Worth Repeating

By: Kevin Vanhoozer

Triune Authorship [Remythologizing Theology]

Only God can make God known. Moreover, we could know nothing of God or his purposes at all if God were not a speech agent, for only speaking disambiguates behavior: "Incorporeal agents who do not speak are like invisible men who are dumb." There would be an obvious gap in a form of theism in which God, having made a world of rational creatures able to love and worship him, did not in any way communicate with them. Christian theology begins in the wake of God's communicative activity or theodrama (drao = "I do") in which God's speaking is a doing and God's doing is more often than not a matter of speaking.

The proper starting point for doctrine of God is thus the biblical depiction of God as a speaking subject whose breathed ("Spirited") voice is expressed supremely in the christological Word made flesh and secondarily in the canonical polyphony that in turn presents Jesus Christ. God thus makes himself known as a triune communicative agent, and what he communicates is not merely information (truth) but energy (life) and purpose (the way) - in a word, himself: the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. The Bible is a product of God's triune communcative work and that not only transmits information but also, and more importantly, conveys life.

The Bible's depiction of God is more than a projection of the best human thoughts about the divine. The Bible is the means whereby God projects his own voice onto the stage of world history.