Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 69:2 (Fall 2007)
Article: Rendering Mute The Word: Overcoming Deistic Tendencies In Modern Hermeneutics; Kevin Vanhoozer As A Test Case
Author: Mark Alan Bowald

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WTJ 69:2 (Fall 2007) p. 367

Rendering Mute The Word: Overcoming Deistic Tendencies In Modern Hermeneutics; Kevin Vanhoozer As A Test Case

Mark Alan Bowald

Mark Bowald is Assistant Professor of Religion and Theology at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.

I. Introduction

We cannot escape our skin. Nor should we want or attempt to. The results would run the spectrum from comedy to tragedy. This simple observation parallels one basic, widely accepted principle from contemporary hermeneutics, that human creatures bring assumptions to the interpretative moment: we read from within a “worldview.”

This claim is brought to the fore in a dramatic fashion with respect to theological knowledge in Karl Barth’s familiar rule that, for theological knowledge, the ratio essendi precedes and governs the ratio cognoscendi: God’s very nature; that which God is and does, absolutely determines the nature and shape of our knowledge of God.

This dictum, framed in terms of agency, helpfully illuminates key aspects related to the act of theological hermeneutics. Thus, for reading the Bible, the fundamental question is the shape of the divine economy that underwrites all activity related to the production, reception, and interpretation of Scripture, enveloping and directing the corresponding creaturely noetic activities. The hermeneutical skin we read from as Christians is, therefore, theistic and Trinitarian. It is irrevocably imprinted and shaped by the self-revealing economy of the living Word of the triune God. The primary features of the divine economy under which the composition, canonization, and reading of the Christian Scriptures are given are the risen, seated, ruling Christ and the Spirit sent to inspirate his kingdom in the church and the world. The ontology of Scripture and its reading, therefore, are founded and administered by Christ in the offices of his heavenly session at the right hand of the Father, implemented by the Holy Spirit, and underwritten by the providential and paternally elective care of God the Father.1

In contrast to this model, the divine economy that underwrites prevailing paradigms for reading Scripture is, largely, de jure if not de facto, deistic. In these

WTJ 69:2 (Fall 2007) p. 368

paradigms the nature of Scripture and its reading reflect a theological economy which only requires the action of a God who creates a world and a stable system of human speech activity and who maintains the stability of that created world. Beyond this initiating and stabilizing activity no further divine action is required or necessary in order to account fully for the hermeneutics of readin...

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