The Task of Dogmatics

Explorations in Theological Method

Zondervan, Oliver D. Crisp, Fred Sanders

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780310535492
• eBook ISBN: 9780310535515
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Defining the Nature, Process, and Mission of Dogmatic Discourse.

Theologians often discuss method in a remote and preliminary way that suggests they are not yet speaking theologically when speaking methodologically. But it is also possible to reflect on the work of Christian dogmatics in a way that is self-consciously nourished by biblical reasoning, resourced by tradition, joined up with ecclesial practice, and alert to spiritual dynamics.

Bringing together theologians who are actively engaged in the writing and editing of extended dogmatics projects, The Task of Dogmatics represents the proceedings of the 2017 Los Angeles Theology Conference and seeks to provide constructive accounts of the nature of the dogmatic task.

The eleven diverse essays in this collection include discussions on:

• Identifying theology's pattern and norm.
• The validity and relativity of doctrinal statements.
• The Apostle Paul and the task of dogmatics.
• The retrieval of patristic and medieval theology.

Each of the essays collected in this volume engage with Scripture as well as with others in the field—theologians both past and present, from different confessions—in order to provide constructive resources for contemporary systematic theology and to forge a theology for the future.

CHAPTER 1

ANALYTICS, POETICS, AND THE MISSION OF DOGMATIC DISCOURSE

KEVIN J. VANHOOZER

THE DISCOURSE OF DOGMATICS: SAYING WHAT IS “IN CHRIST”

Of talking about many things, as the making of many books, there is no end (see Eccl 12:12). Theology is “talk about God” (the logos of theos), yet there are many kinds of theology, including pastoral, biblical, historical, and systematic. There is also misleading talk of God, not only the idle talk of idolaters but also the false “teachings of demons” (1 Tim 4:1).¹ This essay treats yet another variety of theology, dogmatics. Indeed, the goal is to give a dogmatic account of the project of dogmatics itself, along the lines of John Webster’s theological account of theology.²

Let me define dogmatics provisionally as the church’s attempt to employ its own resources (e.g., Scripture, tradition) to issue binding statements concerning who God is and what God is doing.³ In particular, dogmatics sets forth in speech what God is doing in Christ. Stated even more succinctly: dogmatics says what is “in Christ.” As we shall see, however, saying what is in Christ cannot be abstracted from having the mind of Christ and walking in the way of Christ. While the task of dogmatics involves setting out faith’s content (“the good deposit,” 2 Tim 1:14), it also involves the forms of language, experience, and thought that communicate it. Dogmatic discourse involves not only what we say about God (content) but how we say it (form).

Which comes first in dogmatics: a certain kind of experience, reflection, or language? The relationship between concepts (thought), percepts (experience), and words (language) has been at the center of modern debates about meaning and truth. The poet Christian Wiman wonders whether the decay of belief among educated Westerners precedes the decay of language: “Do we find the fire of belief fading in us only because the words are sodden with overuse and imprecision, and will not burn?”⁴ Immanuel Kant complicated the dogmatic task by claiming that experience and language, especially concepts, only get as far as a knowledge of appearances, not reality. Consequently, content-oriented dogmatics has been in the doghouse for much of modernity. Friedrich Schleiermacher accepted the Kantian limits, insisting that the piety that forms the basis of the church is a matter neither of knowing or doing, but rather of feeling (i.e., the consciousness of being related to God).⁵ Hence his famous definition: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.”⁶ Feelings, religious affections, and consciousness are all modes of human subjectivity, and sure enough Schleiermacher declares, “the description of human states of mind to be the fundamental dogmatic form.”⁷

Schleiermacher falls easy prey to Ludwig Feuerbach’s suspicion that underneath every theological statement there lurks an anthropological truth.⁸ By way of contrast, the present essay views the task of Christian dogmatics as speaking and reflecting not about our own experience primarily—even if those experiences are experiences of redemption by Jesus Christ—but rather about who God is and what God is doing. Dogmatics obliges us to do more (but not less) than talk about ourselves.⁹ I agree with John Webster: dogmatics is the study that has the being and agency of God not only for its subject matter but also for its very condition of possibility. What we need, perhaps going beyond Webster, is a dogmatic account of how all three—experience, thought, and language—come together in statements of what is in Christ.¹⁰ In sum, what we need is a poetics of dogmatics.

THE ISSUE: THE RELATIONSHIP OF EXPERIENCE, THINKING, AND SPEAKING IN KNOWING GOD

Robert Jenson says the church’s mission is “to see to the speaking of the gospel.”¹¹ The material content of the gospel deserves pride of place, although in a “post-truth” age we do well “to see to the speaking,” that is, both what is said and how it is said—hence the present reflection on the nature and function of language in dogmatic reasoning and, in particular, the ways in which language brokers the complex relationships between experience and thought. To see what I’m talking about, consider an example from another discipline: mathematics.

