248 - Using and Being Used: Scripture and Systematic Theology

Using and Being Used: Scripture and Systematic Theology
By Colin Gunton

"Two logically related developments have called into question both the authority of the Bible and the propriety of theology's calling itself a truth-telling discipline. While the Bible is regarded by many as simply the self-expression of a primitive people, theology likewise came to be regarded as the self-expression of those who happen to be religious. Side by side, there have come into question the status Of the text and the epistemological respectability of theology."

"HAVE you been read by any good books lately?" That question, attributed to W. H. Auden, provides a fitting reminder that books are not merely passive artifacts, but do something to and perhaps for their readers. I am reminded also of the occasion when a theater director, asked to help some local workshop to make Shakespeare relevant to them, replied that it would be better for them to make themselves relevant to Shakespeare. The incident is worth recalling for it makes us aware that the problem of our use of the Bible in the world after the Enlightenment is not unique to theology, particularly in relation to the question of the kind of freedom with which, for example, a director may treat the text of a play. The sayings to which I have alluded are both attempted correctives to the pervasive modern tendency to assume an absolute freedom over against a text or, for that matter-to allude to the Prince of Wales' views of architecture-the materials with which we build and the landscape into which we fit our buildings. It is time, some feel, to stress a little more the demands made upon us of text, matter, and environment.

The title for this essay might then be altered to, "How are systematic theologians to be used by the Bible?" But that opens up the real problem. The quotation from Auden is, I believe, exactly to the point and provides an essential corrective to our modern tendency to look upon our world and our texts from a great height, objectifizing them and making

Colin Gunton is Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College, University of London. He is the author of Becoming and Being: The Doctrine of God in Charles Hartshorne and Karl Barth (I 978), Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Towards a Trinitarian Theology (1985), The Actuality of Atonement (1989), and co-editor with Daniel W. Hardy of On Being the Church (1990). Dr. Gunton has appeared before in THEOLOGY TODAY in connection with the Karl Barth Symposium, October 1986.

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them merely subject to our control. But there is another kind of objectifying, that against which modernity is rightly in rebellion, and that is the objectifying of authority.

I

To be used by another, let alone by a book, is generally and rightly conceived to be a denial of our humanity. And, although I am for the moment taking the problem as a general matter and not simply of the Bible-for it is only one, albeit the one, among the many books that read us-there swim into view all those conventional images of the biblical writers as merely the mechanical tools of the Holy Spirit. The problems are twofold and correlative. On the one hand, we are still obsessed with the fear of the Bible as an imposed authority, with paranoia about witch hunts and the imposing of dogmatic restraints upon the free enquiry of scholars. On the other hand, we are still unable to free ourselves from a more recent slavery to what can be described as a technocratic view of texts and of the language in which they are couched as freely disposable artifacts, the view so well charted by Hans Frei¹ or reflected in the continual sniping at modern biblical scholars in the writings especially of those students of literature who approach it in a different way.²

The modern problem as far as the Bible is concerned was presented as well as anyone by Coleridge, himself in flight from the snares of a doctrine of verbal inspiration that would compel him to lie for God.

I take up this work with the purpose to read it for the first time as I should read any other work, as far at least as I can or dare … And need I say … that I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness? In short whatever finds me, bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit.³

It is Coleridge's dialectical approach that is here of interest, and in particular that of finding what finds him (an exact parallel of the dialectic we have already met of reading/being read by; using/being used by.) As I have pondered this question, I have found it impossible to avoid seeing much of the matter in terms of similar dialectically related pairings. One central pair is that of authority and freedom, and it is possible to see modern developments as a continuing conversation between the two. Similarly, the reader of Barth will be aware of a kind of dialectic of the divine and human, which is of a type with his tendency to see all theological topics in the light of christology. His approach has

¹ Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative.- A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
² Two important recent books by literary critics, both of them important for the argument of this essay, are Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word,- Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Gabriel Josipovici, The Book of God.- A Response to the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
³ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (first published in 1840 and frequently reprinted).

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much to be said for it, in making it possible for him to accept the modern dogma-some would say discovery-of the humanity of the Bible and juxtapose to it a theology of the Bible's divine authority as witnessing, like John the Baptist's long bony finger in the painting by Grunewald, to the divine Christ.

In the end, I am not sure that I am content with the concept of dialectic as an appropriate way of identifying the central question, not because there can be a non-dialectical finality, but because, I think, we need something more personal, and, indeed, pneurnatological. Is it not true that the greatest books initiate us into a kind of conversation, for example, the conversation between Plato and Aristotle, or between Socrates and Jesus? Or is it better to focus upon the fact that we do not simply listen to others in conversation but join in ourselves in many different ways and at many different levels? No doubt, the conversation is bound to be one-sided when certain authorities-books that read us-are in consideration. Is it not a feature of that much over-used concept, "the classic," that certain books have established themselves in positions of peculiar preeminence? However that may be, the concept of conversation introduces into the debate a number of useful elements, in particular the dynamic and the personal. Perhaps that is what is meant by dialectic. I suppose that what is being sought is not so much the opposition of pairs of concepts, but the communication between people, or, to include the theological dimension, persons. In that respect, it is perhaps Barth's heavy reliance on the category of witness, useful though it is, that indicates the weakness of his approach, suggesting as it does a relation more of objective confrontation than of communication.

But to overdo the notions of conversation and communication is to ignore the fact that we are also in the realm of confrontation, as David realized before Nathan. The notion of conversation can share the weakness of dialectic, in assuming an equality between partners. As the Bible in its opening words reminds us, we are not the first speakers. But this is not simply a theological point about the priority of the divine Word. It applies to texts in general. They are there before we are. As Stephen Prickett points out, for poets like Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge the "poetic" is what helps to constitute reality.⁴ In relation to the Bible, which makes at least implicit claims to be constitutive of human reality, we are, at least to begin with, in a position of passivity. It is certainly useful to characterize the function of the Bible as the book that is one of the means by which a community of faith and worship, and so reality, is constituted "a classic." But it still fails to identify the theological component, the priority of God in the conversation. Even Abraham before Sodom, even Paul dressed in the finery of parrhesia, are compelled to admit that the conversation is somewhat one-sided, and that is meant to be a purely descriptive claim, evident to anyone, believer or unbeliever, who reads the text as it stands before us, or rather as we stand before it.

⁴ Prickett, op. cit., p. 204.

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Thus far, nothing has been said about the use of the Bible in systematic theology, for the reason that it is good to realize that in most respects the systematic theologian stands in the same relation to the Bible as everyone else. We come now to the distinctive kind of conversation that the theologian has with the Bible.

II

Systematic theology is an activity, or series of activities, encompassing thought, speech, and writing. That activity has to do with the articulation and defense of the Christian gospel as the truth-not the truth in a narrow sense, abstracted from action, but the truth that involves also goodness and beauty, the world in all its dimensions. In that broad sense, there are many theologies rightly referred to as systematic, those of Irenaeus as well as Origen, Barth as well as Tillich. To be a systematic theologian, one is not required to produce a system, in the modern sense of a corpus of thought in which all the contents stand in close logical relationship to all others (the ideal of Schleiermacher). From one point of view, Coleridge is the most systematic of theologians, although from another he is highly unsystematic. But if, to use Brunner's magnificent characterization of Irenaeus, to be a systematic theologian is "to perceive connections between truths, and to know which belongs to which," he belongs among a very select few indeed. On this account, then, systematic theology is any activity in which some attempt is made to articulate the Christian gospel or aspects of it with due respect to such dimensions as coherence, universality, and truth.

There are two sides to Brunner's eulogy of Irenaeus that enable us to identify something of the character of Christian systematic theology The first is comprehensiveness, or at least an aim at it. "No other thinker was able to weld ideas together which others allowed to slip as he was able to do." While not wishing to say everything every time, systematic theologians will have in mind the implications of what they are saying on one occasion for what they might want to say on others. But, secondly, the unity of Irenaeus' thought corresponds to the kind of unity that I would want to argue the Bible has. It was, we might say, a free and open unity: "he did not take any trouble to articulate into a theological system the sets of ideas which were connected in their own groups; this cannot have been in the least accidental."⁵ There is, thus, a general conceptual coherence, just as the Bible has a kind of theological coherence, but no attempt is made to force content into a tight logical pattern.

It is interesting here that Josipovici, seeking a more satisfactory analogy for the unity of the Bible than James Barr's image of a cave full of scrolls, lights on that of a Gothic cathedral "built over a long period … by different master masons, with different bands of workmen…. Perhaps, instead of thinking about the Bible as a book to be deciphered, or a story to be told, we should think of it as a person. We do not decipher

⁵ Emil Brunner, The Mediator.-A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1947), p. 262.

