To describe the Bible as “Holy Scripture” is to identify it as set apart by a holy God for the purpose of generating and governing a “holy nation,” a description applied first to Israel (Exod. 19:6) and later to the church (1 Pet. 2:9). The word of God and the people of God exist in a symbiotic relationship, though there is some dispute over which has priority: Does the word of God proceed from the people of God or vice versa? Either way, a doctrine of Scripture must have recourse to more than history or sociology, for its main task is to say how both the word of God (the Bible) and the people of God (the Church) are of God. The present essay reflects theologically on the nature, attributes, purpose, and interpretation of the Christian Bible, examining each of these aspects in relation to God and God’s acts. Viewed theologically, Scripture is a human constituent in the communicative activity of the triune God: the voice, word, and breath that speaks forth the light, life, and love of God himself.

This chapter discusses “New Testament Theology,” “Theological Interpretation,” and the use of the New Testament by theologians, both ancient and modern.

Tolle, lege! ('Take up and read!'). These overheard sing-song words prompted Augustine to take up and read Romans 13.13, a lectionary event that led to his conversion to Christianity. The differences and similarities between Augustine and C.S. Lewis, both avid readers who came to faith in Jesus Christ as adults, are many and striking. As regards similarities, both were well acquainted with the pagan philosophical options of their day; both were skilled in the art of ancient rhetoric, though neither knew Hebrew; both initially regarded the style of biblical texts to be somewhat lowbrow and unseemly. As regards differences, one contrast will have to suffice: whereas Augustine felt compelled to repudiate as false the Manichaean gnostic myths in which he used to believe, Lewis's conversion led him to recognize the biblical story of Jesus as 'myth become fact'. This phrase has puzzled both critics and admirers as to its implications for his view of scripture. It also places Evangelicals, perhaps the group most responsible for Lewis's popularity, in something of a quandary when it comes to scripture, for Evangelicals warm to 'fact' but sound the alarm over 'myth'. Lewis was not terribly troubled over his Evangelical credentials or lack thereof. He was neither a biblical scholar nor professional theologian but a 'mere Christian' and scholar of medieval and Renaissance English literature. He was a person of 'books' before he became a person of 'the book'.

Christian theologians have a ready answer to what for the philosopher is a speculative limit-question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Because God has spoken. God's speaking – a triune work of voice, word, and breath – forms, informs, and transforms the structures, substances, and subjects that make up the created order. God's speech acts cut and connect reality at the metaphysical joints and joists. Reality is divine rhetoric, the universe a poetic work of triune artistry: “God is the author of everything other than Himself.” Any theology that is not a response to revelation is, strictly speaking, irresponsible, in the sense that it is not a response to God's own self-presentation.

Why is there something rather than nothing to do? For the same reason: because God has spoken and continues to speak. God's speaking renders human persons answerable. The triune Author of creation, church, and canon thus bears no resemblance to the absentee Author that James Joyce depicts as wholly removed from his work: “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

The development of doctrine proceeds in fits and starts. One key period, according to Martin Hengel, was the twenty years after the death of Jesus: “More happened (in christology) in this period of less than two decades than in the whole of the next seven centuries.” Others refer to this fecund theological period as the “Big Bang” of Christian origins. If there is a Big Bang in theology proper, however, it may pertain less to the origins of the doctrine than to the bombshell dropped in the early twentieth century by Karl Barth on the playground of the modern theologians. For better or for worse, the shaking of the foundations of classical theism has provoked a massive rethinking and has led many to propose new, revolutionary paradigms for the doctrine of God.

This chapter explores some of the major theological approaches for dealing with the canonical texts and thematic issues examined in the previous chapter. Where the previous chapter focused on biblical representations, the spotlight here is on theological conceptualization. More specifically, the focus is on theological isms: comprehensive systems of ideas – conceptual schemes – that account for the way in which God both relates to and differs from everything else.

Part II set out the contours of a theodramatic metaphysics, providing categories for describing what God the Father has said and done to renew all things in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Being-in-communicative-activity was the leading concept, and we even went so far as to describe the reality of angels in these terms. Chapter 6 introduced the analogy of authorship in order to set forth the nature of God's distinct communicative agency. The present chapter continues our exploration of authorship as a rubric with which to both distinguish between and relate the respective communicative agencies of God and human beings. In particular, we examine what happens when free human heroes “talk back” to their divine author in ways that either advance the communicative exchange or stop it defiantly in its tracks.

His dark materials: does God author evil?

Surely we have proved too much? If God is the author of the “person-idea” that heroes freely (though necessarily) work out, does it not follow that God is ultimately responsible for what the evil- doing villains do as well?

The apostle Peter distinguishes the gospel from “cleverly devised myths” by rooting the former in eyewitness testimony (2 Pet. 1:16). He bases his case for the majesty of Jesus on the “voice borne from heaven” that accompanied Jesus' transfiguration: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (2 Pet. 1:17). Ear-witness testimony thus figures prominently too: “we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure” (2 Pet. 1:18–19).

In combining the prophecies of Isaiah 42:1 and Psalm 2:7, the voice from heaven identifies Jesus by referring to his ordination as Suffering Servant and coronation as Son of God. Peter explains this remarkable piece of theologizing that links suffering to sovereignty by noting that “no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Pet. 1:21). The passage thus alludes, in a pericope-sized nutshell, to the work of Father, Son, and Spirit in the history of redemption from Israel to Jesus Christ. Yet what stands out is the voice from heaven.

