IS THEOLOGICAL TRUTH
FUNCTIONAL OR PROPOSITIONAL? POSTCONSERVATISM’S USE OF
LANGUAGE GAMES AND
SPEECH-ACT THEORY
INTRODUCTION
“The problem of the contemporary systematic theologian, as has often been remarked, is actually to do systematic theology.”1 For evangelicalism, David Tracy’s observation is even more accurate today than three decades ago when he first expressed it. Pluralism’s intensification has rendered evangelical theology introspective and preoccupied with theological prolegomena—how to do theology—and less active in actually doing theology. This has been true for more than two decades. Christian theologians have occupied themselves more with methods for doing theology than with doing theology, more with wondering how we may know God than with knowing God, and more with concern for the impact of culture upon forging Christian theological beliefs than with the impact of Christian theological beliefs upon transforming culture.
Preoccupation with methodological correctness by so many of the church’s theologians for nearly a generation has yielded at least three effects. First, evangelical theology withers, blighting the church’s worship, stunting spiritual growth, and gagging prophetic voices to the benighted world.2 Second, evangelical theology accommodates our pluralistic culture even while engaging in cursory if not glib review and critique of it.3 Third, methodological correctness tends to intimidate and shape Christian theological action, speech, and thought. Occupied with methodological correctness shaped by postmodernism concerns, some serve as “theological methods police” who detain for questioning those who have published works of Christian systematic theology on suspicion that they have engaged in methodological naïveté toward our postmodern culture.4
Chief among theological methods police is Stanley Grenz, who calls for and outlines a “revisioning” of theological method.5 Against evangelical theological method grounded in Scripture as God’s inerrant Word—a method that he perceives as grounded in Enlightenment and modernist foundationalism—Grenz, recently joined by John Franke, advocates a method that is nonfoundational and that rejects a propositional view of Scripture in favor of a functional view that centers upon experience rather than doctrine.6 By “experience” they mean “encounter with God in Christ.”7 Roger Olson, an advocate of this theological shift, christened it postconservative, distinguishing it from evangelicalism but also from postliberalism, which is the source for Grenz’s theological “rules of discourse” borrowed from George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic theological method.8
Postconservatives welcome the triumph of postmodernism and the demise of all forms of foundationalism including the end of conservative modernism as they call it. Perceiving conservative evangelicals to be mod-ernists who simply ground their beliefs upon Enlightenment foundationalism, postconservatives judge conservatives as engaging a naïve theological method that yields not “systematic theologies” but “encyclopedias of theological knowledge.”9 Grenz and Franke treat evangelical theology as if it were “a col-lection of isolated factual statements arising directly from first principles” and as if evangelicals made no distinction between “first-order” and “second-order” theological discourse.10 They contend that “theology can no longer model itself after the foundationalist metaphor of constructing an edifice.”11 Grenz and Franke fault evangelicals for their appeal to Scripture as theology’s “foundation” as if this metaphor for Scripture inextricably ties their beliefs to Enlightenment-modernist philosophical and epistemological foundationalism. 12 “Instead,” Grenz and Franke assert, “we ought to view Christian doctrine as comprising a ‘belief-mosaic’ and see theology, in turn, as the exploration of Christian doctrine viewed as an interrelated, unified, whole.”13
Grenz and Franke contend that evangelical theologians who view Scripture as the inerrant and sure foundation of theological truth are modernists, not simply affected by modernistic ideas. Consequently, they insist that evangelical theology needs more than correction. Evangelical theology—including its method of appeal to Scripture—needs to be overthrown because Grenz and Franke think that conservative evangelicals’ confidence in Scripture’s authority is actually grounded in the canons of Enlightenment foundationalism. So, “in contrast to the Enlightenment ideal that effectively took theology out of the church and put it in the academy,” their proposal would return “theological reflection to its proper primary location within the believing community.”14 Not only do Grenz and Franke adopt a coherence view of truth that leads to their acceptance of nonfoundationalism, but they also embrace a key element of postliberalism. They adopt Lindbeck’s novel use of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s metaphor of grammar as “language games” to support their claim that theology should be a community conversation. They also creatively employ “speech-act” theory at a macro level to advance their case that the Bible is “the primary voice in the theological conversation”15 of the community.16
Regrettably, postconservatives, led by Grenz and Franke, have discarded viewing Scripture as propositional in favor of viewing Scripture as functional, as if the two were incompatible. In conjunction with subordinating Scripture to the primary voice among three sources for theology—Scripture, culture, and tradition—they have located doctrinal authority within the “language games”of the believing community rather than in the linguistic practices of the biblical canon. Moreover, they have identified the Spirit’s contemporary use of Scripture rather than Scripture itself as that which regulates the community’s theology. They reject the continuity evangelicals have historically observed between Scripture and Christian theology. Evangelicals have historically regarded their ongoing endeavor to confess properly, accurately, and to God’s glory the faith once for all delivered to God’s people as continuing in the tradition of the apostles and prophets of old. Though the best evangelical theologians have carefully distinguished between Scripture as God’s authoritative Word and their own theological work as at best approximating the theologi-cal truths of God’s revelatory Word, postconservatives object that conserva-tive evangelicals have virtually fused the two into one. Postconservatives opt for a view of doctrine that, if consistent with the principles adopted, enables them to tolerate mutually exclusive beliefs as equally true.
Do we need to choose whether Christian doctrine bears a functional or a propositional role in the church? Is the postconservative separation between “first-order” and “second-order” discourse valid? Does Christian doctrine, as “second-order” discourse, simply have a functional role for the church? Is Scripture propositional in nature and foundational to Christian theology or not? This essay contends that evangelical theologians at their best have not naïvely equated their theological expressions with Scripture. Also, correctly understood, evangelical theologians have upheld that doctrine is both propositional and functional. The false disjunction in the title of this chapter is purposeful, fully cognizant of warnings against the fallacy of framing one’s research questions disjunctively, excluding other options.17 The title highlights the false disjunction postconservatives pose.
