Building on the Foundations of Evangelical Theology: Essays in Honor of John S. Feinberg
400
Building on the Foundations of Evangelical Theology: Essays in Honor of John S. Feinberg
400eBook
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Overview
John Feinberg is one of the premier evangelical scholars of the last thirty years. His work has influenced countless pastors, scholars, ethicists, and theologians.
Featuring essays by a host of colleagues and former students, such as Graham A. Cole, Bruce A. Ware, Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Robert L. Saucy, and John F. Kilner, this anthology stands as a testament to Feinberg’s enduring legacy and theological acumen. Three sections focusing on the architecture, foundation, and superstructure of evangelical theology offer a coherent, helpful framework for these important essays.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781433538209 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Crossway |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
<strong>Gregg R. Allison</strong> (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society, a book review editor for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and the author of numerous books, including Historical Theology, Sojourners and Strangers, and Roman Catholic Theology and Practice.
<strong>Stephen J. Wellum</strong> (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He is also the coauthor (with Peter Gentry) of Kingdom through Covenant.
Gregg R. Allison (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is professor of Christian theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is secretary of the Evangelical Theological Society, a book review editor for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, an elder at Sojourn Community Church, and a theological strategist for Sojourn Network. Allison has taught at several colleges and seminaries, including Western Seminary in Portland, Oregon, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and is the author of numerous books, including Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine, Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church, and Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment.
Stephen J. Wellum (PhD, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. Stephen lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Karen, and their five children.
Graham A. Cole (ThD, Australian College of Theology) is the dean and professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. An ordained Anglican minister, he has served in two parishes and was formerly the principal of Ridley College. Graham lives in Libertyville, Illinois, with his wife, Jules.
WILLEM VANGEMEREN is director of the Doctor of Philosophy in Theological Studies program and professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.
Bruce A. Ware (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and has authored God's Lesser Glory, God's Greater Glory, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Improvising Theology according to the Scriptures: An Evangelical Account of the Development of Doctrine
KEVIN J. VANHOOZER
INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPING DOCTRINE BIBLICALLY
• "Christian Thought, for $1,000."
• The most baffling and difficult problem of Christian theology.
• "What is the development of doctrine?"
No real Jeopardy contestant, to my knowledge, has ever had to ask this question. Yet the church is in jeopardy of losing its identity, and biblical moorings, if Christians do not ask and answer it: "no task confronting Christian theology today is more vital than the demand that it face this issue squarely." The challenge is to show how Christian doctrine truly is "in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3). This is a particularly pressing problem for evangelical theologians, who affirm the supreme authority of Scripture yet identify with diverse denominations, theological traditions, and doctrines.
There are three reasons why giving an evangelical account of the development of doctrine is a particularly apt way to honor John Feinberg. First, John was for more than twenty years head of the Department of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and the Department's name contains the very problem I wish here to address. "Biblical theology" has come to have two potentially contrasting meanings. The strict sense refers to the theology of the biblical books themselves (or to the historical task of determining and describing it), the broader sense to any theology that accords with the Bible. To speak of "development" of doctrine suggests that one is going beyond, but not against, biblical theology in the narrower sense of the term. That raises the question: is there something theologians have to do "after biblical theology" — after reconstructing the theology of the biblical authors — and, if so, what?
Second, John contributed an essay to and edited a highly regarded volume dealing with the problem of continuity and discontinuity, though John was addressing the problem of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments (and the difference between covenantal and dispensational systems for dealing with this), whereas I am addressing the problem of the relationship between Scripture and Christian doctrine. The underlying problem is the same, namely, how to account for both the sameness between what the Scriptures and later creeds teach (i.e., continuity) while acknowledging some kind of change (i.e., discontinuity).
