Vanhoozer IV - The Personal and the Mechanical

If the positions taken up by the modern theologians that Kevin Vanhoozer cites and discusses in Remythologizing Theology are where the bar is set, then he has certainly succeeded in clearing it. But he is still enmeshed in that culture, particularly in the idea that the language of remythologized Christian theology must be personal in a sense that is (if not the expression of a symmetrical relationship) then certainly conversational, dialogical. (see Ch.6 esp.) He gives prominence to Abraham’s prayer for Sodom, and the Lord speaking with Moses face to face. Vanhoozer shows a praiseworthy concern to safeguard God’s sovereignty (491) and recognises and emphasises that the Creator-creature relationship is asymmetrical. All this is to be welcomed. But it remains unclear (as we saw from the discussion of effectual calling in the last post) what asymmetry comes to, how God retains hi authorial agency while nevertheless in dialogue. Whatever the phenomenology of conversion, it is essential to the Augustinian and Reformed view of divine grace that in regeneration the soul is passive. So there has to be a way of thinking about this in which the choices are more than ‘either communicative or manipulative’. (494) However described, there is a passive moment, one in which the soul, being helpless to produce its own life, is acted upon. You must be born again.

Personal Communication

No sane Christian theologian doubts that the language of the faith, the language of the Bible, is that of the personal creator and redeemer, who has revealed himself in Christ. God speaks, as Vanhoozer emphasises. But he is not simply a talker. He also acts in ways other than speaking. And the speaking tells us the significance of the non-verbal action. Whoever thought that the primary cause of all that happens was impersonal? After all, it is God himself who is the primary cause of all that comes about in his creation. As we saw, a sign that Vanhoozer has not shaken himself free of the hyper-personal character of modern theology is that, along with the current theological culture that he cites, he presents us with the same false dilemma: either personal relationship or impersonal, mechanical causality. He thinks that personal language must supplant the language of impersonal and mechanical causality. But the alternative that is presented, the idea that God deals with persons in an impersonal or mechanical manner, is a figment. There is no dilemma to be faced, for there is a third alternative, and the resulting trilemma can be handled. But this is not a piece of abstract reasoning. For we noted in an earlier post that (to put the point gently) it is also unclear that by stressing the personal character of divine action (as he understands this) Vanhoozer can really aid our understanding of effectual calling, without also invoking causal notions of a distinctly asymmetrical kind.

We have looked at Vanhoozer’s treatment of effectual calling and noted its inadequacies as a statement of the Reformed doctrine. While he claims that remythologizing ‘scrutinizes language about causality in order to bring out a communicative sense to which the church has not sufficiently attended’ (28), the reverse is the case. So long as he restricts God’s relation to the world to primarily that of communicative agency of a conversational kind he cannot do justice to the passivity of the soul in regeneration. It is impossible to do so. The church has noted this, but Vanhoozer is in danger of forgetting it. This failure arises because his account ignores non-conversational elements of divine communication given to us in the Biblical revelation.

Communcation

In the previous post we noted the language of Thomas Aquinas. But no significant theologian employs the idea of divine communication and the word ‘communicate’ more than does Jonathan Edwards. It is everywhere in his writings. As for example, here, taken from his Observations on the Trinity:

God’s determining to glorify and communicate Himself must be conceived of as flowing from God’s nature; or we must look upon God from the infinite fullness and goodness of His nature as naturally disposed to cause the beams of His glory to shine forth.

Does this suggest impersonality, mere mechanism? Clearly not. The Edwardsean idea of communication is much broader than Vanhoozer’s, including creating, sustaining and redeeming of the world, and God’s revealing of himself in diverse ways. Nevertheless, this variety of communication is personal through and through.

Besides thinking of important theologians, we can think of basic theological matters. The creation itself, for example. Does Vanhoozer think that unformed and eternal matter is eternally present, ready to cooperate with the Creator? Clearly not. In creation, was there any cooperation from the human race? ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding’. (Job 38.4) However, there was, Vanhoozer thinks, a struggle, so that creation is a drama too, though this seems dubious, a Greek idea playing a cameo part in the divine drama. (36-7) Think of other events, such as God’s covenant with Abram. Was this bilateral, a done deal between partners? Did Abram negotiate its terms? Certainly, by faith, he cooperated. He acquiesced and obeyed. By faith he obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

Or let us think of the pivotal act of the Christian drama, the Incarnation. Any reader of the biblical narrative is struck by the sensitive and gracious way in which Mary is addressed by the Angel Gabriel, who speaks to her as the highly favoured one, words which caused her perplexity at what the greeting might imply. This perplexity and fear were no doubt both calmed and then further aroused by Gabriel’s words of reassurance. But in regard to the momentous event that was to take place, the conception of the Mediator in her womb, Gabriel did not seek her cooperation. Mary was not pregnant because she consented to be. Note the unconditional language: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, therefore the child to be born will be called ‘holy’ – the Son of God’. (Lk 1. 30f.) Was she caused to be pregnant? Obviously so. Was this mechanical, impersonal causation? Obviously not. Was it rape? The question answers itself.

Was her consent sought? Not in any obvious way. Nevertheless Mary was the divine choice, the one who was highly favoured. As a result, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. (Matt.1.18) Her soul magnified the Lord and she rejoiced in God her Saviour, noting his might, and his holiness, and mercy, and strength, his scattering of the proud, his bringing down of the mighty, his exalting of the humble, his filling of the hungry, his sending away of the rich and his helping Israel, keeping faith with his covenant with Abraham. It makes little sense to suppose that Mary’s words ‘let it be to me according to your word’ expressed her free acceptance of the angel’s word (as Vanhoozer suggests (335)). Rather it was her submission to the unconditional purpose of the Lord that had just then been announced to her by the angel.

Even if we restrict our attention to the divine spoken word, there is more to it than ‘diverse forms of discourse that not only report the action but also carry it forward’. (29) Vanhoozer here refers to the Lord’s spoken commentary on his mighty acts, communicating their significance to us, and his speech acts, where his speaking is his acting in some particular way. Just as Vanhoozer’s theological net misses important cases of communication that are not verbal, so it also misses cases of divine verbal communication which tell us not so much what God does in the theodrama, as what God is and is like. I refer to these as ‘one-liners’. The Vanhoozer net misses the one liners. I shall try to show the significance of this in the final post.

Vanhoozer's 'Remythologizing Theology'

This is the first of several posts on Kevin Vanhoozer’s new book, Remythologizing Theology, (Cambridge University Press, 2010). In the first of these I intend, as best I can, to characterise the basic outlook and theses of the book. The others will offer somewhat more reflective observations.

Kevin Vanhoozer is certainly not short of words. In The Drama of Doctrine (2005) he gave us 488 pages, and now we are offered a second helping of 538. And although it is true that in the new book the author offers Christian theological constructions, he is still chiefly concerned with issues of method, as has been his wont. All these words are no doubt written with the intention of aiding the reader, but I must honestly say that they have the opposite effect on at least one of them. Much of the exposition of his own proposals is repetitious, vapid, and often unclear. The author makes good criticisms of the sort of modern theology in which, in general, he situates himself . He seeks to safeguard basic Christian theological positions such as the Creator-creature distinction and even some distinctive emphases of Reformed theology, as in his treatment of effectual calling. Yet when seen from the standpoint of classic Reformed theology, as we shall see the theological outcome is (in general) unsatisfactory.

The theological constructions which occupy Parts II and III illustrate the method of remythologized theology set forth in Part I. In The Drama of Doctrine this method had to do with understanding Christian doctrine as being essentially theodramatic, here Vanhoozer seeks to construe (or to construct) Christian theology along similar lines.

What’s the difference between doctrine and theology? Something like this, perhaps: a biblical doctrine is a teaching of Scripture. And for Vanhoozer the earlier concern was: how are we to understand such doctrines? Answer: as intrinsic parts of a theodrama, they are what it means to understand God’s dramatic work in Christ, to understand how we ourselves are to be caught up in that drama, participants in it. Doctrine is God in interaction, in dialogue, through the polyphonic character of Scripture, entering the drama himself in the Incarnate Logos. So doctrine is not monologic, nor merely cognitive, or cerebral, teaching, (à la Charles Hodge) but dialogic interaction through the many genres of Scripture, engaging (in one sweep) not only our minds, but our imaginations, affections and wills.

The Proposal

So what is theology, on this view? Theology is a second-order activity, taking the theodrama, and its various elements as just described, and reflecting upon it. What does such theodrama imply about God? To answer this is to be engaged in the remythologizing of theology. The term is potentially confusing, and it seems a pity to have to spend a couple of dozen pages offering an apologia for the use of a word on the title page. But this nevertheless gives the author opportunity to say that remythologizing has nothing to do with Bultmann, but with understanding the Bible not as myth in the sense of a set of ancient fables, but as mythos, a dramatic plot, a plot of this-wordly events, of ordinary as well as heroic stories. That’s theodrama again, of course. And remythologized theology is theology which does not proceed from the bottom up, from a merely human set of ideas, such as Hegel or Anselm offer, or the ‘five speculative “ways” of Aquinas’, but in terms of Scripture’s own theodrama, God’s ways.

So remythologized theology must be systematic reflection on Scripture from Scripture’s own point of view. It is more than idle reflection, however, it is a metaphysical endeavour. To start with, and as the key to the whole, we need to ask what sort of a God must the God be who creates and redeems in such theodramatic ways? The answer to this question gives us a ‘system of projection’ which will depict on the theological screen a portrayal of a certain type and shape, the contours of remythologized theology.

‘Projection’ of course suggests Feuerbach, the idea of religion and its associated theology as nothing but the expression and projection of human ideals, the screening of a supposedly objectively real account of the divine which is (and must be, according to Feuerbach) only the stylising of a person’s deepest needs, his spiritual aches and pains, and his ideals. But that’s Bultmann’s trajectory, not mine, Vanhoozer says. Theodramatic projection starts not from the anthropocentric but from the theocentric, from the point of view of the God of the theodrama, from the director’s chair, so to speak. And it is not the objectifying of the merely subjective, but reflection on who the director is and what he can and cannot do arising from what we know that he has in fact done and not done in enacting the theodrama.

