THE NOTION OF GOD 

Since theology is the study about God (it cannot be the study of God, since God cannot be studied), our attention should be drawn to God.  The topic of God should be the main focus of the theological enterprise.  Everything else in theology revolves or should revolve around the idea or notion of God. The study about God is what I would call in the words of the late Dr. James Cone, the "central semantic axis" of Christian theology.

We do not need to compare the beliefs of one religious system with those of another religious system in order to see notions about God.  Within any given religious systems, we can encounter various notions or ideas about the Deity.  Even within the Christian faith itself, the notion of God is not monolithic by any stretch of the. imagination.  Christians, both collectively and individually speaking, have different ideas of God.  Even when they make use of the Scriptures, which by the way utilize language that attributes human qualities to God (anthropomorphic language), they have different ideas and notions of God.

The idea of God is at once the most important and yet the most questionable of all religious doctrines or "symbols" in the West, and I dare to add, as well as in the East.  This idea or symbol points to the central object of Christian and Jewish faith, the sole "subject" of their revelation, and the final principle of  both reality and  meaning throughout human existence.  Nevertheless, of all concepts in modern cultural life-and in varying degrees for "believers" and "doubters" alike-the idea of God remains the most elusive, the most frequently challenged, the most persistently criticized and negated of all important convictions. Is there a God? Can such a One be experienced, known, or spoken of?  Is such knowledge experience testable, such knowledge verifiable, and such speech meaningful.  Or is all such experience illusory, such  seeming knowledge in fact a projection, and such speech empty?  These issues represent the primordial issues for philosophy of religion, for philosophical theology, and for confessional theology alike (Langdon Gilkey in "God." Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Theology and Tasks. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994, p. 88).

Almost every dominant motif and movement in modernity-its expanding scientific inquiry, its emphasis on what is natural, experienced, and verifiable, its persistent search for the greater well-being of humans in this world, its increasing emphasis on autonomy and on present satisfactions-has progressively challenged the concept of God and unsettled both its significance and certainty.  This challenge has been on two fronts.  They are:

1.  The traditional concepts of God, inherited from the premodern cultures of medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Europe, revealed themselves in almost every aspect to have anachronistic elements and to be unintelligible in the light of modern knowledge and modern attitudes towards reality, with the consequence that these concepts have had to reformulated on a fundamental level (Ibid.).

2.  More important, these same aspects of modernity challenged the very possibility of an idea of God, its knowability, its coherence, and its meaning to much of modernity such an idea is on a number of grounds an impossible idea and, as a consequence, the whole enterprise of a theistic religion appears as a futile, expensive, and even harmful activity (Ibid., pp. 88-89).

Because of this second point, the prime problematic connected with the symbol of God has in modern times differed noticeably from earlier problematics.  Our fundamental questions on religious reflection are not about the nature of the divine and the character of God's activity or will toward us, which represented the main questions of an earlier time.  The question now is the possibility of God's existence in a seemingly naturalistic world, the possibility of valid knowledge of God and meaningful discourse about God, and the possibility of God's existence in a seemingly naturalistic world, the possibility of valid knowledge and meaningful discourse about God, and the possibility of any sort of "religious" existence, style of life, or hope at all.  As a result, the efforts of religious thinkers in our century have by and large been directed at at the following interrelated problems:

1.  A justification of the meaning and the validity of the concept of God in relation to other, apparently less questionable forms of experience-scientific, philosophical, social political, artistic, psychological, or existentialist (Ibid. p. 89).

2.  A reformulation of that concept so that it can be meaningful and relevant to the modern world (Ibid.)

Despite the new and sharper edge to the question of God in modern times, certain continuing issues characteristic of the traditional discussion of this concept have also been present, albeit in specifically modern form.  In the concept of God, as in the reality experienced in religious existence, dialectical tensions have appeared and reappeared as the center of theological discussion.  It is a strange notion filled with paradoxes and polarities.  These perennial problems internal to the concept of God (whether orthodox or reformulated) also characterize modern discussions and manifest themselves with each option characteristic of modern theology and philosophy of religion.  We shall continue to explore their career in modern theologies as well as to show the way modern views of God have handled the question of the reality of God and if the possibility of such a concept.  (Ibid.).

