Systematic Theology: Chapter Two

The previous chapter discussed the subject matter of theology: what theology is. This chapter deals with the discipline of theology: the work that theologians do. The study of theology has a number of names: “Christian doctrine” is the most general term. Doctrine can reflect the position of a particular theologian, church, or denominational group, or an account of one particular aspect of theology, for example, Thomas Aquinas’s or Karl Barth’s “doctrine of the Trinity” or the Reformed doctrine of Presbyterian polity or the Roman Catholic doctrine of the papacy.

“Dogmatics” refers to “authorized church teaching,” and is usually distinguished from doctrine by its universality and normativity. For example, while the universal church has never officially endorsed a specific interpretation of the atonement – there is no universally agreed doctrine of the atonement, but rather there are numerous theologians’ doctrines of the atonement – there is a universally acknowledged understanding of the doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, approved at the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. We thus refer to the “dogmas” of the Trinity and Christology. Thus, all dogmas are doctrines, but not all doctrines are dogmas.

Finally, systematic theology is concerned generally with Christian claims about reality, especially the scope, unity and coherence of Christian teaching: “Systematic theology attempts a conceptual articulation of Christian claims about God and everything else in relation to God, characterized by comprehensiveness and coherence.”¹ On the one hand, systematic theology is more comprehensive than “doctrine” because of the universality of its scope. On the other hand, systematic theology does not claim the definitiveness of dogma because it deals with every aspect of theology, not simply those central theological doctrines over which there is substantial agreement among the majority of Christians. Systematic theology is also the work of individual theologians, or reflects the theological commitments of specific ecclesial traditions.

Historical Development of Theology

John Webster points out that “Conceptual reconstruction of Christian teaching is a post-apostolic enterprise. . .” Early Christian writers did not distinguish between exegetical, doctrinal, moral, and pastoral theology.² For example, Irenaeus’s Against Heresies is an apologetic work written against Gnostic heretics that also includes as part of the discussion throughout the five books fairly comprehensive discussion of Christian doctrines of the triune God, of creation, fall, and redemption. Augustine’s Confessions is a spiritual autobiography that also addresses numerous theological topics, for example, the doctrine of creation and the nature of evil. Much patristic theology is found in the form of sermons, whose primary purpose is the exposition of Scripture within the context of Christian worship.

The following factors led to the development of Christian theology:

1) Conflict with heresy: As second-century catholic Christianity was challenged by various groups that provided alternative accounts of Christian faith, the church found it necessary to respond to this challenge. For example, as noted above in the case of Irenaeus of Lyons, the heresy of Gnosticism in the second century made it necessary for Christians to defend Christian faith by both self-identification – who are we and what do we believe? – and by distinguishing themselves from heresy: how is Christian faith distinct from the alternative accounts?

Where Gnostics focused on duality (between the Old and New Testament; between spirit and matter; between the evil God of the Old Testament and the good God of the New Testament), Irenaeus distinguished catholic Christianity from Gnosticism by focusing on unity: the unity of the Old and New Testaments; the unity of the Creator God of the Old Testament with the redeeming God of the New Testament; the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one triune God; the unity of creation and redemption; the unity of the second-century church in continuity with the church of the first-century apostles; the unity of the church of the apostles as disciples of Jesus Christ in covenant continuity with the community of Israel in the Old Testament.

The Arian heresy of the fourth century led to a crisis about the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. In claiming that Jesus Christ was a creature, Arius raised the crucial theological question that the church had to address concerning on which side of the ontological divide Jesus was located: Is Jesus the Creator or a creature? Over a period of little over a century, christological crises led the church fathers Athanasius of Alexandria, the Cappadocians (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea), and Cyril of Alexandria to formulate the classic Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Over against the Celtic monk Pelagius’s theology of self-salvation, Augustine of Hippo articulated the doctrine that salvation is entirely a free gift of grace, and laid the groundwork for what would be the basic framework of all Western theologies of grace, free will, and salvation.

2) Apologetics: Christian thinkers responded to challenges to Christian faith by non-Christian Gentiles (pagans), Jews, and heretics in ways that led to developments in theology as well. Second-century Apologists such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Origen defended Christian theology against attacks from both pagans and Jews. Augustine’s responses to dualist Manichaeans who denied the goodness of the physical creation and to pagans who blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome led to advances in Christian understandings of the nature of good and evil (The Confessions) as well as a theology of history and the beginnings of Christian political theology (The City of God).

3) Catechesis: Elementary instruction in the content of Christian faith was the third area of theological development. Cyril of Jerusalem (and others) instructed new converts in the subject matter of the Christian faith before they received baptism and became full participating members of the church. Because converts were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, these catechetical instructions tended to have a trinitarian structural outline which eventually became the standard structural shape of later developed theologies.

4) Worship: Finally, preaching and worship were significant sources of early Christian doctrine. Much of the writing of the early fathers consists of sermons, most of which are homilies on the reading of Scripture within the context of worship. These sermons are sources of both early Christian exegesis as well as theology. Prominent examples include the sermons of John Chrysostom as well as (again) Augustine of Hippo.

In addition to the reading of Scripture in the context of worship, the church’s (liturgical) worship itself provided a structure and context for the content of the subject matter of Christian faith. As noted in the previous chapter, modern liturgical scholars are fond of the expression lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of praying is the law of believing), and some liturgical theologians have claimed that the church’s worship is “first theology.”³

The Discipline of Theology and the Three Levels of Knowing and Being

The previous chapter distinguished between the Order of Knowledge (Ordo Cognoscendi) and the Order of Being (Ordo Essendi) at the three levels of (1) symbol and story, (2) history, and (3) ontology. All three levels of knowing and being are reciprocally related. If Christian knowledge begins with level 1, advances in understanding at levels 2 and 3 will have implications for level 1, and vice versa. For example, the Chalcedonian formulation of Christology (Jesus Christ is a single divine person with two natures, one human and one divine) and the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity (God is three persons in one divine nature) led to new ways of reading the Christian story and understanding what it means to be persons. Re-readings of Christian narratives and symbols and new historical discoveries and advances in historiography may have implications for Christian metaphysics and ontology.

As theology is faith seeking understanding (Augustine and Anselm), major advances in Christian theology have taken place as Christian thought has moved from level 1 to level 3: for example, the doctrine of creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo) against Gnostic dualism and Neoplatonic emanationism, the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity (against Arianism), the doctrines of grace (against Pelagianism). While Christian theology has made real advances in the area of ontology (metaphysics), there are also cases where philosophical influence was arguably detrimental, for example, Platonic metaphysical and epistemological dualism, medieval nominalism, and post-Kantian epistemological and metaphysical idealism.

