In The New Testament as Canon, Brevard Childs provides a helpful analogy of historical criticism and its relationship to a canonical approach and interpreting the canonical Scriptures.
Historical criticism is here to stay. Much of the conservative opposition is badly misplaced and even docetic in nature. Nevertheless, I remain largely unsatisfied with this defence and feel that the basic issues of the critical method in interpreting the Bible have been inadequately treated. Perhaps an analogy to the problem can be derived from Melancthon’s example. On the one hand, he sought persuade his students of the indispensability of studying Aristotle’s rhetoric. One could not learn to understand the use of language, concepts and logical categories of theological discourse without the masterful guidance of the great philosopher. On the other hand, he could also flatly state that to build one’s theology on Aristotle was to effect a disaster beyond description. For him, as for Luther, Aristotle and the gospel were alien to each other and irreconcilable opponents.
To apply the analogy, I would agree that historical criticism is an indispensable teacher. From it the interpreter learns a multitude of things about the text, its meaning, history, and audience. Exegesis performed without its aid seems naive, often crude, and flat in its dimensions. Yet also in this case, this information stands in a dialectical relation to the biblical witness which has a unique story to tell about God and his redemption which enters the world of time and space, but shatters its laws and more through endless surprises. It is the claim of the critical method for exclusively first priority which is the issue at stake. To allow the theology of the church to add a homiletical topping after the basic critical work has been done is small comfort. The theological battle has been surrendered at the outset. When Krentz confidently asserts: “Historical criticism provides a way for the Scriptures to exercise their proper function for the church” (65), he has not grasped, in my judgment, the full dimensions of the claims which the critical method is demanding of the church.
Childs, Brevard S. The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (p. 45).
The reason for insisting on the final form of scripture lies in the peculiar relationship between text and people of God which is constitutive of the canon. The shape of the biblical text reflects a history of encounter between God and Israel. The canon serves to describe this peculiar relationship and to define the scope of this history by establishing a beginning and end to the process. It assigns a special quality to this particular segment of human history which became normative for all successive generations of this community of faith. The significance of this final form of the biblical text is that it alone bears witness to the full history of revelation. Within the OT neither the process of the formation of the literature nor the history of its canonization is assigned an independent integrity. This dimension has often been lost or purposefully blurred and is therefore dependent on scholarly reconstruction…Scripture bears witness to God’s activity in history on Israel’s behalf, but history per se is not a medium of revelation which is commensurated within a canon. It is only in the final form of the biblical text in which the normative history has reached an end that the full effect of this revelatory history can be perceived.
