The Drama of Doctrine

A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781611642124
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Observing a strange disappearance of doctrine within the church, Kevin Vanhoozer argues that there is no more urgent task for Christians today than to engage in living truthfully with others before God. He details how doctrine serves the church--the theater of the gospel--by directing individuals and congregations to participate in the drama of what God is doing to renew all things in Jesus Christ. Taking his cue from George Lindbeck and others who locate the criteria of Christian identity in Spirit-led church practices, Vanhoozer relocates the norm for Christian doctrine in the canonical practices, which, he argues, both provoke and preserve the integrity of the church's witness as prophetic and apostolic.

PART 1

THE DRAMA

Part 1 brings all the elements that go into theology—God, Scripture, doctrine, the church—onstage and coordinates them via the leading metaphor of theo-drama. The burden of the argument is that the subject matter of theology—the gospel, God’s saving Word/Act wrought in the person and work of Jesus Christ—must shape theology’s method, not vice versa. The model of drama brings into focus the centrality of communicative action, both human and divine. Both the gospel and the ensuing work of theology involve words and acts, though the divine speech and action are prior to and take precedence over the human response.

The theo-dramatic focus casts new light on Scripture’s relationship to theology; the Word of God written is fully a part of the theo-dramatic action. The human discourse in the Bible is so caught up in God’s triune communicative action that it participates in what we may call the economy of the gospel, mediating both revelation and redemption. The purpose of Scripture and theology alike is to draw the people of God into the communicative action for the sake of communion. This conception of the gospel, Scripture, and theology prepares the way for a new proposal concerning the nature of doctrine. Chapter 3 presents the directive theory of doctrine, argues for its superiority over the “epic” and “lyric” alternatives, and distinguishes it from its (almost) equally dramatic cultural-linguistic counterpart.

Chapter 1

The Gospel As Theo-drama

The Divine Voice and Actor

It is quite correct that the particular vocation of theatre is to explore the consequences of this intuition that “to say is to do” and “to do is to say.”¹

A drama is a doing, an enactment.² Drama represents a course of action in the context of a theater, that is, a place in which an audience observes what happens. In classic theater, the action imitated a reality outside the theater; in medieval drama, the world itself was the prime theater of God’s action, played out on a three-tiered stage that depicted heaven, earth, and hell. The actor/audience boundary was blurred; all humans were players before God. Contemporary theater no longer conceives of God as spectator but has recovered the idea that the audience is part of the action.³ The present work insists that God and humanity are alternately actor and audience. Better: life is divine—human interactive theater, and theology involves both what God has said and done for the world and what we must say and do in grateful response.

Tragedies deal with catastrophes, but theology concerns what J. R. R. Tolkien terms a eucatastrophe: a cataclysmic event with a beneficial effect.⁴ There is good news—euangelion—because God has done something extraordinarily good. “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). This is the divine doing that lies at the heart of theo-drama. To view the gospel as a drama, then, is not to impose some foreign framework onto the biblical texts but rather to make manifest their implicit content: “Theology itself must call for this [dramatic] shape; it must be something implicit within it.”⁵ Who the audience is, and what their role may be, must await treatment in subsequent chapters. The aim of the present chapter is to specify precisely what God has done on the stage of world history that merits the epithet good news.

ENTRANCES, EXODUSES, AND THE ECONOMY
OF THE GOSPEL

The theological nature of . . . drama [lies] in movement and countermovement. God moved; he came down to earth. . . . The most ancient drama, the drama that rules the world, is the drama of the meeting of God with man.⁶

Theology’s method should be appropriate to its theo-dramatic subject matter. Barth was right to insist that the “principle” of theology should be nothing other than the content of divine revelation itself—what God was doing in Christ. “An evangelical theology is one which is evoked, governed and judged by the gospel.”⁷ At the same time, one cannot prise apart the content from the act of revelation. Revelation is not merely the communication of truths about God but, more important, God’s self-communication in act and word. Theology would know nothing of God if God had not taken the initiative to “unveil” himself and raise the curtain on the theo-drama.⁸ Both the content and the process of divine revelation are thus essentially dramatic. God reveals himself in the history of Israel and the history of Jesus Christ through a series of communicative initiatives—some verbal, some eventful—all of which are ultimately redemptive. The “event” of Jesus Christ stands as the culmination of a series of such revelatory and redemptive events, recorded in the Old and New Testaments, which together recount a single drama of redemption that is both covenantal in its focus and cosmic in its scope.

“Evangelical” thus designates that theology which seeks to know the “God of the gospel,” the God who reveals himself in the prehistory, history, and future of Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures that have Christ as their center.⁹ Evangelical theology attends above all to the Bible, Old and New Testaments, as the authorized version of the drama of redemption and indispensable context for rightly understanding what God has done in Christ. For this reason the church has rightly taken the Bible as its Scripture, the normative specification of its singular and unique gospel. Evangelical theology believes that there is no other gospel (Gal. 1:7), no other God besides the God of the gospel, and no other reality than that indicated by the gospel.

