The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture

by Brevard S. Childs

unless one could gain a new understanding of allegory, the enterprise of recovering a usable exegetical Christian tradition was doomed from the outset. To put it bluntly: for better or worse, allegory is constitutive of patristic interpretation.

This volume does not purport to be just another history of interpretation. Within recent years there have been numerous such learned tomes (e.g., Reventlow, Saebe). Generally, these efforts to be comprehensive in scope have often pushed hermeneutical reflections into the background. I hope in my study that the hermeneutical issues will be understood as primary.

Indeed, the major contributions of Nicholas of Lyra in the fourteenth century was in introducing Jewish exegetical traditions to a largely ignorant Christian audience.

Is there a "family resemblance" that emerges from this analysis of many generations of Christian biblical study? Are there any parameters that identify exegesis as Christian? How do successive generations of expositors exert critical judgment in rejecting, correcting, and enriching exegetical moves made by their predecessors in order to address different audiences and changing historical conditions?

Alexander had studied under Hengstenberg in Berlin and aligned himself thoroughly with his perspective. His commentary represents the most complete and scholarly commentary on Isaiah in the English-speaking world during the mid-nineteenth century.

Alexander has no place for allegory, and very little for even typology in his exegesis. He is highly critical of Grotius in his appeal to a double sense in Isa. 9:6. Thus seldom do the Church Fathers appear as dialogue partners, and the range of issues that concern him does not overlap with many of the major questions raised by the church's earliest traditions. In a real sense, his commentary is a reaction to the Enlightenment.

In sum, it would be difficult to characterize Alexander's interpretation of Isaiah as a struggle to understand it as Christian scripture. For him, no real struggle is evident; he simply assumes without debate that the Old and New Testament form a unity that points to the salvation of the church according to the promise and fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Most of his energy, however, is used in a vigorous apologetic defense of this tradition against the theologians, largely German, in the period from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth.

At the outset, it is significant to note that Knabenbauer's opposition to the historical criticism of the nineteenth century is neither initially nor primarily focused on the issue of biblical historicity. Rather, his overriding concern is the perceived attack on the traditions of the Christian church.

However, there are serious problems with the conservative Catholic position represented by Knabenbauer's Isaiah commentary. First, the New Testament perspective often overshadows the witness of the Old Testament itself.

his sophisticated reading of the threefold sanctus in chapter 6 in accordance with trinitarian terminology goes beyond the literal sense of the Hebrew text.

Secondly, Knabenbauer's use of linguistic parallels from Jeremiah to prove the pre-exilic age of Isaiah chapters 40-66 fails to reckon with the highly likely possibility that the book of...

Thirdly, while Knabenbauer's philological evidence is very thorough and often impressive, and his insistence on giving priority of meaning to a word's usage in context rather than to its etymology is sound, the question remains whether he has taken seriously enough Gesenius's arguments on the interpretation of Isa. 7:14 (Commentar Tuber ...

Finally, I have spoken with appreciation of Knabenbauer's use of the Church Fathers as an important part of the Christian exegetical tradition. It is interesting to note that although Knabenbauer restricts himself entirely to interpreting the literal sense of the biblical text, his citing of the ...

One of the pivotal figures of this middle ground was J. C. K. von Hofmann of Erlangen, who waged a battle against positions to his right and left. Unfortunately, he did not write a commentary on Isaiah and thus falls outside the parameters of this study. Still, serious attention must be paid to him. The broad lines of his thought on the Old Testament prophets can be seen in his two important works, Weissagung and Erfullung and Der Schriftbeweis, both of which contain sections on Isaiah.

J. C. K. von Hofmann (1810-1877) is widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential of the confessional scholars of Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century. He was a colleague of Delitzsch in Erlangen from 1859-1867.

Hofmann's thought is a complex combination of pietistic elements and strains of idealistic philosophy, and it reflects the impact of Ranke's historical method as well.

Hofmann's immediate context was shaped by theological battles waged on two fronts. On the far right was the scholastic Lutheranism of Hengstenberg, who understood biblical prophecy as contingent predictions about the future and their fulfillment. On the left were the higher critics, such as De Wette, Hitzig, and Ewald, who dismantled the unity and authority of the scriptures.

Hofmann's great contribution lies in his redefining biblical history in terms of a Heilsgeschichte joined to divine r...