Third, in his chapter in the aforementioned volume and elsewhere, John has shown himself to be a dual threat, a person who does theology as both exegete and philosopher. For example, in his chapter he helpfully cautions against confusing a biblical word (oikonomia = "dispensation") with a concept (dispensation), much less a conceptual scheme or theological system (dispensationalism). It is just such conceptual analysis that proves important in discussions of doctrinal development as well. A case in point: must doctrines be identical to retain their identity over time? Much depends on what "identical" and "identity" mean, and how one views change over time. These are philosophical questions. In light of John's work at the interstice of Bible, theology, and philosophy, then, I want to ask whether the continuity and discontinuity intrinsic to the development of doctrine is best understood by recourse to either analytic or Continental philosophical resources. Which best accounts for doctrinal development: analytic or hermeneutic theology?
The present essay responds to this either-or question, not by choosing one option but by incorporating aspects of both into a larger, properly dogmatic account of doctrinal development. Whereas church historians helpfully describe and interpret doctrinal change over time, systematic theologians need, and seek to provide, a normative account that assists the church in discerning which changes reflect genuine understanding and which do not. We need properly theological categories if we are to distinguish the development of orthodox doctrine from the kinds of changes that characterize things in general. To give a dogmatic account is to distinguish the special development of doctrine from theories of general development. What, then, is "special" about doctrinal development? My contention will be that (right) development of doctrine is an entailment of the gospel of the triune God: the Spirit "enlarges" the word in the process of its regional expansion in an economy of creative understanding that both preserves the good deposit and collects interest on truth's account.
Doctrinal Development: Three Case Studies
Doctrine is what, on the basis of the Bible, the church believes, teaches, and confesses — both explicitly in its creeds and statements of faith and implicitly in its most characteristic practices. Evangelicals are willing to speak of progressive revelation in the Bible, but most do not believe that revelation progresses beyond the Bible. Jesus Christ is God's final word, and he is "the same yesterday and today and forever" (Heb. 13:8). Hence revealed truth, the objective content of the faith, is fixed. By way of contrast, the church's appropriation of that truth is still in flux: the search for doctrinal understanding goes on.
Here, in two nutshells, is the problem: (1) evangelicals confess the sufficiency of Scripture but disagree as to what it teaches; (2) evangelicals proclaim sola scriptura, yet some doctrines are not explicitly taught in the Bible. It is impossible to study church history for long without being struck by both the continuities and the discontinuities in what the church believes, teaches, and confesses on the basis of the Word of God. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes, "The fact of the development of doctrine ... is beyond question; what is at issue is the legitimacy and limits of development."
What does it mean for a doctrine to develop? What actually happens? We can begin by distinguishing minimal from maximal development. Development is minimal (i.e., there is least change) when the church does not add anything to what Scripture says but simply comes to understand it. Development is maximal (i.e., there is most change) when the church introduces a teaching that cannot be derived from Scripture, such as the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, about which we can say, "There was a time when it was not!" Many doctrinal changes lie somewhere between these two extremes. Consider, for example, the following three case studies.
The Deity of the Holy Spirit
The Bible does not explicitly teach the doctrine of the Trinity as expounded at the Council of Nicaea in 325. That Council affirmed the Son was of "the same substance" (homoousios) as the Father, but it fell to Basil of Caesarea to complete the case for — to develop the doctrine of — the deity of the Holy Spirit, and he did so in the face of considerable opposition. Some in the fourth century thought the Spirit was a creature; others refused to commit themselves. The so-called Pneumatomachians (lit., "enemies of the Spirit") accepted the divinity of the Son but not of the Spirit, and appealed to differences in the language Scripture uses to speak of each. They were particularly fond of reading theology off of prepositions, insisting that "from whom" applies to the Father, "through whom" to the Son, and "in whom" to the Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 8:6; Rom. 8:9).
Basil opens his treatise On the Holy Spirit by acknowledging, "not one of the words that are applied to God in every use of speech should be left uninvestigated." Basil is vigilant in his use of language: he refrains from calling the Spirit "God" because the Bible does not; he is reluctant to say the Spirit is homoousios because the Nicene Creed fails to do so. However, he prays "to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit," and he vehemently protests the heretics' claim that, in doing so, he is denying the deity of the Spirit.
