The Future of Old Testament Canonical Interpretation - Chris Seitz

On mute there I am. Am I on? Terry, I'll mute myself. There I am. Can you hear me? Okay, good. It's a pleasure to be here and thanks for all the work. I'll say a little bit more about that, about the volume. I know how much effort goes into projects like this. It's a challenge to know how best to organize a response to the question of the future of a canonical approach. I'm tempted to quote Amos: I'm neither the son of a prophet nor a prophet. And the topic is a wide and broad one. Much depends, I think, on the context in which the question is raised. You can find considerable enthusiasm for a canonical approach, by name or derivatively, in certain North American circles. I think this is due in part to the way it dovetails with synchronic reading, narrative approaches, maybe reader response. Also, it appears to be a congenial alternative for those who have had difficulty squaring historical-critical reconstruction with their traditional Christian views of holy scripture. In that sense, I think the future is positive, if diffuse in character. It may also be a bit differently directed than the formulation of Childs or myself. The fact that we both have turned canonical interpretation in the direction of biblical theology and the long history of interpretation, a move not particularly in evidence in North America, is worth consideration, and I'll come back to that in a moment. First, some general remarks. Continental scholarship forms much of the backdrop for my own investments in diachronic reading as preliminary to canonical evaluation. I suppose in that sense Childs and I share a common heritage. Canonical interpretation has found in recent decades congenial allies in Europe: Rolf Rendtorff of Heidelberg, and for different reasons, Willem Booken in Belgium. And I've argued that canonical reading is where Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth were headed. I've sought to identify convergences as well in the stimulating work of Paul Beauchamp, the Catholic scholar. Ulrich Berg in Bonn speaks of a diachronically reflected synchrony and he signals his appreciation of canonical readings in his own work. One could think of the work of Jean-Pierre Sonny in the Pentateuch, or Jean-Marie Hours in the Psalms, all this in the continental context. Childs himself saw lots of congenial reception, oddly enough perhaps, in the work of German Catholic scholars: Christoph Dohmen, Thomas Söding, the late Erich Zenger, and of course Joseph Ratzinger, who in his Jesus of Nazareth cycle commands a canonical approach. The reshuffling of a confident three-Isaiah model for interpretation, such as many of us were raised in, toward an evaluation of the book as a whole, is indebted to suggestions made by Childs and taken up myself in work in the 80s. This doesn't represent a rejection of that approach in favor of synchronic reading, though there were phases of that. The famous three-Isaiah scaffolding remains, but it now functions more vestigially as attention shifts toward how the 66-chapter book makes sense of itself. Yet for all that, the new big volumes on the Old Testament, the Mohr Siebeck and Oxford volumes on Isaiah, which assemble contributors thirty-fold, while not festivals of diversity, showcase very, very different models for reading, as is somewhat typical of our season of inclusivity. Some more traditionally critical, others interested in metaphor and reader response models, others focused on ancient Near Eastern background, a final section on Isaiah in Asian and African reception. An issue for a canonical approach is the degree to which one must still reconstruct the concrete socio-historical backdrop as decisive for interpretation, either as that which is all that must be said, or as that which takes us to the final form. Joseph Blenkinsopp in his Isaiah commentary does not believe the final form of the biblical text is an intended theological presentation, but must be diachronically recast because that is all interpretation is ever about. So we have a spectrum running from social-historical emphasis to the discovery of successive levels of redactional supplementation, toward a canonical approach which believes these exist but they defer to the final presentation. It is the text, not themselves, that is being prioritized and passed on. The final editors are, as it were, the first readers, and the text carries forward on its own after that. I use Isaiah research to open my remarks because it is an example, I think, of a success for canonical interpretation, but it also reveals a diversity of approaches all the same. More again on this in a moment. Now, terminology: canonical reading, canonical interpretation, canonical exegesis, canonical hermeneutics. These terms are reflective of a direction Childs sought to underscore, but as we all know, the term 'canon' has had a bumpy ride. North American scholarship hears in the word 'canon' material matters: matters of order and scope and arrangements and closure and wider books in circulation that for various reasons are not in this or that canon. In the early church, however, the word had more to do with theological hermeneutics: one God, two testaments, and the refusal to deal in progressive or developmental terms as more foundational. The God of Israel is the one God, is the Father of Jesus Christ, is the triune God. So the rule of faith in Irenaeus, most famously. Childs published in 1979 his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, and he only formally used the word 'canon' in the title of his 1984 New Testament Introduction. This may suggest his own sense of how the term could be open to misunderstanding, and here I think he was right. For all that, the term 'canon' and the discussion about it has been fruitful as well as exasperating. The danger is in people pressing the material side without sensitivity to the theological side, as well as in making closure carry a weight the term does not want or need. It may be that canonical forms of interpretation are