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Sanctified By God's Word: Towards A Websterian Ontology Of Scripture And Church, Benjamin J. Lappenga

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John Webster’s account of Scripture grants the canonical texts an ontology determined by their divine use, discusses Scripture as an aspect of the doctrine of revelation rather than the church, and above all preserves the capacity of God’s Word to question and form believers. Yet, Webster’s proposal has met resistance from theologians who find his accent on sola scriptura inconsistent with his claim that interpretation (not simply “text”) has ontological force as a part of “sanctification.” This paper asks whether it is possible to retain a robustly Websterian account of Scripture while at the same time denying that Scripture’s primacy …