Contemporary Neoorthodox Theology: The Nonpropositional Character of Revelation

2021

The purpose of the present work is to put forth a phenomenological investigation of the act of reading the Bible as Scripture for the sake of a constructive-theological proposal regarding the nature and interrelations of Scripture, Tradition, and Church as sources and authorities for Christian theology. It is intended as the first work of its kind: a proper phenomenology of Scripture in the objective genitive sense. The second chapter addresses two paradigmatic responses to the question of the relation between philosophy and theology. The third chapter introduces phenomenology as a method for engaging in philosophy. The fourth chapter identifies three proto- phenomenological insights into the Scripture-Tradition-Church triad found in the writings of Origen of Alexandria. The phenomenological investigations of this work further develop these three fundamental insights through a careful consideration of the act of scriptural reading, insights which have not yet fully been appreciated in the phenomenological literature on religion and which are relevant for this essential problem in the area of Christian theological method. The first insight is that there is a phenomenological distinction to be made between the biblical text, an artifact which can be held in the hands, and Scripture in the proper sense, i.e. the biblical text intended as containing and communicating the Word of God. The second insight is that that there is a relation of reciprocal or mutual priority which obtains between Scripture and the Tradition of the Church. Ecclesial Tradition is formally or phenomenologically prior to Scripture in the sense that it is what makes Scripture initially accessible to the reader. But Scripture is methodologically or theologically prior in the sense that the goal of the scriptural reader is not simply to impose some traditional perspective upon the text in an act of hermeneutical play but to attain to an understanding of what the text says as Word of God. The third insight is that the distinctly divine quality of the text is revealed in an experience of the phenomenon of the Third Voice, in which a meaning or sense suggests itself to the reader which cannot be identified with the literal sense of the text as intended by the human author, nor predicted on the basis of the habits of interpretation of the human reader. The fifth chapter elaborates on the first two insights. The sixth chapter develops the third insight by responding to the specific question of whether and how there is an experience of the Word of God in the words of Scripture. This is the most essential question of a phenomenology of Scripture, and yet one which has gone untreated by phenomenologists until now. The seventh chapter addresses the theological question about how properly to understand the nature of the Church in light of the inevitable fallibility of theological knowledge. The dissertation concludes in the eighth chapter with some reflections about the possibility of theology without anathemas in light of the phenomenology of Scripture.

Robert Brown has argued that any defence of the authority of Scripture based on its divine inspiration must take account of the reality of the form of Scripture. He points to two facts regarding the Bible’s form (the history of textual error and a variety of beliefs regarding the biblical canon) that, he believes, compromises such a foundation for biblical authority. Exactly which words, he asks, are we to think were inspired? Brown operates with an understanding of revelation which is exhausted by the category of the biblical proposition (i.e. he equates revelation with Scripture, understanding inspiration to be the mode of that revelation). Accordingly, any error within the constituent parts of the propositions found in the Bible undermines the validity of its claim to be revelation in the first place, thus, in Brown’s view, compromising the entire edifice of Christian theology. In what follows, I suggest that a personalist approach is a more suitable way to understand revelation and that the propositional mode of revelation (Scripture) participates in God’s personal revelation in Jesus Christ through the inspiration of the Spirit. By broadening the theological context of Scripture (i.e. understanding it in its Christological and Pneumatological dimension of depth), its authority is not found in its inerrancy but in its reference beyond itself to God’s actual self-revelation in Jesus which God employs as the permanent mode of his revelation by the agency of the Spirit.

Modern Theology, 2010

Broura Bitton-Ashkelony, Theodore de Bruyn, Carol Harrison (vyd.), Patristic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Proceedings of an International Conference to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the International Association of Patristic Studies, Brepols Publishers, Turnhout 2015, p. 389-403, 2015

The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, 2010

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