The Society for the Advancement of Ecclesiological Theology

January 28, 2010 by Gerald Hiestand

Jenson on Prolegomena

In his Systematic Theology, Vol 1, Robert Jenson (an ecclesial theologian in every sense of the term) discusses the church’s misstep in responding to Enlightenment epistemology.

“Catholicism met this challenge by building intellectual walls around the church, thus temporarily dropping out of the story we are tracing here. Protestantism first met it by making the doctrine of scriptural authority into an antecedent basis for theology’s claims. Thus traditional natural arguments for the reliability of Scripture came to bear a new load: we may, it was said, believe Christian doctrine because it is drawn from the Bible, whose truth can be made antecedently plausible. Seventeenth-century Protestant systems’ doctrine of Scripture thus already carried the modern prolegomenal burden.”

Catholicism built walls and retreated from the anti-supernatural claims of modernity’s epistemological Pelagianism; Protestantism granted the modern presupposition and tried to meet it head on via its doctrine of Scripture. Both attempts failed. The epistemological presupposition of modernity never should have been granted in the first place.

Categories: Robert Jenson | Theology