Doctrine and Christian living, faith and life, "orthodoxy" and "orthopraxis" cannot be separated, held in balance, or even considered apart from each other. If I tell the truth apart from love and piety, I am not "doing the truth" at all–and consequently I am not telling the truth, according to Scripture….
Theologizing, in this sense, can never be "objective." It is created out of covenant commitment to the covenant God. Sovereign grace bestowed creates reciprocal responses of faith, love, and obedience. In creating a response, grace testifies to divine initiative. That the response created is reciprocal testifies to the human obligation involved….
As we have said elsewhere, too often theology has lost this praxeological dimension. It has become known as an abstract discipline, not as a "conscientizing" instrument. Brevard Childs reminds us that the eschatological "now" of our stance between the already of Christ's first coming and the not yet of His second coming can be manipulated to separate the history of redemption from our place with Peter, Paul, and John in that history [Biblical Theology in Crisis, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970, pp. 123-28]. If theology is to be biblical theology, its focus is not simply the self-assurance of an exegetical job well done. it calls for the reappraisal of those demands and solutions we originally brought to it at the initiation of our participation in the "hermeneutical spiral." Theologizing is the task of each new generation standing in its particular moment of history, it searches the Scriptures in order to discern the will of God and strives to receive guidance on its way toward the obedient life that must be pursued within the concrete issues of the world's concrete cultures.
Harvey Conn in
Eternal Word and Changing Worlds (thanks to Peter Enns at
a time to tear down | A time to Build Up)
We recognize, therefore, that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.