In a tour de force of prepositional theology, Basil painstakingly examines the biblical use of "through," "from," "with," and "in." He shows that Scripture uses the prepositions flexibly (e.g., "from whom" is often posited of the Spirit as well as the Father). More importantly, he argues that Scripture consistently ranks the Spirit with the Father and the Son, as when Jesus commands disciples to baptize "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matt. 28:19). Basil pointedly asks his opponents how to understand this passage if this common name and rank "is not indicative of some [ontological] communion or union."
Basil's arguments carried the day at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which reaffirmed Nicaea, rejected the doctrine of the Pneumatomachians and, most importantly, confessed the deity of the Spirit, "who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified." Call it a "level-1" doctrinal development — one that identifies who the God who works salvation is, and thus a doctrine on which the integrity of the gospel itself likewise depends. The doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, formulated by the Nicene- Constantinopolitan (381) and Chalcedon (451) Creeds respectively, would be other examples. If neither the Son nor the Spirit were fully God, then at some point, the good news that believers who are "in Christ" enjoy communion with God is fatally compromised. To deny a level-1 doctrinal development — a development that issues in a dogma — is to fall into heresy.
"He Descended into Hell"
Our second case study presents a quite different problem, focusing not on the divine agents but on the divine action. Not only does it concern what happened to Jesus Christ at a key moment in salvation history, but it also figures in the Apostles' Creed and claims some, albeit slim, biblical support (1 Pet. 3:18–20). The number of interpretations of "he descended into hell" is staggering, and we cannot here do justice to them all. My main purpose for including this second case study is twofold: it is a prime exhibit of doctrinal development because it encapsulates the problem of the relationship between Scripture and tradition; it pertains to the gospel, at least in indirect fashion, because it addresses the issue of what happened to Jesus after he died, and thus touches on matters pertaining to his person and saving work (i.e., soteriology).
"He descended into hell" is part of the second article of the Apostles' Creed, which begins, "I believe in Jesus Christ." Why was it included, and what does it mean? J. N. D. Kelly suggests that the historical occasion of the descensus was Docetism, the heresy that denies the reality of Jesus's embodied existence. "He descended into hell" underscores the reality of his physical death. As to what "descended into hell" means, there are a variety of suggestions, including: (1) Jesus preached the gospel to those who died before his incarnation, to give them an opportunity to believe (early church; Pannenberg); (2) Jesus proclaimed victory to and liberated the Old Testament patriarchs in Hades (Aquinas); (3) Jesus triumphed over sin, death, and Satan (Luther); (4) Jesus finished the work of redemption by suffering more (John Aepinus); (5) Jesus suffered not only dying, the moment of death, but also being dead and the second death/damnation (Balthasar).
Wayne Grudem will have none of it, insisting in a hard-hitting essay that evangelicals dissent from the "descent" on the grounds that the clause is unbiblical: "It has no clear warrant from Scripture." Moreover, it flies in the face of biblical texts that clearly oppose it. For example, Jesus's words to the criminal crucified next to him, "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43), leave no time for a descent; and Jesus's next words, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Luke 23:46), suggest that he fully expected to ascend, not descend.
Somewhat surprisingly, John Calvin devotes more attention to this phrase than to any other in the Apostles' Creed. He knows it was a later addition; nevertheless, he thinks it makes an important contribution: "But we ought not to omit his descent into hell, a matter of no small moment in bringing about redemption. ... if it is left out, much of the benefit of Christ's death will be lost." Calvin and the Reformed tradition affirm the descent in two ways: (1) The descent of Jesus's body. Question 50 of the Westminster Larger Catechism is, "Wherein consisted Christ's humiliation after his death?" and answers, "Christ's humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day." The biblical support is Jesus's own statement: "For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. 12:40). (2) The descent of Jesus's soul. Here Calvin is careful to stress the symbolic meaning of "descent." Jesus endured the kind of death we all endure, the separation of soul from body, but he also suffered a hellish agony of the soul specific to his messianic office: separation from God. Calvin is not bothered about the chronology of the events. Jesus suffered death in his soul (i.e., descended into hell) while on the cross (after his death his soul went to heaven even as his body was in the tomb): "The Creed sets forth what Christ suffered in the sight of men, and then ... speaks of that invisible and incomprehensible judgment which he underwent in the sight of God in order that we might know ... that he paid a greater and more excellent price in suffering in his soul." Jesus conquered not only death but also the dread of death: "And surely, unless his soul shared in the punishment, he would have been the Redeemer of bodies alone."
