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God the Teacher: John Webster’s Doctrine of Revelation after Modernity

John Webster’s early theological formation was shaped within the currents of twentieth-century German Protestant theology, particularly under the influence of Karl Barth. In his early doctrine of revelation, Webster retrieves Barth’s theological ontology, locating revelation within the doctrine of the Trinity. Adopting a distinctly modern grammar of divine self-disclosure, Webster portrays revelation as an aspect of the triune God’s being-in-act. Revelation is God’s self-disclosure–God’s trinitarian being enacted in the economy of grace. Recent scholarship—including work by Richard Brash and Michael Allen—has noted a turn in Webster’s later theology away from a Barthian grammar of revelation. However, the extent of this development along with its implications for systematic theology remain underexplored. Building upon their observations, this essay argues that the late Webster frames the doctrine of revelation primarily as a divine pedagogy. Revelation is not God’s immanent being enacted, but a providentially ordered pedagogy in which God the teacher addresses, instructs, and forms his people. In so doing, Webster reframes the concept of revelation from ontology to epistemology, supplanting the earlier conception of revelation as God’s self-enacted being. This reframing marks a genuine development in Webster’s theology. The argument develops in three stages. The first section traces Webster’s early reception of Barth’s doctrine of revelation as “ingredient to the being of God.” The second section identifies the nature and extent of Webster’s late-career development on revelation cast in terms of a providentially ordered pedagogy. The third section evaluates the dogmatic consequences of Webster’s later doctrine of revelation, attending both to the limitations of his earlier account and the constructive promise of his late, pedagogical account of divine instruction. In the area of theology proper,framing revelation as divine self-disclosure risks collapsing God’s perfect life in himself into the divine economy of nature and grace. In the area of anthropology, casting revelation as a purely intrusive, existential event fails to account for the pedagogical conditions of human learning and spiritual formation. In overcoming these limitations, Webster’s late-career teaching offers a path forward for those seeking to retrieve classical dogmatic categories and move beyond the constraints of modernity.

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