Convergences: Canon and Catholicity by Christopher R. Seitz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Convergences: Canon and Catholicity by Christopher R. Seitz R. David Nelson Convergences: Canon and Catholicity. By Christopher R. Seitz. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020. x + 189 pp. The genre of this book is difficult to pin down. In the afterword, Seitz admits the study falls short of pure intellectual history, due mainly to the investment he has made in the movement [End Page 238] of scholarship he surveys (171). Over seven swiftly paced main chapters, the book considers a few seemingly unconnected lines of scholarship, tracing their developments from their origins and revealing surprising parallels and intersections of methodology and insight. Seitz's contribution to the academic study of the Bible, which reorients the question of scripture's meaning to the final form of the two-Testament canon, lies at the point where the roads he follows meet. Readers get a compact guide to scholarship on canonical criticism during the past half-century, albeit in a form that mixes the analysis of ideas, intellectual biography, genealogy, and memoir. Perhaps, then, we might risk a mishmash and call the book academic travel literature. Convergences boasts no central thesis or groundbreaking proposal. Instead, Seitz invites readers to discover how the grand claims of the canonical approach map out on the terrain of the academic study of biblical literature. He writes evocatively of that landscape, describing canonical criticism by recalling his own journey and retracing the steps of fellow trailblazers. In the Anglosphere, students of biblical exegesis know the movement's focus on the Bible's final canonical form mainly through several seminal works by late Yale Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs, Seitz's Doktorvater. Generally, biblical scholarship undertaken within the intellectual culture of the modern research university is historical and critical in outlook. Scholars devote themselves to uncovering the origins and literary developments of biblical texts, in doing so deconstructing traditional religious and theological notions of the Bible's meaning. Childs took the discussion in a new direction, pioneering the canonical-critical approach and breaking new ground in biblical theology. Childs drew upon insights expressed during the first half of the twentieth century by Old Testament scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, Gerhard von Rad, and Martin Noth, even while pushing back against the emphasis on form criticism dominating that era of German biblical scholarship. For Childs and his followers, an exclusive concentration on origins, such as what one typically encounters in the biblical studies guild, misses a crucial segment of the story; namely, that in time communities of faith recognized these texts as sacred [End Page 239] writ, as a literary nexus of revelatory speech uniquely authoritative for belief, theology, worship, and ethical action. Canonical criticism is less interested in how communities of faith sorted out the Bible's contents than in the form the Bible received as a result of that process. As a student of Childs and himself the author of several influential studies in canonical criticism, Seitz is very much an insider to the discussion. Here he tells the tale, in a roundabout fashion, of how the canonical approach materialized. But his real interest is to explore "kindred contributions" (3) emerging in Europe at the same time Childs was at work in the States. The idea for the book originated after Seitz stumbled upon the scholarship of Jesuit theologian Paul Beauchamp. As he immersed himself in Beauchamp's oeuvre, especially the two volumes of L'un et l'autre Testament (one and the other Testament), Seitz discovered astonishing connections between the Jesuit's approach to the unity of the Bible and Childs's attentiveness to canonical form. His engagement with Beauchamp led Seitz to reconsider other texts from twentieth-century European scholarship, including Protestant philosopher Paul Ricoeur's exegesis of Genesis 1 and 2, and Catholic contributions to hermeneutics and biblical theology from the likes of Jean Daniélou and Henri de Lubac. In the conclusion we find a delightful exchange with Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth, showing how canonical exegesis directly informs his reading of the gospels. This book is the yield, then, of an intensive period of discovery and reflection on the part of the author, and likewise an invitation to the reader...