The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology

Preface

At the heart of Christianity lies a series of vividly striking events that together make up the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel—God’s gracious self-communication in Jesus Christ—is intrinsically dramatic. Why is it, then, that Christian doctrine so often appears strikingly dull by way of contrast? And not only dull but weak. Alan Wolfe, a sociologist of religion, argues in his recent book The Transformation of American Religion that doctrine no longer plays any meaningful role in the life and thought of ordinary Christians: Talk of hell, damnation, and even sin has been replaced by a nonjudgmental language of understanding and empathy. Gone are the arguments over doctrine and theology; if most believers cannot for the life of them recall what makes Luther different from Calvin, there is no need for the disputation and schism in which those reformers, as well as other religious leaders throughout the centuries, engaged.¹ Where an earlier generation could speak of the strange silence of the Bible in the church,² the urgent issue at present is what Wolfe terms the strange disappearance of doctrine in the church.³

Reviewers will doubtless dispute the accuracy of Wolfe’s analysis. There is an abundance of anecdotal evidence, however, that suggests he may be on to something. For many in our postmodern age, feeling is believing; to formulate one’s beliefs in terms of doctrine is thought to be unnecessary, impossible, or divisive. Members of mainline churches find it increasingly difficult to articulate the doctrinal distinctives of their respective denominations, and members of megachurches tend to think of themselves as postdenominational.⁴ Wolfe’s argument, flawed and incomplete though it may be, nevertheless paints a plausible and sobering picture: Evangelical churches lack doctrine because they want to attract new members. Mainline churches lack doctrine because they want to hold on to those declining numbers of members they have.⁵

The Drama of Doctrine argues that there is no more urgent task in the church than to demonstrate faith’s understanding by living truthfully with others before God. It further argues that doctrine is an indispensable aid to understanding and to truthful living. Doctrine is a vital ingredient in the well-being of the church, a vital aid to its public witness. The problem is not with doctrine per se but with a picture of doctrine, or perhaps several pictures, that have held us captive.

This book sets forth new metaphors for theology (dramaturgy), Scripture (the script), theological understanding (performance), the church (the company), and the pastor (director). It argues that doctrine, far from being unrelated to life, serves the church by directing its members in the project of wise living, to the glory of God. It sets out to convince ministers and laypeople alike not to dismiss doctrine as irrelevant, and to encourage theologians not to neglect the needs of the church. It aims to make the pastoral lamb lie down with the theological lion. Its goal is to refute, once and for all, the all-too-common dichotomy between doctrine and real life. Christian doctrine directs us in the way of truth and life and is therefore no less than a prescription for reality.

The process of writing this book was itself more dramatic than I had anticipated. During its composition I encountered a number of conceptual, as well as personal, cliff-hangers on whose resolution my identity as a Christian theologian largely depended: Do I practice what I preach? (Not enough.) Am I evangelical, orthodox, catholic, or some combination thereof? (Yes.) Is it possible to maintain a Reformation emphasis on the primacy of Scripture in a postmodern age that views questions of meaning, knowledge, and truth largely in terms of human practices and traditions of inquiry? (Read part 3.) Which local church should I join? (Presbyterian.) I mention these in passing for the sake of those who still maintain an interest in authors. Other readers will want to know something of the ideological location of the author. Plotting my location on the map of contemporary theology is indeed one of the main burdens of the present work. The quest for personal and theological identity takes a narrative shape; when this narrative is lived out with others, it becomes a drama.

One other thickening of the plot deserves special mention. Quite apart from the usual time pressures, I felt the constraint of the subject matter itself, as it periodically seemed to take on a life of its own and resist my authorial will. One often hears how characters sometimes escape the clutches of their authors. So do certain arguments. I began the book fairly convinced that the sufficiency of Scripture meant that the real issue in whether Christians are biblical or not concerns obedience: Will we obey what we hear? While I continue to think that one’s spirituality has a decisive bearing on one’s theology, I have come to rethink the matter of Scripture’s sufficiency. The result is that my original outline, and hope for a slim volume, fell by the wayside. Specifically, what was to have been dealt with in one chapter—the Scripture/tradition relationship—metamorphosed into four, in fact, the whole of part 2. This rethinking also led me to assign a more positive role to the notions of tradition and improvising than I had first anticipated.

We are living in an era of dramatic, even epochal changes (e.g., modern to postmodern; the end of the cold war; religious pluralism). We may be witnessing similar sea changes in theology. The time is ripe for new convergences and alliances, perhaps even healing, along a significant band of what not so long ago was called the shattered spectrum of Christian theology. The two-party system of conservative and liberal no longer seems adequate to describe what is taking place. Some twenty years ago, George Lindbeck produced a manifesto of sorts for a postliberal, cultural-linguistic theology and a regulative theory of doctrine. The present book sets forth a postconservative, canonical-linguistic theology and a directive theory of doctrine that roots theology more firmly in Scripture while preserving Lindbeck’s emphasis on practice.

While reform of the church is not the explicit focus of the present work, it forms a horizon of expectation. What this book contains is an account of doctrine that provides a way forward for both theology and the church by overcoming the fateful dichotomy between doctrine and life. I want to say of theology what Samuel Johnson said about London: he who is tired of doctrine is tired of life, for doctrine is the stuff of life. Christian doctrine is necessary for human flourishing: only doctrine shows us who we are, why we are here, and what we are to do. The stereotype of doctrine as dry and dusty cuts a flimsy caricature next to the real thing, which is brave and bracing. Doctrine deals with energies and events that are as real and powerful as anything known in chemistry or physics, energies and events that can turn the world we know upside down, energies and events into which we are grafted as participants with speaking and acting parts.

Some of the energy that I hope to communicate in this book may be overshadowed by its mass. I had originally intended to write a short, constructive manifesto. That book is here, though one has to look for it! I encourage readers who are more interested in reading about my directive theory of doctrine than my views about everything else to read only the final chapters of parts 1 and 2. The other chapters in those parts include more detailed discussions of the contemporary setting of theology, in light of which I seek to locate my own proposals. Parts 3 and 4 need to be read in their entirety, however, to take the full measure of my thesis.

