caa a22 4500 388023309 CHVBK 20180307124930.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199808 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0036930600056738 doi S0036930600056738 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0036930600056738 Webster John Christ Church, Oxford OX1 1DP, England UK Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections [Elektronische Daten] [John Webster] The territory indicated by my title is impossibly vast, and some delimitations are in order at the beginning. What follows does not attempt any kind of thorough or nuanced historical analysis of the great tangle of issues to which the terms of the title refer. ‘Hermeneutics' and ‘modern theology' don't exist as simple entities; the terms are shorthand ways of identifying very complex traditions of thought and cultural practices, and a serious attempt to trace those traditions and the variations in their relationship would be little short of a history of Western Christian thought since the rise of nominalism. What is offered here is more restricted and precise, chiefly an essay in Christian dogmatics. At its simplest, my proposal is that the Christian activity of reading the Bible is most properly (that is, Christianly) understood as a spiritual affair, and accordingly as a matter for theological description. That is to say, a Christian description of the Christian reading of the Bible will be the kind of description which talks of God and therefore talks of all other realities sub specie divinitatis. There is certainly an historical corollary to this proposal — namely, the need for some account of why the dominant traditions of Western Protestantism (and more recently of Western Catholicism) have largely laid aside, or at least lost confidence in, this kind of dogmatic depiction of the church's reading of the Bible, replacing it with, or annexing it to, hermeneutical theory of greater or lesser degrees of sophistication and greater or lesser degrees of theological content. Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1998 Scottish Journal of Theology Cambridge University Press 51/3(1998-08), 307-341 0036-9306 51:3<307 1998 51 SJT https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930600056738 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930600056738 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Webster John Christ Church, Oxford OX1 1DP, England UK NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Scottish Journal of Theology Cambridge University Press 51/3(1998-08), 307-341 0036-9306 51:3<307 1998 51 SJT CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge