Adriel and I are off to Paris to learn French for a month, studying at the ILCF - CUE (in English here). We expect a few visitors already, so if you're in the area give a shout. We'll be on email (but not on the blog!).

I do plan to make it to Vienna for the canon/Kanon session, and perhaps to attend a special session in honor of Brevard Childs, which may or may not happen on Wednesday morning.

I'm looking forward to unplugging myself from my workstation. Further updates to this site can be anticipated in August, though.

Tags: Personal

Georg Steins is co-hosting two session in Vienna on the closure of the canon, one in the morning and one in the evening of Tuesday, 24 July. I hope to be there. Details and abstracts, from the SBL program book, are as follows:

24-09

EABS: The Closure of the Hebrew Bible Canon: Inside and Outside Perspectives / Der Abschluss de Kanons der Hebräischen Bibel. Innen- und Außensichten Session I

7/24/2007

8:30 AM to 11:30 AM

Room: HS 28 - Hauptgebäude

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück, Presiding
Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel, Presiding

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück
Zwei Konzepte - ein Kanon. Zur Gestalt und Gestaltung des TaNaK / Two Concepts – One Canon. Form and Design of the TaNaK (30 min)
Discussion (15 min)

Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel
Die Reichweite der Kanonformel in Deuteronomium 4,2 / How Far Does the Canonic Formula of Deuteronomy 4:2 Reach? (30 min)
Discussion (15 min)
Break (30 min)

Andreas Ruwe, Universität Greifswald
Zur Entstehung des Pentateuch: Kanonisierung als fortschreitende Konstitutionalisierung / On the Formation of the Pentateuch: Canonization as progressive Constitutionalization (30 min)
Discussion (30 min)

24-35

EABS: The Closure of the Hebrew Bible Canon: Inside and Outside Perspectives / Der Abschluss de Kanons der Hebräischen Bibel. Innen- und Außensichten Session II

7/24/2007

1:30 PM to 4:30 PM

Room: HS 28 - Hauptgebäude

Georg Steins, Universität Osnabrück, Presiding
Johannes Taschner, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel, Presiding

Egbert Ballhorn, Universität Osnabrück
Psalm 151: Eine Innensicht Davids - außerhalb des Psalters / Psalm 151: David from Inside, Outside of the Psalter (30 min)

Matthias Millard, Kirchliche Hochschule Bielefeld-Bethel
Der Kanon als ein didaktisches Konzept / The Canon as a Didactic Concept (30 min)

Carola Krieg, Universität Mainz
Der Bibelkanon - Javne - Rabbinsche Stimmen / The Canon of the Bible, Javne, Rabbinical Voices (30 min)



A number of the contributers are involved in the soon-forthcoming Der Bibelkanon in der Bibelauslegung: Beispielexegesen und Methodenreflexionen, edited by Steins and Ballhorn.

From about a year ago I found this list of contributors scheduled for that volume:
Egbert Ballhorn (Hildesheim), Christoph Dohmen (Regensburg), Thomas Hieke (Regensburg), Matthias Millard (Bielefeld-Bethel), Tobias Nicklas (Nijmegen), Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr (Jena), Silvia Pellegrini (Berlin), Klaus Scholtissek (Würzburg), Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger (Passau), Georg Steins (Osnabrück), Johannes Taschner (Bielefeld-Bethel).

Looks like the SBL sessions could be a good preview for the book.

Tags: Deutsch, Canon

Christopher Seitz has written an elegant and laudatory obituary for the SBL website. An excerpt:

Childs’s control of the history of ideas, especially continental scholarship; his immersion in the apparatus of classical theological reflection from the Reformation period and from the wider history of biblical interpretation; his technical training in Hebrew language; and his deep love of and concern for the church, and the way the Bible made its renewing voice heard, as the speech of God for every age: these characteristics of the man and his work mark him off as a scholar whose best analogies are to be found in figures like Jerome, Chrysostom, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, or his teacher from a more recent day, Karl Barth. No one who ever heard him lecture will forget his carefully composed prayers, and no one who heard him preach or pray will have failed to note a man of great learning, humility, Godly fear, and deep Christian hopefulness.

...

