Case Studies Across Eras: Augustine, Luther, Bultmann, Childs, and Contemporary Voices

Introduction: Five Windows on One Canon

Historiography in biblical studies is not a museum tour of interesting interpreters; it is professional formation. When we read Scripture with Augustine, Luther, Bultmann, Childs, and representative contemporary voices, we are not simply learning “what they thought.” We are training our instincts about what counts as a good question, which kinds of evidence can (and cannot) bear doctrinal weight, where to place the fulcrum between history and theology, and how to shepherd communities of reading. Each of these figures emerged within concrete crises—Augustine amid late antique doctrinal and pastoral turmoil; Luther in the Reformation’s contest over authority and assurance; Bultmann under the pressure of modernity’s sincerity about history and science; Childs in a post-critical moment seeking a path from analysis back to Scripture as Scripture; and contemporary interpreters negotiating polyphonic methods, global voices, and decolonizing critiques.

This chapter offers student-facing case studies in which each figure’s method is allowed to do real exegetical work. For comparability, we anchor the portraits in concrete texts: Augustine on Genesis and the Good Samaritan; Luther on Romans and Galatians; Bultmann on the Gospels (miracle, kerygma, and myth) and the resurrection; Childs on Isaiah and the Psalter; then two “modern voices” vignettes—Richard B. Hays on figural intertextuality and J. M. G. Barclay on gift in Paul—paired with gestures toward other recent currents. The goal is not to crown a winner but to learn what each lens sees best, where it distorts, and how a doctoral exegete can integrate strengths without naively importing weaknesses.

Throughout, we will name the historical pressures that generated each method; we will cite representative passages and scholarship; and we will narrate how the chosen method conducts the reading from text to theological judgment. The chapter closes with assignments that ask you to perform similarly disciplined, era-aware exegesis.

Augustine: Charity, Canon, and the Many Senses of Scripture

Historical and Theological Setting

Bishop of Hippo (354–430), Augustine wrote as a pastor and theologian in a late antique world where Scripture functioned liturgically, doctrinally, and apologetically. His hermeneutics, set out programmatically in On Christian Doctrine, combine two controls: the rule of faith (regula fidei) and the double love command (caritas). Readings must harmonize with the church’s creed-shaped narrative and must conduce to love of God and neighbor (Augustine, 1997). At the same time, Augustine is no enemy of the “literal sense.” In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, he insists that “literal” means “authorial intention in its canonical discourse,” not “crude surface,” and that the literal can proliferate in divinely intended plenitude (Augustine, 1991).

Case Study A: Genesis 1—Temple Time, Allegory, and Intellectual Humility

Augustine presses Genesis 1 beyond physical description toward theological timekeeping: the ordered “days” choreograph sacred time and creaturely dependence, climaxing in Sabbath. He entertains multiple construals of the “days” (instantaneous creation with pedagogical days; angelic knowledge structuring time), refusing to foreclose where the text speaks richly and where the church has no dogmatic necessity to decide (Augustine, 1991). Two Augustinian moves deserve to enter your own toolkit. First, his epistemic humility: when Scripture’s truth exceeds our grasp, we confess what the text surely teaches (the world’s goodness, order, gratuity) while allowing legitimate diversity on speculative points. Second, his canon-first literalism: the literal sense is not flattened physics but theological discourse in the register of praise. This has enduring use when you arbitrate contemporary science-faith disputes: Augustine’s control—what must be confessed? what can be left open?—keeps both special pleading and needless scandal at bay.

Case Study B: Luke 10:25–37—The Good Samaritan and the Totus Christus

Patristic readers often practiced figural or allegorical readings in which material details signal theological realities. Augustine reads the Good Samaritan as Christ himself, who finds Adam (humanity) half dead, binds wounds (sacramental grace), places him on his own beast (Christ’s body), entrusts him to the inn (the church), and pays for his care with two denarii (the two commandments, or the two sacraments, or the two Testaments) (Augustine, 1997). Read unsympathetically, this is free association. Read within Augustine’s totus Christus theology—the “whole Christ,” head and members—it is a disciplined ecclesial hearing that guards two convictions: Scripture witnesses to Christ in all its parts, and Scripture exists to build up the church in love.