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people, we encounter them. And the closer we are to a person the more certain we will be that we cannot tell his story. Yet we also know that we will never be likely to confuse that person with another." ⁶

Since the time of the Enlightenment, however, and particularly as a result of the work of Schleiermacher, systematic theological activity has taken on something of a different character. It is, in particular, more self-conscious, and like most forms of self-consciousness, this one brings with it an excess of self-preoccupation. Lost innocence, however, may not be regained at will, and in any case this lost innocence enables us to become clearer about the nature of the problem of the Bible. What has happened? Two logically related developments have called into question both the authority of the Bible and the propriety of theology's calling itself a truth-telling discipline. While the Bible is regarded by many as simply the self-expression of a primitive people, theology likewise came to be regarded as the self-expression of those who happen to be religious. Side by side, there have come into question the status of the text and the epistemological respectability of theology.

In this connection, it is important to bear in mind what is often implicitly or explicitly denied, that earlier generations were neither naive about the authority of the Bible, as Origen's disastrous attempt to save it demonstrates, nor unselfconscious about the epistemological status of theology, as Anselm's work everywhere witnesses. The peculiar character of the modern discussion derives rather from the fact that the assault has come everywhere at once, so that we may neither appeal without further ado to the Bible as authority nor engage in systematic theology without in some way or other first giving some epistemological justification. The result is that modern systematic theology inevitably must operate not only with conscious attention to epistemological questions, but do it in such a way as to reveal awareness of the fact that much mainstream epistemological discussion denies its right to exist. One of the things that epistemological self-consciousness does is to focus attention first of all on the relativity of texts, formulations, doctrines, and beliefs of every kind-theological and other-and second on the variety of authorities to which theologians appeal and always have appealed.

(1) Relativity. To claim that all expressions and formulations are relative to their time does not imply an absolute relativism of the kind that treats cultures as totalities sealed off from one another. The point is one about the finitude, contingency, historicity, and fallibility of any place in the tradition, ours included. In fact, ours especially, simply because we are in the middle of it and cannot judge it as objectively as we can the formulations of other eras. To miss that was the most grievous

⁶ Josipovici, op. cit. pp. 302, 307. "Our attitude to such a remark [Barr's likening of the Bible to a cave full of scrolls] will depend less on 'the facts' and more on our sense of what constitutes a whole. If the Christian Bible was indeed nothing but a bundle of scrolls in a cupboard, there is something within it which wants to turn it into something else… (p. 49).

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error of the Enlightenment. That is not to deny that a formulation, theological or otherwise, may claim to be true. To say that the symbol of Chalcedon is couched in the conceptuality of its time-what other conceptuality could it have used?-is not to deny its candidature for truth, and in two senses: as an accurate summary of what the New Testament says about Jesus, and as the truth about who Jesus is. That does not mean it is the final truth-there is, this side of eternity, no such thing-nor the total truth about Jesus, but simply that it may respectably be held to say things that more or less successfully represent what is the case.

To acknowledge that all treasure is contained in the earthen vessels of language, is not at the same time to concede that no treasure is contained therein. It can also happily be conceded that language changes, though not suddenly or absolutely, with the passage of time and the development of thought. This implies, that to say the same thing, or perhaps better, the same kind of thing, as the Bible or a biblical writer means that different words are required, not necessarily all of them different, but certainly different in some respects. That is one of the reasons for the necessity of systematic theology.

(2) Authorities. There is little need to argue for the view that, in the construction of a theology, a whole variety of authorities is appealed to by theologians of every kind. Among them is the Bible, which is given varying degrees of authority by varying kinds of theologian, but also other theologians, common sense, reason, the pronouncements of church councils, the spirit of the age-which may, of course, operate unconsciously--and so on. But given the variety of sources and authorities, what uses does theology make of Scripture in particular? A great deal of light can be thrown by looking at examples of what in fact has happened. They will show that what theologians have done with Scripture is more various than may sometimes appear, and certainly different from what they have either said they are doing with Scripture or have been said by others to be doing. There is a great deal more variety and freedom than is widely believed. The relation between the concepts by which systematic theology lives and the biblical expression from which some of its content derives is indirect. There is, that is to say, logical space between the Bible and those who use it, and it is in that space that are to be found both the obedience of true Christian theology to the authoritative word and the freedom which is the form of that obedience.