As we mark and mourn his passing, we lean into the confident hope that Brevard Childs will be read and heard, and his work continued, well beyond the years he gave us. He was never a man to call attention to himself, but rather to point to the God who in every generation raised up women and men of faith, to extend the legacy of prophet and apostle in their own way, in their own generation. This challenge never failed to energize Brevard Childs, and we who give thanks for his life do so in gratitude to the God who sent him and gave us these years of service and proclamation, always to his greater glory.
May God grant him joy and rest eternal with his saints from every age.

Tags: Childs

Georg Steins sends regrets in an official response on behalf of the Institut für Katholische Theologie, at the Universität Osnabrück, because (in his words) "wir in Osanbrück viel zu verdanken haben." The letter appears here with his permission.


Sehr geehrte Frau Childs,

mit großer Bestürzung und Betroffenheit habe ich die Nachricht vom plötzlichen Tod Ihres Mannes, des Kollegen Professor Brevard S. Childs, erhalten. Als Direktor des Instituts für Katholische Theologie an der Universität Osnabrück spreche ich Ihnen, Ihren Kindern und der ganzen Familie mein aufrichtiges Beileid aus.

Mit Brevard S. Childs verliert die internationale Bibelwissenschaft eine mutige Persönlichkeit und einen herausragenden Gelehrten. Ihr Mann gehört zu den Pionieren einer Neuen Biblischen Theologie in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Seine Wiederentdeckung des Kanons als Schlüssel einer theologischen Bibelinterpretation hat zahlreichen Kolleginnen und Kollegen nicht nur einen Weg gewissen, sondern eine breite Bahn geöffnet, auf der wir in noch unerforschtes Neuland gelangen können. Ich wüsste keinen anderen Exegeten zu nennen, dessen Werk in den zurückliegenden Jahrzehnten in der Fachwissenschaft so tiefe Spuren hinterlassen hat.

Die neue Richtung des „canonical approach“ findet in der deutschsprachigen Exegese erst allmählich größere Beachtung; lange Zeit stieß der Ansatz ihres Mannes in der Fachwelt auf Skepsis, nicht selten auch auf Ablehnung. Die Bibelwissenschaft in Osnabrück ist dem Wirken Ihres Mannes schon seit längerem auf besondere Weise dankbar verbunden: Wir, d.h. mein Kollege Professor Christoph Dohmen (der jetzt in Regensburg lehrt) und ich, haben Anfang der 90er Jahre begonnen, das Werk Ihres Mannes intensiver zu studieren und mit seinem Blick die Bibel als Kanon zu reflektieren. Von Christoph Dohmen kam dann die Anregung, das großen Werk „Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments“ ins Deutsche zu übersetzen; die Übersetzung ist schließlich 1994 und 1996 unter dem schönen Titel „Die Theologie der einen Bibel“ in zwei Bänden beim Herder Verlag in Freiburg im Breisgau erschienen.

Das Werk Ihres Mannes hat für nicht wenige Exegetinnen und Exegeten der jüngeren Generation in Deutschland schon jetzt gewissermaßen „kanonischen“ Rang erreichen, in dem Sinne, dass es auch unabhängig von seinem Autor weiterwirkt und immer neue Kräfte freisetzt – zum fortwährenden Hören auf das Wort Gottes in den vielen Worten der einen Heiligen Schrift.

Wir wollen Gott danken, dass er uns und der Welt diesen Diener des Evangeliums geschenkt hat, und wünschen Ihnen und Ihrer Familie in all Ihrer Trauer und Ihrem Schmerz das feste Vertrauen auf den, der unseren Anfang und unser Ende in seinen guten Vaterhänden hält.

Es grüßt Sie

gez. Georg Steins

Tags: Deutsch, Childs

Ephraim Radner's comment was pretty well buried among the other responses to Saturday's news. (That list has been updated today.) I post it here because it's heartfelt and colorful. It also tracks with with Seitz's comment about BTONT's readership, from yesterday.

