I should say, I’m realizing that I’m still quite traditional myself; but not scholastic (a mix of Webster, Vanhoozer, TFT and then some old school thrown in for good measure).

Well, just so you know; I read your mini-bio here at the blog, I noticed that quote from Turrettini . . . I’m onto you, Duby ;-) !

I’m open to recognizing some holes that should be filled in by the kind of work that Webster is doing. I would add (in part just to express where I’m coming from) that I’m not as down on Reformed orthodoxy as others can be (a psychological study might reveal that my liability to OCD tendencies sets me up to delight in fine distinctions and clarifications :). Even if the Reformed scholastics didn’t achieve the kind of thing that Webster has outlined, they do talk about Scripture in relation to the economy when, for example, they talk about its perspicuity and emphasize that it’s meant to make us wise unto salvation and doesn’t depend for its efficacy on our understanding every detail of the whole Bible. Having said that, yes, let’s still see more books like Webster’s because we’ll benefit tremendously from them!

No, I don’t see an either/or; but wouldn’t you say that post-Reformed orthodox folk have an imbalance here, and that in fact there is an either/or — or maybe more accurate, an “only?” I mean there seems to be little attention paid to the points that Webster highlights; and emphasis is given to the fact that Scripture is our epistemic ground (w/o providing a thick account of Scripture’s ontology in the economy of grace) by the post-Reformed. The post-Reformed seem to abstract Scripture from a soteriological framework, and see Scripture through a purely intellectualist approach.

I would agree that it’s important to consider Scripture in the order of being even as it serves as the source for our knowledge of God. I brought up the importance of Scripture as the epistemic starting point primarily because it sounded to me like you were setting up an either/or between that and a dogmatically-informed ontology of Scripture.

And yet, this seems precisely to be what Webster is after; i.e. in providing a dogmatically thick ontology of scripture that seeks to eschew the usual trad understanding. I don’t think Webster is challenging the idea of Scripture’s role in providing epistemological resource, but instead that his dogmatic relocation acknowledges the role that an order of being should have on an order of knowing. And I think it is at this juncture that Webster provides a very fruitful, constructive move in construing an ontology of scripture that the trad approach does not.

I think that’s an important point to work through. As I said, I really appreciate Webster on Scripture, but I’m not sure I would want to oppose locating Scripture within the economy of grace and conceiving of it as the epistemological foundation for theology. Both seem vitally important to me. Scripture arises from God’s desire to reveal himself to us and to bring about our salvation. Yet, because of the ascension, we don’t have access to Christ except as he is presented to us in Scripture, which seems to imply that Scripture is the starting point for the knowledge of God, even if Christ himself is actually the decisive locus of God’s revelation.