FROM PROPOSITIONAL TO NARRATIVE THEOLOGY
More than a decade ago Grenz began his theological project with Revisioning Evangelical Theology. As he lays out his revision of the theological task, he rejects what he calls “Evangelical Propositionalism.”18 He challenges the ideas of the Dean of Evangelicalism, Carl Henry, expressed in his multi-volume work—God, Revelation and Authority.19 Whether Grenz adequately or correctly represents Henry’s beliefs is disputable.20 The designation “propositional revelation” (probably not coined by evangelicals) is not with-out its ambiguities and difficulties, which is why Henry qualifies his use of the expression.21 Despite Henry’s careful definition of “propositional revela- tion” and his insistence that God’s revelation is both propositional and personal, Grenz yields no substantial concession to evangelical theologians such as Henry.22 Instead, he adopts an exaggerated and severe judgment of the work of evangelical theologians. He approves of Pinnock’s assessment of evangelical theology: “Clark Pinnock . . . rejects as inflexible and undynamic the ‘propositional theology that sees its function as imposing systematic rationality on everything it encounters.’”23 Grenz continues:
Taking his cue from the contemporary narrative outlook, he chides academic theology for looking for truth in doctrine rather than in the biblical story. Viewing revelation as primarily narrative, Pinnock sees the task of theology as expounding the story and explicating its meanings. Theology, then, is a secondary language whose propositions “live off the power of the primary story.”24
Grenz offers no recognition that Pinnock overstates the case. Pinnock’s division between “doctrine” and “the biblical story” foreshadows Grenz’s sepa-ration of the same. Both fail to acknowledge that evangelical biblical theologians, who are engaged in narrative theology because their work is in the redemptive and historical narrative of Scripture, and who are engaged in self-criticism concerning the subtle influences of the Enlightenment and modernism upon their presuppositional beliefs, already offer chastening to sys-tematic theological method. Furthermore, though Grenz perceives a dichotomy between beliefs that God’s revelation is propositional and that God’s revelation is largely narrative in form, he passes over crucial hermeneutical questions and proceeds as if this disjunction were real. Thus he fails to engage evangelical scholars who have addressed the hermeneutical issues he passes over, including “the hermeneutical spiral, the pairing of ‘distanciation’ and ‘fusing of horizons,’ and asymptotic approaches to knowledge.”25
For Grenz, his problem “with evangelical propositionalism . . . is not its acknowledgment of a cognitive dimension of revelation and consequently of the statements of theology.”26 The problem, he claims, is that because Western individualism has held evangelicals hostage, they have misunderstood “the social nature of theological discourse.”27 He presumes his premise that evangelicals have uncritically clothed themselves with the “Western mindset,” which is also modernism, both of which evangelicals need to shed “if our the-ology is to speak the biblical message in our contemporary situation . . . and reclaim the more profound community outlook in which the biblical people of God were rooted.”28
What, however, does Grenz mean? He answers, “Evangelicals are correct in asserting that the revealed truth of God forms the ‘basic grammar’ that creates Christian identity. . . . But this identity-creative process is not an individualistic matter occurring in isolation. Instead, it is a development that hap-pens within a community.”29 Having set up this false disjunction, as if evangelical theology isolates individuals from a community, Grenz claims,
We may view theology as the faith community’s reflecting on the faith experience of those who have encountered God through the divine activity in history and therefore now seek to live as the people of God in the contem-porary world. Ultimately, then, the propositions of systematic theology find their source and aim in the identity and life of the community it serves.30
What can deliver Grenz’s communitarian Christian theology project from being reduced to one more religious belief current within an ocean of religious pluralism? Grenz and Franke look to a modification of Lindbeck’s use of the concept of “language games.” How can they retain the Bible as authoritative after reducing it to “the primary voice in the theological conversation”? Grenz and Franke appeal to “speech-act” theory. Does appeal to “speech- act” theory save the postconservative project so that it can speak of anything objective? To these questions we now turn, respectively.
EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY AS COMMUNITY CONVERSATION
While Grenz surfs across the waves stirred by the deep currents of Enlightenment foundationalism and modernist epistemology, his survey of these currents bears an inveigling quality that fails to fathom the depths. As a key element in his proposal to postmodernize theology and to approach theology as a “community conversation,” Grenz appeals first to Wittgenstein’s “language games” and then to J. L. Austin’s “speech-act theory.”
Wittgenstein’s “Language Games”
As Grenz and Franke adopt a nonfoundational theological method, they raise the question, “What would theology look like if it not only rejected the correspondence theory of truth, but sought to follow Wittgenstein and move beyond realism as well?”31 They do not, however, directly appeal to Wittgenstein. Instead, they visit Lindbeck, who channels Wittgenstein’s “language games” with a novel twist, if not a failure to “play by the rules.”
The later work of Wittgenstein, climaxing in his Philosophical Investigations, corrected his earlier work on language and truth, Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, in which he defended the “picture theory of meaning,”that objects pictured by words and sentences determine their meanings. Later he corrected this belief that a word has an essential meaning and that it invariably pictures a particular object. He came to recognize that meanings of words and of sentences are determined by their uses within contexts.32 He designated these wider contexts “language games.” Wittgenstein simply dis-covered philosophically what is intrinsically true of language.33 It is axiomatic that words and sentences derive their meanings from their uses within con-texts. Biblical exegetes and scholars have long acknowledged the truth of what Saussure demonstrated linguistically and Wittgenstein showed philosophically.34
Regrettably, some take Wittgenstein’s “language games” beyond his own conclusions, as David Clark observes:
They say that because language functions in complex ways according to the grammatical rules that govern what can and cannot be said in a particular form of life, language may not refer at all. This means they relate the words ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’, not to reality, but to grammar. Meaning is not a function of a connection of language to reality, but of language to more language.35
Grenz and Franke trade upon this exaggerated use of Wittgenstein’s work to claim his support for their cause:
Coherentism and pragmatism provided ways to leave behind the foundationalist preference for the correspondence of truth. The means to overcome metaphysical realism, however, came from another source, the “turn to linguistics.” . . . [S]ignificant for the quest for a nonfoundationalist epistemology via linguistics was the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).In a sense, Wittgenstein completed the shift toward belief systems and the communal dimension of truth pioneered by the coherentists and the pragmatists. . . . Wittgenstein came to realize that rather than having only a single purpose, to make assertions or state facts, language has many functions, e.g., to offer prayer, make requests, and convey ceremonial greetings. This discovery led to Wittgenstein’s important concept of “language games.”