I am certain of Brevard Childs’ rest with the saints.  But he will be missed in a great way.  There have been and are Old Testament scholars of enormous gifts and contributions.  But Childs almost single-handedly—single-mindedly and single-heartedly—wrested serious Biblical studies away from the diseased grip of historical-critical irrelevance, with its fragmenting of the divine text, with respect to Scripture’s reality as the Word of God. The movement of renewal he inititiated is still in its infancy, and its future for the Christian faith and Church still uncharted. I pray we may be worthy of the legacy he has left. But I would not be surprised if, when histories are written of Scriptural scholarship, he is not viewed as among the greatest in the last 50 years.  That he fulfilled his vocation while being a man of humble faith, prayer, and warm affection for students and colleagues is a testimony to the marvelous grace of God.  May the Lord bless him in His Kingdom, and may our hearts be thankful.

Tags: Childs

Brevard Childs died on Saturday, 23 June 2007, in New Haven. He sustained injuries from a bad fall in a few days earlier from which he was unable to recover. Born 2 September 1923, he was 83 years old.

The following brief biography is excerpted from Gerald Sheppard, "Childs, Brevard (B. 1923)," in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (ed. Donald K. McKim; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 575-584. The correction in the first line is courtesy of C. R. Seitz.

Childs grew up in Southern Presbyterian churches [sic—He was baptised Episcopalian in Columbia SC. It was only when he moved north to Queens (a consequence of his father's ill health) that the family attended the Presbyterian Church. He and Ann attended an anglican church in Cambridge.] and studied at the University of Michigan (A.B. and M.A.). After serving in the army in Europe during World War II, he earned his B.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary before pursuing a doctorate at the University of Basel, Switzerland. At Basel Childs studied Old Testament with Walther Eichrodt, among others. In addition to his studies in Basel, he took advantage of Near Eastern scholarship at Heidelberg University.

In Basel Childs met his wife, Ann, who had attended some of Karl Barth's lectures with him. This was an exciting period for theological study. Besides the vigorous table talk among the visiting and local students, inexpensively published journals of essays and debates between theologians, biblical scholars and historians further stimulated the intellectual atmosphere.

At the University of Basel Childs completed his dissertation on the problem of myth in the opening chapters of Genesis just at the the time when Walter Baumgartner replaced Eichrodt as the senior Old Testament scholar. Creating consternation at the time, Baumgartner informally refused to accept the methodology of Childs's dissertation, so Childs had to change his plans in order to undertake a full revision, now informed by a new grasp of form-critical analysis. That obligation helps explain why Childs became one of the leading tradition historians in North America. The revised dissertation, Der Mythos als theologische Problem im Alten Testaments (1953), was never published, though Childs circulated major portions of it under the title A Study of Myth in Genesis 1–11 (1955) among his wide network of English-speaking scholarly friends.

In 1954 Childs began teaching Old Testament at Mission House Seminary and in 1958 accepted a teaching position at Yale Divinity School...

Childs was the Sterling Professor of Divinity at Yale University, where he remained an emeritus professor for the duration of his life.

I met Childs breifly at his house in Cambridge last spring. He and Ann spoke fondly of their student days in Europe in the early 1950s, and Childs remembered in story his many “unforgettable teachers,” including von Rad, Zimmerli, Cullmann, Bornkamm and Barth. (Compare the prefaces to Myth, Memory, Exodus, and especially to IOTS, NTCI, OTTCC and BTONT.) Due in part to this training, he was able to bridge the gap between German and Anglo-Saxon scholarship as few ever have. His passing is marked with sadness not least because he was one of the last Old Testament specialists to control the entire field, Old and New. His readers frequently note how very much more he read than the rest of us.

Childs' work is among the most misplaced of any biblical scholar since Hermann Gunkel, except that in Gunkel's case the methods associated with him (Gunkel did not exactly approve of "form criticism"), at first controversial, soon won almost unanimous support. Childs wrote at a time when a broad consensus had ceased to be a possibility.

Childs spent a lifetime confronting the dissolution he experienced. As he explains in the preface to his landmark Introduction to the Old Testament at Scripture (1979),

Twenty-five years ago, when I returned home from four years of graduate study in Europe, the area within the field of the OT which held the least attraction for me was Introduction. I supposed that most of the major problems had already been resolved by the giants of the past. Even allowing for the inevitable process of refinement and modification, could one really expect anything new in this area? I was content to leave the drudgery of writing an Introduction to someone else with more Sitzfleisch.