Fundamental to the remythologizing project is the idea of God as a triune communicative agency. The remythologizer must ask the question: What must God be like if he is actually the speaking and acting agent depicted in the Bible? For ‘The Bible is the means whereby God projects his own voice onto the stage of world history’. So (for one thing) ‘both the transcendence and immanence of God are best viewed in terms of communicative agency rather that motional causality’. (24) Theology is to use interpersonal rather than causal categories. The coherence of theology is not to be sought in mere logical consistency or connectedness, but in a personal plan as this is revealed in the narrative.

So Christian theology remains as much a metaphysical endeavour as it was for Hodge or Anselm.

But a metaphysics of the Christian theodrama will therefore give pride of place to the speech and action of the divine dramatis personae. For the triune God in communicative action is the touchstone of reality according to this theodramatic vision….but that does not mean that there is no place for metaphysics. Rather metaphysics becomes the attempt to reflect on subjects, human and divine, “actively engaged, through dialogue, in the process of mutual self-communication.” (25) (The quoted words at the end are those of Gerald A McCool.)

Remythologization ‘seeks to recover the biblical mythos, its theodramatic sense together with its theodramatic referent, and to provide a coherent and appropriate conceptual elaboration of the ontology of the divine dramatis personae in terms of communicatve agency”. (27)

These statements already suggest an agenda of problems and issues. But before identifying these we must look further at the contemporary setting in which Professor Vanhoozer places his project. This may give us some more items for our agenda.

The Setting

In The Drama of Doctrine the author situated himself somewhere in the middle between Charles Hodge’s merely cerebral, cognitive, monologic theology, (here I do not contest this eminently contestable claim about Hodge), and George Lindbeck’s communitarian and instrumental (if not pragmatic) view of doctrine, (not contestable), drawing from each. In the new book Vanhoozer offers a different sort of sandwich. I don’t think that it’s intrinsic to what he wants to say about remythologizing that he does position himself in this way, but what it shows is that he has two audiences in view, at least. One is the American evangelical constituency, with its high view of Scripture but it’s relatively low view of systematic theology. The intention here is to pep up theology in theodramatic fashion, so making it less dry, and more marketable because closer to the letter of Scripture. The second intended audience is that of modern academic theology: Professor Vanhoozer wishes to position himself in this firmament, or ferment, or ideas. To do this he takes some time and trouble to sketch what are for him the two main outlooks in modern theology.

Each falls under the general heading of trinitarianism. For the last few decades modern theology has been awash with proposals that are ‘trinitarian’. One theme or set of themes arises from the loss of interest in the ontological trinity, and exclusive focus placed on the economic trinity. God’s being is his redemptive action, his identity is given through how he is identified in creation and salvation history. The thrust is personalistic and panentheistic: God’s being is intrinsically tied to the world and with how it goes. Panentheism is the idea that the world and everything in it is not distinct from God its Creator, but is in some sense an extension of it, or rather that the created order is situated within the divine reality, though yet somewhat distinct from it. (The incisive book to read is John Cooper’s Panentheism). Various changes to this theme are rung; by Moltmann, Jenson, and so on, and now, by Kevin Vanhoozer.

This personalistic, panentheistic theme is developed in another way, though emphasis on the social trinity, understood as a trinity of equal persons united in perichoretic, i.e. interdependent, love. Added to this is the idea of divine kenosis, of God withdrawing to make space for person to person dialogue with humankind. This is used both as a model for Christian relations and for God’s relation with the world. Again, there are various variations on this themes: Vanhoozer cites Jenson and Freitheim and Brueggermann, Catherin M Lacugna, Elizabeth Johnson, and Open Theism. He makes incisive criticisms of important aspects of these views, and then offers his own variant.

This variant on the personalistic thrust resists the idea that personal relation should supercede the very idea of divine substance, and stresses the creature-Creator relation as well as divine freedom. He emphasises trinitarianism, and especially divine personal action in dialogue with his creatures, rather than ‘mechanical’ causation. The dialogue is a symmetrical give and take between divine and creaturely parties, divine loving action together a spoken commentary, 'triune communicative agency' as the author puts it. The parameters of such theology nevertheless seem to be characteristically modern.

Vanhoozer's way forward, beyond relational theism or panentheism and back to something more like classical theism, is to think through God’s love, and being, in terms of neither impersonal causality nor personal mutuality alone but rather in terms of communicative and self-communicative action. The love of God is the triune God in self-communicative action, God’s sharing his own life with what is other than (“outside”) himself. (177)

It ought to be borne in mind that the new book, and Vanhoozer’s work more generally, is addressed at one and the same time to the two distinct audiences that we have identified. Attempting to connect up with modern debates in such a direct way is, in my view, at least a tactical mistake, perhaps more serious. What happens when the fashion changes, as change it will? Like a nomadic tribe, modern theologians exhaust one piece of pasture and then move on. I guess they’ll soon be moving on, to begin in earnest to reflect on (say) ‘Theology and human rights’, or 'ecological theology' or whatever. However, given the current grand narrative of the theologians, one thing is unlikely to change : the strong undertow of universalism and libertarian freedom, with no incongruity detected. For all his wish to engage with Scripture, as we shall see Vanhoozer is strangely muffled on this side of things.

What's to come

There are a number of issues worth considering here. Beginning at the top, in the next post we shall consider the nature of Vanhoozer’s ‘theodramatic God’. After that, we shall consider the theological application of his claim that God’s relation to the world is dialogical, using his own treatment of effectual calling as the case study. In the fourth post we shall reflect further on an axiom of modern theology, which Vanhoozer endorses, that the personal and the causal are exclusive categories. And finally we shall identify important, crucial biblical data that Vanhoozer’s personal, theodramatic theological grid passes by on the other side.

At least, that’s how I plan to go. But who knows?

Vanhoozer II - Anything of Substance?

In this post we focus on what Kevin Vanhoozer has to say on the metaphysics of God. As we have seen, Remythologizing Theology is a metaphysical enterprise, having to do with the nature of the Director of the theodrama which is the Christian Gospel. The author is sympathetic with, but also critical of, modern Trinitarian panentheism. He offers various pertinent criticisms of it, for example that it does not do justice to the Creator-creature relationship, or to divine freedom. He also criticises the idea that in creation God withdraws by a kind of kenosis in order to make space for human freedom and for the establishing of divine-human relations that are themselves perichoretic, and so, symmetrical. Further, he considers the idea that God is nothing but relationships, relationships all the way down, as he expresses it. He rightly makes the point that for there to be relationships there must be relata, subjects in relation.

Nonetheless one significant thing that he takes from modern trinitarianism is the idea that divine relationships are personal and not causal, and that they are (as far as human beings are concerned) dialogical, that is, what I shall call two-way personal. In a later post we shall come to see the significance of that. But more importantly for us at this point, Vanhoozer first has to give an account of God, distinct from his creation, an account of the metaphysics of ‘divine communicative agency’. If this is not a variant of the modern panentheism that he critiques, then what exactly is it? God is more than a set of events or relationships, but what more? Who is God?

God is tripersonal with a shared divine essence. But what kind of a person, given that God does what Scripture says that he does? Particularly, given what God does in dialogue. One phrase Vanhoozer chooses to express his answer to the questions, who is God, and what is he like? is: ‘God is no other than he has revealed himself to be’. This is a variant of Barth’s ‘God’s being is in his act’ (220): alternatively, ‘God’s being is in his free, wise and loving communicative agency’.

From the fact that God dialogues with human beings we may infer at the very least that he has the capacity to communicate. From the Incarnation of the Word we may further conclude that God has the capacity to communicate himself. God’s presence is thus in the first instance personal, agential, and communicative rather than merely spatial, substantive or metaphysical. (205-6)

As Vanhoozer says, on this proposal any divine metaphysics or ontology must be ‘after the fact’.(217) That is, we can only discover God's character from what he says and does.

‘God in act’, ‘God’s being is in his free wise and loving communicative agency’. ‘God is no other than he has revealed himself to be’. At this point the sea fret begins to come ashore. We need carefully to reflect on these forms of expression. These words could be taken various ways. For example, they could mean that in what he communicates, God is genuine. He is not faking anything. There is no façade. His communications have the backing of God himself, and in that sense are expressive of himself; they are not insincere, or hypocritical. This would be a moral thesis, about God’s character.He is as good as his word. Or they could mean that we know of God only via what he communicates, by its character and scale. This would be an epistemological thesis. The author occasionally flirts with this idea, saying that we know of God’s identity by what we identify regarding what he has done. Or they could mean that though God is distinct from his creation he exhaustively reveals himself in it. That is, when we establish what God had done, there is nothing over, nothing that God might have done but hasn't, for instance. But none of these suggestions would take us far enough to establish a metaphysical thesis about the being of God, which is what Vanhoozer is after. For these expressions to get us on the metaphysical path the 'is' in each case has to be the 'is' of identity. 'God is [nothing other than, he is identical with] his free, wise and loving communicative agency’. But then, so it seems, panentheism beckons, despite Vanhoozer's intention to wriggle free.

At this stage, we need to remember that it is not possible to make genuine metaphysical proposals simply by introducing novel phrases or neologisms. Such proposals require clarity, and they lay upon the proposer not only the obligation to be clear on what his proposal means, but also over what it does not mean. In rejecting classical theism because it is, in Vanhoozer’s judgement, impersonal, mechanical, and monologic, and in rejecting panentheism because (for example) it collapses what God does and what God is, what metaphysical option is this phrase ‘God is in his…..’ intending to identify? Something between classical theism and panentheism, presumably. But what?

One possibility is as follows. God is essentially Trinitarian, in a perichoretic relationship in which love is necessarily communicated among the persons. So God is essentially communicative. So he could not fail to communicate himself ad extra. That would be a metaphysical thesis of some interest. However, Thomas, though a ‘classical theist’ says something like this. He says that God must create (and so 'communicate') even though the character of what he creates is at his discretion. The Angelic Doctor puts it like this-

God, in willing his own goodness, wills things other than himself to be in so far as they participate in his goodness. But, since the divine goodness is infinite, it can be participated in infinite ways, and in ways other than it is participated in by the creatures that now exist. If, then, as a result of willing his own goodness, God necessarily willed the things that participate in it, it would follow that he would will the existence of an infinity of creatures participating in his goodness in an infinity of ways. This is patently false, because, if he willed them, they would be, since his will is the principle of being for things, as will be shown later on. Therefore, God does not necessarily will even the things that now exist. (Summa Contra Gentiles I.81.4)

Vanhoozer attempts to move a critical step further than this, however, by in effect arguing that since God‘s communicating is verbal, it is that of a speech agent, and his being is in his communicative agency, then whatever he creates must be a dialogue partner. As he puts it ‘the economic Trinity is a dramatic analogy (a being-in-temporal-act) of the light, life, and love that God is in himself (a being-in-eternal-act)’. (218, the author’s italics.)

