Contents: chapter I. John webster: a darker playwright for renaissance england

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Contents: 
CHAPTER I. JOHN WEBSTER: A DARKER PLAYWRIGHT FOR 
RENAISSANCE ENGLAND ................................................................................ 4 
1.1. Biography of John Webster .......................................................................... 4 
1.2. John Webster: A Darker Playwright for Renaissance England ..................... 9 
CHAPTER II. TOWARD THEOLOGICAL THEOLOGY: TRACING THE 
METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF JOHN WEBSTER .............................. 12 
2.1.Reading Theological Theology .................................................................... 12 
2.2. Principled, Biblical Reasoning ................................................................... 17 
2.3. Theological Theology Again ...................................................................... 22 
2.4. Principles toward a Theological Theology .................................................. 28 
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 31 
LIST OF USED LITERATURA .......................................................................... 33 

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INTRODUCTION 
For thirty years, John Webster established himself as a leading theologian 
and shaped a variety of conversations regarding topics as diverse as the doctrine of 
God, Holy Scripture, ecclesiology, and creation. Having previously held significant 
positions at Wycliffe College in Toronto, the University of Oxford, and the 
University of Aberdeen, he held a chair at the University of St. Andrews until his 
death in May 2016. He supervised dozens of doctoral students, many of whom now 
play key roles in a variety of theological faculties around the globe. With Colin 
Gunton, he founded the International Journal of Systematic Theology and 
remained at the helm as editor nearly twenty years later, even as that publication 
has established itself at the front rank of its kind. With Kathryn Tanner and Iain 
Torrance, he edited The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology. He served in a 
variety of other capacities in major book series and journals of repute: as series 
editor for Studies in Systematic Theology (T&T Clark) and for Great Theologians 
and Barth Studies (Ashgate), and as a member of the editorial board for Scottish 
Journal of Theology, Current Issues in Theology (Cambridge), Journal of 
Reformed Theology, Studies in Theological Interpretation (Baker Academic) and 
New Studies in Dogmatics (Zondervan Academic). His influence has been recently 
noted by his peers with the publication of a festschrift upon his 60th birthday.
Professor Webster’s work began with reception of modern Protestant 
theology. He introduced the English-speaking world to the Lutheran systematic 
theologian and philosopher of religion, Eberhard Jüngel. This first phase of his 
published work took the form of a published doctoral dissertation that remains the 
standard account of Jüngel’s work as well as two volumes of edited essays by 
Jüngel and another edited collection of essays responding to his theology. Years 
later, he also put together a new translation of Jüngel’s work on Karl Barth’s 
doctrine of the theology, God’s Being Is in Becoming, and introduced his 
polemical treatise on justification for its release in English.

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His second sustained work of reception focused on the theologian whom 
Jüngel drew upon most, the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Webster 
offered the first significant analysis of the final fragments of the Church 
Dogmatics and their ethical bearing on the Christian life in his Barth’s Ethics of 
Reconciliation. He then followed this work a few years later with a collection of 
essays surveying more widely on Barth’s Moral Theology. Whereas the first book 
focused tightly upon one relatively small section of Barth’s voluminous text, the 
latter volume showed a sense of the whole and an ability to appreciate its dogmatic 
and moral architecture. Webster also offered two volumes that have proven 
significant in drawing new readers to Barth, releasing an introduction to his 
theology entitled Barth and editing the Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth. A 
few years later, he continued his own work in offering close readings of particular 
texts by Barth as he examined some of his earliest lecture cycles in Göttingen and 
explored their formative role for his own theology as an exegetical and Reformed 
theologian; these essays were published as Barth’s Earlier Theology.

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CHAPTER I. JOHN WEBSTER: A DARKER PLAYWRIGHT FOR 
RENAISSANCE ENGLAND
1.1. Biography of John Webster 
Though John Webster is considered one of the major figures of Jacobean 
drama, relatively little is known about his life. He is best known for writing the 
tragedies The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, the two most frequently 
staged Jacobean plays not written by Shakespeare. 
Webster was probably born close to 1578 in London, the son of a 
prominent coach-maker and member of the prestigious Company of Merchant 
Taylors. Webster most likely went to the Merchant Taylors’ School. He would 
have presumably begun his study at this well-regarded institution in 1587. He 
served as the official poet of the Merchant Taylors Company and designed a lavish 
pageant for the investiture of Sir John Gore, a Merchant Taylor, as the Lord Mayor 
of London. 
His work in the theater began with the writing of collaborative plays in the 
early 1600s, an activity that he continued throughout his career, though he remains 
best known for the works he wrote individually. Between 1602 and 1605, he is 
believed to have collaborated on five plays, including Caesar's Fall, Lady Jane, 
Westward Ho!, and Northward Ho!. 
Around 1604 or 1605, Webster married Sara Peniall, who was about ten 
years his junior. Within about a year, their first son was born, also named John. It 
is not known how many children they had, but it is clear they had a large family 
and were of good standing in their community. They presumably had enough 
money to live comfortably, as Webster did not publish anything more until The 
White Devil in 1612. 

