Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context by Brevard S. Childs

Abstract

714 BOOK REVIEWS Christ is both beatific and damnific: as you know him, so you have him. The point of such an observation may be that the theological synthesis must be a human one, and that it must not presume to include the divine judgment: it must be historical if it is to be aesthetic. The aesthetic integration of humanity is in Christ, and it is not and cannot be simply eschatological as the theologians so far examined tend to suppose. As de Lubac, in congruence with the entir,e patristic tradition, points out, the one theological synthesis is that which joins the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Kingdom of God under the three senses of Scripture, as type, as antetype, as fulfillment. These must be held in their actual unity, for it is the unity of Scripture, of history, the unity of man, whose solidarity in the first Adam is understandable only in terms of solidarity with the second Adam, Christ the King. This synthesis is that of a sacramental humanity, a sacramental history, whose unity is at once covenantal, Christocentric, historical, and Eucharistic: that of the interrelated sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum of the Augustinian analysis . This is the unity of the Christus totus, whose splendor is the sole subject of theological aesthetics. Taken seriously, it bars, as infected with a cosmological prius, much of the usual statement of the problem, out of which the classic errors of apokatastasis and predestination have emerged. The cosmological reversion which tempts all Christian theology consists in the rationalizing attempt to transcend the obscurity of our fallen historicity, and the theologians examined in this volume show the mistake to be as possible to a theological aesthetics as to a theological metaphysics. Von Balthasar has done more than any other contemporary Catholic theologian with the possible exception of de Lubac to lead theology beyond cosmology, and in this as in many other things we are all in his debt. (A small number of misprints mar this edition, notably on pp. 355 and 417.) Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context. By BREVARD S. CHILDS. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Pp. 255, incl. Index. Brevard Childs has already written two major books detailing a canonical criticism approach to reading the Bible: .An Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture and .An Introduction to the New Testament as Scripture. These are landmark studies of the last decade which have BOOK REVIEWS 715 effectively challenged the undisputed reign of the tradition-history approach which emphasized the tracing of the different strands of tradition in all their stages of development, in order to understand how Israel or the early Christian Church came to its final biblical expression of faith. Canon criticism insists that biblical theology focus on the received text of the Scriptures, and not merely on the events and development behind the texts. The concrete shapes and order of all the books influence the further reading of any individual book; and the tradition of how the books have been and are to he read gives essential clues to why they assumed the shape and order in which we find them in the canon. To neglect this aspect is to risk reducing biblical theology to a history of religion in the Old Testament and New Testament. In this present volume, Childs continues his work by sketching a program for doing Old Testament theology according to a canonical approach . It is not really a full theology, but contents itself with identifying problems and discussing canonical method while providing a loose framework of major themes and some sample texts to illustrate the proper use of that method. The author is also at pains not to reject the fruitful results of the historical-critical method. Indeed he defines Old Testament theology as precisely the theological reflection on a received body of ;;cripture whose formation was the result of a lengthy history of development (p. 6). He firmly maintains that Old Testament theology is a Christian discipline that deals with the problem of interpreting and appropriating the two testaments in relation to faith in Jesus Christ. But the task of...