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3000 Characters s.v. "Childs, B. S."
Childs was born 2 September 1923 in Columbia, SC. His family soon moved to NY, where he was drafted into the US Army in 1942 after a year at Queens College. While being demobilized in 1945 he completed enough correspondence courses to graduate from the University of Michigan with an MA in 1947. In 1950 he earned a BDiv from Princeton Seminary. He then spent four pivotal years back in Europe, studying OT under Eichrodt and Baumgartner at Basel (ThD, 1955), with a term at Heidelberg. Back in America he taught OT for four years at Mission House Seminary until his appointment at Yale Divinity School in 1958, where he retired in 1999. He received honorary degrees from the Universities of Aberdeen (1981) and Glasgow (1992) and was Stirling Professor of Divinity at Yale from 1992. He wrote numerous articles and over a dozen books. He died 23 June 2007, aged 83.
Childs’ early work pursued the form-critical method in which he was trained. In 1970 he proposed an overhaul of the Biblical Theology Movement at a time when its break-up had become evident. Both interests merged in a landmark OT Introduction (1979). Its wide-ranging argument sought to show the canonical shaping by which the Bible became sacred scripture for Jews and Christians. It described the emergence of “final form” in historical terms, but its theological stance made the approach unlike other methods and criticisms. Childs’ magnum opus is his Biblical Theology (1992) and represents the sum of his remaking of that discipline, which for him (as for G. von Rad) centers on the person of Christ.
Two major commentaries highlight Childs’ interest in the history of interpretation. Exodus (1974) was remarkable for its incorporation of Jewish and Christian reception as part of a Christian theological task. Isaiah (2001), which sustained a warrant for limited comparison to redaction criticism, did not follow the precedent. Instead, Isaiah’s history of reception got separate treatment (2004) as part of a search for “family resemblance” in Christian hearing of Isaiah’s witness. The search relates to a late-flowering affirmation of Christian figural reading.
Bibliography. Primary: B. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia 1970). Id., The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary (Louisville 1974). Id., Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia 1979). Id., Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context (Philadelphia 1985). Id., Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis 1992). Id., Isaiah: A Commentary (Louisville 2001). Id., The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids 2004).
Secondary: D. Driver, Brevard Childs, Biblical Theologian: For the Church’s One Bible (Tübingen 2010). [with complete bibliography] R. Harrisville and W. Sundberg, “Brevard Childs: Biblical Criticism under the Discipline of Canon,” in The Bible in Modern Culture (Grand Rapids 2002) 304–328. K. Richards and C. Seitz, eds., Brevard Childs in memoriam (forthcoming).
— Daniel R. Driver and Nathan MacDonald