The Drama Of Doctrine: A Canonical-linguistic Approach To Christian Theology

The overall aim is to explain how the church comes to share the mind of Christ, despite the difference of centuries, cultures, and conceptual schemes, thanks to the dramatic interplay of Word and Spirit. Vanhoozer describes the canonical-linguistic approach in terms of four marks. It is evangelical in its understanding of the dramatic action at the heart of the Bible's authoritative witness, orthodox in its thinking about the divine dramatis personae, catholic in its attention to various voices in Scripture and in the traditions of its interpretation, yet protestant in its use of Scripture as a critical principle for discriminating between forms of ecclesial performance. The net result is a non-reductive or expansive orthodoxy that attends to the dialogue inside the canon and about it for the sake of the integrity of our contemporary renderings of the drama of redemption