Systematic Theology: Chapter Three (Appendix)

Perhaps the most heated point of controversy concerning the Bible in contemporary culture concerns whether we can trust the Bible. In previous generations, even those who never read the Bible commonly referred to it as the “Good Book.” In contemporary culture, more and more people view the Bible as an “evil book” because they view the God of the Bible as an oppressive threat – a bully who is fundamentally opposed to human flourishing. The crucial disagreement concerns the divide between a hermeneutic of continuity and a hermeneutic of discontinuity, and a divide between a hermeneutic of trust and a hermeneutic of suspicion.

The trustworthiness of Scripture has been challenged at all three levels of knowing and being. The Christian story and symbols have been challenged as either incoherent or as hostile to human flourishing. The historical witness of Scripture has been challenged as fundamentally unreliable, as not giving an accurate account of either the history of Israel or of the “historical Jesus.” At the level of ontology, it has been claimed either that the God of the Bible does not exist, or that if some kind of spiritual reality exists, it bears little or no resemblance to the God described in the Old and New Testament Scriptures.

The crucial issue of continuity over against discontinuity concerns whether God is in himself who he has revealed himself to be in the history of revelation. As noted in the previous paragraph, this is often posed in terms of either the historical reliability of the Scripture or their incompatibility with the findings of modern science, or the God whose story is told in the Bible is rejected as a morally repugnant character. I would suggest that two more pressing concerns lie behind the current challenges; first, the loss of transcendence and, second, distinct from, but connected with this, a moral challenge. Third, and related to both of the above is the more recent issue of the loss of faith among a younger generation of primarily “Exvangelicals” labeled “deconstruction.”

Loss of Transcendence

Key to the loss of transcendence in contemporary culture is what Charles Taylor in his book The Secular Age has designated as the “immanent frame,” a constructed social space that frames the lives of contemporary Western people within a natural (rather than supernatural) order. Taylor refers to this social space as a secular “social imaginary” that excludes transcendence. A “social imaginary” is different from an intellectual system in that it is the way that people unreflectively “imagine” or “feel” about their social surroundings. Social imaginaries are expressed more in terms of “stories,” images, and legends rather than in articulated intellectual beliefs. The secular “social imaginary” is thus similar to Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “paradigms,” but in contrast to the theoretical and reflective nature of paradigms, the secular “social imaginary” is rather a “take,” a way of construing the world as without transcendence that the contemporary person brings to experience rather than derives from it.⁵⁴

Given the assumptions of an a priori secular social imaginary, interpretation of the Bible becomes problematic insofar as the subject matter of the biblical story is from beginning to end an account of the transcendent God who has created and redeemed the world, a God who speaks and acts. (more…)

Systematic Theology: Chapter Three

The two previous chapters dealt with the subject matter of theology (what theology is) and the task of theology (what theologians do). This chapter and the next deal with the sources of theology. Traditionally, these are Scripture (sola scriptura; Reformation Protestant), Scripture and tradition (Council of Trent; Roman Catholic), Scripture, tradition, and reason (Anglican; Richard Hooker), Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience (Methodism; the Wesleyan Quadrilateral; liberal Protestantism).

In terms of the three levels of knowing and being (ordo cognoscendi and ordo essendi), these sources of theology belong to the first level, the order of knowledge. Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience provide the sources and context within which Christians come to know what Christian faith is, and what it means to live as Christians. At the same time, it is important to distinguish between the first source – Scripture – and the other three sources in that historically Scripture has provided the primary source of the knowledge of Christian faith while reason, tradition, and experience are not in themselves independent sources of knowledge of Christian faith, but rather provide the ecclesial context in which Christians come to know and interpret Scripture.

Historically, tradition is not a separate and distinct source of knowledge of God, but the context in which Christian faith takes place. Patristic theologians like Irenaeus were expositors of Scripture, and the second century Rule of Faith is both a summary of the content of Scripture and a hermeneutical guide for interpreting Scripture. For theologians like Anglican Richard Hooker, reason was not a separate source for knowledge of God, but a hermeneutical tool to use in interpreting Scripture. For founder of Methodism John Wesley, experience did not provide additional knowledge about God, but was rather an ecclesial context in which the church appropriates the truth of Scripture.

At the same time, Reformation Protestants did not understood sola scriptura to mean that the church reads Scripture in an interpretive vacuum (nuda scriptura, “biblicism”). Protestants continued to recite the Creeds and to endorse the theological teaching of the ecumenical councils because they understood them to be summaries of and interpretive guides to the clear meaning of Scripture. Affirming sola scriptura did not prevent historic Protestants from endorsing confessional statements such as the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, the Reformed Westminster Confession, the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles or reading Scripture through interpretive guides such as the Lutheran Book of Concord or confessional catechisms.

In terms of the threefold level of knowing and being, Scripture has a unique role because of its place in the threefold structure. Although contemporary Christians read Scripture as the primary source of Christian knowledge and spiritual and moral formation (level 1), Scripture’s origins lie in the second level of the order of knowing and being – the level of history (level 2). The Bible is not a single “book,” but the collected writings of prophets and apostles who bear witness to the economy of salvation – the revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the history of Israel, the incarnate Jesus Christ, and the New Testament church. As noted in the two previous chapters, this history of the economic Trinity (level 2) points beyond itself to the ontological reality of God’s nature in itself (the immanent Trinity, level 3). Our knowledge of God as Trinity thus follows from our knowledge of God in the history of salvation, and our contemporary appropriation of this knowledge in prayer, worship, and Christian ethics is dependent on this historical source of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

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