Tag: method
Sort by:
- The theological disciplines: An orientation for the perplexed, updated
- Category
- Theology
- Tags
- method
Ever been confused about the different academic disciplines broadly grouped under the umbrella of “theology”? Here’s an (over)simplified orientation to what they are and what questions they address. Biblical studiesWhere did the scriptural texts come from, how did they get to be what they are, and what do they say? Biblical theologyWhat did/do the Scriptures mean? Systematic theology (a.k.a. constructive theology)How do we make sense of our Christian beliefs in a way that is meaningful for our lives today? Applied theologyHow do we put our theological understanding into practice? Practical theologyHow do our actual practices inform and illuminate our beliefs? Historical theologyHow have Christians understood and practiced their faith in the past, why did they do so, and how has that shaped our understanding and practice today? The borders between the different theological disciplines are open. Each one feeds into the others, sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly, but always and inevitably. The trick is to be aware of how each one does so, so that we can engage consciously and well in that inevitable interdisciplinary cross-pollination, rather than unconsciously and therefore usually poorly. Of course, this not a complete list. All these disciplines can be broken down into sub-disciplines. All of these disciplines and sub-disciplines involve interaction with other, independent academic disciplines.1 And how to group and categorize different sub-disciplines is often debatable.2 Neither are the summaries of the essential questions very fulsome—representatives of any of these disciplines would probably want to give a richer and more nuanced description.3 1 Archaeology, sociology, anthropology, literature, linguistics, philosophy, history, and organizational studies are just a few obvious examples. 2 Even whether some theological disciplines should be counted as sub-disciplines or separate categories unto themselves is often debatable. I suspect that a number of Christian ethicists and philosophical theologians, for example, might take umbrage at my failure to list their disciplines as separate categories. 3 If anyone wants to offer a better but equally succinct phrasing of their discipline’s question(s), I’d be more than happy to consider a revision. - Theological method, spiritual formation, and textual criticism - Thoughts on Croasmun and Kennedy’s “Improving on ‘Original Manuscripts’”
- Category
- Theology
In 2012 at the Society of Vineyard Scholars annual conference, Matt Croasmun and Todd Kennedy described some problems with the notion of “original manuscripts” in regard to Scriptural texts. They suggest that the distinction between textual criticism and redaction criticism is based on a modern scholarly construct that we have imposed on the past—specifically, a distinction between licit and illicit revision of Scriptural texts, which happened in earlier and later periods, respectively. Croasmun and Kennedy suggest that the process of textual development is continuous, with no discernible transition from one phase to another, and therefore that we should set aside any attempt to distinguish between licit and illicit textual development on the basis of such phases. Instead, they suggest that identifying the authoritative Scriptural words among textual variants should be a matter of theological and spiritual discernment—and indeed that this is always already the case anyway, and that we should honestly embrace this reality. They make a lot of good points and their analysis is helpful. I agree that there is continuity across the process of textual development, and that we should acknowledge and embrace the role of theological and spiritual discernment in the task of identifying the inspired words of Scripture. I especially agree with their position that the concept of “original manuscripts” is flawed and misleading because there never was any such thing. However, I am not convinced that we should abandon textual criticism so blithely. If the meaning of a text resided only in its reception, such a proposal would make sense, but this is not the case. The intentions of authors and of our forebears in the faith are not transparent to us, but neither are they opaque; we can have an approximate yet reliable sense of those intentions. This means that both what the various authors and redactors intended to communicate and what the recipients of that communication understood and passed on are significant factors for our own understanding. This in turn means that we should redefine the goal of textual criticism in terms of canonical manuscripts rather than original manuscripts. Despite the rhetorical justification of finding the “original manuscripts,” textual criticism has always in fact been aimed at reconstructing the initial versions of the texts that were circulated in the early church. It was only a misguided assumption that “initially received” and “original” were synonymous that caused this. But once we lay aside the misleading notion of “original manuscripts,” we become able to see textual criticism’s purposes and value correctly. The results of textual criticism have been quite reliable. There is always a certain amount of uncertainty and room for scholarly debate over some passages, of course, but there are good reasons for confidence that our critical texts closely approximate the documents that the early church read, exposited, circulated, etc. But why should the version of the Scriptural documents used by the early church be our standard? Put simply, because we follow a Lord and Saviour who was born at a certain time and place, and because such is the nature of tradition. Our faith has been handed down to us from our predecessors, and those closest to Jesus are the only ones we can look to to convey his words and deeds to us. The Spirit of God has never stopped communicating with us, but because we are imperfect listeners we need a κανῶν by which to gauge what we hear and from which to learn the characteristics and patterns of his behaviour. Unguided discovery is a poor pedagogical practice in a case like this; Jesus spent three years teaching his closest disciples in the ways of his Spirit, progressively releasing them into ministry as they gained competence in hearing and following the Spirit. He could not send them out to follow the Spirit’s lead until they had learned how to do so. So likewise for us today. We need guidance to learn the ways of the Spirit. We have nowhere to look for this guidance but to our forebears in the faith, and they all look back to their forebears. The Scriptures that guided the earliest Christians are therefore the Scriptures to which me must look, too. Of course, the Scriptures would be lifeless apart from the Spirit working in and through them. And even with the Spirit working through them, they are only every instrumental towards the larger goal of bringing us into union and communion with God. But as the Spirit works through the Scriptures, we learn to recognize him. We need this Scripturally mediated revelation in order to learn how to recognize him, and we need this κανῶν to be handed down to us from the earliest days so that we can trust it even when we cannot trust our own discernment of his voice. And so, the work of textual critics is legitimate and valuable. We need our Scriptures to align with the earliest canonical versions of the Church so that we can put our trust in them as reliable guides to learning to discern the word of the Spirit of God. It is important to consciously bring theological and spiritual discernment into the process of textual criticism, but we cannot reach the requisite level of theological and spiritual maturity to do so without first being formed by the Spirit through the Scriptures and the community of God’s people. - Usefulness and limitations of the “Wesleyan quadrilateral” for theological method(published )
