The Church's Guide for Reading Paul: The Canonical Shaping of the Pauline Corpus

by Brevard S. Childs

Brevard Childs here turns his sharp scholarly eye to the works of the apostle Paul and makes an unusual the New Testament was canonically shaped, its formation a hermeneutical exercise in which its anonymous apostles and postapostolic editors collected, preserved, and theologically shaped the material in order for the evangelical traditions to serve successive generations of Christians.

Childs contends that within the New Testament the Pauline corpus stands as a unit bookended by Romans and the Pastoral Epistles. He assigns an introductory role to Romans, examining how it puts the contingencies of Paul's earlier letters into context without sacrificing their particularity. At the other end, the Pastoral Epistles serve as a concluding valorization of Paul as the church's doctrinal model. By considering Paul's works as a whole, Childs offers a way to gain a fuller understanding of the individual letters.

Genres: Biblical Studies

288 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Brevard Springs Childs was Professor of Old Testament at Yale University from 1958 until 1999 (and Sterling Professor after 1992), and one of the most influential biblical scholars of the 20th century. Childs is particularly noted for pioneering canonical criticism, a way of interpreting the Bible that focuses on the text of the biblical canon itself as a finished product. In fact, Childs disliked the term, believing his work to represent an entirely new departure, replacing the entire historical-critical method. Childs set out his canonical approach in his Biblical Theology in Crisis (1970) and applied it in Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979). This latter book has been described as "one of the most discussed books of the 1980s".

Reviews

[Ted]

I decided not to rate the book, as I ended up skimming through most of it as I just no longer have the interest in much of what Childs is writing about. I bought the book some years ago and never got around to reading it. But in my retirement, his issues are just no longer that interesting to me. He is reviewing a lot of the scholarly literature dealing with Paul's epistles. His frame of reference is Protestant scholarship. Childs is trying to add to that frame of reference the idea of 'canon' and how one can't simply read biblical texts, one must take into account how each biblical book made it into the canon and what purpose or role it serves as part of the canon in relationship to and interpretation of all the other books of the bible, or in this case specifically the New Testament. Many of the issues raised were created by the Protestant Reformation's rejection of the Church and Tradition and he is trying to deal with them within that framework. It seems to me some of these issues would be dealt with differently if one attempted to deal with them within the history and Tradition of the Church rather than assuming that the Protestant Reformation has the correct way of dealing with Scripture.

[Isaac Soon]

I really had high hopes for this book. The first two chapters are very interesting and Childs has some really insightful things to add to thinking about the Pauline corpus, authenticity, and how to potentially (! key term) understand Paul theologically. But, when it gets down to the actual examination of key Pauline themes and text I found that he did not state anything new. Most of it was a restatement of previous research (and some of it outdated at that). Sadley, this canonical reading that he set up did not really yield much exegetical fruit in my opinion.

[Caleb Rolling]

In typical Childs fashion, he offers a programmatic guide for reading Paul, a brief survey of alternative approaches (and with much attention toward European scholarship), and a series of exegetical proofs to support his canonical proposal. Lots to think about, for sure, and while I happily accept his canonical approach at large, I am not quite sold on all the particulars of his exegetical proofs.

[Keith Skrdlant]

This was such a headache to comprehend that I feel guilty even adding it to my "read" list. I had to read some academic reviews just to make sure I grasped the basic ideas. Consensus there is that the thesis is poorly developed. I understood everything Childs was attempting to do as he did it, but his argumentative structure is so strangely organized that it does his short-in-evidence position no favors.