These two movements of history and revelation are joined in an indissoluble relation with Christ, who is the source of both. The advance of prophetic history is continually adumbrated by Old Testament types pointing forward to New Testament antitypes. Revelation is not doctrine, but history. Old Testament prophecy does not consist of isolated predictions awaiting a fulfillment in the future; instead the entire Heilsgeschichte is prophetic. This sacred history gradually unfolds through different stages in an organic whole, moving toward a goal. The Bible is the record of this Heilsgeschichte, but it is not to be read "externally." Rather, the meaning of its history only comes through the experience of the new birth, which confirms that Christ is the goal of all biblical history.

His photographs show him always carrying a flower when lecturing.

He remained one of the few Old Testament commentators in the nineteenth century who still paid careful attention to the acc...

Above all, he was an orthodox Lutheran scholar who was a biblical theologian at heart and wrote seve...

Delitzsch was very appreciative of Hofmann's emphasis on a Heilsgeschichte that encompassed both the Old and New Testaments within a dynamic movement culminating in Christ. He also agreed in seeing a typological component that preserved the unity of the unfolding events by adumbrating the anticipated restoration of God's creation through a process of fulfillments. Finally, he shared with Hofmann the emphasis of earlier German pietism that true understanding of scripture was unlocked by means of the personal, subjective, religious experience of the interpreter.

In his detailed exposition one can see that, although he accepted such terms of Hofmann's as Heilsgeschichte, Typologie, and Erfullung, Delitzsch frequently defined this terminology in a different way from Hofmann. For example, he objected to Hofmann's view of sacred history as an organic process that unfolds independently of human response. Indeed, for Delitzsch God offers salvific prophecy through history, but history in itself is not revelation ("die Geschichte nicht an sich eine weissagende ist," p. 18o).

In his introductory preface to the English translation of the fourth edition of Delitzsch's Isaiah commentary (1889; English translation 1894), S. R. Driver makes much of the change in Delitzsch's critical estimate of the authorship of the book of Isaiah. In his earlier editions he had defended the unity of the Isaianic authorship, whereas finally in 1889 he offered an accommodation respecting the origin and authorship of the book when he acknowledged the authorship of a Deutero-Isaiah. In sum, Delitzsch appeared to align himself with the modern historical-critical approach long advocated by Driver.

in his new introduction to chapters 40-66, Delitzsch offers a different emphasis. He downplays his shift regarding the authorship of Second Isaiah, claiming that for him it involved little of hermeneutical significance. He suggests that he had never found anything objectionable in the view that the book of Isaiah contained prophecies later than Isaiah's. Indeed, he had always treated chapters 40-6o as addressed to the exiles. (This response seems a bit disingenuous considering the intensity of his earlier opposition to dual authorship.)

The Christian message of the book remains a unity. Regardless of whether another is the immediate author, the book is the outcome of impulses springing from Isaiah. Moreover, the book contains a consistent eschatological message extending from the promised Messiah, to the suffering servant, to its Christological fulfillment in the New Testament.

First, he is at pains to see the larger unity of the book even when recognizing that certain sections were later than Isaiah. He agrees that chapters 24-27 could not have been written by the prophet himself, but by a disciple "who in this case surpasses his master" (vol. 2, p. 419). Then he argues at length that they form a finale to chapters 13-23.

Delitzsch often traced the parallels between the legal portions of the Pentateuch and Isaiah's application of the laws in a conscious effort to call into question the Wellhausen axiom...

Second, Delitzsch labored hard in describing a literary and historical seq...

Third, Delitzsch wrestled hard in his interpretation of the servant figure in Second Isaiah. He resisted the effort of traditional Christians to identify the servant immediately with Jesus Christ, but paid closest attention to the corporate references to Israel as the servant in chapters 41 and 42. Then in the middle section (chapter 49), he observed that the servant was also sent to redeem Israel, and therefore could not be simply identified with the nation as a whole.

Finally, in chapter 53 he felt that exegetically it was impossible to avoid the overwhelmingly individual references ascribed to the servant.

He continued, "Isaiah 52:13-53:12 proclaims the suffering and resurrection of Jesus Christ as clearly as if the prophet stood under the cr...

Finally, Delitzsch's commentary on Isaiah in its fourth and final edition never swerved from an all-pervasive Christological focus th...