Notice that at a critical point in the exposition unusual, newly-coined expressions are once again taking the place of clarity of expression and the presentation of argument. What is ‘a-being-in-eternal-act’, ‘a-being-in-temporal-act’? Goodness-knows-what-the-hyphens-are-meant-to-mean! As a rule, a fit of the hyphenics is a sure sign that something is adrift.

Besides the presence of this semantic mist of unknowing, there’s both a logical objection to such a proposal, and a theological objection, if (that is) these expressions are intended to be statements about what God is. The logical objection is: how can we conclude (contrary to what Thomas holds, for example) from what God in fact does, that his nature is such that he must do that? And the theological objection is: does the characterisation of God’s agency proposed by Vanhoozer, that his communicative agency must take the form of speech etc., not place unduly restrictive constraints upon God? Who are we to say what God could and could not have done? - Does Scripture warrant this restriction? Why cannot God communicate to us in ways other than speech? Although Vanhoozer's procedure is ‘after the fact’, is it not also somewhat prescriptive? (It is also seen to be extravagant, in that (Vanhoozer thinks) it requires the inanimate creation to be capable of being addressed by God and obeying him. And silence is also a form of speech. But we won’t go into that here.)

It seems that Vanhoozer reveals that he is beset by the same itch that afflicts the modern Trinitarians, to go beyond what either Scripture or logic warrant. Scripture tells us what God does and has done, but (by and large) it does not tell us what he could have done. It does not tell us that he must communicate though it does show us that he did in fact communicate. (In our next post we shall see that Scripture indicates that God communicates himself in other ways than in speech, ways that are not incidental to his purposes.) If God is ‘in’ what he says, and as a consequence he could not say other than he has said, then it is hard to resist the beckoning hand of panentheism. And far from such a concept of God being a recipe for free, interpersonal, non-causal, open-ended conversation between God and his intelligent creatures, it comes to look pretty deterministic, for God at least. He is fated to communicate, to unendingly chatter, to be a divine Mr Talkative.

So, does Vanhoozer's metaphysics of God have anything of substance? The somewhat unfortunate answer is, yes and no. Yes, because he clearly wishes to separate himself from the guild of modern panentheists, and to give due recognition to the Creator - creature distinction, for example. But the trouble is that in pursuing this goal, Vanhoozer has deprived himself of tools that would be useful, nay essential, in articulating the metaphysics of Christian theism. He badly needs to allow himself to use metaphysical modalities. What God must necessarily be and do, and what he may do. By restricting divine communication to what God has said and done via the one narrative that he has established - creation, redemption and consummation through Jesus Christ - he is carried inexorably by the rapids in the direction of panentheistic reductionism, despite his best efforts to swim upstream. He fails to note in this new book, what he failed to note in The Drama of Doctrine, that within the events of the one narrative, interspersed within it, and given more particularly in apostolic commentary on it, are dozens and dozens of general statements about who God is which do not entail God speaking. And dozens and dozens of statements about what God does which do not take the form of speech agency. So focussed is he on the one narrative and on the theodrama, and in the new book on the theology of the theodrama, that he fails to notice the significance of these data. We shall look at some of these in a later post.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is free – liberal, undeserved, and also (we must never forget) contingent. Not only does Vanhoozer need to recognise the necessities of God's nature, he also needs to see the contingencies of God's actions ad extra. It might not have been so; we might not have been so. God is free to act, but not free to act against his nature, and so on: such nuts and bolts of classical theism are left behind, and this indicates continuing unease with classical theism, and sympathy for modern panentheism.

In a later post we shall give attention to what I call ‘one liners’, statements in Scripture about what God is, necessarily is, and necessarily isn’t, without which Christian theology would be impoverished. And vital instances of God's non verbal communications. To pass over these data is, I believe, not the way to achieve an advance in our understanding of Christian theism, but to slip backwards. Aa a beginning, in the next post we shall consider what Vanhoozer's metaphysical net of divine speech agency fails to catch.

Vanhoozer III - KJV and Lydia of Thyatira

(Above is a thumb-nail of the Big Orange, Kevin Vanhoozer's The Drama of Doctrine, which both precedes and animates Remythologizing Theology, the book in focus in these posts. Confused? Read on.)

There are undoubtedly some excellent features in Vanhoozer’s theological proposals. To begin with, take the central motif - the God who acts and speaks. Christians confess that God has acted and still speaks in Scripture, telling the reader the abiding significance of his actions. And then there are a number of theological emphases that this carries with it – such as the importance of Scripture itself, the upholding of divine freedom, and the asymmetry of the Creator/creature distinction, and of his intention to uphold a strong account of divine grace.

The question is, even with all these emphases in play, can one construct satisfactory Christian theology by means of remythologized theology? This boils down to two sorts of questions, it seems to me. The first is whether the Bible, as it stands, is a theological document, and in what sense. Is God’s word theological? Is the word of God in a position to remind the theologian of some theological strand or element that he is overlooking, or to caution him over his excesses? Or is it simply raw data, to be manipulated and ‘modelled’ at will? This is the issue between the first-order, the data of theology, and the second -order, the theology itself. If theology is alreadythere, in Scripture, then the difference is between theology and the reading of Scripture is not one of kind, only one of degree. And the second is whether, granted that Scripture is in some sense a theological book, is the Vanhoozerian theme of the God who speaks and who acts sufficiently rich and clear to enable the development of a satisfactory Christian theology from it?

I shall briefly try to test these questions by looking at what Vanhoozer says about divine calling, the effective, empowering, gracious call of God to sinners. This is another point at which the author clearly wishes to strike a Reformed, Augustinian emphasis. in the call God speaks, and speaks efficaciously, he utters the call that brings a response. There is a wide variety of biblical data which together give us a doctrine of effectual calling. And then there is a rich history of discussion of the concept, particularly in Reformed theology. Here is some of what Vanhoozer says.

The Calling

Vanhoozer’s overall project is to replace theologies of causal agency characteristic, he believes, of classical theism, with a theology of divine convincing presence, a matter of God’s and human kind’s aymmetrical interpersonal interaction (367-8). He wishes to replace generalities about mechanical causation with specifics about divine personal action is Karl Barth’s ‘stroke of genius’, and Vanhoozer willingly takes his cue from it. (370) In this he follows the ‘personalist’ turn in modern theology which he outlines in Part I of his book.

Initially, it may seem surprising that the author treats effectual calling as an aspect of divine providence. Yet the calling of men and women occurs in the providential order, God’s government of his world. More especially, calling involves people, as providence more generally involves God’s interacting with those made in his image. At all events, God’s call of people by grace serves Vanhoozer’s expository and exploratory purposes well – a clear case of God speaking and acting, and of men and women entering into dialogue with him. In this instance, of God acting as he opened Lydia’s heart (Acts 16.14), the case that the author focusses his attention on.

The author is unconvinced by Calvin’s (and, more generally, by the Reformed tradition’s) view that in effectual calling it is the Spirit that ‘causes the preached Word to dwell in their hearts’. (Inst. III.24.2) This is because for something to be a personal communication, on the modern personalist view of things, it has to be expressed in person - to – person relation. That is, it has to involve both divine and human persons exclusively at the level of conscious intention-forming and willing, and only at that level. So the divine calling is heard by those called, and they learn, and respond, or (alas) they fail to respond. ‘Is the grace that changes human hearts thus a matter of energy or information? It is both’. (373) The effectual call is a divine speech-act that has both illocutionary and perlocutionary force. It is effectual because of the self-communicative power of the triune God. ‘The effectual call is a sovereign summons to participate in the light and life of the triune God.’ (373) So the effectual call represents a distinct communicative causality, ‘one that moreover lies at the core of the theodramatic action, where infinite and finite freedom meet.’(373) It is causal, then, but not mechanically causal. (It is a pity that the author does not help his reader more at this point by spelling out the difference in clear terms) The Spirit has perlocutionary power, that is, the power to bring it about that the story of Jesus is received with its intended significance. Or does it? It is a 'sovereign summons'. The sign ‘Beware of the Dog’ is a warning, summoning us to take avoiding action. But it only has perlocutionary force for me if, understanding it as a warning, I take it seriously, and I am thereby warned, and actually do take avoiding action. So the theological alternatives (as far as providence is concerned, and more generally) are: a response that is free and willing, as against one that is brought about mechanically, coercively. Naturally, faced with such a choice, Vanhoozer opts for freedom and willingness.

Who can deny that a free and willing response must be part of the effectual call? Here I do not wish to go where Vanhoozer himself does not venture. If it is free and willing, why doe the story of Jesus have perlocutionary force for some and not for others? I can well imagine that he may be irritated by these dichotomies, urging us to mature beyond their binary character.

That apart, what he has given us may be part of an account of the effectual call, but can it be the whole of it? Do we not have to know (from a place other than the narrative) the state that Lydia was in? If she is dead in trespass and in sins, facing the wrong way, in rebellion and repudiation of God, then before she can enter into dialogue with God through his word, she has to want to do this. On the Vanhoozerian interpretation, Luke’s account is back to front. According to remythologized theology Luke should have said, ‘who attended to things spoken of by Paul, and the Lord opened her heart’. But Luke in fact says ‘whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended to the things….’ Being opened, (in our terms, being made willing, wanting to hear), her heart then attended to the apostolic message about Jesus the Saviour. As regards regeneration and conversion, Reformed theology has insisted on two things. First, that there is a moment of passivity in regeneration, when new life is given, light to those in darkness, life for the dead. Hence 'regeneration'. Second, that such a granting of life is wholly along the grain of the personality of the one who is give that life. Is this monergic causation? Yes. Is it mechanical? Certainly not. Is it mysterious? Yes it is. This suggests that the grid of Vanhoozer’s theodramatic, speech-active, remythologized theology does not have the right shape.

