Vanhoozer Drama Of Doctrine Analysis

Kevin Vanhoozer shares some affinity with Barth and Placher as well. His separation of theology and ethics I find most interesting because his premise, that scripture and its subsequent doctrine can best be understood as a script for dramatic performance. And yet somehow Vanhoozer separates the script and its performance, suggesting at various points throughout his book The Drama of Doctrine that both stand on their own. In Vanhoozer’s narrative approach, God the director is also the scriptwriter with the script being scripture. Additionally, the script itself, scripture, is also an actor. In order to add to the confusion, Christ, who is also God and therefore director and scriptwriter, is also the main actor who gives form and meaning to the …show more content…
partial and nuanced", "pragmatic", "provisional", "for the time being", "experimental". Doing less than this is to settle for less than the church's true identity, Jesus Christ, whose capacious identity opens up onto the whole of reality; doing more than this is to misconstrue Christian knowledge of that person—either by turning him into a principle or a schema, ignoring his unsubstitutability, or by short-circuiting his profound eschatological mysteriousness, and settling for a debased form of …show more content…
How does he arrive at this conclusion? First, like Barth and Placher, he unequivocally sees Jesus as the ultimate revelation and only lens through which the biblical narrative can be viewed. Nowhere is this more apparent in Resident Aliens than his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. Here, we see that the community of Christians is the catalyst that, in Hauerwas’ view, makes it possible for Christians to live out the ethic of Jesus. “These are words for the colonists. The Sermon is not primarily addressed to individuals, because it is precisely as individuals that we are most apt to fail as Christians. Only through membership in a nonviolent community can violent individuals do better.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Stanley Hauerwas sees an ethical Everest that is individually unclimbable. Reaching that ethical summit is only made possible by climbing with a group of like-minded, fully dedicated teammates. There is a very valid question to ask regarding his assessment of humanity. If individuals are so incredibly useless, why would a community made up of them be any different? It believe it is fair to say that it is Hauerwas’ assessment that it is communities that translate, understand, and embrace the gospel narrative