Questions for reflection:

1.  What is your notion of God?

2.  Where do you derive your notion from?

3. How does your notion compare to other people's notion?

4.  Do you think that your notion of God is inferior or superior to that of other people's notions, or is it just different?

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 QUESTIONS REGARDING SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION 

In seeking to construct a faithful and relevant theology, there will always be questions relative to the sources of theology.  There will always be questions relative to whether Scripture takes precedence over experience and tradition, or whether the three are concomitant with each other.  

We consider some new interpretive issues that raise questions about the authority of Scripture and tradition or that offer additional possibilities for their appropriation.  We might place these questions into two groups:

1.  The first has to do with new theories of religious language, including British analytic philosophy.  French structuralism and deconstructionism, German and French hermeneutic phenomenology, and American linguistics and literary criticism.  Obviously we can say nothing about these theories here other than to observe that our understanding of how language functions, especially in texts of religious, poetic, and narrative character, has been greatly enriched. in recent years.  The reality-reference of biblical symbols, metaphors, and stories is quite different from that presupposed by the old scripture principle, concerned as it was with the communication of revealed truths and doctrines.  Freed from the first naivete of the old doctrine of Scripture, we are  now able to enter into the intentionality of the writings with a kind of second-order or postcritical naivete , in that way sharing in their evocation of the power of being and the new ways of being in the world associated with it (Paul Ricocur, The Symbolism of Evil. Boston Press, 1967, pp. 10-19).

2.  The second group of interpretive issues reflects the concerns of feminist theology, black theology, and liberation theology in general. In dealing with this, we note that all authorities associated with the dominant Western cultural and religious tradition have become problematic in the eyes of those who have suffered oppression within Western society.  The theological movements associated with these oppressed groups have raised searching questions and offered new interpretive insights.  To what extent, for instance, do patriarchalism, the acceptance of slavery, the logic of sovereignty, the royalist metaphors and a predominantly Western orientation discredit Scripture and the doctrinal tradition?  Are black, feminist, and liberationist hermeneutics now  the only valid ones.  How do they relate to the critical consciousness that had its birth in the Enlightenment (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in Scripture and Tradition, p. 83)?  

These are difficult, persistent questions that we cannot hope to resolve immediately.  Rather, in conclusion, we return to the underlying theological problem with which we have been concerned all along, i.e. how to reconceive Scripture and tradition after the collapse of the house of authority, and how to understand their function in the constitution of ecclesial existence.  The thesis here is that Scripture and tradition are vehicles of ecclesial process by means of which the original event of Christian faith is able to endure as normative and to function redemptively in the transformation of human existence.  Implicit in this thesis is a rejection of the traditional way of understanding the Church as primarily a community of revelation that endures by means of deposits of revelation in Scripture, dogmas, and institution. In contrast, we view ecclesiastical existence as the redemptive presence of the transcendent, transforming any and all provincial spaces, whether based on ethnic, geographical, cultic, racial, sexual, political, social, or doctrinal considerations-transforming  them in the direction of a universal community, yet without losing the determinacy intrinsic to human being. The problem is to discern the sort of origination and duration that attends this kind of redemptive community, as well as the vehicles of duration.  Remembrance of the events in which Christian faith originated will not be for the sake of the events themselves-a purely antiquarian interest-but for the sake of redemption (Ibid., pp 83-84). 

Finally, there is the interpretive tradition to consider.  Communities are shaped not only by events by events of origin but also by the controversies, crises, and interpretations that compromise their ongoing tradition.  Such events gain shaping effect only through embodiment or sedimentation in linguistic and institutional forms. What ordinarily has been called doctrinal and theological tradition are called "sedimented interpretation."  Living interpretation becomes sedimented in ways that comprise the self-identity of the community and contribute to redemptive transformation.  Disclosures can and do attend the ongoing history of the ecclesial community; revelation is not exhausted at the outset.  Indeed, the act of interpretation may itself be disclosure, and the new disclosures may in time obtain sedimentation (Ibid. p. 83). 

