One of the hallmarks of the modern study of the Bible, which is one of the important legacies of the Enlightenment, is the recognition of the time-conditioned quality of both the form and the content of scripture. A pre-critical method which could feel free simply to translate every statement of the Bible into a principle of right doctrine is no longer possible.
Faithful scholars have seen, since the establishment of the New Testament canon, and even earlier as the Talmud indicates, that one must a avoid a wooden literalness in exploring the text, and even avoid any principle of direct transference from the text's world into the world of the reader. This was true even prior to the Enlightenment.
Of course, it is a caricature of the history of Christian theology to suggest that such a use of the Bible was universal in the pre-Enlightenment period. Augustine, Luther and Calvin - to name but a few - all worked with a far more sophisticated understanding of the Bible than the term 'pre-critical' suggests.
Although many history books would have us believe that the Enlightenment was the incubator of atheism, it was rather, in fact, an era of reflective believers - not critical of faith, but rather of critical faith. Voltaire earnestly opposed atheism; John Locke wrote commentaries on the Pauline epistles. Certainly, many of the Enlightenment thinkers were not Christians or Jews; but the significant explicit atheists among them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Many of them were explicitly Christian.
Given their sincere faith, we are not compelled to automatically agree with them, but we are compelled to give them a hearing. Like Augustine and Luther before them, the Enlightenment scholars wrestled with the fact that Scripture was inspired in a finite place by an omnipresent God, inspired in a finite time by an eternal God, and inspired within the conditioning factors of a culture by an unconditioned God. Unlike Luther and Augustine before them, these scholars wrestled in a different way.
Nevertheless, it is still true that the issue of the Bible's time-conditioned quality became a major hermeneutical problem in the wake of the Enlightenment and the rise of the historical-critical method.
The old puzzle was formulated in a new intellectual framework; absolute truth in a relative context, eternal truth in temporal location; universal truth in one specific place; unconditional truth in a culturally-conditioned context. Brevard Childs directs us to focus our
attention on the process by which divine truth acquired its authoritative form as it was received and transmitted by a community of faith. Accordingly, there is no biblical revelation apart from that which bears Israel's imprint. All of scripture is time-conditioned because the whole Old Testament has been conditioned by an historical people. There is no pure doctrine or uncontaminated piety. Any attempt to abstract elements from its present form by which, as it were, to distinguish the kernal from its husk, or inauthentic existence from authentic expression, runs directly in the face of the canon's function.
Professor Childs is suggesting that we cannot simply distill or extract crystalized doctrinal truths or pure dogma from the text. The form and the content are extricably linked. Perhaps especially so of those bits of text which are labeled 'narrative theology', but also in the propositional segments of scripture. Not only can we not extract the unconditional truth from the culturally-conditioned text, but we, as readers, are also culturally-conditioned, so even if our text contained transcendental truths and nothing else, our ability to read the text would not be so pure:
Moreover, to take seriously a canonical approach is also to recognize the time-conditioned quality of the modern, post-Enlightenment Christian whose context is just as historically moored as any of his predecessors. One of the disastrous legacies of the Enlightenment was the new confidence of standing outside the stream of time and with clear rationality being able to distinguish truth from error, light from darkness.
If we were to accept the idea that it is our task to sift the timeless truths of scripture out of the concrete particulars of some time and place, we would be faced with the question, how do we identify those timeless truths? Our ability to spot them would be clouded by the fact that we are products of our particular time and place. Professor Childs indicates a different route:
In conscious opposition to this legacy of the Enlightenment, the canonical approach seeks to approach the problem with a different understanding of how the Bible functions as a vehicle of God's truth. By accepting the scriptures as normative for the obedient life of the church, the Old Testament theologian takes his stance with the the circle of tradition, and thus identifies himself with Israel as the community of faith. Moreover, he shares in that hermeneutical process of which the canon is a testimony, as the people of God struggled to discern the will of God in all its historical particularity.
In this understanding of meaning, Professor Childs is in some ways similar to Wittgenstein's explanations of meaning, inasmuch as community plays a central role discovering the meaning of a proposition for both Childs and Wittgenstein.
In passing, we note that Childs uses 'Enlightenment' as a shorthand - which we well understand - but we remember that there is no simple, clear-cut era or group of thinkers which are ready-made to answer to the word 'Enlightenment' - but rather that it is a convenient historical construct, which runs roughshod over many nuances and ambiguities.
To get at the truth in scripture, then, Professor Childs encourages us to see ourselves as part of the community of faith now, and as part of the community of faith then: part of the current church as the Body of Christ on earth now, and part of God's people to whom the text was first given. Further, we must realize that these two communities, so very different, are nonetheless organically connected. We are striving then to see the text from the inside. We cannot pull extracted propositions out of the text, but we can enter into the text, which is done by entering into the community which formed the text and still maintains the text - into the community which was formed by the text and is still formed by the text.