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The Duchess of Malfi, generally considered Webster’s best play, was first 
staged by the prestigious King’s Men, probably in 1614, and seems to have been 
well-received even then. His father probably died sometime before 1615, but not 
much else is known about this period of Webster’s life. 
Webster probably wrote Guise, a lost play, around that time, presumably 
followed by the tragicomedy The Devil’s Law-Case, which was written sometime 
before 1622 and was the last of his non-collaborative plays. This is generally 
agreed to be the most difficult of Webster’s plays to assess, in part because it is 
almost never staged. The rest of the collaborative plays associated with Webster 
are almost impossible to date, and in some cases the extent of his association with 
them is uncertain. 
Webster died sometime before November 1634; no more specific 
information is available. As is the case with many of his contemporaries, Webster's 
reception since his death has been inconsistent, even though his work has never 
entirely dropped off the radar. Since the 1920s, a great deal of critical work has 
been published on his plays, focusing primarily on The Duchess of Malfi and The 
White Devil. His most popular plays, these plays are dark and disturbing works 
that set the stage for the Gothic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries. 
For other people named John Webster, see John Webster (disambiguation). 
John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632) was an English Jacobean dramatist best 
known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are 
often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and 
career overlapped with Shakespeare's. 
Webster's life is obscure and the dates of his birth and death are not known. 
His father, a carriage maker also named John Webster, married a blacksmith's 
daughter named Elizabeth Coates on 4 November 1577 and it is likely that Webster 
was born not long after, in or near London. The family lived in St Sepulchre's 

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parish. His father John and uncle Edward were Freemen of the Merchant Taylors' 
Company and Webster attended Merchant Taylors' School in Suffolk Lane, 
London. On 1 August 1598, "John Webster, lately of the New Inn" was admitted to 
the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court; in view of the legal interests evident 
in his dramatic work, this may be the playwright. Webster married 17-year-old 
Sara Peniall on 18 March 1605 at St Mary's Church, Islington. A special licence 
was needed to permit a wedding in Lent, as Sara was seven months pregnant. Their 
first child, John Webster III, was baptised at the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West 
on 8 March 1606. Bequests in the will of a neighbour who died in 1617, indicate 
that other children were born to him. 
Most of what is otherwise known of him relates to his theatrical activities. 
Webster was still writing plays in the mid-1620s, but Thomas Heywood's 
Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (licensed 7 November 1634) speaks of him in the 
past tense, implying he was then dead. 
There is no known portrait of Webster. 
Early collaboration 
By 1602, Webster was working with teams of playwrights on history plays, 
most of which were never printed. They included a tragedy, Caesar's Fall (written 
with Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton and Anthony 
Munday), and a collaboration with Dekker, Christmas Comes but Once a Year 
(1602). With Dekker he also wrote Sir Thomas Wyatt, which was printed in 1607 
and had probably been first performed in 1602. He worked with Dekker again on 
two city comedies, Westward Ho in 1604 and Northward Ho in 1605. Also in 
1604, he adapted John Marston's The Malcontent for staging by the King's Men. 
The major tragedies 
Title page of The Duchess of Malfi, 1623 

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Despite his ability to write comedy, Webster is best known for two 
brooding English tragedies based on Italian sources. The White Devil, a retelling 
of the intrigues involving Vittoria Accoramboni, an Italian woman assassinated at 
the age of 28, was a failure when staged at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612 (published 
the same year) being too unusual and intellectual for its audience. The Duchess of 
Malfi, first performed by the King's Men about 1614 and published nine years 
later, was more successful. He also wrote a play called Guise, based on French 
history, of which little else is known, as no text has survived. 
The White Devil was performed in the Red Bull Theatre, an open-air 
theatre that is believed to have specialised in providing simple, escapist drama for 
a largely working-class audience, a factor that might explain why Webster's 
intellectual and complex play was unpopular with its audience. In contrast, The 
Duchess of Malfi was probably performed by the King's Men in the smaller, indoor 
Blackfriars Theatre, where it might have been appreciated by a better educated 
audience. The two plays would thus have been played very differently: The White 
Devil by adult actors, probably in continuous action, with elaborate stage effects a 
possibility, and The Duchess of Malfi in a controlled environment, with artificial 
lighting and musical interludes between acts, which allowed time, perhaps, for the 
audience to accept the otherwise strange rapidity with which the Duchess could 
have babies. 
Late plays 
Webster wrote one more play on his own: The Devil's Law Case (c. 1617–
1619), a tragicomedy. His later plays were collaborative city comedies: Anything 
for a Quiet Life (c. 1621) co-written with Thomas Middleton and A Cure for a 
Cuckold (c. 1624) co-written with William Rowley. In 1624, he also co-wrote a 
topical play about a recent scandal, Keep the Widow Waking (with John Ford, 
Rowley and Dekker).[6] The play is lost, but its plot is known from a court case. 
He is believed to have contributed to the tragicomedy The Fair Maid of the Inn 

