‘Theological intelligence’, John Webster remarks, ‘traces the outer movement of God's communicative goodness’ to the triune life in se.Footnote 1 Appropriating such a posture, this essay traces one particular creaturely reality – holy scripture – to its origin in the plentiful life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In dialogue with two Reformed theologians, Karl Barth and John Webster,Footnote 2 I argue that Christian teaching about holy scripture, along with its fitting ecclesial reception, is constituted by a backward reference, namely, the antecedent perfection and plentiful liveliness enjoyed by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Footnote 3 As the triune relations ad intra fund God's gracious self-communicative presence in the Word and Spirit, so the economy of electing grace undergirds the ontology of holy scripture as ‘a field of divine activity’.Footnote 4 Holy scripture is the sphere of Word of God who gives life by the Holy Spirit.
What follows, then, is a dogmatic account of holy scripture that takes seriously God's divine life a se – a vitality or liveliness set forth in the economy of redemption, reconciliation and consummation. Construed negatively, divine aseity establishes the incommensurability of God and creaturely reality by distinguishing, without sundering, scripture and God's self-communicative presence.Footnote 5 God's sovereign majesty and loving-kindness are preserved by situating God's inscripturated word, the creaturely witness of God's self-disclosure, within the economy of grace. The Bible is holy scripture. Construed positively, divine aseity indicates God's life-giving relationship to the canonical texts, and, in turn, establishes scripture as ‘a field of divine activity’. The triune God who lives per se and a se, elects and sanctifies the texts of scripture to serve as intermediaries of God's enlivening instruction. The Bible is holy scripture.
The argument develops in four stages. The first section offers a brief account of the doctrine of divine aseity, with particular reference to its deployment in Karl Barth and John Webster. The second section considers the doctrine of divine aseity as ‘pronobeity’, or God's self-determined freedom pro nobis, with a view to the economy of electing grace.Footnote 6 The triune God who has life from himself wills life for human creatures. God's gracious turn towards creation in the missions of the Son and Spirit determines the ontology of scripture by further characterising God's divine action in, with and under these textual servants. The third section articulates further the positive dogmatic function of divine aseity for bibliology. God the Trinity elects, sanctifies, and employs holy scripture to mediate the viva vox Dei. The fourth section unfolds the significance of divine aseity for reading scripture by focusing on one hermeneutical application. As an act caught up in the life-giving movement of the triune God, scriptural reading is characterised by prayerful anticipation of hearing God's vivifying speech.
Divine aseity
The doctrine of divine aseity is an aspect of God's perfection. Aseity denotes the manner or mode of God's self-existent being in himself as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which anchors God's free bestowal of life in the economic missions of the Word and Spirit.Footnote 7 God lives a se and in se. God the Trinity is ungrounded, unconstrained and infinitely transcends all creaturely being. All that God is God is from Godself and not from another. Webster writes, ‘God simply is, originally, authoritatively and incomparably, and no creature can say, as does God, “I am who I am”’.Footnote 8 Accordingly, divine aseity is reflected in Barth's writings with the tautology, ‘God is God’.Footnote 9 Barth writes,
Dogmatics – in all and each of its divisions and subdivisions, with all of its questions and answers, with all its biblical and historical observations, with all of its formal and material reflections, examinations, and summaries – in its beginning and in its end, in its entirety and in its parts, can say nothing other than this: God is.Footnote 10
God necessarily lives from Godself and in Godself. God is YHWH, ‘I am who I am – I shall be who I shall be’ (Exod 3:14). God is the ‘self-existing, self-living, self-affirming God whose being is his ever-continuing life and whose life is his ever-continuing being’.Footnote 11
Construed negatively, then, aseity is God's independentia or self-sufficiency, which anchors God's free relation to created reality.Footnote 12 Webster explains, ‘God in himself limitlessly exceeds his relation to what he has made’.Footnote 13 God is thus ‘free from all origination, conditioning or determination from without by that which is not Himself’.Footnote 14 God is ‘self-grounded’ and utterly distinct from created reality.Footnote 15
Nevertheless, for Barth and Webster, we must say more. For this mode of independence ‘does not in itself constitute God's freedom but its exercise’.Footnote 16 Barth writes, ‘God's freedom is not in any way identical with God's being over against the world, but is just as operative in His relation to the world as in His being in Himself’.Footnote 17 Further, a purely negative description falters in making aseity a ‘paired’ or contrastive concept, which defines God as God relates to creatures. For this reason, Barth considers divine aseity to be ‘a primarily positive and dynamic concept’, while the notion of God's independence is a corollary of God's life a se.Footnote 18
Christian dogmatics, as a positive science, is the disciplined practice of thinking after God as God has revealed Godself in holy scripture. It is concerned with the particular identity of God as this one. Webster remarks,
When it inquires into divine aseity … theology is not asking ‘what must be true of a god?’, but a rather more unwieldy question: ‘Who is the God, the enactment of whose utter sufficiency as Father, Son and Holy Spirit issues in his creative, reconciling and perfecting works towards his creatures?’Footnote 19
For this reason, Barth and Webster are severely critical of dogmatic accounts of aseity which proceed apologetically, in an endeavour to prove or establish God's existence, or speculatively, in abstraction from divine instruction.Footnote 20 In contrast to these approaches, a dogmatic account of God's aseity serves as a commentary on the triune Lord who possesses fullness of life a se.
