David Kelsey’s The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology is an important work in the exploration of the intersection between the Bible and theology. Unfortunately, this book was out of print when I was in seminary. But a friend of mine and I convinced Dr. Kelsey to do an independent study course on the topic. In it, we explore the history of how different theologians throughout church history have used the Bible in their theology.
Several years ago, I noticed that Kelsey had a new book out on the same topic. It was entitled Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology. When I bought it, I found out it was actually a reprint of his earlier work but under a different title.1 I am currently reading this book as a refresher in what I learned in the reading course. I thought I would post a series of blogs on the topic.
Kelsey’s method is fairly straightforward. He explores seven different ways of using Scripture in theology, using a modern theologian to illustrate each approach. He is quick to point out this this is not intended as a typology, but merely as a way to talk about common ways of using Scripture. He also notes that some theologians use more than one of the approaches in their theology.
Kelsey asks four questions of each of the approaches:2
- What aspect of Scripture is taken to be authoritative?
- What is it about this aspect of Scripture that makes it authoritative?
- What sort of logical force seems to be ascribed to the Scripture to which appeal is made?
- How is the Scripture that is cited brought to bear on theological proposals so as to authorize them?
In the next few posts, I will go over what he has to say about these seven different approaches.
Next post in the series: Doctrine and Concept
On April 27th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I don’t know if it would be any more honest for people who hadn’t heard of it until the reprint to think that its still “recent” theology, as opposed to “modern” theolgoy, which does not necessitate the theology being recent. Well, its a tough call.