Has God Said?
Scripture, the Word of God, and the Crisis of Theological Authority
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Has God said? Has God actually spoken, declared himself and his purposes to us? Historically the Christian faith has affirmed God's redemptive, revelatory speaking as historical, contentful, redemptive, centrally in Jesus Christ and, under Christ and by the Spirit, in the text of Holy Scripture. But in the past three centuries developments in Western culture have created a crisis in relation to historical, divine authority. The modern reintroduction of destructive dualisms, cosmological and epistemological, via Descartes, Newton, Spinoza, and Kant have injured not only the physical sciences (e.g., positivism) but Christian theology as well. The resulting "eclipse of God" has permeated Western culture. In terms of the Christian understanding of revelation, it has meant the separation of God from historical action, the rejection of God's actual self-declaration, and especially in textual form, Holy Scripture. After critical analysis of these dualistic developments, this book presents the problematic effects in both Protestant (Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Tillich) and Roman Catholic (Rahner, Dulles) theology. The thought and influence of Karl Barth on the nature of Scripture is examined and distinguished from most "Barthian approaches." The effects of dualistic "Barthian" thought on contemporary evangelical views of Scripture (Pinnock, Fackre, Bloesch) are also critically analyzed and responses made (Helm, Wolterstorff, Packer). The final chapter is a christocentric, multileveled reformulation of the classical Scripture Principle, via Einstein, Torrance, and Calvin, that reaffirms the church's historical "identity thesis," that Holy Scripture is the written Word of God, a crucial aspect of God's larger redemptive-revelatory purpose in Christ.
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1: Has God Said?
- Chapter 2: Spinoza, Semler, and Gabler
- Chapter 3: Has God Said?
- Chapter 4: Biblical-Critical Methodology and the Text of Scripture as Written Word of God
- Chapter 5: Developments Regarding the Nature of Holy Scripture in Modern Roman Catholic Thought
- Chapter 6: Barth, Barthians, and Evangelicals
- Chapter 7: Scripture as the Written Word of God
- Chapter 8: Einstein, Torrance, and Calvin
- Appendix: The Authority of Holy Scripture and the Need for Hermeneutical Authority in the Theology of the Early Church Fathers:
- Bibliography