The Hermeneutics of Doctrine by Anthony C. Thiselton

Abstract

344 BOOK REVIEWS We do not need Nietzsche's foresight to see the connection between the Christian worldview and the metaphysical equality of all human beings, or to foretell the violence that will inevitably follow in the wake of the abandonment of that worldview-all we need is history. In one of the most eloquent passages in the book, and which bears quoting in full, Hart comes to this conclusion: The savagery of triumphant Jacobinism, the clinical heartlessness of classical social eugenics, the Nazi movement, Stalinism-all the grand utopian projects of the modern age that have directly or indirectly spilled such oceans of human blood-are no less results of the Enlightenment myth of liberation than are the liberal democratic state or the vulgarity of late capitalist consumerism or the pettiness of bourgeois individualism. The most piteously and self-righteously violent regimes of modern history-in the West or in those other quarters of the world contaminated by our worst ideas-have been those that have most explicitly cast off the Christian vision of reality and sought to replace it with a more "human" set of values. No cause in history-no religion or imperial ambition or military adventure-has destroyed more lives with more confident enthusiasm than the cause of the "brotherhood ofman," the postreligious utopia, or the progress of the race. (107-8) In the fifth century, St. Augustine's City of God helped Christians come to terms with the collapse of the Roman Empire. In that same tradition of offering a vigorous defense of the Christian religion in dolorous times, Hart's Atheist Delusions has given Christians who are now trying to negotiate the shoals of post-Christian civilization just the book they need. University ofSt. Mary ofthe Lake Mundelein, Illinois EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J. The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. By ANTHONY C. THJSELTON. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2007. Pp. 649 $46.00 (cloth}. ISBN: 978-0-8028-2681-7. Starting with The Two Horizons in 1980, and later with New Horizons in Hermeneutics (1997) and Thiselton on Hermeneutics (2006), Anthony Thiselton has established himself as a master in cataloguing various interpretative theories, particularly as applied to biblical exegesis. As the title indicates, the present work is concerned with establishing a proper hermeneutics for doctrinal claims. The book is sweeping in its scope, as its length attests, because the author seeks not BOOK REVIEWS 345 only to provide general interpretative guidelines, but also to offer examples of a hermeneutically sensitive approach to virtually the entire realm of Christian doctrine: the person and work of Christ; the meaning of the cross, expiation and substitution; the significance of the Trinity; the nature of the Church; and the sacraments and eschatology. Although the book offers many themes worthy of discussion-such as the author's distaste for easy condemnations of foundationalism or for similarly facile invocations of "incommensurability"-all of his minor digressions are ultimately in service to his central claim: Christian doctrines can never be understood as jejune abstractions because they arise from the performative, dramatic, embodied life of the Church. As such, doctrines are lived out publicly in communal settings and "invite and ... deserve belief" (21). Markedly accented here is the Wittgensteinian claim that the utterance "I believe" is necessarily incarnated in patterns of action and commitment which surround the believer's assertions (20). Doctrine, therefore, is "indissolubly interwoven with practices and a form of life" (97). Thiselton intends to obviate, then, any understanding of dogma as a brittle thing, severed from its living meaning in Scripture and in the practices and rituals of the Christian community. His approach is to examine biblical teachings by means of the historical-critical method, to discuss how such claims have been read in the later tradition and, finally, to make such teachings-by a hermeneutically perceptive readingintelligible for today. Although this methodology may have the scent of varying correlational approaches, Thiselton strongly rejects any tendency to collapse biblical teaching into contemporary experience. And he emphatically wishes to overcome the kind of thinking which holds that the New Testament needs an emptying of its traditional content in order to become acceptable to present-day sensibilities. On the contrary, he...