The Domain of the Word

Scripture and Theological Reason

John Webster

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780567304278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

The book brings together a set of related studies on the nature of Scripture and of Christian theology by one of the most prominent representatives of Protestant theology of our time. After a brief introduction on the setting of the book and its major themes, the first part of the volume examines topics on the nature and interpretation of Scripture. A comprehensive proposal about Scripture and its interpretation is followed by a study of Scripture as the embassy of the risen Christ, and by three related chapters analyzing the ways in which widely different major modern theologians (Barth, T.F. Torrance and Rowan Williams) have understood the nature and interpretation of the Bible. The second part of the volume makes a cumulative proposal about the nature and tasks of Christian theology, examining the fundamental principles of systematic theology, the distinctive role and scope of reason in Christian theology, the relation of theology to the humanities, and the vocation of theology to promote the peace of the church.

PART ONE

Scripture

1

The domain of
the Word

(1) The nature of Scripture

I

Holy Scripture and its interpretation are elements in the domain of the Word of God. That domain is constituted by the communicative presence of the risen and ascended Son of God who governs all things. His governance includes his rule over creaturely intelligence: he is Lord and therefore teacher. In fulfilment of the eternal purpose of God the Father (Eph. 1.9, 11), and by sending the Spirit of wisdom and revelation (Eph. 1.17), the Son sheds abroad the knowledge of himself and of all things in himself. He completes his saving mercies by making known to lost creatures their true end in the knowledge, love and enjoyment of God. In the domain of Christ’s rule and revelation, Holy Scripture is the embassy of the prophets and apostles. Through their service, and quickened to intelligent and obedient learning by the Holy Spirit, the communion of saints is instructed by the living Christ. And so it is in terms of their occupancy of and function in this domain – in the economy of grace and revelation – that we are to consider the nature of Scripture and what may fittingly be expected of those who hear it in faith.

Some preliminaries: First, a prudent theology will treat questions concerning the nature and interpretation of Scripture indirectly, that is, as corollaries of more primary theological teaching about the relation of God and creatures: this, because Scripture is (for example) part of God’s providential supplying of the life of the church, and we will remain unclear about Scripture as long as we are unclear about God, providence and church. Indeed, part of the strain evident in some modern conceptions of Scripture and hermeneutics originates in their unhappy alienation from their proper doctrinal habitat: uprooted, they find themselves exposed, lacking the resources afforded by a larger theological and spiritual environment, and so unable to flourish. This fate they share, of course, with the doctrine of revelation which has suffered similar dislocation; in both cases, disarray is overcome in part by restoring them to their proper subordinate place.

Second, the order in which the two divisions of the topic are treated is of some consequence: bibliology is prior to hermeneutics. Theology talks of what the biblical text is and what the text does before talking of who we are and what we do with the text, and it talks about what the text is and does by talking of God as Scripture’s author and illuminator.

Third, theology must keep alert to the spiritual dimensions of the topic, especially in reaching judgements about what we may perhaps consider present disarray in theology and exegesis. Accounts of Scripture and its interpretation which are governed by a theology of the divine economy were the common currency of the premodern church, but remain at the margins of some dominant tendencies in contemporary theological work. Their recovery in patristic and mediaeval historical theology and in some dogmatics is cause for gratitude and ground for hope. But the question remains: Why does this construal of Scripture and its interpretation still prove rather difficult of access? Why is it that a theological culture, which in other respects has shown itself so sophisticated and so eager to expose the pathology of modernity, is often unexercised over these matters? Much might be said in this connection about the retardant effect of intellectual custom and institutional arrangements such as the fourfold division of the theological curriculum. But more needs to be said, most of all about the spiritual history of modern theology. Over the course of that history, certain habits of thought – entered into, often enough, with a good will and a clear conscience, and with genuine desire to advance the work of the church and its theology – have in some measure benumbed theology, made it sluggish in conceiving and pursuing its proper end in fellowship with God. Whether done well or ill, theology and the study of Scripture are spiritual tasks, and the conditions for their flourishing include spiritual conditions. Pathologies of modern reason applied to the Bible must, therefore, do rather more than simply identify an intellectual fall from grace (such as those whose chief culprits are Scotus and Spinoza), for there is only one fall, that of Adam; all alike share his contempt for the Word of God, all our history – including all our theological history – suffers from what he unleashed into the world. In the matter of the theology of Scripture and its interpretation, the imperative of reconciliation with God needs to be kept in view.

Fourth, however, we ought not to approach these matters as if we found ourselves at a point of particularly acute declension in the history of theology and exegesis. This, because theology takes place in the domain of the Word of God, and in that domain the living Christ rules. He is not defeated by theological reason’s defection. Theological and hermeneutical work is enclosed by the promise of Christ’s instruction. It is a principle of Augustine’s hermeneutics that God, ‘being asked, gives understanding, who gave his Word unasked’.¹ Despite our treachery against the divine Word, we may have ‘hope and confidence’ because we are ‘invited to understand him’.² There is no need to proceed in gloomy or acrimonious fashion as if the gift of the Word had not been given and received by the church. The domain of the Word is the domain of grace; God has not ‘abandoned us as contemptible’.³ Revealing grace is ruling grace, even now overcoming our resistance; the gracious divine Word enriches ‘with all speech and all knowledge’ (1 Cor. 1.5).