Divine aseity, then, denotes not only God's transcendence over creaturely being but positively, the fullness, liveliness and plenitude of God's triune being in se.Footnote 21 God's perfect and antecedent glory is life-full: ‘God is, and therefore God lives, and therefore God moves; and in this being, his life and movement, he is perfect’.Footnote 22 Christ's eternal glory, the apostle teaches, is prevenient, ‘before all things’ (πρὸ πάντων, Col 1:17).Footnote 23 Marius Victorinus, citing John 5:26 (‘For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself’) comments, ‘Therefore, like the Father, so the Son is life and life from himself. Indeed, this is the very life which is power of living for himself and for others, without receiving it elsewhere. Life is, therefore, movement, original movement, unique movement, self-movement, only begotten movement.’Footnote 24 God is self-originating, self-sufficient and self-moving life.
Moreover, a Christianly specific doctrine of aseity indicates the triune glory ad intra.Footnote 25 As this one, God is life in se and per se, and therefore the source of life, and therefore enlivening. God's aseity, Webster remarks, ‘cannot be conceived apart from the mutual relations of Father and Son; its perfection includes the perfect mutuality of the Father's giving of life to the Son who in his turn has life in himself’.Footnote 26 The incarnate Son prays, ‘Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed’ (John 17:5).Footnote 27 This passage speaks of the exchange of self-sufficient glory that precedes God's working ad extra (cf. John 1:1; 1:14).Footnote 28 ‘He [the Son] is, while all other things come into existence’.Footnote 29 God's plentiful life, then, is the perichoretic communion and co-constituting internal relations of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. ‘God a se is the perfection of paternity, filiation and spiration in which he is indissolubly from, for and in himself.’Footnote 30 God's life or existence a se is the three subsisting modes of existence: The Father eternally begetting the Son and, together with the Son, spirating the Spirit, the Son eternally proceeding from the Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.Footnote 31
Divine aseity is operative and enacted in God's transitive acts. Kenneth Oakes explains, ‘God's being in se is the “basis and prototype” of his being pro nobis’.Footnote 32 This modus operandi rests on the asymmetrical correspondence between the triune God's immanent activity and transitive acts. There is a relationship of ‘inseparability, irreversibility and reciprocity between theology and economy’.Footnote 33 Barth explains, ‘God is who He is in His works’.Footnote 34 Put again: ‘What he is there in the heights (which he also is for us) is what he is here in the depths (which he also is in himself).’Footnote 35
To God's absolute aseity there corresponds God's relative pronobeity, God's being pro nobis – the latter fittingly reflecting yet never exhausting the former. ‘God's outer works’, Webster explains, ‘bear a surplus within themselves’.Footnote 36 From God's triune fullness, God ‘bestows himself as the Lord, savior and partner of his creature’.Footnote 37 In this temporal enactment, God continues to act a se. Christopher Holmes writes, ‘God is wholly self-sufficient, wholly himself, in his movement toward humanity’.Footnote 38 In this regard, divine aseity is pronobeity: the free presence of trinitarian love pro nobis. To be sure, the very logic of divine aseity indicates that this glorious movement is gracious.