I owe thanks to John Stackhouse for inviting me to deliver a paper on theological method that spawned the present work, and to Carey Newman for his invitation to turn that lecture into a book. I am grateful to the Northside Theology dinner discussion group—David Cunningham, Steve Long, Mark McIntosh, A. K. M. and Margaret Adams—for their interaction with a précis of the book during a crucial stage of its gestation. I also benefited from the Common Root project—an ongoing discussion between theologians from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Mundelein Seminary of St. Mary’s University—for illuminating discussions on the nature of the gospel in the evangelical and Roman Catholic traditions respectively, and from comments by participants in the 2004 Ward Consulation in Theological Education. Thanks go to those stalwarts who attended my six-week presentation of the content of this book as part of the Lay Academy at First Presbyterian Church (Libertyville, Illinois).

Two of my MDiv students, J. T. Paasch and Daniel McClain, eagerly digested and debated the first three chapters with me over several richly caffeinated sessions. Thanks also go to three of my PhD students: to Lisa Sung and Adam Co, for their comments on various parts of the book, and to Michael Sleasman for his help in copyediting and in eliminating redundancies, a ministry for which many readers will surely be grateful. My colleague Doug Sweeney read a rough draft of the conclusion and pointed out a significant lacuna in the argument, which I have since amended, hopefully to his satisfaction. I owe a special thanks to two more former students. Dan Treier ensured the dramatic nature of the writing process by calling my attention to a number of problems in an earlier draft. His ongoing insights and criticisms led me to rehearse the argument more than I might otherwise have done, and he was the ideal pastor-critic who knew when and where to condemn and when and where to console, and in what measure. And Sam Wells helped me to trust my intuitions about improvisation by sharing the manuscript of his wonderful book Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics before its publishers officially raised the curtain. I am particularly pleased to thank my two daughters, Mary and Emma, for being such an enthusiastic and encouraging audience as I sporadically tried out various words, figures of speech, and arguments on them. Thanks go as well to my wife, Sylvie, for attending a number of plays in the Chicago area, all in the line of dutiful research.

More generally, I would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues who have contributed to the contemporary renaissance of Christian theology, especially those who participated in the several Dogmatics Conferences that I organized while teaching at the University of Edinburgh. The discipline is in a much healthier state compared to a generation ago, when I was an undergraduate. From among the many theologians whose work has helped me see a way beyond the sterile conservative/liberal impasse while remaining generously orthodox, let me mention, in addition to those already named, Gary Badcock, the late Colin Gunton, Bruce McCormack, Francis Watson, and John Webster.

I dedicate this work to Nicholas Lash, whose expert supervision of my Cambridge doctoral dissertation has stood me in good stead with my own doctoral students, and whose Performing the Scriptures has been percolating at the back of my mind since I first heard it presented in a D Society seminar during the Michaelmas term of my first year of doctoral studies in October 1982. Little did I know at the time that I was working with the person who would later be named an exemplar of postmodern theology in the Anglo-American tradition.⁶ While he will certainly not agree with everything in this book, he will perhaps be able to see how easily it could have been worse were it not for his simmering curative influence.

1. Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (New York: Free Press, 2003), 3.

2. See James D. Smart, The Strange Silence of the Bible in the Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970).

3. See Wolfe, Transformation of American Religion, chap. 3, whose first section is entitled The Strange Disappearance of Doctrine from Conservative Protestantism (67).

4. So Wolfe, Transformation of American Religion, 74.

5. Ibid., 87.

6. Brad Kallenberg and Nancey Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity: A Theology of Communal Practice, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 26.

Introduction

The Way of Truth; The Stuff of Life

In the beginning, an empty space. A word breaks the silence, bespeaks a universe; the world dawns. More words; nondescript space acquires shape, becomes a place for forms emerging from the dust. The stage is set. Action!

To be or not to be is not the question, nor our choice. We are thrown into existence, says Martin Heidegger.¹ We simply find ourselves in a world. We are here, onstage, with many others. Unaided reason cannot tell us why we are here or what we are to do. For existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger, the challenge is to achieve authenticity, which in his view means constantly preparing to play one’s own death scene.

Today we have more information about life, and more techniques for sustaining life, than ever before, but we remain flummoxed with regard to the question of life’s meaning.² We have mapped the galaxy, but we are still trying to get our bearings. We have mapped the human genome, but we are still trying to determine what we are. We need guidance as we seek to play our parts, prompting as we grope for our next lines. To be sure, being cast—born—into a certain place and time (and class) provides some initial direction. We are socialized into our various identities—male or female, Christian or Muslim or New Age, American or Asian, modern or postmodern—from the time we are toddlers.

The natural and social sciences continue to vie for bragging rights over which most influences the human condition: nature or nurture; genetic determinism or social indoctrination; heredity or history. Some say our roles are hardwired by our biology; others ascribe our programming to society. Which is it? And, regardless of how one answers, what happens to freedom, one’s capacity for self-determination? Where, in our postmodern technological age, is the Maginot Line that protects human dignity and personhood?

The very way these questions have been framed betrays their author’s location on the stage of human history. They are all about me, about us; they are all anthropocentric. They have more of postmodern Western culture than the gospel about them; they evince the telltale signs of modernity’s typical neuroses. Paul Tillich reads cultural history as a series of anxiety attacks: ancient civilization suffered the anxiety of death; the Middle Ages and Reformation, the anxiety of guilt; modernity, the anxiety of meaninglessness. Perhaps, had he lived longer, he might have characterized postmodernity as the anxiety of truthlessness.

Christian doctrine, the considered result of faith’s search for biblical understanding, responds to each of these cultural-spiritual conditions. Employing the gospel as its primary, though not exclusive, resource for dealing with life’s most persistent questions, Christian doctrine teaches us how to cope with various real-life crises. Doctrine, far from being a matter of abstract theory, is actually the stuff of real life. Real life is located in the way of Jesus Christ, and the purpose of doctrine is to lead us precisely in this way.

