Doctrine and Genre

As an addition to my previous post on doctrine and "translation" and a little conversation that followed from it: what genres are appropriate for Christian teaching?

Doctrine, after all, is just that: teaching the faith. One of my faculty advisers at the University of Dayton pointed out how "catechesis" is a popular topic especially among Catholic thinkers these days, but is also under-explored theologically.

Why don't theologians do most of their work in biblical commentaries? Or, why are sermons seen as the product of theological reflection rather than the source? Why isn't a Wednesday night bible study at a local church not considered to be "real theology"?

John Webster is a theologian who teaches at Aberdeen who actually has a pretty handy reflection on this topic. This appears in his book Confessing God. It's a little heady (oddly enough), but Webster asks this question of genre and doctrine in a way that I think is useful. What Webster says about the "canonical" shape of premodern theology sounds congenial to Baptist convictions in several ways:

"The history of the genres of theological writing is still largely unexplored in any systematic way; yet the importance of such a study for interpreting the situation of theology in modernity can scarcely be over-emphasized. What happens to styles of theological writing when Wissenschaft [academic essays, basically] replaces citation as the dominant mode of enquiry and argument? When citation is in the ascendant, the literary forms of theology are generally governed by the fact that the Christian worlds of meaning are shaped by biblical, creedal and doxological texts and by the practices which both carry and are themselves carried by those texts. Theology’s literary forms and intellectual architecture, its rhetoric and its modes of argument, are controlled by proximity to these sources. Hence its favoured genres: biblical commentary, exposition of texts which have a heavy presence in the tradition (such as the creeds, the Lord’s Prayer or the Decalogue), or polemic conducted within an agreed frame of reference supplied by a stable canon of biblical materials and of major voices in the tradition. When they function well, these genres are transparent to that into whose presence they seek to introduce the reader. They are not construed as an improvement upon the canon of Christian texts, organizing it more effectively according to scientific principles, or translating its rough, immediate language into a more sophisticated and reflective idiom. Rather, theology maps out the contents of the canon, or applies them in particular circumstances by extended paraphrase of their content."



-Confessing God, 20-21.