I have written several times about the foundationalist nature of theology and scripture in modernism. Liberal theology looks for a universal experience common to all humanity as its foundation for theology. The universal experience becomes the interpretative lens for doing theology and usually reduces scripture to a high expression of the universal experience, but it ceases to be truly authoritative.
The conservative method views scripture as a theological erector set. Scripture is a disconnected set of theological truths that must be formed into an all-encompassing, bomb-proof, systematic theology. This tends to elevate the resulting system as the lens for doing theology, and the system takes on an authority over and above the scripture itself.
So what is the alternative? I just finished reading “The Character of Theology: A Postconservative Evangelical Approach,” by John R. Franke. He gives a one-paragraph summary of how the authority of the Bible can be understood in a postmodern era:
N. T. Wright suggests a model of biblical authority that moves along similar lines. He uses the analogy of a five act Shakespeare play in which the first four acts are extant but the fifth has been lost. In this model, the performance of the fifth act is facilitated not by the writing of a script that “would freeze the play into one form” but by recruitment of “highly trained, sensitive, and experienced Shakespearean actors” who immerse themselves in the first four acts and then are told “to work out a fifth act for themselves.” The first four acts serve as the “authority” for the play, but not in the sense of demanding that the actors “repeat the earlier parts of the play over and over again.” Instead, the authority of the extant acts functions in the context of an ongoing and unfinished drama that “contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order to first understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.” Wright then suggests that this model closely corresponds to the pattern of the biblical narratives. (p. 162. Franke is quoting from N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?" Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7-32. The quotes are from pages 18-19.)
I gave my interpretation of this perspective in three posts when I first began to blog in June.
Divine Composition
Missing Pages
The Ultimate Family History
Generous Orthodoxy will begin a discussion of Franke’s book next week. They plan to review the book a section at a time, and I get the impression that they expect to be at it for weeks. You still have time to get the book and wade in. I want to invite you all to join in.
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