I am returning now to a series I began at the end of April on David Kelsey’s book Proving Doctrine.  This series got interrupted by Easter, little league games, and my trip to Tennessee, but I wanted to come back to it because Kelsey provides a helpful framework for considering questions of how we use the Bible in theology.  For an overview of Kelsey’s approach, see the initial post in this series.

In Kelsey’s third chapter, he looks at a second pair of theologians: G. Ernest Wright and Karl Barth, who approaches are quite different than those of Warfield and Bartsch.  For both Wright and Barth, it is the narrative of the Scripture that is central.

For Wright, history is the place that God is known.  God’s attributes are revealed by God’s actions, so what makes the Bible authoritative is the fact that it reveals God’s actions to us.  Not surprisingly, therefore, Wright is a big proponent of the idea of salvation-history.  The Bible provides us with a meta-narrative of God’s interaction with the people of Israel and later with the church.  The bolster his argument, Wright points to the fact that both the OT and NT contain numerous recitals of God’s acts in history.  The people of God recited the salvation-history as a way to understanding God.  Because the Bible is the one place that this salvation-history is narrated, it is the authoritative text for Christianity.

To answer the four questions:

  • It is the narrative of Scripture that is authoritative.
  • What makes it authoritative is the fact that it reveals God’s actions, which allows us to know God.
  • The logical force is the force of confessional recitals of history that provide an overarching interpretation of the history of the world.
  • The Bible is brought to bear on theology in a very direct way, although it is a two step process: the Bible reveals God’s actions which in turn reveal God.

One problem with this approach is that it means that revelation is not located directly in the text.  The Bible is only indirectly the locus of God’s revelation.  Instead, it is the history to which the text points that is the place where God is revealed.  This suggests that if the salvation-history could be known through other methods, the Bible would be irrelevant.

This same problem is not found in the work of Karl Barth.  Although Barth also sees God as revealed through actions, it is precisely those actions as narrated by the text that reveal God.  Barth points to the Gospels, which he says are interpreted history.  Obviously, Jesus did other actions, but it is precisely those narrated by the text that reveal who Christ is.  He notes that each of the Gospels has a similar narrative structure.  It is the story told this way (and not in other ways) that the story reveals who God is.

To turn to the four questions:

  • What is authoritative is the narrative as narrative.
  • What makes it authoritative is the fact that God chooses the reveal God’s self through the text.
  • The logical force is the force of an encounter with God if and when God choses to reveal God’s self to the reader through the text.
  • Scripture bears on theology in an indirect way as the theologian appeals to the patterns in Scripture.

Kelsey points out that this way of describing the authority of the text is difficult to asses.  The text becomes authoritative only when it is accepted by the church as authoritative.  If one accepts these texts, then the reality the narrate becomes important.  The downside to this is that there is nothing in the text that is automatically authoritative, which means the reason for accepting the text as authoritative must lie outside the text (i.e., one accepts the text because one accepts Christianity, not vice versa).  The upside to Barth’s construction is that is describes fairly well the way that the text traditionally has worked in the church.  It is a functional view of the text, as opposed to the appoach of Warfield, for whom it is the character of the text that makes it authoritative.

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