The Grid

The trouble is, the grid is not appropriately shaped to receive the variety of biblical data. Sir Arthur Eddington famously quipped ’What my net cannot catch isn’t fish’, and that’s what is seriously adrift with Vanhoozer’s new proposal. His net misses important fish. Consider first some of the language of Scripture relating to the effectual call:

A new heart will I give them, and I will write my law into their hearts.

The God who said let there be light has shined in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ

We are spiritually dead in trespasses and sins

The seed of new life needs to be implanted

We need the new birth through the mysterious and sovereign work of the Spirit.

It is essential to the Augustinian and Reformed view of divine grace that in regeneration the soul is passive. The passivity of death leads, through grace, to the activity of new life. So there has to be a way of thinking about this in which the choices presented by the grid are more than ‘either communicative or manipulative’. However described, there is a passive moment, one in which the soul, being helpless to produce its own life, is acted upon.

The data of Scripture regarding the effectual call include that the Lord will give a new heart to people who are dead in trespasses and in sins, shining in hearts to give them the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Surely these are not mere metaphors, Biblical raw data manipulable by the theological modeller, but they are already theologically loaded, carrying unavoidable theological implications.

Besides, presenting us with the dichotomies: either personal and so not manipulable. And: coercive and so not personal, looks like a failure in imagination. The slapping of a newborn baby, ensuring a first sharp intake of breath: is that personal or mechanical? Dragging a body from the freezing lake and giving it the kiss of life. What sort of a relation is that? And think of some cases of conversion. Was Saul’s conversion ‘free and voluntary’? And then think of some of the complications and nuances over that word ‘free’ and its relation ‘voluntary’.

Such data are missed because Vanhoozer’s net is of a shape and size only to pick up instances of interpersonal dialogue, and so monergistic data slip through and cannot be regarded as relevant for formulating a biblical doctrine of the effectual call. To refer to an intellectual procedure that I think that Vanhoozer does not much like when used as a theological tool, but which is inevitable, his new proposal gives us a bad induction of the biblical data. And this is because the beliefs that he brings to the data are so obviously theory-laden.

Part of the aim of achieving a degree of systematic theological understanding of conversion, say, is to achieve the integration of the various elements of the Scriptural presentation, both the personal and the impersonal, the conscious and the unconscious, the merely logically separable and the temporally separable. These accounts will include, of course, reports of conversion in Scripture, such as those of Lydia and of Saul, part of its narrative. But then we also need to take account of data of other areas of revelation about the effect of sin in the darkening and corrupting of the human mind and will, and with the work of the Holy Spirit in applying the fruits of Christ’s redemption, and so on.

A Final Question

All this biblical evidence points to the divine effectual call of a sinner being something deeply mysterious. It most certainly cannot be ‘demystified’ (Vanhoozer’s word) by thinking of the entire business along the lines of a well-led academic seminar in which some of the participants eventually come to adopt the Professor’s point of view. Some who have thought about the new birth have seen it not as a divinely-conducted conversation but as a radical turnaround for those who are not on speaking terms.

Is Christian theology intended to de-mystify? To an extent, yes, to the extent that it shows that what may be prima facie contradictory in the biblical data is not so, and instead is consistent, and to conceptualise it in a way that is both consistent and faithful to Scripture. But the success or otherwise of that theological endeavour is determined by the character of the data, not by the urge to de-mystify.

Vanhoozer V - Don't Forget the Oneliners

Besides other things, we’ve been asking if the Bible itself is a theological book, or simply raw data to which we come with our theory-laden agendas. Both in The Drama of Doctrine, and now in Remythologizing Theology, Vanhoozer strongly conveys the impression that is characteristic of the modern theological mood, that in regard to the theologian’s relation to Scripture, the theologian always has the initiative. In The Drama of Doctrine, there are various proposals, the Hodge-Henry hypothesis, of Christian doctrine as exclusively cognitive, the George Lindbeck alternative of doctrine as the establishing of the identity of the Christian community, and Vanhoozer’s own proposal, somewhere in between, of doctrine as dramatic direction. In the new book there is modern panentheism, in which what God does is indistinct from what he is, there is the perichoretic, symmetrical Trinitarian model of divine human relations, and there is Vanhoozer’s own proposal, somewhere in between, of God as communicative agent.

But we have seen that it is impossible for the modern theologian to retain the initiative in a fully consistent fashion. For example, according to Vanhoozer what we need is an account of God as engaging in triune communicative agency. But how has that small word ‘triune’ slipped in? Triune, trinitarian? The trinity, is that a theory too? Or is the teaching of Scripture clearly and indelibly Trinitarian? Does the Bible teach the trinity, or not? The answer is obvious. The theologian cannot start from scratch not only because there is a history of theology that we inherit, but also because the Bible itself presents us with a theology.

At one place (footnote 488) Vanhoozer notes that he has not said much in his proposals about God as the creator and sustainer of the universe, citing 1 Cor.8.6. This may suggest that his remythologizing project is based on somewhat selective biblical data. But it is not so much the question of being selective. It is that by focussing on God’s communication by conversational speech he skews its importance. The biblical data which I have called ‘one-liners’ is not more of the same, but quite different in how it informs of who God is and what he is like. The omission from his list of communicative acts – poetry, song, parable, apocalyptic, story and argument - of statement, or assertion, is significant, as is his omission of the dominical and apostolic discourse which takes the form of doctrine+application.

In The Drama of Doctrine, though Vanhoozer inveighs against de-dramatized theology, he also acknowledges the presence in Scripture of what he calls creedal language. In my view, one reason why the later book is an advance on the earlier one is that more recognition is given to the creedal language of Scripture than earlier. But still not enough. His present proposal is meant to provide a theological framework in which doctrine as dramatical direction is understood, but it still goes nowhere near enough to acknowledging and giving importance to the fact that the Bible is full of what I have called‘one liners’. One liners are short statements about God, or even parenthetical clauses,that, although they first occur on some particular occasion, in some context, nevertheless transcend that occasion and context. They are statements which, even when they are de-dramatised, express permanent truths about God, truths which transcend both actions of the divine drama and conversations between God and man.

A sample of one-liners

Here is a sample of twenty-one of these one-liners about God himself, taken at random from the scores that are to be found in Scripture.

Deut 32.40 – ‘As I live forever….’

Rev. 1.8 - ‘I am the Alpha and Omega…who is and who was and who is to come the Almighty’.

I Tim 6.15 – ‘The blessed and only sovereign, the King of kings, and Lord of lords’.

Job 11. 7 – ‘Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?’

Is. 40.13 – ‘Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?’

Eph. 3.10 – ‘the manifold wisdom of God’

Job 28.24 – ‘He looks to the ends of the each and sees everything under the heavens’

Acts 15.17 – ‘The Lord makes these things known of old’

I Sam. 16.7 – ‘The Lord looks on the heart’

Ps. 94.10-11 – ‘He who teaches man knowledge – the Lord – knows the thoughts of man, that they are a breath’.

Rom. 3.30 - ‘God is one’

Heb 13.8 – ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever’

Ps. 16.2 – ‘You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you’.

Matt. 5.48 – ‘Your heavenly Father is perfect’

II Pet. 3.8 – ‘With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’

Rom. 16.27 – ‘the only wise God’

I Sam 2.2. – ‘there is none holy as the Lord’

I Thess. 1.9 - ‘the living and true God’

I John.5.20 – ‘that we may know him who is true, and we are in him who is true’

John 5.26 – ‘The Father has life in himself’

John 4. 24 – ‘God is spirit’

Only twenty-one, out of many hundreds, taken at random. These have to do mainly with the life, and power, and steadfastness, and energy and uniqueness of God. They are by no means generalisations drawn from the mighty acts of God, but many record what God is in himself. They tell us about the being or nature or essence of God. Of course, others could be added to our list, having to do with his Trinitarian nature. All these ‘one liners’ are creedal statements, or statements that have creedal implications, which though they first occur in part of what Vanhoozer calls the mythos, may be abstracted from that context and re-issued, time and again, in other contexts. For they are permanent, permanently true statements about God, as God himself is permanent. They help to provide us with the biblical doctrine of God, and so to provide the permanent theological context in which a Christian theologian must work, which he must emphasise, and which he must not infringe.

Not only that, the one-liners also provide the theological scaffolding of the mighty acts of God, reminding us, by their frequent and also incidental occurrence in Scripture, of the character of the so-called ‘director’ of the drama.

The Pastorals

Let us look at this in a different way. One of the most significant groups of writings in the New Testament are Paul’s pastoral epistles. One might think, on Vanhoozer’s schema, that coming towards the end of the NT canon they would provide guidance for all those ministers whose function it is, according to Vanhoozer, to portray the drama of redemption and to initiate new players into how to be participants in it. But not a bit of it.

For our purposes here, two features of these writings stand out. First, what is said about the job of ministers. The letters express Paul’s expectations for the rising generation of ministers of the Gospel. They are to be primarily and principally, teachers. (I Tim. 1.3-8,3.3, 3.9, 4.2, 4.10, 4.13, 4.16, 5.17, 6.3 . 2 Tim. 1.13, 2.2, 2.14, 2.23, 2.28, 3.10, 3.14, 4.2-3. Titus 1.9, 2.1, 2.7, 2.15, 3.8.)

Second, the letters also contain their own share of one liners:

I Timothy

‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1.15)

‘To the king of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever’ (1.17)

‘God our Saviour, who desires all people to be saved’ (2. 3-4)

‘For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (2.5)

‘For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving’. (4.4)

‘…the living God, who is the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe’ (4.10)

‘…God, who gives life to all things’ (6.13)

‘..the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in inapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see’ (6.16)

II Timothy

‘….the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace. (1.8-9)

‘But God’s firm foundation…(2.19}

‘All Scripture is breathed out by God….’(3.16)

‘…of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead…’ (4.1)

‘…the Lord stood by me and strengthened me…’(4.17)

Titus

‘….God, who never lies, promised before the ages began’ (1.2)

And in addition there is this beautiful epitome of the gospel so admired by John Newton:

For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, teaching us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and so purify for himself a people for his own possession, who are zealous of good works. (2.11-12)

While there is movement in this direction in some of the assertions of Remythologizing Theology, a movement in a creedal direction, I am still not convinced that Vanhoozer has got it.

