MetaCatholic

In a busy week I had book-marked some posts I wanted to come back to, in particular Stephen’s two posts on Childs’ and Brueggemann’s differences. Phil Sumpter has now responded (and has other interesting posts on Childs as well). As if that weren’t enough to digest, John Hobbins has also weighed in with a plea for Christian attentiveness to Jewish exegesis. It seems to me that there are several different issues that are getting blended together in this conversation, but all these posts have very interesting things to say, even if I see rather less difference between Childs and Brueggemann on this.

I find it interesting that the main debate on canonical criticism has come from First Testament scholars: NT scholars seem to me to have been largely indifferent. I presume that this is partly because a main strand in studying early Christianity has been to seek out, elucidate and stress diversity in what is, compared to the First Testament, a fairly tightly unified group of writings. I also suspect it is partly because the First Testament is read primarily as (an admittedly loose) canon, for which the NT writers are providing their own canonical interpretation. The diversity is unified in the interpretative key of Jesus of Nazareth.

One of the significant issues that seems to me to have become more problematic for Christians is precisely to do with the integrity of the First Testament. One of the abiding lessons that I think historical criticism has bequeathed to the doctrine of scripture is a sense of the original location of the human word that conveyed the word of God. That has introduced a level of discomfort with typological, allegorical and prophetic understandings of the First Testament as a collection to be read only and explicitly christologically. I don’t see how Christians can avoid christological readings, but they are, I think, chastened and deepened by paying attention to the question of original location. It is this sense of original location, together with historical editing, that, I think, causes Childs to reach for canonical criticism, and, ironically, which informs Brueggemann’s post-modern brokenness. (Post-modernism is often very modern indeed!)

I note that some of the discussion has focussed on Ecclesiastes, a book whose witness Christians have far too easily domesticated as a praeparatio evangelica, and which like Job is not very well domesticated by its ending. Here the divergent voices are the dominant and discordant voices these books contribute to the canonical symphony, that are not muted by their editing. I want to illustrate a slightly different point with a different pairing of texts.

Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria: He shall not come into this city, shoot an arrow there, come before it with a shield, or cast up a siege ramp against it. By the way that he came, by the same he shall return; he shall not come into this city, says the LORD. For I will defend this city to save it, for my own sake and for the sake of my servant David.” (Isaiah 37:33-35)

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD.” (Jeremiah 7:3-4)

The first text, which belongs with a whole raft of less clearly historically situated oracles about God’s dwelling in Zion in Isaiah, guarantees Sennacherib’s defeat because of God’s choice of Zion as his dwelling. While other parts of Isaiah can be just as lethal in their warnings as any part of Jeremiah, this is one of the characteristic voices of First Isaiah. It is gathered into the collected prophecies (and the deuteronomic history) because of the spectacular nature of its fulfilment – the nearest we come to a non-biblically attested biblical miracle.

And it leaves its mark. The prophets of Jeremiah’s day, who effectively recall this promise of the Zion tradition in Jeremiah’s parody mantra “This is the temple of the Lord” no doubt see themselves faithful to Isaianic tradition and their history. Just as Jerusalem was saved from Assyria because it was the dwelling place of God’s name, so it will be saved from Babylonia. Jeremiah overthrows this tradition with a contradictory word.

At one level, both voices are somewhat constrained and muted within their own collections, yet they still stand, now collected into one canon. It is not then enough for the interpreter to quote the Bible, as though what it says is a single voice, but the interpreter must also read the signs of the times, to discern whether the faithful word of God might be salvation through God’s presence, or salvation through his absence, and whether the word of comfort or the word of warning needs to lead the orchestra of diverse voices.

In doing so, the question of the current location of the interpreter (Brueggemann’s point) is a necessary part of knowing how to hear oneself addressed (Childs’ point). There is more to be said about reading these texts than just this, of course, from a whole raft of temple and Jerusalem texts, through a narrative of desert tent to built, destroyed, rebuilt and re-destroyed temple. But when that is done the canon points beyond itself to various interpretations, Christian and Jewish, about God’s presence and absence and the fidelity of God to his promises and his history with his people. Those are very divergent voices, whose discord is not merely about their separate singing from the same song sheet in different keys, but the attempt by one voice to drown out the other.The Christian song of Zion has often been and often still is destructive of the Jewish song, yet today some of the Jewish songs of Zion are profoundly threatening to the justice upon which Zion is meant to be built and to which it is summoned to bear witness. The canon does not, and cannot, impose harmony on this.

The Christian interpretation will have also to draw into the account the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as temple stories about the dwelling of God with his people, where the destruction of all promises and the keeping of all promises appears to be the same, and presence and absence are most fulfilled in the same body and the same moment.

Only interpreters who know something of where they stand can hope to discern the appropriate melody of the canon for their times, and hear which song they are invited to join in. Only those interpreters who hear the melodies of the canon can hope to discern where they stand. In the end, and at the cross, all the daughters of song are brought low, because the divine discord is where the hope of harmony begins.