I am somewhat of a latecomer to the world of 'theological' exegesis. Several books have come out recently in which the authors explain what it is (or at least what their particular take on it is). Other books have been published in which a specifically theological approach to the biblical text is used and celebrated. I have haphazardly danced around the periphery of the topic and the discussion surrounding it, entering the arena here and there, but with no clear objective for engaging with the material. Recently while reading through the inimitable John Webster's essay Hermeneutics in Modern Theology: Some Doctrinal Reflections found in his book Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics, I came across his five theses from which he works in constructing a distinctly theological hermeneutic (pp.57-58). I believe implementing these will go a long way towards providing one with the 'tools' for a properly and robustly theological exegesis:
1. There is no single thing called 'understanding,' and those traditions of modern theology which accept responsibility for articulating or responding to any such phenomenon have in fact usually been recommending a certain anthropology as a transcendental condition for Christian theology. Much greater headway can be made by adopting a low-level approach, in which hermeneutics is as it were 're-regionalized,' and the foundational task of elaborating a hermeneutical phenomenology of interpretive subject is abandoned.
2. the chief task of such a re-regionalized theological hermeneutics is not the construction of better theory to ground Christian reading of the Bible but construction of theory which makes sense of that reading by depiction. Its main business, in other words, is making a map of particular, historical, social and spiritual space within which this interpretation occurs, without worrying about inquiring into the (anthropological) conditions of possibility for there being such a space at all.
3. Such a depiction of the 'space' of Christian reading of the Bible is a matter of making a Christian theological construal of the field of reality within which such reading occurs. It is, in effect, a hermeneutical ontology which is required, although the governance of theology requires that this ontology be quite other than a religiously-tinted metaphysic or phenomenology.
4. Accordingly, the language, conceptuality and modes of explanation of a Christian construal of the hermeneutical situation will not be pre-doctrinal. It is a theological theory which is required, not an essay in the interpretation of Christian symbols understood as penultimate expressions of something more humanly basic. As theological theory it is enclosed and determined by the positum of Christian theology--particularly, the Credo of the church, ultimately the Word of God--to which it is responsible and in response to which it is a movement of intellectual self-articulation.
5. Most of all: theological hermeneutics will be confident and well-founded if it says much of the reality which is the axiom of all Christian life and thought: the living, speaking reality of the risen Jesus Christ present in the Spirit to the assembly of God's people.
