Things I Have Learned in the PhD Program (9)

9. Be careful what you tweet about your dissertation when your supervisor is following you.

Recently, I tweeted,

Which reminded me of a cautionary tale from earlier this year. One morning I wrote this:

And a few minutes later I read this:

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France is Bacon . . . obviously

A delicious misunderstanding demystified:

(via)

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Beginning a History of the Alexandrian Library

Deep in my study, as the outer world resounded with the havoc of war, or limped in slow recovery from its frightful toll, I thought I would write the history of the Alexandrian Library, itself the perfect victim of military madness and of the frenzy of the heart and soul of man.

–Edward A. Parsons, The Alexandrian Library: Glory of the of the Hellenic World, ix.

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Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian, Book Review (Shorter | SBJT)

Title: Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian: For the Church's One Bible
Author: Daniel R. Driver
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck, 2010
Price: € 69,00 (amz)
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 328

In this revised version of his doctoral thesis completed at the University of St. Andrews, Daniel R. Driver seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of Childs’ oeuvre and to uncover the inner workings of his brand of biblical theology.

After surveying Childs’ life and the history of the canon debate, Driver divides his analysis into three main parts. In part one, Driver gives a sort of reception history of Childs’ work both in English and German contexts. In part two, he exposits Childs’ canonical approach itself and examines its internal coherence. According to Driver, Childs makes two major shifts or turns in his career. The first is Childs’ movement from a focus on “form” to a focus on “final form.”

In part three, Driver examines the second major shift in Childs’ career, which relates to his reflection on the relationship between the Testaments. Childs’ concern in this area is to affirm that Christ is the subject (the res) that both the Old and New Testaments witness to in their own discrete voices. After providing a test case for the issues raised throughout his discussion (on the scope of Psalm 102), Driver concludes with an epilogue that surveys recent work on the canon and suggests its relevance to Childs’ approach.

One of the consistent criticisms of Childs is that he is inconsistent and that his approach is in need of reconstructive surgery. This perception was encouraged by James Barr’s biting criticism of Childs throughout his career. According to Driver, this critique in particular has helped generate a “bi-polar Childs” in much secondary literature (36-50). On the one hand, Childs champions a focus on the final form of the text, but on the other he engages in various forms of historical criticism in his treatment of biblical material. Many critical biblical scholars would decry a privileging of a final form, which they view as arbitrary, and many evangelical biblical scholars would balk at the use of critical methodology, which they view as dangerous.

For Driver, what is missing in the contemporary discussion is the historical Childs, or better, the canonical Childs. Though one might surely still take issue with elements of Childs’ work, Driver maintains the importance of recognizing that for Childs, there is an internal logic to his version of the canonical approach. Driver points out that the “missing link” many critics neglect is the notion of canon-consciousness (71, 144ff) and that Childs sees an integral connection between the “pre-canonical” forms of texts and traditions and the shape they take in the canon as part of the church’s Scripture.

Driver’s articulation of Childs’ “career thesis” is that “the historically shaped canon of scripture, in its two discrete witnesses, is a Christological rule of faith that in the church, by the action of the Holy Spirit, accrues textual authority” (4). Driver’s overall contention is that Childs’ approach is complex but ultimately coherent.

Evangelical and historical-critical scholars alike who are wary of all things "canonical" would do well to situate Childs in his academic context. Driver demonstrates that throughout his career, Childs reflected on the relationship between historical-critical and biblical-theological methods and assumptions. And there are important differences between his application of these critical tools and “business as usual” in the scholarly guilds.

In a sense, the burden of Driver’s volume is to answer thoroughly the question, “What happens if Childs’ work proves to have a logic of its own, even if it is a logic one finally chooses not to enter?” (59). It is this suggestive yet balanced approach that makes Driver’s volume an instructive hermeneutical guide for reading Childs.

See also,

• My overly garrulous more developed review/interaction with Driver's volume (and a few relevant links)
• This shorter version also appears in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15.3 (Fall 2011): 97.

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Canon Formation as a Survival of the Fittest

At the conclusion of his excellent and wide-ranging discussion of the formation of the New Testament (The Canon of the New Testament, 286-67), Bruce Metzger makes a few well-put general comments:

Instead of suggesting that certain books were accidentally included and others were accidentally excluded from the New Testament Canon--whether the exclusion be defined in terms of the activity of individuals, or synods, or councils--it is more accurate to say that certain books excluded themselves from the canon. Among the dozen or more gospels that circulated in the early Church, the question of how, and when, and why our four Gospels came to be selected for their supreme position may seem to be a mystery--but it is a clear case of the survival of the fittest.

From this point of view the Church did not create the canon, but came to recognize, accept, affirm, and confirm the self-authenticating quality of certain documents that imposed themselves as such upon the Church. If this fact is obscured, one comes into serious conflict not with dogma but with history. 

See also,

• My review of C. E. Hill's Who Chose the Gospels?

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Yielded Secrets

One of the wonderful things about books is that they don't grow agitated or dismissive. They patiently bear all the scrutiny you choose to give them, and the more carefully you read them the more of their secrets they yield.

–Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 53.

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The Complexity of Unalloyed Dialogue

Updike on Hemingway:

It was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.

–John Updike, "Foreword," in John Updike: The Early Stories, x.

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The Entire Fabric of the Bible

Christ not only fulfills the Old Testament but fills out the entire fabric of the Bible, summing up all things in Himself.

–Joshua E. Williams, "How the Birth of Jesus Fulfills the Old Testament"

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The Purpose of Liberty

Liberty is intended by God for you to use as an instrument for loving others (Gal. 5:13), and not as an instrument for suiting yourself.

–Doug Wilson

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Art and Splendor

Art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people's hearts.

–Taha M. Ali, in Poetry 199.3 (Dec 2011): i.

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Updike on the Aging Writer

In the work Updike was editing before he died, he muses about the "advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity."

You are full of material--your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation--when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of brining news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first twenty years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

By forty, you have probably mined the purest veins of this precious lode; after that, continued creativity is a matter of sifting the leavings. You become playful and theoretical; you invent sequels, and attempt historical novels. The novels and stories thus generated may be more polished, more ingenious, even more humane than their predecessors;

But none does quite the essential earthmoving work that Hawthorne, a writer who dwelt in the shadowland "where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet," specified when he praised the novels of Anthony Trollope as being "as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case."

–John Updike, Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism, 3-4.

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A Language the Dark Voices Do Not Understand

The gospel gives me hope, and hope is not a language the dark voices understand.

–Andrew Peterson, from the foreword to Behold the Lamb of God: An Advent Narrative, by Russ Ramsey (via).

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