Unlike metaphysics and ontology, critical historical study is largely a modern discipline. Historical criticism was not significantly applied to the Christian story until the modern era, although early examples of historical criticism included such discoveries as the pseudonymity of the writings of (Pseudo) Dionysius the Areopogite or the forgery of the Donation of Constantine. As the tools of historiography that developed first in the nineteenth century were applied to the reading of the Christian Scriptures (“historical-critical method,” so-called “higher” and “lower criticism”) as well as to the history of the church (church history) and theology (historical theology), historical discoveries, historical readings of Scripture, use of tools of modern historiography, as well as the development of modern “historical consciousness” produced significant changes in the ways in which Christians read the Bible, understood their own history, as well as how they did theology.

For example, most modern readings of the New Testament assume the two-source theory (Mark and “Q”) of synoptic Gospel authorship or the non-Pauline authorship of the epistle to the Hebrews. Modern studies of both Old and New Testaments place them within the context of what historians know about the history and culture of the ancient Middle East for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and, for the New Testament, the dominance of Greek culture following the death of Alexander the Great (Hellenism), second temple Judaism, the Roman Empire (pax Romana), and first-century Mediterranean culture as historical background for the reading of the New Testament.

Both history of the church (including developments in theology) after the first century as well as secular history provide a theological context in which theologians do theology, that is, “tradition.” Subsequent history influences how theologians read both Scripture and the church’s earlier tradition. For example, it is almost impossible (but would also be irresponsible) for modern western Christians to read the letters of the apostle Paul without taking into account how Paul has been read by previous figures such as Augustine, or how contrasting interpretations of Paul have played a key role in Reformation-era theological disagreements concerning justification, or the theological significance of the twenty-first century “New Perspective” interpretations of Paul.

Divisions in the church, not only between East and West, but, most significantly, divisions among western Christians between the Roman Catholic church and the churches of the Protestant Reformation, and finally between the Protestant churches themselves, provide a crucial context in which all contemporary theology takes place. There are no living Christians who are members of a non-divided church. Even Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians (who mutually claim identity as Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church) live within the context of division from one another and from the churches of the Reformation. Members of churches that have their historical roots in the Protestant Reformation have to do theology within specific ecclesial traditions that are divided not only from Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but also from one another. Different ecclesial bodies not only have to sort out their own identities and histories, but take into account of and sort out how they will relate to other Christian bodies with their own respective and alternative histories. Contemporary Christian theology thus occurs within a single “tradition,” but a multiplicity of “traditions,” and is necessarily “ecumenical,” at least to the extent that theologians cannot pretend that other Christian ecclesial bodies do not exist.

Not only Christian history, but the history of the non-Christian world also has played a key role in the development of Christian theology: (1) in the pre-Reformation period, the relation between Christianity and pagan philosophies (Platonism and Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism), the relation between Christianity and the other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Islam), (2) after the Protestant Reformation, modern recognition of and interaction with non-Christian cultures and religions and the rise of the missionary movement, and, (3) finally, the collapse of Christendom and the rise not only of Enlightenment rationalism, but of post-Christian post-modern secularism.

In the post-industrial era, the rise of modern science also has created both challenges and opportunities for theology. Although the “war between science and religion” has often been exaggerated, there was a genuine shift from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican understanding of astronomy in the sixteenth century which meant that the earth could no longer be understood to be the literal center of the universe. Modern scientific discoveries of the vast size of the universe along with its extreme age demanded modifications of what were thought to be literal readings of the first chapters of the book of Genesis. Modern evolutionary science has presented more challenges to Christian theology at all three levels of story/symbol, history, and ontology, specifically questions concerning the unique creation of human beings in the image of God and a historical first sin that lies behind the doctrine of original sin. The theological gamut runs from those who view modern science as fundamentally atheistic and a threat to Christian faith to theologians who argue for a “scientific theology” in which modern science and Christian theology are partners.

Crucial Periods in the History of Theology

The following is an outline of crucial periods in the history of theology, along with a short summary of theological issues addressed.

Early Church or Patristic Era

The era of the early church is sometimes designated the patristic era because of the importance of key figures designated as “church fathers,” for example, Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo. Although this period extends approximately from the time of the close of the New Testament canon to the end of the first millennium, the most significant (or at least well-known figures) wrote during the first five centuries. There are, however, significant figures (especially in the Eastern church) who wrote later, for example, John of Damascus, Maximus the Confessor, and Leontius of Byzantium. Despite the term “patristic,” there were significant women theologians and spiritual writers who lived during this period, for example, Macrina, sister of Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa.

Crucial theological issues that were addressed included:

1) The Doctrine of Creation and the Unity of God: Against Gnostic dualism, Irenaeus of Lyons argued that the God who redeemed humanity in Christ is the same God who created the world.

2) The Incarnation: Against the Arian claim that Jesus Christ was only a creature, Athanasius of Alexandria argued that in order to redeem humanity, the incarnate Son of God must be fully God. Against the Nestorian claim that the Son was God “especially present” in the man Jesus, but not personally identified with God (the Logos formed a moral union with the man Jesus), and the Apollinarian claim that the divine Logos had no human mind or soul (the Logos assumed a body, but not full humanity), Cyril of Alexandria and the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon affirmed that in order for God to redeem humanity, the Son must be fully God and fully human, a single divine person with both divine and human natures, including a human intellect and will.

3) The Trinity: Against modalism (much like an actor playing multiple parts, God is a single individual appearing sequentially in the three roles of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) or tritheism (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct beings), patristic Christianity affirmed that God is three distinct persons (hypostases or personae) sharing a single divine nature (ousia or substance).

4) Grace: Against Pelagian claims that natural human free will alone is capable of acquiring salvation, Augustine argued that salvation is entirely the gift of God, and that faith itself is a gift of divine grace.

Medieval Period

The medieval period extends from approximately the beginning of the second millennium until the Protestant Reformation (1000 to 1520).

Medieval scholastics (such as Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas) consolidated the patristic heritage and systematically considered the relation between faith and reason, the doctrines of God, the Trinity, creation, incarnation, atonement, grace and the sacraments. Translations of the writing of Aristotle led to interaction between Christian theology and pagan philosophy, and the rise of Scholasticism. Medieval mystics addressed the relationship between theology and spirituality. Much post-Reformation theology – both Roman Catholic and Protestant – has its roots in this period. The theology of Augustine of Hippo and other patristic theologians was transmitted to the post-Reformation churches through figures such as Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus.

