Until We are Actively Caught Up

“Revelation is a movement that moves. Impelled into hearing and responsibility by that movement, the Christian is also authorized and empowered for interpretation. Because they have their place in the formative economy of the clear Word of God, interpretative acts are neither constructive nor creative. But they are work, a straining of our powers to follow, an attempt to discern and articulate the clear Word which does not simply lie before us but which sets itself in relation to us as an address which we do not really hear until we are actively caught up in the movement of which both it and we are part.”

[John Webster, “Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture,” in Out of Egypt, 381]

Made Capable of Hearing

“Reading Scripture is inescapably bound to regeneration; only after a drastic reworking of spiritual psychology can the language of virtue have its place. What is therefore fundamental in giving an account of hermeneutical conversion is not a theory of moral virtue or the reader’s ‘character,’ but a soteriology and a pneumatology. Through the incarnate Word, crucified and risen, we are made capable of hearing the gospel, but only as we are at one and the same time put to death and raised to new life. Through the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ we are given the capacity to set mind and will on the truth of the gospel and so read as those who have been reconciled to God.”

[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 89]

The Most Telling Instance

“The redefinition of the interests and scope of philosophical inquiry which resulted when ‘analysis by quantitative elements broke loose from the subordinate role it had played within an ontological scheme’ was, on [Kenneth] Schmitz’s account, immense and immensely damaging. The history of modern Protestant theology and biblical hermeneutics betrays similar features, their advance retarded but not finally resisted by the flowering of scholastic divinity in the post-Reformation era: a privileging of the elements of the biblical economy, and a reluctance or inability to trace those elements to their cause in the fullness of God’s own life. The reluctance left Protestant theology exposed to the naturalization of those same elements when viewed in detachment from their principles, of which the steady secularization of biblical science is only the most telling instance.”

[John Webster, The Domain of the Word, vii–viii]

Hope Is Neither a Fantasy Nor a Gesture of Defiance

“Hope is that creaturely disposition which corresponds to the fact that all occasions of human history, including its future, are caught up within the economy of the triune God’s mercy. Because God is to the depths of his eternal being triune, and because he acts in the world as the one he is in himself, then the entire scope of human history and action is embraced by God’s purpose. God is not simply originator (setting the creation in motion), nor simply end (tying up the loose ends of history at its terminus). Rather, as Fathers, Son and Spirit, God is infinite – no time or space is apart from or beyond his presence and action – and so steadfast – his purpose has been is and will be at all times constantly and reliably at work. And it is as this one that God is the ground of hope, for hope trusts that, because the Father’s purpose has been accomplished in the Son and is now at work in the world in the Spirit’s power, then human history is God’s economy. Within the space which the triune God creates, hope is neither a fantasy nor a gesture of defiance, but a fitting, truthful attitude and shape for action. In short: hope rests upon God’s faithfulness, and God’s faithfulness is triune.”

[John Webster, “Hope,” in Confessing God, 199]

Turn With Some Urgency to the Divine Promise

“‘Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 16:17). Christian systematic theology takes place in the wake of that breathtaking dominical announcement. Yet it remains an earthly, flesh and blood enterprise, far indeed from the theology of the blessed, communicated to the perfected saints by the permanent intellectual light of the presence of God through the mediation of the Son. It is the rational work of the children of Adam who are only slowly learning what it is to be the children of God. This relativizes systematic theology in the present condition of creaturely infirmity after the Fall; yet it is accompanied by a promise of divine wisdom, already given and to be given again, by which creatures can be conducted from ignorance and unhappiness to knowledge and bliss. If systematic theology is to survive in a culture which has been deprived of a sense that rational creatures have a celestial final cause and which cannot envisage contemplation as a mode of science, it will find itself turning with some urgency to the divine promise.”

[John Webster, “Principles of Systematic Theology,” IJST 11.1]

Denial of Easy Identification of Divine and Human

“There is doubtless a danger of ‘spiritualizing’ the church with such affirmations. It is clearly important that this emphasis on the priority of divine action over the church as an act of human association not be allowed to eclipse the ‘visibility’ of the church. The polemical portrayal of Protestant religion as bare subjectivism without objective social form or endurance is doubtless a caricature, but it nevertheless identifies a potentially disruptive element in the dogmatics we have just outlined. Can a society which is in its essence ‘invisible’ ever be really human—that is, historical, material, bodily? In an evangelical ecclesiology, the gesture—rhetorical and theological—towards invisibility must certainly be made, and its absence from an ecclesiology may be symptomatic of other disorders—a lavishly over-realized eschatology, an eliding of the distinction between the gospel and its human representations, an atrophied sense of the church’s fallibility, above all, perhaps, a routinization of the operations of the Spirit.

