Conversational Theology

It is tempting to reduce the communicative act to its propositional content alone. Yet such an identification of divine discourse with propositional content is too hasty and reductionist, for it omits two other important aspects of the communicative action, namely, the illocutionary (what is done) and perlocutionary (what is effected). To repeat: what is authoritative about the Bible is what God says and does in and with its words. To equate God’s word with the content it conveys is to work with an abbreviated Scripture principle that reduces revelation to the propositional residue of its locutions. Such an abbreviated Scripture principle, in overlooking the illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions, is both christologically and pneumatologically deficient. It fails to see that what Scripture is doing is witnessing to and hence mediating Christ, and it fails to do justice to the role of the Holy Spirit in making sure that this witness is effective.

And that’s the problem with a strong dependence on the confessions. Here’s a better perspective:

Many theologians who believe that doctrines refer truly, however, are aware that their formulations, while adequate, and nevertheless incomplete. it need not follow that doctrines, once formulated, must always be expressed in teh same verbal form. To imply that they must is to confuse sentences with propositions. There is a difference between a “static” formulation and a “stable” truth. The same truth may be (incompletely) expressed in a variety of relatively adequate formulations.

The Drama of Doctrine, Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Worth every penny.

I’ve skimmed bits of this in the past but I’m trying to read it properly now and I’d forgotten just how good it is.

Here are some things that have particularly struck me in the last couple of days:

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.

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The Christian way is not something one can behold 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. 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…

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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. 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. The reader, thus propositioned, becomes a player in the ongoing drama of creation and redemption…

And, following on from my last post:

The church in every age contains elements within its response to the gospel that are more or less faithful, which is another way of saying that its response is more or less distorting. That is precisely why no one reception of the text – neither commentary nor community – is equal to the gospel itself. Diversity can be positive and enriching unless it hardens into divergence, where instead of walking the way in a different manner, one sets out on a different way altogether.

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Where “evangelical” reminds us that understanding is accountable to the gospel, “catholic” reminds us that the gospel is not monocultural. The one gospel is best understood in dialogue with the many saints.

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What emerges from such a canonical-linguistic, catholic-evangelical theology is not a set of timeless propositions, nor an expression of religious experience, nor grammatical rules for Christian speech and thought, but rather an imagination that corresponds to and continues the gospel by making good theological judgments about what to say and do in light of the reality of Jesus Christ.