The Protestant and Tridentine Reformations

Although the Protestant Reformation is often considered the beginning of the modern period, the Reformation was just as much a late medieval movement. Besides late medieval theology, the Reformation was also influenced by the social movements of the Renaissance and Humanism. The Reformation is significant not only as the source of identity of the numerous Protestant churches, but also of the Tridentine Roman Catholic church, which distinguished itself from Protestantism by articulating its own self-understanding of Catholic identity at the Council of Trent, and initiated its own attempts at reform. Thus, both the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic church of the Council of Trent could be described as reforming movements in the late medieval western Catholic church, each of which defined themselves as catholic over against the perceived inadequacies of the other. The Reformation period extends approximately from 1500 (including earlier attempts at reform such as conciliarism, as well as groups like the Waldenses) to the end of the Wars of Religion (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries).

The Protestant Reformation addressed theological concerns that had not been addressed previously or at least adequately in the history of theology.

1) The relationship between Scripture, tradition, and reason: Although all Christians affirmed the authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the primary source of theology, it was only at the time of the Reformation that earlier discussions about the relationship between the Scriptures and post-canonical traditions of the church (such as conciliarism) led to definitive and lasting divisions in the western Catholic church as well as disagreement concerning the canonical status of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical intertestamental books.

2) Hermeneutics: a crucial hermeneutical issue concerns not only the proper interpretation of Scripture, but how the church applies the teaching of Scripture in a contemporary setting very different from and hundreds of years after the historical period of the biblical authors. Despite agreement about the primacy and sufficiency of Scripture over against subsequent church tradition, Protestants themselves disagreed about the authority of the church in relationship to Scripture and its interpretation. A fundamental area of disagreement concerned the difference between a permissive (normative) hermeneutic or a restrictive reading of Scripture (the regulative principle) as well as the question of continuity between the Reformation and pre-Reformation church. Were Christians allowed to do anything that Scripture did not forbid, or, rather, were Christians forbidden to do anything that Scripture did not command? Did Reformation Christians consider themselves to be making a radical break from the medieval Catholic church in order to return to the purity of New Testament Christianity, or did Reformation Christians view themselves as reforming and correcting the medieval church but not starting over?

3) Soteriology: Of equal importance to disagreements about the role of Scripture in theology and the relationship between Scripture and tradition were concerns about the appropriation of salvation, specifically the nature of justification and the relation between justification and sanctification.

4) Predestination: Discussion of the theology of justification led to renewed discussion of Augustinian themes of grace, free will, and predestination. There were as many disagreements between Protestants about predestination as there were between Protestants and Roman Catholics concerning justification. However, there were parallel disagreements among Roman Catholics as well, with Bañezian Dominicans, Molinist Jesuits, and Suarezians as much in disagreement with each other as they were with Protestants. In Jansenism, the Roman Catholic church found a form of Augustinian predestinarianism as extreme as anything found among Calvinists.

5) The sacraments: There had occasionally been debates about sacramental theology in the pre-Reformation church, but these became more contentious as the result of the Reformation. All Reformation churches agreed in rejecting Roman Catholic transubstantiation, but often differed as fiercely among themselves concerning sacramental theology as they did with Rome. If not transubstantiation, what did Protestants believe about the manner in which the risen Christ is or is not present in the sacrament? Concerning baptism, some Reformation Christians defended the traditional practice of baptizing the infants of Christian parents, while the “Anabaptists” of the Radical Reformation affirmed exclusively “believer baptism.”

6) Christology: Particularly between Lutherans and the Reformed, different understandings of how the risen Christ is present in the Eucharist turned out to be related to different understandings of the incarnation. Different eucharistic theologies implied different Christologies.

5) The doctrines of the Church, Church authority, Church polity: Breaking with Rome led to reevaluations of how the church should be governed. Protestant polities ran the gamut from Anglican episcopacy to Reformed presbyterianism to Free Church congregationalism. At the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed the centrality and authority of the papacy, and, in the nineteenth century, the first Vatican Council would declare the doctrine of papal infallibility (under certain restricted conditions).

Modernity (1650 to the present)

While the Protestant Reformation led to the collapse of universal papal authority in the West, it did not for the most part lead to the dissolution of close relations between established churches and local governments. Only the Anabaptists advocated an actual separation between church and state, and throughout Western Europe, each national state was closely aligned with a state church. The universal practice of “Erastianism” ceased only with the end of the so-called Wars of Religion. The beginnings of modernity can conveniently be located with the end of the Wars of Religion and the rise of religious tolerance, although other factors also contributed: the rise of the modern state, the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the shift from largely agricultural to largely manufacturing economies, the beginnings of capitalism during the Renaissance, the rise of modern science, the rise of “free thought” and the secularism of the German and French Enlightenments.

Modernity led to a host of new theological concerns.

1) Secularism, the Enlightenment, and pluralism: The collapse of Christendom led to new challenges from anti-Christian and non-Christian alternatives to Christian faith, for example, deism, atheism, and agnosticism.

2) Science: The rise of modern science became a challenge, an alternative to, and a conversation partner for Christian faith.

3) History: The use of modern historical method to study the Scriptures created not only challenges to, but new attempts to formulate Christian faith.

4) Pluralism: The collapse of state establishment of particular Christian churches led to a proliferation of different expressions of Christian faith living alongside one another (denominationalism). While Judaism had existed as a kind of precarious minority religion within Christendom for most of the patristic and medieval period, western exploration of the Americas, Asia, and Africa led to direct contact with other religions besides Christianity. Particularly in the late modern period, immigration from non-Western countries meant that Christians might encounter not only Jews, but Buddhists, Muslims, or Hindus among their neighbors. Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a variety of new religious movements sprang up in western countries, particularly the United States. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, large numbers of people abandoned allegiance to any religious identity whatsoever (the category of the “nones).” In consequence, pluralism is the normal context for the practice of contemporary Christian faith among western Christians, and, for the last several centuries, response to both modernity and pluralism has become a major theological task. Multiple versions of Christian faith (denominationalism), contact with other religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, etc.), and various secular alternatives to Christian culture mean that theology must engage both other Christian (ecumenism) as well as non-Christian conversation partners.

Ironically, at the same time that western Christians have encountered pluralism in the form of both secularism and the immigration of non-western peoples who bring their religions with them, traditional forms of Christianity have seen a kind of explosion of converts in majority world countries. Although systematic theology has largely been a Western project, the vast majority of Christians now live in Asia and the Global South.