So we have seen a rather formal descriptive account of how the literatures of Israel, kergygma, and traditional interpretation function as normative vehicles of ecclesial process.  If it should be asked why this is the case, what empowers them to function redemptively, then we should want to advance a theological proposal concerning God's "use" of these literatures in the shaping of a new kind of corporative existence in which human beings are redemptively transformed.  To speak in this way does not imply any kind of special divine intervention or supernatural inspiration.  Rather, ecclesial process as such is the work of God in history.  It is an utterly historical process, subject to the contingencies, failures, and unfinished character of all such processes.  God saves through the historical manifestations of human possibility, not from history or in spite of it.  God does not "cause" or "control" these manifestations, nor any sort of identity exist between what God wills and specific historical occurrences.  Rather, we must speak of God "shaping," "transforming," "occasioning," "making use of the uses" of Scripture and tradition.  The unpacking of these metaphors would require a reformulation of the doctrine of providence and new ways of thinking about the Church, sanctification, and the spiritual presence of God (Ibid., pp. 85-86).  

Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 

When we speak about Scripture and tradition, certain issues emerge.  One of them has to do with the canon.  When we speak of the canon, we are talking about that collection of books which the Church (both Jewish and Christian) considers to be authoritative and normative for faith, governance, and practice.  The notion of "authoritative and normative" is related to the doctrine of divine inspiration, i.e. that it was God who gave the Scriptures to the Church.

"Canon," by traditional definition signifies an officially sanctioned collection of writings containing divine revelation-supernaturally inspired and inerrant, the ultimate rule of faith doctrine, and life.  With the collapse of the house of authority, this way of understanding "canon" must be given up.  The question is whether there are other senses in which the concept of canon may continue to be valid or helpful.  It may represent a way of ascribing some kind of "wholeness" or inner unity to a set of writings. While the quest for wholeness is unavoidable, a variety of kinds of wholeness may in fact be ascribed to the texts, leading to several competing versions of the canon. Theologians may having a "working canon," or a "canon within the canon," to which they appeal in construing the wholeness or essence of Christian faith, but none of these may be endowed with divinely sanctioned authority.  In this context, continued use of the concept of canon, however modified, is not helpful and should be abandoned.  We acknowledge, however, that there remains a question as to how those writings that are constitutive of the faith of Israel and early Christianity can best be identified (Edward C. Farley and Peter C. Hodgson, in Scripture and Tradition, p. 81).

Another specific question concerns the relation of Scripture and tradition to each other and to other ecclesial authorities. We have tended to view the issue of Scripture versus tradition as a false one, since in the classic criteriology most of the qualities attributed to Scripture were extended to the doctrinal tradition as well.  Obviously both Scripture and doctrinal tradition are part of an ongoing "traditioning" process which is to be understood in historical-critical terms, not in terms of successive stages of salvation history.  But at the same time, we acknowledge that differences exist between writings that attest to  the origin of a religious faith and those that help to perpetuate it-differences both in the character of these writings and the uses to which they are put by church and theology. A further question concerns the relation of both Scripture and tradition to other elements of theological criteriology such as the role of experience, the function of norms in relation to sources and authorities, the kind of reality-reference implicit in religious faith, and finally the adjudication of truth claims or the making of theological judgments (Ibid., pp. 81-82).

A third persistent issue concerns the use of biblical exegesis in church and theology.  Implicit in this discussion is the contention that the exegesis of biblical texts must be critical, whether employed in preaching, instruction, or the doing of theology.  The alternative to critical exegesis is proof-texting, which brings with it all the paraphernalia of the old Scripture principle. However, we acknowledge that preachers, theologians, and lay people cannot be expected to to be biblical scholars, and we recognize that biblical scholarship itself has tended to complicate the theological use of biblical texts by showing how dependent their meaning is on determinate historical, literary, and linguistic contexts. Theologians, and preachers work with their own set of criteria, employing biblical texts in quite different frames of reference while at the same time seeking not to do violence to them.  They must start with the principles of critical exegesis and historical consciousness, yet they need to move beyond them in ways that are fitting.  While the results of biblical scholarship are clearly relevant to doing theology, they are not ultimately decisive, since every theological proposal and every sermon is shaped by a prior imaginative construal of what Christian faith is all about, a construal that determines how biblical texts and other sources will be selected and interpreted, while at the same time being controlled by close attention to the patterns, nuances, and details of the texts (Ibid. p. 82). 