Theology’s purpose is not merely therapeutic, of course. Rowan Williams is right to call attention to three other dimensions of theology as well. First, celebration: theology begins in worshiping God. The dogma, we might say, is the doxology. Second, communication: theology seeks to explain the meaning of God and his works to those inside the church and without. Third, criticism: theology struggles to demarcate true from false witness to God and his works.³

Doctrines, then, are profitable for celebrating, communicating, criticizing—and coping—provided they are used competently. The present work sets forth an account of theological competence, which involves more than academic expertise. Theological competence is ultimately a matter of being able to make judgments that display the mind of Christ. Individual Christians, and the church as a whole, have no more crucial task than achieving such theological competence. One of the chief means of doing so is by attending to doctrine—to its derivation from Scripture and its development in the believing community.

Doctrine helps the church understand where it has been thrown and what role it is to play there. The church now lives between the times (of Jesus’ first and second comings), between the acts of a divine drama of redemption.⁴ Each act of the play is set in motion by an act of God. The first act is creation (Genesis 1–3), the setting for everything else that follows. Act 2 (beginning from Genesis 12 and running through the rest of the Old Testament) concerns God’s election, rejection, and restoration of Israel. The third, pivotal and climactic act is Jesus: God’s definitive Word/Act. Act 4 begins with the risen Christ sending his Spirit to create the church. The fifth and final act is the eschaton, the consummation of all things, and the consummation of God’s relationship with Israel and the church. The church lives at present between the definitive event of Jesus and the concluding event of the eschaton, poised between memory and hope.

Sound doctrine—authoritative teaching—is vital for the life of the church, and hence for the life of the world. This is hardly a truism; yet in many quarters doctrine is thought to be the problem. On the one hand, it is divisive, an obstacle to love and unity; on the other hand, it all too often appears insipid and irrelevant, maintaining no vital contact with the complications and particulars of everyday life. Unfortunately, there is more than a little truth to each of these charges. The fault lies less with sound doctrine, however, than with its mishandling, and with a misunderstanding of its nature and purpose. A false picture of doctrine has held us captive. We begin, then, by setting the stage: sound doctrine is suffering from confusion about its nature, from disagreement concerning the locus of its authority, and above all from its captivity to a debilitating dichotomy between theory and practice.

THE SETTING: THEOLOGY AND THE

CULTURAL-LINGUISTIC TURN

Each new Christian generation must grapple with the question: What has the church to say and do that no other human institution can say and do?⁵ Nature and society alike abhor a vacuum, and there are many ideologies and agendas waiting to rush and fill the hearts and minds of the uncommitted. Bereft of sound doctrine, the church is blown about by cultural fads and intellectual trends. Indeed, this has largely been the story of the church, and of theology, in the modern world. There has been an atrophying of theological muscle as a result of too many correlations and accommodations to philosophical and cultural trends.⁶

What the church uniquely has to say and do cannot be reduced to philosophy or politics. The church’s unique responsibility is to proclaim and to practice the gospel, to witness in its speech and life to the reality of God’s presence and action in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The theologian’s unique responsibility is to ensure that the church’s speech and action correspond to the word of God, the norm of Christian faith and practice. A number of contemporary theologians are not sure, however, whether to invoke the notion of authority or, if they do, where to locate it: in the history of Jesus Christ, in the biblical text, or in the believing community.

Faith Seeking Understanding: Sources and Norms

Christian theology must distinguish between true and false knowledge of God, for indiscriminate talk of God is not an option for those who seek to worship in spirit and in truth. Yet the appeal to God is too powerful simply to be let loose. History affords too many illustrations of individuals and societies (and churches!) too hastily invoking God’s name as a rationale for their beliefs and behaviors, or as a rationale for diverse forms of oppression, even war. It is precisely because God-talk is so easily abused that we must return again and again to the question of theology’s sources and norms.

The Nature of Doctrine: Preliminaries

Doctrine, according to one of its chief historians, is easier to describe than to define.⁷ Doctrine has to do with what faith seeking understanding gets when its search is successful. To be precise: Christian doctrine is the reward that faith finds at the end of its search for the meaning of the apostolic testimony to what God was doing in the event of Jesus Christ.⁸

Where should people of faith look to gain a better understanding of what they confess? Zophar’s question to Job returns to taunt us: Canst thou by searching find out God? (Job 11:7, KJV). Whereas the genius-philosopher discovers only what is within the scope of one’s own reason, the apostle proclaims a message, and a truth, that is not a product of his own devising: What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes . . . we declare to you (1 John 1:1–3).⁹ The challenge for those who have not themselves witnessed God’s Word is that of access. Where is divine revelation now to be found? There are at least four possible candidates.¹⁰

1. Biblical Propositions

There is a long-standing tendency to identify divine revelation with biblical assertions or statements, considered to be the prime instances of truth-bearing language. Doctrines here function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.¹¹ Like the Jews at Berea, many theologians—typically evangelicals congregating on the conservative end of the spectrum—studiously search the Scriptures to find out what the Bible actually teaches, to see whether these things were so (Acts 17:11).

Hard questions will nevertheless have to be asked of a method that appears to reduce the diverse modes of language in the Bible to the assertive and propositional. In the first place, a propositionalism seems inadequate given the variety of biblical texts, especially those that are concerned with aesthetic and affective qualities and not simply the cognitive. Second, to speak merely in terms of informing fails to do full justice to God’s complex relation to Scripture. The Bible is more than divine data. Third, biblical propositionalism would seem to presuppose the quintessentially modern form of epistemology, namely, foundationalism.¹²

2. The Person of Christ

Karl Barth advances a second, more dynamic conception of the way in which God’s self-revelation relates to the biblical text. Searching the Scriptures is once again the motif, not to mine them for propositions that are once true, always true but rather, in Jesus’ words, because they . . . testify on my behalf (John 5:39). For Barth, the Bible becomes the Word only when God graciously condescends to make himself known by enabling readers to follow the human words to their proper reference—Jesus Christ, the living Word of God. The Bible thus becomes what it already is: a witness to Jesus Christ and therefore a form of God’s Word.