According to Wittgenstein, each use of language occurs within a separate and seemingly self-contained system complete with its own rules. . . . Each use comprises a separate “language game,” and each “game” may have little to do with the other “language games.” . . . Like the move to coherence and pragmatism, adopting the image of “language games” entailed abandoning the correspondence theory of truth. But unlike these two earlier proposals it also opened the door for the questioning of metaphysical realism. According to Wittgenstein, meaning and truth are not related—at least not directly or primarily—to an external world of “facts” waiting to be apprehended. Instead, they are an internal function of language. Because the meaning of any statement is dependent on the context—that is, on the “language game”—in which it appears, any sentence has as many meanings as contexts in which it is used. Rather than assertions of final truth or truth in any ultimate sense, all our utterances can only be deemed “true” within the context in which they are spoken.36
Grenz and Franke hyperextend Wittgenstein’s “language games,” for to agree with Wittgenstein concerning how words and sentences denote meaning does not require agreement with the postconservative notion that “meaning and truth are not related—at least not directly or primarily—to an external world of ‘facts’ waiting to be apprehended.”37
Doctrine as “Rules of Discourse”
Grenz and Franke’s use of Wittgenstein’s “language games” is an adaptation derived from Lindbeck’s “cultural-linguistic” approach that separates doctrine from Scripture. Lindbeck endeavors to find a via media between two types of theological method he finds deficient. On the one hand, associated with conservative evangelicals and with Henry in particular, he identifies the “cognitive-propositionalist” type that “stresses the ways in which church doctrines function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.”38 On the other hand, he finds classical liberalism to be the “experiential-expressive” type that views doctrines as “non informative and non discursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations,”a type associated with Schoolteacher and classical liberalism.39 As the via media, Lindbeck proposes the “cultural-linguistic” alternative model in which doctrines function as the believing community’s “rules of discourse.”He attempts to root his theological-methods model in Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games.” For Lindbeck, “Doctrines regulate truth claims by excluding some and permitting others, but the logic of their communally authoritative use hinders or prevents them from specifying positively what is to be affirmed.”40 Christian doctrines are like community rules:
For example, the rules “Drive on the left” and “Drive on the right” are unequivocal in meaning and unequivocally opposed, yet both may be binding: one in Britain and the other in the United States, or one when traffic is normal, and the other when a collision must be avoided. Thus oppositions between rules can in some instances be resolved, not by altering one or both of them, but by specifying when or where they apply, or by stipulating which of the competing directives takes precedence.41
The following example illustrates how the “rules-of-discourse view” functions:
Consider the assertion, “We are saved by grace alone.” The propositionalist will take this as a factual claim about the mechanism of salvation. The experiential-expressivist will understand it as the symbolic expression of an experience of the power of God in salvation. On Lindbeck’s view, the meaning of the doctrine can be expressed in a rule like, “Christians should always speak and act upon their salvation in a way that expresses gratitude to God, not pride in their own accomplishment.”42
Doctrine as “rules of discourse” supplants Scripture as “rule of faith and practice” (which historically has been the church’s source of doctrine). “Scripture in tradition” displaces sola Scriptura.43 Lindbeck exploits Wittgenstein’s “language games” that locate meanings of a word or a sentence within their respective contexts, to locate meaning of doctrine within a community’s “rules of discourse.” Is it legitimate to transfer Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “language games” from grammar to doctrine?
According to Lindbeck, a community’s doctrines, like rules of grammar, function as norms by which adherents know how to think about and live within the world as a member of a given believing community. Doctrines are “teachings regarding beliefs and practices that are considered essential to the identity or welfare of the group.” And thus “they indicate what constitutes faithful adherence to a community.”44 In other words, the doctrine of a given Christian community (whether Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, or other) functions as the “rules of the belief game” within that community for how to think, how to speak, and how to live.
Lindbeck, however, takes Wittgenstein’s “language games” beyond their proper conclusions.45 Whereas Wittgenstein’s “language games” concern what determines meanings of words and sentences, Lindbeck stretches the “language games” metaphor. Believing that rules of grammar do not say any-thing true or false about reality outside the language those rules govern, he claims each rule is “true” only within the framework of the rules that com-prise that language. Having made the shift of categories, with ease Lindbeck applies his concept of “rules of grammar” to “doctrine as grammar.”
So, his interpreters conclude that Lindbeck views doctrinal statements as making “true” or “false” claims only within the “language game” of the particular Christian community within which those statements are made. “True”and “false” are categories that are not suitable to particular doctrinal statements, for the elements that comprise the whole are “true” or “false” only intrasystematically.46 Doctrines are “true,” then, as “parts of a total pattern of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting.”47 So, according to Lindbeck, doctrines do not make “first-order” claims of truth, which is to say, as inter-preters including Grenz and Franke read him, they make no claim about objective reality. Instead, functioning as rules of grammar, Christian doctrines make second-order assertions. As such, Christian doctrines function to regulate how Christians of a particular believing community are to speak about God; Christian doctrines do not function to make actual assertions about God.48 So to claim that Jesus Christ really is God is not a claim about objective reality; it is only a claim about what Christians believe and what is cor-rect for Christians to confess within their own community.49
As he argues his case in The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck has led numerous readers to understand him to jettison a correspondence theory of truth for a coherence theory because particular doctrines have no necessary correspondence to reality; they only cohere with other doctrines within the system of belief, that is, intrasystematically.50 “Correspondence to reality is at a different level.”51
Lindbeck’s broadening of Wittgenstein’s “language games” metaphor is dubious, and it is doubtful that Wittgenstein intended his concept to be so exploited, but full assessment of Lindbeck’s proposal lies outside this essay.52
Evangelical Community Constructs the World
Evangelical theologians at their best distinguish between Scripture as God’s Word and interpretation of Scripture as entailing theological formulations. To the degree that evangelical theologians view their understanding of Scripture as fused into one with God’s revelation, as if their knowledge of God and of his ways were already perfected and absolute, postmodern epistemological correctives are helpful. So evangelicals use the designations “first-order” and “second-order” as helpful distinctions between God’s revelatory Word and the church’s theological expressions derived through the interpretation of Scripture, respectively.53
However, since Grenz has been working to “revision” evangelical theology, not only has he adopted Lindbeck’s two categories—first-order and sec-ond-order—but he has also filled these categories from Lindbeck’s novel use of Wittgenstein’s “language games” discussed above. Nevertheless, Grenz wants to advance a step beyond where Lindbeck’s proposal goes. Furthermore, Lindbeck is not pleased with postmodernists like Grenz, though he does not mention him, who reason that “for Lindbeck, the truth of Christianity . . . is predominantly intrasystemic.”54 Grenz claims that the “task of theology is not purely descriptive . . . but prescriptive.”55 What does he mean? He is not referring to what Christians ought to obey. Instead, he says, “The theologian seeks to articulate what ought to be the interpretive framework of the Christian community.”56
Because Grenz and Franke adopt a coherence view of truth that leads to their acceptance of nonfoundationalism and to what they call “communitarian theology” after the order of Lindbeck’s, they encounter a problem that poses devastating danger to their project. They ask:
How can we seek truth in a multicultural world in which various communities offer diverse theological paradigms? In other words, does theology speak about anything objective, or does it content itself with merely articulating the interpretive framework of a specific religious tradition?57
Is the communal view of Grenz and Franke capable of reflecting reality beyond itself? Can Christian theology talk about a real world? Or, “Does the move beyond foundationalism entail a move away from metaphysical realism?”58 Grenz and Franke regard this question “improper and ultimately unhelpful.”59 Instead, they would prefer the question, “How can a nonfoundationalist theological method lead us to statements about a world beyond our formulations?”60 Their response is to take a cue from post-modern sociologists “who provide insight into the world-constructing role of society in general and language in particular.”61 They accept a basic post-modern antithesis: either we have full and absolute knowledge of a thing, or our knowledge of a thing is socially constructed with dubious connection with reality, which is the thing-in-itself.62 Because of this, in the end, they have to answer the question, “Why give primacy to the world-constructing language of the Christian community?”63 Grenz and Franke respond, “As Christians . . . we believe that the Christian theological vision is true. But on what basis can we make this claim?”64 How can they avoid retreating to what they perceive to be the “foundationalist epistemology”of conservative-evangelical modernists? They simply assert their way out of their dilemma.