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a novel (now a major motion picture with Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons) that tells the true story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematician who gained admittance to Cambridge University to work with the renowned Englishman Professor G. H. Hardy. Ramanujan was a devout Hindu for whom mathematical discovery resembled a process of mystical vision. He claimed that all his discoveries were revealed: “An equation to me,” he famously said, “has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” By contrast, his Cambridge mentor, while recognizing Ramanujan’s genius, insisted on his supplying step-by-step clarifications of his seminal ideas about numbers. The novel details the way in which Hardy, “the Apostle of Proof,” engaged Ramanujan, “the Prince of Intuition.”

The story turns largely on what we might describe as a conflict of mathematical poetics: an intuitive imagination that yearns for not a beatific but an arithmetic vision on the one hand, and an analytic reason satisfied with nothing less than the long way of axiomatic demonstration on the other. Hardy once said that Ramanujan had “a feeling for form,” and this is a good description of poetic sensibility. Even in a discipline like mathematics there are connections between forms of seeing, experiencing, and thinking. Well, what about dogmatics? Where should we locate its discourse on the linguistic spectrum between analytic demonstration and poetic intuition?

THE NATURE OF DOGMATIC DISCOURSE

There is a poetics of theology as there is in mathematics—a variety of ways to experience, think, and speak about the infinity (of God). Perfect being theologians purport to set forth in speech the properties of a being so great that none greater can be conceived—a being of infinite perfection.¹² Setting forth in speech the properties of such a being is not quite the project of dogmatics, which attends not merely to the concept of infinite perfection but, more specifically, the triune God—and to what Emily Dickinson describes as “the infinite a sudden guest” (a reference to the historical incarnation), and what Ed Oakes’s recent Christology describes as “infinity dwindled to infancy.”¹³

Neither can dogmatics be content with an apophaticism that speaks of infinity only by saying what it is not. For the biblical discourse of the prophets and apostles that generates and governs Christian dogmatics is largely cataphatic, describing in positive terms (even if they are anthropomorphisms) “that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 John 1:1).

Christian dogmatics is not a speculative discourse that begins from or limits itself by means of an abstract concept of infinity. It is rather a response to a prior divine communicative initiative.¹⁴ We speak truly of God because God first spoke to us. Dogmatics exists in and under what John Webster calls “the domain of the Word”: God’s communicative and self-communicative activity. Defining dogmatics as “talk about God” does not go far enough; other forms of discourse speak of God (often in vain). Webster rightly identifies the distinctiveness of dogmatics “in its invocation of God as agent in the intellectual practice of theology.”¹⁵ God is Lord of his Word—its form (poetics) and content (analytics)—as well as its hearing. And, out of his lordly love and freedom, God has decided to communicate a share of his infinite knowledge of himself with those he created in his image.¹⁶

Humans may not be capable of experiencing, knowing, and saying the infinite, yet the infinite is capable of humanity: infinitum capax finiti, or rather “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). Specifically, God the Son, the “form of God” (Phil 2:6), took on the “form of a servant” (Phil 2:7). The communicative agency of the triune God is the enabling condition of Christian dogmatics: not philosophical anthropology, epistemology, or even hermeneutics. In the economy of divine light, Christ is the human surface that mirrors the Father, who otherwise dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim 6:16). God is both subject matter (object) and active agent (subject) of dogmatics. Theologians too are subjects of intellectual acts—of biblical interpretation, historical inquiry, conceptual elaboration, and as we shall see, confessions of faith—but their activity originates, is sustained, and is illumined by a divine communicative activity that encompasses them.

THE TASK OF DOGMATIC DISCOURSE (ACCORDING TO BARTH, BAVINCK, AND WEBSTER)

For Karl Barth, the task of dogmatics is to examine how far church proclamation corresponds to or agrees with the Word of God...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. ANALYTICS, POETICS, AND THE MISSION OF DOGMATIC DISCOURSE
• 2. DOGMATICS AS SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
• 3. CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE AS ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT TO A NARRATIVE
• 4. “KNOWLEDGE PUFFS UP, BUT LOVE BUILDS UP”: THE APOSTLE PAUL AND THE TASK OF DOGMATICS
• 5. PERMANENT VALIDITY AND CONTEXTUAL RELATIVITY OF DOCTRINAL STATEMENTS
• 6. HOLY SCRIPTURE AS SACRED GROUND
• 7. CHRISTOCENTRISM AND THE IMMANENT TRINITY: IDENTIFYING THEOLOGY’S PATTERN AND NORM
• 8. THE WORD OF GOD AS TRUTHMAKER FOR CHURCH PROCLAMATION: AN ANALYTIC BARTHIAN APPROACH TO THE DOGMATIC TASK
• 9. DIVINE PERFECTIONS, THEOLOGICAL REASONING, AND THE SHAPE OF DOGMATICS
• 10. DOGMATICS AS ASCETICS
• 11. WHY SHOULD PROTESTANTS RETRIEVE PATRISTIC AND MEDIEVAL THEOLOGY?
• SCRIPTURE INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX
• AUTHOR INDEX