Whereas the propositional view highlights God’s use of the biblical words in the past (e.g., inspiration), Barth calls attention to God’s use (or not) of the biblical words in the present (e.g., illumination).¹³ The question to be asked of Barth concerns the relationship of the Bible’s quasi-sacramental mediation of Jesus’ real presence to the verbal meaning of the text itself. While some of his early critics accused Barth of emphasizing the subjective event of revelation to the detriment of the objective text, it is surely significant that Barth expected the Spirit to use just these words to disclose Jesus Christ. Just as propositionalists would not want to deny the personal element in revelation, so Barth would not want to deny the role of propositions.

3. Christian Piety

Religious experience is yet a third possible locus of divine revelation. This option is qualitatively distinct from the first two because it conceives the words of Scripture in terms of their human use to express an individual’s or a community’s religious experience. Human subjectivity becomes the locus of a revelation that is typically immediate and nonverbal.

The classic representative of this position is Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology: Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.¹⁴ The New Testament, for example, is an expression of its authors’ attempt to express the felt significance of Jesus Christ. It is highly unsatisfactory, however, to give the impression that adequate theological statements should ever take the form "God to me is . . ." All knowledge may begin in experience, as Kant said, but if it ends there too, then we shall have no means to arbitrate conflicting views as to what God is like.¹⁵ Christian experience on its own is too varied and unreliable to serve as the ultimate criterion for our knowledge of God.

4. Church Practices

Of late, a number of theologians have enshrined ecclesiology as first theology, the source and norm alike of faith’s search for understanding. Those who draw their theological first principles from ecclesiology have made what we may call the cultural-linguistic turn. This turn to the church’s own habits of speaking and acting is a welcome, and long overdue, change. For much of modernity, theology has been in thrall to principles drawn largely from philosophy, resulting in what we may term a kind of Athenian captivity of the church. To begin theologizing from the church’s own language and culture is to make a radical break from the modern tendency to start with some neutral methodology.¹⁶

The understanding that faith seeks is, from this fourth perspective, implicit in the church’s core practices. John Milbank declares that theology is a matter of explicating Christian practice.¹⁷ Theology articulates the logic inherent in the new communal way of life—the culture—that is the Christian church. It is the form of the church’s life and language that gives doctrines their substance and meaning.

This option shines with postmodern promise. Proponents of this view have no need either to aspire to or to pretend to have objectivity; on the contrary, the theologian’s task is to describe how things look from within a certain ecclesial perspective. This perspective has come down to us through a centuries-long dynamic process: tradition. In this framework, the Bible is less a textbook of divinely revealed information than an identity narrative that both acquires and exerts meaning in the interpretative community for which it functions as Scripture. Doctrines are articulations of the implicit grammatical rules that govern the community’s speaking and thinking about God.¹⁸

Yet relevant questions remain. The most important is whether such an approach has more of sociology than of theology about it. Does doctrine refer to God, or does it merely describe how members of the Christian community talk about God? If church practices serve as both source and norm for theology, how can we ever distinguish well-formed practices from those that are deformed? Kathryn Tanner accurately states the problem: [P]ostliberal talk of describing the internal logic of first-order practices strongly suggests that second-order theology does nothing more than uncover a logic internal to those practices themselves.¹⁹ It is important to recognize that there is something in the nature of theology’s subject matter—God, the gospel—that resists being designated as mere local custom.

In each of the above cases, doctrine is a second-order formulation of something first-order, be it biblical propositions, Jesus’ person, Christian piety, or church practices. Doctrine thus appears parasitic; it lives on the second story, over the store as it were. However, as we have just seen, we lack agreement when it comes to deciding in just which house theology lives. Significantly enough, each of these houses has a room for the Bible.²⁰ To summarize the four options: the Bible is either coextensive with revelation, a witness to revelation, an expression of one’s experience of revelation, or a product and condensation of the church’s language and life.

The Norm of Doctrine: Sola Scriptura or the Uses of Scripture?

The location of theological authority is hardly a new issue. The church in every generation has had to wrestle with it. The usual suspects—reason, experience, Bible, tradition—have repeatedly been rounded up and pressed into theological service. What is new is the waning of the influence of the Enlightenment and of modernity’s tendency to decide the legitimacy of all human enterprises, including exegesis and theology, on the basis of allegedly universal criteria of rationality. For two centuries and more, exegetes and theologians were forced to make doctrinal bricks with the mud and straw of reason and religious experience, the only two sources recognized by the modern gatekeepers of knowledge. Thanks to the critiques of sundry postmoderns, we are now able to see just how culturally relative, historically situated, and ideologically driven was the project of modernity. We have also come to see just how secular much of modern biblical studies and theology have been. Exegetes read the Bible like any other book (Benjamin Jowett); theologians, meanwhile, were busy recasting theology in terms of this or that philosophy. In short, nontheological frameworks determined the agenda for theology, with fateful results. Scripture dwindled into human history; tradition shriveled into human experience.²¹

The location of theological authority was the subject of an interesting exchange of letters between Erik Peterson and Adolf von Harnack in 1928.²² Harnack maintained that the principle of sola scriptura (Scripture alone) could no longer be maintained responsibly.²³ Though the idea that the Bible contains divinely revealed truths solves the problem of the locus of authority, Harnack considered it theologically naive and would have no part in it. Instead of mourning the loss of the church’s authority principle, Harnack reveled in it, arguing that at last the church was returning to pure religion and to the simple, nonhierarchical message of the gospel: brotherly love.

Erik Peterson, for his part, was not so sanguine: Without any dogmatic authority there can be no church.²⁴ It is one thing to say, with Martin Luther, Here I stand, but there is no point standing if one has no standpoint, no position on the crucial intellectual, social, and ethical matters of the day. Bereft of the authority of doctrine, the church becomes as weak and as arbitrary as any other human institution.

Harnack saw only a stark alternative to his own preference for cultivating Jesus’ ethical way of life: Either one traces Protestantism back to [Greek or Roman] Catholicism, or one grounds it on absolute biblicism.²⁵ In Harnack’s view, each of these options had been closed off by modernity, with its keen sense of the historically conditioned (and hence culturally relative) origins of Scripture and tradition alike.

