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Klaas Schilder’s Historical Consciousness and Redemptive-Historical Interpretation

Redemptive-historical interpretation aims to limit the primary meaning of Scriptural passages to their relation to and significance for God’s unfolding acts in time. Accordingly, redemptive-historical interpretation might be argued to see divine revelation as fundamentally offering certain type of historical consciousness—a consciousness of the very real acts of God in history and what he intends by such acts for humanity’s salvation. While figures like Richard Gaffin and Gerhardus Vos have long been associated with redemptive-historical interpretation, Sidney Greidanus offers 20th century Dutch theologian Klaas Schilder as an equally significant contributor to the methodology. Schilder, a dogmatic theologian known among English speakers for his theology of culture or ecclesiology, gave extensive attention to debates over hermeneutics and the preaching of historical texts in church sermons. This essay aims to explore the relationship between Schilder the theologian and his lesser-known contribution to redemptive-historical interpretation. The thesis pursued in this essay is that there is a natural link between Schilder’s emphasis on historical consciousness, which is the key to understanding his theology of culture, and interpreting and preaching Scripture as God’s ordered to the mode of God’s self-revelation in history. According to Schilder, the significance and meaning of history and humanity’s historical-situatedness set implications for the nature of the church’s mission and Christian cultural labor. But the clues to history can only come the God’s perspective on history, which is offered by Scripture and in fact is the very nature of what Scripture is and how it functions: to provide God’s own unfolding articulation of the meaning of history and historical events as they unfold by his hand. This study therefore aims to build on growing interest in Klaas Schilder’s work by contributing a crucial link between two discussions of Schilder’s thought that heretofore have not been investigated.

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Recent Publications

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