# Canonical Theology?



## Herald (Jun 2, 2006)

Has anyone ever heard of canonical theology?


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## Herald (Jun 2, 2006)

My wife's cousin is a prof at Philadelphia Biblical University. I told him about my departure from dispensationalism and my study of CT. He mentioned a third theological system: canonical theology. I never heard of it. I'm interested if anyone has ever heard of it?


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## gregbed (Jun 2, 2006)

> _Originally posted by BaptistInCrisis_
> My wife's cousin is a prof at Philadelphia Biblical University. I told him about my departure from dispensationalism and my study of CT. He mentioned a third theological system: canonical theology. I never heard of it. I'm interested if anyone has ever heard of it?


The only other time I heard that term is when a friend of mine was attending PCB, oops PBU. I will ask him for some details. All I remember is him saying it seemed to involve using nothing but the Scripture to understand the Scripture. Maybe its some kind of dispensational hijacking of Biblical Theology. I'll call my friend tomorrow if you don't hear something sooner.


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## Herald (Jun 2, 2006)

> _Originally posted by gregbed_
> 
> 
> > _Originally posted by BaptistInCrisis_
> ...



Mmmm....I wonder if he heard it from my wife's cousin?


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## Pilgrim (Jun 3, 2006)

Near as I can tell from a Google search, this may refer to something put forward by Brevard Childs. Here's an appraisal by Carl F.H. Henry: 
http://beginningwithmoses.org/articles/canonicalhenry.htm


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## Puritan Sailor (Jun 3, 2006)

If I remember right, the aim of Canonical theology is simply the study of the theology of the present Canon as a complete piece of historical literature. There may be some overlap with Evangelicals in their findings but as I understand it, it is probably dominated by liberals.


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## srhoades (Jun 3, 2006)

> _Originally posted by puritansailor_
> If I remember right, the aim of Canonical theology is simply the study of the theology of the present Canon as a complete piece of historical literature. There may be some overlap with Evangelicals in their findings but as I understand it, it is probably dominated by liberals.



If that is true then it definitely sounds like something that sprung from the modern liberal theological era. Only now, like every other heresy, it's just been relabeled.


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## Puritan Sailor (Jun 3, 2006)

I wouldn't exactly call it heresy yet. If I understand it right, they just focus their studies on the theology of the Bible as presented in the Canon. Now, the presuppositions that go into their arguments and conclusions may end up heretical, but the idea itself can actually be helpful in how we understand theology. Some evangelicals are paying more attention to the Canon and how it forms our theology, especially in Old Testament studies. But it's still an rather new development so I would wait to render such a harsh judgment on it just yet.


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## srhoades (Jun 3, 2006)

> _Originally posted by puritansailor_
> I wouldn't exactly call it heresy yet. If I understand it right, they just focus their studies on the theology of the Bible as presented in the Canon. Now, the presuppositions that go into their arguments and conclusions may end up heretical, but the idea itself can actually be helpful in how we understand theology. Some evangelicals are paying more attention to the Canon and how it forms our theology, especially in Old Testament studies. But it's still an rather new development so I would wait to render such a harsh judgment on it just yet.



OK, perhaps I was a bit hasty. I was always under the impression that whenever the Bible is reffered to as "historical literature" it was a polite way to affirm the historicity of the Bible while denying the transcendant and supernatural.


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## Herald (Jun 3, 2006)

I think we are onto something in our attempt to uncover what canonical theology is. As I understand his definition, John Oliff (assistant professor at P.B.U.) does consider canonical theology to be the bible as "one book" or "one piece of literature" with all parts forming the whole. This idea came forth in our discussions on the minor prophets. He calls them "the twelve" and believes them to be one book (the twelve), not twelve individual books. On the surface I can see his point. All 66 books of the bible are intricately woven together, but they do maintain individual distinctives and separate themes. I wonder if those are lost when considering them part of a larger scheme?


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## Herald (Jun 3, 2006)

> _Originally posted by Pilgrim_
> Near as I can tell from a Google search, this may refer to something put forward by Brevard Childs. Here's an appraisal by Carl F.H. Henry:
> http://beginningwithmoses.org/articles/canonicalhenry.htm



Chris, thanks. I happened upon the same article when I googled canonical theology. I found the pickings rather slim on the internet.

[Edited on 6-3-2006 by BaptistInCrisis]


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## gregbed (Jun 3, 2006)

> _Originally posted by BaptistInCrisis_
> 
> Mmmm....I wonder if he heard it from my wife's cousin?



Would your wife's cousin be Gary Schnitzer(sp?)?

It looks like others here have given you some good info. I will have to read the Henry article. I seen Child's name and he comes up a lot in the footnotes of the Biblical Theologians (Theologists?). I have found Biblical Theology to be very useful in understanding the Bible. The authors I have read - Goldsworthy, Hafemann. A good place to start is perhaps "The Drama of Scripture" by Craig Bartholomew & Michael Goheen. Then move onto something by Goldsworthy. I like the Goldsworthy Trilogy (3 books in one paperback binding) and "According to Plan".


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## Contra_Mundum (Jun 3, 2006)

I have a friend (and know of others) who went to PCB, whatever its name now. He took a Bible degree, but was always in tension with profs he thought took a liberal slant on inspiration.

