harvard Theological Review. According to the abstract,

Julius Wellhausen proposed a “sharp break” between ancient Israelite religion and early Judaism: for him, the eighth-century prophets were the “spiritual destroyers of old Israel” and the forerunners of early Judaism. The biblical theologian Brevard Childs rejected Wellhausen’s reconstruction and insisted instead that “very strong theological continuity” characterized the development of Israelite religion from its outset. Numerous contemporary theological interpreters share Childs’s perspective. However, a “Wellhausen renaissance” is currently underway in the study of Israelite religion and early Judaism. This situation poses an unresolved challenge for theological interpretation, at least of the kind that Childs advocated. The present article addresses this dilemma. It first inventories Childs’s reasons for opposing Wellhausen’s sharp break, which emerge from Childs’s vision for scriptural “theo- referentiality.” Secondly, it tests whether Childs’s theological insights, the very same that led to his repudiation of Wellhausen, might accommodate Wellhausen’s historical claim. The final result is to set Wellhausen and Childs, historical reconstruction and theological interpretation, in a noncompetitive relationship.

HT: theLAB

In the Mail: Driver, Brevard Childs

Driver, "Brevard Childs"
Daniel Driver

In yesterday’s mail arrived Daniel Driver’s Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian: For the Church’s One Bible (Baker). The volume is a corrected, North American edition of Driver’s previous volume under the same title from Mohr Siebeck (2010; ix), which was itself a “thorough revision and updating” of Driver’s PhD thesis (Brevard Childs: The Logic of Scripture’s Textual Authority in the Mystery of Christ, St. Andrews, 2008; xi). This North American edition was just released in August, and Baker’s description of it is as follows:

Brevard Childs (1923–2007), one of the monumental figures in biblical interpretation in the last half-century, is a founding presence in the current resurgence in theological interpretation of Scripture. He combined critique of biblical scholarship with a constructive proposal related to the canon. Because his work is influential, complex, and contested, it needs and merits clarification. In this full-scale explication of Childs’s thought, Daniel Driver takes account of the complete corpus of Childs’s work, providing a thorough introduction to the context, content, and reception of his canonical approach. . . . [T]his affordable North American paperback edition adds an appendix giving English translations of the numerous German extracts in the book.

For this volume, I am grateful to Baker and to the Stone-Campbell Journal, which has solicited a review.

Slaves at Home

Ezra and Nehemiah each provide their own distinct reports of the Jews’ return from Babylonian exile. Even if the portrayal of this return as a “second exodus” is not a particular, literary concern in these books,1 the narrative’s inclusion of elements like captivity, release, land resettlement, and covenant establishment certainly echo important features in the narrative of Israel’s exodus from Egypt.2 Even so, Ezra and Nehemiah include in their portraits of the people’s experience of some “reviving” (מחיה) a stroke in which the people also found themselves still to be slaves (Ezra 9:8–9; cf. Neh 9:36).3

As a prime example of the people’s slavery in “the land that you gave to our fathers to eat its fruit and its goodness” (Neh 9:36; הארץ אשׁר־נתתה לאבתינו לאכל את־פריה ואת־טובה), “its increase goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins” (Neh 9:37; ותבואתה מרבה למלכים אשׁר־נתתה עלינו בחטאותינו). This observation situates even the returned community as being, to some extent, still subject to the covenant’s curses (e.g., Deut 28:33, 51). Yet, the promise still stood of a day when Abraham’s children would again freely enjoy the produce of the land (Deut 30; Isa 55; cf. John 4:35; Rom 4:13; 10:1–17).

1. Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1st American ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 634.

2. Cf. P. M. Venter, “Canon, Intertextuality and History in Nehemiah 7:72b–10:40,” HvTSt 65, no. 1 (2009): 161.

3. G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011), 745–46; N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 1; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 268–79, 299–301; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God 2; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 125–31, 428–30.