III

Against any who would continue to claim that theology, or a theology, is able to encompass the whole of the biblical message, we must acknowledge the fact that all theologies belong in a particular context, and so are, to a degree, limited by the constraints of that context. To that extent, the context is one of the authorities to which the theologian must listen. Different dimensions of the scriptural message come to expression

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in different contexts: justification by grace in the context of the sale of salvation by indulgences, the doctrine of the homoousion in the context of the denial of the divinity and humanity of Christ, and so on. In the first case, the concept of justification was directly suggested by Scripture, however one-sidedly some may now accuse Luther of using it, because it is clear that Paul and perhaps others do use such a notion. In the latter, the concept was adapted to theological use in an attempt to encapsulate the threatened dimensions of the biblical teaching about Christ.

This suggests several implications. (1) The biblical message, in the sense of a finally adequate or even provisionally complete account of biblical teaching, is a chimera. That is a theological point and has to do as much with the nature of God and the limits of the human mind as with the nature of the Bible.

(2) But there must be added a specifically pneumatological point, that the Spirit may make possible at particular historical kairoi the reaffirmation of biblical faith by enabling the theological expression of what is needful for the times. For example, it may be that some forms of liberation theology are doing that in some contexts today.

(3) That is not to deny that there may be theological summae that do by their very many-sidedness succeed better than others in encompassing something like the wholeness of the biblical message, nor that we who live after millennia of theological activity are not in a better position than some of our forebears to encompass a more complete view of what is possible. But we may be sure that the very greatest will omit items that ought to be there and get others simply wrong.

(4) The examples of justification and the homoousion enable us to say that the relation between the narratives, wisdom, theology, and concepts of the Bible and the more self-conscious articulation of systematic theology is both indirect and various. The case of the homoousion is one example. There is still no final agreement whether it does fairly summarize the biblical teaching about Christ, although I continue to bold that Chalcedon's twofold use of the concept remains a necessary criterion (though not essential content) of an adequate christology. Two other examples will provide illuminating insight into the relation of the Bible and systematic theology. The first is Anselm's use of the concept of "satisfaction." It can be argued that in his treatise, Anselm both succeeded in articulating in his context the rationality of the Christian theology of salvation in a way that remains true to some dimensions of the story and continues to illuminate the theology of atonement for us; and that he failed in certain ways to express aspects of it without which it is gravely deficient.⁷ In so doing, he has at once genuinely expressed aspects of the Bible's use of judicial metaphor in depicting the human relation to God and fallen short of doing it justice.

⁷ I have tried to sort the wheat from the chaff in chapter 4 of The Actuality of Atonement. A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989).

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A second example is the use in the tradition of the notion of the image of God. The fact is that the concept is used very rarely in the Bible, chiefly in Genesis, while in the New Testament it is for the most part used of Jesus and not of the human race in general. Yet the paucity and variety of use should not rule out its use in theology if it enables aspects of the divine-human relation to come to speech. Here we might say that the Bible suggests concepts but in no way limits their development to the meaning they had in their context. And yet the matter is far more complex. The history of the systematic use of the concept shows that it has at times been taken too far from its biblical roots. The platonizing of the notion in Augustine led to the now disastrous location of its content in reason, overstressing the rational dimensions of our humanity. The interesting point about the modern use is that, in the context of the ecological crisis and the development of feminism, the original contexts, particularly in Genesis, are being re-examined in the quest for a more adequate theological anthropology. The point for our purposes is the illustration of both the place and the limits of the systematic use of Scripture.

(5) To the note of indirectness, let us now add another: that of freedom. One is not bound to deny the work of the Holy Spirit in the composition of Scripture in order to suggest that we should seek alongside it some account of the Spirit's work in the theologian's use of Scripture, May we not say that the theologian should be free to emphasize now one dimension of the manifold message, now another, and to develop a concept beyond the limits of its meaning in the source from which it is drawn-as in the case of the image of God, perils and mistakes being admitted? Of course, I am operating with a particular concept of freedom, not that of autonomous choice so much as that which is the gift of the Lord who is the Spirit to find the truth for the times. That is not to recommend a criterionless use, but neither is it to expect anything too direct or rigid. That is what I mean by saying that the theologian operates in a logical space between the text and the present. But this implies something about the nature and authority of the odd collection of books with which we are concerned. For logical space is not empty space. It is the room for maneuver given not only by the distance of two realities, but by their relation. What is our particular relation to the text that we read and by which we are read?