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with John Fletcher, Ford and Phillip Massinger. His Appius and Virginia, probably 
written with Thomas Heywood, is of uncertain date. 
Reputation 
Webster's intricate, complex, subtle and learned plays are difficult, but 
rewarding and are still frequently staged. Webster has gained a reputation as the 
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist with the most unsparingly dark vision of 
human nature. Even more than John Ford, whose 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is also 
bleak, Webster's tragedies present a horrific vision of humanity. In his poem 
"Whispers of Immortality", T. S. Eliot memorably says that Webster always saw 
"the skull beneath the skin". 
Webster's title character in The Duchess of Malfi is presented as a figure of 
virtue compared with her malevolent brothers. She faces death with classic Stoic 
courage in a martyr-like scene which has been compared to that of the king in 
Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II. Webster's use of a strong, virtuous woman 
as his main character was rare for his time and marks a deliberate reworking of 
some of the original historical events on which the play was based. The character 
of the Duchess recalls the Victorian poet and essayist Algernon Charles 
Swinburne's comment in A Study of Shakespeare that in tragedies such as King 
Lear Shakespeare had shown such a bleak world as a foil or backdrop for virtuous 
heroines such as Ophelia and Imogen, so that their characterisation would not seem 
too incredible. Swinburne describes such heroines as shining in the 
darkness.[citation needed] 
Webster's drama was generally dismissed in the 18th and 19th centuries, 
but many 20th-century critics and theatregoers have found The White Devil and 
The Duchess of Malfi brilliant plays of great poetic quality. One explanation for 
the change of view is that the horrors of war in the early 20th century had led to 
desperate protagonists being on stage again and understood. W. A. Edwards wrote 
of Webster's plays in Scrutiny II (1933–1934) "Events are not within control, nor 

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are our human desires; let's snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of 
tight corners, and meet the end without squealing." The violence and pessimism of 
the tragedies have seemed to some analysts close to modern sensibilities.[ 
1.2. John Webster: A Darker Playwright for Renaissance England 
In the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, a young boy seen feeding a live 
mouse to a cat identifies himself as John Webster (1580-1634). When Will 
Shakespeare asks the boy what he thought of 
Titus Andronicus
, Webster replies, "I 
like it when they cut the heads off. And the daughter mutilated with knives… 
Plenty of blood. That's the only writing." 
While hyperbolic, Hollywood, and of course fictional, the joke about the 
budding playwright 
John Webster
 is grounded in reality. His plays would introduce 
a new grittiness to the English stage. He was a playwright unafraid to grapple with 
the darker sides of mankind: whether in 
The White Devil
 (1612) or 
The Duchess of 
Malfi
 (1614), Webster was willing to deal out gruesome ends to his characters. 
The White Devil tells the story of the affair between the Duke of Brachiano 
and Vittoria Corombona (both married to other people), encouraged by the 
pandering of Vittoria's brother Flamineo. Brachiano has his wife and Vittoria's 
husband murdered, and Vittoria is tried for the murder of her husband and sent to a 
convent for penitent whores. The banished Count Lodovico, in love with 
Brachiano's now dead wife, returns and avenges her death with an impressive array 
of murders. Vittoria's dying words are, not unreasonably: 
In The Duchess of Malfi, the widowed duchess marries her social inferior, 
Antonio, against the wishes of her two brothers. Her brothers' spy in her court, 
Bosola, reveals her pregnancy to her brothers. When troops are sent to collect the 
Duchess, Antonio, and their children, the Duchess and her two youngest children 
are captured. She is tortured with waxen images of her husband and and oldest son, 
who appear dead, then she and her children are executed. Bosola becomes 

