{"id":65,"date":"2004-11-11T13:45:53","date_gmt":"2004-11-11T21:45:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=48"},"modified":"2004-11-11T13:45:53","modified_gmt":"2004-11-11T21:45:53","slug":"postmodern-theology-and-sola-scriptura","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2004\/11\/11\/postmodern-theology-and-sola-scriptura\/","title":{"rendered":"Postmodern Theology and Sola Scriptura"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d like to follow up on the discussion of how a postmodern theology might deal with the “sola scriptura” concept. I’ve mentioned Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism<\/a> as one source of vigorous discussion about the authority of scripture in the context of postmodern theology. To follow up on that reference, I’ll try to summarize the argument in Chapter 3 of that book, titled “Scripture: Theology’s ‘Norming Norm'”. This post will contain some brief thoughts, and hopefully I’ll be able to flesh out some more details in later posts. (In the interests of brevity, I’m not giving page cites, but the chapter is only about 30 pages long.)<\/p>\n

Grenz and Franke’s thesis, as I understand it, is that postmodern concepts of how communities read and interact with texts can be useful in a protestant understanding of revelation. They take as one of their starting points Article 1.10 of the Westminster Confession of Faith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of counsels, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scipture.”<\/a><\/p>\n

They note that<\/p>\n

“[t]he declaration that the Spirit speaking in or through scripture is our final authority means that Christian belief and practice cannot be deterined merely by appeal to either the exegesis of scripture carried out apart form the life of the believer and the believing community or to any supposedly private (or corporate) “word from the Spirit” that stands in contradiction to biblical exegesis.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This means that the Biblical text is not merely a repository of propositional truths. Instead, “the Spirit speaks to succeeding generations of Christians through the text. Traditionally, this ongoing divine work has been known as ‘illumination'”.<\/p>\n

The Christian tradition as well as the Christian community, then, are important aspects of how the text is understood and applied in any context. The text doesn’t exist only in the foundationalist sense of an independent entity waiting to be discovered. In real ways, the text is given meaning as the Spirit works within the life of the Church.<\/p>\n

The question Matt asked in one of his comments to my prior post is a good one: if all postmodern theology is seeking to do is understand the text, why not stick with the time-tested “sola scriptura” formulation? For me at least, that isn’t the right question. It’s not, at least for me, that there’s any desire to jettison the concept of “sola sciptura.” Rather, it seems that the concept, and the related concepts of “inerrancy” and “verbal inspiration,” have become encysted against the ongoing work of the Spirit. In some ways (being myself not a Charismatic), I see some of these “pomo” theological ideas as a bridge between the crusty doctrinalism of propositional traditions and the unbounded emotionalism of charismatic and pentecostal traditions. In short, at least to some extent, I see it as a useful way of obtaining better balance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d like to follow up on the discussion of how a postmodern theology might deal with the “sola scriptura” concept. I’ve mentioned Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism as one source of vigorous discussion about the authority of scripture in the context of postmodern theology. To follow up on that reference, I’ll try to summarize the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-13","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}