Peterson’s verdict on the Protestant theology of his day—that it was largely the affair of academics, cut off from the life of the church—no doubt continues to ring true. Indeed, Peterson sounds downright contemporary in his insistence that Protestantism live off its Catholic capital: its liturgy (at least in mainstream denominations) resembles the Roman Mass; its confessions draw on the ancient creeds; its theological concepts share the same Thomistic-Aristotelian heritage. Cut off from the root that nourished it, however, there seem to be only three ways for Protestantism to resolve theological conflicts: to translate the faith into the universal truths of reason (rationalism); to appeal to a quality of religious experience (mysticism); to prove the truth in works of love and justice (activism). The problem with all these alternatives is that there is nothing distinctly Christian about them.

Significantly, neither Harnack nor Peterson thought to turn to the principle that the Reformers themselves had identified as normative: sola scriptura.²⁶ Biblical authority did not even figure among Peterson’s options for Protestantism, not least because it seems inevitably to open up the Pandora’s box of sectarianism where everyone (that is, every denomination or congregation) does what is right in his own eyes. What is at stake, then, is the eclipse of the Protestant church as a plausible church public.²⁷ Peterson himself voted with his feet and converted to Roman Catholicism.

Is it indeed the case that even Protestants have no real choice when it comes to the relationship of Scripture and tradition, given the all-too-glaring weaknesses of biblicism? The future of Protestantism rests on how one answers the Peterson challenge. The issue, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is whether after separation from papal and worldly authority in the church, an authority can be established in the church and grounded solely on the word and on confession.²⁸

The question Harnack and Peterson debated in modernity’s prime has become even more pressing at modernity’s end. The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy is well known.²⁹ It has to do with the contamination of experience and reason by language and with the concomitant loss of criteria of legitimation for knowledge and truth outside language. The net result of the linguistic turn was to remove the prestige from modernity’s two privileged epistemological criteria—reason and experience—and to restore the prestige to tradition, understood as a community’s habitual practices.

George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine was published in 1984 and marked the first appearance of the cultural-linguistic turn in theology. Though Lind-beck’s postliberal proposal initially appears to swing the pendulum of authority back to the biblical text, a closer inspection shows that he relocates authority in the church, that singular culture within which, and only within which, the Bible is used to shape Christian identity. Lindbeck accepts Wittgenstein’s insight that linguistic meaning is a function of use, and that linguistic usage varies according to the forms of life or practices—cultures—that users inhabit. Hence Lindbeck’s key premise: that the experience and the reasoning of the individual human subject is always already shaped by a tradition of language use (e.g., culture).³⁰ The cultural-linguistic turn is postmodern, then, in its rejection of the modern premise of an autonomous knowing subject.

The underlying issue is the same now as it was in 1928: whither Protestantism? The prevailing postmodern cultural winds currently blow away from sola scriptura toward tradition. Now that the modern myth of universal reason (one size fits all) has been deconstructed, even philosophers have begun to speak in terms of tradition-based rationality.³¹ Postmoderns have discovered an alternative to the modern extremes of the absolute objectivity of universal reason and the absolute subjectivity of personal preference: a relatively absolute intersubjectivity, in a word, the authority of communal tradition. What criteria of legitimacy we have left are internal to a tradition.

One of the most interesting examples of the ambiguity of the cultural-linguistic turn in theology is the work of Hans Frei. In his Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Frei demonstrated, perhaps more effectively than anyone else, how biblical critics came to interpret the Bible with frameworks of meaning and criteria of truth that were derived from science, history, and philosophy rather than from Scripture and Christian faith.³² He insisted that the Bible does not have to be repackaged or translated into some other conceptuality in order to be made intelligible. His own instincts were to let the biblical narrative mean and claim truth on its own terms.³³

In his later work, however, Frei’s thesis that the Bible means what it says received a cultural-linguistic correction. Frei apparently came to believe that merely affirming the Bible means what it says was no longer sufficient. The difficulty lay in knowing how to anchor the literal sense and secure its reference to Jesus Christ as the ascriptive subject of the Gospels. It is difficult to know whether Frei believed that the fault—the insufficiency of the Bible means what it says—lay with the text or with the reader. In any event, Frei proposed a new way of understanding literality: [T]he literal meaning of the text is precisely that meaning which finds the greatest degree of agreement in the use of the text in the religious community. If there is agreement in that use, then take that to be the literal sense.³⁴ This is as clear a cultural-linguistic hermeneutical manifesto as one could hope to find. I shall argue, however, that it is mistaken, though just where the mistake lies and how serious a mistake it is are open questions.³⁵ The present study aims to correct (without overreacting to) this cultural-linguistic misstep by locating authority not in the use of Scripture by the believing community but in what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls divine authorial discourse.³⁶

In the present cultural-linguistic setting of theology, biblical meaning and authority alike are viewed in terms of the church’s use of Scripture. David Kelsey’s classic study of the uses of Scripture in contemporary theology admirably describes how various theologians employ the Bible in different ways to authorize their respective theological proposals.³⁷ Kelsey is surely right to call our attention to the real and legitimate difference between professing and practicing biblical authority. He displays keen insight in noting that how people actually use the Bible is a better indicator of what they really believe about its authority than what they profess. Yet Kelsey seems unaware of the danger of conflating biblical authority with its ecclesial use. Some uses of Scripture may be inappropriate or incorrect.³⁸

Given the present authority-of-interpretative-communities climate, sola scriptura seems a less likely solution than ever to the problem of theological authority, and a less likely candidate for savior of Protestantism. Tradition, it would seem, effectively trumps Scripture. Such a judgment is, however, peremptory, for the Scripture/tradition relationship is a good deal more complicated than any one-way picture suggests. Nonetheless, the momentum in contemporary Protestant theology, particularly when the topic is authority, is clearly toward traditions of use.³⁹