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disgusted with his masters' cruelty and decides to kill the brothers, but accidentally 
kills Antonio. Bosola then murders one of the Duchess' brothers, and he and the 
remaining brother stab one another to death. 
Little is known about John Webster's early life. He was born not long after 
1577, the son of a freeman of the Guild of Merchant Taylors, and Webster likely 
attended the Merchant Taylors' School; he may have continued working in his 
father's office even after he began his career as a playwright. He wrote a number of 
great plays, including The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Devil's 
Law-Case. He also collaborated with other playwrights, particularly on his 
comedies, including: Westward Ho (1604) and Northward Ho (1605) with 
Thomas 
Dekker
; 
Anything for a Quiet Life
 (1621) with 
Thomas Middleton
; and A Cure for 
a Cuckold (1624) with William Rowley. On a personal note, Webster was no 
stranger to the extra-marital sex that appears in his works. His first child was born 
only two months after his marriage to Sara Peniall in 1606. 
Although Webster's plays include adultery, murder, treachery, and political 
machinations, he doesn't write that way just for the shock value. His plays reveal 
real, albeit unpleasant, truths about people: he brings out issues of class divide, the 
nature of justice, love and lust, the role of religion, political obligation, sibling 
relations, and immorality in the courts. Webster creates characters that both are and 
are not sympathetic, complex in a manner not unlike real human beings. All the 
while he masterfully crafts the play's structure to prolong suspense. 
To hear a wonderful lecture about the questions of sexual autonomy and 
class distinction, listen to 
Emma Smith's podcast on The Duchess of Malfi
. 
Also check out Smith's podcasts on Thomas Dekker (
The Shoemaker's 
Holiday
 and 
The Roaring Girl
), with whom Webster collaborated on Westward 
Ho and Northward 
Ho, 
and 
Thomas 
Middleton
, 
with 
whom 
Webster 
wrote Anything for a Quiet Life.In Collection(s):
John Webster
 
Reuse this essay:
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Cite:John Webster: A Darker Playwright for Renaissance England by Kate 
O'Connor 
at 
http://writersinspire.org/content/john-webster-darker-playwright-
renaissance-england. Published on 03 April 2012. Accessed on 24 April 2023. 
If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: John Webster: A Darker 
Playwright for Renaissance England at http://writersinspire.org/content/john-
webster-darker-playwright-renaissance-england by Kate O'Connor, licensed as 
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK). 

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CHAPTER II. TOWARD THEOLOGICAL THEOLOGY: TRACING 
THE METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF JOHN WEBSTER 
2.1.Reading Theological Theology 
In 1995 Webster delivered a lecture entitled “Reading Theology” upon his 
installation as Ramsay Armitage Professor of Systematic Theology at Wycliffe 
College in Toronto. Several of his abiding concerns are evident already in this 
lecture. The lecture begins by noting the significance of the “textual deposit” 
which Christian theologians read, as well as the modern biases against such a 
notion and practice (in particular, looking at excerpts from Descartes’s Discourse 
on Method and Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy). Webster notes that 
Hegel’s concern for traditioned inquiry runs against the grain of Cartesian 
intellectual pursuit, which tends toward the ahistorical. “It is not simply that when 
they browse in the library Descartes is skeptical and Hegel is fascinated, but rather 
that texts and the conventions of schooling with which they are associated are for 
Hegel a shape for the mind, whereas for Descartes they are an obstacle.” Webster 
argues that modern theology has struggled with competing visions for the 
reflective self’s nature, then, and he suggests that Hegel offers a better way 
forward. Over against Descartes, Hegel might help us realize we never begin, 
much less beginning anew, for we always receive a gift prior to any action or work, 
intellectual or otherwise. 
Yet Webster suggests a need not simply to find the right philosophical 
approach and apply its parameters to the pursuit of divinity, but to offer what he 
calls here “a theological account of theology” which necessarily “describes its 
nature and functions by invoking language about God, describing the human 
actions of creating and reading theology in relation to divine agency.” Webster’s 
first proposal addresses theology, church, gospel, Scripture, and their relations: 
“Theology serves the Word of God by assisting the Church to remain faithful to 

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the gospel as it is manifest in Holy Scripture.” Here the issue of faithfulness is 
highlighted, and he notes the primacy of “hearing the gospel and the Bible” over 
any intellectual act of construction or response. The most apt term, then, for 
theological work is exegesis, in as much as it honors our receptive posture and the 
specifically textual character of that reception. In so doing he commends the 
reformational concern for catechetical practices in theological training, 
highlighting not only Calvin’s famous purposes for preparing his Institutes of the 
Christian Religion but the lesser known program of Zwingli laid out in his On the 
Education of the Youth. 
He extends his argument, however, with a second proposal that follows 
with many parallels and one distinctive difference from the first proposal. 
“Theology serves the Word of God by assisting the Church to remain alert to the 
challenge of the gospel as it is manifest in Holy Scripture.” Webster points to the 
role of theology here as challenge, the single word that differs from the preceding 
point. He elaborates: “Theology is the tradition discriminating between itself and 
the Word of God, acknowledging the contingency and, therefore, openness to 
revision of the ways in which it has sought to represent the gospel.” Because the 
Word always comes before and remains distinct from even our most honored 
affirmations, it always challenges any sense of finality shy of glory. Webster 
grounds this discriminating or challenging role of God’s Word not in human sin, 
finitude, linguistic indeterminacy, or any other common argument, but ultimately 
in the reality that “it is the living voice of God, who, as it were, stands on the far 
side of all our attempts to convert God’s Word into a mere intensification of our 
natural existence.” These two ways of theology’s operation are summed up by 
Webster as encompassing “a descriptive or ‘locative’ mode, in which theology 
serves the Church’s need to state its identity, and a critical or ‘utopian’ mode, in 
which theology serves the Church’s need to resist cultural sclerosis.” Further, he 
immediately argues that “reading will be near the centre of the theological school’s 
mission,” specifically, reading “Scripture and the classics of Christian response to 