God freely wills to elect, redeem and reconcile creation. And so, Barth remarks, ‘God is for Himself but He is not only for Himself’.Footnote 39 In the missions of the Word and Spirit, God a se is God pro nobis: ‘In its perfection, [aseity] is also a movement of self-gift in which the complete love of Father, Son and Spirit communicates itself ad extra, creating and sustaining a further object of love. Of himself, God is gracious.’Footnote 40 Divine aseity as pronobeity is revealed most clearly in the economy of electing grace, ‘the communication of God's underived life to the world’.Footnote 41
God's pronobeity
What more can be said of God's gracious communication of life? From eternity past, God the Trinity wills to give life through the missions of the Son and Holy Spirit. ‘God's aseity although it marks God's utter difference from creatures, does not entail his isolation, for what God is and has of himself is life, and that life includes a self-willed movement of love.’Footnote 42 In the Word and Spirit, God overcomes human sinfulness and establishes a sphere of communicative fellowship between God and creatures. Crucially, this temporal bestowal of the life does not compromise divine aseity but specifies its shape: ‘Out of the plenitude and limitless perfection of his own self-originating life as Father, Son and Spirit, God determines to be God with his creatures.’Footnote 43 The history of election, which rests on God's benevolent will, is the field of God's gracious and enlivening employment of holy scripture.Footnote 44
God's self-communicative movement towards the creature is demonstrative of God's underived fullness of life. The economy of salvation reaches back to God's inner life a se. Election, as the ‘first primal movement of God toward man’, is grounded in God's antecedent triune communion.Footnote 45 God's prevenient life a se undergirds the gratuity of God's movement towards the creature. ‘God's holy love for his creatures would be groundless if it were not the outworking in time and space of his eternal being as the holy and loving Father, Son and Spirit’.Footnote 46 Of Godself, God gifts Godself. In this sovereign ἐκλογή, God remains mysterious and utterly free. Election is gracious, ‘according to the purpose of his will’ (Eph 1:5). Webster explains, ‘The divine purpose is eternal, antecedent, wholly spontaneous and unconditioned by any consequent.’Footnote 47 This determination occurs on the basis of God alone and is unhindered by external constraints. Webster again:
God's will is effortless, self-moved, outward movement, flowing from abundance of life and therefore a determination of himself for generosity that does not violate the creature because God is not a rival occupant of some territory in which the creature can also be found struggling to preserve itself.Footnote 48
The God who loves eternally does so determinatively in Jesus Christ; in him God determines to bless the creature. The author of Ephesians locates the act of election ἐν Χριστῷ (Eph 1:3). Further, redemption and inheritance are found ἐν ᾧ (Eph 1:7; 1:11). In the Son, Webster remarks, ‘The divine resolve finds its embodied, temporal climax’.Footnote 49 This temporal enactment of God's plentiful life discloses the reality of grace: ‘The form of God's aseity, the chosen path of the divine being, is specified in the history of Jesus Christ; God's freedom is freedom for fellowship.’Footnote 50 Barth writes similarly,
God is God by virtue of the fact that in His eternal Son, and therefore from all eternity, He was, is, and will be the God of men, who loved, loves, and will love men. He did this, does this, and will do this in freedom, for He is sovereign, He is majesty. He is the omnipotent God. He has aseity, as the old theologians used to say: He is sufficient unto Himself and He needs no other. His loving is in no way a form of needing. But all this is grace.Footnote 51
In this self-enactment of the triune life, we encounter the living Lord who determines to be our God. Yet, we must proceed cautiously here so as to not imply that God's freedom grounds God's love. The freedom of God's redemptive acts is a function of God's perfect life that God enjoys as Father, Son and Spirit. This is, again, part of the reason why a positive construal of divine aseity is requisite. The triune God's predestining decree is God's spontaneous determination to thwart humanity's self-imposed ‘exile of sin’ and bestow life, covenant fellowship with himself.Footnote 52
We may now ask, how does divine aseity, exercised in God's gracious turn towards humankind, inform the doctrine of scripture? First, holy scripture is a function of divine grace. Situating bibliology within this frame of reference overcomes the temptation of ascribing properties to scripture untethered from the reconciling missions of the Son and Spirit. Holy scripture is by virtue of none other than God's gracious, vivifying action. The electing grace of the Father, Son and Spirit constitutes scripture as a sphere of divine activity. The irreversible relationship between God and scripture is freely constituted and, therefore, contingent. Scripture is by virtue of its relation to the Word and Spirit. Unlike God, holy scripture is not a se, not necessary, but ‘wholly gratuitous’.Footnote 53 To say otherwise distorts the qualitative distinction between God and creatures, and so upends theological reasoning. The doctrine of scripture, Webster reminds, ‘must not contravene the eschatological transcendence of the self-revealing God’.Footnote 54 Barth likewise argues that, ‘[God] is not bound to [scripture] but it to Him’.Footnote 55 In this sense, dogmatic teaching on holy scripture preserves the incommensurability of uncreated and creaturely being.