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

HOW IS THE SCRIPTURE USED IN MODERN THEOLOGY?

While modern theologians have continued for the most part to regard Scripture as the source of a specific revelatory content to be translated into theological concepts, their actual use of Scripture often belies the assumption.  The tension between the doctrine of Scripture and its uses that we observed to be already present in classical theology has become especially acute in modern times (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in ''Scripture and Tradition," p. 77).  

David Kelsey points this out very clearly in his "The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology." Although he distinguishes between seven different uses, the uses fall roughly into two main groups, possibly with one type mediating between them ("The  Bible and Christian Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion  (September 1980) pp. 385-402). 

At one extreme, Scripture may be construed as containing inspired inerrant doctrine. What is authoritative about Scripture, in this context, is its doctrinal content, and this content is considered revelation itself-of direct divine origin, inspired fully in all its parts, infallible with respect to to matters of doctrine or belief, to be translated without alterations into theological presuppositions.  Here we have the standard Scripture principle with one minor adjustment.  When offering reasons for adopting this view of plenary inspiration, what we have is an advancement of a functionalist argument: As used in the Church, the Bible is a holy or numinous object experienced as such by members of the community who bow and tremble before its awesome power and supernatural illumination (Farley and Hodgson, op. cit., p. 77).

In the second place, Scripture may be construed as containing distinctive concepts.  This is the position of the so-called biblical theology movement.  Here Scripture is authoritative because of the intrinsic revelatory power of its concepts.  Using critical methods, the task of biblical scholarship is to set forth the system of technical concepts that comprise the essence of the Hebraic and Christian Scriptures (Ibid. pp. 77-78). 

Third, Scripture may be construed as the recital of salvation history.  Revelation is understood no longer as contained in verbal deposits, but as consisting in certain distinctive "acts of God in history." These distinctive acts comprise salvation history, a subject of events within world history from which, when confessionally recited in Scripture, the concept of God can be inferred and then translated into theological proposals (Ibid., p. 78).  

These first three types hold in common the view that Scripture is authoritative by virtue of its content, a content in some sense identical with divine revelation.  However, in the second and third types, the content has been displaced from the actual words of Scripture, the writings as such to something that must be critically reconstructed from the writings, namely a system of of technical concepts or a set of distinctive events.  All three continue to understand the role of theology to be primarily that of translation and citation.  At best they allow for certain modifications in the Scripture principle but do not question its underlying premises (Ibid.).

The fourth type may be viewed as transitional.  What we have here is not a recited content, but rather scriptural narratives  that render an agent  by setting forth the distinctive patterns of intentions  and actions through which the agent's identity is constituted.  The whole canon of Scripture renders the same subject, Jesus Christ, whose identity is that of God with us.  This subject may be revealed through our encounter with the texts.  The texts are authoritative by virtue not of any inherent property they may have, but of a function they fill in the life of the community (Ibid.). 

Kelsey summarizes this position by saying the following: "To say that Scripture is 'inspired' is to say that God has promised that sometimes, at His gracious pleasure, the ordinary human words of the biblical texts will become the Word of God, the occasion for rendering an agent present to us in a Divine-human encounter (Kelsey, op. cit. pp. 47-48).

The final three types share a common perspective. They construe scripture as expressing a past revelatory event and occasioning its present occurrence. The expression may be in the form of poetic images having to do with a cosmic creative process or religious symbols concerned with the manifestation of the power of new being, or kerygmatic statements expressive of God's word of personal address by which a new self-understanding is evoked in the hearer.  The images, symbols, and statements  are not identical in content with the event, power, or word they express.  The actual authority of Scripture derives not from its content, but from its power to occasion new occurrences of revelation and new experiences of redemptive transformation when used in situations of proclamation, theological reflection, and personal self-understanding.  Finally, images, symbols, and kerygma may not be directly translated into theological concepts.  Theology, rather, has the task of "redescrbiing" what has been expressed biblically in symbolic or mythic language, employing a philosophical conceptuality (whether process, idealist, or existentialist) and an "imaginative construal" of what Christian faith is all about.  Only in that way can it be set forth intelligibly to the modern mind (Farley and Hodgson, op. cit. p. 79).  