Properly defined, the concept of the invisibility of the church is a standing denial of any easy identification of divine and human work. Talk of the church’s invisibility secures the all-important point that ‘[o]nly as creatura verbi divini [creature of the divine word] is the Church an object of faith, because God’s action in establishing and disclosing the true relationship between the creator and his creation that makes faith possible can be confessed as the content of faith’. Yet when this necessary gesture takes over, and is allowed to become the only constitutive moment for ecclesiology, other problems quickly emerge, and a picture of the church is promoted in which the human Christian community is unstable, liminal, and so incapable of sustaining a coherent historical and social trajectory.”

[John Webster, “The Self-Organizing Power of the Gospel of Christ: Episcopacy and Community Formation”, IJST 3:1 2001]

Alarmingly Undiscriminating

“First, evangelicals need an ecclesiology, and the ecclesiology they need is an evangelical ecclesiology, for the gospel is ecclesial. But an ecclesiology has to be a good deal more than a set of inchoate instincts which grab hold of whatever bits of doctrine float in their direction. A properly evangelical ecclesiology has to take its place within the scope of doctrinal affirmations which spell out the Christian confession of God, Christ, the Spirit, election, reconciliation, sanctification, and the rest. Evangelical Christianity is nowadays sometimes tempted to think that the remedy for its instinctive ecclesiological indifference or minimalism is to move upmarket. The evangelical tradition has latterly been alarmingly undiscriminating—in its very open attitude to socially immanent theories of atonement, for example, or in its enthusiasm for the concept of ‘relationally’ as a theological panacea. But the evangelical tradition surely has more to offer to catholic Christianity than a soft-focus version of the contemporary ecclesiological consensus. Is it too much to hope that the evangelical tradition will dig a little deeper into the theology of grace? Bart warned Roman Catholics around the time of Vatican II to beware lest they became liberal Protestants; my worry is that evangelicals will become catholicized Protestants who make the mistake of thinking that the only ecclesiological improvement upon individualism and ‘soul liberty’ is a rather ill-digested theology of the totus Christus.”

Learning What It Is To Be Children of God

“‘Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 16:17). Christian systematic theology takes place in the wake of that breathtaking dominical announcement. Yet it remains an earthly, flesh and blood enterprise, far indeed from the theology of the blessed, communicated to the perfected saints by the permanent intellectual light of the presence of God through the mediation of the Son. It is the rational work of the children of Adam who are only slowly learning what it is to be the children of God. This relativizes systematic theology in the present condition of creaturely infirmity after the Fall; yet it is accompanied by a promise of divine wisdom, already given and to be given again, by which creatures can be conducted from ignorance and unhappiness to knowledge and bliss. If systematic theology is to survive in a culture which has been deprived of a sense that rational creatures have a celestial final cause and which cannot envisage contemplation as a mode of science, it will find itself turning with some urgency to the divine promise.”

[John Webster, “Principles of Systematic Theology,” IJST Vol. 11:1 2009, 71]

Not Responsible for My Own Being

“To live the life of active fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being: by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely the ‘yoke of slavery’ (Gal. 5:1) from which I have been set free.”

[John Webster, Holiness, 94

We Are Incapable of Telling

“God is in himself replete, unoriginal love, the reciprocal fellowship and delight of the three and the utter repose and satisfaction of their love. God requires nothing other than himself. Yet his unoriginal love also originates. Why this should be so, we are incapable of telling, for though with much concentration we can begin to grasp that it is fitting that God should so act, created intelligence cannot get behind or reduce any further is the outward movement of God’s love, God’s love under its special aspect of absolute creativity. God’s creative love is not the recognition, alteration or ennoblement of an antecedent object beside itself, but the bringing of an object into being, ex nihilo generosity by which life is given. By divine love, the ‘infinite distance’ which ‘cannot be crossed’ – the distance between being and nothing – has been crossed. The love of God, therefore, has its term primarily in itself but secondarily in the existence of what is other than God, determined by that love for fellowship with him.”