now in vogue but do not want to use the term for this and for other reasons. Now I want to work through the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings in very brief compass to give a sense of what's going on in canonical interpretation. The longitudinal source idea going back to Wellhausen and others has demanded that it be taken as a kind of point of bearing for serious thinking about the Pentateuch or Hexateuch. Most of my generation's classical training, classical four-source JEDP forms of that insistence carry on, though chiefly in North American circles. The continental scholars tend to date the levels of tradition to a late post-exilic period and they disagree over the character of supplementation, contestation, or disputation regarding what is now called the Priestly writer and the non-Priestly writer. The disagreement entails scholars who need to agree about the disputed terrain being decisive all the same. So big volumes are produced with contributors from North America, Europe, and Israeli contexts, each said to be chiefly interested in this or that dimension of the approach, but they need to be brought together all the same because of methodological confusion. In my most recent book on convergences, I try to show how Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth—von Rad in particular, the premier theological Old Testament scholar of his day—were far more interested in dealing with the merger and conflation of levels of tradition as these are productively at work in the final form. Childs took that kind of interest and carried it through to evaluating the significance of each of the five books of the Pentateuch as theological accomplishments. Rolf Rendtorff did much the same thing from his perspective. What we are witnessing, I think, today in contemporary Pentateuch research is competing accounts of sources or levels of tradition and how far they may be thought to extend. So the terms Pentateuch, Hexateuch, and Enneateuch are all raised, and it's as though the final form of five books is incidental, theological, and of no serious interest as ingredient in the canonical presentation, except perhaps at entry and exit points. Here Genesis and Deuteronomy take center stage. Missing is a model which can successfully explain the five-book form from the ground up. Rendtorff's model, I think, was conducive to that, but the field has chosen to return to longitudinal models in which the main levels are post-exilic and the history of religion dominates. I want to read a brief quote from Martin Noth which surprised me because of the way in which he already was moving in this direction in 1948. He writes: 'The question of whether the combination of sources has not resulted, perhaps unintentionally, in unexpected narrative connections and theological insights, and hence whether in the final analysis the whole has not become greater than merely the sum of the parts. Therefore, thenceforth this literary whole has been read as holy scripture and has been used in worship. Thus it has exerted a historical impact. It has remained right to the present day as the only concretely given reality. Therefore it is also the task of scholarship to take into its purview this totality in the form in which it has been transmitted.' I think most of us think of Martin Noth more for his model of diachronic reconstruction than for his, in some ways, rich theological remarks at the end of that book. I have appreciated some frank commentary recently from Pentateuch scholars on the in-house character of their work and a sociology of knowledge question about just what all the labor is really about. Von Rad, Childs, Rendtorff, Noth had a sense of a larger, I think, churchly context in which their work was to make sense. But instead of that, the worries that are now being registered are more about reputation and dogmatic pedagogy on the problems of ongoing instability in method. Listen to the remarks of Brainerd Alberts. He writes: 'Because of the paucity of external evidence and the high number and complexity of internal exegetical and historical data, the discussions seem to be influenced by unconscious prejudices and ideological limits which are difficult to clarify.' And he writes: 'Observed from the outside, this kind of dispute appears to be strange and may even damage the academic reputation of an institution.' And see where his worries are coming at the problem from a slightly different angle. Thomas Römer in Switzerland introduces a recent essay on the Pentateuch with these words: 'Teachers convinced of the importance of introducing their students to the question of the formation of the Torah in historical-critical perspective today find themselves confronted with a very uncomfortable situation. The current debate makes it almost impossible to present the consensus on the question without coming across as somewhat demagogic.' He then proceeds to give a hopefully non-demagogic solution to the diachronic puzzle. It's hard for me not to conclude that the problems are resident in the method and its expectations for resolution. A more promising approach, I believe, is that of Jean-Pierre Sonny: 'Does the Pentateuch tell of its own redactional genesis?' And even more recent work from Eckhart Otto. Prophets. Let's move to the next portion of the canon. I've just mentioned my own work going on in Isaiah at present. The canonical form of the 66-chapter book is now worthy of our scrutiny and evaluation beyond the three-Isaiah model. Single authors are now assigned to cover the whole book. A lot has changed since my own time in writing commentaries in the 80s and 90s. In his 1979 Old Testament Introduction, Childs treated the individual minor prophets, the Twelve, in canonical order, that is, beginning with Hosea, followed by Joel, and ending with Malachi. This was in contrast to the Amos-to-Jonah sequential model still popular in textbook treatments. He was not, however, questioning the sequential model or setting up a hard alternative. Rather, he was concerned with the individual witnesses themselves