Divine self-consistency has not often been named as the leading theological motif of Brevard Childs and his school of ‘canonical hermeneutics’. And yet it is. Over against the minute differentiations of biblical criticism, and in spanning the fundamental two-ness of the Christian Bible, the canonical approach insists on the singleness and sameness of God. Christopher R. Seitz, student and heir apparent of Childs, aims in his most recent, capstone publication to illuminate the divine self-consistency by engaging several of the signature features of the canonical approach. Or, as he says programmatically, ‘to take seriously the ontology of the Old Testament – its unique presentation of monotheism – as this opens onto theological formulation’ (p. 4).
Elder Testament is at once an introduction to the canonical approach, a miniature Old Testament survey, a senior scholar's career retrospective and a state-of-the-art critical proposal. Unfortunately, these genres fit uneasily together. The first two, introduction and survey, tend towards brevity and ease of access, as reflected in the use of short chapters in which care is taken to introduce key terms. But as a career retrospective it summarises and footnotes Seitz's own prior work (which has seldom been introductory-level); and as a state-of-the-art, it dialogues with recent entries in biblical and theological scholarship, commending some and shadowboxing with others. In consequence, the book's central claims about the Old Testament's ‘ontology’ and its ‘presentation of monotheism’ play distinctive roles across the book, according to whichever genre presses to the fore.
Elder Testament divides into three sections. The first, titled ‘Orientation’, introduces the canonical approach and updates Seitz's own vision of it. The first chapter proposes ‘Elder Testament’ as a new nomenclature for Israel's scriptures (with ‘elder’ connoting venerability and time-tested sagacity as well as antiquity) and thus revises Seitz's own previous advocacy for the traditional terminology of ‘Old Testament’. Following chapters outline the canonical approach, not so much as a material claim about the development or closure of this literature but as a theological hermeneutic: a credendum about the ‘theological referential[ity]’ of these writings (p. 37; cf. p. 40) and about the self-consistency of the divine life to which they witness (p. 46). Seitz also voices a new and cautious criticism of Childs in this connection: Childs often identifies the ‘subject matter’ or res of the Old Testament as Jesus Christ. But Seitz speaks of the triune God as the subject of the Old Testament, and of the logos which is ‘the active means by which God makes himself known within Israel’ (p. 45).
The running conversation with Childs and back-citations to Seitz's earlier work in the ‘Orientation’ mean that its register is fairly technical. In terms of the book's main claims, the section dwells more on theological ontology than on the Old Testament's ‘unique [literary] presentation’. As a state-of-the-art, it would hence have benefited from greater precision in the way it coordinates these two domains – and perhaps from widening its circle of interlocutors to include more systematic theologians who address theological reference and the Trinity. As it stands, the section suffers from a certain fuzziness. When it does name a theologian, the exposition would benefit from more development. For example, Karl Barth's essay on the ‘strange new world within the Bible’ does not obviously dovetail with Erich Auerbach's observations about the odd ‘stop-and-start’ literary quality of the Old Testament (pp. 72, 83), since Barth there intends to relativise and not to celebrate the Bible's literary achievement.
The book's second section, ‘Entering the Elder Testament’, contains a miniature Old Testament survey; as such, its contribution to the book's main claim is more literary than ‘ontological’. Seitz's overview of the Pentateuch, Prophets and Writings is the most streamlined and readable part of the book, even as his interesting observations on current research may present a challenge to those unfamiliar with the field. The section opens and closes with a sustained case study of the Old Testament's divine names. Instead of taking the well-known Pentateuchal alternations between YHWH and Elohim as indices to various, sedimented source materials, Seitz argues that these names point to two dimensions of the one divine life. YHWH is God's personal name made known to Israel in time, whereas Elohim is a ‘generic name’ (p. 105; cf. p. 117) that bespeaks God's universality across place and time. In a word, these names adumbrate God's life in its immanence and economy. Here, too, however, clarity is wanting. What is a ‘generic name’? Does Seitz know that Elohim is ‘used throughout the world’ and has equivalents in other Semitic languages (p. 105) from the testimony of the Old Testament itself, and if so, where? Also, is Elohim always ‘generic’ in the Old Testament? Albert de Pury has recently argued that it functions at times as a proper name.
The third section of the book, ‘Theological Readings in the Elder Testament’, takes up several literary phenomena in the Old Testament that have exerted a historic influence on the church's deliberations about the Trinity: ‘colloquies [or conversations among divine persons] in the Psalms, divine agency in creation (Genesis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes)’, speech about the Son in Hebrews and Old Testament theophanies (p. 261). Seitz seeks to demonstrate that these historically ‘elder’ testimonies still carry an ‘extensional sense’: because of God's self-consistency, they speak in their own integrity to God's triune self. Here the book comes closest to thinking biblical discourse and theology ontology together, including and especially in view of christology, yet the overall effect remains impressionistic.
Seitz has written a stimulating and substantial work that advances the project of interpreting scripture canonically. In spite of this service, Elder Testament also shows some critical unclarities: theologically, in relating considerations of literary association with theological reference; and editorially, in its shape and its pitch. Besides answering to multiple, noncontiguous purposes, the prose of Elder Testament is cumbersome, and typographical errors litter its pages.