For doctoral readers, the lesson is double. On one hand, Augustine reminds us that the canon’s theological purpose should not be embarrassed out of view; sermons and catechesis may responsibly deploy figural sense under the rule of faith. On the other hand, modern literary and historical controls rightly ask whether Augustine’s reading respects Luke’s narrative function (a parable that explodes boundary-keeping ethics). The mature move is not to lampoon Augustine nor to mimic him woodenly, but to ask when and how a Christological figuration can serve Luke’s own thrust and the church’s formation at once.

Gains and Limits. Augustine trains canonical imagination and pastoral prudence. His risks are over-allegorization and occasional subordination of historical grit to theological elegance. His insistence that love and creed norm interpretation remains a powerful criterion for weeding out clever but cruel readings (Augustine, 1997, 1991).

Luther: Law/Gospel, Justification, and the Perspicuity of the Kerygma

Historical and Theological Setting

Martin Luther (1483–1546) fought on two fronts: against late medieval soteriology (anxious merit-economies) and against a magisterium that, in his judgment, obscured the gospel’s clarity. His hermeneutical center is the distinction of law and gospel and the doctrine of justification by faith. Scripture’s “theology of the cross” (theologia crucis) unmasks human righteousness and proclaims God’s alien righteousness given in Christ—this is the “center and star” by which exegesis navigates (Luther, 1960, 1957).

Case Study A: Romans 1:16–17—The “Righteousness of God”

Luther’s famous “tower experience” focused on iustitia Dei: not the terrifying attribute by which God judges, but the gifted righteousness by which God justifies the ungodly. In his preface to Romans, Luther glosses Paul as proclaiming a righteousness revealed and received by faith, not achieved by works (Luther, 1960). Historically informed exegesis will note the range of the phrase in Second Temple contexts and in Paul’s argument (covenant faithfulness; saving power; forensic declaration). Luther’s theological construal is not the only philologically plausible reading, but it proved spiritually generative and textually responsible insofar as it attends to Rom 3:21–26; 4:5; 5:1.

Case Study B: Galatians—A Polemical Commentary as Hermeneutical Manifesto

In his 1535 Lectures on Galatians, Luther performs his hermeneutic: antithesis of law and gospel, relentless centering of Christ, and pastoral boldness against anything that re-enslaves consciences. “The gospel is a word of salvation, a word of grace” (Luther, 1957). He reads Paul’s table-fellowship crisis (Gal 2) as a betrayal of justification, and “works of the law” as any ecclesial performance conscripted into grounds of standing before God. This is not antiquarian; it is pastoral exegesis aimed at the anxious heart.

Gains and Limits. Luther’s gifts are clarity, gospel-centered pressure, and a keen sense of how ecclesial practices can contradict doctrine. His risks include a tendency to polarize complex Pauline discourses and to universalize his late medieval opponents into the first century. Yet his insistence that exegesis serve consolation—a broken-hearted sinner hearing Romans in church—should shape doctoral work that otherwise risks becoming bloodless (Luther, 1957, 1960).

Bultmann: Form Criticism, Demythologization, and the Kerygma

Historical and Theological Setting

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) came of age when historical-critical scholarship had thoroughly problematized naive harmonies, and when modern cosmology and anthropology rendered biblical “mythic” idioms culturally alien. Bultmann’s two signature contributions are form criticism—the attempt to classify Gospel units and reconstruct their Sitz im Leben—and demythologization—the program of translating mythic language into existential self-understanding in the mode of Heideggerian analysis (Bultmann, 1963, 1984). His aim was to preserve the scandal and summons of the kerygma (proclamation) rather than to bind faith to premodern cosmology.

Case Study A: The Synoptic Tradition—From Oral Units to Proclamation

In History of the Synoptic Tradition, Bultmann classifies pericopes (miracle stories, pronouncement stories, legends) and proposes communal functions (catechesis, polemic, missionary preaching). The gain is real: he confers genre literacy and a sense that the Gospels are theologically shaped proclamation, not stenography (Bultmann, 1963). When you exegete Mark 2:1–12, for example, form-critical instincts push you to ask how this pronouncement story establishes Jesus’ authority to forgive and how such stories circulated and stabilized within communities.

Case Study B: “Myth” and Resurrection—Kerygma Without Discarding Event?