It struck many as incomprehensible how Delitzsch could emphasize the absolute need for a sober, grammatical-philological exegesis, and then add, "Christ, the crucified and resurrected One, is the active goal of the entire Word of God, and thus also its final meaning" (cited in Wagner, p. 325). Or again, in an essay translated into English (The Old Testament Student, pp. 77-78) he writes, "Without the New Testament, the Old Testament would be a labyrinth without a clue, a syllogism witho...

1. Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841-1915) It is fitting to begin with Thomas Kelly Cheyne, Oriel Professor at Oxford. Cheyne began his critical study of Isaiah as early as 1868, when he published a textual-critical study of the book. This effort was followed shortly in 1870 with an attempt to arrange the book of Isaiah chronologically.

In the fifth edition of his commentary (1889) one notices a growing uncertainty regarding his conservative stance.

Then in a series of articles republished in Founders of Old Testament Criticism, Cheyne actually attacks Driver for his conservative and timid positions respecting Isaiah.

Nevertheless, he finds definite Christian elements in the Old Testament of two kinds. First, there is a foreshadowing of special circumstances in the life of Christ, occurring casually in the midst of apparently rhetorical descriptions.

It is important to notice what Cheyne is not saying: i) It is not an issue of Old Testament prediction and New Testament fulfillment, 2) nor is there any Heilsgeschichte moving from the Old Testament to the New, 3) nor is the New Testament the culmination of our Old Testament ideal. Rather, there is a certain kind of correspondence between the Old Testament and the New especially visible in the Psalms and Isaiah, which correspondence can be maintained only on the basis of a strictly grammatical, philological reading. It emerges quite clearly at this point that Cheyne is attempting to harmonize the older, traditional view of the Old Testament as a witness to Jesus Christ with the newer historical-critical interpretation of the biblical text.

the problem arises whether one can combine the two different readings of a biblical text, the historical/grammatical and the spiritually foreshadowing, without deeper reflection on the context from which biblical interpretation is conducted. In the end, Cheyne's theological compromise does not satisfy either the secular historian or the confessing Christian believer.

Indeed, "it can hardly be doubted that the prophet's thought is national ... the servant is a creation of the prophet's mind, the ideal Israel itself" (pp. 358-59). The modern reader is left with the impression that Davidson is struggling with great difficulty to hold together two very different positions respecting the servant, and that he has not yet been successful in this compromise.

In 1891 Samuel Rolles Driver published his epoch-making Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. Its significance is not that his analysis was itself groundbreaking; from the perspective of German scholarship, his book contained very little that was new or previously unknown.

However, for the English-speaking world the impact of his volume was of crucial importance. It marked the end of the major resistance to critical Old Testament scholarship by the mainline Protestant Christian churches, and this lack of resistance was increasingly taken for granted by a flood of popularizations throughout the English-speaking world.

At the conclusion of his introduction (p. lxxiii), Skinner summarizes what he considers the critical consensus regarding the authorship, structure, and literary development of the book of Isaiah: "The book bearing Isaiah's name is in reality a collection of prophetic oracles, showing a composite authorship, and completed literary history. Approximately two-thirds of it consists of anonymous prophecies, all of which are of an age subsequent to Isaiah. To this class belongs the whole of the latter part of the book after chapters 4off., but even within chapters 1-39 great diversity of authorship exists."

For both Skinner and Driver, biblical history has no dialectical dimension, and thus the hermeneutical tensions between the biblical portrayal and a secular reconstruction have vanished.

Another component of interpretation that is shared by both Skinner and Driver is a pervasive influence of philosophical idealism,

One hears in Skinner the frequent appeal to a growth of spiritual truths (p. xxvi), of religious values, of God's moral personality (p. liv), and of "simple but comprehensive principles" (p. xlvii) undergirding the prophet's consciousness.

When discussing his interpretation of Isa. 7:14, Skinner concludes that the sign given Ahaz was, in short, the actual birth of the Messiah. Then he writes, "It is no objection to this view to note that the sign did not come to pass. Unfulfilled predictions are a standing phenomenon of the Old Testament. If the sign had been merely a particular event in history, it would have been rendered invalid by its failure to realise itself ... [but] it retains its religious value as long as the ideal to which it points remains an object of faith and aspiration" (vol. 1, p. 67). Driver's view regar...