The God‐Intoxicated Theology of a Modern Theologian

John Webster was a God‐intoxicated theologian. His remarkable doctrinal work profoundly shaped modern Protestant dogmatics, most especially in its Doctrine of God. Webster worked out of the whole tradition, drawing on the scholastics in both Catholic and Protestant forms, and touching on the Patrist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of systematic theology : IJST Vol. 21; no. 1; pp. 24 - 43
Main Author Sonderegger, Katherine
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.01.2019
Subjects
Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Biblical studies
Dogmatism
God
Modernism
Theology
Webster, John
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Summary:John Webster was a God‐intoxicated theologian. His remarkable doctrinal work profoundly shaped modern Protestant dogmatics, most especially in its Doctrine of God. Webster worked out of the whole tradition, drawing on the scholastics in both Catholic and Protestant forms, and touching on the Patristic legacy, giving primacy to Augustine. But this ready eye for the past did not make Webster's Doctrine of God a repristination of the past, nor reactionary in theme. In fact, Webster was a modern theologian in a distinctive mode: of ressourcement or retrieval. He viewed his task in this area as two‐fold, to diagnose disorder and timidity in modern treatments of God, and to set forth a positive doctrine, anchored in Scripture, and descriptive of the Lord disclosed in these Biblical events. Webster favored a particular form of Personalism in the Doctrine of God; he focused on who God is, not what Deity is. His Doctrine was a thorough‐going Trinitarianism, giving a wholly Triune account of the Divine Perfections, and offering the daring proposal that the Economy was included eternally in the Perfect Life of the Immanent God.
ISSN:1463-1652
1468-2400
DOI:10.1111/ijst.12342