In “New Testament and Mythology,” Bultmann argues that the New Testament speaks in mythic idioms (three-storied universe; demons; miracles) that moderns cannot naively inhabit. The proper task is not to subtract myth, but to interpret it: resurrection, for example, speaks of God’s eschatological “Yes” in the existential self-understanding of faith (Bultmann, 1984). Critics charge reduction: do we lose history in favor of decision? Bultmann replies that the scandal of the cross, grasped in preaching, remains; faith does not rest in historical probabilities but in God’s address.

Gains and Limits. Bultmann’s gains are sobriety, genre awareness, and a bracing insistence that the Gospel is proclamation calling for decision. His limits are the potential decoupling of kerygma from history, and a tendency to impose a single philosophical anthropology on manifold texts. Nevertheless, doctoral readers should absorb his rigor and his desire to speak credibly in modern culture even as they correct his program by re-binding proclamation to God’s acts in Israel and Jesus (Bultmann, 1963, 1984).

Childs: Canonical Shape and Theological Exegesis

Historical and Theological Setting

Brevard S. Childs (1923–2007) responded to a perceived impasse: historical-critical gains had multiplied, but the Bible as Scripture—the church’s canon in its received form—often disappeared under reconstructions. Childs proposed a canonical approach: use critical tools, but order them to the final form of the text within the canon; read the Old and New Testaments together within the church’s theological horizon (Childs, 1979, 1992).

Case Study A: Isaiah—Unity Through Canonical Framing

Childs accepts compositional layering (First, Deutero-, Trito-Isaiah) yet insists that the canonical book speaks with literary-theological unity: recurring motifs (“Holy One of Israel”), the Hezekiah narratives as hinge (chs. 36–39), and an arc from judgment to comfort. Exegesis thus honors both diachrony and synchrony, refusing to stop at hypothesized sources and returning to the book the church reads (Childs, 1979). When you preach Isaiah 40, you do so as part of a whole that has already schooled readers in Zion, holiness, and the nations.

Case Study B: The Psalter—From Anthology to Shaped Witness

In Introduction, Childs foregrounds the Psalter’s editorial shape (five books; framing Psalms 1–2; crisis in Psalm 89) and its canonical pedagogy: Torah piety and Davidic hope, crisis of kingship, re-centering in YHWH’s kingship, crescendo of praise (Childs, 1979). Exegesis of Psalm 1, then, is not a generic wisdom pep-talk; it is the portal that shapes readers who will face Psalm 89’s disorientation and await Books IV–V’s reorientation.

Gains and Limits. Childs gives doctoral readers a disciplined way to carry historical gains into theological exegesis ordered to the church’s Scripture. Risks include under-specifying how canon relates to synagogue and to differing Christian canons, and an occasional tendency to subordinate troubling diachronic data under canonical unity. Used prudently, Childs’s approach is an indispensable integrator (Childs, 1979, 1992).

Contemporary Voices: Figural Intertextuality and the Social Texture of Grace

The contemporary scene is too diverse to reduce to a single “voice.” Two case studies—Richard B. Hays and J. M. G. Barclay—illustrate how recent work develops earlier insights while correcting excesses.

Case Study A: Richard B. Hays—Echoes and Figuration

Hays’s Echoes of Scripture trained a generation to hear metalepsis—how Paul (and later, the evangelists) invokes Israel’s Scripture with snippets that summon whole narrative worlds (Hays, 1989, 2016). His criteria (volume, thematic coherence, rhetorical fit) keep intertextual work from pareidolia. Consider Romans 9–11: when Paul cites Hosea’s “not my people,” Hays argues we must import Hosea’s restorative horizon, not only the words, thus disciplining readings that tilt toward final rejection. Or Matthew 2:15: “Out of Egypt I called my son” is not a proof-text but a figural claim that Jesus recapitulates Israel’s vocation. Hays’s work operationalizes Childs’s canonical instincts in close exegesis and calls the church to recover figural hearing without abandoning historical sense (Hays, 1989, 2016).

Gains and Limits. The gain is exegetical sensitivity that hears the canon’s music. The risk is over-hearing—finding echoes everywhere—or reading forward so strongly that Israel’s Scripture loses its integrity. Hays’s own criteria are designed to police these dangers.