Nor are all uses of Scripture strictly doctrinal. Many acknowledge Scripture’s life-giving, sacramental power as well: [T]he church must come to understand Scripture as a sacramental, poetic-like word, not as propositional truths, an expression of human experience, or mere information for practical living.⁴⁰ An even happier scenario would be one in which we did not have to choose between the Bible’s truth and its affective power! Indeed, it is an important assumption in the present work that the imagination is a cognitive instrument, and that Scripture, in addressing our imaginations, speaks to our minds, wills, and emotions alike. While some in the church decry using the Bible to generate doctrine, preferring to emphasize Scripture’s ability to reframe our way of seeing the world and understanding our lives,⁴¹ it is preferable to see doctrine itself as an indispensable cognitive and imaginative instrument for shaping the life of the church.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life: Theory versus Practice

One important contributing factor to the cultural-linguistic turn is the perception that doctrines as traditionally conceived are theoretical and hence unrelated to the concrete practice of the church. The deeper problem, however, is the captivating picture of the theory/practice dichotomy itself. The new emphasis on church practice in the wake of the cultural-linguistic turn rightly reminds us that theology involves a way of life, not merely a system of belief. Christian theology ultimately has to do with Jesus: the way, and the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

A New Ugly Ditch

Earlier generations of theologians had to cope with G. E. Lessing’s ugly ditch between the accidental truths of history and the necessary truths of reason. Theologians in late modernity face another, equally ugly divide. No dichotomy is as fatal to the notion of doctrinal theology as that of theory and practice, a mortal fault line that runs through the academy and church alike. Seminaries in particular are familiar with the tension between the so-called theoretical disciplines (e.g., systematic theology, biblical studies, church history) that are oriented to knowledge and the so-called practical disciplines (e.g., pastoral theology, pastoral counseling, Christian education) that seek to develop ministerial and professional skills.

Theory is the darling of ancients and moderns alike. In Greek philosophy, theoria refers to the eternal truths that one beholds with the mind’s eye (from Gk. theōreō: I behold). For modern thinkers, theory is the product of universal reason or the scientific method and has unmatched explanatory power. In the eyes of its critics, however, theory is abstract, speculative, and generally impractical, both in the sense that its concern is with knowledge rather than practical application and because it is based on something other than experience or practice. Postmoderns reject the universal claims of theory; the mind’s eye is clouded by language, culture, race, gender, class, embodiedness.

Theory’s fall from postmodern grace may be to theology’s advantage. Stanley Hauerwas rightly claims that Christianity is distorted when it is treated merely as a system of beliefs.⁴² The cultural-linguistic insight is that theology is connected to the life of the church. Doctrines arise not from speculative theories but from the core practices—baptism, the Eucharist, prayer, worship—that constitute the ongoing life and identity of the church.

Bridging the Ditch: The Way of Wisdom

The theory/practice distinction, together with the contrast between doctrine and life to which it gives rise, is toxic to Christian faith and to the project of faith seeking understanding. The present work seeks to move theology away from theoretical knowledge in order to reorient it toward wisdom. It is this picture of theology as wisdom that, more than anything else, enables us to traverse the ugly ditch between theory and practice.

Theological knowledge is neither merely theoretical nor instrumental; it has less to do with scientia than with sapientia: Sapience includes correct information about God but emphasizes attachment to that knowledge. Sapience is engaged knowledge that emotionally connects the knower to the known.⁴³ Theology involves both theory (knowledge) and practice (life) for the sake of its pastoral function: assisting people to enjoy and glorify God.

Perhaps the best way to overcome the theory/practice dichotomy is to let the subject matter of Christian theology determine theology’s task. Jesus Christ is the word and wisdom of God, the revealer and the redeemer: the way, the truth, and the life. Several points follow for theology from this astounding identification. First, theology must be concerned with what each of these terms represents; it must deal with truth, with ways of living, and with the meaning of life. Second, it must keep all three in mind at once. Focusing on truth to the exclusion of way and life leads to a preoccupation with theory; conversely, a preoccupation with way and life can lead to pragmatism. Christian doctrine, similarly, should serve the purpose of fostering truthful ways of living. Faith gets understanding when it lets the history of Jesus Christ govern the meaning of way, truth, and life. Finally, theology must make the way, truth, and life of Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture its primal and final norm.

The Way

The earliest name for Christianity was the Way (Acts 9:2).⁴⁴ To belong to a way is to follow it. Walking is a frequent biblical image for a person’s lifestyle or pattern of conduct. Christians are to walk in the Spirit (Gal. 5:16), in love (Eph. 5:2), and in wisdom (Col. 4:5). Jesus’ self-designation in John 14:6 picks up imagery from the Old Testament that would have been well known to his listeners, most notably that of the two contrasting ways or walks depicted in Psalm 1. This wisdom psalm opposes the way of the righteous, which leads to life, to the way of the wicked, which leads to death. The books of Kings and Chronicles afford frequent examples of kings who walked in the [evil] way of the kings of Israel (2 Chr. 21:6), along with a few exceptions who walked in . . . the way of . . . David (2 Kgs. 22:2).

To be a Christian is to belong to Jesus’ way, to be actively oriented and moving in the same direction as Jesus, toward the kingdom of God. The Johannine epistles encourage Christians to walk in the light (1 John 1:7), just as he [Jesus] walked (1 John 2:6). What is this way? The Johannine epistles define the Christian way in terms of following truth (2 John 4) and following love (2 John 6). Just as noteworthy as the designation itself is its context: persecution. Those who belong to the Way may expect to suffer for their life witness to the truth.⁴⁵ Augustine’s comment is apt: What is ‘walking as Christ walked’? Walking upon the sea? No, it is walking in the way of righteousness. . . . Nailed fast upon the Cross, he was walking in the way—the way of charity.⁴⁶ Jesus’ life, passion, and death together thus define the Christian way.

The Truth

To confess Jesus as the truth is to affirm his way as utterly reliable—true in the sense of trustworthy. It is trustworthy because Jesus is the truth of God. Jesus knows God the Father, corresponds to God the Father, and makes God the Father known: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:9). Jesus’ way is the way of the Father: No one comes to the Father except through me (John 14:6). Such claims lie behind what has come to be known as the scandal of particularity, the outrageous thesis that the God who is too great to be comprehended and too terrible to be seen is somehow present, hidden/revealed in the pale Palestinian: The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being (Heb. 1:3, NIV). Finally, the way is trustworthy because Jesus is the truth of humanity. Following Jesus’ way promotes human flourishing (shalom) and leads to the summum bonum: life, eternal and abundant.