5) Modernism (Liberal Protestantism) and fundamentalism are twin but opposed responses to all of the above. For modernism, secularism means that Christian faith must be re-formulated in terms of the demands of modern culture and purged of “supernaturalism,” “miracles,” or exclusivist claims to truth; for “fundamentalists,” the integrity of Christian faith is maintained through “reaction” rather than engagement with modern and post-modern culture.

6) Ecumenism: After hundreds of years of separation, theologians of different Christian traditions now re-engage one with one another, and almost all contemporary theology occurs within an ecumenical context. Theological divisions are often more extreme within Christian denominations than between them.

7) Nationalism and modern and post-modern secular political ideologies: The collapse of Christendom, combined with the emergence of the modern nation-state, capitalism, and pluralism has created a vacuum filled by political ideologies proclaiming not only comprehensive explanations of reality, but also demanding the kind of loyalty previously attached to religion. Ideologies such as conservatism, nationalism, liberalism, progressivism, libertarianism, socialism, and secular versions of feminism, neopatriarchy, diversity, inclusiveness, and racial and sexual forms of identity compete for the loyalty of post-moderns, including within the churches. Navigating these competing loyalties while remaining faithful to Christian identity is a formidable task in the contemporary setting.

Some Classic Christian Theologies

Pre-Reformation

Irenaeus. Against Heresies and Defense of the Apostolic Preaching (the first Christian theologian)

Origen. On First Principles (the first “systematic” theology)

Athanasius. Contra Gentes (Against the Heathen) and De Incarnatione (On the Incarnation)

Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures (Instruction before baptism)

Augustine of Hippo. Enchiridion

John of Damascus. Exposition of the Orthodox Faith

Anselm of Canterbury. Monologian; Proslogian; Cur Deus Homo et al

Richard of St. Victor. On the Trinity

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae

Reformation Theologies

Philip Melanchthon. Loci Communes (Lutheran)

Book of Concord (Lutheran)

John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion (Reformed)

Richard Hooker. Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Anglican)

Jacobus Arminius. Public and Private Disputations (Arminian)

Contemporary Theology

The most significant background factor for modern and contemporary theology has been the Enlightenment, combined with the rise of modern secularism. In philosophy, the Cartesian move to the self that begins with the knowing subject rather than the known object, the critical epistemology of Immanuel Kant accompanied by skepticism about ontology and metaphysics, the ongoing influence of David Hume’s arguments against miracles, the beginnings of historical consciousness, philosophy of history (with Hegel) and modern historicism, the Romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, and the appearance of more recent philosophical movements beginning in the twentieth century such as existentialism, phenomenology, linguistic analysis, analytical philosophy, post-modern deconstruction, communitarianism, and philosophy of science have all influenced contemporary theology, not only as secular antagonists, but also as conversation partners for Christian theologians.

Broadly speaking, three different theological schools represent responses to the modern and post-modern projects. These can be described as “fundamentalism,” “liberalism,” and “critical orthodoxy.” George Hunsinger has designated them “enclave theology,” “academic theology,” and “ecumenical theology.”⁴ They have also been designated as “reactionary,” “revisionist,” and “theologies of retrieval.”⁵

Helmut Thielicke has argued that in every generation there must be a new Christian response to the culture of a new generation. To refer to responses as “conservative” and “modern” or as “traditional” and “progressive” is not helpful because these simply represent quantitative differences along a spectrum rather than addressing specific differences that distinguish the responses. Every theology must relate to the contemporary culture, and is thus “modern.” Every theology, to the extent that it is Christian at all, must find some form of continuity with the past, and is thus “conservative.”⁶

Thielicke focuses instead on the manner in which the contemporary addresses and responds to changes in the current culture, designating three possible responses: reaction, accommodation, and re-actualization.

Reaction “simply transmits traditions in an authoritarian, immature, and mechanical way with no attempts to come to grips with them or to appropriate them.”⁷

Accommodation does not want to give up on Christian faith, but its response is pragmatic. Accommodation calls the truth “under me” and lets me be its form. The “ill-cutting garment” is cut to suit oneself. The approach is pragmatic in that “it assigns truth the function of being the means whereby I master life.”⁸

Actualization rather consists in a “new interpretation of truth.” The truth remains intact, and the hearer is called “under the truth” in a new time and a new situation. Theology challenges the contemporary to “make corrections” and to “return afresh to its kerygmatic theme.”⁹ Thielicke designates these three responses as “Fundamentalist,” “Cartesian,” and “non-Cartesian.”

Fundamentalism/Enclave Theology

Thomas Oden distinguishes “fundamentalism” from classical theology as a modern movement that began in the nineteenth century in reactionary response to the crises of modernity: historical-critical study of Scripture, modern science (especially evolution), and rising secularism.¹⁰

Fundamentalism as a form of “conservatism” is a “reactionary attachment to the past.” Reference to the present is negated, but ironically an “artificial modernity” often provides a “pedagogical substitute” for actual engagement. The approach is “pseudo-conservative” in that it evades contemporary questioning, while it simultaneously abounds in association with the life of the age through appropriation of technological innovation, advertising slogans, or contemporary musical styles.¹¹ In the more recent cultural setting, one thinks of the rise and fall of “seeker services.”

So ironically, fundamentalism embraces characteristics of modernity while reacting against it. This can be seen in the following ways.

Fundamentalism tends to follow the methodological foundationalism introduced by Descartes in the adoption of an apologetic that in paradoxical ways reflects the concerns of deism. Theology tends not to place its center in the triune God central to Christian faith, but in the defense of a doctrine of God as a metaphysical “first cause.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not at the center of soteriology, but serves primarily as an epistemological proof of Jesus’ divine identity. In the area of soteriology, atonement is too often reduced to Jesus’ substitutionary death on the cross to the neglect of not only Jesus’ earthly mission, but also the significance of Jesus’ permanent humanity in the doctrines of the ascension and the risen Christ’s continuing mediation and personal presence in the church. A concern with the defense of the historicity of miracles and the “inerrant” inspiration of Scripture serves primarily to provide epistemological certainty as guarantees of the infallibility of divine revelation.

Fundamentalism also tends toward a lack of engagement with the historic creedal center of Christianity. Its soteriology tends to a kind of reductionist account of sin and conversion. There is a loss of both the doctrines of creation and of the significance of God’s covenant with Israel and of the Old Testament. In common with modernity, fundamentalism tends toward an anthropological center, focusing on questions of individual salvation. The relative absence of a doctrine of creation ecclesiology leads to the loss of reflection on the relation of church to culture. Exclusive focus on individual conversion leads to loss of historic Christian spirituality and ethics as well as a theology of worship.