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Scripture.” While he notes that some would see such an educational program as 
restrictively and impracticably intellectualist, he argues that just the opposite is 
true, for engagement of texts enables cultures to “articulate, reflect on, and criticize 
themselves” and to enable them to thoughtfully inhabit ministerial functions.
Webster draws significant implications for theological schools and their 
relation to the broader university culture, though he returns to this theme at greater 
length in Oxford inaugural lecture upon assumption to the Lady Margaret 
Professorship in Divinity in 1997. That lecture was entitled “Theological 
Theology” and offered a much more direct comparative assessment of his earlier 
proposals with the reigning intellectual culture of university theology and religious 
studies programs.
Beginning broadly, Webster there noted that “Christian theology is not a 
serious factor to contend with in thinking about the university’s intellectual agenda 
and its modes of enquiry.” Why? First, the modern university has marginalized 
moral and religious concerns. Second, religious and theological work has taken 
upon itself the normative models and practices of university life. In other words, 
the discipline has been threatened from the outside and, in so doing, has assumed 
the form of that which is outside. The result? “[T]he more theology invokes 
theological doctrine to articulate its nature and procedures, the more precarious has 
been its tenure in the dominant institutions of intellectual enquiry.”
“Theological Theology” then presented that “anthropology of enquiry” 
operative in the modern university culture, one where “learning is a generic human 
enterprise” and that the “most basic act as a reflective self is that act in which I 
summon the world into my presence, as it were commanding it to appear before me 
by making a representation of it.” This anthropology has encouraged the decline 
of Bildung (formation) and the rise of Wissenschaft (science), a turn from the 
pursuit of the good viewed in a particular shape and toward good intellectual 
practice according to universal protocols. The newly minted Lady Margaret chair 
of divinity suggested that this retrogression was not owing solely to forces external 

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15 
to the discipline of divinity but also largely (chiefly?) to the internal development 
of the discipline itself which he depicts as “its steady alienation from its own 
subject matter and procedures.” He sketched the genealogies of Michael Buckley 
and Eberhard Jüngel to give some shape to this broad judgment of disciplinary 
decline, what can only be depicted as an analysis that the salt of theological inquiry 
had lost its saltiness.
Not content simply to gesture toward other genealogies, the lecture then 
offered two case studies wherein particular doctrines had become sites of “disorder 
within Christian dogmatics” and instances for observing the “hesitancy of theology 
to field theological claims.” First, the migration and expansion of the doctrine of 
revelation was highlighted. He argued that “the shift . . . in post-Reformation 
dogmatics—a shift described by Ronald Thiemann as one ‘from assumption to 
argument’—is not simply a matter of making explicit basic principles of 
Reformation thought. Quite the opposite: it often takes the form of the replacement 
of a doctrine of God by epistemology.” Second, he describes how “the resurrection 
shifts from being an object of belief to being a ground of belief.” In both instances, 
apologetic concerns based on the wider anthropological assumptions that 
knowledge can be discerned by any objective observer has led to re-situating and 
re-scaling these doctrines for new purposes. 
The earlier focus upon texts and “reading theology” are not lost, for 
Webster then turned to contrasting two modes of theological inquiry. He speaks of 
a turn from what he here calls “citation” to scientific, universal enquiry as the 
“dominant mode” of argument.
35
 Citation worked by way of constant reference to 
fundamental texts. Indeed, “theology’s literary forms and intellectual architecture, 
its rhetoric and its modes of argument, are controlled by proximity to these 
sources.” A shift to universal enquiry, however, “involves retiring the rhetoric of 
commentary, paraphrase and reiteration, for those ways of doing theological work 
cannot serve the goal of enquiry, which is proof underived from the terms of the 
tradition itself.”

