Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Harvesting the Drama Metaphor

I’m beginning a new series of blog articles, all exploring how we can harvest the ‘drama metaphor’ for the three disciplines of biblical theology, ethics, and doctrine. The impetus really came from discovering three books which uses the drama metaphor to apply it to the three areas of biblical theology, ethics and doctrine. They are (respectively) Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael W. Goheen’s The Drama of Scripture: Finding Our Place in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004); Samuel Wells’ Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2004); and Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 2005). Basically, the Drama metaphor seeks to see the gospel or salvation history as God's great drama, by which we become involved and participate in through His grace. The plan is to post a review of each of these books in turn, with other related posts interspersed in between. I have no idea how long this will take, but the aim of this exercise is to test the viability of the drama metaphor as a means of connecting these three disciplines together. If it is indeed viable, then the drama metaphor, properly ‘harvested’, could go quite some distance in providing a seamless connection and application of these three disciplines into our lives and the lives of our congregation members. Stay tuned!
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous17 March 2009 at 02:29

    Edmund, mate, I'm looking forward to it.
    I'm particularly interested whether this metaphor could address the issue of how we can step outside our own cultural presuppositions as we do exegesis and theology...this issue came up as I was reading an chapter by Gamble in the book "always reforming". He says that biblical theology would help us to develop a theological method that is not a mere reflection of the culture that we are in (eg. the method of much systematic theology is based on 'loci communes', taken from Aristotelian assumptions about knowledge). Should be sweet!

    Akos

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  2. Fongster19 March 2009 at 18:53

    Hi good thoughts. Big question which I've occasionally thought about. But haven't had a chance to explore deeper. On one hand, we've got the common thinking that doctrine or systematic theology consists of timeless truths which we have to get 'behind the text' of Scripture. Yet, on the other hand, we've got KV who states that there is no such thing as timeless truth, but rather turth is always embedded with culture, but what God's truth is is that it is trans-cultural truth (it transcends culture, but is not acultural). Need to think about this more. Cheers

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