Case Study B: J. M. G. Barclay—Gift, Grace, and Social Worlds

In Paul and the Gift, Barclay revisits charis in Second Temple and Greco-Roman contexts and argues that “grace” can be perfected along multiple dimensions (superabundance, priority, incongruity, efficacy, singularity). Paul’s distinctive configuration—especially incongruity (gift to the unworthy)—reshapes social relations in Galatians and Romans (Barclay, 2015). The exegetical payoff is precision about how theology makes people: grace reconfigures patronage, honor, and reciprocity; it creates communities that resist ethnic or status sorting. Barclay thus marries philology, ancient social history, and theology; his Paul stands within a Childs-like canonical frame, yet speaks with Bultmann-like urgency about transformation—without collapsing kerygma into mere interiority.

Gains and Limits. Barclay’s gains are conceptual clarity and social realism; his risk is reception—how communities might absolutize one “perfection” of grace without the others. Yet his taxonomy equips doctoral readers to speak more carefully about “gift” in texts and in churches (Barclay, 2015).

Other Currents in Brief

We have already encountered feminist, liberation, and postcolonial readings in this course; they remain indispensable ethical lenses. Ellen F. Davis models agrarian and practical theological exegesis that keeps close to Hebrew poetics and to the church’s life (Davis, 2009). Kevin Vanhoozer articulates a “theodramatic” account that welcomes post-structural insights while insisting on canonical authority and ecclesial performance (Vanhoozer, 1998). N. T. Wright argues historically and theologically for the bodily character of resurrection and the narrative of Israel’s God now fulfilled (Wright, 2003). Beverly Roberts Gaventa reads Romans as an apocalypse of God’s invasive grace, de-centering human agency (Gaventa, 2016). Together these voices signal an integrative, canon-attentive, historically serious, ethically alert practice that many of you will inhabit and extend.

Comparative Synthesis: What Each Era Teaches Your Practice

Augustine teaches teleology: Scripture aims at caritas under the creed; figuration serves formation. Luther teaches center: justification and the cross orient exegesis toward consolation and freedom. Bultmann teaches sobriety and kerygmatic urgency: read the Gospels as proclamation to concrete hearers; translate without trimming scandal. Childs teaches order: let analysis return to the canonical form within the church’s two-Testament field. Hays and Barclay show how to do this now: train ears for echoes, train minds for concept-clarity, and let social worlds matter in theology.

For doctoral readers, integration means learning to sequence tools and to state your controls out loud. One disciplined pattern—adequate for many projects—is: establish the text; read its form and rhetoric; situate it historically and socially; locate it canonically and intertextually; consult reception where the text’s effects have shaped doctrine or harm; then speak theologically in the register the text demands. Augustine and Luther keep your end in view; Bultmann prevents pious shortcuts; Childs keeps the canon on the desk; Hays and Barclay refine your craft in the weeds of exegesis.

Two Extended Worked Comparisons

Comparison 1: Isaiah 7:14 / Matthew 1:23

An Augustinian might foreground the Emmanuel motif as a Christological promise already gesturing toward the totus Christus—God-with-us in Israel and church—while allowing multiple “literal” articulations of the eighth-century sign (Augustine, 1991). Luther will stress the consolatory nature of the sign—God for the unworthy—leaning into Matthew’s gospel of gift (Luther, 1960). Bultmann will note how Matthew’s formula quotations function kerygmatically, announcing fulfillment in a myth-laden idiom that calls for existential decision (Bultmann, 1984). Childs will insist that Isaiah be read first in its canonical context (Syro-Ephraimite crisis; near-term sign), then Matthew in his—figural recapitulation—without collapsing one into the other (Childs, 1979, 1992). Hays will press criteria for hearing Hosea/Isaiah echoes coherently in Matthew’s narrative (Hays, 2016). The integrated reading you would write states Isaiah’s immediate sense, then argues—canon in hand—that Matthew legitimately figures the text christologically, and finally articulates how the church can preach Emmanuel without superseding Israel.

Comparison 2: 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 (the Supper)

An Augustinian reading emphasizes caritas and the totus Christus: discerning the body means recognizing the poor as Christ’s members at table (Augustine, 1997). Luther reads the text against sacramental reductionism and against class pride: Christ’s promise is for sinners—close the distance between rich and poor (Luther, 1957). Bultmann reminds you that the tradition Paul “received” is kerygma embodied; the Supper’s words interpret the cross in the present tense (Bultmann, 1984). Childs alerts you to the Supper’s canonical rhythms—Passover recast; prophetic critique of unjust feasting—so that your exegesis keeps Old Testament textures alive (Childs, 1992). Barclay brings gift analysis to bear: the Eucharist is a counter-benefaction that remaps honor and reciprocity in the body (Barclay, 2015). The composite result is a reading that raids all these treasuries in proper order.