Is there a speaking subject up there? If those to whom electrical switches and elective surgery are a matter of course find it hard to believe in miracles, how much more difficult is it for those who have explored space and mapped the human genome to believe in a voice from heaven?

If demythologizing had a patron saint, it might well be Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It was Hegel who perfected the translation of biblical representations into philosophical conceptualizations – Vorstellung into Begriff, mythos into logos – without remainder. In so doing, however, Hegel fails adequately to attend to the way in which biblical forms of discourse are themselves forms of reasoning, thus diluting the wine of theodrama into the water of abstract theoretical truth. By contrast, this chapter sets the stage for remythologizing by sampling a variety of biblical passages that (1) occur at key points in the theodrama that focus on God in communicative action and (2) represent a variety of types of divine–human dialogical interaction. These are the passages with which theologians must come to grips when formulating a doctrine of God in order to do justice to the biblical mythos, itself a means of God's self-presentation. The second part of the chapter culls out several key issues that emerge from a consideration of these passages and which have proved decisive in distinguishing one theism from another.

A gallery of canonical exhibits

The purpose of this brief survey is to concentrate our attention on the biblical material upon which theology must reflect in order to formulate a theodramatic metaphysic: a categorial analysis of God's mighty (and occasionally meek) communicative acts.

Divine compassion is the goodness God directs to suffering others. Anselm and Barth express this truth in two apparently contradictory ways, the one denying any emotional content (i.e., feeling) to the divine compassion, the other affirming it, at least in qualified fashion. Is God unmoved (Anselm), moved (relational theists and panentheists), or self-moved (Barth) by human suffering?

The compassion of God is a recurring theme at several nodal points in the scriptural account (e.g., Ex. 34:6–7). As the contrasting quotes from Anselm and Barth attest, compassion resembles both action and passion. It therefore serves as an excellent test case with which to sum up our case for remythologizing theology. Accordingly, this chapter contrasts a remythologized conceptual elaboration of divine compassion as a form of communicative action with the kenotic-relational ontotheological version that currently prevails in the theological marketplace.

According to Luke 1:78, Jesus is the splanghna theou: the “compassion of God.”

To say “God and world” is to express both a distinction and a relation. God is transcendent (God is holy, set apart from the world) and immanent (God is love, invested in the world). When Christians further describe the world as “creation” they place it in the context of the gospel story of its renewal in Christ through the Spirit; in so doing they posit an absolute distinction (Creator vs. created) within an even greater relation (the covenant of grace). A Christian doctrine of the triune God must provide an intelligible account of this distinction and relation.

Part II set forth just such an understanding, at least in preliminary fashion: God's being is that triune communicative agency by which Father, Son, and Spirit actively present themselves to and do things for one another and the world. This communicative variation on theism has many of the strengths of the voluntary kenotic–perichoretic relational theistic and panentheistic alternatives examined in Part I, but not their defects. In particular, communicative theism describes what it means to partake of the divine nature in a way that does justice to the centrality of Christ as the climax of an extended covenantal history. Part III continues the constructive account by taking up the question of divine action and interaction with the world.

It is time to retrace our steps. Looking back on chapter 2, we see that an “open panentheism” such as Clayton's has the capacity to weave the recovery of the Trinity and the relational turn into a new metaphysical system – ontotheology in a new key, as it were. Even many who stop short of embracing panentheism are now willing, even eager, to assert God's self-limitation for the sake of positing genuine relationships between God and finite but free human beings. Indeed, kenotic-relational ontotheology could lay strong claim to representing a “new orthodoxy,” such is its attractiveness to diverse streams of contemporary theology and potential for integration. The concept of relationality is notoriously ambiguous, however, covering a multitude of conceptual sins. Further, it is not altogether clear whether, or to what extent, a kenotic-relational panentheism is appropriately Trinitarian (i.e., able to preserve both the unity of the divine nature and the distinctness of the divine persons). As we have seen, the tendency in contemporary Trinitarian theologies is to inflate the Spirit and marginalize the Father; but this is as sub-orthodox as the early modern tendency to inflate the Father and marginalize the Spirit.

At the outset of the previous chapter I mentioned three issues that serve as touchstones by which to discern the difference between classical theism and alternative models of the God/world relation. What has become of God's personhood, love, and suffering in the new orthodoxy?

Contemporary critics of metaphysics (their name is Legion) have accused it of being, among other things, a white man's myth. Many in today's multicultural world doubt whether any single conceptual scheme, no matter how coherent, could be universally true (or win universal consent). The notion that a system of humanly derived categories could cut reality at its joints is commonly dismissed as a philosophical Will-o'-the-wisp. Feuerbach's shadow reaches into postmodernity: anthropology is now the secret not only of theology but of metaphysics. Philosophical conceptions of the divine may say more about the reach of human concepts (our theoretical “gaze”) than they do about the reality of God's self-giving in Jesus Christ.

One alternative to the myth of metaphysics is the metaphysics of mythos, the attempt conceptually to elaborate the truth of the storied history of the God of Israel and Jesus Christ. To remythologize theology (and metaphysics in general) is to put our discourse of what is under the discipline of the biblical accounts of God's speaking and acting.

The present proposal has nothing to do with invoking God as the solution to a philosophical problem (e.g., what moves the universe?).