Second, as God elects human creatures to life of fellowship with Godself, so God elects holy scripture as the servant of the economy of redemption. This election occurs despite the frailty of the human witnesses. The act of eternal election – ‘[God] predestined us in love’ (Eph 4b–5b) – is the enactment of triune communion. It is a ‘love which directs itself outwards’.Footnote 56 This movement is gracious – without regard to the worthiness of the object of love – and merciful – with regard to the sinfulness of the object (Eph 2:1–5). Electing grace thus characterises all of God's transitive works: ‘Free grace is the only basis and meaning of all God's ways and works ad extra’.Footnote 57 God elects and (to use Webster's language) ‘sanctifies’ holy writ to be a fitting servant of his presence. It is a gratuitous determination to employ finite realities or ‘earthen vessels’ (2 Cor 4:7), despite their inherent unworthiness, to bear the living voice of the living God. Barth writes, ‘The fact that … His inner glory … becomes outward, the fact that He wills the creation, and the man Jesus as the first-born of all creation, is grace, sovereign grace, a condescension inconceivably tender.’Footnote 58 Likewise, in hallowing textual realities to serve his purposes, ‘God's eloquence and intelligibility condescend to creaturely form’.Footnote 59 Sacred scripture is at once a contingent, historically located text and a sanctified instrument of divine address. By grace, God superintends the words of scripture to be fitting auxiliaries of his enlivening presence. T. F. Torrance writes, ‘In Holy Scripture … we have to do with the majestic Word of the Lord God which he has stooped to speak in the frail human words of the Holy Scriptures thereby constituting them through his grace as the unique authoritative written Word of God to mankind.’Footnote 60 The triune God miraculously overcomes human sinfulness in electing, inspiring and preserving the canonical texts. What more can be said of God's deployment of holy scripture?
‘A field of divine activity’
Holy scripture, taken up into the economy of electing grace, is no static or lifeless collection of texts, but the sphere of the resurrected Son and the Holy Spirit, the vivificantem (‘giver of life’). This movement is demonstrative of the triune bliss and, as such, enlivening. Just so: the doctrine of aseity undergirds scripture's dynamism as the ‘herald of the viva vox Dei’.Footnote 61 For as Webster notes, ‘The perfection of God's life as autotheos issues in his works as Father, Son and Spirit in creation, reconciliation and redemption.’Footnote 62 Consequently, God's agency in scripture is a se and as such, it is life-giving. Barth writes,
Either God speaks, or he does not. But he does not speak more or less, or partially, or in pieces, here a bit and there a bit … If God speaks, then God speaks, and we have to do with the one Logos that the prophets and apostles received, the one revelation in the incarnation which the people of the Bible know and attest as either promised or manifested.Footnote 63
The risen Christ speaks by his Spirit through the elected servant of divine revelation. Holy scripture is, in Webster's expression, ‘a field of divine activity’.Footnote 64 Proceeding from the Father, the living Word of God speaks as one who is a se.Footnote 65 Representing a principal theme of Barth's dogmatics, Webster writes, ‘“God is Lord in the wording of his Word” ([Church Dogmatics] I/1, 139) – that is, as God's self-utterance makes itself heard as human speech, it does so in its full dignity, spontaneity and aseity (self-existence) as the Word of the Lord.’Footnote 66 Divine aseity characterises God's speech in, with, and under holy scripture. Such is the force of Barth's well-known formula, ‘God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself.’Footnote 67 God is God in this bestowal of divine instruction.
