Anthony Thiselton and the Hermeneutics of Doctrine

I’m beginning a couple of new postings on Anthony C. Thiselton’s The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 2007. For those of us familiar with Thiselton, he’s highly regarded in the area of hermeneutics. But in this book, he takes hermeneutical theories to cover not so much the biblical texts, but doctrine, i.e. his whole book is really about how we come to believe what we believe about our doctrine. He unpacks his proposal in the first section, discusses possible objections to it, and then proceeds in the third section of his book to apply his proposal and theory to the different key areas of Christian doctrine.

The key proposal Thiselton offers is that a dispositional account of belief stands at the heart of a hermeneutic of doctrine. He begins by suggesting in the first chapter that rather than think of doctrine as ‘solutions’ to free-floating “problems”, it is better (pace Gadamer) to understand doctrine within a ‘hermeneutical dialetic of question and answer’ (p.8), i.e. understanding the two horizons of understanding (the earlier original (‘their’) context and the present (‘our’) context), and seeing how these two horizons modify each other and merge to form a single, larger horizon (p.4). Thiselton suggests that this was how the early Christian confessions came about – they were a first-person way of expressing Christian identity and commitment called forth by specific settings or situations, in another words – it was how one nailed one’s colours to the mast. This prepares the way for the 2nd chapter where Thiselton heads into the dispositional account of belief. His central thesis is as summairsed on p.21:

“Belief, then, is action-oriented, situation-related, and embedded in the particularities and contingencies of everyday living. [...[ Action, contingency, particularity, and the public world of embodied life constitute part of the very grammar of what it is to believe. In the chapters that follow I argue that these features stand at the heart of a hermeneutic of doctrine. For hermeneutics is concerned with particularity and embodied life, as well as with a distinct dimension of coherence and with expanding horizons of understanding.” (emphasis his)

Anticipating the objection that such a thesis might lead to a behaviourist account of belief (causal mechanism akin to a conditioned reflex), Thiselton suggests the reverses is true. Rather, the dispositional account of belief he offers embodies within it the concept of habit and “training” or tradition, which enhances the moral and volitional dimension of the person/s believing by relating belief to the formation of character. In this regard, Thiselton highlights the advantage of seeing doctrine as drama in relation to training and performance, something which he discusses at greater depth in subsequent chapters.

Finally, Thiselton highlights that his thesis of a dispositional account of belief pertains to communal doctrine rather than only to individual belief. Thiselton argues ‘that “doctrine” must retain its epistemological status as necessarily embodying truth-claims that invite and indeed deserve belief, but on the other side [...] doctrine also carries with it inextricably a communal commitment and communal formation’ (p.21, emphasis his) . In another words, Thiselton is against the idea that belief in doctrine is merely what a community or body of believers ‘makes it out to be’, where in such a case, the epistemic question of whether there is really an objective truth-claim does not matter; but at the same time, Thiselton does retain the idea of the communal nature of belief in doctrine.

If I could summarise, what stands at the center of Thiselton’s proposal are the following tenets – doctrine is self-involving first-person belief utterances; it is located in action, contingency, particularity and is public; it involves disposition which (in following H. H. Price’s definition) is the reservoir of knowledge, understanding or conviction which the believer draws to perform appropriate belief utterances or habituated actions in the public domain (p.30); it involves habit and training, and finally it is communal. What an interesting proposal! More to come as we plod along in the book.