Analysis 18 - Tell Me the Old, Old Story

‘I know this man……His name is Stand-fast; he is certainly a right good pilgrim’. - Mr Honest, (John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress).

In the last Analysis I argued that the Biblical narrative is what it is because it is God’s narrative, the God who reveals himself in Scripture by means of representative statements about his nature or essence, and then narrates what he has freely done and suffered for our sakes and for our salvation. So at once we see that Christian doctrine cannot be essentially theodramatic , since its rests upon a bedrock that is pre-narrative or narrative-indifferent in character.

Kevin Vanhoozer’s ‘theodramatic’ proposal for re-casting our understanding of Christian doctrine cannot be the whole story, or even the main story. But can it be an account of Christian doctrine at all? Can it be any of the story? Can it turn out to be anything other than an extended rhetorical embellishment of the idea of Christian doctrine?

Act 4

Let us first briefly remind ourselves about what Dr Vanhoozer says about what he calls Act IV of the drama. This Part is concerned with ‘The Performance’. that is the performance of Christians who are ‘participating in the once-for-all mission of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit’. (366) This is the sort of thing he has in mind:

Theology as a practical sapientia directs us to perform the atonement by appropriating our identity in Christ an by engaging in practices that participate fittingly in Jesus’ saving work... Actors who wish to participate fittingly in the theo-drama must therefore learn what their role “in Christ” entails, not only in theory but in practice. For to perform the doctrine of the atonement is to engage in a theater of martyrdom….(362)

According to Vanhoozer doctrine prepares us for fitting participation in the drama of redemption. (363)


Two observations

I begin an answer to these questions about the nature of our participation in the drama of redemption (supposing we allow ourselves to use the word ‘drama’ for the moment), with a couple of general observations.

Since the time when the Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans, an important structural distinction has been recognised between Christian doctrine on the one hand and its application to the lives of individual Christians and the Church on the other. In his letter Paul teaches us about sin and righteousness and grace and atonement (in roughly the first 11 chapters) and then applies these truths practically, from 12 onwards. It’s similar in Galatians and Ephesians and Colossians and is foreshadowed by Jesus’ teaching on bearing fruit, the danger of looking back, and his teaching on not only being hearers of the word, but doers of it also ; as well as his emphasis, especially in John, on love as the basis of true discipleship; an emphasis followed by James’ teaching on faith and works.

So from these first Christian times the distinction between doctrine – the teaching about God, and salvation, which we are to believe – and application - the consequences that belief in the doctrine of our salvation should have for our human life in the widest sense - has become deep-seated in Christian thought. The one is to lead to the other, but each is nevertheless distinct from the other , and the one may not lead to the other. The seed may not bear fruit. The profession of faith may not even be skin-deep.

Vanhoozer’s proposal that Christians are to be participants in the drama of redemption, the theodrama, if it were to be taken seriously, would blur if not entirely abandon this formative, time-honoured distinction and connection. It is therefore one thing to speak of ‘doctrinal direction’ (Vanhoozer 362), a phrase which is easily assimilated into the age-old doctrine + application approach to Christian theology; it is another thing to talk of ‘engaging in a theater of martyrdom’ (362), which (I suggest) takes us well beyond the parameters of the New Testament.

Vanhoozer’s idea of ‘participation’ is a very strong one, and it is the only sense which would justify the writing of The Drama of Doctrine in the first place. But we need to bear in mind that participation comes in a variety of strengths. For example, in a democratic society, voters, Members of Parliament, the Civil Service, and ministers of the government all ‘participate’ in the political process. (‘Participatory democracy’). But the strength of that participation ascends from the humble voter through to the (sometimes) not-so-humble member of the ruling elite. In a theatrical production the audience, the director and producer, the designers and technicians, the cast, and the audience, all participate in the drama. But obviously the cast participate by enacting the play, the audience by watching and enjoying it.

Shortly I shall try to show that when the NT refers to the relation of Christians to the work of redemption it uses a sense of ‘participate’ that is very weak, one that does not at all justify the attempt to recast Christian doctrine in the wholesale way that Vanhoozer proposes. Ironically, it is when, in Part IV of the book, ‘The Performance’, he comes to work out the role of doctrine in the drama, that Vanhoozer himself f is forced to recongise this weakest sense, the sense that does not justify the writing of the book in the first place. So he says, in the place already noted, that doctrine prepares us for fitting participation in the drama of redemption. (363) He is forced to explain or gloss the language of theodrama using non-dramatic terms which are already richly displayed on the surface of the New Testament – calling, union, sanctification, and so on, th staple of Berkhofian systematic theology. ‘Those who participate in the theo-dramatic missions do so through union with Christ, a union that is wrought by the Spirit yet worked out in history by us’. (366) ‘It is the Spirit who creates a new “role” (character, “spirit”) in us through the process of sanctification.’ (373) Here Professor Vanhoozer employs the rhetoric of drama to do nothing more than embellish what boils down to a conventional understanding of the relation between doctrine and practice. It’s hardly worth the labour, and most certainly does not justify the bally-hoo.

Pretence

The second general point is that making the idea of drama theologically central creates serious difficulties over the pronounced stance of the New Testament on sincerity and against hypocrisy. Participating in a drama is, basically, play acting. And one thing that the New Testament, and particularly Jesus in his teaching on hypocrisy, is dead set against is play acting: hypocrisy, playing a part, not being wholehearted and sincere, being merely outward and not inward, and so forth. No doubt this is one reason, perhaps the reason, why the New Testament does not use the concept of drama in a positive way. It uses many other figures which convey intense, concentrated, activity – a fight, a race, a wrestling match, a walk – but it never uses theatrical figures. So before he can set out to treat Christian doctrine theodramatically the theodramatist must defend the very idea of a drama against the strictures and warnings of Jesus and the New Testament more generally against play-acting and mere role-playing in religion. (369) Should this not mismatch arouse our suspicions?


Tense

Why do I insist that the sense in which Christians participate in the accomplishment of redemption must be a very weak sense? For the simple reason that by now the theodrama is over. I fully realise that some of the sense of this pastness is ‘eschatological’, but this does not change the main point. The segment of real time in which the mighty acts of God’s redemption were accomplished is past. The drama is no longer taking place, and our eschatological hope is wholly based upon what has been accomplished. No amount of re-presenting the drama, in re-enactments of the Incarnation or of the Crucifixion, or in celebrations of Baptism or the Supper, can provide us with the means of participating in it even as strongly as an audience participates in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest when they are watching it and are engaged and moved by what they see and hear. For such an audience is watching a real-time production of a drama, but in the case of the ‘drama’ of redemption such a privilege is denied us.

Of course besides this fact of tense, on which the New Testament insists, (and which any dramatic or sacramental view of the Christian faith tends to water down) there are other, more theological reasons, for denying to Christians strong participation in the accomplishment of redemption. The work of our redemption was solely the work of the Son, in accordance with the will of his Father and empowered by the divine Spirit. He is the sole redeemer, and though we may share in his sufferings, it is because he suffered that we have sufferings to share in. Sharing in his sufferings could never mean being a co-redeemer with him.


Continuance

As we have noticed, the very idea of doctrine as drama is noticeably absent from the New Testament conception of the application of doctrine. ‘Drama’ is not a biblical word, and it is hard to see that it is a biblical concept either. Of course our redemption is in history and through history. To be sure it occurred little by little. Of course the Lord produced twists and turns in that history, the unexpected, the shocking. To be sure believers are in Christ, sharing in his sufferings, his death and resurrection.

Let us press this point a little. As Vanhoozer notes, the New Testament has a rich vocabulary to depict the atonement – it is a victory, an example, a sacrifice, a penal substitution, and so on. But nowhere in these riches do the writers of the New Testament find it in themselves to refer to the cross as a drama, or a play, or a type of play, such as a tragedy, even though obviously enough there are dramatic and tragic aspects to it. Is this omission not significant?

In applying such doctrines tio Christian life the apostles do not invite us to join them in a drama, or even to think of our lives as a drama, but in fact to do and to be something that is dramatically different from that, as we shall shortly see.

I suggest that insofar as we permit ourselves to use the language of drama about the accomplishment of our redemption, this can only be illustrative, a metaphor, a conceit, and thus something to be used sparingly and with care. Think how far from the spirit and the letter of the New Testament is the idea that the Lord God is an impresario!

The response to the fact of our redemption that the New Testament calls for is not to participate in it, (in any but the weakest sense) but to celebrate it, to enjoy it, and to stand fast in confessing it. The New Testament is given over to stressing the solid, lasting, permanent character of the gospel and the dangers of forgetting this. So Christians are urged to continue, to be patient, to endure, to stand, to keep in mind, to be steadfast and immoveable, to be not soon moved, not to forget, to wait, to remember, and so on. This language suggests not the shifting activity of the actor, but precisely the opposite. It calls for inactivity, ‘engaged inactivity’ as we might call it

Jesus Christ, in whom this stability is to be rooted, ‘is the same yesterday, today and for ever’. And even if, in the interests of supporting some idea of the real presence of Christ at the Supper, we are urged to dramatise our celebration of it, and our participation in the celebration, we must never forget that the Supper is made intelligible only by the Word, and that intrinsic to the Scriptural commentary on the Supper is the teaching that it is an act of remembrance.

So….

In the Preface to his book Professor Vanhoozer explains how what he thought and hoped would be a small book turned into a large one. It did indeed. But its size deceives. The book is a long development of an unbiblical analogy which borrows what illuminating force it provides by riding piggy-back upon the distinction between doctrine and its application, the age-old, basic way in which the New Testament shapes our understanding of the Christian life and how to live it. It is greatly to his credit that Professor Vanhoozer sees that this is how the New Testament speaks to us. But in recognising this, however fleetingly, he undermines the cogency and plausibility of his own novel proposal.

Charles Hodge & the Method of Systematic Theology

This is a draft of a contribution to a forthcoming volume in honour of Professor David Wells, edited by Ron Gleason and Gary Johnson (Crossway)

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined - just as found :

- Thomas Hardy

Introduction

In this paper I wish to do two things; to try to trace the roots of a particular interpretation of Charles Hodge's theological method, the one outlined in the first seventeen pages of his Systematic Theology, and to indicate how popular and uncritical this interpretation of him has become. Then, in the second half of the paper, to try to show what Hodge really said and implied and that the latest criticisms of Hodge, those offered by Kevin Vanhoozer, are simply a replay of the uncritical chorus. This paper is intended as neither an attack nor a defence of Hodge, but only as an effort to put the record straight.

