The practice of theology is always embedded within the concrete world of history and creation. As a result, it is always contextual, yet never reducible to mere relativity. The Bible is the Word of God to humanity. Yet, as centuries of biblical scholarship has demonstrated, an individual author composed each book to address a specific crisis and context. Similarly, in each generation, the ministry of the Church catholic interprets and proclaims the Word of God within a specific context.
This may involve applying the implications of an objective Christian doctrine in relation to a contemporary cultural or civilizational challenge. Invariably, the theologian must also interpret the Word of God within the matrix of any given era’s scientific, philosophical, and general cultural beliefs. This interaction may involve the theologian demonstrating the coherence of the Word with these beliefs as articulated within the dominant epistemological paradigm. Indeed, in order to make the Word of God intelligible to people in a given era, every theologian consciously or unconsciously adopts an ancillary philosophy.
In other contexts, the role of theologians will be to push back against the larger cultural community’s epistemological and ontological claims. In either case, the Word of God as the eternal, transcendent, and unchanging standard of all truth will find itself translated into a finite and historically contingent context. Returning to our earlier Christological analogy, just as there is a communicatio idiomatum, or exchange of realities between Christ’s two natures, so too there is an exchange of realities between the eternal and inspired Word of God and the finite and historically conditioned context within which the Word of God is proclaimed.
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from