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16 
A complex decline narrative is presented: “It is not simply that theology 
has failed to keep pace with modernity (in one sense, it has kept pace all too well); 
nor simply that theology was turfed out by rationalism (for theology itself 
contributed a great deal to its own decline.” Such external threats are matched by 
internal malformations as well, for “internal disarray incapacitated theology all the 
more because it left theologians with such a reduced intellectual capital to draw 
upon as they sought to make judgments about the ideals, academic and spiritual, 
which presented themselves for their attention with such institutional force.”
And a broad future is envisioned or called for, not simply one in which 
theology is allowed or tolerated within the panoply of intellectual disciplines. Such 
would be to abandon the notion of the university as indeed unified in any sense, if 
one discipline were tolerated in spite of its supposed failure to meet intellectual 
standards. Rather, Webster argues that theology, by being more theological, might 
actually provoke challenge to the regnant understanding of human inquiry. Here 
Webster speaks of the “distinctiveness” of theology and locates it “not simply in its 
persistence in raising questions of ultimacy, but rather in its invocation of God as 
agent in the intellectual practice of theology.” Theology not only keeps values on 
the table, as it were, but it reminds us that God serves the whole meal. 
The lecture concludes with brief attention to the project of Johannes 
Wollebius. Webster noted that Wollebius identified God himself as the “principle 
of the being of theology,” that is, its material principle, and the Word of God as the 
“principle by which it is known,” that is, its formal principle. A realist theological 
approach must be upheld, but this commitment must be matched by a rigor to focus 
as a discipline upon identity description of God himself, not growing bored with 
such concern and seeking solace elsewhere. And God’s agency must be 
acknowledged through the auxiliary of his Word, wherein theological inquiry is 
given fresh legs as its object is also shown to be its subject. 
This first phase of principled exposition regarding the nature and practice 
of theology, then, has identified major concerns: God, Scripture, church, culture, 

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17 
and reading. Webster engaged with classic texts marking the modern tradition of 
rational inquiry as well as sought to identify ways in which such intellectual habits 
had infiltrated and permeated much modern divinity. By way of response, he 
pointed first to a need to fix upon divine agency not only as the object of our 
inquiry but as the context for such intellectual pursuit and second upon the need to 
challenge the supposedly universal and objective truths sought by science and to 
pursue distinctive and competing truths and visions by fixing upon the particular 
texts of the Christian theological tradition. 
2.2. Principled, Biblical Reasoning 
We can observe a second phase in Webster’s methodological development, 
as we consider two texts published during his tenure at the University of Aberdeen. 
We will first look at his presentation of “Biblical Reasoning” wherein he returns to 
concerns about the anthropology underneath any theological method but also 
presses on to speak more fully of the economy of God’s grace as well as the 
specific modes of reason undertaken in dogmatics and exegesis. We will then 
consider his essay on the “Principles of Systematic Theology,” wherein he returned 
to those basic points drawn from Wollebius in “Theological Theology” regarding 
the material and noetic principles of theology. We will see that his basic concerns 
are sustained here, though new resources are brought to bear upon his argument 
and new wrinkles or details are added to the picture. 
Without leaving the structure of the divine economy behind, Webster then 
turns to locate reason within that framework as well. Here the counter-cultural 
nature of Christian accounts of reason is brought out explicitly, wherein the notions 
of human nature (of a non-plastic sort), human teleology (as received from God), 
and divine law are shown to fly in the face of either critical or post-critical 
philosophy in the (late) modern era. The Christian account distinctively defines 
reason as (1) contingent and, further, given by God; (2) defined by a metaphysical 
nature given by God rather than sheer human will (as in voluntarism); and (3) 
darkened by sin and reinvigorated by the reconciling work of the Son. A small 

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18 
print excursus then distinguishes Webster’s dogmatic account of reason from other 
recent iterations, namely, the semiotic approach of Oliver Davies, which is 
impressive for its constant reference to divine presence but too restrictively 
invested in the doctrine of creation apart from needful attention to divine 
transcendence, on the one hand, and the economy of sin and redemption, on the 
other hand, and the incarnational or advent-oriented approach of Paul Janz, which 
fails to affirm the freedom and aseity of God in its attempt to honor the immanence 
of the divine.
Finally, then, the essay returns to its beginning: “Christian theology is 
biblical reasoning. It is the redeemed intellect’s reflective apprehension of God’s 
gospel address through the embassy of Scripture, enabled and corrected by God’s 
presence, and having fellowship with him as its end.” Reflecting on the same 
statement about ontological and noetic principles drawn from Wollebius in 
“Theological Theology,” three statements are offered by way of analysis here: (1) 
“Scripture is the cognitive principle of theology in the sense that Scripture is the 
place to which theology is directed to find its subject matter and the norm by which 
its representations are evaluated”; (2) “the ontological principle of theology is God 
himself—not some proposed entity but the Lord who out of the unfathomable 
plenitude of his triune being lovingly extends towards creatures in Word and 
Spirit”; and (3) “the cognitive principle is grounded in the ontological principle,” 
namely, the “cognitive and revelatory force [of Holy Scripture] is not that of a 
textual deposit but of a loving voice and act of rule.” Thus, theology has to be 
characterized as a determinate sort of inquiry, what he will elsewhere call a 
positive science that is governed by its specific object. 
The determinacy of theology’s inquiry shapes its exercise in two ways. 
“Exegetical reasoning is, most simply, reading the Bible, the intelligent (and 
therefore spiritual) act of following the words of the text.” Following here takes the 
form of “intellectual repetition” and paraphrase, honoring that positive character of 
this science, for theology is not exercised a priori (“from the earlier”) but a 

