WORD AND CHURCH

Essays in Christian Dogmatics

John Webster

T&T CLARK

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Copyright © T&T Clark Ltd, 2001

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First published 2001

ISBN 0 567 08818 9

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

In memoriam

GEORGE SCHNER, S.J.

1946–2000

συνεργός τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Scripture

1 The Dogmatic Location of the Canon

2 Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections

3 Reading the Bible: The Example of Barth and Bonhoeffer

Christ and the Church

4 Incarnation

5 Jesus in Modernity: Reflections on Jüngel’s Christology

6 The Self-organizing Power of the Gospel of Christ: Episcopacy and Community Formation

7 Christ, Church and Reconciliation

Ethics

8 God and Conscience

9 Eschatology and Anthropology

Index of Names

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the essays in this volume have been previously published as follows:

‘The Dogmatic Location of the Canon’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie 43 (2001), pp. 17–43.

‘Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections’, Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998), pp. 307–41.

‘Jesus in Modernity: Reflections on Jüngel’s Christology’ as ‘Jesus in the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel’, Calvin Theological Journal 32 (1997), pp. 43–71.

‘God and Conscience’, Calvin Theological Journal 33 (1998), pp. 104–24.

‘Eschatology and Anthropology’ as ‘Eschatology, Anthropology and Postmodernity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2 (2000), pp. 13–28.

INTRODUCTION

The essays assembled here, written over the course of the last five years, form a set of working studies in Christian dogmatics, that delightful activity in which the church praises God by ordering its thinking towards the gospel of Christ. They cluster around three themes. The first of these themes is the nature of Holy Scripture and its interpretation. Recent theology has happily witnessed the gradual narrowing of the gap between systematic theology and biblical studies, as first hermeneutical theory and then renewed appreciation for pre-critical interpretative practices have begun to cure some of the myopia of critical-historical exegesis. Yet, from the point of view of Christian dogmatics, the large and often (too) sophisticated literature on post-critical hermeneutics is not wholly satisfactory. One major reason for this is that there has been remarkably little attention paid to doctrinal description of the nature of Scripture, with the result that central topics—concerning the perfection, perspicuity, sufficiency ...