Adiaphora

“As that [older] overarching framework crumbled, Christian theological teaching about revelation became at one and the same time desperately unworkable and desperately necessary: unworkable because of what was feared to be irrefutable philosophical and moral challenge; necessary because any possible response to that challenge seemed ultimately to require a defense of Christian claims by a reconstruction of the possibility of revelation, a reconstruction in which the guiding hand was very often philosophical rather than dogmatic.…

Most tellingly, these reduced accounts of revelation were seriously under-determined by the specifically Christian content of Christian teaching about God. ‘Revelation,’ that is, was transposed rather readily into a feature of generally ‘theistic’ metaphysical outlooks. As such, it could be expounded generically, without much by way of concrete material reference to those aspects of the Chrisitan apprehension about God which mark out its positivity: Christology, pneumatology, soteriology and—embracing them all—the doctrine of the Trinity. Understood in this dogmatically minimalistic way, language about revelation became a way of talking, not about the life-giving and loving presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Spirit’s power among the worshipping and witnessing assssembly, but instead of an arcane process of causality whereby persons acquire knowledge through opaque, non-natural operations. In short: failure to talk with much by way of Christian determinacy about revelation—whether on the part of its opponents or of its defenders—left the doctrine pitifully weak, and scarcely able to extricate itself from the web of objections in which it was entangled.

Yet at the very same time that the doctrine was eviscerated in this way, the demands placed up on it increased to a point where they became insupportable. Perhaps the most significant symptom of this is the way in which Christian theological talk of revelation migrates to the beginning of the dogmatic corpus, and has to take on the job of furnishing the epistemological warrants for Christian claims.…

If this unhappy process is to be countered, what is required is not more effective defense of the viability of Christian talk about revelation before the tribunal of impartial reason: the common doctrinal slenderness of such defenses nearly always serves to inflame rather than reduce the dogmatic difficulties. The doctrinal under-determination and mislocation of the idea of revelation can only be overcome by its reintegration into the comprehensive structure of Christian doctrine, and most especially the Christian doctrine of God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 11–12]