- Category
- Theology
The Wesleyan quadrilateral is great. However, it needs a very important nuance (one which Frank has already pointed to). We do not have epistemologically unmediated access to any of the four elements. We can’t just access Scripture, but only our interpretations of Scripture. We can’t just access the tradition, but only our interpretations of the tradition, We can’t simply access even our experience, for it, too, is always already interpreted by the time we access it; even reason is not directly accessible, for what we have access to is always our interpretation of what is reasonable and how to reason. This is important, for it means that everything involved in our attempts to know and understand anything are always only provisional interpretations, and therefore never settled. Communal discernment, interpretation, and learning are our best ways to help make our knowledge as closely approximate to reality as possible, but even that is still only ever provisional. So I really don’t think we can ever assume something really is what we think it is, or aim to have exactly correspondent knowledge of the reality. We can only ever seek to approximate it as best we can through seeking coherence and testing whether our understanding works as an explanation of all that we encounter. And so as a result, often I find that my interpretation of one or more elements of the quadrilateral is at odds with my interpretation of some other element, I cannot surrender to the temptation to let one trump the others. Instead, I must keep wrestling until it all makes sense together, no matter how far down the rabbit hole I have to go. Anything less is intellectual suicide. - Evangelical theological method and the loss of charismatic experience, updated (published )
- Category
- Theology
Evangelical theological method is so concerned to root revelation in the Bible because most of them in theory, and virtually all of them in practice, have lost any sense of the Holy Spirit doing anything beyond illuminating their reading of the text. Without any space in their theology for the idea that the Holy Spirit might say anything to them directly, evangelicals only have the Bible left as a locus for supernatural revelation. Yet since it is a text, the Bible is therefore suitable for rational investigation (thus the dominance of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic in Evangelical thought). Thus exegesis becomes the mode of divine communication today, and the role of the Holy Spirit is to guide and guarantee the correctness of that exegesis and the subsequent application. This fundamental shift to cessationism (whether doctrinal or merely practical) sets Evangelical thought into a very different situation from that of the patristic church. Both Evangelicalism and the early church saw the Bible (from which the early creeds and formulae were derived) as providing the rule of faith. However, the early church used this rule to guard against misguided readings that claimed to come from some kind of new, supernatural revelation of otherworldly wisdom, whereas Evangelicalism uses this rule to guard against encroachments of modern secularism. The former is guarding against heresy and syncretism, the latter is guarding against unbelief. The early church did not use the Rule of Faith (i.e. the creedal statements derived from and summarizing the Bible) to combat pagan religions, since it was completely inapplicable to them. It was no use to say to a worshipper of Mithras “Mithraism violates our Rule of Faith, so it must be rejected,” because he would not listen to such a claim. First he had to encounter Jesus and be converted before the Rule of Faith would have any claim on him. Only once he was a Christian could the Rule of Faith be applied to him and his theology. Evangelicals, on the other hand, seem to want to use the Rule of Faith (i.e. the Bible and statements derived from and summarizing it) to fight against secularism. They protest that secular culture does not conform to the Bible and insist that Western civilization needs to return the Bible to its proper place so that the truth of the Bible can be heard and thus people can encounter Jesus. This is, of course, madness and doomed to failure, since the modern non-Christian has no more reason to accept the Bible’s authority than the ancient Mithraite. The essential difference here is that the early church and the heretics it fought had in common a supernatural faith that included the ongoing speech of the Spirit, whereas the evangelical church has boiled all supernatural revelation down into Scripture and its interpretation and relies on this over against the naturalist assumptions of its opponents. The early church’s use of the regulating function of Scripture and creed was aimed to judge purported Spirit revelations to determine their true source. The Evangelical church’s use of this regulating function is conflated with the revelatory function (which itself has been constricted only to Scripture) and is used to resist and counter beliefs that do not claim the same source at all. - Relation of meaning between crucifixion and resurrection, updated (published )
- Category
- Theology
The resurrection is the main event and the ultimate point of the gospel. The crucifixion functions as the qualifier that shapes the meaning of the resurrection. By itself, the crucifixion would be meaningless. It would amount to nothing but the unpleasant but forgettable death of some wandering preacher long ago at the hands of the powerful. Jesus of Nazareth would appear in fewer footnotes than Bar Kochba. It is only because of the resurrection that the crucifixion becomes meaningful. Thus the crucifixion is dependent on the resurrection for its meaning. The resurrection is fundamentally meaningful, though its meaning is contextually qualified by the crucifixion. Resurrection requires death in order to become possible, and so its meaning is necessarily qualified by death; however, to require death is not to require crucifixion. If Jesus had lived to an old age and died with dignity reclining on a couch conversing with his followers (as Socrates did) and had then been resurrected by God, his resurrection would still be meaningful as Good News and therefore worthy of proclamation. But its meaning would have a different quality. Thus the relation between resurrection and crucifixion is like that between noun and adjective. The resurrection is the locus of meaning, and the crucifixion is the quality of the meaning. The resurrection is the sine qua non of Christian faith; the crucifixion is the sine qua aliter.