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Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Webster
John Webster
Affiliation:
Christ Church, Oxford OX1 1DP, EnglandUK
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Extract

The territory indicated by my title is impossibly vast, and some delimitations are in order at the beginning. What follows does not attempt any kind of thorough or nuanced historical analysis of the great tangle of issues to which the terms of the title refer. ‘Hermeneutics’ and ‘modern theology’ don't exist as simple entities; the terms are shorthand ways of identifying very complex traditions of thought and cultural practices, and a serious attempt to trace those traditions and the variations in their relationship would be little short of a history of Western Christian thought since the rise of nominalism. What is offered here is more restricted and precise, chiefly an essay in Christian dogmatics. At its simplest, my proposal is that the Christian activity of reading the Bible is most properly (that is, Christianly) understood as a spiritual affair, and accordingly as a matter for theological description. That is to say, a Christian description of the Christian reading of the Bible will be the kind of description which talks of God and therefore talks of all other realities sub specie divinitatis. There is certainly an historical corollary to this proposal — namely, the need for some account of why the dominant traditions of Western Protestantism (and more recently of Western Catholicism) have largely laid aside, or at least lost confidence in, this kind of dogmatic depiction of the church's reading of the Bible, replacing it with, or annexing it to, hermeneutical theory of greater or lesser degrees of sophistication and greater or lesser degrees of theological content.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 1998 , pp. 307 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1998

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References

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6 Ibid., p. 137.

7 Ibid., p. 136.

8 Ibid., p. 137.

9 Text and Interpretation, p. xvii.

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42 Church Dogmatics IV/3 (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1963), p. 8Google Scholar. The context of this is Barth's extensive recovery of the prophetic office of Christ in Church Dogmatics IV/3. It is worth recording that this doctrine offers a fruitful dogmatic context within which to expound a theology of the Bible. The older Protestant dogmatics customarily treated the Bible in two places: first (and primarily) in the locus de revelatione, and second (with much less intensity), in the treatment of the munus prophelicum Christi, where the mediating functions of Bible and church proclamation were discussed. When handled in the first locus, the Bible often became too tied up with the foundational enterprise of seeking indubitable foundations for knowledge, as well as with the rationalistic method of deducing proofs for doctrines from Biblical propositions. Handled in the second context, however, the Bible is much more happily related to the living presence and activity of the risen Christ.

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83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., III. 1.

85 Ibid., IV.33.