Finally, fundamentalism tends to be insular, defining Christianity in terms of each tradition’s specific historical institutions. According to George Hunsinger, “enclave” theology tends to place the center of its theology in its own confessional distinctives.¹² (There are thus versions of “fundamentalism” or “enclave” theology in every ecclesial tradition, but these are mutually antagonistic, for example Baptists and Lutherans on infant baptism, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox on the papacy.)

Revisionist Theology

Revisionist Theology is the successor to (or just another name for) “liberal Protestantism” or “Catholic modernism.” Liberal theology finds its historical origins in Friedrich Schleiermacher, the “father” of liberal Protestant theology, who combined the Pietist tendency to interpret the subject matter of Christianity in terms of the experience of faith with a Neo-Kantian theory of knowledge. Schleiermacher combined pietist spirituality with Kantian epistemology to conclude that the object of Christianity was religious experience. There could be no knowledge of God in himself but only of God as experienced in human consciousness. The object of Christian religious experience was the “feeling” of absolute dependence on God. George Lindbeck designated liberalism as “experiential-expressivism.”¹³

In its numerous variations, Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic appeared repeatedly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the underlying substructure of liberal Protestant theology. Later liberal theologians include Paul Tillich, the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, Roman Catholic David Tracy, “mainstream” feminist theologians such as Sallie McFague and Elizabeth Johnson, and popular theologians such as Episcopal bishop John Spong and New Testament scholar Marcus Borg.

Revisionist theology places a great deal of emphasis on theological methodology, which must be faced “at the outset.” It also recognizes the importance and significance of modernity. Revisionist theologians tend to identify Christian faith with a “pre-textual experience of ultimate reality.” They tend to “bypass the Bible” to get back to the initial experience of the divine behind the text. Revisionist theology assumes that modernity has made much traditional Christian theology problematic, and that theology must find a way to accommodate the contemporary insights of science, feminism, the social sciences, etc.¹⁴

Revisionist theology is “Cartesian” in that it locates its starting point with the “addressee.” A primary concern is the process of appropriation. While there are various approaches, Cartesian theology focuses on the “adult self,” which has “come of age.”¹⁵ Cartesian theology tends to reduce the content of theology to anthropology, which becomes a kind of filter through which the message is reinterpreted in an attempt to avoid a heteronomous authoritarian tradition.¹⁶ A preliminary anthropology serves as the prolegomena to theology in a manner similar to the way in which the Old Testament had functioned in traditional theology.¹⁷

If classical theology since Irenaeus has focused on the unity of the subject matter of theology, liberalism is marked by a hermeneutic of “discontinuity.” Liberalism tends to see discontinuity between the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith” (the confessional Christ of Christian dogma), between the earliest Christian community as followers of Jesus and the later “orthodox” church (second century “Catholicism”), between Christian “orthodoxy” and authentic religious experience.

In the area of metaphysics, revisionist theology is an example of what Charles Taylor has called living in the “immanent frame.”¹⁸ The immanent frame is a kind of epistemological and sociological “natural order” in contrast to a “supernatural” or “transcendent” world. Within the immanent frame, everything that happens can be explained in terms of immanent causality, and the divine does not intervene. Liberal theology reflects the immanent frame in that it tends toward a metaphysical monism and rejection of divine intervention. Its doctrine of God tends to be panentheist at best, and its Christology adoptionist. (There are no miracles; God did not literally become incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead.)

Finally, revisionism answers the fundamental theological question concerning soteriology – What does it mean that Jesus saves? – by embracing an illustrativist understanding of the atonement. The person and work of Jesus Christ are not uniquely constitutive of salvation: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus do not create a unique salvation available nowhere else, but rather illustrate a salvation that is available elsewhere, or perhaps even everywhere. Jesus is not the only way to salvation, but is at most one way among others, or is perhaps the way of salvation for Christians, but not necessarily for everyone.

Critical Orthodoxy/ Theologies of Retrieval

What has been identified above as “critical orthodoxy” and Hunsinger has called “ecumenical theology,” John Webster designates as “Theologies of Retrieval.”¹⁹ These have also been labeled “post-liberal,” “post-critical,” “post-conservative,” “post-modern orthodoxy,” “restorationist,” “ressourcement” theologies, and “Evangelical Catholic” or “Catholic Evangelical” theologies.

Thielicke used the term “non-Cartesian” to describe this response to modernity. The approach is “conservative,” but does so through critical and contemporaneous appropriation, or, as mentioned above, actualization. The concern is not with mere repetition, but with “reproduction,” not mere quotation, but with “re-presentation,” making the witness of faith “contemporary to the present generation.” Because old truth has to be set in a new present, there is a theological history, not a timeless “perennial theology.”²⁰

Thus Thielicke prefers the term “non-Cartesian” rather than “conservative.” While the present situation and its questions must be considered, they cannot become normative, but rather must be recast and transcended in encounter with the Bible and the church’s historical texts. In correction of the liberal concern with appropriation, one’s individual reception of faith is not what makes something an event. In salvation, the Holy Spirit points us away from the self and its preconditions, directs us to the Scriptural word, but also orients us to the person and work of Jesus Christ – who exists prior to us and outside us, but also includes us.²¹

Theologies of retrieval believe that the mainstream theological response to the Enlightenment critique of Christian religion tended to distance theology from its proper subject matter and its connection to the past. In addition, these theologies tend to view pre-modern Christian theology as a resource rather than a problem. The only way adequately to address the modern (and post-modern) cultural situation is through re-appropriation of classical Christian teaching about God and his relation to the world.²²

These are then theologies of Ressourcement. They view the history of Christian thought and practice as the field of the Spirit’s operation in the church. They find resources in the theological study of Scripture, in historic theological figures such as the church fathers, especially Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Augustine, in Thomas Aquinas for Roman Catholics (and many non-Catholics), in Luther and Calvin (for Protestants), and, for Anglicans, figures such as Thomas Cranmer, Richard Hooker, and the Caroline Divines.