[W]hich theological vision is able to provide the transcendent vision for the construction of the kind of world that particular theologizing community is in fact seeking? Which theological vision provides the framework for the construction of true community? We believe that Christian theology, focused as it is on God as the triunity of persons and on humankind as the imago dei, sets forth a helpful vision of the nature of the kind of community that all religious belief systems in their own way and according to their own understanding seek to foster.65
As Lindbeck accepts the community tradition as a given, so Grenz and Franke accept it because it is there. In the end, then, Alister McGrath’s criticism of Lindbeck’s postliberal or culture-linguistic approach to theology fits the Grenz-Franke model also.66 The problem concerns the origin of doctrine. What is the source of the cultural-linguistic use of doctrine? Is it God’s revelation, or is it human communal wisdom (in other words, religion)?
Rather than offer correctives to evangelical theology, Grenz and Franke (following Lindbeck) overreach in their criticism of what they call cognitive-propositional theology and endeavor to overhaul evangelical theology. Because they set up a false disjunction between propositional and personal revelation, they fail to give adequate consideration to theology that is both cognitive and propositional, and they discard propositional theology. Consequently they locate theological authority within the “language games” (linguistic practices) of the community of believers rather than in the “language games” of Scripture. So the Grenz-Franke model is subject to Vanhoozer’s criticism of Lindbeck’s approach:
Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model, by seeing theology’s task as describing the grammar of the community’s culture and language, ultimately runs the risk of reducing theology to cultural anthropology, in which talk about God just is talk about the community. Such reduction amounts to a failure to speak of God . . . and hence to a failure to preserve the reality of God, together with his divine initiatives. Failure to refer to the divine initiatives results, in turn, in the loss of the central point of the good news, which is to say, in the loss of the gospel itself.67
SCRIPTURE AS THEOLOGY’S NORMING NORM AND
“SPEECH-ACTS”
If doctrines function as community norms that direct adherents on how to think, speak, and live as Christians, what role does Scripture have? Grenz and Franke reply that Scripture functions to regulate theology’s communitarian norm, but not in the way evangelicals view Scripture as the foundation for belief.
Grenz claims that not until Charles Hodge and his contemporary Princetonian theologians did the church embrace a doctrine of Scripture as the foundation for Christian faith nor as “the central fundamental.”68 Simultaneously Grenz attempts to argue that Princeton’s theologians attempted a novel move to establish a doctrine of Scripture as foundational to all Christian theology and that the view of the Bible as not inerrant got lost in the fray.69 It seems that Grenz falls prey to a word-use fallacy that leads to category confusion. For him, the imagery of Scripture as “foundational” to all Christian theology necessarily links the evangelical belief with Enlightenment epistemology and modernist foundationalism and renders the evangelical view worthy of rejection. So, Grenz asserts, “a misunderstanding of Luther’s principle of sola scriptura led many theologians to trade the ongo-ing reading of the text for their own systematic delineation of the doctrinal deposit that was supposedly encoded in its pages centuries ago.”70 He con-tinues, “Thereby, the Bible was all too readily transformed from a living text into the object of the scholar’s exegetical and systematizing prowess,” an altogether revealing statement of Grenz’s postmodern predilection.71
As if he had established a real and substantive change in how evangelicals understand sola Scriptura in the wake of nineteenth-century Princetonian theologians, Grenz remarkably appeals to the Westminster Confession (the Princetonians’ own Confession) to ground his idea that “the Bible is the norming norm in theology.”72 So, as if recovering a treasure lost to evangelicals in the modern era, he appeals to “speech-act theory” to make effective for “the postmodern, postfoundationalist context” his particular view of how the Spirit speaks through Scripture to perform “the illocutionary act of addressing us.”73 His use of speech-act theory is novel; it is not at the ordinary hermeneutical level at which evangelicals employ it frequently and properly concerning interpretation of the biblical text. He quickly passes over the Spirit’s speech-acts in Scripture to the church—the Spirit is teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing (2 Tim. 3:16). He treats these speech-acts as “only parts of a larger whole, namely, the goal or product of the Spirit’s speaking.”74
Grenz and Franke say:
We affirm with the church throughout its history that God has acted and spoken; the biblical texts bear witness to God’s acting and speaking to the communities of faith in the biblical era. But God acts and speaks today too, and the Bible is the Spirit’s chosen vehicle for speaking authoritatively to us.75
Similar to Lindbeck’s novel use of Wittgenstein’s “language games” metaphor, so Grenz and Franke appeal to Austin’s speech-act theory to carry their agenda forward.