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19 
posteriori (“from the latter”). As in both “Reading Theology and “Theological 
Theology,” so here the primary mode of theology in this vein is arguably 
commentary, that exercise of carefully tracing and teasing out the significance of 
determinate texts which predate the intelligent agent. “Dogmatic reasoning 
produces a conceptual representation of what reason has learned from its exegetical 
following of the scriptural text.” Dogmatics does not do away with scripture but 
offers a new idiom for mapping it: “seeing Scripture in its full scope as an 
unfolding of the one divine economy; seeing its interrelations and canonical unity; 
seeing its proportions.” The essay concludes by speaking to a commonality 
between exegetical and dogmatic reasoning, namely, that they are both “indirectly 
ascetical disciplines” such that in their exercise, “the intellect is drawn away from 
idols.”
“Biblical Reasoning” brings to bear two complements to Webster’s earlier 
focus on a counter-cultural approach to a distinctively Christian understanding of 
the nature, ends, and practices of theology. First, it focuses upon the divine 
economy and specifically locates Holy Scripture within that orbit; this bespeaks a 
move made at length in his earlier Scottish Journal of Theology lectures that were 
then published as Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch. Secondly, it also locates the 
work of reason—more specifically, the very practice of theology itself—within the 
realm of sanctification, such that theology is not merely about sanctification but is 
itself a part of God’s sanctifying work. Grace, then, is not only the content of 
theology but also the context for its actual exercise. Webster had unfolded these 
ideas earlier in “The Holiness of Theology.” Without shirking the earlier 
confrontational approach vis à vis modern intellectual culture, then, “Biblical 
Reasoning” has focused even more specifically upon Scripture and reason as 
historical, human, creaturely realities and simultaneously noted the need to locate 
them ontologically and teleologically within a deeper divine economy. 
Second, the following year saw the publication of “Principles of Systematic 
Theology” in an issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology that 

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20 
included a number of programmatic essays. Webster’s essay traces theology back 
from human thought of God to human teleology and eventually to the very nature 
of God.
Webster expands on earlier comments to note here that 
the Holy Trinity is the ontological principle (principium essendi) of 
Christian theology; its external or objective cognitive principle (principium 
cognoscendi externum) is the Word of God presented through the embassy of the 
prophets and apostles; its internal or subjective cognitive principle (principium 
cognoscendi internum) is the redeemed intelligence of the saints.
He observes that speech about principles depends on the notion that being 
precedes knowing; further, the order and relation of being(s) shapes the order and 
sequence of knowing. We do not make knowledge, but knowledge is given unto 
us. Thus, 
the idiom of the principles of theology simply schematizes the history of 
God with creatures in its communicative aspects. Far from lifting theological work 
out of temporal processes of knowledge, it aims to identify the agents and acts 
(infinite and finite) which together constitute those processes as they are suspended 
from God’s self-knowledge and shaped by his self-manifestation.
First, we must attend to divine knowledge of the divine, that is, to the 
wisdom and knowledge possessed by the triune Godhead. “No one knows the Son 
except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son”; “The Spirit 
searches everything, even the depths of God”. As Webster summarizes, “God’s 
knowledge is an aspect of the perfect fellowship of his triune life, in which each 
knows and is wholly known by each.” But God’s knowledge is not solely God’s 
knowledge, even if it is only God’s own, for this unique God is communicative (a 
term which most plainly can be rendered as “making common certain goods with 
others”). “The possibility of Christian theology thus lies in what God alone knows 
about himself and yet communicates by disclosure—in God and the Word of God.”

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21 
While human capacity must be denied, divine communication is the 
glorious affirmation of the gospel. “God so tempers his knowledge that it assumes 
fitting created form. This accommodated form is Holy Scripture, and, by 
derivation, its reception and contemplation by the saints.” Decrying modern 
naturalistic accounts of the Bible, Webster insists that we return these texts to their 
place in the divine economy. Here Webster brings in the classic distinction made 
between archetypal and ectypal theology in the Protestant scholastics, wherein 
God’s theology and human theology are related as a source and its stream. He then 
depicts three sorts of ectypal theology: before the fall (ante lapsum), after the fall 
(viatorum), and in paradise to come (beatorum). As in “Biblical Reasoning,” he 
offers a sketch of spiritual history to trace these distinctions across the terrain of 
the ages as depicted through the lens of the canonical scriptures. 
What of systematic theology, in particular, if it is located amidst that 
broader account of theology in the economy of sin and grace? Webster addresses 
its object, arrangement, and relation to Holy Scripture in turn. First, “the matter of 
systematic theology is primarily God and secondarily all things in God, the latter 
being a derivative though no less necessary object of systematic 
reflection.” Admittedly, in this phase of the economy, the primary object of 
theology (God) is “only indirectly accessible” and, thus, consideration of other 
things in relation to God is not mere addition but needful contemplation for the 
sake of actually learning of God himself. Second, “because the matter of 
systematic theology is the ineffable God and the movement of goodness in which 
he extends towards creatures, an account of Christian doctrine can be only 
provisionally systematic.” The order ought to merge the “dramatic and the 
synthetic, in order to present to best effect the acts which make up the outer 
movement of that history, the agents by whom they are enacted, and the origin and 
telos of the whole.”
Third, “the divine Word—that is, the ascended Son of God speaking to 
creatures in the Spirit’s power through the biblical testimonies—is the external 

