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Note: these excerpt threads are subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority permits Kevin J. Vanhoozer: "Figural reading is canonical ... in the sense that it represents the inner logic or telos of the canon by interpreting the story of Israel and the story of Jesus as one story... figural interpretation is canonical in the sense that it is the rule for present-day Christians to make sense of their stories as Jesus did of his, precisely by reading their own lives in light of the life of Jesus... Typology is the mainspring of theo-dramatic unity, the principle that accounts for the continuity in God's words and acts, the connecting link between the history of Israel and the history of the church, the glue that unifies the Old and New Testaments... The meaning of a historical event is largely a matter of its place in a larger story. History is that larger story, that whole in light of which we can make sense of the parts. The canon is not a dehistoricized sourcebook of faith but a theo-drama: a record of the words and acts of God. The biblical theo-drama assumes that history is the proper stage for divine action and that history is directed toward its goal by divine purpose... The canon thus teaches us to see, trains us in certain crucial epistemic practices that, in conjunction with the Spirit's work, are necessary for the renewing of our minds and for our perceiving the whole in Christ. To participate in this canonical practice is thus to become an apprentice to a pattern of dominical interpretation of Scripture and history alike. We begin to speak, see, judge, and act canonically when we learn to interpret the history recounted in the Bible, as well as our own ongoing history, as part and parcel of the drama of redemption in Christ... The critical point in the theo-drama - the moment of greatest suspence, the moment of truth - is that of the actor's response: Will we or will we not respond? Will we or will we not acknowledge God for who God is and ourselves for who we are? Will we or will we not pray? Prayer is an essential part of the dialogical action at the heart of the theo-drama... Prayer is that canonical practice whereby we do not merely envision the theo-drama but indwell it and assume a speaking part..." [222-224] Drama of Doctrine "The canonical dialogue - the dialogue in and between the canonical books themselves - is both catalyst and norm for the ensuing play in the history of the church... To be sure, the historical and cultural gap between the biblical authors and denizens of the tweenty-first century is incontravertible. Yet there is also a certain contemporaneity between the biblical authors and later Christians... Despite historical distance, we become participants in its distinctive communicative practice when we grasp a text's literary genre, we share the same literary context. Historical distance is no necessary obstacle to understanding if readers can learn practical wisdom by becoming apprentices to the communicative practices of Scripture. By entering the worlds that the canonical authors create for us, therefore, we develop the ability to interpret our own world and, more important, the ability to see, say, judge, and do what is Christo-dramatically fitting in our own situations." [331] The Drama of Doctrine "In classical Greek, the verb to play the hypocrite originally meant to interpret and the noun hypocrite simply meant actor. When the terms were later used metaphorically to compare human life in the world to the work of the actor on the stage, only the context determined whether the comparison had a positive, neutral, or negative connotation. There is ongoing discussion as to how theatrical a meaning the term hypocrite has when used in Scripture. Jesus did not fault hypocrites for being bad actors but because they were inwardly godless... Hypocrisy is nevertheless a real possibility if doctrinal direction is not accompanied by spiritual formation. The solution is not to give up the theatrical metaphor, however, but to take it with the utmost seriousness. Like good actors, we have to learn not simply how to play-act a role but rather to become the role we play... This brings us to the second objection: that personal identity is something we choose and construct, that it is roles all the way down. The Greek term persona originally arose in the context of the theater, where it denoted mask. To say that it is roles all the way down is to see the person as nothing but a persona, as the sum total of the roles one plays, the masks one wears. The doctrine of election is a fitting response to the suspicion that human identity is an arbitrary individual or social determination. Election is the ultimate casting call: while we were yet in the womb, God has cast us in the role of creature and child of God. It is less a matter of choosing one's role, then, than of playing the role in which we have been cast ... Here the language of the theater and of theology complement one another. The person under the mask is the person known and called by God. The theatre highlights the person as an actor and speech agent; theology views the actor's communicative acts in what is ultimately a covenantal context... To be a human person is ultimately to respond to the call of God and others. Human persons initiate action and relate to others largely by means of their word-acts. The person is an identifiable agent whose identity is a function of his or her characteristic patterns of communicative action. The self is a speech agent - an actor..." [365-367] The Drama of Doctrine "The purpose of the doctrine of atonement, like other doctrines, is to help us understand the theo-drama, to clarify our role in it, and to direct us to play our part well... the doctrine of atonement trains us to think, imagine, and even feel that who we are is a matter of our having died and been raised with Christ..." [392] The Drama of Doctrine |