God's vivifying speech encompasses past events, present reality and future expectation: ‘God is never an echo’.Footnote 68 Concerning Christ's past speech, the author to the Hebrews writes, ‘In these last days [God] has spoken to us by his Son’ (Heb 1:2). In the present, the gospel is proclaimed by the Holy Spirit, who says, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion’ (Heb 3:7).Footnote 69 Moreover, in expectation and hopefulness, this present reality carries forward to the future: ‘exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today”’ (Heb 3:13). In every instance, Christ speaks by his Spirit as the ὁ ζῶν (Rev 1:18; cf. John 6:51). Webster remarks, ‘As the living one, Jesus is alive with divine life. His resurrection is thus not simply the prolongation of creaturely existence, but the demonstration of the fact that in him there is life, that he has life in and from himself, in semetipso and so a se.’Footnote 70
The Son shares in the triune life, and so ‘the Son gives life to whom he will’ (John 5:21).Footnote 71 Therefore, God's agency in, with, and under scripture is not merely an inert deposit or past happening, but rather, a present reality whereby the risen Christ witnesses to God the Father by the Holy Spirit. This miraculous and vivifying occurrence is beyond human control or manipulation and so conditions all readerly activity. ‘The door of the Bible texts can be opened only from within.’Footnote 72 Even as the doctrine of God digresses into obscurity insofar as it floats free from the discrete revelation of Jesus Christ, so bibliology suffers a similar fate insofar as it is untethered from the continued agency of the elected and risen Christ, who has life ἐν ἑαυτῷ (John 5:26). Webster explains, ‘[Christ's] exaltation is the condition for and empowerment of his unhindered activity and address of creatures. This address takes the form of Holy Scripture.’Footnote 73 Jesus Christ, now exalted ‘above the heavens’ (Heb 7:26) ‘at the right hand of God’ (Acts 2:33), sends the Holy Spirit as a witness.
The Holy Spirit, as ‘the giver of life’ (τὸ ζῳοποιοῦν, John 6:63) and ‘the Spirit of holiness’ (πνεῦμα ἁγιωσύνης, Rom 1:4), testifies to the resurrected Christ through sacred scripture. Webster states, ‘Scripture is the Spirit's auxiliary’.Footnote 74 The Holy Spirit is the one ‘in whom the resurrection power of the Father and the resurrection life of the Son are unleashed in creation’.Footnote 75 In the Spirit's eternal procession from the Father and the Son, the Spirit is life.Footnote 76 Webster explains, ‘The Spirit is the one who is sent by the Father in the name of the Son (John 14:26) and by the Son from the Father (15:26) and so acts towards creatures as the life-giving Spirit (Rom. 8:2; 2 Cor. 3:6)’.Footnote 77 The Spirit, with the Son, gives life by illuminating scripture. The Holy Spirit's internal testimony is an integral element of the ontology of scripture as the Word of God. T. F. Torrance remarks,
We are swept along by the mighty driving wind of the Spirit into direct encounter with the wholly other reality of God who may be heard only though his own self-witness and be understood only through the eternal Word that he himself is and has caused to become incarnate in the world, made flesh in the midst of Israel in Jesus Christ.Footnote 78
The ‘Spirit of Christ’ (πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ, 1 Pet 1:11) once at work among the prophets and apostles now bears witness to the ‘living and abiding Word of God’ (λόγου ζῶντος θεοῦ καὶ μένοντος, 1 Pet 1:23), thus fulfilling Christ's promise: ‘the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live’ (John 5:25).
The life-bestowing movement of the Word and Spirit is the greater reality in which the Christian reader finds herself.Footnote 79 Webster writes, ‘As we hear Scripture read, we are in the presence of one who speaks to us by his Holy Spirit. These ancient texts are not curios, little windows on an antique religious culture into which we peer from afar. They're the speech of Christ to us.’Footnote 80
Hearing the viva vox Dei
To recapitulate the path taken thus far. The triune God who lives a se speaks life through the prophetic and apostolic auxiliaries of divine teaching. Scripture thus serves God's triune movement of underived life pro nobis. As the triune God's elected and sanctified instrument, scripture mediates the viva vox Dei. In light of the previous discussion, this section asks, ‘How does the doctrine of God's aseity – the underived, abundant life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – determine the church's task of reading sacred scripture?’ As it edges towards the significance of a metaphysics of scripture for its ecclesial reception, the present discussion concentrates on one feature of scriptural reading which follows from Christian teaching on divine aseity: the prayerful expectation of hearing God's life-bestowing address.