IV

The systematic theologian engages in one side of a conversation, albeit one in which the first word has been spoken by another or others. This can be taken in a purely descriptive sense that we would not be theologians unless others had been such before us. We receive our material from both the Bible and the writings of others. But it can, and must, be taken also in the sense that they exercise a kind of authority over us. The question now is, what is that authority and how does it relate to our freedom?

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Let me begin with a trinitarian dogma., To be a person is to exist in mutually constitutive relations with other persons. Father, Son, and Spirit are what they are because they constitute and are constituted by each other by virtue of their free relatedness. It is sometimes suggested that their relatedness may be construed as a kind of conversation, due allowance being made for the metaphorical character of the language. The suggestion finds some support in Scripture. "The Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God." This sounds very much like a kind of eternal, albeit metaphorical, conversation.

The constitution of human persons is a somewhat more complicated matter. In the first place, we are constituted not by relations of mutuality, but by virtue of our creation and redemption by another. What we are is the outcome of the eternal divine conversation: "all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." We are constituted as human persons by the eternal Word of God, who in John's account is the one incarnate for our salvation (reconstitution?) in Jesus. In the second place, however, the way by which the constitution of human persons takes place is not unmediated, but happens by means of an immense range of relationships, that are mutually constitutive in different ways and to different degrees. At one level, we are constituted-as Feuerbach famously remarked-by our intake of food, where there is little mutuality involved. At another, in our relations with other persons, there is a high degree of mutual constitution.⁸

But how do words share in the process of constitution? Words are among the earthen vessels by which we become what we are in our relations to one another. In so far as it is right to see ourselves as essentially part of a conversation, we may expect words to be central in the process of our becoming the kind of people we become. On such an account, written texts are among the means by which we are made what we are. They speak, or fail to speak, and so shape our reality.⁹ That is a general point, and not simply about the Bible, as Stephen Prickett's remark about the poet's constitution of reality makes clear. But it is true of the Bible in particular ways. In so far as the reading of the Bible creates in us belief or unbelief, or particular forms of belief, the point is an obvious one, as witness the text that Augustine took and read, and so shaped reality for generations after him. As the history of our culture shows, the Bible is a text that has done much constituting.

⁸ Cf. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961).
⁹ Here we stumble upon an interesting tangential point: that there is some reason to believe that it is not only the Bible that encourages us to think of the centrality of words in the constitution of our humanity. It is also the enduring lesson that Plato teaches us in his insistence on the constitutive character of the ideas. Some words spoken in time speak also of eternity. Plato's mistake was that he tried to find an other than earthen vessel for the eternity. The distinctive shape of the biblical conversation, a shape totally missed by the exponents of those who strewed thorns in the way of Coleridge's quest for faith, is constituted by the fact that words are earthen vessels. The Bible does not have authority apart from its status as an earthen vessel. And not only an earthen vessel, but one whose center is One who suffers and is crucified.

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But one can find belief or unbelief in the pages of a novel, the hearing of Mozart, or the death of a child. What is it about this particular set of texts that makes it so central to the theological task? The reason surely is that this set of texts mediates in a specific way the Word that creates and redeems. That is not to deny that other realities also mediate the eternal Word, but rather to compose a variation on Calvin's theme that without Scripture we are for the most part unable to recognize the world as God's. A modern version of Calvin's point is, I think, made by Wittgenstein: "So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make any judgments at all?" Scripture, accordingly, is that without which certain things may not be said. It is the necessary but not sufficient condition for a theology's being Christian.¹⁰

But we cannot remain content with this point if we are to move beyond a merely didactic conception of Scripture's function and authority. Is not the central matter here the creation of certain communal forms of life-Israel and the church-which are uniquely those constituted by this Word? The Christian church is the kind of community that it is for all kinds of historical and contingent reasons, but it is distinctively the Christian church insofar as it is constituted by Word and Spirit mediated through the earthen vessel of Scripture. That is a development of the point already made that we must recognize certain authorities not simply to be able to make judgments, but in order to be what we are. In that respect, the words of Scripture are constitutive of specific ecclesial forms of communal life. Among the forms of life that are, at least partly, constituted by Scripture is what we call systematic theology. This is one of the shapes-the rational shape-taken by the communal life of the Christian church. This, in turn, relates to another Wittgensteinian point, that rationality is constituted by, or is a function of, a communal form of life.