The criticism, in a nutshell, is that Hodge has a naively inductivist view of science and applies this to the relation between Scripture, which is a 'storehouse of facts', and the construction of systematic theological doctrines. It is alleged that this approach, besides having a primitive view of scientific method, does not make sufficient allowance for context, or presupposition, or for having due regard to the organic character of Scripture. It is said to be unacceptably positivistic, objectivistic and empiricist.

Bavinck and Kuyper

Perhaps the taproot of this criticism lies in the brief discussion that the Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck has of Hodge, though this is not likely, since the Reformed Dogmatics (1895-1901) has only recently been translated. So the source may rather be Kuyper's Encyclopaedia of Theology, (1898) the second volume of which has been translated for longer. The two theologians have very similar ideas about Hodge. We shall look first at Bavinck and then more briefly at Kuyper.

In the section on theological method in Volume I of his Reformed Dogmatics , Bavinck contrasts what he calls the 'synthetic genetic method' with the 'experimental' method of Charles Hodge of establishing the 'scientific' character of theology. This is part of a discussion about the scientific character of theology, about whether, following Schleiermacher, the subject matter of theology ought to be the scientific study of human religious states. This leads to the question, if Christian Theology is distinct from Religious Studies, what ought to be the method of Systematic Theology, and is that method 'scientific'?

Bavinck proceeds to outline the synthetic genetic method, which he himself adopts, he describes as follows: While receiving the content of his faith from the hands of the church , he is

positioned in Scripture itself as the foundation of theology (principium theologiae) and from there develop dogmas. What a theologian does in that case is replicate, as it were, the intellectual labor of the church. We are shown how dogmas have arisen organically from Scripture - that the firm and broad foundation on which the edifice of dogmatics rises is not a single text in its isolation but Scripture as a whole. 'Synthetic-genetic' presumably because the theologian synthesises the dogmas of the church from Scripture, and shows how these dogmas have their roots in Scripture.

Bavinck sharply distinguishes this method from the 'empirical or experimental method' of Charles Hodge. He understands Hodge as applying to Scripture the Baconian experimental method of (1) collecting the facts, (2) framing an explanatory hypothesis for them, and testing the hypothesis experimentally, though actually he does not take these points from Hodge himself but from Robert McCheyne Edgar.

Correspondingly, he [Edgar] says, the first task of Christian dogmatics is to gather the facts, say the facts of the moral world order, sin, the person of Jesus, holy Scripture etc. The second task is to attempt to explain these facts by the presupposition of creation, fall, the deity of Christ, the inspiration of Scripture. And finally, the theologian must verify them by what Scripture teaches concerning these presuppositions.

But according to Bavinck this method does not stand up under examination. He offers three connected reasons for rejecting it. But first there is an implicit contrast between his own approach, in which the 'dogmatician....lives in communion of faith with the church of Christ and confesses Scripture as the only and sufficient basis (principium) of the knowledge of God, Accordingly, the dogmatician receives the content of his faith from the hands of the church'. Here are the three reasons:

First,

In divine revelation word and fact are always connected; it does not merely convey facts that we have to explain, but it itself clearly illumines those facts. Scripture does not show us some facts that we then summarize under the rubric of sin, but it tells us itself what the essence of sin is. It not only tells us what Jesus has done but also who he was. Without this explanation we would not understand the facts at all and would give them a totally wrong interpretation.

Secondly

The term hypotheses is completely inappropriate here. In the first place, the doctrine of the origin and essence of sin, to cite an example, or the doctrine of the deity of Christ, is not a hypothesis we have conceived but part of the witness of Holy Scripture. Furthermore, that doctrine, based as it is on this witness, is not a human hypothesis but a word of God that as such demands faith.

Finally,

If God has spoken in his Word, there is no longer any room for "experiment'. Subsequent to the witness of Scripture, verification is in the nature of the case impossible in this area.

This account insofar as it involves Hodge is compressed. There is no direct citation from Hodge, only a brief summary of the McCheyne Edgar article. In a work such as the Reformed Dogmatics this summary approach is understandable. Nevertheless it leaves the reader with a seriously misleading and even unintelligible account of the Princeton theologian's method. For each of the three points made by Bavinck, insofar as they implicate Hodge, seem to be off their target.

The impression that Bavinck conveys of Hodge is that he thinks that Scripture simply consists of a set of facts, which the theologian then provides an interpretation for these, the interpretation coming from the hypothesis that the facts suggest or indicate. So one fact is that three men hung on crosses, and said various things. What do these facts mean? The theologian offers an interpretation.

But as an account of the procedure that Hodge recommends, this is very wide of the mark. As Hodge understands matters, the 'facts' which the systematician assembles are the clauses and sentences and collections of sentences - narratives and arguments - of Scripture, and only those facts.

It is a fact that the Scriptures attribute omniscience to Christ. From this it was inferred that He could not have had a finite intelligence, but that the Logos was clothed in Him with a human body with its animal life. But it is also a Scriptural fact that ignorance and intellectual progress, as well as omniscience, are ascribed to our Lord. Both facts, therefore, must be included in our doctrine of his person. We must admit that He had a human, as well as a divine intelligence.....

We see from these words what Hodge means by a fact: 'Christ is omniscient', 'Christ was ignorant of certain matters', 'Christ experienced intellectual progress', are all facts ascribed to our Lord by Scripture, according to Hodge. And 'Christ could not have had a finite intelligence' and 'the Logos was clothed with a human body' are examples of inferences drawn from an incomplete induction of such facts. So though the word 'hypothesis' may be absent, the idea of a hypothesis tested by the facts is clearly present, as we have just seen. But the facts from which the inferences are drawn are not facts apprehended apart from words, but facts that are expressed in words. The idea that the data of Scripture are instances of data of a natural scientific kind is not one that Hodge entertained.

In the case of the third objection, there is straight misunderstanding. Hodge is not proposing an experimental or verificationist procedure which will test the claims of Scripture by reference to data outside or apart from Scripture, but the very reverse of this.

Kuyper discusses Hodge's method briefly in his Principles of Sacred Theology. Unfortunately it contains some inaccuracies: Hodge does not say that Scripture offers us no 'scientific theology', but rather that the beginnings of such theology are to be found in the New Testament epistles. Nor does Hodge say that the theologian must authenticate the truths of the Bible, which are not truths until he authenticates them. Just the reverse , in fact. And as for Hodge being brought back 'under the power of naturalistic science' Kuyper does not seem to realise that the invocation of scientific induction is purely methodological for Hodge.

Hodge’s references to induction should not be misunderstood. This cannot the logic of general induction, but the induction in question is from the bounded set of expressions in the canonical scriptures. Suppose we attempt by induction to determine whether all swans are white. We discover that some are black. Are all swans either white or black? Perhaps there are pink swans in remote and unexplored regions. And what about past swans? And future swans? Induction in the natural world is necessarily unbounded in time and space. But inferences from the biblical data are the precise opposite; there is a fixed set of data the boundaries of which are known.

Secondly the inferences drawn from such data are not mere generalisations drawn from the experiences of natural regularities in the world, but arise from data that have meaning. So induction may be followed by deduction, as the consequences of the meaning of the canonical sentences are addressed, and the deductive implications of such sentences are part of those data. It must embrace an exhibition of the 'internal relation' (as Hodge puts it) of those facts. (i.e. their logical relation.) And he emphasises that systematisation involves the 'reconciliation' of data, (p.2) that is, the establishing of their consistency, the ‘relation in which the separate truths contained therein stand to each other’(p.2)

So Hodge's appeal to scientific induction is an analogical argument: as facts are to scientific induction, so the facts of Scripture are to the inductive reasoning of the theologian. But it does not follow that the theology is a case of natural science.

Geerhardus Vos, in his inaugural lecture for the newly-established Chair of Biblical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (1894) ‘The Idea of Biblical Theology’ seems at first to offer some support for the Bavinck/Kuyper view of theology and theological method. He views Biblical Theology as a part of Exegetical Theology which deals with the revelation of God in its historical continuity and stresses its organic character. (21)

Biblical Theology exhibits to the student of the Word the organic structure of the truth therein contained, and its organic growth as the result of revelation. It shows to him that in the Bible there is an organization finer, more complicated, more exquisite than even the texture of muscles and nerves and brain in the human body; that its various parts are interwoven and correlated in the most subtle manner, each sensitive to the impressions received from all the others, perfect in itself, and yet dependent upon the rest, while in them and through them all throbs as a unifying principle the Spirit of God’s living truth.

and the interrelationship between fact and interpretation.(9-10)

And in the second place, we must remember that the revealing acts of God never appear separated from His verbal communications of truth. Word and act always accompany each other, and in their interdependence strikingly illustrate our former statement, to the effect that revelation is organically connected with the introduction of a new order of things in this sinful world……to apply the Kantian phraseology to a higher subject, without God’s acts the words would be empty, without His words the acts would be blind.and of the fact that the Scriptures themselves are pre-theological documents.

…the mighty creation of the Word of God furnishes the material for Theology in this scientific sense, but is no Theology. It is something infinitely higher than Theology, a world of spiritual realities, into which all true theologians are led by the Spirit of the living God. Only if we take the term Theology in its more primitive and simple meaning, as the practical, historic knowledge of God imparted by revelation and deposited in the Bible, can we justify the use of the now commonly accepted name of our science. As for the scientific elaboration of this God-given material, this must be held to lie beyond the Biblical period.

Despite all this, however, comparing Biblical Theology and Systematic theology, and in no way disparaging the latter, Vos has this to say

The very name Biblical Theology is frequently vaunted so as to imply a protest against the alleged un-Biblical character of Dogmatics. I desire to state most emphatically here, that there is nothing in the nature and aims of Biblical Theology to justify such an implication. For anything pretending to supplant Dogmatics there is no place in the circle of Christian Theology….Dogmatic Theology is, when rightly cultivated, as truly a Biblical and as truly an inductive science as its younger sister.

