Ethereal Thought Train

This may be the single most awesome paragraph I have read in a long while from a sheer depth of thought.

So, the long and the short of it all is that somehow the biblical theologian and the dogmatic theologian are both confronted with the same unavoidable “chicken and egg” dilemma of the question of priority? Is priority in God as the source of reality; in Jesus as the mediator of the knowledge of God; in Scripture as our only source of God’s inspired testimony to Jesus; or in the Holy Spirit’s enabling of the once incapacitated human mind and spirit to know the truth? The answer is clearly, “yes; all of the above.” Thus we can make the distinction between the ontological priority of the Trinity, the hermeneutical priority of the incarnate Christ, the material priority of the Scriptures, and the epistemological priority of the Spirit’s inner testimony to the regenerated heart of man. These all coinhere, are interdependent, and relate in the hermeneutical spiral. This interdependence is no greater a burden on our subjective knowing than is the coinherence of the three persons of the Trinity, or the coinherence of the divine and human natures of Christ, or of the divine and human natures of Scripture, or of the relationship of the divine Spirit’s indwelling of the believer and our own humanity. Not only is it no greater burden, it is also of the same importance.

via The Ontological and Systematic Roots of Biblical Theology – Graeme Goldsworthy.

As our small group has been studying through Systematic Theology together (this is round 3 of me teaching), some new thoughts have arisen as I consider doctrines.  One that was particularly interesting was the result of teaching revelation, and having a very significant thought that related to this quote, which captures the challenging portion of the doctrine of revelation very succinctly.

The biblical theologian who accepts the canonical coherence of the source documents has already made a dogmatic assumption, or a whole series of them, about the nature of the biblical canon. This is only to say that our doctrine of Scripture is itself drawn from Scripture. If we then recognise that the Bible causes us to reckon with its testimony to the ontological Trinity as the ultimate source of all reality, including the canon, we might feel justified in an arrangement that starts with dogma concerning God (the objective). Yet it is we (the subjective element) who are contemplating this objective. In the final analysis, whether we view this from the perspective of biblical theology or the perspective of dogmatics, we find that the relationship of the subjective and objective is always before us.

via The Ontological and Systematic Roots of Biblical Theology – Graeme Goldsworthy.

When you return to the ultimate question about revelation, and the fact that it is a question of the relation of a subjective experience of the believer to an objective truth, we seem to forget that God is both objective AND subjective.  This is the result of both the perfection of His being and His personhood.

God’s ontological perfection is indeed His objective nature, but He is not merely a concept to be objectified; He is a personal being who relates to us, and therefore transcends the objective/subjective divide through reaching down, not us reaching up.

Perhaps this is an oversimplification of a very deep philosophical problem, but I think far too often in our philosophical challenges with our doctrines we forget the fundamentally relational nature of our God.