So, the situation can be summarized by saying: (1) being constituted by Scripture is a necessary condition of a communal form of life's being truly Christian. (2) Among the activities of the Christian community is a specifically rational one, known as systematic theology. Being constituted by Scripture is a necessary condition of systematic theology's status as Christian theology. Or, a little more riskily, we may say that Scripture, as the book of God, is the way by which God makes possible that community of worship and life, one of whose activities is systematic theology.

But we must realize, on the other hand, the many other agencies contributing to the whole process. Central among them is what has already been described as the freedom of the human partner in the conversation. This is a freedom both of limitation and of what Tolkien called "subcreation." It is a freedom of limitation because it consists in the fact that a particular subject matter is given to the theologian, who is

¹⁰ Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 493. Are all the different ways in which systematic theology is indirectly related conceptually to Scripture to be summed up in this?

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not condemned to the necessity of attempting to say everything, but is given a particular set of topics centered on the Word through whom the world is created and redeemed. The theologian aims at a kind of universality, but a particular universality. We are here, in a sense, back to the question of authority, but of authority in terms of the giving of certain boundaries to content, as (1) in the prescribing of themes: God, creation, humanity, sin, salvation, eschatology, and (2) in prescribing the general form of the themes, in distinction from parallel or rival theologies and philosophies, for example, creation over against pantheism; single God over against polytheism (but not "monotheistic" in the manner of Islam or deism); human freedom and the openness of history over against Marxism and the rest.

There is a freedom of subcreation because, through the Spirit, theology is enabled at particular times to repeat in its finite concepts the eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM.¹¹ If Coleridge is right, that is the privilege of the user of the imagination in all spheres of human endeavor. At that level, we have to confess happily that in certain respects the systematic theologian is in the same boat as every other toiler with words, concepts, sounds, pigment, wood, and stone. At another level, it is a different kind of enterprise because theology's conversation is centered not on the created order in general, but on the world as it is revealed in Christ to have a particular kind of origin and destiny.

It is precisely here that we find the possibilities for the development of a pneumatological conception of freedom. The freedom of the systematic theologian is to be found in the way the imagination is enabled to use the Bible obediently, originally, and systematically. In this use of the rational imagination we can discern a freedom that consists in finding anticipations of the finished among the unfinished.¹² By the rational imagination, I mean something of that use of words wherein their worldly and finite content is not annulled in some rationalizing, but transformed into being the vehicle of theological truth about God and God's relation to the world. The imagination is a function of the human response to the world. But as the focus of inspiration-the liberating and enabling temporal work of the Spirit-it becomes the vehicle of words that do not simply repeat but constitute.

It is clear that on such an understanding, it does not matter which words are used-whether justification from the Bible or satisfaction from Roman legal theory-so long as they are enabled by the Spirit to

¹¹ An echo of Coleridge's famous definition of the imagination at the end of Chap. XIII of the Biographia Literaria: "The primary imagination I bold to be the living power and prime agent of human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM."
¹² On the rational imagination, see Ray Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Towards an Ontology and Rhetoric of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 251. "An imagination of reason is no less in evidence, formerly in the great metaphysical systems, today more in the theoretical natural and social sciences: a 'given' structure is probed for what it subsumes, and from it other structures are extrapolated which will both describe and explain it."

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articulate in their context the being and act of God. Here, of course, there is raised the question of criteria, whether and in what sense a use of the Bible is to be adjudged to constitute a truthful articulation of being. If the freedom which is the eschatological work of the Spirit operates in the logical space between the written words of the text and the communal life that is shaped by it, criteria will be found in the continuing conversation with those both within and without the confines of the community.

Systematic theology is the rational dimension of the conversation that is initiated by God at the creation and continued in the history of God's dealings with the world. The Bible's authority is that it represents the heart of that conversation, both its initiation and the particular human response that is Israel, Jesus, and the church. It sets the boundaries for the conversation, or the space within which human parrhesia is to make its response. But that response, too, is part of the work of God, for it is enabled to take place as the Spirit enables the earthen vessels of human language to become articulations in time both of the Word of God and of the human response to that Word. The conversation is incarnational and pneurnatological. As witness to the incarnation, Scripture is also witness both to the capacity of words to embody theological and other meaning and to a boundedness of content. With this word, theology is able to be Christian; without it, it ceases to be so. As sharing in the Spirit's constitution of a community of worship, life, and thought, theology is witness to the human imagination and reason's capacity to transform language so that it may by anticipation represent something of the truth that belongs to the end.