The Life

Jesus is life, which is more than a matter of biology. Scripture depicts life as more than sheer physical existence. Life has to do with being in God’s gracious, life-giving presence. The supreme covenant blessing in ancient Israel was being with God, signified by the cloud that covered the tabernacle (Exod. 40:34–38). Sin, by contrast, alienates us from God and thus from the source of life. To have life in the theological sense is to be in a relationship of fellowship with God; to have life is to be included in the life of God. Doctrine is surely not unrelated to life in this sense. Indeed, it is precisely because doctrine is always and only about life—that vital fellowship with the triune God—that it issues in doxology.

From Theory to Theater

To the list of theology’s fourfold tasks—celebrating, coping, criticizing, communicating—we may now add a fifth: continuing. Christian theology seeks to continue the way of truth and life, not by admiring it from afar but by following and embodying it. Following this way involves more than adopting a certain ethic. More basic than external conformity to a moral code is the disciples’ fellowship with the one who is the way. Yet inner commitment is not the whole story either. Following the way ultimately requires using the imagination as well; for the way of Jesus Christ is more an embodied story than it is an embodied argument, and as we shall see, it is largely thanks to the imagination that disciples are able to relate the story of Jesus to the story of their own lives.

The Christian way is not something one can behold (theōreō) or contemplate with the mind’s eye only. Doctrine seeks not simply to state theoretical truths but to embody truth in ways of living. There is, however, another kind of beholding, more active and self-involving, associated not with philosophy but with the theater (theaomai). The Christian way is fundamentally dramatic, involving speech and action on behalf of Jesus’ truth and life. It concerns the way of living truthfully, and its claim to truth cannot be isolated from the way of life with which it is associated. For the way one lives bodies forth one’s beliefs about the true, the good, and the beautiful, so much so that it becomes difficult to separate the person from the thesis or argument or doctrine uttered by the person.⁴⁷ The purpose of doctrine is to ensure that those who bear Christ’s name walk in Christ’s way. Far from being irrelevant to life, then, doctrine gives shape to life in Christ.

The metaphor of the theater involves more than theoretical beholding, and this in two ways. First, an audience is more than a group of passive (or impassive) observers. Spectators typically have more than a theoretical interest in the drama as it unfolds on the stage. One of the principal purposes of the theater, according to Aristotle, is to achieve catharsis. There is thus a degree of emotional and imaginative investment in the kind of beholding that takes place in a theater that goes beyond the disinterested speculation of theorists. Second, and more important, theology is more than a spectator sport. To anticipate the argument of later chapters: the main purpose of doctrine is to equip Christians to understand and participate in the action of the principal players (namely, Father, Son, and Spirit). Theatrical beholding overcomes the theory/praxis dichotomy, then, when it insists on audience participation.⁴⁸

Thinking of doctrine in dramatic rather than theoretical terms provides a wonderfully engaging and integrative model for understanding what it means to follow—with all our mind, heart, soul, and strength—the way, truth, and life embodied and enacted in Jesus Christ. As such, it does justice to the cultural-linguistic turn and the concomitant emphasis on practice, and at the same time opens up interesting new possibilities for conceiving the relationship of Scripture (the script of the gospel) and the life of the church (the performance of the gospel).

THE THESIS: THE CANONICAL-LINGUISTIC APPROACH

The cultural-linguistic turn characteristic of postliberal and other types of postmodern theology is a salient reminder that theology exists to serve the life of the church. Yet the turn to church practice seems to have come at the expense of biblical authority. The canonical-linguistic approach to be put forward in the present book has much in common with its cultural-linguistic cousin. Both agree that meaning and truth are crucially related to language use; however, the canonical-linguistic approach maintains that the normative use is ultimately not that of ecclesial culture but of the biblical canon.

The burden of the present work is to commend the canonical-linguistic approach to theologians for its turn to practice, for its emphasis on wisdom, and for its creative retrieval of the principle of sola scriptura. One of its fundamental theses is that sola scriptura refers not to an abstract principle but to a concrete theological practice: a performance practice, namely, the practice of corresponding in one’s speech and action to the word of God. The supreme norm for church practice is Scripture itself: not Scripture as used by the church but Scripture as used by God, even, or perhaps especially, when such use is over against the church: And the task of theology is just that: to exemplify the church facing the resistance of the gospel.⁴⁹ Canonical-linguistic theology attends both to the drama in the text—what God is doing in the world through Christ—and to the drama that continues in the church as God uses Scripture to address, edify, and confront its readers. Let us consider more carefully these dramatic dimensions of doctrine.

The Understanding That Faith Seeks Is Dramatic

Any discussion concerning the future of Protestant theology must reckon with Karl Barth’s contention (against Harnack, among other liberals) that the subject matter of theology must determine its method. Objectivity in theology is a matter of attending to its matter, or rather, to its speaking and acting subject: the self-revealing God.⁵⁰ At the heart of Christianity lies a series of divine words and divine acts that culminate in Jesus Christ: the definitive divine Word/Act. The gospel—God’s self-giving in his Son through the Spirit—is intrinsically dramatic, a matter of signs and speeches, actions and sufferings. At the same time, it is easy to see why the church has been ambivalent about the theater. The only explicit New Testament reference to a theater is found in Acts 19, where it was the site of a riot in Ephesus against Paul’s missionary activity. Paul’s friends urg[ed] him not to venture into the theater (Acts 19:31). Subsequent generations of Christians have been happy to follow Paul’s example, eschewing not only the theater, but the dramatic imagination as well.

Yet what faith struggles to grasp is what we have seen and heard (1 John 1:3). Doctrine is a response to something beheld—beheld not theoretically but, as it were, theatrically: a lived performance. For the word of life is nothing less than the life of Jesus, the Word—a historical drama. His story is the non-doctrinal basis upon which doctrine rests.⁵¹ The gospel continues to be seen (in baptism and the Lord’s Supper) and heard (in preaching); these are the means through which Christ becomes present to his people. In a real sense, therefore, we have seen and heard the gospel, in its twofold form of Word and sacrament. What faith seeks to understand is inherently dramatic.