as coherent in the form we have them, including arguably later redaction and supplementation. For this reason, he just works on the Twelve in the order they come to us in the Masoretic text. It would be fair to say that right behind Isaiah in terms of newer approaches is work on the Book of the Twelve. Like Isaiah, some are more invested in diachronic precision, plotting serial redactions, others purely synchronic, the divine character development across the Twelve and the like. I produced a book on the topic in 2007 in which my main aim was to suggest that the chronological model had limitations that were built in, and I was no longer able to justify it in basic introductory Old Testament courses. The subtitle of that book, 'Towards an Introduction,' indicated its provisional character. I went on to write a commentary on Joel and various essays in which this different approach was showcased. I also tried to focus on the theological portrayal of the Twelve-book collection and certain trans-historical movements that could helpfully explain trends elsewhere in the canon, including the Pauline letter collection: 13 individual letters in a given order. That remains. Then Jeremiah and Ezekiel. I wrote my dissertation on these works and I tried to describe the canonical shape of Jeremiah in an essay early in my career. At the time, the reigning commentaries—Bill Holladay, Robert Carroll, William McKane, Ron Clements—were all appearing and they could not have been more different, to the point of methodological confusion. I'm not sure that situation has changed much. Perhaps in the Q&A we can pick up other insights on this. One could see a similar kind of divergence in the commentaries of the day: those of Walther Zimmerli and Moshe Greenberg on Ezekiel. And finally, the Writings. By its very nature, the third division of the canon is a miscellany. This also partly explains why it has been recast either in terms of minor reshuffling in Jewish circles or in the relatively late newcomer familiar to us in printed English-language Bibles, where the Ketuvim, the Writings, have become historical books aligned with kindred witnesses from the Former Prophets, and the poetic books ranged alongside one another: Psalms, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, the so-called lyrical books. A subset of this state of affairs was the emergence in the 18th century of a distinctive literary category of books to be called Wisdom Literature. The nomenclature 'wisdom' was familiar enough, but this was now to be something more formal. Publishing houses like textbooks: Wisdom Literature, usually taught in semester two, was born: Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon, increasing orders of skepticism, decreasing tidy proverbial cause-and-effect schemes, bottoming out with Qoheleth, and then making a rebound in the deuterocanonical books. Fortunately, at least to my mind, this model is on the wane. It might be good to have a decent introduction to the Writings which doesn't get bogged down in questions related to the different orderings in the history of reception. Wisdom perhaps would be better re-situated in this context. And finally, biblical theology and history of interpretation. It's possible, of course, to speak about canonical interpretation as a species of modern historical-critical reading, even one that was judged initially, at least in the 80s, as presenting a strong pushback by the field. In my own work, I have tried to show how canonical reading does not ignore tensions in the uneven terrain of the biblical text but offers a different interpretation of them. The subject matter of the Bible, and precisely its life with a living people of God's choosing, has led to constant rehearing, deeper digging, fleshing out a privileged inheritance of divine disclosure as God's vital word makes its inroads through time. On this account, closure lacks the dramatic character often given to it by those who view canon as an external imposition, the setting down of lists, proper arrangements, and the like, conciliar models of approving books and closure, which never worked well at all in the Old Testament. Childs emphasized the distinctive character of Israel's sacred literature. The Old Testament is a book by and for a people, and it comes to others in that same spirit. It is not generic literature, even as it can be treated that way and has been. The idea of attachment to a people carries over and is indebted to this same idea when it comes to Christian scripture in its two-testament form. Much of my more recent writing has focused on this dimension: the Bible in its married life with the church in commentary through the ages. This also explains why Childs taught courses in the history of biblical interpretation and in 1974 included what at the time seemed an odd section on Exodus in Jewish and Christian reception in an otherwise standard critical commentary. At the time, he spoke of how the final form of the text came into sharper focus when one saw it against alleged descriptions of its coming to be, some more illuminating than others, and the same held true for its subsequent handling in church and synagogue. Crucial in the latter regard was the fact that the Bible is written from faith to faith. It anticipates readership coming to it in the same spirit as those who were its privileged bearers, prophets and apostles. The church does not conflate its position in time with earlier witnesses but comes to scripture's subject matter, God in Christ, by means of their written testimony. These things are written in the canonical form you have them, that you might believe. Blessed are those who, though being neither apostle nor prophet, come to the same faith by means of them. In my view, the history of interpretation exists to correct each age's overreaches and amnesia. It ought to teach a certain humility about what goes in each age for objectivity and priority. Historical-critical reading is our present modern Western burden, and it should remain always provisional and preliminary and