by Gary W. Buchholz

This is Gary Buchholz's second reply to Jeffrey Gillette's defense of Brevard Childs. Where the companion post "Canonical Conjuring" addressed Childs' first argument — that the canon frees the text from historicist interpretation — this one addresses Childs' second: that the canon is a dialectical process by which the church shaped and was shaped by Scripture, giving the contemporary community a living paradigm for wrestling with the truth of the gospel.

Buchholz's counter opens with Habermas' theory of truth as rational consensus — the opposite of tradition-valorizing authority. He then marshals feminist theology (Fiorenza, The Acts of Paul and Thekla) to show that what Childs calls "tradition" was in fact systematic distortion: women were preaching and baptizing in the early church, and the canon excluded the texts that witnessed to this. Childs, Buchholz argues, is naive — he valorizes tradition when it suits his confessional position and discards it (the Reformation, the patristic interpreters) when it does not.

The post ends with a sweeping critique: Christianity's central "problems" — sin, redemption, supernatural salvation — are self-generated. Religion offers both the poison and the cure. And Childs, by continuing the mistake of 2000 years of Christian history, inadvertently becomes the strongest argument for the secular and post-Christian epoch already underway.

In order to distinguish true from false statements, I refer to the judgement of another — and indeed to the judgement of all others with whom I may enter a conversation (whereby I counterfactually include all of the conversation partners I could find if my life history were coextensive with the history of humanity). The condition for the Truth of statements is the potential consent of all others. Truth means the possibility of obtaining a rational consensus.

— Jürgen Habermas, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in Communication and the Evolution of Society

This is a reply to the second of Childs' criticisms of Dunn, Best, and Koester, cited by Jeffrey Gillette from The New Testament as Canon (1985):

Recently Brevard Childs of Yale has registered two very powerful (to my mind at least) criticisms of the Dunn / Best view of Scripture…. Second, Childs criticizes Best and Dunn for not realizing that the significance of the canon was not to tie the gospel to the past, but to the future. The process of canonization was a dialectic in which the church shaped the text, and in return were shaped by the same Scriptures. Rather than presenting a series of outdated and irrelevant snapshots of Christianity (a position, by the way, which neither Dunn nor Best would hold), we see in the canon the church of several generations wrestling with the basic questions of what it means to be and to live as a Christian. Inasmuch as the basic questions of human existence, justice and theology have remained the same throughout the past two millennia, the canon serves to give us a living paradigm of how the contemporary community must wrestle with the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Childs is right that tradition shaping canon and canon shaping tradition was a dialectical process in history. But this analysis of the dynamic of how the canon and the church "evolved" does not give warrant to valorize this process.

In this, Childs remains pre-critical, ignoring the possibility of systematic distortion in the tradition. He ignores the possibility that texts and language, far from being a vehicle of knowledge, are in fact the bearers of oppressive ideologies.

Such is the view of feminist theologians. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has recognized this and writes her book In Memory of Her to try to restore the historically true picture of the full participation of women in the church, over against the distortion of same by both the canonical biblical texts and tradition.

Again, if we go "outside" the canon to the apocryphal Acts, we find the full participation of women in roles of preaching and baptism. An excellent example is The Acts of Paul and Thekla — a story of Paul teamed up with a woman who preaches and baptizes. It didn't quite make it into a male-dominated society and was therefore excluded from the canon.

Childs is naive. Anything and everything the tradition does is True and right. That the canon could contain anything like "corruption" is, for him, unthinkable.

Childs' "valorization" of history is very uneven. He takes what he likes and discards what he does not. Tradition that wrote the texts was "good." Tradition that redacted the texts was "good." But Childs will never appeal to that same tradition — the 2nd-century church fathers and later — for authoritative exegesis of these texts. It seems that the tradition was "good enough" and authoritative enough to write the texts, but was in no position of authority to tell us what they mean.

Again, in the canonical approach, "author's intention" is not important — and so the texts, in reality, become the vehicle for legitimation for Childs' own confessional position. Author's intention cannot judge Childs, nor can historical context, since he has excluded these from the conversation from the very beginning.

If Childs valorizes the tradition, then why did he leave it? Childs is Protestant Reformed. It seems that the tradition that framed the canon with authority has lost that authority in pronouncing Protestantism a heresy. Childs does not "like" this part of the tradition so he discards it.

Canon is the founding ideological document of the Protestant Church. By consensus, Protestants have agreed that the Bible is the "Truth." Bible and canon exist at the level of truth as consensual definition, and not Truth as defined in terms of mimetic representation of any external reality. Childs will see to this by eliminating historical-critical method, which could prove it wrong. Childs will see to this by eliminating any appeal to author's intention, which would inhibit the free play of his exegesis.

Inasmuch as the basic questions of human existence, justice and theology have remained the same throughout the past two millennia, the canon serves to give us a living paradigm of how the contemporary community must wrestle with the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Is it not possible that the 2,000-year history of Christianity has created the problem as much as it has solved it? In the History of Religions this is known as the "Salvation Syndrome." Religion offers you both the poison and the cure. It becomes the answer to its own self-generated problem.

Why have the "questions of human existence, justice and theology" remained the same throughout the past two millennia? Because the West has been Christian for the past two millennia and has been prey to Christianity's own self-generated, self-defined problems.

Yes, the canon can serve as a paradigm for the solution of that "problem." But why accept the "problem" as a problem in the first place? The problem is a problem by definition — a "given."

I don't think Man is in need of any "supernatural" redemption. I don't think any supernatural redemption is either possible or necessary. I don't think the canon should be "valorized" in the way Childs sets out to do. I don't think the Christian tradition should be valorized. I don't accept the statement of the problem, and therefore "the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ" is no answer.

The Christian tradition is valuable but should not be taken at its word. Christianity is a history of human being — singular — dealing with the world, solving ontological problems. Christianity is expert at ontology but no authority on metaphysics or any ontic reality. Christianity is about "us" as human being in-the-world. It ought not look "up" for a "revelation" but rather look "within" to its own history. By its mistake one takes hold of Truth — Greek aletheia — as "unconcealedness" or "disclosure" of Man's ontological being (dasein) in-the-world. For Childs to continue the "mistake" of 2,000 years of Christian history is the precondition for the success of the program of secular theology and its move to the post-modern and post-Christian historical epoch.

Colophon

Gary W. Buchholz posted this to net.religion.christian on 22 October 1985 from the University of Chicago Computation Center. This post continues the exchange begun in "Hunting Phantasma in the Christian Tradition" and continued in "Canonical Conjuring — Brevard Childs, New Criticism, and the Death of Exegesis." Jeffrey Gillette, whom Buchholz addresses throughout, was posting from Duke University. Together these posts — alongside "Schleiermacher and the Church," "GhostBusting the Christian Tradition," and "The Canon as Ideological Weapon" — form one of the most sustained engagements with post-critical biblical scholarship in early Usenet history. Buchholz's engagement with Fiorenza, Habermas, Heidegger, and secular a/theology situates him within the University of Chicago Divinity School's particular intellectual milieu of the mid-1980s.

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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