Remythologizing, Projection, And Belief: A Reply To Vanhoozer -- By: Oliver D. Crisp

Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 04:1 (Summer 2013)
Article: Remythologizing, Projection, And Belief: A Reply To Vanhoozer
Author: Oliver D. Crisp


Remythologizing, Projection, And Belief:
A Reply To Vanhoozer

Oliver D. Crisp

Fuller Theological Seminary

Introduction

Kevin Vanhoozer believes theology is in need of remythologizing. In his recent tome, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship,1 he criticizes Rudolf Bultmann for his demythologizing project which is, he thinks, just one among other “myths”, that is (borrowing from Aristotle), the presentation of a drama, a dramatic rendering of the biblical material. Bultmann objects to traditional ways of conceiving the biblical drama as in need of such demythologizing without being cognizant of the fact that his own position is itself a piece of mythologizing in the Aristotelian sense. In other words, his own theological proposal is a story about how we should read the Bible, yet another interpretive framework, rather than the sober truth of the matter, which overturns all previous attempts to make sense of the text (RT, pp. 16–17).

Against Bultmann, Vanhoozer offers a different, dramatic account of the biblical material, which does not demythologize, but remythologizes it. Scripture presents us not with a series of cobbled narratives that must have the acids of criticism applied to them in order to get at some Ur-story underlying the accretions of legend and miracle. Rather, Scripture presents us with a divine drama: God speaks and seeks to draw us his creatures into the story as he relates to us. The result, as Vanhoozer puts it, is “a Trinitarian dialogical theism” which “view’s God’s being as a being-in-communicative-act” with the “God/world relation” being regarded “primarily in terms of a distinctive communicative causality” and “Scripture as ingredient in an economy of triune discourse, and biblical interpretation in the church as a form of participation in God’s communicative acts.” (RT, p. 32)

For those familiar with Vanhoozer’s earlier work, much of this talk of divine communication in terms of theodrama will be familiar. This is clearly a further development of, or a stage in, his constructive project, which purports to be setting out what he has elsewhere termed a first theology. This is a theology that integrates biblical interpretation, systematic reflection and philosophical engagement. It is certainly stirring stuff. Not only is his laying out of different live options in the debate in the early chapters enlivening (I shall

be using the second chapter on the classical doctrine of God in my Systematic Theology classes), his own alternative is intriguing and suggestive, even if one does n...

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