Evangelical catholic theologies of retrieval tend to be critical of previous theology for focusing too much on some doctrines (for example, anthropology) while neglecting others (such as the doctrine of the Trinity and creation). They tend to view the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation as central for theology and admire patristic theologians such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, and Augustine of Hippo.²³

There is also for these thinkers an expansion of the doctrine of the church. The very possibility of Christian theology is the mystery of salvation, and since salvation is communion with the triune God, there can be no theology that is not rooted in the practices of the church – practices of worship, prayer, and Christian ethics.²⁴

Modern examples of theologians of retrieval would include (among Protestants) Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, Thomas Oden, Leslie Newbigin, George Hunsinger, Robert Jenson, James K. A. Smith, and Kevin Vanhoozer, (among Roman Catholics) Hans Urs von Balthasar, Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Matthew Levering, and (among Anglicans), Arthur Michael Ramsey, Austin Farrer, E. L. Mascall, Stephen Sykes, Robert Webber, John Webster, N.T. Wright, Ephraim Radner, and Hans Boursma.

Modern/Contemporary Theology and the Three Levels of Knowing and Being

The diversity of approaches to theology in the modern period could lead to the conclusion that modern theology is lacking in coherence and there is no way to decide between various approaches. A generation ago, two books in the late twentieth century had already documented this variety. David H. Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology summarized seven basic approaches, each represented by a different “case study”: doctrine as content (B. B. Warfield); concepts as content (Hans-Werner Bartsch); historical recital (G. Ernest Wright); narrative rendering (Karl Barth); image and mystery (L. S. Thornton); religious symbol (Paul Tillich); myth and self-understanding (Rudolf Bultmann). Kelsey focused on the theological use of Scripture, concluding that there is “no one ‘standard’ concept ‘scripture.’” Moreover, there is no one standard of “normative” meaning or “authority,” and, in “actual practice,” Scripture is “concretely construed in irreducibly different ways.”²⁵

Avery Dulles’s Models of Revelation documented five different models: revelation as doctrine (B. B. Warfield), as history (G. Ernest Wright, Oscar Cullmann, and Wolfhart Pannenberg), as inner experience (Friedrich Schleiermacher, early C. H. Dodd, Karl Rahner), as dialectical presence (Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann), and as new awareness (Gregory Baum, Gabriel Moran, Paul Tillich).²⁶ Dulles added his own approach to this list: revelation as “symbolic mediation.”²⁷

Additional approaches have appeared in the following generation, and the dizzying variety could lead to despair of sorting it all out. How does one decide which if any of so many theological approaches is the correct one?

The distinction between the three levels of knowing (ordo cognoscendi) and being (ordo essendi) discussed in the previous chapter, correlated with the three distinct ways in which theologians have responded to modernity – reaction (fundamentalist), accommodation (revisionist), and actualization (retrieval/ressourcement) – can help provide a way toward a unified discussion. Modern approaches to theology have tended to focus on one or the other of the three levels of knowing and being.

The following chart indicates the broad approaches of recent theology.

 

Any of the three basic theological approaches in the first column can be combined with any one or more of the emphases in the second column. There can thus be Fundamentalist, Revisionist, or Retrieval theologies that focus on either Story and Symbol, History, or Ontology, or any combination of the three. The following will focus primarily on different theologies of Ressourcement/ Retrieval or “critical orthodoxy.”

Level 1: Story and Symbol

The last generation has seen numerous theological approaches focused on the first level – the level in which we come to know and live out Christian faith within the context of reading Scripture, and through worship, prayer, and Christian ethics within the life of the church. In the reading of Scripture, the focus is on the final form of the canonical text as it has been received by the church.

A number of earlier twentieth-century theologians emphasized the significance of “symbol” or “metaphor” in theology, particularly among Roman Catholics and Anglicans. Edwin Bevan wrote in his Gifford Lectures of religious symbols that convey knowledge of the things they symbolize.²⁸ Anglican Lionel Thornton focused on the typological interpretation of biblical images in his three-volume work on Christology.²⁹ Another Anglican, Austin Farrer, combined metaphysics and poetry in his Bampton lectures The Glass of Vision, and the use of images and typology in A Rebirth of Images.³⁰ Roman Catholic theologian Avery Dulles made the case for theology as “symbolic communication” at the end of the twentieth century.³¹

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, “narrative theology” was the successor to an earlier emphasis on salvation-history (to be discussed below). Earlier influences on what became narrative theology included Karl Barth’s “The Judge Judged in Our Place” in his discussion of the doctrine of the Atonement in Church Dogmatics IV/1 as well as H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Meaning of Revelation.³² Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature anticipated later discussion by contrasting the biblical texts’ narrative presentation of truth with that of Homeric literature.³³ Narrative theology brought together the narrative genre of many biblical texts, the notion of self-identity as a narrative process that takes place over time, and the recent recovery of “virtue ethics” to speak of Christian theology as a way of telling the “Christian story.”³⁴ Narrative theology was often associated with the “post-liberal” theology of the “Yale School” of theologians such as George Lindbeck, Hans Frei, and the Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas.³⁵ Incorporating linguistic insights from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, narrative theologians adopted literary categories that included not only “story,” but also such notions as the “grammar” of Christian faith.³⁶

Similar to and building on the contributions of narrative theology was an adoption of the category of drama. Anglican apologist Dorothy L. Sayers earlier correlated theology with drama in her essays “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Dogma is the Drama,” as did Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulèn in The Drama and the Symbols.³⁷ Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar articulated a dramatic interpretation of redemption as Theo-Drama in the five-volume center of his sixteen-volume systematic theology.³⁸ Evangelical theologian Kevin J. Vanhoozer echoed von Balthasar’s influence in The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology. Vanhoozer endorsed a “non-reductive” reading of theology that resists “privileging any one biblical literary form,” a weakness he found in narrative theology: “The model of drama opens up a way to view Scripture in the most elastic terms of God’s dialogical action, where saying is a form of doing.” Theo-drama includes not only a series of “divine entrances and exits,” especially pertaining to God’s action in Jesus Christ, but also theology itself as a response corresponding to God’s word and deed in the form of human action or “improvisation.”³⁹

In contrast to traditional approaches that structure theology around one of the two first traditional Platonic transcendentals of either the “True” (Doctrine) or the “Good” (Ethics), von Balthasar’s multi-volume systematic theology engages theology in light of the third transcendental of the “Beautiful.” Von Balthasar labeled this approach as “Theological Aesthetics.”⁴⁰

Also associated with the erstwhile “Yale School” is the “canonical approach” of the biblical scholar Brevard S. Childs. In contrast to previous historical-critical readings of Scripture that postulated a reconstruction of the history behind the text, the “canonical approach” focused on the “final form” of the biblical texts (that is the final redacted form in which the biblical texts were received by the church), the relation of the various biblical texts to each other to form a single canon of Scripture, and especially on the Bible as a two-testament canon, again, in contrast to theologies that neglect the Old Testament.⁴¹

