Comments on Brevard Childs
Brevard S. Childs was perhaps the most influential thinker in the development of canonical theology in the last several decades. His work, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, presents a thorough analysis of the forces that led to the formulation of a canonical theological position. In this series of lectures and comments of Childs’ work, I examine the critical epistemological and theological decisions behind his formulation. These discussions give you graduate level insights into the liberal Christianity of the contemporary church.
As faithful supporters of At God’s Table, I am glad to offer you these lectures without charge. Enjoy and learn.
Skip Moen
First lecture (about 3 hours)
[audio:https://skipmoen.com/audio/childs-1.mp3](To listen, hit the Play button above, or right-click here, select “Save as…” and download the file to your computer.)
Second lecture (about 1 hour)
[audio:https://skipmoen.com/audio/childs-2.mp3](To listen, hit the Play button above, or right-click here, select “Save as…” and download the file to your computer.)
Third lecture and concluding remarks (about 1 hour)
[audio:https://skipmoen.com/audio/childs-3.mp3](To listen, hit the Play button above, or right-click here, select “Save as…” and download the file to your computer.)
Podcast: Download
Thanks Skip for making this available. It has really helped me to understand (or formalise my understanding) of the formal paradigm from which many with whom I’ve had discussions in the past approach the scriptures, and why they seem unable to appreciate the need to see the Bible from a Hebraic perspective.
It seems to me that once the paradigm espoused by Childs and others of his ilk is embraced and internalised, there needs to be a tremendous amount of “unlearning” before one is able to shift to a Hebraic view of the scriptures.
I am reminded of a (brief) conversation I had with a preacher about a sermon that he preached about the “God is…” statements in the NT. He said that there are only about 3 or 4 places in the Bible when we are told, “God is…” (God is spirit, God is love, God is faithful, God is a consuming fire). I challenged him on this and pointed him to Exodus 34:6 where God described God to Moses. His response was, “Talking about the attributes of God is different to saying that ‘God is…’. ‘God is…’ is a much stronger statement.”
My comment then was, “Surely we should be taking notice of God describing God before we listen to a man’s view of what God is.” His response? “Oh, but you have to develop your theology from the New Testament.” When I disagreed with him, he politely but firmly said, “That’s OK, we can agree to disagree”, terminated the conversation and moved on to someone else.
I didn’t understand at the time why he didn’t seem even remotely interested in entertaining the thought that the OT could have any bearing on our understanding of God – now I do. He wasn’t at all comfortable with his paradigm (or perhaps his comfort zone) being threatened.
I think that, deep down, many Christians know that they haven’t been taught “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” but they’re afraid to step out of their comfort zone and find out why, or even to look for the missing pieces of the puzzle. I also know now why I was never comfortable with the idea of going to Bible college – had I done so before I had a thorough grounding of the Hebrew origins and themes of scripture I may well have rejected it like so many others. Were I to begin now, I don’t think I’d pass because I couldn’t simply regurgitate the answers that they would want to hear ;-).
Especially when regurgitation is the standard for education in our culture. What happened to training people to THINK!
Too true! I sometimes used to cop it from other students in high school because I was always the one who would ask the difficult questions. The problem was that the teachers were usually only regurgitating what they’d been taught, so they usually didn’t know the answers themselves. My physics and chemistry teacher actually thanked me at the end of the year, because I’d forced him to go and learn new stuff to be able to answer the harder questions. At least he was mature enough to admit it. Some other teachers I’ve known would have simply said, “Get back in your box!” (or words to that effect, perhaps not so directly) ;-).
One thing is for sure – I’ll never encourage my boys to stop asking the hard questions, or to simply regurgitate the “right answers”.
It is interesting that, in rabbinic thought, one’s wisdom is revealed not so much by the answers one gives, but by the questions one asks. Rabbi’s would often answer a question with another question. That was a hallmark of some of Jesus’ discussions – people were amazed at the questions He asked.
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!