Hans Urs von Balthasar employs the theatrical metaphor to good effect in his multivolume work Theo-drama.⁵² The term theo-drama calls attention to the action of God (e.g., creation, redemption) in which the church finds itself caught up. The present work, while acknowledging this emphasis, focuses not simply on the dramatic nature of the content of Christian doctrine but, more particularly and distinctly, on the dramatic nature of Christian doctrine itself. Both the process and the product of faith’s search for understanding are properly dramatic.

Doctrine indicates the way, the truth, and the life of Jesus Christ and directs us to step on out. Doctrine thus resembles stage directions for the church’s performance of the gospel.⁵³ Doctrines are less propositional statements or static rules than they are life-shaping dramatic directions: Doctrines serve as imaginative lenses through which to view the world. Through them, one learns how to relate to other persons, how to act in community, how to make sense of truth and falsehood, and how to understand and move through the varied terrain of life’s everyday challenges.⁵⁴ Doctrines are like loose but nonetheless definitive scripts that persons of faith perform; doctrines are the drama in which we live out our lives.⁵⁵ All this is very encouraging for disciples who wish to overcome the theory/practice dichotomy in order to continue following the way.

Biblical Interpretation Is Dramatic

The drama of doctrine is rooted in Israel’s history and is narrated with a high degree of literary sophistication so as to establish a worldview.⁵⁶ The biblical narrative is a three-dimensional discourse that operates with historical, literary, and ideological principles. The remembered past is rendered through a plot, which in turn renders a proposition: a possible way of viewing and living in the world.⁵⁷ The reader, thus propositioned, becomes a player in the ongoing drama of creation and redemption: "As a participant in this historical process, the reader is spoken to in the text.⁵⁸ Inside the story, God acts to reveal himself and to save his people; there follow various tests of memory, gratitude, and obedience. Outside the story, the readers face the same challenge: Will they understand, remember, and respond accordingly to what we have seen and heard" about God in and from the text? Hence the process of faith’s search for understanding—seeing, hearing, engaging, and reflecting upon what we have seen and heard through reading—is itself a matter of high drama.

For better or for worse, Scripture makes tyrannical demands on the reader: The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.⁵⁹ The notion that Scripture makes demands is likely to offend some readers, who will feel the claim as an assault on their freedom, interpretative and otherwise. The demand arises, however, from a conviction as to what reality is like (what we have seen and heard) and from a concern to bring readers into alignment with it. The demand arises, as Barth saw with peculiar lucidity, from the requirement that theology correspond to its subject matter—the word of God—with faith and obedience.

Some literary critics have recently called attention to the connections between reading texts, gaining knowledge, and shaping character.⁶⁰ The drama of reading Scripture ultimately involves the fate of text and reader alike: Will the text succeed in establishing its worldview? Will the reader be decisively shaped through the process? There is potential for dramatic conflict not merely within the story but in the very process of reading in which the reader struggles, sometimes spiritually, with the text. It is tempting—all too tempting!—to hear one’s own voice in Scripture. For example, the suggestion that doctrinal dramas be tested in the concrete lives of women⁶¹ risks making a particular kind of human experience a touchstone for what is doctrinally acceptable and hence a de facto authority. Like other advocacy theologies that attempt to do theology from the perspective of the experience of a particular social or gender or racial group, this procedure mistakenly locates Christian identity other than where it belongs, namely, in Christ.⁶²

In sum, to speak of the drama of doctrine is to call attention to what is involved, and what is at stake, in doing theology. The drama stems from the clash between the ideology (read: theology) of the text and that of the reader, on the one hand, and from the conflict of disciplinary approaches, methods, and rival ways of reading the text, on the other. One goal of the present work is to model a post-critical approach to biblical interpretation that respects both the principle—or rather, practice—of sola scriptura and the location of the interpretative community that nevertheless results in performance knowledge and doctrinal truth.

The Theater of Exegetical Operations

The way forward is complicated by what amounts to a near consensus among biblical scholars that there is no place for doctrine in the exegetical inn. Philip Davies speaks for many biblical critics who resist reading the Bible as Scripture: "I prefer to see theological reading as a legitimate option among others, and based not on a claim about the objective character of its contents but on the decision of the Church . . . to adopt this literature as a canon."⁶³ For Davies, the church’s interpretative interest possesses no more authority than any other interpretative community. Right reading is a tradition-dependent, community-based notion. Those who do not want to engage in the theological interpretation of Scripture can join another game: deconstruction, structuralism, or any one of a variety of critical approaches available in the smorgasbord of contemporary criticism. Yet, if this is all biblical interpretation amounts to, if reading the Bible to meet Jesus Christ is merely one (legitimate?) option among others, can the church continue seriously to maintain that the one to whom the biblical text witnesses is the way, the truth, and the life?

When did exegetes lose interest in theology? When nontheological interests replaced theological interests, of course: In the self-assured world of modernity people seek to make sense of the Scriptures, instead of hoping, with the aid of the Scriptures, to make some sense of themselves.⁶⁴ Biblical scholars should not be too surprised if, having cast out the evil spirit of dogmatic theology, seven others, more wicked still, rush in to take its place.

One is hard pressed to say which is uglier: the ditch separating theory and practice or the ditch that separates exegesis and theology. Both are unnatural, even perverse, not least because doctrine is largely a matter of exegesis, of providing analyses of the logic of the scriptural discourse.⁶⁵ The Bible, similarly, is largely a matter of theology. The great irony of modern biblical studies, however, is that doctrinal considerations have been excluded from any significant role in the exegetical task, thus preventing exegetes fully from engaging with the primary subject matter of the biblical texts: the word of God. Biblical critics are content to use the texts as evidence for a reconstructed history of what actually happened. However, there is a world of difference between approaching the Bible as suspect information and as supernatural communication . . . the first approach is instrumental, the second interpretative.⁶⁶ Forms of exegesis that treat the biblical texts as data rather than as bearers of divine discourse are distinctly undramatic.

Consider Jesus’ exegesis of God the Father (John 1:18), by way of