Influenced by and echoing Childs’s canonical approach, a recent emphasis on “figurative reading” attempts to bring together the two-testament canon, history, and ontology. Although somewhat critical of both narrative theology and historical-critical readings, a case could be made that figurative reading combines elements of both story and history insofar as it attempts to find a pattern of historical and analogical correlation between typological events in the Old Testament and their New Testament anti-types. Fundamentally, figurative reading makes the case for a narrative and symbolic unity between the Old and New Testaments grounded in both history and ontology.⁴²

Canonical theism is a movement associated with the late Methodist theologian William J. Abraham. Canonical theism challenges the notion of canon as an epistemic criteria concerned with justification, rationality, and knowledge, and, specifically, the role of such notions as Scripture alone fulfilling that function. To the contrary, canonical theism appeals to the multiple ecclesial canons of creed, Scripture, doctrine, liturgy, the Fathers, bishops, iconography, and the sacraments. These function not as epistemic criteria, but soteriologically, and are given by the Holy Spirit as means of grace and salvation within the Christian community, the church. The primary purpose of these multiple canons is to integrate practitioners into the life of God, not to provide epistemological warrants for doctrine. Canonical theism gives priority to ontology over epistemology in the sense that it relegates epistemic warrants to a secondary concern, insisting that the purpose of the various canons is to initiate Christians into the life of faith through baptism, to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church, and to be converted to a life of holiness. At the same time, within the structure of the three levels of knowing and being, canonical theism clearly belongs within level one – the level of narrative and symbol – insofar as canonical theism is primarily concerned with those ecclesial canons that make possible a knowledge and love of God within the spiritual life, worship, and ethics that take place within the life of the church today.⁴³

Finally, liturgical theology is a movement associated with the “liturgical renewal” movement of the mid-twentieth century, an ecumenical movement that included figures in all of the major Christian churches that practice liturgical worship – Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, to a lesser extent Reformed and Methodist – and its influence. Liturgical theology is systematic theological reflection that addresses the theological meaning of the specific texts, actions, and order of liturgical worship, but also reflects theologically on the general meaning of liturgy or worship. Liturgical theologians are concerned about the relationship between faith and worship – lex orandi lex credendi (the order of prayer is the order of believing) – and some liturgical theologians distinguish between liturgy as the primary form of theology, with systematic theological reflection as a secondary order of theology flowing out of the church’s worship.⁴⁴

Level 2: History

All of the above approaches belong to the first level of knowing and being, and each touches on some aspect of how we come to know and love God within the context of the church – through the symbolic, narrative, dramatic or typological interpretation of Scripture, through worship and prayer, and through Christian ethics. However, at the heart of Christian faith is the assertion that God has acted, has done something. The “good news” that the gospel refers to is an event or rather a series of events – that God has created the world and in that world has made humanity in his image, that God is Immanuel (“God with us”) first in covenant with Israel, and then most definitively in the Word Incarnate (Jesus Christ) and, finally, God has become present in the church through the giving of the Holy Spirit. Theology then must address the level of this history in which God has acted. That history is at the heart of Christian faith – it is of the essence or sache, the scope (skopos) of faith, summarized in the Rule of Faith and the trinitarian structure of the creeds. The symbols, narratives, biblical canon, and practices of the church refer beyond themselves to a particular concrete history.

That God has revealed himself by acting in the history of Israel, in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and through the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church was a major theme in numerous writers associated with “biblical theology” in the early and mid-twentieth century. This earlier biblical theology “movement” distinguished itself from systematic theology by attempting to describe the actual theology of the biblical authors in their historical development rather than as a summary of post-biblical confessional statements, from the history of religion (often associated with liberal Protestantism) as describing the (non-theological) merely human history of Israel’s religion, and from earlier orthodoxy by engaging seriously with modern tools of historical criticism.⁴⁵

A crucial concern of these scholars was the recognition that the Bible is not a story about merely human experience, but that in the biblical text God appears regularly as an active participant who speaks, acts, makes promises, judges sin, and has a gracious purpose for humanity, something that caused embarrassment for many modern biblical scholars.⁴⁶ The title of G. Ernest Wright’s book The God Who Acts made clear that biblical theology was “a theology of recital or proclamation of the acts of God, together with the inferences drawn therefrom.”⁴⁷ Wright was criticized for making a “strange” separation between God’s acting ands speaking,⁴⁸ but other scholars made clear that revelation included both divine acting and speaking.⁴⁹ Oscar Cullman wrote a lengthy defense of “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) as “the essence of the Christian message common to all New Testament books” in Salvation in History. Themes in Cullman’s book include the mutual relationship between event and interpretation, the crucial significance of the Old Testament for Christian faith, making clear that faith in Christ is a faith in a history of salvation and not faith in a “punctilinear” event, the salvation-historical tension between “already” and “not yet” as a key to understanding New Testament salvation history, and Jesus Christ as the “mid-point” of salvation history, looking back to the history of Israel, and forward to the church and eschatology.⁵⁰

In the area of systematic theology, a group of then younger theologians associated with Wolfhart Pannenberg published Revelation as History, claiming that God’s self-revelation is made known by God’s historical acts, that revelation is only complete at the end of history, and that this final revelation of God’s deity has been anticipated in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.⁵¹ Pannenberg became one of the leading theologians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and he continued to defend a theology of revelation as history throughout his career.⁵²

More recent and contemporary biblical scholars and theologians do not follow slavishly in the tracks of the earlier salvation history school, but nonetheless continue the theme of combining biblical theology with an affirmation of divine revelation in the history of Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church. Systematic theologian William Abraham made the case for revelation as both divine acting and speaking in Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism.⁵³ In the area of Old Testament studies, Walter Moberly is a more recent contributor to combining Old Testament theology with historical reading.⁵⁴ N. T. Wright and Ben Witherington III have written numerous commentaries, historical studies, as well as their own New Testament theologies. Other New Testament scholars who combine historical readings of Scripture with commitment to orthodox Christian faith include Richard Bauckham, Marcus Bockmuehl, and Larry Hurtado.

Level 3: Ontology

The key insight of a Christian ontology is that God is in himself who he is in his revelation. The God who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation must be triune in himself if God’s revelation in history is a true revelation of his character. The title of Eric L. Mascall’s book He Who Is makes the claim for ontology that G. Ernest Wright’s book God Who Acts made for history.⁵⁵

The twentieth and twenty-first century have been the occasion of renewed interest in Christian ontology or metaphysics. Broadly speaking, theologians, philosophers, and philosophical theologians have included defenses of what is sometimes disparagingly and misleading called “classical theism,” as well as revisionist alternatives.