Divine aseity has a constraining function for scripture's ecclesial reception. It sponsors a distinction between created and uncreated being, between God's life a se and creaturely life ab extra. Webster explains,
Created being, time and movement are just that: created. If this is so, they cannot be understood as self-standing elements. Their existence and nature must be understood by reference to their cause or origin, by virtue of which they have and are held in being and are directed to their perfection – that is, by reference to the missions of divine love undertaken in time by the eternal Son and the Holy Spirit, and to the inner divine love, wisdom and power on which those missions rest.Footnote 81
The sheer difference between uncreated and created being is the sine qua non of all creaturely activity. Theological theology, then, with its due concentration on God's life a se, depicts the church's reading of holy scripture by prioritising divine action as the condition and ground of creaturely acts. For this reason, the section above outlined the action of the Son and Spirit which establishes holy scripture as a field of life-bestowing address.
Scriptural reading proceeds from God, the principle of creaturely being. The ecclesial task of reading scripture, then, is neither self-initiated, self-willed nor self-derived but stands in desperate need of ‘divine assistance’.Footnote 82 The renewal of human intelligence, with which fallen humans hear the divine Word, derives from the determination of the triune God to restore fellowship with humankind. More closely, ecclesial hearing of the Word is engendered by the Holy Spirit who awakens, quickens and illumines fallen intellects to read rightly.Footnote 83 Webster writes, ‘God's Word does not stun creatures into immobility; it moves them, it is a path (Ps. 119:35), a divine movement summoning and ruling a corresponding creaturely movement’.Footnote 84 This regenerative grace – ‘Grace does not devastate creatures but rectifies them and sets them to work’ – encloses scriptural reading.Footnote 85 Heralding the divine Word, scripture is a sphere of blessing.
Corresponding to God's gratuitous action is that basic act of creaturely existence: prayer. Invoking God, the church anticipates God's vivifying speech. First, then, as God's ‘absolute life’ undergirds scripture as a field of divine activity, so it establishes an expectancy on the part of scriptural reader. Again, divine aseity is God's ‘underived fullness of life that is lovingly shared with a cosmos that can only ever enjoy life derivatively’.Footnote 86 Knowing that the God who has life in se gives life in the reconciling missions of the Son and Spirit, the church anticipates God's vivifying speech in, with and under God's prophetic and apostolic witnesses. The church's anticipation of God's bestowal of life takes the form of ‘exceeding attentiveness’ to the elected instrument of divine speech.Footnote 87 Webster writes, ‘Here, not there, we are to expect God's address of us, and so here, not there, is where we will wait.’Footnote 88 To speak of anticipation signals both the dependence of the creature on the Creator as well as the need to attend to scripture as divine address. The reader of scripture, then, stands as one addressed, awakened, quickened. In this way, ‘We listen to Scripture as the living voice of the living Christ’.Footnote 89
Second, divine aseity demands that scriptural reading is prayerful. ‘Prayer’, Webster reminds, ‘is the humbling and reorientation of our agency’.Footnote 90 Creaturely acts are derived, having their being from another. ‘[Prayer] accompanies and permeates every human act, including the act of the mind. Invoking God, we enact our created nature.’Footnote 91 For this reason, prayer is a requisite of properly ordered scriptural reading. The basis of this prayer is God's life a se which enacts limitless grace: ‘Needing nothing from any other, God is sheerly beneficent, since there is nothing he can gain.’Footnote 92 Respecting this principle, the interpreter invokes the triune God to give life – the capacity to receive his Word. God's abundant life undergirds scripture as a field of divine activity, and just so, establishes a prayerful expectancy and readiness to hear the viva vox Dei.
Conclusion
Holy scripture is God's elected instrument to extend fellowship between God and humankind through the Word and Spirit. Scripture is thus situated in the wider scope of God's communicative action, which in turn finds its origin in the prevenience of God's triune life. On this basis, scripture is the sphere of God's life-giving movement of the Word and Spirit. Such is to follow Webster's dogmatic principle: ‘To expound any Christian doctrine is to expound with varying degrees of directedness the doctrine of the Trinity; to expound the doctrine of the Trinity in its full scope is to expound the entirety of Christian dogmatics.’Footnote 93 Scripture and its ecclesial reception are no exception. The triune God speaks as the living Lord of holy scripture by sending the Word and Spirit to create faithful readers of scripture. All of this is grace – the unmerited, unconditioned, unrestrained life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which is perfectly possessed in se and perfectly set forth ad extra.
