by Gary W. Buchholz
Gary W. Buchholz was a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1985, posting long theological essays to net.religion.christian — the early internet's first sustained forum for academic theology. This post is his reply to Jeffrey Gillette (Duke University), who had defended Brevard Childs' recently published The New Testament as Canon (1985) against Buchholz's earlier critique in "Hunting Phantasma in the Christian Tradition."
The opening and closing quotes, drawn from Vincent Leitch's Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (1983), frame Buchholz's central argument: canonical criticism — Childs' method of reading the Bible as a unified canonical whole, freed from historical-critical constraints — is simply a theological reinvention of 1940s "New Criticism," the literary theory that treats texts as autonomous, ahistorical, self-referential objects. And since New Criticism is already dead in secular literary studies — killed by deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the Yale School — Childs is, as Buchholz puts it, "writing NTAC with a corpse on his back."
The real answer to the canonical vs. historical debate, Buchholz proposes, must come from entirely outside the theological tradition: from Habermas' critical theory (to dissolve Barr's historicism) and from secular literary criticism (to expose Childs' textualism). The post ends by ghostbusting — exegesis as "literary legerdemain," spectres conjured from canonical juxtapositions — and a self-deprecating sign-off: Buchholz "toasting a marshmellow in 'honor' of Brevard Childs."
Here is what we now know. We are a community of bemused acolytes to Metaphor. We are celebrants of Misreading and inheritors of indecipherable Scripture. Our commentary is devoted yet doubled, Writing. We write the already written poems we read. We write the history we make, the selves we are, and the criticism we publish. To produce, to write, we promote discontinuity. Mediums of metaphor and madness, we are not responsible, except for our will to power over texts and for our presumption in writing. That we justify the Text, Tradition, and Society in our work is not to be misunderstood as acceptance of responsibility. To make such a byproduct the necessary precondition of critical production is to put late before early and thereby affirm, once more and inescapably, the madness of metaphor……
(appropriately continued at end of this posting…)
I'd like to thank Jeffrey Gillette for his reply and explication and criticism of my posting "Hunting Phantasma…" regarding the search for doctrinal Truth in the Christian tradition.
It's obvious that Jeffrey and I are reading the same books. My posting drew heavily on a newly purchased book, The New Testament as Canon by Brevard Childs of the Divinity School at Yale. Jeff's reply to me drew heavily on that work also.
I've been following this debate between the "canon critics" and the historical school for about two years now. Canon Criticism was inaugurated into the academic world back in 1979 with the publication of Childs' Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. I had the fortune — or misfortune — of using this text for class several years ago. It was difficult reading for one whose prior education was steeped in historical-critical method (since corrected), as Childs challenges some very basic assumptions that historical-critical methodology takes as "givens."
The prime exemplar of the most sustained criticism of Childs and the canonical approach is found in the person of James Barr. Barr's initial reaction was favourable, on the basis of Childs' Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970), with some reservations about the "absolutization of the canon as an exegetical principle." Criticism appeared in JTS (Journal of Theological Studies) in 1974, the Journal of Religion (1975), and JSOT (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament).
More recently, Barr published Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism (1983), in which he devotes almost half the book to the explication and criticism of the "canonical approach." This "general" criticism is followed by a 40-page appendix where Barr takes Childs et al. to task on a number of specific technical points. Barr's judgement on Childs upon reading Introduction to the OT as Scripture was "to convince me that the program of canonical criticism was essentially confused and self-contradictory in its conceptual formulation" (Scripture, p. 132). Barr then goes on for 40 pages to show how this is the case.
Childs continues to refine his methodology and find new applications. Witness the most recent The New Testament as Canon (1985), which Jeffrey and I have just read. This will of course provide fresh "meat" for further criticism from the historical school.
We'll leave the traditional historical school (Barr et al.) and the new canon critics (Childs et al. — the "déjà vu" or resuscitation of the Biblical Theology Movement, whose obituary was filed in 1960) to fight it out. In my estimation, they have not the proper tools whereby the whole question may be eliminated — and this elimination, to the point of dissolution, I take to be the only proper answer.
A proper resolution can only come from "outside" the religious, theological, and biblical tradition. The "answer" to Barr is the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas, whereby Barr's valorization of church history will be eliminated. The "answer" to Childs is secular literary criticism in the form of the obituary of "New Criticism," which shadows Childs' canonical approach. "New Criticism" and "canonical methodology" are one and the same — Childs writes NTAC with a corpse on his back.
The first sustained critique I have found of Childs from a specifically secular literary-critical perspective is John Barton's Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study. Barton sets Childs' methodology in the wider literary-critical tradition, showing how canonical methodology can be equated with a 1940–50s movement called "New Criticism." Barton then rehearses the eventual downfall of this movement and, by association, the expected downfall of canon criticism. To paraphrase Barton: when Childs discovers that his theological enterprise is in the end purely literary, he will find himself in the company of some strange bedfellows indeed — most notably, the Yale School of Deconstruction and the post-modern a/theology of Mark Taylor and his following in the AAR (American Academy of Religion).
I'm sure all this is of no interest to the "believers" in this file whose faith is secure in their obliviousness to any and all theological questions. So here is where I will stop, having outlined the basic contours of this academic debate. If Jeff is willing to take up the case for Childs — which he says he finds convincing — then I would be most happy to continue at a more technical level.