So Vos, writing sixteen years after the death of Charles Hodge, is not opposing induction to the stress he places on Biblical Theology as an organically related set of revealed truths, or on the intereconnectedness of fact and interpretation in the biblical revelation. This can only mean that he takes induction as a method of pursuing a resolutely a posteriori approach in gathering and understanding the biblical data, and not as denoting the entirety of theological method. This, as I shall be arguing, is Hodge’s view as well.

And then, the deluge

Bavinck and Kuyper set the ball rolling, and it still rolls. Since their day, and particularly in the present day, numerous theological critics have understood (or rather misunderstood) Hodge by interpreting him through a Kuyperian lense, and accepting the criticism in a thoroughly uncritical fashion.

See, for example, Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy set the Theological Agenda, (Valley Forge,Pa. Trinity Press International, 1996) pp.42-3); Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era , (Grand Rapids, Baker, 2000 pp.71-3) ; John R. Franke, The Character of Theology: A Postconservative Evangelical Approach. (Baker, 2005, pp. 88-9); George Marsden in Faith and Rationality (ed. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff (University of Notre Dame Press, 12 ) (p. 241); David Clark, To Know and Love God, (Crossway 2003); Stephen Wellum, "Postconservatism, Biblical Authority and Recent Proposals for Re-Doing Evangelical Authority" in Reclaiming the Center, (Wheaton, Crossway, 20 , 174))

Hodge's advocacy of an 'inductive' method in theology is said to embody all the wrong things. He is accused of being a 'foundationalist', 'positivistic', ‘empiricist’ and ‘individualistic’. These traits are said to reveal him as expressing the mentality of the Enlightenment, 'the assumption of modernity', in his pursuit of objectivity, a mentality perhaps fostered by the influence upon him of one of the most notable figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Thomas Reid, and perhaps by the dreaded ‘Reformed Scholasticism’. By implication, in our post-modern era Hodge's theological method is to be avoided like the plague.

The latest expression of such accusations that I have come across is in a piece by Professor Kevin J. Vanhoozer, 'On the Very Idea of a Theological System: An Essay in Aid of Triangulating Scripture, Church and World'. When the usual charges are uncritically levelled against Hodge, this time from a highly-regarded theologian in the Reformed family, then it's time to try to set the record straight.

What Vanhoozer claims

In the course of his advocacy of theology as involving 'theodramatic triangulation' between Scripture, church and world, Professor Vanhoozer has this to say about Hodge.

Hodge's inductive method betrays certain tell-tale marks of its time, though this alone is hardly an argument against it. In particular, the method presupposes a subject-object dichotomy in which the interpreter's mind observes and analyses its object: the facts of the Bible. The direction of theological reasoning is bottom up: from biblical foundations to doctrinal formulation. The location or situation of the interpreter is irrelevant: the glory of the inductive method is that close observation allows the facts to emerge, regardless of who is doing the observing. Second, Hodge works with a dichotomy between fact and theory that has been called in question by philosophers of science who insist that data are always/already 'theory laden'. Third, Hodge's decision to read the Bible as a book of divinely revealed facts predisposes him to focus on the Bible's content and to construe this content as propositional teaching. Such a focus on revealed content runs the risk of neglecting the larger canonical context and literary form of the biblical 'facts', perhaps the inevitable result of biblical empiricism.

These sentences bear certain familiar tell-tale signs, expressed in three charges against Hodge: that he presupposes a ‘subject-object dichotomy’ in which the mind observes facts (which are in some sense mind-independent), and in which the situation of the interpreter is irrelevant. According to Vanhoozer, according to Hodge anyone can do the observing necessary to being a theologian. Second, that Hodge is said to work with a ‘dichotomy’ between fact and theory, not taking any account of the theory-ladenness of data. Thirdly, that in virtue of the first and second of these practices Hodge focuses on revealed content of the Bible and is predisposed to construe that content as propositional teaching. The tell-tale signs are unmistakable: 'mind-independent facts’, the neglect of ‘situation', the focus on facts and propositions.

Before we look at these three charges in turn, it is worth noticing that in this article Professor Vanhoozer says little if anything directly about Hodge's inductive approach to the data of Scripture, (though he does mention it in his article in the Kostenberger book) . Nevertheless, a word or two about this is in order.

No doubt it is tautologically true that Hodge was a child of his time, and no doubt he could have benefited from the philosophy of science of children of later times, notably the claim that scientific theories are falsifiable hypotheses, not inductive generalisations from the data. No doubt Hodge's account of scientific procedure is naively Baconian. No doubt he would have learned things from Karl Popper, or N. R. Hanson, or Imre Lakatos, or even (heaven forbid!) from Thomas Kuhn. But this is not, I think, the main point. The main point of invoking induction for Hodge is simply to endorse a method which gives Scripture theological priority, allowing it to address us rather we addressing it. One imagines that for Hodge any method which ensured this outcome would be equally valid. For example, he might well have endorsed the view that every doctrinal hypthesis must be falsifiable by Scriptural data.

So, at last, we turn to Hodge and his critic. First to revisiting those seventeen pages, and then to looking at Professor Vanhoozer's three charges.

Hodge's seventeen pages

Hodge is concerned to distinguish what he believes to be the correct systematic theological method from two other methods which he calls, somewhat imprecisely as he acknowledges, the 'Speculative' and the 'Mystical'. The speculative method, Hodge says, 'assumes, in an a priori manner, certain principles and from them undertakes to determine what is and what must be. It decides on all truth, or determines on what is true from the laws of the mind, or from axioms involved in the constitution of the thinking principle within us. To this head must be referred all those systems which are founded on any a priori philosophical assumptions'. He then proceeds briefly to examine three forms of this Method: Deistic, (the natural religion of Herbert of Cherbury, no doubt), Dogmatic (Hodge cites the method of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo), and the Transcendentalistic (including the romantically-tinged rationalism of the New England, of Hodge's day, and more widely, Hegelianism). The second main method, the mystical, in its supernatural form holds that the Spirit of God is in direct communion with the soul, granting otherwise unattainable knowledge. Such mysticism is to be distinguished from the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit in his role as illuminator of the Scriptural truths. Mysticism in its natural form appeals to natural religious consciousness.

To these methods - perhaps 'approaches' would be a better word - very broadly sketched, Hodge opposes 'the inductive method'. This method is similar to induction in the natural sciences in assuming the trustworthiness of sense perceptions, of mental operations, and of truths not learned from experience but which are given in our human constitution. By induction the scientist perceives, gathers and combines his facts, taking care as far as possible to collect only the facts and all the facts. From these he deduces certain laws. The Christian theologian proceeds in a parallel way. For him the Bible is the 'store-house of facts'. Besides the mental principles used in natural science, the theologian appeals to other naturally-implanted principles. For example, to the essential distinction between right and wrong, that sin deserves punishment, and other similar first truths, 'which God has implanted in the constitution of all moral beings, and which no objective revelation can possibly contradict'. (It is at this point perhaps that Hodge's Reidian commonsensism most clearly reveals itself. If he were alive today perhaps Hodge would express these ideas in terms of proper basicality or truth-acquiring mechanisms.) Using these principles the Christian theologian must 'ascertain, collect and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him'. The Bible clearly reveals what is otherwise dimly perceived, the character of the external works of God, our own consciousness and the laws of our nature, and our religious experience. Further, 'the Scriptures teach not only the truth, but what are the effects of the truth on the heart and conscience, when applied with saving power by the Holy Ghost'.

Like the scientist, the theologian ought to carry out his induction as thoroughly and comprehensively as possible. In theology a partial induction of particulars has led to serious errors. It is a fact, Hodge claims, that the Scriptures attribute omniscience to Christ. ‘From this it was inferred by some that He could not have had a finite intelligence, but that the Logos was clothed in Him with a human body with its animal life. But it is also a Scriptural fact that ignorance and intellectual progress, as well as omniscience, are ascribed to our Lord. Both facts, therefore, must be included in our doctrine of his person'.

The facts induced

must not be willfully denied or carelessly overlooked, or unfairly appreciated. We must be honest here, as the true student of nature is honest in his induction. Even scientific men are sometimes led to suppress or pervert facts which militate against their favorite theories; but the temptation to this form of dishonesty is far less in their case, than in that of the theologian. The truths of religion are far more important than those of natural science. They come home to the heart and conscience. They may alarm the fears or threaten the hopes of men, so that they are under strong temptation to overlook or pervert them.....Science cannot make facts; it must take them as they are. In like manner, if the Bible asserts that Christ's death was a satisfaction to justice, the theologian is not allowed to merge justice into benevolence in order to suit his theory of the atonement. If the Scriptures teach that men are born in sin, we cannot change the nature of sin, and make it a tendency to evil and not really sin, in order to get rid of the difficulty.....We must take the facts of the Bible as they are, and construct our system so as to embrace them all in their integrity.

Finally (at least as far as we are concerned) according to Hodge 'principles are derived from facts, and not impressed upon them'.

It is...unscientific for the theologian to assume a theory as to the nature of virtue, of sin, of liberty, or moral obligation, and then explain the facts of Scripture in accordance with his theories. His only proper course is to derive his theory of virtue, of sin, of liberty, of obligation, from the facts of the Bible. He should remember that his business is not to set forth his system of truth (that is of no account), but to ascertain and exhibit what is God's system, which is a matter of the greatest moment.....So long, however, as the binding authority of Scripture is acknowledged, the temptation is very strong, to press the facts of the Bible into accordance with our preconceived theories.....It is the fundamental principle of all sciences, and of theology among the rest, that theory is to be determined by facts, and not facts by theory.

Summarising, two things are to be noted. The first is to underline the point that in setting out his views Hodge is prescribing a set of ideals, not describing what actually goes on. And it is obvious, in reading his words, dated in certain respects as they must be, that his overriding concern is to preserve and protect the a posteriori character of theology in its relation to Scripture, by being resolutely a posteriori in his construction of Christian doctrine or principle or theory. This is the point of the stress on induction.

