Remembering Brevard Childs
by David Bartlett
During this summer two of my friends and colleagues died. Each had made significant contributions to theological education and to the church. In some ways their theological commitments were strikingly different, but they shared a fierce devotion to the Bible and an unshakeable conviction that scripture still speaks to contemporary people. I want to write this month about Brevard Childs and next month about Letty Russell.
Brevard Childs was an Old Testament scholar. He began his career approaching biblical texts much as his contemporaries did—with a focus on a text’s original historical context. But he also studied with Karl Barth, and under Barth’s influence he came to appreciate the ways in which the whole Bible is always greater than its parts and to believe that the power of scripture is not limited to the history behind scripture.
Childs became the leading proponent of what came to be called a canonical approach to the Bible. This strategy for biblical interpretation made two claims. First, what scholars and preachers and all Christian readers are supposed to interpret is the biblical text in its canonical form—as the church has accepted and loved it. He wasn’t nearly as interested in the sources behind Genesis as he was in Genesis itself and what counted for his reading of Matthew was not so much how Matthew used Mark or the elusive Q but how Matthew told the story in his own terms.
The second claim was that we should read the whole canon as a series of text in a kind of ongoing conversation. Childs’ commentary on Exodus was a stunning example of learning to read the Old Testament texts in conversation with other Old Testament texts and how to read Exodus in the light of its use in the New Testament.
My suspicion is that his work will be seen more as a corrective to other movements in biblical studies than as a movement all by itself, but in the light of his work, all of us do stand corrected.
What was clearest about Childs was that he was driven above all by theological interests. Put more simply he was driven by his profound Christian faith. Many of us would have disagreed with him about the scope of that faith—especially as it related to issues of social justice. (He was in favor of social justice; he just wasn’t sure it was the subject for preaching or exegesis). But what was clearest in his writing and his preaching and his argument and his prayers was the profound conviction that the God who is God is revealed in Jesus Christ and that scripture bears witness to that revelation.
Requiescat in pacem.