372 - Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism

Canon and Community:
A Guide to Canonical Criticism
By James A. Sanders
Philadelphia, Fortress, 1984. 96 pp. $4.50.

This is the most recent publication in the Fortress Guides to Biblical Scholarship."Canonical criticism" is a phrase coined by Sanders over the Nears (at least since 1972). Academia has cultivated the historical-critical methodology which attempts to recover the points originally scored in the biblical text. In contrast, canonical criticism, while using the tools of this methodology (form criticism, etc.). goes beyond it in an effort to place the Bible "where it belongs in the believing communities of today " (p. 20).

To this end, it conceives of canon as a process and not just a list of books accepted as authoritative by a community Canonical process refers to the

373 - Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism

formation of the biblical books on their way to canonization. On this journey, the tradition (both oral and written) is repeated. but also resignified and adapted to the needs of the community. For example, one can point to the Exodus theme in Isa. 40ff., or to the corrective which Jerermiah applies to the Zion theology of Isaiah. There is a movement in the biblical continuum, an "unrecorded hermeneutics which lie between the lines of most of its literature" (p. 46). The process becomes "intense" in the sixth century ( formation of Torah and Prophets) and in the first century A.D. (New Testament writings).

The stance of Sanders differs from that of Brevard Childs. The latter emphasizes the final shape ofthe Hebrew Bible. as determinative of the way intended to be understood. Sanders highlights the whole process that preceded the shape. an area of pluralistic and even contradictory meanings as the community accepted, rejected, modified its tradition. But he also considers the final shape significant. as in the positioning of Esther after Ezra-Nehemiah in Christian, but never in Jewish, lists (p.43).

Sanders makes much of the "unrecorded hermeneutics" in the Bible (pp. 46, 50). which seems to be the dialectic between text, tradition, and community decision within the canonical process. But he also records some hermeneutics of his own, which I find congenial but not necessarily flowing from canonical criticism. These are expressed in five "salient observations" (pp. 51-57). One of them is "the divine bias for the weak and dispossessed"-surely a genuine biblical datum, but riot dependent upon canonical criticism. The use of such verbs as "polytheize." "monotheize" (passim) also suggests a particular hermeneutical stance adopted by the author.

This is an exciting work, and it can make the Bible an exciting book to read. because it illumines the dynamics between the community and the tradition, or which the Bible is the result. It is intended not only for technical scholars, but for "clergy and laity," to whom an encouraging epilogue is addressed.

Roland E. Murphy
Duke University Durham
North Carolina.