Looking back over this typology, we realize that a full correspondence between the classic doctrine of Scripture and the actual theological use of Scripture is found only in the first type.  Already in the second and third types certain tensions appear as such to something that must be critically reconstructed from it.  In the last four types there is a clear disparity in which Scripture is actually construed as authoritative for church and theology and what Kelsey calls "the standard picture."  Theologians such as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann espouse a doctrine of Scripture, and they do so primarily in terms of that standard picture.  They understand Scripture to be authoritative because it mediates in the form of narrative, image, and symbol, myth, and so on, a normative revelatory occurrence that in some fashion is to be occasioned anew and translated into modern conceptualities.  In other words, the doctrine of Scripture continues to be subordinated to the doctrine of revelation (Ibid., pp. 79-80).  

Under these circumstances what seems called for are fresh theological understandings of Scriptures that attempt to overcome the disparity between doctrine and use.  Several such attempts have been made recently, but for the most part, they represent modifications of the option we have just explored (Ibid. p.80).

For example, certain evangelical theologians such G. C. Berkouwer and Jack Rogers, while retaining the traditional principle of divine inspiration, are prepared to concede that the human instruments of this inspiration are finite and contingent, thus to qualify the doctrine of infallibility and acknowledge the legitimacy of certain forms of criticism.  But they still view Scripture as containing a divinely given revelatory content.  Another option is represented by Schubert Ogden, who proposes that the authority of Scripture derives in fact, from "a canon within the canon," the "Jesus-kerygma" of the earliest apostolic community, accessible only by means historical critical reconstruction (Ibid.). 

In his own constructive proposal, Kelsey develops an explicitly functional understanding of Scripture.  Scripture, he says, has authority to the extent that it functions in the Church to shape new human identities and transform individual and communal life (This view has an antecedent in S.T. Coleridge's Confession of an Inquiring Spirit. 1840).

It can be understood theologically to function this way because it is God who is active in Scripture-not God "saying" or "revealing" as we have it in the classic images, but rather God "shaping identity," using the uses of Scripture toward a specific end: the actualization of God's eschatological rule. This model is a product of creative human imagination, but it has the power to evoke fresh disclosures of the reality of God and the meaning of human existence (Farley and Hodgson, op. cit. p. 80).

So, I end this essay by posing the following questions:

1.  How does the function of Scripture in modern theology and in the contemporary Church compare to how it functioned in the earlier stages of theological construction?

2.  Is the function of Scripture in modern theology an antithesis to its function in earlier Christianity when the "Scripture principle" was being embraced and incorporated into the theology of the Church?

3.  Does the function of Scripture in the contemporary period constitute a departure or deviance from "the faith once delivered to the saints," or is it on a continuum? 

These questions remain with us as we continue on the journey of "faith seeking understanding."

In the Name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer. Amen.  

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology 

Tainan Theological College/Seminary 

 EXPLORING THE FUNCTION, ROLE, AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF AUTHORITY

Until now, we have seen how the Scripture and the tradition have constituted a "house of authority" in Christian theology.  In other words, Scripture and tradition (along with experience) have constituted the norms and standards of belief and practice.  The notion of "the Scripture being our only rule of faith and practice," or the transmitted tradition being the "guiding norm" for theology as it was in the early Church, come under question and scrutiny now.

Some might consider it "heretical" to even think of questioning the historical authority.  After all, they might say, this authority was handed down by God and who are to even begin to tamper with it?  I respectfully submit that our collective and individual insecurities lead us to need or want a secure and stable structure that we can rely on, instead of allowing our theology to go awry or disparate.  We don't want to have a "scatter brain" theology, which consists of "think as you please," or "it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere." We long for a secure structure that tells us what to believe without questioning.  In the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions, adherents are expected to subscribe to the tradition simply "because it's been that way all along."  In Protestantism, there is the notion of "the Bible says so, end of story."  In either case, there has been no room for "razzle, dazzle." 

Now we come to a point when this structure of authority is questioned and challenged.  The question is "Do we have to be enslaved to a structure of authority that was handed down a long time ago "just because?" Is there any room for modifying or revamping that structure, so that in the end, we still have something to rely on rather than have a theology "at random" or "at whim?  Here we shall examine some levels of criticism and how they brought about the collapse of a structure that was already tottering from within.  