Traditional Christian ontology has been defended primarily by the two schools of Thomist metaphysics and followers of Karl Barth’s ontology.

Modern Thomism originates in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (Aug. 4, 1879) calling for the restoration of “Christian philosophy,” and a return especially to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Contemporary Thomist scholars include theologians as much as philosophers, and significant contributions have appeared in the areas of the theology of creation, the doctrines of God and the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the theologies of grace and the sacraments.⁵⁶

One of Karl Barth’s major contributions to theology was his return to the traditional order of the doctrine of God, beginning with the doctrine of the Trinity (especially the economic Trinity) prior to discussing the One God.⁵⁷ Barth’s influence has led to a Trinitarian revival in modern theology, not only among Protestants, but among Roman Catholics and even the Orthodox.⁵⁸

The relation between Barth’s Trinitarian theology and his doctrine of election has led to a division among Barthian scholars, with some interpreting Barth as consistent with traditional Trinitarian theology, while others have made the argument for a “revisionist” metaphysics, subordinating the doctrine of the Trinity to the doctrine of election.⁵⁹

There have been significant challenges to so-called “classical theism,” whether that of Thomists or Barthians, especially concerning such traditional positions as the immutability or impassibility of God. In the mid-twentieth century, “process theology,” associated with liberal Protestantism, embraced a metaphysics of process (following Alfred North Whitehead), in which everything changes (is in “process”), including God.⁶⁰

The school of analytical theology, influenced largely by Alvin Plantinga and “Reformed epistemology” applies the methodology of analytical philosophy to theology, including (in some cases), a “possible worlds” metaphysic.⁶¹ Among evangelicals, “Openness of God” theology is a group of evangelical philosophers and theologians largely connected with the analytical school, who have challenged traditional “classical theism,” especially the notions of divine immutability and foreknowledge.⁶²

Finally, there have been theologians who have engaged with other schools of modern philosophy, for example, the linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein or phenomenology.⁶³

Conclusion

The variety of approaches in modern and contemporary theology could leave the reader with a paralysis arising from the sheer number of possibilities from which to choose. A generation ago, concerns were already being expressed over the speed with which “movements” come and go in theology, and the above summary makes clear that recent years have provided only additional options.⁶⁴ The number of choices is complicated by the tendency of theologians to dismiss alternatives other than their own as illegitimate. A previous generation of biblical theologians criticized earlier “orthodoxy” for trying to demonstrate the inner coherence of Scripture through collation of proof-texts combined with extensive systems of typology. They accused systematic theologians of imposing dogmatic schemes onto the reading of Scripture, and thus intruding “alien ideas” rather than following along the lines of the biblical texts.⁶⁵ One of the goals of the historical approach was to free theology from the “propositional dogmatics” of those who systematized Scripture through patterns of thought “foreign to its own nature,” of being “more Hellenic than Hebrew,” of disregarding the variety, change, and flexibility in the biblical texts.⁶⁶

In the following generation, advocates of a “narrative interpretation” of Scripture in turn criticized the previous historical-critical readings for driving a wedge between the Scripture’s narrative sense (“literal meaning”), and a hypothetically constructed historical reading (“historical referent”), and a “religious meaning” distinct from both. To recognize Jesus Christ as the subject matter of both testaments is different from discerning their unity in a “history of salvation.”⁶⁷ Canonical interpreters of Scripture subsequently criticized “narrative” readings as “abstraction[s],” existing apart from the “canonical form” of a Two-Testament Bible.⁶⁸ To bring things full circle, narrative theologians were also criticized for turning God into a “story,” for substituting human talk about God for the theological (ontological) realism of knowing God as Trinity.⁶⁹

A correlation between the three levels of ordo cognoscendi and ordo essendi combined with Hilary of Poitier’s dictum “The word is subject to the reality, not the reality to the word” (Non sermoni res, sed rei sermo subiectus est) could perhaps provide both order and guidance through the apparent maze. Each of the modern and more recent approaches summarized above finds its location in one of the three specific areas of the order of knowing and being. Each approach also demands specific skills, and scholars who have specific areas of expertise understandably tend to interpret Scripture and theology through their areas of competence. Advocates of literary readings will emphasize more the narrative and symbolic dimensions of the text of scripture. Skilled exegetes will be more concerned with a careful literal reading of the biblical text in its final form. The historically trained will inevitably investigate the historical referential matter of Scripture within its own historical and cultural context. Philosophers and ethicists will be more likely to emphasize either the ontological referents of the subject matter of Christian faith (metaphysics and ontology) or the significance of Scripture, worship, and prayer for Christian ethical and spiritual formation – moral theology, liturgical theology, spirituality.

In addition, the tendencies of scholars to focus on a specific area can lead to imbalance that will be corrected in the next generation. It should not be surprising that an almost exclusive emphasis on historical-critical method in the early and mid-twentieth century was succeeded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by symbolic, narrative, dramatic, and figural “canonical” readings that locate normativity in the final form of the biblical text over against readings that attempted to reconstruct a history “behind the text.” At the same time, historical-critical readings continue, and, as noted above, there also has been a renewed emphasis on the ontological subject matter of Christian faith: the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, Christian anthropology, theologies of grace and the sacraments. Perhaps varieties of approach could be understood to complement rather than compete with one another.⁷⁰

In light of this continuing plurality of theological approaches, Hilary’s dictum should serve as a reminder that while theology always begins with worship, with prayer, and with reading Scripture within the context of the church’s worship, the subject matter of the biblical texts is referential. The canonical witness of the Old and New Testaments texts refers beyond the texts themselves both to the economic Trinity (the historical revelation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the history of Israel, of Jesus, and the church), and from there to the immanent Trinity (the triune God as eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in se). Theologians cannot be content then to leave things with level 1 (the level of epistemology): narrative, canonical, or typological readings of Scripture within the settings of the church’s worship, or with liturgical theologies, Christian ethics, or church mission. There is an historical priority to God’s revelation in history as well as an ontological priority in God’s own trinitarian existence. In terms of a theology of both knowledge of God as well as redemption and grace, the triune God acting and speaking in historical events as well as God’s own tripersonal reality in itself have priority over our response in both knowledge and worship of God. Much like John the Baptist in Grunewald’s famous triptych, theology must point away from itself to the crucified Jesus Christ, to the God who meets us in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, because God is first Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from all eternity.