New article published: “Is Scripture a Gift?”

As of this morning, I have a new article published in the journal Religions. It’s called “Is Scripture a Gift? Reflections on the Divine-Ecclesial Provision of the Canon.” Here’s the abstract:

This article investigates whether the canon of Christian Holy Scripture is properly understood as a gift and, if so, what theological implications this might entail. Following the introduction, the article has three main sections. The first section proposes an expanded grammar by which to describe the production and reception of the canon in and by the church, under the superintending sovereignty of the divine will and action. The second section offers a guide to recent inquiry into “the gift” in the fields of philosophy and theology, particularly those theories that might prove useful for applying the concept of “gift” to Scripture. The third section unfolds a normative account of the Christian canon as a gift of the triune God to his people and through his people, thus making sense of the long-standing liturgical practice of responding to the reading of the sacred page in the public assembly with a cry of thanks to God.

The article arose out of research I conducted as part of the “Gratitude to God” project at Biola University, which was funded by the Templeton Foundation. The article is only one part of a whole special issue dedicated to the question of gratitude to God. Most of the other articles are either social-scientific or philosophical; contributors include Christopher Kaczor, Kent Dunnington, and Matthew Lee Anderson, among others.

As part of the same “G2G” project, I also wrote a popular essay for Comment published this past January titled “Grace Upon Grace.” It distills some of the broad contours of a theological conception of grace or “the gift” with respect to the total grammar of Christian doctrine, whereas the article homes in on a particular locus: namely, whether “the gift” applies to the canon and, if so, how and with what theological implications.

It was a pleasure spending more than two years reading up on the literature—theological, philosophical, historical, economic, literary, and biblical—on gift, gratitude, grace, and exchange. It was always on the edge of my interests but never at the center of them. I didn’t come close to a comprehensive investigation. But I learned enough to realize how fascinating the subject is, and I’m glad I did.

A few other odds and ends:

• I already spotted a typo, for what it’s worth: page 21, endnote 45: “field yield” should be “first yield.” (UPDATE: I found a few more, alerted the editors, and they fixed them all.)

• The article is—how should I put it?—long. As in: 19,000 words, if you include endnotes and the list of works cited. It’s a very small book, in other words. Take a deep breath before plunging in.

• This article completes, not a series, but at least an ad hoc sequence of articles on the doctrine and interpretation of Scripture. I’ve been waiting for it to come out so that I could gather together links to all of them in one place, along with links to books, reviews, and occasional writings. All together I imagine they amount to 400,000 words on this single locus, give or take 50,000. And that’s not even to mention the Big Book I hope to publish on the subject in a decade or so. At this point, though, I’ll admit I feel somewhat spent. I’ll gladly take a little break from writing about this doctrine. That word count is high enough as it is; nobody needs more from me on the topic for the moment.

• Religions has a practice more common to the soft and hard sciences (as far as I understand it), that is, of publishing the comments of blind peer reviews; here’s the page for all of them, along with my replies.

• Three of the reviewers’ comments came in all at once; all had good things to say, and approved publication without need for revision. So I made final revisions, submitted it, and we were good to go. Then a fourth reviewer’s comments came in belatedly, and s/he judged the article in need of some more work. Both the editor of the special issue and the journal’s editors decided that the three “yay” votes qualified the article to be worthy of publication, hence its coming out today. But I wanted to flag this reviewer’s comments (a) because this is my first time with “open” reviewer comments and (b) because the comments in question are rich, substantive, and worthy of further reflection. Indeed, granted all the work that went into the article as it stands, I don’t doubt that incorporating this feedback into another version of it would have improved it even more; and if I end up doing any further work on the topic of Scripture and the gift, I will doggedly pursue the lines of inquiry raised by this reviewer, since they demand more attention that I was able to grant them. For that reason, whoever the comments’ author is, he or she has my thanks.

New article published: “The Church and the Spirit in Robert Jenson's Theology of Scripture" in Pro Ecclesia

I have an article in a two-part symposium in Pro Ecclesia commemorating the life and thought of Robert Jenson, and though the issues are not yet published, my article is available in an early, online-first capacity. Here's the abstract:

In the last two decades of Robert Jenson’s career, he turned his attention to the doctrine of Scripture and its theological interpretation. This article explores the dogmatic structure and reasoning that underlie Jenson’s thought on this topic. After summarizing his theology of Scripture as the great drama of the Trinity in saving relation to creation, the article unpacks the doctrinal loci that materially inform Jenson’s account of the Bible and its role in the church. Ecclesiology and pneumatology emerge as the dominant doctrines; these in turn raise questions regarding Jenson’s treatment of the church’s defectability: that is, whether and how, if at all, the church may fail in its teaching and thus in its reading of Scripture.

Check out the whole thing here.

I've got a new article out in Modern Theology

It's called "What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in the Theology of Robert Jenson." You can find it here (paywalled). And here's the abstract:

"This articles engages the theology of Robert Jenson with three questions in mind: What is the doctrine of the Trinity for? Is it a practical doctrine? If so, how, and with what implications? It seeks, on the one hand, to identify whether Jenson’s trinitarian theology ought to count as a “social” doctrine of the Trinity, and to what extent he puts it to work for human socio-practical purposes. On the other hand, in light of Jenson’s career-long worries about Feuerbach and projection onto a God behind or above the triune God revealed in the economy, the article interrogates his thought with a view to recent critiques of social trinitarianism. The irony is that, in constructing his account of the Trinity as both wholly determined in and by the economy and maximally relevant for practical human needs and interests, precisely in order to avoid the errors of Feuerbachian “religion,” Jenson ends up engaging in a full-scale project of projection. Observation of the human is retrojected into the immanent life of the Trinity as the prior condition of the possibility for the human; upon this “discovery,” this or that feature of God’s being is proposed as a resolution to a human problem, bearing ostensibly profound socio-practical import. The article is intended, first, as a contribution to the work, only now beginning, of critically receiving Jenson’s theology; and, second, as an extension of general critiques of practical uses of trinitarian doctrine, such as Karen Kilby’s or Kathryn Tanner’s, by way of close engagement with a specific theologian."

The article has its origins in a term paper I wrote for Linn Tonstad at Yale, in a seminar a few years ago in which we read the manuscript for what eventually became God and Difference, a book now receiving warranted attention from all over the place, most recently in a series of rousing responses in Syndicate. It also has a degree of overlap with Ben Myers's recent series of tweets on the Trinity (gathered together in a post) summarizing the classical approach to the doctrine over against the last century's innovations and trends. Consider my article an exercise in that sort of frumpy theology—borrowing my friend Jamie Dunn's coinage—but in this case focused on a single important figure on the contemporary scene. I love Jenson's work and it means a great deal to me, but the article identifies within his trinitarian project a problem (a significant one, I think) internal the logic of his own system. I look forward to hearing what others think, especially those who read and value Jenson's thought.