In Defense of Doctine

Evangelicalism, Theology, and Scripture

Rhyne R. Putman, Rhyne R. Putman

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781451472165
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451496703
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Questions surrounding the relationship of Scripture and doctrine are legion within the Protestant tradition. This study is an apologetic for the ongoing, constructive theological task in Protestant and Evangelical traditions. It suggests that doctrinal development can be explained as a hermeneutical phenomenon and that insights from hermeneutical philosophy and the philosophy of language can aid theologians in constructing explanatory theses for particular theological problems associated with the facts of doctrinal development, namely, questions related to textual authority, reality depiction, and theological identity. Joining the recent call to theological interpretation of Scripture, Putman provides a constructive model that forwards a descriptive and normative pattern for reading Scripture and theological tradition together.

2

Historical Consciousness, Development, and Hermeneutics

Doctrinal development may be an inevitable, even essential element of the theological task as it has been practiced for nearly two millennia, but explicit theoretical reflection on the nature of this phenomenon is a relatively recent feature in Christian thought. The history of evangelical attention to the problem of development is much shorter, because, as we shall see, Roman Catholic theologians began addressing the issue much earlier than their Protestant and evangelical counterparts. The study of general hermeneutics or hermeneutical theory, a discipline concerned with understanding the relationship between interpreters and texts (i.e., written texts or any other complex aggregate of signs employed in interpersonal communication), also has a short history, and as is the case with the history of the development problem, evangelicals were tardy to the discussion.

A detailed historical account of either hermeneutics or the problem of doctrinal development is far beyond the scope of the present study.^[1] Space mandates sidestepping many important contributions to these fields. Furthermore, some studies of doctrinal development devote much space to the cataloging of various models of development, such as Jan Walgrave’s oft-cited typology of logical theories, transformistic theories, and theological theories.^[2] Such typologies can be heuristically and pedagogically useful, but they also tend to subject these theories to hermetically sealed categories which reflect the biases of their architects and which are often alien to the intentions of the theologians they describe. For these reasons, no such typology appears in this historical outline.

The purpose of the present chapter is to survey hermeneutical features in a few notable theories of doctrinal development throughout three stages of the history of the problem: pre-critical approaches from early medieval Christianity to the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, nineteenth-century approaches following the rise of historical consciousness, and twentieth-century approaches since the Second Vatican Council. Roman Catholic theologians have dominated this conversation historically, and many of the representative Protestant and evangelical approaches to the topic have been reactionary. In this chapter, many features common to critical studies in hermeneutics and doctrinal development will be observed, as conscious, critical reflection on each of these issues shares a common ancestry in the impact of Romanticism and post-Enlightenment historicism on biblical and theological studies. The history of the problem of development shows that its theorists, like philosophers of hermeneutics, mostly wrestle with questions about the nature of historical understanding and interpretation.

Hermeneutics and Development
in Pre-Critical Approaches

Some of the most noteworthy and most universally recognized examples of postcanonical doctrinal development appeared during the first five centuries of Christianity. Amid centuries of theological, political, and social turmoil, the church developed the confessional statements that came to be associated with “orthodoxy” (or “right belief”). The parameters of the Christian canon were drawn, and the traditional doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ were established. Yet it was only in retrospect that Christian theologians started reflecting on the nature of these historical developments or the growth of Christian doctrine.

Before the advent of historical criticism in the nineteenth century, there were two basic approaches to the phenomenon of development. One approach, seen throughout medieval theology, was a growing awareness of the need to defend the ecclesial interpretation of doctrine and the authoritative role of extracanonical tradition. Medieval theologians were greatly concerned about advancing their understanding of the Christian faith and assumed that doctrinal development was essentially the “unpacking” of fixed biblical truth. Historical theologian Malcolm Yarnell calls this the “classic thesis.”^[3] Another approach, represented by Protestant and Roman Catholic voices during the Reformation and post-Reformation era, was to deny any true development in the history of the church. Reformers on both sides seemed to take one step forward and two steps back, as they simultaneously acknowledged the need for ecclesial reformation and theological critique but also denied the historical phenomena of a growing tradition. Approaches to development in the pre-critical era generally regard true doctrine as immutable or unchanging.

Early and Medieval Theology

The anathematization of Nestorianism at the First Council of Ephesus (431) was a recent memory when the Gallic monk Vincent of Lérins (d. 445 c.e.) penned his Commonitorium (or “memory aid”). In this classic work on theological method, Vincent defends the church’s authoritative tradition over against what he perceives to be the doctrinal innovations of heretics. Vincent does not address the particular theological issues that concern him, though some have suggested he is responding to the pessimistic theological anthropology and predestinarianism of Augustine of Hippo (354–430).^[4] Although he warns against excessive theological speculation, Vincent insists that individual Christians and the entire church alike should progress in their understandings of doctrine: “There should be a great increase and a vigorous progress, in individuals and in the whole group, in the single man as well as in the entire church, as the ages and centuries march on, of understanding, knowledge, wisdom, but, at least in its own kind, in the same doctrine, that is, in the same sense, in the same meaning.”^[5]

For Vincent, doctrinal progress does not mean transformation of the gospel’s essence; it means organic, continuity-preserving growth in knowledge of divine truth. In the same way that a human being retains his or her identity from infancy through childhood into adulthood and old age while growing and maturing, so too “the doctrine of the Christian religion must follow the laws of progress, so as to be strengthened by the years, amplified by time, grow taller with age, yet remain uncorrupted and unimpaired, complete and perfect in . . . its proper senses, permitting . . . no change, no wasting of its distinctive character, no variation in its outline.”^[6] This analogy from anthropological identity is the first of many like it in the history of the problem of doctrinal development.

Vincent likewise compares the development of doctrine to the process by which seedlings sown are cultivated, nurtured, blossomed, and ripened. This growth is appropriate as long as there is no essential transformation: “It is right that those ancient doctrines . . . should in the progress of time be given complete care, be refined, polished, but it is wrong for them to be changed . . . to be mutilated, to be marred. Let them get proof, illumination, definition, but they still must retain their fullness, their integrity, their natural characteristics.”^[7]

Vincent maintains that the biblical canon is “complete” and “sufficient for every purpose” but notes that there is need for the church to interpret Scripture as safeguard against the various interpretive errors of heretics. His defense of postcanonical doctrinal development is explicitly hermeneutical: “By its very depth the Holy Scripture is not received by all in one and the same sense, but its declarations are subject to interpretation, now in one way, now in another, so that, it would appear, we can find almost as many inter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Reading Scripture and Developing Doctrine
• Historical Consciousness, Development, and Hermeneutics
• Doctrinal Development in the Descriptive Theological Hermeneutics of Anthony Thiselton
• Doctrinal Development in the Normative Theological Hermeneutics of Kevin J. Vanhoozer
• Interpretive Authority and Doctrinal Development
• Religious Language, Reality, and Doctrinal Development
• Development and Continuity
• The Hermeneutics of Faithful and Fitting Doctrinal Development
• Bibliography
• Index