Locality and Catholicity: Reflections on Theology and the Church

Why is theology good for the church? One authoritative contemporary answer runs like this: theology is good for the church to the extent that it aims at a description of the linguistic and conceptual world of Christian faith normatively set forth in Holy Scripture. Theology, on this model, is ‘intra...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Webster, John B. 1955-2016 (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 1992
In: Scottish journal of theology
Year: 1992, Volume: 45, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-18
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Parallel Edition:Non-electronic
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Summary:Why is theology good for the church? One authoritative contemporary answer runs like this: theology is good for the church to the extent that it aims at a description of the linguistic and conceptual world of Christian faith normatively set forth in Holy Scripture. Theology, on this model, is ‘intratextual’ or ‘intrasemiotic’, offering a ‘thick description’, a kind of ethnography of the public, intersubjective meaning routines of Christianity, most of all as they are instantiated in Scripture which is the encoding of the ‘semiotic universe’ of Christian faith. Viewed as such, theology is a close cousin to what Clifford Geertz calls ‘interpretive explanation’: it is a discipline which ‘trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs … mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are’; as such, it furnishes‘systematic unpackings of the conceptual world’ of Christian faith.
ISSN:1475-3065
Contains:Enthalten in: Scottish journal of theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S0036930600038874