Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation - Book Review

Currents in Theology and Mission, Dec, 2003 by Mark C. Mattes

By Telford Work. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2001. xx and 343 pages. Cloth. $35.00.

In this book Telford Work, professor of religion at evangelical Westmont College, offers a revision of his Duke dissertation, which seeks to address the many questions about the authority of Scripture by developing "a fully Trinitarian account of Scripture, establishing and exploring its divine and human character and its salvific purpose in its Church setting and beyond. It claims that the Christian Bible, as divine message, historical phenomenon, and physical object, participates in the Trinitarian economy of salvation" (p. 2). In this way Scripture is norm for the church, the basis of its mission.

For Work, the old dichotomies of fact and value, historical-critical analysis and existential of ethical import, tradition versus individual liberty, autonomy versus heteronomy, are a fictitious result of Enlightenment assumptions that now have been fragmented by postmodern critiques. They are no longer plausible. Characteristic of the Duke school, he seeks to locate the authority of scripture in the agency of the church whose origin is from the Triune God and whose ultimate goal is union with this God. Hence, ecclesiology is a form of trinitarian theology, and the Trinity enables our ability to map the cosmos within the divine plan for salvation. Thus everything within the cosmos is elevated to its triune basis and goal. The church has a place in the economy of the triune life via grace and serves as the singular way the triune life is embodied. Work's is a deeply ecumenical evangelicalism, tempered by an Orthodox and Roman Catholic appreciation of Scripture that sees Scripture as traditioned and traditioning.

Work's book is divided into three main sections: (1) The Beginning of Scripture: The God of Word, which examines Athanasius, Augustine, Barth, and von Balthasar's views of Scripture and ecclesiology, (2) The Mission of Scripture: A School for all the World, which examines the role of Scripture and its development in Israel and its authority in light of Jesus' mission, and (3) The End of Scripture: God's Word in Faithful Practice, presenting the role of scripture in community formation, humanity, the church's life, and worship.

Interestingly, he argues that controversy over Scripture's authority today is comparable to the iconoclastic controversy more than 1,000 years ago. While fundamentalists are surely "bibliolaters," mainline Protestants by contrast have usurped Scripture's divinity (p. 5). For Work, the ecclesiological, trinitarian foundation of theology alters the terrain and moves bibliology into an orthodox trinitarian perspective. Word-Christology and Spirit-Christology "portray a Christocentricity that elevates the biblical Word even as it firmly subordinates it to Father, Son, and Spirit, by locating its power in the power of the Triune God. They demand close attention to the actual course of Scripture in human history, while never forgetting that human history is a salvation history moving towards the realization of God's will" (p. 122).

At one level, the kind of theology presented here seems to be a significant advance on the tired above-mentioned dichotomous categories of the last four decades. However, this reviewer cannot help but wonder how the Trinity or the church can or should be an adequate substitute for the gospel. Wouldn't linking Scripture's authority to the authority of the gospel as sheer promise still be the best approach for a truly "evangelical" theology?

Mark C. Mattes

Grand View College

Des Moines, Iowa