Blue Cord

I just heard from a friend at Yale that the memorial service for Brevard Childs will be held on September 25th at 5:30 pm.  The service will be in Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School.

James Pate left a comment on my prior post about source criticism and theology. He asked how source criticism determines which layers of the text are authoritative. In other words, is the final form of the text authoritative or does the authority reside in the layers itself?

I wanted to address this by first noting that source criticism does not determine which layer(s) are authoritative. Authority is a theological concept (at least as applied to the Bible) and source criticism is a philological method. It gives us an idea of the date and social location of the text, but by its nature it cannot tell us what to do with the text afterwards.

In my previous post, I noted that the reading the text theologically is best done by paying attention to the various layers, hearing their different voices, and seeing how the text in its final form unites those layers without destroying their distinctiveness. Canonical criticism would suggest that it is this final form that is authoritative, and that is a theological judgment.¹ Such theological judgments are appropriate, but they are not a part of source criticism.

Canonical criticism sees the authority of the text as residing in the final form because this was the form that was canonized by the faith communities. I don’t completely disagree with this, but I think earlier layers are authoritative as well, because they were considered canonical (to an extent) by the communities that produced and transmitted them. The canonical process obviously accepted the authority of those layers or they would not have been included in the final form. The canonical process may have modified some of the layers, but it did not obliterate them. This suggests that the authority of the original layers should be respected to a degree, although it should not be confused with the authority of the text as a whole. That is why it is so important to pay attention to the various voices as well as to the way they have been combined.

This means that ultimately my answer to James’s final question is yes. James asked:

[S]hould we try to balance the difference perspectives against each other, recognizing them all as simultaneously true in some sense

This is opposed to his other options, where he asked whether we should treat P as “a degeneration of Israelite religion from a better, freer form.” This kind of Hegelian understanding of history is inappropriate when applied to biblical theology.² Nor should we prefer Deuteronomy’s supposedly more egalitarian reading of the law to that of Exodus. It is not a question of privileging one over the other. To move from Hegel to a reversal of Kierkegaard, I would say it is not either/or but both/and. We have to listen to both Exodus and Deuteronomy, noticing the differences and tension between the layers, as well as the harmonies (and discordant notes!) they produce in their final form.

1. Brevard Childs was very up front about the fact that he was engaged in a theological endeavor. [back]
2. The tone of James’s comment suggest that he is not too fond of this option either. [back]

Cow and Boy has a great comic strip today on what might happen when Jesus returns. I think Leiknes is dead on when he thinks people will be more interested in having Jesus do miracles than they are in following his message.  Most of us would rather be entertained than follow a life-changing message.

When Julius Wellhausen published his major work on source criticism, it was entitled Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel).  It explored source criticism as something that had to be done before a history of Israel could be written. Once the texts had been set in historical order, we could write a history of Israel based on those texts.

Today we recognize that source criticism and history are so intertwined that we cannot study them in isolation.  We cannot, for instance, posit a priestly source without being able at the same time being able to say something about priests in ancient Israel. Although not all historians of ancient Israel will deal with source criticism, very few source critics would do their work apart from talking about history.

The question I wanted to address in this post, however, is whether source criticism must be done before theology can be done.  Some people are thinking this way, as can be seen from the title of one of Campbell and O’Brien’s books on the Pentateuch entitled Rethinking the Pentateuch: Prolegomena to the Theology of Ancient Israel.  Although they see it as a first step towards a theology of ancient Israel, I want to address source criticism as a prolegomena to modern theology.

In Walter Brueggeman’s book Theology of the Old Testament, he uses a dialogic approach that sees different parts of the OT as proposing different theologies which are held in tension within the text.  The canon never resolves these tensions, but neither does it ignore them.

It seems to me that one of the best ways to follow such an approach is through source criticism.  The different layers of the text offer different theologies.  The tension is created when those layers are combined to give us the text we have now.  Doing source criticism, therefore, not only gives us a way to identify the different theologies but also shows us how the tension between them is to be maintained.  The different layers are not just randomly thrown together.  Instead, they have been shaped into the canon that we have now.

In paying attention to the canonical shape of the theologies in the Bible and the way they interact with each other, we have a model for how we can move forward with our own theology.

According to the U.S. Constitution, the federal government has limited powers. Those same limits do not apply to the Chinese government, which apparently wields more power than I was aware of. Take this news story, for example:

In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”¹

While this seems absurd, the article goes on to explain that the motive behind the move is to give China control over selecting the next Dalai Lama.

1. Quote taken from the Newsweek website. [back]