Austin distinguishes three kinds of acts accomplished by speech: (1) say-ing something (the locutionary act); (2) what we do when saying something (the illocutionary act); and (3) what we accomplish when saying something (the perlocutionary act).76
While other evangelicals engage speech-act theory at its linguistic level (as crucial to interpretation of texts), Grenz and Franke merely summarize Austin’s concepts and then bypass the hermeneutical level of the Scripture’s objective speech-acts to address instead the Spirit’s subjective speech-acts by using Scripture within the community of believers.77 Thus, they skip over accessible speech-acts in Scripture, to which the church has historically turned for its theological beliefs, to get to inaccessible speech-acts in the Spirit’s use of Scripture for us. Grenz and Franke do this because they reason, “If the final authority in the church is the Holy Spirit speaking through scripture, then theology’s norming norm is the message the Spirit declares through the text.”78 Yet it is not the text of Scripture but the Spirit’s use of Scripture that they feature in their view. So the theologian’s hermeneutical work is not so much to hear what the text of Scripture says, but to hear what the Spirit has to say to the church by appropriating Scripture:
Because the Spirit speaks to us through scripture—through the text itself—the ongoing task of the community of Christ is to ask continually, What is the Spirit saying to the church? (Rev. 2:11, etc.). We inquire at every juncture, What illocutionary act is the Spirit performing in our midst on the basis of the reading of this scripture text? What is the Spirit saying to us in appropriating this text? In short, we inquire, What is the biblical message?79
So, though Grenz and Franke mention the need to do “careful exegesis” of the biblical text in order to understand its “‘original meaning,’” their appropriation of Austin’s speech-act theory is not at the textual level of exegesis but at the level of the “Spirit’s illocutionary act of appropriation” of Scripture for the contemporary church:
Consequently, we must never conclude that exegesis alone can exhaust the Spirit’s speaking to us through the text. Although the Spirit’s illocutionary act is to appropriate the text in its internal meaning (i.e., to appro-priate what the author said), the Spirit appropriates the text with the goal of communicating to us in our situation, which, while perhaps parallel-ing in certain respects that of the ancient community, is nevertheless unique.80
So, it is in “this process of listening to the Spirit speaking through the appropriated text, [that] theology assists the community of faith both in discerning what the Spirit is saying and in fostering an appropriate obedient response to the Spirit’s voice.”81
Assuming the veracity of social constructivism, Grenz and Franke claim that the Spirit appropriates the Bible to construct a new world. What world is this? It is the eschatological world God purposes for his creation as he has revealed in the Bible. As through his speech-act “in the beginning” God created the world, so now God is creating a new world by the Spirit’s perlocu-tionary act in using Scripture.82
Their appropriation of speech-act theory entails misappropriation, for Grenz and Franke focus upon the Spirit’s appropriation of Scripture, which is hardly accessible as speech-acts, instead of focusing upon the Scriptures which are the Spirit’s accessible speech-acts. Though they regard these inaccessible speech-acts of the Spirit to be “closely bound to the text,” the Spirit’s world construction does not reside in the text. This is so because the biblical text is not the Spirit’s creative speech itself; Scripture is just the instrumenttality of the Spirit’s creative speech. So it is outside Scripture that “the Spirit performs the perlocutionary act of creating world.”83 Thus, however closely linked the Spirit’s present inaccessible speaking may be with Scripture, Grenz and Franke locate the Spirit’s present speaking outside the canon. They do so because the new world the Spirit creates in his perlocutionary act “is not simply the world surrounding the ancient text itself. It is the eschatological world God intends for creation as disclosed in the text.”84 In fact, they say that the Spirit’s perlocutionary act of world construction “does not lie in the text itself.”85 They dislodge the perlocutionary act from the locutionary and illocutionary acts. By the Spirit’s appropriation of the biblical text the “Spirit per-forms the perlocutionary act of creating a world through the illocutionary act of speaking, that is, of appropriating the biblical text as the instrumentality of divine speaking.”86
Their appropriation of speech-act theory, then, is to move beyond what Scripture says and means (textually accessible) to God’s acts and speech today (textually inaccessible). But if “God acts and speaks today,” how can we access these speech-acts? Is not our access to God’s speech-acts only through God’s Word, the text of Scripture? Scripture is where God’s speech is accessible to his people. If, as they claim to agree with Hans Frei, the “location of meaning” is in the biblical narrative, not residing in an event within ancient history that lies behind the text, why do Grenz and Franke not focus upon the text of Scripture as the location of the Spirit’s speech-acts instead of locating meaning in the Spirit’s appropriation of Scripture for the contemporary community of believers?87 If liberals and many evangelicals locate the mean- ing of the biblical text behind the text, do not Grenz and Franke shift the location of meaning too? The postconservative project, guided by Grenz and Franke, turns the Bible into something other than what it actually is just as much as some evangelicals have unwisely done when they attempt to locate God’s revelation—the real locus of God’s revelation and authority—some-where other than in the text of Scripture.
CONCLUSION
If the location of Scripture’s meaning is in the text, surely the Spirit’s speech-acts—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary—are all resident in Scripture. For this reason, Vanhoozer offers an approach to theological method with his “canonical-linguistic” proposal that is superior to Grenz and Franke’s adaptation of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic method.88 Vanhoozer summarizes the three features of his approach:
(1) The Scripture principle—the way in which one identifies the Bible as the Word of God—should be formulated in terms of divine communicative action [speech-acts]. (2) The canonical-linguistic approach conceives theology as the practice of indwelling the biblical texts, of looking along the texts so as to understand the judgments they embody, hence to learn canonical wisdom. (3) Doctrine is instruction or direction on how to participate fit-tingly in the ongoing drama of redemption.89
Thus, rather than locate the perlocutionary aspect of the Spirit’s speech-acts outside the text of Scripture within the contemporary church, does not the Spirit’s word that makes all things new reside in Scripture itself? The Bible itself, as God’s revelation, is God’s interaction with us. Scripture conveys God’s speech-acts to us.
Furthermore, Vanhoozer’s approach better accounts for the place of God’s people. For Vanhoozer, the doctrines of the “community of faith” do not set the “rules of discourse.” Authority does not reside in how Christian readers of Scripture use Scripture; doctrinal authority derives from how the biblical authors, authorized by God’s Spirit, use terms such as “God,” “grace,” and “salvation.”90 Vanhoozer’s approach preserves Scripture as the church’s foundation of faith, retains the correspondence theory of truth, and reclaims the priesthood of individual believers as capable of doing theology rightly. He portrays proper interplay between Scripture and Christians:
Right theological judgment is the product of human cognitive action that has been nurtured by divine canonical action concerning right covenantal relations. The canon is nothing less than a unique and indispensable frame-work—the spectacles of faith, as Calvin put it—that enables us faithfully to imagine (to see and to taste) the world as it is in Christ, the “wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24), or in other words, as it really is.91
Is this not the way forward rather than the way marked out by Grenz and Franke? If some evangelical theologians imply that the Bible comes to us in the wrong form and is more useful and effective if given the shape of their theological formulations, have not Grenz and Franke also reshaped the Bible through their adaptation of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach?
