more important than their mutual tensions and disagreements in detail.”185 It is the “more important” theological message arising from the canon as a whole that Brevard Childs’ hermeneutical paradigm seeks to rescue back for the communities of faith, both in the academy and the church.
Brevard Childs’ hermeneutical paradigm is, however, not a naïve attempt to harmonize apparently disparate or inconsistent texts of the Bible, as some of his detractors have argued.186 Rather, akin to Martin Luther’s hermeneutica sacra, it is a hermeneutical presupposition with which the reader approaches the texts of the Bible as the divinely inspired Word of God and the authoritative rule of faith.187 For Childs, the unifying factor in the canon is that it is sacred Scripture. Childs, much like Martin Luther, opposes the historical-critical or any other scientific critical methods of textual interpretation. His concern is that the method’s atomizing analysis of the texts of the Bible should not be an end in itself; a synthesizing attempt is necessary to discern the coherent message from the canon of Scripture. Dale Brueggemann aptly remarks that Childs’ confessional approach to biblical criticism is not a capitulation to literalistic biblicism; “literalists and fundamentalists can only take false comfort in what is happening in this regard; they should not be deceived into thinking that critical scholarship has come to its senses in repentance of its errant ways.”188 Brevard Childs’ embrace of scientific methods of textual interpretation is premised on the understanding that “interest in the sources from which the biblical books were composed, or the forms they use, or the skills with which they were assembled by redactors, is a natural consequence of attending to the givenness of the text, and of realizing that if the Bible does mediate knowledge of God, it does it through these means and not otherwise.”189
It is not just from the historical-critical scholarship’s “errant ways” that Childs’ hermeneutica sacra seeks to recover the Bible for the community of faith. It is also from the secular literary critics who read the Bible as a literary classic devoid of any divine authority. Thus, as John Barton remarks, Brevard Childs’ “canonical approach is a proposal about how Christians should read the Bible within the context of faith.”190 Nonetheless, Barton rightly cautions that “whereas biblical critics should be sensitive to the church’s call to be more theological, they should also reckon that the church is not best served by an academy that simply capitulates to the uncritical whims of the communities of faith.”191 Consistent with this caution, Brevard Childs adopts a centrist stance which, as Kathleen M. O’Connor notes, “seeks to preserve biblical studies from both the dogmatism of biblicizing conservatives and much more from the historicism of wide-eyed children of the Enlightenment.”192 Childs’ fiercest critic, James Barr, who often terms Childs’ theologies as “canonical fundamentalism” or “theological fundamentalism,” nonetheless, acknowledges that “Childs touches on aspects which for many are religiously very important, and these are likely to produce other expressions in the future.”193
The Reformation Legacy in Pneumatic Hermeneutics
Martin Luther (1483–1546), the monk of Wittenberg, has been credited with many theological, ecclesiological, and even political achievements. However, as Derek Wilson aptly cautions, “we have to resist the temptation to recreate him in our own image.”194 Nonetheless, Martin Luther is rightly renowned for fanning the sixteenth-century revolt against the papal tyranny of the time and an awakening of the Church from spiritual slumber. The particular thesis of this paper is that a critical aspect of Martin Luther’s legacy, often overlooked in Reformation studies, is his influence on biblical hermeneutics. Luther’s sixteenth-century biblical hermeneutics became the bedrock of subsequent Protestant theological-hermeneutical development. Luther’s Reformation hermeneutic was a hermeneutica sacra; it was a hermeneutical paradigm shift which not only rescued biblical interpretation from the magisterium of the church of the day but also utilized scientific tools of textual analysis to interpret the Bible as sacred Scriptures. Luther’s Christological-hermeneutical focus, and his embrace of the illumining work of the Holy Spirit in biblical interpretation, were hermeneutical moves that sought to combine biblical interpretation with theological reflection. Thus, his hermeneutical method integrated biblical exegesis with Christological-pneumatic-theological reflection.
Although Luther’s Reformation paradigm was foundational for Protestant hermeneutical development from the sixteenth century onward, this paradigm was derailed in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment in which biblical hermeneutics were not only secularized but also divorced from theological reflection. Recent developments in canonical criticism not only hark back to Luther’s Reformation hermeneutics but also seek to render the biblical message meaningful for the contemporary communities of faith, for the meaning of Scripture extends hodie ueque ad nos (even to us today). Luther’s integrative hermeneutica sacra is particularly instructive for the contemporary Church, which, on the one hand, studies the Bible with cold objectivity as though the Bible has no divine relevance for the Church today; while on the other hand, the Pentecostal-Charismatic wing of the Church, whose pneumatic hermeneutic apparently underrates the value of scientific tools of textual exegesis and tendentiously privileges pneumatology over Christology in its theological reflection, has a lot to learn from Luther’s hermeneutica sacra.
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