[John Webster, “Trinity and Creation,” IJST 12:1, 2010 (emphasis original)]

More Modest and More Urgent

“Compare a modern scholarly biblical commentary with one by Calvin. The difference is not simply the availability to the modern writer of considerably more by way of historical materials, but a changed relation to the text itself and to the act of explication. A modern scholarly commentator has the task of accounting for the text, and a set of tools at her disposal to establish how the text came to be. Calvin’s task is at once more modest and more urgent: more modest, because he is simply interested in eliciting the plain sense of the text; more urgent, because his rhetoric positions the reader in such a way as to be accountable to the text, or better, to be called to account by God through the medium of the text. Hence a fundamental criterion for the success of a piece of exegesis is its ability to let the rhetoric of Scripture stand and itself shape the theologian’s discourse.”

[John Webster, ‘Theological Theology’ in Confessing God, 21]

Dignity Is Encountered, Not Simply Ascribed

“If it is to speak well, theology is thus obliged to undertake a dogmatics of human dignity, as part of a moral anthropology which is governed by the church’s confession that its Lord and God is indeed worthy and has created all things. A dogmatic moral anthropology tries to indicate that, according to the church’s confession of the gospel, creaturely life and history have being, duration and purpose by virtue of (and only by virtue of) the creative, preserving and glorifying work of the triune God. He is the ground of creatures; without him, all is surface, and apart from him appeals to dignity can scarcely be more than cries of alarm, or prohibitions, or commands which lack final authority to compel action. Apart from God, dignity is precarious, hovering in an order of obligation untethered to an order of being. Obligation can only quicken action if it presents the imperatival force of being.…

Dignity is encountered, not simply ascribed, and encountered in such a way as to be beyond manipulation. And so, creaturely dignity sets before us a requirement which is transcendent, ‘sacral’, one grounded in the purpose, will and work of God.”

[John Webster, “The Dignity of Creatures”]

Conscience is Theological

“It is crucial, therefore, that a theological depiction of conscience and its moral field be governed by the conviction that the Christian life is hidden with God in Christ. Owing its origin to the absolute creativity of God who brings into being the things that are not, manifest as a pattern of human activity only after the manner of God as mystery, known only in the miracle of divine self-revelation, the life of the people of God is more than simply a strand of moral culture. Unless this is stated with some force, then, as Barth noted, ‘the holiness of the Christian character … can be directly perceived,’ and theology becomes merely ‘applied anthropology.’”

[John Webster, “God and Conscience” in Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics, 247]

Our Refusal to be Spoken To

“Hermeneutical and methodological questions are at best of secondary importance in the interpretation of Scripture. The real business is elsewhere, and it is spiritual, and therefore dogmatic. Correct interpretation cannot be detached from correct depiction of the situation in which we as readers go to Scripture and encounter God. The task of such a depiction is a dogmatic task, calling for the deployment of the concepts and language through which the church has sought to map out as best it can the astonishing reality of God’s saving self-communication. If sophisticated hermeneutical theory fails to persuade, it is largely because, in the end, it addresses the wrong problems, and leaves untouched the real difficulty with reading Scripture. That difficulty — as Bonhoeffer and Barth diagnose it — is spiritual and therefore moral; it is our refusal as sinners to be spoken to, our wicked repudiation of the divine address, our desire to speak the final word to ourselves. From those sicknesses of the soul, no amount of sophistication can heal us.”

[John Webster, “Reading the Bible” in Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics, 109]

Really to Read

“Christian reading of the canon is faithful reading, properly exhibiting the fundamental characteristic of all actions of faith, which is self-forgetful reference to the prevenient action and presence of God. Faithful action is action; its practitioners are agents. But both action and agent are defined by reference to that in the presence of which (of whom) they find themselves and before which (before whom) they are to demonstrate a relinquishment of will. Even in its acts of construing and interpreting, in bringing a communicative interest to bear up on the text, the Christian reading act is a kind of surrender. Above all, faithful reading is an aspect of mortificatio sui, a repudiation of the desire to assemble all realities, including texts, including even the revelation of God, around the steady centre of my will.

To read — really to read — is to submit to the process of the elimination or correction or conversion of false desire, for it is that false desire — sin — which more than anything else is destructive of the communicative fellowship between God and humanity in which the canon plays its part.”

[John Webster, Word and Church, 43–44]