The Church’s Guide for Reading Paul: The Canonical Shaping of the Pauline Corpus

By Brevard Childs. Eerdmans. Pp. 288. $28. ISBN 978-0-8028-6278-5

Reviewed by Christopher Seitz

The prolific scholar Brevard Springs Childs influenced a generation of Episcopal students, among many others, during his 40 years as professor of Old Testament at Yale University. The Episcopal Church played a role through much of his life, beginning with his baptism at Trinity Church in Columbia, S.C. where his large family were active members. Though ordained in the Presbyterian Church after training at Princeton Seminary and the University of Basel, he was a frequent worshiper at the parish next to his home, Christ Episcopal Church in Bethany, Conn., where the funeral service for him was held. He and his wife, Ann, split their later years between Connecticut and Cambridge, England, where they worshipped at St. Edward King and Martyr.

Shortly before his untimely death in 2007 he completed a manuscript for The Church’s Guide for Reading Paul. The book picks up concerns from his previous work on the Old Testament, New Testament, biblical theology and the history of biblical interpretation and is a fitting final tribute to an enormously creative, Catholic and confessional mind.

The concern with “the Church” referred to in the title points to Childs’s previous work on the canon. Canon does not refer to lists of books or external determinations of the scope of the literature, but is intrinsic to the Bible’s coming-to-be. Childs understands the form of the biblical witness as critical to its appraisal and interpretation, and he broke new ground in his long career by conceiving of authorship and inspiration in new ways. The Church has an active role in shaping and handing over the apostle Paul, through the vehicle of his letters, for those generations post-dating his apostolic ministry. The specificity of the letters is retained, but the transition from Paul the Apostle and church planter to Paul the steward of the mystery of God (including the eternal plan for his Church; see Eph. 3:1-6; Col. 1:23-27) to Timothy and the next generation all constitute “the Church’s guide for reading Paul,” that is: the Church’s guide for understanding the character of the Gospel’s outreach from Jesus Christ to the present age.

Childs never lost interest in the specificity engendered by reading the Bible with historical-critical tools, and in this work he defends such inquiry against reader-response and even some forms of literary analysis claiming the title “canonical.” Efforts to interpret Paul apart from the canonical form, however, create a developmental model which is captive to changing reconstructions, on the one hand, and which fails to note the historical character of the shaping enterprise itself. Categories such as “deutero-Pauline” may properly understand certain characteristics of Ephesians and Colossians, for example, but with no way to associate this understanding with the canonical form itself. Romans may be a mature letter and a “late witness” over against Galatians and the Corinthian correspondence, but in its present location its superscription serves to introduce the Pauline collection in its entirety, and the letter functions as a compendium of all the major Pauline themes, through which the subsequent witnesses gain their perspective and sharpness.

Childs had offered an Introduction to the New Testament as Canon in 1984, but he did not feel it achieved the critical attention it deserved. Observing the decade-long Society of Biblical Literature’s quest to deal with the Pauline letters through a historical lens, and the problems for consensus this approach betokened, encouraged Childs to take up the project with a more focused look at the Pauline letters. Also addressed is the role of Acts and Hebrews, as well as the General Epistles. Acts serves to link the apostolic testimony of the Catholic Epistles with the Pauline corpus, while Hebrews and the Epistles acknowledge, with the Pastorals, both the received scriptural witness of the old covenant (2 Timothy and the reference to his being raised in the faith by these writings), now heard in fresh ways, and the letters of Paul themselves — though difficult to understand — ranged alongside these writings as scripture (2 Peter 3:16).

The Church’s Guide, as with all Childs’s previous work, presents a scholar totally at home in critical scholarship of an international scope. His interest in canon has been particularly well received in German Roman Catholic scholarship, and the engagement with this literature often reveals common ground. At a time when Protestants in North America are turning to the history of interpretation (“the tradition”) and the canon/Rule of Faith, and Roman Catholic scholars are engaged in the enthusiasms of historical-critical questions and investigations, Childs always presents a fresh and creative handling of the Bible against which to plot these dual movements.

