Rendering God's word: Human and divine agency in modern biblical hermeneutics: A typology.

Description

The Enlightenment tradition continues to exert a strong influence over how the act of reading Scripture is construed. This is indicated in an exacting bias against the prior influence of another agent (human or Divine) on the knower/reader in both modern and postmodern epistemologies/hermeneutics. The problem, we suggest, is that the idea of removing oneself from the influence of God's agency is at best awkward and at worst implausible. We seek to demonstrate in this thesis how, despite the continued subscription to Enlightenment ideals, judgments pertaining to divine agency and its perennial relationship to human agency operate in, with, and under Modern construals of the act of reading Scripture. To do this we construct an axiological framework, an ad hoc typology by which to measure the location and relationship of recent accounts of reading Scripture according to the stance they necessarily take towards the relationship of human and divine agency.The bottom left corner of the triangle is our first "type" giving of preference to the human action in the text of Scripture. Examples include the early work of Hans Frei, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson. The bottom right corner is the second type and is indicated by the preference given to human action in the reading. Examples include David Kelsey, (the later work of) Hans Frei, Werner Jeanrond, and Stephen Fowl. The top corner is our third type giving preference to Divine agency in the determination of meaning. Karl Barth, Nicholas Wolterstorff and James K. A. Smith are surveyed as examples.Linear typologies have distinct limitations in that they can only identify a particular approach with respect to the negotiation of two issues, represented as the two points that anchor each end of the line. This severely hampers the typologies ability to account for the uniqueness of an individual's thought as it evolves and becomes more nuanced depending on the particularity of the question or situation. Our typology seeks to advance upon one dimensional linear typologies by creating a two dimensional typological space. This space will be in the shape of a triangle.

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