For now, I'd like to formulate an answer to the criticism of Best, Dunn, and Koester et al. given by Childs in NTAC, as cited by Jeff in his last posting.
Jeff argued that Childs registers "two very powerful criticisms" of the historical school's view of Scripture. The first:
Recently Brevard Childs of Yale has registered two very powerful (to my mind at least) criticisms of the Dunn / Best view of Scripture. First, Childs argues that Best wants to anchor the meaning of the text too firmly in a "historicist reading" — that the meaning of a parable is what Jesus meant when he told it, or what the Evangelist meant when he wrote it down. In fact, the many levels of material in the text (e.g. what Jesus said, what the early Church passed on, what the Evangelist wrote down, what latter editors may have reworked) shows the church involved in the exact opposite of the "freezing" process. The process of the canon is a process by which the believing community attempted to "loosen the text from any one given historical setting, and to transcend the original addressee," while still remaining faithful to the fact that the Word of God came in time and history.
I think we are talking about two slightly different things. The redaction of the gospels is one thing and the formation of the canon is another. I do not think that Childs is historically correct when he gives this reason for the formation of the canon. I have the standard two-volume collection of apocrypha which, as background, cites all relevant extant ancient documents pertaining to canonical selection. There is not a single extant ancient author that can give a "reason" for the specific contents of the canon. As you know, there were a number of different canonical lists that do not agree among themselves. Canon only becomes officially defined and institutionally sanctioned in about 400 AD.
So Childs is being true to his methodology: history is important but irrelevant. On this I can only say that Childs' assertion that the reason for the canon was to "loosen the text from any one given historical setting, and to transcend the original addressee" is a flight of the imagination — reading back into history a legitimation for his own approach. History is "important" for legitimation but becomes "irrelevant" when one can find no historical facts to back it up.
Koester et al. — the historical school, for whom history is important and not irrelevant — might want to say historically that the "reason" for the institution of the canon (authoritative books) in the Roman Empire, now a Christian state with an officially sanctioned religion, was for the political purpose of quelling diversity within the empire.
In other words, the reality would be that the canon — far from being a positive enterprise of "transcending" and "loosening" on the part of the church — may be just the opposite. Not a "transcending" and "loosening" but rather a return to the primitive apostolic witness of the 1st-century church on the part of the church, now construed as a socio-political entity, in the face of intolerable diversity (especially the Marcionite church, which already had a "canon").
One speaks quite rightly when one points to the 4th century as the time the canon was "closed" — and this would imply just the opposite of what Childs asserts as the history behind canon formation.
This brings us to the question of redaction. Childs would be quite right that the effect of redaction would be to "loosen" the text from its historical setting. But when one "removes" the text from history, what do we have?
In fact, the context for interpretation and exegesis for Childs is not history, nor is it the author's intention. The context for interpretation is the canon itself — as text among texts. Here is where Childs falls into the hands of the secular literary critics and the successors to "New Criticism."
"New Criticism" takes the text to be an authorless, ahistorical, autonomous, self-contained, self-referential entity. The text and the things it relates are not to be judged by a correspondence theory of reality. The text is not a copy of the real world — the text is a world complete and autonomous in itself.
The above is Childs' approach in secular terms: canon as context, not history. Correspondence to history is "irrelevant." What takes center stage now is inter-textual coherence. It is Rabbinic Midrash reborn in Christian terms.
We are now on our way to true "alchemy." We exegete "worlds" — literary, not historical — by the juxtaposition of texts (history is irrelevant). In canonical juxtaposition we create, alchemize, a meaning that no author or redactor of the text ever had. In gospel harmony we create a fifth gospel that was never written. This literary "alchemy" of textual and inter-textual weaving is limitless. The only constraint is imagination.
Phantasms are conjured from the texts in the style of a Christian Midrash. Specters appear at every point where text meets text — these are primal sites of canonical conjuring. Exegesis becomes literary legerdemain, and the historical and literary worlds become confused.
Believers — Watch out! Watch out! — or you'll get "slimed." Who you gonna call?
…Carnivalesque, our criticism should be entertaining and colorful: we need haunted houses, rollercoaster rides, distended balloons, seductive come-ons and promising gambles. To hustle is more compelling and more captivating than to pester.
— Vincent Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, p. 267
Colophon
Gary W. Buchholz posted this to net.religion.christian on 21 October 1985 from the University of Chicago Computation Center. Buchholz was completing graduate work at the University of Chicago Divinity School and had been following the debate between canonical criticism (Brevard Childs) and the historical-critical school (James Barr, Helmut Koester, Ernst Best) for two years. Jeffrey Gillette — the "Jeff" of this exchange — posted from Duke University under the handle [email protected]. This post is part of a series: "Hunting Phantasma in the Christian Tradition" prompted Gillette's reply; this post and "Ghostbusting Brevard Childs" are Buchholz's rejoinders. Together with "Schleiermacher and the Church," "GhostBusting the Christian Tradition," and "The Canon as Ideological Weapon," they form one of the most sustained engagements with post-critical biblical scholarship in early Usenet history. The title "Ghostbusters" (1984) had just been released the year before — hence the jokes.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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