Let me say something in clarification of my last post. What I wrote there, with reference to biblical hermeneutics, might sound like existentialist confusion at some level. It might sound like I think utilizing literary, grammatical, historical, and canonical tools in biblical exegesis is not a viable option. But I am exactly not saying this. What I am saying is that the way I approach Scripture, through the Chalcedonian pattern, has to do with a theological ontology, and ontology of Scripture. In other words, my primary approach to Scripture has to do with what Barth calls dialekin (see his Göttingen Dogmatics), or dialectic, or dialogical engagement with the text. This means that my engagement with Scripture, in this mode, is one that expects a dialogical encounter with the viva vox Dei (living voice of God) as He speaks, through Christ, throughout the total canon of Holy Scripture; in all its inter and intratextual and canonical vividness. There is an existential aspect to this, in an I-Thou sense of encounter; but the existential isn’t one that comes from below, but above as that is unilaterally shaped and given by God in Jesus Christ. I just didn’t want anybody thinking that I no longer see value in the normal biblical interpretive tools that often attend the exegesis of the text.

That said, those tools will be utilized in a way that is determined by the reality of the text, and thus the necessary paradoxes that come with the text’s res as that is revealed in the breath of Jesus Christ. This means, furthermore, that I will not engage Scripture in what TF Torrance identifies as the necessitarian logico-deductive schemata that Reformed and Lutheran orthodoxy approaches the text with; or we might say, in the Ramist/Agricolan mode that has shaped scholasticism Reformed and Lutheranism since the genesis of those movements. No, my approach to biblical interpretation will be principially and intensively regulated by the rule of faith, who I understand to be Jesus Christ (in contrast, but with some overlap with the Patristic regula fidei). My approach to Scripture, thus, is more of a con-versation I engage in through the koinonia I share with the triune God as that is mediated through my participation with Christ in and through his Spirit anointed humanity. But the literary and canonical critical tools are still utilizable within this sort of dialogical mode.

Not sure this really concretizes things much better than my original post. But since the reality of Holy Scripture is a subject there is going to be some serious relational and personalist resonances involved in the way that I approach Scripture; or maybe it would be better to say: in the way that Scripture and its reality approaches and confronts me as God’s living voice is proclaimed throughout every jot and tittle of its Christoformed and staurological disclosure. Maybe it would be even better to say that I read Scripture in a mode of prayerful doxology as that is pushed into me through participatio Christi.