Childs Quote of the Day – The Theological Significance of the Decalogue

“The Decalogue  … reflects a special content. Its imperatives are not addressed to a specific segment of the populace, but to everyone within Israel. They are straightforward and immediate with a comprehensiveness which is unusual. This quality has been achieved historically by a lengthy development which both expanded and contracted the commandments. A Certain flexibility can be seen in the different homiletical. It remains an imperative directed to historical Israel, but Israel as the people of God which has been extended both in time and space beyond the first generation of those who experienced Sinai….
directions to which the material has been pointed …

… it is an important task of an Old Testament theology to sketch the range of interpretation within the whole Old Testament in order to understand how the Decalogue functioned within Israel, and to discern both the dynamics of its movement and nature of its actualization. For example, the narrative material offers a major commentary within scripture as to how these commands now function within the canon … Similarly, the writings of the prophets, psalmists and sages bear directly on a canonical understanding of the Decalogue….” (OTT, 63-64).

Childs Quote of the Day – God’s Purpose in Revelation

On “the goal of self-disclosure”:

Surprisingly, the Old Testament is virtually silent regarding divine motivation. One searches in vain to see this issue treated in any diret fashion. It is evident that divine revelation is never grounded in some need of God, as if he were lonely. There si no hint that God required some fulfillment, or even sought fellowship with mankind in order truly to express his Godhead. Such a move is simply foreign to the Old Testament. (43).

He continues suggesting that the only way to begin to discern God’s purpose in revelation is to oberve his acts throughout Scripture. These acts ultimately point to God’s intent to make himself known for “the proper response … of praise before the manifest glory of God’s presence in his works…” (46).

But since his purposes have been obscured at the fall (46),

the most suitable biblical term for God’s purpose with his creation is ’savlation’ or ‘redemption’. These are much more to be preferred to the much-abused term ‘liberation’. … To make use of the biblical term ‘kingdom of God’ as an equivalent to salvation – his rule over all that he created – will perhaps serve to prevent any restriction of God’s work to the individual human soul, but also point to the divine initiative of bringing his cosmic will to completion, which is an eschatological force energizing the world. (49)

I’m not so sure I agree with this. Even though his purposes became obscured by the fall, I think overall his purposes was always to make himself known so that he might be glorified in praised. No?

Making Excuses for God?

Though I’ve committed to only posting one Childs ‘Quote of the Day,’ today’s reading had some interesting comment on a recent conversation around blogdom. John Anderson, has posted a blog here that has started some interesting discussion of who exactly God is from an Old Testament perspective. One aspect of this, as expected, deals with the portrayal morality and God’s actions. With implication for both the morality of man and of God, note Childs comment:

Certainly the Hebrew prophets were consistent in their claims of a moral dimension in history. To this extent prophetic interpretation stands in stark contrast to all those theories of post-Enlightenment historians who view history as a complex nexus of purely immanental forces. Yet is is a serious misunderstanding of the Old Testament to infer that the Bible is concerned chiefly in constructing a history of morality in order to contrast good and bad behaviour. Actually one of the disturbing features of the Old Testament for many modern readers is precisely its lack of interest in this area which runs roughshod over questions of ethics. Rather, it is only at a far deeper level and growing out of a profoundly theological reflection on God’s purpose in the world that the prophets see the mysterious hand of God ruling and over-ruling human folly. (38) (emphasis mine)

In response, should the modern day thought make excuses for the character of God in the Old Testament?

Childs Quote of the Day – How Is God Known?

In continuation of my rereading of Childs’ OTT in a CC, here’s the most stimulating quote of today’s reading.

Chapter 3 – How is God Known?