Is it conceivable that postconservatives such as Grenz and Franke have not engaged postliberalism radically enough, that is, at its biblical-theological roots? Authentic evangelical faith chastened by insights of postliberal biblical theology need not lead to the theological method postconservatives have mapped out following the postliberal lead of Lindbeck who, though building upon the biblical-theological and hermeneutical work of Brevard Childs, Hans Frei, et al., took steps that evangelicals need not and should not take. Positively, for example, Erich Auerbach correctly distinguishes biblical narrative from other literature, such as Greek epic: “Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us for-get our own reality for a few hours, it [Scripture] seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.”92
The theologian’s task is far more than transposing Scripture into atemporal truths. The theologian’s assignment is not to reshape, for example, the four Gospels to fit the form of the New Testament Letters because these seem more manageable and usable for preaching, teaching, and catechetical instruction. Rather, the task is to uphold Scripture as God’s Word that grounds the church’s beliefs today as it did in the days when the Spirit authorized the writing of Scripture through the apostles and prophets of old. Scripture is indispensable to the existence and life of the church. Scripture is God’s speech-acts by which he formed the church and by which he accomplishes his purposes of judgment and of salvation in the world.
Does not the warp and woof of the biblical text with its variety of literary genres, from narrative to letter, weave the fabric of Christian theology that should occupy the church’s theologians? Does not the Christian theologian’s task stand in continuity with that of Moses and of Isaiah and with that of Jesus and of Paul who did theology for God’s people? Surely, what the Bible yields is not raw data that need to be shaped into theology. It is already theology in its own right.93 It is already theology done by God’s authorized theologians for God’s people.
Does not Scripture’s use of Scripture teach us how we are to read and to use Scripture to shape and to ground the beliefs and behavior of God’s people? Isaiah’s historical-cultural context differs from that of Moses. Nevertheless, Isaiah employs Moses’ exodus motif effectively for his own generation, shaping and grounding the faith and expectation of God’s salvvation for generations beyond him. Likewise, Jesus and Paul stand in continuity with Isaiah and with Moses who precede them, so that they open the Scriptures as God’s revelation that functions to provide directly the the-ological beliefs God’s people are to embrace. Should not Christians always be striving to embrace the first-order language of God’s revelation as their own in such a manner that their own second-order formulations of things believed asymptotically move toward the fullness of Scripture’s first-order form and content? This is the hermeneutical spiral in which Christians, theologians or not, find themselves as they immerse themselves in God’s Word.
All that God discloses to us in Scripture comes to us with its own theological categories and structures for understanding God and his ways. Therefore, should not the first work of the church’s theologians be biblical theology, with the Bible’s message altering us, forging our theological categories, shaping our understanding of the world we inhabit, and changing the world itself? Surely the theologian’s task is to embrace the Bible’s covenantal categories and structures for understanding God and his ways, for interpret-ing and explaining the world in which we live, for transforming us to live in this present world, and for preparing us to inhabit the world for which we hope in Christ, rather than to draw upon contemporary culture as a source for theology.
1 David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (1975; reprint Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 238, emphasis his.
2 Several have narrated the demise of Christian theology. Though his criticism is not principally against preoccupation with theological method, for the effects of this preoccupation, see David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993).
3 For a not so cursory critique of postmodernism, see D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1996).
4 See, for example, the criticism of Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1996) and of Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1994) by Stanley J. Grenz in his Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), 77.
5 Stanley J. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology: A Fresh Agenda for the Twenty-first Century (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
6 Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 48. Grenz and Franke call Charles Hodge and Wayne Grudem “conservative modernists” (50).
7 Ibid., 48.
8 See Roger Olson, “Reforming Evangelical Theology,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), 201. It is worth noting that when young evangelicals coined the term “the new evangelicalism” in the late 1940s, they retained the historic designation—“evangelical”—but distanced themselves from the separatism and quarrelsomeness so closely associated with fundamentalism. They did not overturn fundamentalist doctrine. Harold Ockenga stated, “Doctrinally, the fundamentalists are right, and I wish to be always classified as one” (“From Fundamentalism, Through New Evangelicalism, to Evangelicalism,” in Evangelical Roots, ed. Kenneth Kantzer [New York: Thomas Nelson, 1978], 40). Olson, on the other hand, asks, “Are ‘evangelical’ and ‘theologically conservative’ synonymous? Are all evangelical theologians conservative? Most observers—both inside and outside the large and diverse subculture of North American evangelical Christianity—would probably answer yes. Evidence is growing, however, that some theologians who insist on wearing the label ‘evangelical’ (or cannot escape it even when they try) are shedding theological conservatism. A new mood, if not movement, in North American evangelical theology can be described as ‘postconservative.’ The best analogy is to ‘postliberal’ theology—the posture of theologians who see themselves moving beyond liberalism while preserving some of its qualities”(“Postconservative Evangelicals Greet the Postmodern Age,” Christian Century 112 [May 3, 1995]: 480).
9 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 50.
10 “First-order” refers to the language of Scripture as God’s revelation, and “second-order” refers to theological formulations of Scripture’s teaching. Whether Grenz and Franke are correct is disputable. Other essays in this volume critique the Grenz-Franke model.
11 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 51.
12 It seems that Grenz and Franke commit a word-meaning fallacy that Wittgenstein’s “language games” exposes, namely, that the same words (in this case “foundation”) may bear significantly different meanings depending upon the “language game” being played. Grenz and Franke, in this case, are not “playing by the rules” of the “language game.”
13 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 51. As if recognizing that their rejection of the metaphorical use of “foundation” is rather harsh, Grenz and Franke say that “while we might view the Christian interpretive framework as in a certain sense foundational for theology, we could more properly speak of theology as the articulation of the cognitive mosaic of the Christian faith” (51). This concession appears directed to “Reformed epistemologists” such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (see Renewing the Center, 200-201).
14 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 201; and Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 45-46.
15 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 206.
16 Speech-act theory consists of viewing our use of words as having three distinguishable but not separable linguistic acts: (1) utterance of words—merely speaking (locutionary act); (2) the function of words—promise, command, greet, etc. (illocutionary act); and (3) the effect words bring about—persuasion, conviction, etc. (perlocutionary act).
17 Cf., e.g., David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 4.
18 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 65ff.
19 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, 6 vols. (1976–1983; reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1999).