I think his concerns from 15-20 years ago are seeing new flowerets. Canonical theology (and unless someone offers a new insight, I will agree with the Childs connection) is unbelieving scholarship's direction out of the abyss of the liberal trajectory. The other fork-in-the-road is the tar-pits of deconstructionism and mutivalent meaninglessness. I call canonical theory the "as if" approach. As in, "Lets treat the Bible _as if_ it were what the fuddy-duddies claim (even though we know it isn't--snicker-snicker) because if we don't start pasting this thing back together now, we are going to shred our way out of a job."

{the Twelve, by the way, is the Hebrew designation for the minor prophets, i.e. the "final canonical form"}

Canonical theology, as an interpretive paradigm, would logically be something like the following:
Rather than a piecework of theologies from different times and places (as liberalism suggested), the religious communties that produced the Scriptures were contiguous and continuous. Therefore, they kept (and modifed, however majorly or minorly) a body of literature that made coherent sense as they kept on adding to it over time. At first, they were more open to additions, but as time went on, they would naturally have found less and less that could be "fully consistent" with the history of interpretation. Eventually this would lead to a moment of "canon closure", after which the canon was fixed. No more literature could be added and so the development of the religion from that point had to take place in the realms of "theology".

Canonical theology would, therefore, seek to understand the development of that body of religious literature, with the prior understanding that what is present is all there is to work with. Everything else is largely speculative (but of course we can't give up the whole history-of-religion approach, or the various forms of disecting criticism that gave birth to our approach). Nevertheless, understanding the Bible _as we have it_ should yield some new insights into the Scriptures as *apparently* coherent. We should be able to figure out "the story of the Bible" as its final, fixed canonical form presents it, because what made it until the end was such as could be made to fit, somehow.

There is a pseudo-submissive aspect to this approach to the text of Scripture. One good thing that can be noted is that this is liberalism's reluctant concession to the remarkable unity of the Bible's message; this is them being forced to acknowledge that one generation of biblical owners/interpreters actually flowed smoothly into the next for multiple generations, with remarkably few (!) radical disjuncts. At least in this sense: what is left is what made it over time. This is the survival of the fittest.

The major defect of this school (beside a continued rejection of the idea that "a Word from God" would always be consistent, would always be intelligible if it were intentional, would always be precious and preserved intact by people devoted to it) is that it rejects none of its liberal precursor's premises. In fact--despite the instability of JEPD theory, despite the a-historical, atomistic readings and conclusions of various (often contradictory) interpreters of the textual data, despite the failures of all the liberal schools to agree on a single developmental theory--liberalism's conclusions are taken together as being the unquestioned "assured results" of the post-mortem on "old conservativism," its naive literalism and historicism.

Canonical theology is quite possibly, the final path (the funeral procession?) for neo-orthodoxy. Karl Barth, as Fred Greco has reminded us here on the PB, was profoundly anti-Covenant-theology. But it was his crossing back over the stream of Reformed orthodoxy that gave him a way out of liberalism's man-centered dead-end. It was a lurch back toward transcendence. That answer, however, led only to a relativistic, indefinable, "noumenal" leap. Relativisitc incoherence, radical subjectivism, all this implies that there is no *ultimate message* from God to man. The only meaning is that there is no meaning, for God's intelligibility demands objectivity--unless there is none to be had.

So canonical theology is a quest for final, objective meaning in the text.


> Let's treat the Bible _as if_ it were meaningful, at least to those who put it together. And let's discover that meaning, if we can. And we shall delight ourselves in it, as we trudge on down into our graves.
> 
> Let's congratulate ourselves on discovering the meaning of this book, that we don't believe, but which gave meaning to the creators of it, and to their dullard descendants (not as clever as we were, to figure out its absurdities). Let us march steadily down this path (seems rather sturdy, yes?) into the gloom, the light fading as we expire.
> 
> ...


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## Herald (Jun 3, 2006)

Bruce,

I am a fish out of water on this whole issue (although I quickly scrambling to the nearest pond!). The reason this concerns me is because I have left dispensationalism and I am studying covenant theology. My wife's cousin suggested two scholars in the canonical theology arena. The first you mentioned, Bevard Childs. The second is Hans Frei. 

I am going to keep my ear to the tracks on this issue. I believe there is truth in the balance.

[Edited on 6-3-2006 by BaptistInCrisis]


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## Puritan Sailor (Jun 3, 2006)

But Canonical theology itself I think can be used readily by evangelicals too. It was God after all who providentially assembled the Canon. There is a particular theological unity in the Hebrew Canon which the English misses. Read Chronicles (the last book positionally in the Hebrew Canon) and then read Matthew. There's a harmony there theologically that is hugely important. Matthew picked up where Chronicles leaves off. Just because a bunch of liberals advocate a particular approach doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong. We have learned much about interpreting Scripture in our battles with the liberals with form and redaction criticism. granted they take a grain of truth and fill it full of unbiblical presuppositions, but that grain of truth in a biblical evangelical worldview can actually strengthen our case against liberalism. But again, let's see where this all goes. It's still a new development.


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