Suggested Assignments

To internalize these patterns, undertake a sustained comparative exegesis that requires you to inhabit each figure’s instincts before integrating them.

First, write an Augustine-to-Childs dossier on Luke 10:25–37. Begin with Augustine’s figural reading and his caritas rule; then treat the parable’s literary rhetoric and social stakes (neighbor as enemy); then return canonically to Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19; finally, propose how a Childs-style canonical approach can sanction a bounded figural christology that also honors Luke’s ethical shock. Name where Luther’s law/gospel and Barclay’s “incongruous gift” sharpen pastoral application.

Second, prepare a Bultmann-aware, canon-constrained exploration of Mark 5:21–43 (Jairus’s daughter; the hemorrhaging woman). Classify the pericope’s forms; articulate the kerygma; then, resisting reduction, narrate how the story’s history-reaching claim (Jesus over death and impurity) can be confessed in a modern register. Let Hays’s criteria test intertexts (Levitical purity; prophetic healing) and let Augustine’s charity rule govern modern pastoral speech about bodies and touch.

Third, choose a Pauline passage (Galatians 2; Romans 9–11) and run Barclay’s taxonomy of gift through it. Show how Luther’s instincts are right and where precision about grace’s “perfections” can clarify long-standing debates; then bind your reading to a Childs-like canonical horizon.

Each assignment should end with a brief “method reflection” in which you state which era’s instincts most affected your reading and why—naming both gains and necessary corrections.

Conclusion: Practicing a Generous, Ordered Plurality

The best doctoral exegesis is generous and ordered. It is generous in that it welcomes the plurality of interpretive gifts across the centuries—Augustine’s caritas and figuration, Luther’s gospel clarity, Bultmann’s kerygmatic urgency and genre sobriety, Childs’s canonical discipline, Hays’s figural ear, Barclay’s conceptual rigor—and recognizes how each arose to solve real problems. It is ordered in that it refuses eclecticism: you do not wield Bultmann to cancel Easter, or Luther to ignore narrative nuance, or Augustine to bypass history, or Childs to iron out difficulty. You sequence and situate. You establish what a text says and does in its own world; you listen to how the church has heard; you bind your hearing to the canon’s unity and the gospel’s consolation; and you speak with clarity into communities that must live what they hear.

If you learn this orchestra’s score—when to give each instrument the melody and when to let it rest—you will read with integrity and teach with joy. You will also be equipped to extend the concert into voices not yet centered here: global South readings, womanist wisdom, postcolonial corrections. That extension is not a polite add-on; it is the next movement of the same symphony.

References

Augustine. (1991). The literal meaning of Genesis (J. H. Taylor, Trans.). New City Press.

Augustine. (1997). On Christian doctrine (R. P. H. Green, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

Barclay, J. M. G. (2015). Paul and the gift. Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Bultmann, R. (1963). History of the synoptic tradition (Rev. ed.). Harper & Row.

Bultmann, R. (1984). New Testament and mythology and other basic writings (S. M. Ogden, Ed. & Trans.). Fortress Press.

Childs, B. S. (1979). Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Fortress Press.

Childs, B. S. (1992). Biblical theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological reflection on the Christian Bible. Fortress Press.

Davis, E. F. (2009). Scripture, culture, and agriculture: An agrarian reading of the Bible. Cambridge University Press.

Gaventa, B. R. (2016). When in Romans: An invitation to linger with the Gospel according to Paul. Baker Academic.

Hays, R. B. (1989). Echoes of Scripture in the letters of Paul. Yale University Press.

Hays, R. B. (2016). Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Baylor University Press.

Luther, M. (1957). Lectures on Galatians (1535), in Luther’s Works (Vol. 26; J. Pelikan, Ed.). Concordia.

Luther, M. (1960). Preface to the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, in Luther’s Works (Vol. 35; H. J. Grimm, Ed.). Fortress Press.

Vanhoozer, K. J. (1998). Is there a meaning in this text? The Bible, the reader, and the morality of literary knowledge. Zondervan.

Wright, N. T. (2003). The resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.