The first and still the most important is historical criticism in its various forms.  The beginnings of historical consciousness may traced back to the Renaissance, but they came to fruition in the Enlightenment and its aftermath.  Historical consciousness assumes that every entity occurs in a specific but ever changing context and is itself always fluid.  No exceptions to the principle of historicity can be allowed.  While this insight was fully grasped by Johann Gottfried Herder and others in the eighteenth century, its impact was experienced only gradually.  Criticism seemed to arrive in successive waves until finally all aspects of Scripture and doctrinal tradition were engulfed.  Because it was easier to assume a critical stance toward the Old Testament, methodological breakthroughs generally occurred first in Old Testament research and were only later applied to the Christian Scriptures (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in Scripture and Tradition, p. 73).

The first and most basic historical-critical level at which investigation was carried out was text criticism, developed already by such Renaissance scholars as Nicholas of Cusa.  It tested the authenticity of received texts and established the first principles of critical editions.  It was followed by literary and source criticism, which showed that the authors to which many of the books of the Old and New Testaments were traditionally attributed were not the actual authors, and that in most cases, a complex process of oral and written tradition underlay the writings in their present form.  The Documentary Hypothesis regarding the Pentateuch and recognition of the central role played by oral tradition in the formation of Israel's Scriptures led to similar discoveries in the area of the New Testament.  Concurrently, various forms of content criticism emerged.  The rationalists attacked the miraculous elements in the sacred history and attempted to replace them with a "purely natural" explanation.Then the so-called "mythical interpretation" came along to argue that these elements are ingredient to the structure of biblical mythology and cannot be removed without its meaning.  David Strauss in particular, advanced the thesis that much of the biblical material is actually not historical but mythical or legendary in character, reflecting the religious interests of the author or community that produced it.  With this went a challenge to the truth claims mediated by such material.  The effect of such criticism on the gospel history of Jesus was especially devastating (Ibid., p. 74). 

These three forms of criticism tended to predominate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In our modern era (twentieth and twenty-first centuries), tradition criticism has played a major role, beginning with the form criticism of Rudolf Bultmann, who showed a developmental trajectory of the units comprising the synoptic tradition can be established, permitting a reconstruction of the earliest forms of the tradition.  Bultmann's successors, the so-called "redaction critics," stressed the importance of understanding that  the function of the text in the literary and theological framework established by the editor or author.  Within current biblical studies, two new methods have come to be increasingly influential; structuralism, concerned with a depth dimension of grammatical and linguistic relations, and a second level of literary criticism, concerned with literary genres.  By attending to the function of symbol, myth, legend, narrative, poetry, parable, epistle, and other literary forms, critics have come to the realization that Scripture does not contain "doctrine" or "deposits" or revealed truth at all.  Biblical language portrays new ways of being in a world transformed by grace; its meaning is a function of symbolic and metaphorical uses of language that cannot be directly translated into conceptual terms (Ibid.).

Obviously, these various layers of historical and literary criticism seriously complicate the traditional way in which Scripture was understood to contain the content of revelation-as divinely inspired, infallibly expressed, equally distributed to all its parts, available for translation into theological concepts, immutably valid for all generations.  Similar types of criticism were applied to the history of doctrine.  The historical myths underlaying doctrinal legitimation of dogma and papacy were exposed, and the whole process by which an authoritative tradition originated and developed was grasped in a thoroughly historical manner.  Here the great master was Adolf Harnack, but he had many eminent predecessors, notably Johann Salomo Semler, and Ferdinand Christian Baur (Ibid.).