Vanhoozer's three charges

Professor Vanhoozer first alleges that Hodge presupposes a subject-object dichotomy in which the mind observes mind-independent facts in which the situation of the interpreter is irrelevant. This is a serious misreading, serious because it confuses two fundamentally different matters. As we have noted, Hodge is not describing what actually goes on in carrying forward the science of theology, but giving his views on what ought to happen. His words are not descriptive, but normative or prescriptive. So of course, as is made obvious by a cursory reading of the material, Hodge insists on the importance of taking into account the situation of the interpreter. He refers to it time and again. Rationalists and dogmatists and mystics bring principles to the interpretation of Scripture which they are unwilling to test by its data. We are all tempted to do this because of the importance of the issues at stake, to pervert or overlook the teaching of Scripture, to 'press the facts of the Scriptures into accordance with our preconceived theories', as he puts it.

It would be easy to show that in every department of theology, - in regard to the nature of God, his relation to the world, the plan of salvation, the person and work of Christ, the nature of sin, the operations of divine grace, men, instead of taking the facts of the Bible, and seeing what principles they imply, what philosophy underlies them, have adopted their philosophy independently of the Bible, to which the facts of the Bible are made to bend. This is utterly unphilosophical.

In making these observations (so it seems to me) Hodge is far from being the fuddy-duddy that he is nowadays reckoned to be, but instead has his finger firmly on the pulse of things. If by a miracle we could introduce him into contemporary discussions we may imagine him having a word or two to say about the subjectivizing and sceptical consequences of viewing Scripture through the lens of post modernity. What Hodge affirms is that it is possible by careful attention to the data, and by the help of the Holy Spirit, (another vital factor about our situation), to come to a true understanding of the teaching of Scripture even though there is a sense in which the theologian is involved in a never-ending process of revisiting the data.

Whether in these ways Hodge succeeds in avoiding a 'subject-object dichotomy' is not clear, because the term itself is not clear. 'Dichotomy' means 'a sharply defined division'. Is there a sharply defined division between the subject, the human senses and intellect, and the object, the data of Scripture? Don't most of us makes such a 'dichotomy'? Aren't most of us guilty of what Hodge is guilty of here? Except in certain forms of idealist thinking the subject and the object are not the same. Hodge can only make the important distinction between the principles that we may wrongly bring to Scripture and the principles which we may rightly take from Scripture, by making a distinction between principles and facts. Any process involving the testing of theories must do the same.

Contrary to what Vanhoozer claims, then, for Hodge it matters a very great deal who is doing the observing. It matters whether or not the observer is a speculator, or a dogmatist, or a mystic, or some of each. The danger of operating with preconceived theories is not a situation which Hodge himself is exempt from, nor (he would say) is anyone else. He is certainly not setting himself up as some kind of paragon. The point is that, according to Hodge, we should strive with might and main for an objectivity based on a thoroughly a posteriori approach to the data of Scripture.

Secondly, Vanhoozer charges that in Hodge’s approach there is a dichotomy between fact and theory, for Hodge (it is said) does not take any account of the 'theory-ladenness' of data. Theory-ladenness is, I think, the idea that all factual statements, but particularly those that enter into scientific reasoning, imply some theory or other. 'There is a table over there' is 'laden' with the theory of the spatio-temporal location of middle-sized artefacts. 'I am aware of a red sense datum' is laden with the theory of phenomenalism. ‘He has an Oedipus complex’ is laden with psychological theory. Some terms, like ‘gene’ or ‘electron’ are theory-laden. Is Hodge aware of this point? Decidedly so. His Systematic Theology begins 'In every science there are two factors: facts and ideas; or, facts and the mind. Science is more than knowledge. Knowledge is the persuasion of what is true on adequate evidence. But the facts of astronomy, chemistry, or history do not constitute the science of those departments of knowledge. Nor does the mere orderly arrangement of facts amount to science. Historical facts arranged in chronological order, are mere annals......If, therefore, theology be a science, it must include something more than a mere knowledge of facts. It must embrace an exhibition of the internal relation of those facts, one to another, and each to all'. And the seventeen pages end with ‘It is also assumed (viz. by the inductive method applied to Scripture) that the relation of these Biblical facts to each other, the principles involved in them, are in the facts themselves…..'

As Hodge proceeds to show, collecting together the facts of Scripture is not like collecting pebbles from a beach and sorting them. For the facts of Scripture are related conceptually, or ‘internally’ related, as he puts it. In a Christian view of Scripture ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’ is consistent with ‘God created the heavens and the earth’ and ‘Our God is a consuming fire’, and it is the task of the systematic theologian, as far as he is able, to display this consistency. In other words, unlike pebbles on a beach, the facts of Scripture, expressed in the sentences and clauses of the Bible, have semantic and syntactic meaning. We can draw inferences from them, as Hodge shows from this example: ‘It is a fact that the Scriptures attribute omniscience to Christ. From this it was inferred that He could not have had a finite intelligence, but that the Logos was clothed in Him with a human body with its animal life. But it is also a Scriptural fact that ignorance and intellectual progress, as well as omniscience, are ascribed to our Lord. Both facts, therefore, must be included in the doctrine of his person’.

It must be remembered that Hodge’s remarks about the nature of theological method have to do in particular with systematic theology. And for him systematic theology builds on the results of biblical theology. ‘So the Bible contains the truths which the theologian has to collect, authenticate, arrange and exhibit in their internal relation to each other. This constitutes the difference between biblical and systematic theology. The office of the former is to ascertain and state the facts of Scripture. The office of the latter is to take those facts, (viz. the facts ascertained and ordered by the biblical theologian) determine their relation to other cognate truths, as well as to vindicate them and show their harmony and consistency’.

Hodge's Princeton successor B. B.. Warfield puts the point in the following terms:

Systematic Theology is not founded on the direct and primary results of the exegetical process; it is founded on the final and complete results of exegesis as exhibited in Biblical Theology. Not exegesis itself, then, but Biblical Theology, provides the material for Systematics. Biblical Theology is not, then, a rival of Systematics; it is not even a parallel product of the same body of facts, provided by exegesis; it is the basis and source of Systematics. Systematic Theology is not a concatenation of the scattered theological data furnished by the exegetic process; it is the combination of the already concatenated data given to it by Systematic Theology. It uses the individual data furnished by exegesis, in a word, not crudely, not independently for itself, but only after these data have been worked up into Biblical Theology and have received from it their final coloring and subtlest shades of meaning - in other words, only in their true sense, and after Exegetics has said its last word upon them.

So for Hodge the facts to which the systematic theologian attends are already ‘laden’ with the conclusions of the biblical theologian. It is because of the work of the biblical theologian that Hodge is able to say, 'Although the Scriptures do not contain a system of theology as a whole, we have in the Epistles of the New Testament, portions of that system wrought out to our hands. These are our authority and guide'.. So it would be a mistake to think that Hodge believes that the Bible is nothing but sets of facts and that all theological reasoning is ‘bottom up’, as Vanhoozer thinks. No, the Bible contains theories too, as the biblical theologian teaches us. The language of the Bible is laden with them. Perhaps Hodge would be inclined to say that in the Bible ‘God’ is a theory-laden term. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself’: is that not a theory-laden statement? Would Hodge deny it?

So besides facts, Scripture, especially the Pauline epistles, also provides us with portions of systematic theology. This is why Vanhoozer is inaccurate in supposing that Hodge makes a principled distinction between the facts of the Bible and the systems that theologians devise. The Bible already contains valid samples of such a system, according to Hodge. 'It is no less unscientific for the theologian to assume a theory as to the nature of virtue, of sin, of liberty, of moral obligation, and then explain the facts of Scripture in accordance with his theories. His only proper course is to derive his theory of virtue, of sin, of liberty, of obligation, from the facts of the Bible'. The theologian is the focus of the influence of competing theories. Those he brings to the Bible, so distorting it, and those he obtains from the Bible after proper induction, involving inquiring into, summarising and connecting up its teaching. Unsurprisingly, therefore, systematic theology 'is not an easy task'. The idea that Hodge plays down or dismisses theories, and allows that anyone can be a systematic theologian simply by assembling the facts of Scripture, without courting the danger of having those facts distorted by false theories, is a major misunderstanding.

Finally, Vanhoozer claims that in virtue of the first and second of these practices Hodge is predisposed to construe the content of the Bible as propositional teaching. Well, Hodge certainly does construe the content of the Bible as propositional teaching, though interestingly enough an induction of the seventeen pages shows that the word 'proposition' is never used there. However, Hodge refers to 'the truths' of the Bible, and 'the facts of Scripture', and I suppose that he would not deny that these truths and facts are expressed, or are expressible, in propositions. 'God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself' is (Hodge would say), a fact, a true proposition, a truth. Whether asserting such things 'runs the risk of neglecting the larger canonical context and literary form of the biblical “facts”, perhaps the inevitable result of biblical empiricism', as Vanhoozer claims, is hard to tell. Perhaps it does run this risk. And perhaps not. I rather fancy that Hodge, who was something of a Bible commentator, was appraised of the different literary forms of the Scripture, capable of distinguishing between parables, narratives and wisdom literature, and the literal from the metaphorical. As we've already noted, he believes that the Epistles of the New Testament are unique among the other books of the Bible in providing for us fragments of systematic theology.

If behind the dislike of ‘propositional theology’ there lurks the fear of equating 'propositional' with dry, detached truths located in a dry, detached theological system, then Hodge’s words may also allay such fears. At two places in the seventeen pages Hodge notes that the Bible contains not only doctrines, or theories, or principles, or truths, but also states 'what are the effects of the truth on the heart and conscience, when applied with saving power by the Holy Ghost....The Bible gives us not only the facts concerning God, and Christ, ourselves, and our relations to our Maker and Redeemer, but also records the legitimate effects of those truths on the minds of believers'. So whatever defects ‘propositional theology’ might nowadays be thought to have, one cannot, I think, reasonably charge Charles Hodge with proposing that the appreciation of revealed truth should be dry or detached.


Conclusion

Unfortunately, Professor Vanhoozer's negative comments about Charles Hodge's systematic theological method are not novel. As we have seen they are part of the retail trade of disparagement of Hodge and Princeton theology occurring more generally within current evangelical and Reformed theologising. But that does not excuse their inadequacy. The comments are inaccurate at numerous points and unbecoming a serious scholar. Vanhoozer is of course fully entitled to develop his novel view of systematic theology as ‘theodrama’, a triangulation of Scripture, church and world, but it is wrong to use a distorted and partial account of Charles Hodge’s theological method to aid him in that task. Hodge is not an untouchable icon: he shared in our common infirmities. But he is entitled to have his views fairly presented .