II

To simplify matters rather drastically: a dominant trajectory in the modern development of study of the Bible has been a progressive concentration on what Spinoza called interpretation of Scripture ex ipsius historia, out of its own history.⁴ Precisely when this progression begins to gather pace, and what its antecedents may be, are matters of rather wide dispute. What is clear, at least in outline, is that commanding authority gradually came to be accorded to the view that the natural properties of the biblical text and of the skills of interpreters are elements in an immanent economy of communication. The biblical text is a set of human signs borne along on, and in turn shaping, social, religious and literary processes; the enumeration of its natural properties comes increasingly to be not only a necessary but a sufficient description of the Bible and its reception.⁵ This definition of the text in terms of its (natural) history goes along with suspension of or disavowal of the finality both of the Bible and of the reader in loving apprehension of God, and of the Bible’s ministerial function as divine envoy to creatures in need of saving instruction. To speak of the historia Scripturae is to say that Scripture is what human persons author, and that its interpretation is what human persons do to get at the meaning so authored. In describing authoring or interpreting, language about God is superfluous, or merely ornamental, or invoked only as the remotest background condition for human communication. Further, priority is given to the generic features of the biblical writings and their interpretation – the features which they share with other texts and acts of interpretation – over the particular situation in which they function – the situation, that is, of divine instruction. That situation is epiphenomenal: most basically, the ontology of the Bible and that of its readers is that of pure nature. Thus, for example, the category of ‘text’, with its linguistic, semantic and literary properties, comes to play a different role in modern study of the Bible from that which it plays in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana. For Augustine, the text’s linguistic, semantic and literary properties are signa mediating divine instruction, whereas for moderns they are not underlain by anything other than the processes of authorship or the history of religion. Even when the category of ‘text’ is supplemented by those of ‘scripture’⁶ or ‘canon’,⁷ these refer largely to the use of and ascription of value to texts, and carry no metaphysical weight. Running parallel to the naturalization of the text there is the ‘deregionalization’ of practices of interpretation, a standardization of its operations and ends which takes its rise in a natural anthropology of the interpreter and interpretative reason. Nor are matters helped much by supplementary talk of ‘God’s “use” of the church’s use of scripture’,⁸ for here God’s agency remains consequent rather than initiatory.

Countering the hegemony of pure nature in bibliology and hermeneutics requires appeal to the Christian doctrine of God, and thus of God’s providential ordering of human speech and reason. Within the divine economy, the value of the natural properties of texts, and of the skills and operations of readers, does not consist in their self-sufficiency but in their appointment as creaturely auxiliaries through which God administers healing to wasted and ignorant sinners. What more may be said of this economy of revelation and redemption of which Scripture is a function?⁹

III

When we speak of the divine economy, we say that finite being and acts (including textual and intellectual acts) are willed, governed and directed by God, who is their prime and final cause. The external works of the Holy Trinity are the orderly enactment of the absolutely original and antecedent purpose of God the Father, namely, his purpose that the eternal movement of God’s own glory will include his glorifying of himself by glorifying creatures, that is, by giving, conserving and perfecting created life. Creatures are just that – creatures, having their being in this divine gift and the movement to which it gives rise. Created nature is this history, moved over time to its appointed perfection by the will and work of God.

The economy is constituted by the missions of the eternal Son and the Holy Spirit. In the Word made flesh – in the eternal Son who is intrinsic to God’s very being, and who becomes a creature, so gathering to himself all created being – ‘all things hold together’ (Col. 1.17). By him creation is constituted as an ordered unity, because he is the one through and for whom all things were created (Col. 1.16); he prevents creation from disintegration, for through him God reconciles to himself all things (Col. 1.20); he is creation’s end as the one in whom God will unite all things (Eph. 1.10). Further, created reality is animated by the life-giving Holy Spirit. As Lord, having like Father and Son life in himself within the fullness of the triune relations, the Holy Spirit is life-giver. He bestows and preserves creaturely being with its own proper powers and freedoms. In the Spirit’s superintendence of creation, God works to quicken the forms of created life, and to move creatures to self-movement towards their perfection.

Created being, time, action and culture are given shape, made into an order, by the purposive activity of the triune God. Created being and activity are grounded in these opera dei externae, which are themselves grounded in the unfathomable plenitude of God’s being in himself. This may seem hopelessly distant from questions concerning the nature and interpretation of the Bible. Not so: forgetfulness of this wider triune economy is a large part of the disarray of the church’s apprehension of Scripture, and biblical study suffers in an acute way from the evaporation of the metaphysics of nature, history and culture ordered by and towards God in Christ in the Spirit’s power. Reinstating biblical practice includes recollection of this triune economy in which both Scripture and its readers have their place.

IV

God’s external works are communicative. The reconciling and perfecting missions which the Son and the Holy Spirit undertake at the Father’s behest are both regenerative and revelatory, because the relation of the triune God to the world is that of a self-interpreting agent. God’s action towards the world is personal: not merely the operation of a causal force, but intentional action which establishes relations and proffers meaning. As God acts to reconcile and perfect, God addresses creaturely intelligence, summoning creatures to knowledge, trust, love and praise, and not merely making a blank determination concerning them. God, in short, speaks.

More closely, God speaks as in the Spirit Jesus Christ speaks. The eternal Word made flesh, now enthroned at the right hand of the Father, is present and eloquent. His state of exaltation does not entail his absence from or silence within the realm within which he once acted in self-humiliation; rather, his exaltation is the condition for and empowerment of his unhindered activity and address of creatures. This address takes the form of Holy Scripture. To accomplish his communicative mission, the exalted Son takes into his service a textual tradition, a set of human writings, so ordering their course that by him they are made into living creaturely instruments of his address of living creatures. Extending himself into the structures and practices of human...