20 See Rodney J. Decker, “May Evangelicals Dispense with Propositional Revelation?—Challenges to a Traditional Evangelical Doctrine,” unpublished paper read at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Colorado Springs, November 2001. (Decker’s article is available online at http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/documents/prop_rev.pdf. ) Critical assessment of Henry’s defense of “propositional revelation” is warranted, for his claims need some nuancing. However, more than nuancing is needed concerning Henry’s claim that God’s revelation is univocal, associating him rather closely with Enlightenment and modernist liberal theology. Michael Horton comments, “After judging that analogy has lost favor in Roman Catholic theology, Carl Henry remarks, ‘The main logical difficulty with the doctrine of analogy lies in its failure to recognize that only univocal assertions protect us from equivocation; the very possibility of analogy founders unless something is truly known about both analogates. analogates.’ In the next sentence, Henry cites his mentor Gordon Clark in support of this criticism of analogy. Many conservatives like Henry apparently share with liberal theology the assumption that language must be either univocal or equivocal, setting the bar for ‘truth’ so high that at some point a crisis must inevitably arrive in interpretation. ‘The key question is: are human concepts and words capable of conveying the literal truth about God?’ If so, these words and concepts must directly mirror the divine being, or they represent untruth” (Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama [Louisville: Westminster John Knox 2002], 189). See also my chastening appeal to evangelical theologians concerning analogy in “Veiled Glory: God’s Self-Revelation in Human Likeness—A Biblical Theology of God’s Anthropomorphic Self-Disclosure,” in Beyond the Bounds: Open Theism and the Undermining of Biblical Christianity, ed. John Piper, Justin Taylor, and Paul Kjoss Helseth (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 156-158, 192-193, 196-199.
21 Decker makes this clear:First, Henry does not view the Bible as a digest of assorted logical syllogisms. He explicitly claims that “the truth of revelation is not a series of unrelated and disconnected propositions” (GRA [God, Revelation, and Authority ], 1:233). It should also be noted that propositions are not the same as concepts. A concept (e.g., grace or sin) cannot be true or false. Only as one asserts a proposition regarding a concept can it be true or false. Third, propositional revelation is not invalidated by figures of speech, rhetorical questions, or imperatives. “Regardless of the parables, allegories, emotive phrases and rhetorical questions used by these writers, their literary devices have a logical point which can be propositionally formulated and is objectively true or false”(GRA, 3:453). Questions are not propositions in the technical sense, but rhetorical questions imply a judgment that can be stated in propositional form. Likewise, imperatives, though technically not propositions by their grammatical form, do not “cancel the fact that revelation is primarily correlated with a communication of propositional truth. Imperatives are not as such true or false propositions; but they can be translated into propositions (e.g., ‘to kill is wrong’) from which cognitive inferences can be drawn” (GRA, 3:417) (Decker, “May Evangelicals Dispense with Propositional Revelation?” 3).Vanhoozer, who engages Henry’s views more carefully and with more nuance than Grenz and other critics, seems to press Henry’s comments on the Sixth Commandment too far. Vanhoozer says, “Henry thinks that the primary concern of revelation is ‘the communication of truth.’ Even divine commands, such as ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ can be ‘translated into propositions’ (e.g., ‘murder is wrong’) (477 [sic;417]). This example of Henry’s is instructive; in my view, the primary purpose of a command is not to state a universal truth (though I would agree that such a statement is implicit) but to direct human behavior. The question, then, is whether evangelical theology can correspond to the primary concerns of Scripture, whether this be the communication of truth or the regulation of action” (Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Voice and the Actor: A Dramatic Proposal About the Ministry and Minstrelsy of Theology,” in Evangelical Futures, 70 n. 25; emphasis added). It appears that Vanhoozer shifts categories from “the primary concern of revelation” (which by Henry’s illustrative use of the Sixth Commandment includes a full range of non-indicative statements) to “the primary purpose of a command.” Henry’s statements already account for Vanhoozer’s qualification.
22 For example, Grenz claims, “Despite good intentions, evangelical contextualizers all too easily can remain trapped in a view of propositional revelation that simply equates the divine self-disclosure with the Bible. . . . These theologians are likewise at risk of merely continuing the older enterprise of biblical summarization, with only a slight nod to the necessity of rephrasing theological propositions in contemporary language.” Grenz singles out Millard Erickson as a theologian who “occasionally displays this conservative tendency” (Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 71-72).
23 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 71. He cites Clark Pinnock, Tracking the Maze: Finding Our Way Through Modern Theology from an Evangelical Perspective (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 186.
24 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 71.
25 D. A. Carson, “Domesticating the Gospel: A Review of Grenz’s Renewing the Center,” chapter 2 in this volume, 46.
26 Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 72.
27 Ibid., 73.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 75-76.
31 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 45.
32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953); idem, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)
.33 Wittgenstein built upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1959).
34 Cf. the influences of James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: University Press, 1961);and Anthony C. Thiselton, “Semantics and New Testament Interpretation,” in New Testament Interpretation: Essays on Principles and Methods, ed. I. Howard Marshall (Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans; Exeter, England: Paternoster, 1977), 78-79.
35 David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology, Foundations of Evangelical Theology, ed. John S. Feinberg (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003), 377.
36 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 194-195. Grenz offers only one citation of Wittgenstein’s later work, and in doing so, his reference is confusing because his note refers to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §65, page 32 (it is actually page 31).
37 Ibid. The qualifier in this statement, “at least not directly or primarily,” proves that Grenz and Franke extract more from Wittgenstein’s “language games” than is acceptable.
38 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia:Westminster, 1984), 16.
39 Ibid., 21.
40 Ibid., 19.
41 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 18.
42 Thanks to Michael Horton (“Yale Postliberalism: Back to the Bible?” in A Confessing Theology for Postmodern Times, ed. Michael S. Horton [Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2000], 196) for pointing out this example from William Placher, “Postliberal Theology,” The Modern Theologians, vol. 2, ed. David F. Ford (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 120. See Horton’s essay for a critique of Lindbeck’s proposal.
43 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “The Spirit of Understanding: Special Revelation and General Hermeneutics,” in First Theology: God, Scripture, and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 222.
44 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 16.
45 See David Clark’s comments at note 35 above.
46 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 80.
47 Ibid., 64.
48 Ibid., 69.
49 Vanhoozer comments, “Let us assume that this account of meaning is broadly correct. Does it follow that what theologians should describe is the use of Scripture today rather than the use to which words and sentences were put by those responsible for the final form of the biblical text? To replace sola Scriptura with ‘Scripture in tradition’—which is to say, with community conventions—is to use the wrong strategy at the worst time” (“The Spirit of Understanding,” 222).
