The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture.

The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture. By Brevard S. Childs (Eerdmans, $35). C.'s contribution to biblical studies has been substantial and sustained for many decades, and the history of the interpretation of Isaiah offered in this book--ranging from the Septuagint and the New Testament to many figures in church history, including Luther and Calvin, up to the early twentieth century--shows C. at his well-informed and widely read best. He skips from the early twentieth century, however, to postmodern interpretation, omitting a host of significant twentieth-century scholars, and delivers in the postmodern chapter a scathing critique of Walter Brueggemann that I found quite one-sided. Almost anyone who does not accept C.'s "canonical approach" would face the same criticism. In a sense, C.'s discussion of Isaiah is a test case for trying to understand the church's use of the Old Testament in general, and he identifies the following characteristics of the church's approach: the authority of scripture, use of both literal and spiritual senses, divine and human authorship, christological content, and the dialectical nature of history. While admitting that parts of Isaiah come from several centuries, C. argues that the dating of the book in its superscription functions canonically to locate the historical setting of the whole prophecy to the preexilic period. Most historical critics will not find this persuasive, nor are we really given much help by this approach with the considerable difference between Isaiah's view of the messiah in chaps. 9 and 11, for example, and the radical reinterpretation of this idea in the New Testament; the same could be said for Isaiah's views on the servant that also function quite differently in the New Testament's interpretation of the death of Jesus. It is these latter questions that really energize me. RWK