Calvin on Scholarship and Ministry
"None will ever be a good minister of the word of God, unless he is first of all a scholar." -- John Calvin
From a sermon on Deuteronomy 5.23-7, as quoted in Ronald Wallace, Calvin's Doctrine of the Word and Sacrament, 120.
Comments
Andrew Hagee.
hageea@uni.edu
Andrew
Understood this way, the relation of dogmatic and practical theology becomes clear. Dogmatic explication coincides always with practical interpretation. When we encounter the Word of God, dogmatic theology and practical theology are the dialectical offspring. The former, we might say, concerns the relation between humanity and God, while the latter concerns the relation between human and human. The "vertical" and the "horizontal," our being and our act, are inseparable and dialectically identical.
Something along those lines is how I would want to construe the dogmatic-practical relationship. And so I agree with Travis about the faith-works ordering, so long as it's rightly understood.