50 The clarity of Lindbeck’s argument, or the lack thereof, has recently come to greater light in an exchange with Avery Cardinal Dulles. See Dulles, “Postmodernist Ecumenism: A Review of The Church in a Postliberal Age. By George A Lindbeck. Edited by James J. Buckley. Grand Rapids, Mich.:Eerdmans, 2003,” First Things 136 (October 2003): 57-61. See “George Lindbeck Replies to Avery Cardinal Dulles,” First Things 139 (January 2004): 13-15. Lindbeck’s correction of Dulles’s misunderstanding is instructive for both conservative and postconservative evangelical interpreters of Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine. Lindbeck acknowledges that because of certain “deficiencies, it has been easy to suppose that the second, intrasystematic kind of ‘truth’ is an alternative to rather than a condition for propositional or ontological truth. When this happens, readers falsely conclude—with delight in the case of postmodern relativists, but, more to my liking, with sadness in the case of Cardinal Dulles—that ‘for Lindbeck, the truth of Christianity . . . is predominantly intrasystemic.’A corrected formulation, in contrast, simply notes that special attention to the intrasystematic (and categorical) conditions for affirming ontological truth is inseparable from a cultural-linguistic perspective on a religion such as Christianity. It most emphatically does not imply that the realities which faith affirms and trusts are in the slightest degree intrasystematic. They are not dependent on the performative faith of believers (as if, for example, Christ rose from the dead only in the faith of the Church), but are objectively independent.”
51 Horton interprets Lindbeck as saying, “So Christianity is the one true ‘gigantic proposition,’ and other religions are thoroughly incommensurable with it, just as German is incommensurable with Japanese. Thus, a non-Christian religion is not false but meaningless” (“Yale Postliberalism: Back to the Bible?” 200).
52 See ibid., 205; cf. Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); cf. idem, Covenant and Eschatology, 311 n. 101.
53 Regrettably, suiting the sharp cleavage he perceives between two camps within evangelicalism, Roger Olson claims that for “traditionalists,” “traditional theological formulations are a first-order language of revelation. God revealed doctrines,” but “reformists” (postconservatives) “tend to emphasize the human instrumentality in articulating doctrine, seeing it as a second-order language—in other words, as a human interpretation of divine revelation” (Roger Olson, “The Future of Evangelical Theology,” Christianity Today 42 [February 9, 1998]: 42). Later in the same essay, Olson equivocates on his use of terms; he confuses first-order with “core doctrines” and “second-order” “with secondary doctrines” (47). David Clark distinguishes between summations of Scripture as “doctrine” (first-order) and interpretations of Scripture for contemporary culture as “theology” (second-order) (To Know and Love God, 88-89).
54 Lindbeck, “George Lindbeck Replies to Avery Cardinal Dulles,” 13.
55 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 203.
56 Ibid.
57 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 51.
58 Ibid., 52.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Carson, “Domesticating the Gospel.”
63 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 54.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Alister E. McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine: A Study in the Foundations of Doctrinal Criticism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), chapter 2.
67 Vanhoozer, “Voice and the Actor,” 100.
68 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 69-80.
69 Carson responds:A decade and a half ago, a small group of scholars, exemplified by Jack Rogers and Donald McKim, tried to convince the world that the Princetonians had transformed the historic doctrine of Scripture into an indefensible precisionism, an indefensible inerrancy. Their own historical errors were nicely put to rest by John Woodbridge and others, whose close knowledge of the primary sources dealt this revisionist historiography a death blow. The result is that no one of stature makes the same mistake today. But now Grenz is attempting his own wrinkle: the Princetonians may not have changed the doctrine but they elevated it from one article of faith to the foundation for faith.This sweeping claim probably cannot be sustained. The Princetonians had more to say about Scripture than some of their forebears, precisely because that was one of the most common points of attack from the rising liberalism of the (especially European) university world. But I suspect that even-handed reading of the evidence would not find Hodge or Warfield adopting a stance on Scripture greatly different from that of Augustine or Calvin, so far as its role in the structure of Christian theology is concerned (“Domesticating the Gospel,” 69).
70 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 206.
71 Ibid. To view the Bible as “a living text” is hardly supported by Hebrews 4:12. The expression—a living text—reflects the postmodern treatment of texts, the way loose constructionists view the Constitution of the United States. Furthermore, to suggest that the modern period witnessed the rise of exegetical and theological prowess insults all those who went before.
72 Ibid., 207. He cites Westminster Confession 1.10—“The supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the scripture.” Does not the fact that chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession is “Of the Holy Scriptures” seem ironically contrary to Grenz’s presumption that the Princeton theologians did not stand in the tradition on Scripture flowing from the Westminster Divines?
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid; emphasis his.
75 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 73. For a better articulation of how the Bible, a closed canon, is authoritative to the contemporary church, see N. T. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” Vox Evangelica 21 (1991): 7-32.
76 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), esp. Lectures 8-10, 94-131.
77 For excellent discussions of how speech-act theory enriches our understanding of biblical hermeneutics, see Kevin Vanhoozer, “The Semantics of Biblical Literature: Truth and Scripture’s Diverse Literary Forms,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1986), 53-104; and Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998), 201-280.
78 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 74.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., 74-75.
81 Ibid., 75.
82 Ibid., 77.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., 78.
87 Ibid., 73; cf. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 280-281.
88 Vanhoozer, “Voice and the Actor,” 61-106. Against the Grenz-Franke assumption that modernist epistemological foundationalism is to blame for any view of Scripture as foundational to Christian theology, Vanhoozer contends that we can “take the canon as our theological foundation without succumbing to epistemological foundationalism” (86).
89 Ibid., 101. Vanhoozer identifies his canonical-linguistic approach as “postpropositionalist because it rejects the picture theory of meaning. Instead, it insists with speech-act theory that language is a form of action and that propositions may be used to do more than picture the world” (75). No one should confuse Vanhoozer’s view with the postconservative view of Grenz and Franke when he states that his view “is better described as postconservative rather than postliberal” (77). He carefully defines his terms. “The present approach is postconservative theology because it transcends the debilitating dichotomies between referring and expressing, between propositional and personal revelation, between God saying and God doing, precisely by focusing on the Bible as a set of divine communicative acts. God in Scripture is doing many things with words, not simply conveying information, nor even revealing himself. The approach is postconservative in that it maintains there is something in the text that is both indispensable and authoritative, namely, the divinely intended meaning” (76). Even though Vanhoozer may be hyperbolizing these alleged “debilitating dichotomies” to make his point, it is evident that he is not a postconservative in the same vein as Grenz.
90 Ibid., 77.
91 Ibid., 85.
92 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 15.
93 Cf. Wright, “How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?” 7-32.