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9 Conclusion Divine Eloquence In all our attempts to repair Christian theology in the relatively hospitable climate afforded by some educational contexts in recent years in the latemodern West, and in all our efforts to reappropriate the wisdom of the premodern past in service of that reparative labor, it is important that we do not lose sight of the scale of the challenges raised to theology by modern thought. Ernst Troeltsch was an eloquent exponent of one of the most significant of those challenges, the challenge of modern historical consciousness. It is a challenge that goes to the heart of Christian theology. In the current revival of the theology and theological interpretation of Scripture, it is a challenge we need to keep before us and factor into our understanding and our practice. I have sought here to offer one way of beginning to address that challenge, drawing on both premodern wisdom and late-modern insight from Gregory Nazianzen and Hans Frei. In this study, Gregory and Frei offer respectively a sort of premodern figure and late-modern partial “fulfillment” of an answer to the problems Troeltsch’s account of historical consciousness raises for Christian theology in general and specifically in respect of Holy Scripture. Figure and fulfillment have not matched neatly and yet there are surprising resonances and possibilities of supplementation. While Frei’s position in many ways goes well beyond Gregory’s in addressing the challenge, there are strong similarities of strategy—ways in which Frei works, in his own fashion, along lines we see suggested by Gregory. While Gregory’s theology and practice belong very much to their own time, yet there is enough commonality of purpose between the theologians—given their common preoccupation with the same divinehuman subject—to allow not only for his insights to be echoed in Frei’s more developed thinking on the question of history and Scripture, but for him 273 to suggest possibilities of supplementation and correction to Frei’s thought, especially in respect of pneumatology and the conceptuality used to describe Jesus Christ and his presence. In Chapter 1, I explicated Troeltsch’s account of the challenges posed by historical consciousness for the theology and theological interpretation of Scripture, and showed how, in varying degrees, a number of important recent proposals failed adequately to address those challenges (though some offered significant insights reiterated or developed through the reading of Gregory and Frei in later chapters). Those challenges centered on the problem of how to think of divine action in a world viewed historically. They problematized thinking of Scripture as the vehicle or instrument of divine action, the unity of the text and the reality it attests, and the capacity of the text to address the world of the reader and so to sustain its normative function in Christian community. They also placed scriptural texts within a wider spectrum of ethical thinking as historical relativities that may be judged in light of other historical highpoints of the expression of human values. We can sum up the rest of the foregoing argument in terms of three moments of thought developed in respect of each of the core problems and each of these particular issues for the theology of Scripture: strategies and lines of reflection suggested by Gregory; Frei’s answer to the issue beyond Gregory; and how that answer might be developed in light of Gregory’s thinking undeveloped by Frei. I The basic problem of divine action in a historical world, as Troeltsch frames it, was not part of Gregory’s intellectual milieu. Nevertheless, Gregory’s general account of the relation of God and world offers some suggestive ways forward. His understanding of God as exceeding every creaturely limitation, analogy, or conception clears space to see divine action in noncompetitive relation with the complex creaturely interactions it orders providentially, even in respect of human cognition and action. His understanding of human beings as rational, desiring agents ordered to an end in God allows us to begin to see them historically and teleologically as immersed in historical contingencies yet oriented to something that transcends them. These notions combine in an understanding of history as the field of a divine pedagogy proceeding in steps, which accommodates divine action to the limits of historical creatures while accustoming them to ever-deeper conformity to God. Gregory’s account of Jesus Christ and our participation in him in the Spirit suggests we think of the incarnate Word as a historical particular who conditions the whole of history...

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