cautionary. It would be equally a mistake to hold up one special period of reading in the history of interpretation as decisive—the Reformers or the second century or the Tridentine period—because this robs the Bible of its special character as ruling the rule of faith and giving it its working terrain. Appropriate to our topic on the future of canonical reading, it is this dimension that seems the least plowed and furrowed by biblical scholars, with some exceptions. It was an area of special interest at Vatican II, though largely for theologians, ressourcement scholars, and likely emerged for very different reasons there as a pushback against scholasticism or historical-critical optimisms as they saw it. On occasion, some biblical scholars would speak of it as a fruitful area for work, Paul Beauchamp. At other times, things like typology were seized on insofar as they might be useful for tradition-historical reading, von Rad and the linking of Old Testament and New Testament. Sensus plenior had a day in the sun in the hands of the New Testament scholar Bultmann, who wrote his thesis on Theodore of Mopsuestia, though for different reasons of possible utility. All of this has come and gone. The Bible of Alexandria working group in Paris brings together sharp scholars, but how this is related to biblical studies down the hall is less clear. I think this will prove true of the Blackwell's volume and also the one being edited now by Liang Ciao. I suppose this could be one of those areas where one concedes a scholar can't do everything. Yet at the same time, much of the biblical guild reflexively assumes that today's questions and answers are of some obvious higher quality. A better way to think of it is they're more complicated due to the problems of historical contextualizing and less obviously connected to a social context, the church, beyond their own limited range. Studying the history of interpretation introduces modern readers to commentary that cannot be confined to one testament or the other, or theology or pastoral care or homiletics, but is obliged to be of service to them all. This brings us to a final area where canonical interpretation has made a contribution: biblical theology. And again, it is a contribution without a lot of obvious models at present. John Goldingay and Walter Brueggemann have written big theologies of the Old Testament, but a signature for them both in different ways is keeping such theology preserved from New Testament influence. There is a certain timeliness about this: the concern that the voice of the Old Testament in the hands of sympathetic New Testament readers leads to erasing that voice or making it something temporally en route to a subsequent testament without its own abiding Christian witness. What would a biblical theology that gives equal attention to two testaments as Christian witnesses look like? Childs' own offering was daunting, over 600 pages. Was it also unwieldy? Is it important to explain the discrete witness as against historical-critical background questions first for Old Testament, then New Testament, and then turn to familiar theological themes: God the Creator, covenant, election, Christ the Lord, reconciliation, law and gospel, humanity, new and old, the kingdom of God, and finally ethics? Is there a more compact model to be built on something of the same chassis? In 'Convergences,' I use the formal lectionary selections as a way to demonstrate biblical theology, especially since the Old Testament lessons which are chosen supply a wide range of models. This protects against the voice of the New Testament subsuming the voice of Israel's scriptural witness. One might consider a biblical theology that somehow operated with this starting point, careful in so doing to cover the traditional theological themes. I know that Schnelle and Feldmeier are producing big volumes on Old and New Testament in biblical theology where an Old Testament person is assigned one and a New Testament person the other. I'm not sure where that model will go. It seems to me the more recent Mark Elliott volumes will be useful here. Volumes in your book for biblical theology? I can't see this making great headway. The initial volumes in the first decade, I think people read, but more recently I'm not so sure. To conclude: what is the future for canonical interpretation? I've tried today to briefly survey the question by looking at various developments in the field of Old Testament. In my own work, I've tried to extend a canonical approach in commentary writing, in both Old and New Testament introduction, history of interpretation, technical monographs. So in range and in drilling down in technical essays, I have something of my own legacy. What will its future be? Here I look forward to reading the contributions to this volume. The field continues to prize specialization and not comprehensiveness, and I do believe canonical reading and earlier forms of biblical interpretation by contrast did not confine themselves to this or that silo of research and writing. If canonical interpretation is defined along these wider lines, then its future, it seems to me, is not clear. At the same time, many of the concerns of canonical reading at the level of individual treatments lives on, if not explicitly calling itself that. That may be no bad thing. Barth did not encourage guardians. If the wider concerns of canonical reading are conveyed under different rubrics, that would be enough. One final postscript: I believe the canonical approach to the New Testament, as Childs laid it out and as several generations now are looking at the question, was extremely illuminating, and others have picked up that torch. We've been looking at the Old Testament today, but to the degree to which canonical interpretation is an explicitly comprehensive affair involving New Testament, biblical theology, and reception history, it would be important to pay proper attention to the canonical reading of the New Testament and its future. And that, however, is a topic for a different day. Thank you very much.