a time to tear down | A Time to Build Up » conn http://peterennsonline.com Dr. Peter Enns on the Bible and Contemporary Christian Faith Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:50:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Harvie Conn on the Dynamic Character of Revealed Truth http://peterennsonline.com/2008/12/11/harvie-conn-on-the-dynamic-character-of-revealed-truth/ http://peterennsonline.com/2008/12/11/harvie-conn-on-the-dynamic-character-of-revealed-truth/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:43:04 +0000 Pete Enns http://peterennsonline.com/?p=299 Biblical theology’s focus on revelation as a historical activity underlines the dynamic, rather than static, character of revealed truth. John Murray speaks of the “tendency to abstraction” on the part of systematic theology, the tendency to historicize, to arrive at “timeless” formulations in the sense of topically oriented universals. This danger becomes even more real for Third World theologians whose agendas of concern do not fit easily into the traditional Western loci of theology. Biblical theology provides a model that, by its very nature, reminds us of the historico-contextual character of our theologizing.

At the same time, that history of special revelation is organic in character. The Bible is not merely a heterogeneous collection of oods [sic] and ends, nor a symposium of biblical theologies. Biblical theology seeks to do justice both to the diversity of the divine testimony within the diversity of human settings and to the underlying unity of that testimony. It studies the data of revelation given in each period of cultural history in terms of the stage to which God’s self-revelation progressed at that particular time and place. But this unifying element is always the end point of the process, not the process itself. Its wisdom is always defined in terms of the administration of the mystery hidden in ages past, revealed in Christ, made known among all the world’s cultures, and consummated at his return (Eph. 3:8-10; Rom. 16:25-26; Col. 1:25-27). (Eternal Word and Changing Worlds, pp. 225-26).

]]> http://peterennsonline.com/2008/12/11/harvie-conn-on-the-dynamic-character-of-revealed-truth/feed/ 0 Conn on “the evangelical’s perception of theology as some sort of comprehensively universal science” http://peterennsonline.com/2008/11/26/conn-on-the-evangelicals-perception-of-theology-as-some-sort-of-comprehensively-universal-science/ http://peterennsonline.com/2008/11/26/conn-on-the-evangelicals-perception-of-theology-as-some-sort-of-comprehensively-universal-science/#comments Thu, 27 Nov 2008 02:20:49 +0000 Pete Enns http://peterennsonline.com/?p=293 Theology become functionally the queen of the sciences, the watchdog of the academic world, the ultimate universal. Combined with Western ethnocentrism, it produces the tacit assumption ‘that the Christian faith is already fully and properly indigenized in the West” [David J. Bloesch, "Theological Education Missionary Perspective," Missiology 10 (January 1982): 16-17]. Our credal formulations, structured to respond to a sixteenth-century cultural setting and its problems, lose their historical character as contextual confessions of faith and become cultural universals, having comprehensive validity in all items and settings. The possibility of new doctrinal developments for the Reformed churches of Japan or Mexico is frozen into a time warp that gnosticizes the particularity of time and culture. The Reformation is completed, and we in the West wait for the churches of the Third World to accept as their statements of faith those shaped by a corpus Christianum by a Western church three centuries ago. (EWCW, p.221)

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