Two decades of teaching have brought many changes in my perspective. Having experienced the demise of the Biblical Theology movement in America, the dissolution of the broad European consensus in which I was trained, and a widespread confusion regarding theological reflection in general, I began to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the foundations of the biblical discipline. It was not a question of improving on a source analysis, of discovering some unrecognized new genre, or of bringing a redactional layer into shaper focus. Rather, the crucial issue turned on one’s whole concept of the study of the Bible itself. I am now convinced that the relation between the historical critical study of the Bible and its theological use as religious literature within a community of faith and practice needs to be completely rethought. Minor adjustments are not only inadequate, but also conceal the extent of the dry rot.

Major controversy followed the publication of IOTS in 1979. Few were won over to the new approach, and a handful (some very prominent) insisted that an allegedly incoherent method stood in need of reconstruction. On the other hand, at a Yale lecture in the early 1980s, Rolf Rendtorff asked Childs to translate for the audience his reaction to IOTS: Es war als fielen mir die Schuppen von den Augen.

This anecdote is related by Christopher Seitz, who prominently among Childs' students has defended the sanity of the canonical approach (for the Rendtorff story see Seitz's essay in Canon and Biblical Interpretation, p84). Much like Gunkel's reception at an earlier time, however, it proved easier to assume that the challenge to the reigning order signaled more chaos than creation. As Machiavelli once wrote, "the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions."

Seitz is close to the mark, I think, when he writes of a later book (1992): "Childs's Biblical Theology may prove to be a book in search of an audience, and for that reason it will be judged by the widest variety of readers as learned but unsatisfactory and by an even smaller audience as the most brilliant proposal for theological exegesis offered in recent memory, but one unlikely to gain the sort of foothold necessary to transform the church in its use of scripture."

It is still much to early to assess the significance of Childs' long and productive career. I know a few who place themselves in the second, smaller group—some who have passed through St Andrews in recent years. I myself came to the controversy late, and I maintain hope that many more in my generation will avail themselves of the immense learning and insight on offer in Childs' work. Like me, more may come to wonder about the contents of the book (on the NT again!) Childs never had the time to complete, or failing that, to recognize the complexity and enormity of the task he undertook as a Christian exegete.

The funeral service will be held this coming Saturday, with and family and close friends in attendance.

At this time our thoughts and prayers are with Ann, the family, their close friends. Brevard Childs is lamented for the acumen and memory that passes with him. His personal warmth, gentleness, and charity make the loss sadder still. May his memory be for a blessing.

Tags: Childs, PhD

Listed here are links to other online mentions of Childs' passing. Some include personal reminiscences. I have artificially set the date and time back, obviously, and for a time I will add links as they multiply.

In the Blogosphere

Stephen Cook :: Prayers Requested for Prof. Brevard S. Childs
Kevin Wilson :: In Memorium: Brevard Childs
Stephen Cook :: Sad Announcement :: Loss of True Giant :: More Details
Kendall Harmon :: Brevard Childs RIP :: including a comment by Ephraim Radner
Jim West :: Brevard Childs has Died
Airton José da Silva :: Sobre Brevard Childs, que faleceu ontem
Benjamin Myers :: Brevard Childs
Christopher Heard :: R.I.P. Brevard Childs
Charles Halson :: In Memoriam, Brevard Childs
Graham @ Leaving Münster :: Brevard Childs - Rest in Peace
Michael Westmoreland-White :: R.I.P. Brevard S. Childs (1923-2007)
Scott Clark :: Brevard S. Childs
Jim Davila :: Brevard Childs
Justin Taylor :: Brevard Childs (1923-2007)
Andy Goodliff :: Brevard Childs (1923-2007)
Claude Mariottini :: Brevard Childs
Peter Matthews :: Brevard Childs 1923-2007
Henry Neufeld :: In Memory
Jason :: Brevard Childs Died
Michael J. G. Pahls :: Brevard Springs Childs (1923-2007)
Richard Floyd :: Personal Reflections on the Death of Brevard Childs
*I have ceased to update blog posts. If you want to add another, please paste the URL in the comments.*

Official Notices and Obituaries

Frank Brown :: Yale Divinity School Announcement
Georg Steins :: Universität Osnabrück (posted on this site)
Christopher Seitz :: SBL Obituary, Brevard S. Childs 1923-2007 (excerpted here)

Tags: PhD, Childs