God, His Servant and the Nations in Isaiah 42:1–9. By FREDERIK POULSEN.

Abstract

The subtitle of Poulsen’s dissertation explains its fundamental purpose: Biblical Theological Reflections after Brevard S. Childs and Hans Hübner. It reviews ways in which the proposal to impose a method of ‘canon criticism’ to establish a biblical theology, first put forward by Brevard Childs in 1970, has subsequently been explored by a variety of scholars both critically and positively. It falls firmly into two parts, the first examining whether the idea of canon criticism is a viable one and the second examining the interpretation of Isa. 42:1–9 as a key passage for the interpretation of the relationship between the two biblical Testaments. For the first part Hans Hübner is selected as the primary dialogue partner by using his three-volume biblical theology (Biblische Theologie des Neuen Testaments, 3 vols., 1990–5) as the primary basis of criticism. A key feature is that, whereas Childs follows the Reformed Protestant tradition of a Bible comprised of a Hebrew Old and a Greek New Testament, Hübner argues that the earliest Christian Bible was fundamentally a Greek compilation. In such a context the idea of a canon was already based on a Hellenized Greek-language literary tradition. In consequence Childs’s idea of ‘canon’ imposes, rather than presupposes, a return to a Hebraic hermeneutical tradition which was not that of the earliest Christian literature. Against this it appears questionable how far Hübner’s biblical theology authentically reaches back behind that of the New Testament since, in it, the Hebraic element is moulded by the linguistic, textual, and philosophical ideas of the later New Testament authors. Admittedly a weak point of Childs’s original proposal is that, by presuming canon to exist for all Christians in the conventional received form of the sixteenth-century Protestant form, already a long prehistory of debate regarding its function in Christian life and in conjunction with possible Jewish alternatives is presupposed. On the other hand, as firmly endorsed by Hübner’s approach, a purely New Testament theology can scarcely be held to exist independently in view of the extent of inner-biblical exegesis that its writings presuppose. Problems come to the surface when, in a post-Reformation literary scene, inner-biblical links and connections not accessible to the earliest Christian writers are employed, as becomes evident from the plethora of concordances and dictionaries which flourish in contemporary scholarship. This is explored in the second part of Poulsen’s dissertation, covering the hope of a message of salvation extending to embrace all nations. The background to discussion about the possibility and method of biblical theology which formed the starting-point for Childs’s proposal about canon criticism is not carried further, and has, in any case, been well covered in a wide range of bibliographical essays dealing with the most important issues. From the outset Childs’s starting-point was dissatisfaction with the way in which modern, historically focused, biblical studies have diverged a long way from the mainstream of Protestant Christian theological tradition. Preoccupation with philology and dates of authorship of documents which, by their very nature, are imprecise except in very broad periods, had the effect of secularizing a branch of scholarship which had a genuine religious purpose. Concern to recover this underlying religious purpose easily became diverted in attempts to restore outmoded forms of allegorizing or the building up of semantic word links which aroused further objections.