Aspects of the present work have their precursors in Childs’s earlier undertakings. We have explicit exegetical engagement with specific texts, such as in Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), including Paul’s reference to Moses’ veil in 2 Corinthians 3; Abraham’s faith in Romans 4 and Galatians 3; Israel and the church in Romans 9-11; Paul’s apostolate in 2 Corinthians, Colossians and Ephesians, and the Catholic Epistles. How one might properly assess the normative character of the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament was a perennial concern for Childs (and one hotly contested today). The present work provides up-to-date engagement with New Testament scholarship (Ulrich Luz, Richard Hays, Frances Young, Luke Timothy Johnson, Wayne Meeks) in the manner of Childs’s earlier introductions. And the concern for the life of the Church as ingredient in the shaping process, with its attendant views of inspiration, remind one of his masterful history of interpretation of the Book of Isaiah, which concluded: “I believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

It is probably this ability both to work with critical theory and never lose sight of the theological freight the methods were always meant to bear that marks off the work of Brevard Childs. The complexity of the questions he engages is always in direct proportion to their significance theologically. This means that one is asked to go on an occasionally arduous journey; but the reader is spared convolution in expression or protracted engagement with the discipline of New Testament scholarship for its own sake. Childs lets what is important remain clearly in view.

Those who were his students at Yale will remember his carefully composed prayers before lectures, but also his command of the material and sense of seriousness about what was being discussed and weighed. I was present at a tribute to him in Vienna and was struck at his influence on people from so many different corners of the globe. Childs had learned rabbinic Hebrew in Israel, alongside Ancient Near Eastern languages at Basel. His Dutch was excellent, and he was much respected in Germany, where his works were translated, and in the United Kingdom, where he lived and studied.

At his funeral his son remarked that he never knew his father as an international scholar, but as a deeply prayerful man who always took the time to write and stay in touch with his two children. During his infantry service in World War II in Europe, with the war only slowly winding down, he carefully answered the letters written to him by his sister, who worried about questions being posed in her university Bible courses. He encouraged her to listen and think carefully and not to dismiss or fear.

One gets a sense, when reading Childs’s work, that he is one of the last people to have a truly international grasp of the discipline of biblical and theological studies. At Yale he taught a two-semester course on the history of biblical interpretation. He could speak intelligently about the shifts in understanding of “the literal sense” from the rabbinic period, through Antioch and Alexandria, Augustine and Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra and Rashi, to Luther, Calvin and the early 18th century historical-critical methods, but not omitting attention to an obscure French Roman Catholic from the 19th century.

This appreciation of the long march of Bible, Theology and Church also tempered his understanding of what he was up to, and how charity must be displayed with colleagues and students. In that sense, though his family members remembered one man, and his colleagues and scholarly jousters another, they were one and the same person, who worked diligently, prayerfully and humbly all his life. A genuinely ecumenical thinker, unwilling to divide and conquer, or to misrepresent for advantage, he is probably that rare scholar whose technical work was grounded in his Christian walk and vocation, above all else.

He also liked to tell of how he had got things wrong — how he and his young graduate student friends had made fun of Karl Barth, only to learn the hard way how truly brilliant and well prepared he was to meet them on the ground they claimed was their own. Or how he once wrote the great Roman Catholic scholar Raymond Brown, wondering why he invested so much in historical verification rather than attending to the canon’s own (Catholic) voice, only to receive a one-line postcard in return: “Bard, my enemies are not your enemies.” Vatican II and Barth’s Basel must both be honored for the questions they bring.

Only the deep respect that keeps challengers honest and careful on the field of battle can account for the friendships such an energetic and creative intellect was able to preserve, all the while hewing closely to the vision he believed the Bible called him to describe and commend for the next generations of students. In that sense, one can see in The Church’s Guide to Reading Paul a model for faithful teaching and obedience, through suffering and hardship as well as enthusiasm and success, that Brevard Childs himself modeled.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Christopher Seitz is Research Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Wycliffe College, Toronto, and Incarnation School of Theology, Dallas.