That Jesus died for our sins is part and parcel of the gospel (Rom. 5:8; 1 Cor. 15:3). The event of atonement — the reconciliation of God and humanity made possible by the cross — is a sine qua non of salvation. That is why crucicentrism is one of David Bebbington's four distinguishing marks of evangelicalism. However, when it comes to explaining the mechanism of the atonement, we are dealing with a level-2 doctrine. Level-2 doctrines deal with some aspect of the history of redemption — not with the divine persons per se, but with what they have done (and with what humans have or have not done in response). However, though Christians affirm that Jesus died "for us," they disagree about what happened (i.e., the meaning of the events in question). Calvinists and Arminians agree that Jesus's death has atoning significance, but they disagree about the nature and extent of the atonement. "He descended into hell" is not like the deity of the Holy Spirit. It is a level-2 doctrine that seeks to understand the significance of Jesus's death. Denominations may divide over their understandings of the cross, yet they continue to acknowledge one another as fellow Christians: "Bible-believing Christians can allow themselves to differ on the nature of Jesus's descent into hell. Some will be able to recite this part of the Apostles' Creed with conviction, while others may choose to remain silent."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Building on the Foundations of Evangelical Theology"
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Copyright © 2015 Gregg R. Allison and Stephen J. Wellum.
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
Contributors,
I DESIGNING THE ARCHITECTURE OF EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY,
1 Improvising Theology according to the Scriptures: An Evangelical Account of the Development of Doctrine (Kevin J. Vanhoozer),
2 Hermeneutics and Evangelical Theology (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.),
3 Does the Apostle Paul Reverse the Prophetic Tradition of the Salvation of Israel and the Nations? (Robert L. Saucy),
4 Epistemic Eucatastrophe: The Favorable Turn of the Evidence (Thomas A. Provenzola),
5 Christian Miracle Claims and Supernatural Causation: Representative Cases from the Synoptic Gospels and Contemporary Accounts (Gary R. Habermas),
II SETTING THE FOUNDATIONS OF EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY,
6 The Glory of God in the Doctrine of God (Bruce A. Ware),
7 The Doctrine of the Trinity: Consistent and Coherent (Keith E. Yandell),
8 By What Authority Do We Say These Things? Enlightenment Dualism and the Modern Rejection of Biblical Authority (John Douglas Morrison),
9 The Many "Yes, buts ..." of Theodicy: Revisiting John Feinberg's Account of Moral Evil (Thomas H. McCall),
10 Evangelical Christology and Kenotic Influences: A "New" and "Better" Way? (Stephen J. Wellum),
11 Holy God and Holy People: Pneumatology and Ecclesiology in Intersection (Gregg R. Allison),
12 God's Faithfulness, Human Suffering, and the Concluding Hallel Psalms (146–150): A Canonical Study (Willem VanGemeren),
III ERECTING THE SUPERSTRUCTURE OF EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY,
13 Thinking Theologically in Public about Bioethics: Theological Formulation and Cultural Translation (John F. Kilner),
14 The Trinity, Imitation, and the Christian Moral Life (Graham A. Cole),
15 Christian Apologetics in a Globalizing and Religiously Diverse World (Harold A. Netland),
16 Ethics from the Margins: A Conversation with Womanist Thought (Bruce L. Fields),
Response by John Feinberg,
Chronological List of John Feinberg's Publications,
General Index,
Scripture Index,