… to reflect on the Old Testament theologically in the context of the Christian canon establishes a perspective from which the enterprise is engaged. It rules out a stance which distances itself form Christian faith and tries merely to describe the development of Israel’s faith in God or to picture differently concepts of an ancient deity. But then does not this canonical context imply that a reflection on the Old Testament faith in God be immediately related to Christian faith in Jesus Christ? The very fact that the Christian canon treasures a portion of the scripture in which the name of Jesus is not mentioned offers an initial warrant for seeking another theological option. The implication of the Old Testament canon, both on a formal and material level, is that the Christian life is still lived between promise and fulfilment, not as a unilinear heilsgeschichtlich pattern, but as a description of the essential eschatological dimension of divine redemption. To reflect on God’s revelation in the Old Testament is not a pre-Christian stage which has been rendered inoperative by the full revelation in Jesus Christ. Rather, it belongs  to the nature of the Christian faith that the perception of God through the witness of the old covenant remains a constitutive stance for Christian theology. The struggle to perceive God in the testimony of the Hebrew scriptures is not an historical anachronism, but a consciously Christian understanding of the continuing, authoritative function of the Old Testament for the church. Although the ultimate task of biblical theology is to hear the witness of both Testaments, such an enterprise does not call into question the legitimacy, even necessity, of serious theological reflection on the old covenant in its own right as scripture of the church. (30)

Brevard Childs Quote of the Day – On Revelation

As I mentioned here, in honor of my rereading of Childs’ ‘Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context,’ I’m going to continue the post the most stimulating quote of the day’s reading. Today’s quote is a bit of a patch job, but captures the essence of what I found most stimulating. There’s even a reference to Bultmann for Jim West.

Chapter 2 – The Old Testament as Revelation

Both [James] Barr and [F. G.] Downing … [define] the term revelation according to common parlance. Barr stresses that revelation implies hitherto unknown information, Downing that it effects a removal of obscurity … [this] interpretation … seeks to demonstrate that the term revelation has a different function in the Bible from its subsequent theological usage fails to deal adequately with the Bible’s role as authoritative canonical literature. Their exegesis suffers from being flat and reductionistic in quality. The canonical process often assigned a function to the literature as a whole which transcended its parts. The collection acquired a theological role in instructing, admonishing and edifying a community of faith, and that altered its original semantic level. Frequently a particular story was deemed paradigmatic of God’s ways with his people. Thu even though the knowledge of God communicated through a traditional narrative was not a revelation in its strictly linguistic sense of disclosing hitherto unknown information available to God, in its new role as scripture it served a unique religious role. It disclosed God for the community in a way which was transmitted only through this corpus of literature … The term revelation is integral to the task of Old Testament theology, but only as a shorthand formula pointing to the whole enterprise of theological reflection on the reality of God… The theological issue is not resolved by positing a sharp contrast between pre-critical and modern historical interpretation. Both Barth and Bultmann tried to teach us that lesson in the 1920s. The threat of domesticating the Word is equally present on both the right and left of the spectrum. If the canonical approach is conceived of as a closed system by which to handle biblical revelation, it is also doomed to failure and should rightly be rejected. However, if it can serve as a means for taking seriously the human form of the witness to divine revelation which God continues to bring alive for each new generation through his Spirit, it may serve as a useful tool for grappling with the real issues at stake in the theological enterprise. (22-23, 25-26).

Brevard Childs – Quote of the Day

In honor of my rereading of Child’s “Old Testament Theology in A Canonical Approach,” I’m going to start a new series entitled “Brevard Childs Quote of the Day” where I bring forth the most stimulating quote of the day’s reading. I’m only reading about a chapter a day so we should get 20 good quotes out of this.

Chapter 1 – Introduction to Old Testament Theology

The controversy with the traditio-historical critics is not over the theological significance of a depth dimension of the tradition. Rather, the issue turns on whether or not features within the tradition which have been subordinated, modified or placed in the distant background of the text can be interpreted apart from the role assigned to them in the final form when attempting to write a theology of the Old Testament. For example, to seek to give theological autonomy to a reconstructed Yahwist source apart from its present canonical context is to disregard the crucial theological intention of the tradents of the tradition, and to isolate a text’s meaning from its reception. (11)