Theopedia

Brevard Childs

Overview

Brevard Springs Childs (1923-2007) was an American Old Testament scholar who taught at Yale University for forty-one years and developed “canonical criticism,” the view that the Bible should be interpreted according to the final, received shape of the canon rather than reconstructed according to the sources and stages behind it.12 The approach pushed back against historical-critical scholarship that had fragmented biblical books into their component sources, arguing instead that theological interpretation should attend to the text’s finished, canonical form.2 Childs’s own exegesis, though, continued to rely on source-critical conclusions about how books like the Pentateuch were composed, a tension critics have pointed out in his work.3

Life and Ministry

Childs was born September 2, 1923, in Columbia, South Carolina.1 He earned a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Michigan in 1947, with his education interrupted from 1943 to 1945 by service in the United States Army during the Second World War.1 He went on to earn a B.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1950 and a Th.D. from the University of Basel in 1955.1

From 1958 until his retirement in 1999, Childs taught Old Testament at Yale University, where in 1992 he was named a Sterling Professor, Yale’s highest academic rank.1 He also received honorary doctorates from the University of Aberdeen in 1981 and the University of Glasgow in 1992.1 He died June 23, 2007, in New Haven, Connecticut.1

Theological Contribution

The Canonical Approach

Childs proposed that Old and New Testament interpretation should proceed from the canon’s final, received form rather than from the sources, redactions, and historical stages critical scholarship had identified behind each book.2 He put the underlying conviction this way: “Biblical Theology has as its proper context the canonical scriptures of the Christian church, not because only this literature influenced its history, but because of the peculiar reception of this corpus by a community of faith and practice… It was therefore a fatal methodological mistake when the nature of the Bible was described solely in categories of the history of religion, a move which could only develop in the direction of contesting the integrity of the canon and denying the legitimacy of its content as theology.”4

Alongside this, Childs (with others in what came to be called the “canonical criticism” school) argued for a functional definition of canon: a collection of books becomes canonical not merely when a final, closed list is fixed, but whenever those books function as authoritative Scripture for a worshipping community, a status Childs held some books had already reached well before the fourth-century closing of the list.5 Michael Kruger describes Childs as central to establishing this functional definition as “an alternative to Sundberg’s” older, purely exclusive one.2

Myth, Source Criticism, and the Final Form

Childs’s early work also shaped how later evangelical scholarship distinguished the Old Testament’s own genre from that of its ancient Near Eastern neighbors. John Oswalt adopted Childs’s own definition of myth, “a form of expression, whether literary or oral, whereby the continuities among the human, natural, and divine realms are expressed and actualized,” as the working definition for his own study contrasting biblical and mythological worldviews.6

That same body of early work, however, operated within the source-critical categories mainstream Old Testament scholarship used to reconstruct the Pentateuch’s composition, including a willingness to treat parts of it as late priestly material.3 Critics have argued this sits uneasily beside the canonical approach’s own claim that interpretation should proceed from the text’s finished, received shape rather than from a reconstructed compositional history.3

Historical Significance

Evangelical assessment of Childs’s canonical approach has generally been mixed rather than wholly favorable or dismissive. Kruger commends “Childs’s willingness to allow theology back into the world of biblical studies,” his insistence that exegesis be done “on a canonical level, considering the contribution of all twenty-seven (or sixty-six) books and the way they interact,” and his critique of “modern critical methodologies and the manner in which they splinter and fracture the canonical text.”7

Kruger raises two sustained objections. First, Childs’s account of how the canonical text took shape treats successive generations within the worshipping community, not only the original “apostles and prophets,” as agents of the text’s own development, which Kruger argues broadens the traditional locus of inspiration beyond what Scripture’s own self-testimony supports; he quotes Robert Gnuse’s observation that “the biblical tradition does not seem to give a direct affirmation to the social model of group inspiration; rather the group always seems to be addressed or led by a chosen individual.”7 Second, Kruger presses the question of why the canon’s fourth-century shape should be treated as fixed and authoritative if, on Childs’s own account, the text remained open to communal shaping up to that point; he cites Frank Spina’s question of whether canon is “accorded too lofty a position when its existence may simply be the result of a historical accident.”7 Kruger’s own alternative supplements Childs’s functional definition of canon with what he calls an ontological definition, canon as the books God himself gave the church, which Kruger argues neither Childs’s functional definition nor the older exclusive definition fully accounts for.8

The Pentateuchal source criticism Childs continued to rely on has drawn a related but distinct criticism: that it undercuts the canonical approach on its own terms. Citing Paul House’s assessment that “at one very key point Childs exits the canonical approach in favor of source criticism,” Samuel Parkison presses the same question House raised, why a scholar who stresses the final, received form of the canon would also want to retain conclusions built on reconstructing the text’s prehistory, concluding that “not allowing the canon to speak on its own terms undercuts the canonical approach.”3

The approach continues to be cited in later scholarship, including a dissertation study of the unity of the Minor Prophets that applies Childs’s method directly.9

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Wikipedia, s.v. “Brevard Childs,” accessed August 31, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevard_Childs. The Theopedia Library holds no dedicated biographical treatment of Childs’s life; this entry, drawing on the Princeton Theological Seminary Manuscript Collection finding aid and a Yale Divinity School obituary, was the only source for these uncontroversial biographical facts (dates, institutions, degrees) that this session’s environment allowed fetching directly. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  2. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 1, “The Church’s Book.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 2, §”Excursus: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics,” 75-87, quoting Paul House, Old Testament Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 47. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  4. Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible (Philadelphia: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 8, quoted in Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty,” chap. 2 excursus. ↩

  5. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 1, “The Definition of Canon,” 27-46. ↩

  6. John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), notes, quoting Brevard S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (London: SCM, 1960), 19-21. ↩

  7. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, §”B. Evaluation.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 1, §”C. Childs’s Definition of Canon.” ↩

  9. Oren Rhea Martin, “The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan: Part 1-The Old Testament,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 114-216, citing Andrew Yueking Lee, “The Canonical Unity of the Scroll of the Minor Prophets” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 1985). ↩