Theology done in accord with the euangelion highlights two divine initiatives that together make up God’s good news about God: God acting (there is only news if something has been done) and God speaking (there is only news if someone reports what has been done). Evangelical theology accepts these divine initiatives as the two givens with which theology begins: “[E]vangelical Christianity refers to that version of Christianity which places the priority of the Word and Act of God over the faith, response, or experiences of men. Concretely this means the supremacy and authority of the Word of God (as a synonym for all the revelation of God, written and unwritten) over all human philosophies or religions.”¹⁰ What follows is not so much a novel interpretation of the gospel as an attempt to formulate what, for lack of a better term, could be called “mere evangelicalism.”

The gospel is “the greatest drama ever staged . . . a terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero.”¹¹ Drama is a composite of word and deed: at times the language of action drowns out the words, at other times the words carry the action along. Yet what God was doing in Jesus Christ ultimately makes sense only according to the biblical script that places the person and work of Jesus Christ in the Old Testament context of creation and covenant. There is a cosmic stage and a covenantal plot; there is conflict; there is a climax; there is resolution. Evangelical theology deals not with disparate bits of ideas and information but with divine doings—with the all-embracing cosmic drama that displays the entrances and exoduses of God.¹²

Entrances

The first premise of evangelical theology is that God can enter and has entered into relationship with the world. The God of the gospel is free to come and go as he pleases. This is not some arbitrary premise but rather the inescapable conclusion of the biblical narrative, in which God is portrayed as creator, and hence Lord, of the whole spatio-temporal nexus. Scripture depicts God entering into the course of human events, often in such a way as to make a decisive difference. God appears as the divine warrior in times of need, and at other times as bearer of a word.¹³ Yet the ultimate ground for affirming that God is free to enter the world as he pleases is the incarnation: the second person of the Trinity has entered into humanity and become one of us.¹⁴ The Fourth Gospel presents Jesus as the word of God become flesh (John 1:1, 14). That this Word is named Emmanuel (“God with us”) and Jesus (“the Lord saves”) is no accident, for this divine entrance is the condition for God’s definitive victory on behalf of his covenant people.

Exoduses

The gospel, like all dramas, involves both entrances and exits. There is an “exodus” in the gospel, and a “gospel” in the book of Exodus. In each case, the mighty salvific act of God takes the form of an “exit.” Exodus and the Gospels have the same thematic focus.¹⁵ Both Exodus and the Gospels recount the words and deeds of the person that will come to be a covenant mediator, and both devote considerable space to accounts of covenant ratification. In Exodus, the last half of the book records the institution of the covenant between Israel and Yahweh; in the Gospels, the long passion narratives function in much the same way.¹⁶ Finally, each covenant mediator erects a “house” for God (Moses the tabernacle, Jesus the church), and each appoints a successor (Joshua for Moses, the Paraclete for Jesus).

The exodus—God’s delivery of Israel from their oppression in Egypt—is the great saving event of the Old Testament. It is an event of high drama, the long-awaited fulfillment of God’s earlier promise to Abraham. Yahweh promises deliverance and delivers on his promise. The exodus thus becomes the one act, more than any other, that serves to identify the God of Israel: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exod. 20:2). The exodus is a key theo-dramatic development: “The historical imagination of the author of Exodus transforms ‘common-place’ history into what Calvin called a theatrum gloriae Dei, a theatre of the glory of God.”¹⁷ The deliverance from Egypt is “theatrical” in both its scale and its details and especially in its typological pointing beyond itself to “the yet greater liberation to be accomplished by Christ.”¹⁸

In Luke 9:31, Jesus speaks of his death as a “departure” (exodos) to be accomplished in Jerusalem.¹⁹ That Jesus refers to his death and resurrection as an exodus cements the parallel between Exodus and the Gospels.²⁰ The mention of “exodus” in connection with Jesus’ death in the account of his transfiguration is hardly coincidental; it rather stands for “the entire passion narrative section introduced by that episode.”²¹ This new exodus, like the earlier one, is God’s mighty act. What does Jesus’ dramatic exit accomplish? According to 1 Peter 1:14–20, Jesus’ blood “delivers” from the bondage of sin: “Because the death of Jesus was prefigured in his baptism, in which the water ordeal symbolism of the Red Sea passage was renewed (cf. 1 Cor. 10:1ff), we may say with biblical propriety that Jesus, like Moses, leads his people through the sea of death.”²²

The Economy of the Gospel and the Economic Trinity

“The Lord has risen” (Luke 24:34). What in Greek is a single word joyfully proclaims the climax of the drama of redemption. “The Lord has risen” contains in nuce the resolution of the dramatic tension built up over centuries: How would God make good on his promises? How could God keep covenant with covenant breakers? How would God bless all the nations through the seed of Abraham? “The Lord has risen.” There is a density in this statement that calls for thought and “thick description.” While the explicit subject of this sentence...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Way of Truth; the Stuff of Life
• Part One: The Drama
• Part Two: The Script
• Part Three: The Dramaturge
• Part Four: The Performance
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References