A second level of criticism is neither historical nor literary but social-phenomenological. It argues that the "Scripture principle" does not offer a vehicle of duration corresponding adequately to ecclesial existence.  This sort of criticism has rarely been advanced explicitly, but it is implicit in the ecclesiology and theological method of certain theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher. A community whose actual social duration is based on testimony to the Gospel, the experience of salvation mediated by the presence of the risen Christ, and the inauguration of God's promised eschatological rule cannot have literature construed as an atomistic collection of authoritative texts containing a deposit of revelation confined to a specific time in the past.  The ecclesial community, moreover, is non ethnic, universal, and culturally pluralistic, so that purely ethnic, provincial, and culturally relative elements of Scripture cannot be authoritative.  On this view it is altogether possible that features logically attending the form of social and religious existence represented by Christian faith have never been fully actualized or even perceived, and in their place, forms have been adopted that contradict Christianity's immanent ideal. The question of Scripture and tradition is therefore closely intertwined with that of ecclesiology (Ibid. pp. 74-75). 

The third level of criticism is theological.  It addresses the themes or presuppositions that underlie the Scripture principle, namely salvation history and the principle of identity.  While this theological critique has been widespread during these past  centuries, it has rarely been been perceived as undercutting the Scripture principle.  Yet clearly it does.  The patriarchalism, monarchialism, and triumphalism of the classical salvation-history scheme, for instance, have been widely discredited. Triumphalism in particular founders on the rock of theodicy, for it has proven very difficult to sustain the logic of sovereignty in the face of massive evil experienced during the past century.  If theology shifts from the model of causality to that of influence, and acknowledges the contingencies of world process-as in various forms of existentialism, process thought, and political theologies-then salvation history and the logic of triumph dissolve.  This is also the case with the principle of identity. Since the Adamic myth rules out an ontological identity between Creator and creation, this identity has usually been construed on the model of causal efficacy as an identity between what God wills to happen or make known and what in fact happens or is known in history.  Apart from the discrediting of the logic of triumph, the chief difficulty with the principle of identity is that of a literalized myth. In folk religion everywhere, God is represented mythically as thinking, willing, reflecting, and accomplishing in the mode of an in-the-world-being who intervenes selectively in world process.  There are enormous problems with this sort of mythology.  It mundanizes the divine and sacrilizes the non-divine. It violates finite human freedom and the contingency of the natural world.  And it is hard pressed to avoid attributing specific evils as well as goods to the divine will.  With the end of mythological thinking about God, the theological foundations of the Scripture principle evaporate (Ibid., pp 75-76).

The house of authority has collapsed, despite the fact that many people still try to live in it.  Some retain title to it without actually living there; others are antiquarians or renovators, attempting in one way or another to salvage it; others have abandoned it for new quarters or no quarters at all.  During this past century and a half, a spectrum of possible theological responses to this "shaking of the foundation" may be sketched as follows.  Clearly at one extreme are those who abandon the biblical writings as in any sense scripture, regarding them as obscurantist, provincial, no longer authoritative for life in the world. This was seen as an option in the Enlightenment, and was taken up explicitly by certain forms of historicism, modernism, and relativism.  At the other extreme are those who continue to defend the Scripture principle more or less uncompromisingly : Protestant scholasticism, Catholic orthodoxy, the Princeton theology, and modern evangelicalism (Ibid., p. 76).

In the middle ground, two groups may be distinguished. One seeks to modify the principle by displacing the locus of revelation from the canon of Scripture as such to specific events, figures, concepts, or subsets of texts-something like a canon within a canon.  An identity is no longer maintained between the written document and revelation, but the authority of Scripture continues to derive from its revelatory substratum, which might or might not be presumed to be beyond the reach of historical criticism.  The other group, without always acknowledging it, uses Scripture in relation to constructive theological proposals in such a way as to negate the presuppositions and axioms of the Scripture principle, and thus construe scriptural authority in a functionalist rather than revelational terms. This group may continue to espouse a rather traditional doctrine of scripture, yet clearly they are doing something quite different (Ibid., pp 76-77).

En fin, we are left with various options. Do we continue to subscribe, uncritically, to the notion of "biblical authority?"  Is our notion of "authority" one of the Scriptures themselves, or is it one of the one who inspired and speaks to the Scriptures, therefore making it a derivative authority?  Does the authority, as we asked before, extend to the divergent manuscripts, translations, and versions of Scripture, or does it only reside in the original autographs?  Do we equate biblical "authority" with the authority of our hermeneutics (interpretations), thereby creating "a canon within a canon?"  As we continue to engage in constructive theology, we will also continue to pose these questions as a challenge to how we do theology.  

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology 

Tainan Theological College/Seminary