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22 
cognitive principle of systematic theology. Systematic theology must at every point 
return to this principle as a commentary returns to its text.” Webster responds to 
Geerhardus Vos’s essay, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a 
Theological Discipline,” pointing out that Vos severed systematic theology from 
the historical shape and sweep of the canon (assigning such texts only to biblical 
theology, a newly distinguished discipline in its own right). Webster finds such 
errors to flow from treating scriptural writings as “raw material” rather than an 
interim step in human illumination (in the long journey unto beatitude), from 
treating theological concepts as “improvements upon Scripture,” and, ultimately, 
from neglecting the ineffability of theology’s object. By way of repair, Webster 
calls for “immersion in the texts and thought patterns of the Christian tradition” 
which are “best expressed by the substantial presence of exegesis.” Indeed, he 
presses further to say that “Scripture must be the terminus ad quem of systematic 
theological analysis, not merely its terminus a quo.” In other words, theology does 
not merely go from Bible to concepts, but those concepts—themselves biblically 
derived in judgment, if not in specific terminology—are meant to return us to the 
Bible anew. 
2.3. Theological Theology Again 
In his last phase, Webster both returned to earlier concerns—theological 
theology again—as well as further developed areas of inquiry that were relatively 
underdeveloped in his methodological oeuvre, specifically, the virtues and vices of 
human theological inquiry. We can observe both continuity and discontinuity, then, 
by attending to two recent lectures. First, we will consider his inaugural lecture 
upon assumption of a Chair of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews in May 
2014, at which time he spoke on “Intellectual Patience.” Second, we will attend to 
his recent lecture on “What Makes Theology Theological?” which expands upon 
his “Theological Theology” lecture almost twenty years prior. We can see that the 
emphasis upon the material order and, thus, divine provenience remains unabated; 
we can also see a continued concern to think about cognitive order in both its 

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23 
external and internal registers and, thus, to attend to the economy as the field of 
both Word and Spirit’s work. But we see more attention given to the resultant work 
of those divine persons by greater focus upon the persons, natures, ends, and 
virtues/vices of the humans in this economy of grace. 
First, “Intellectual Patience” offers “an anatomy and commendation of an 
intellectual virtue” precisely because “one of the chief parts of divinity’s apostolic 
office in the university is the articulation of a metaphysics and morals of 
intellectual inquiry, presenting and enacting a version of the good intellectual 
life.” Webster observes that the faculty of divinity, alone among the four medieval 
faculties, has struggled for legitimacy in the modern university, and it has 
oftentimes found acceptance only by absorbing a “naturalist metaphysics of 
inquiry” or by “reinventing itself as the historical and literary science of religious 
phenomena,” which has brought a remarkable “scholarly harvest” and yet has also 
brought a “heavy cost.” Such themes are familiar to anyone who has read “Reading 
Theology” and “Theological Theology” from his first phase. Here Webster 
proposes another posture toward the modern university: “Precisely in its 
unconventionality, a theological metaphysics and morals of inquiry will try to 
illuminate the life of the mind and provide intelligibility to natural experience and 
action . . . by tracing intellectual life to its source in divine benevolence, by which 
alone its nature and duties are disclosed.”
As in his prior phases, Webster notes the anthropology underlying different 
approaches to intellectual inquiry. Here he insists that “the life of the mind is 
natural, that is, inherent in our nature and faculties as the kind of beings that we 
are.” Mental activity accords with our make-up and experience, precisely because 
we are made to be thinking creatures. Yet he notes that inquiry’s natural-ness 
cannot be equated to it being an “instinctive” posture; rather, it must be 
intentionally cultivated so as to activate the “potentiality of our nature.” To address 
such intentional cultivation he draws on the language of virtue, that is, of a “stable 
property of character which disposes its possessor to operate well in some realm of 

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24 
human activity.” While he notes the existence of moral virtues, he focuses 
specifically upon intellectual virtues in this essay. Those “intellectual virtues 
underlie intellectual faculties, powers, skills and practices, and animate excellent 
intellectual performance,” that is, “intellectual performance which moves in 
estimable ways to worthy intellectual ends.” He offers a schematic description of 
four types of intellectual virtues: (1) those “which dispose us to labour to acquire 
intellectual goods,” such as studiousness; (2) those “which dispose us to receive 
the intellectual goods,” for example, humility; (3) those “which fit us to contribute 
to and profit from common intellectual life,” like impartiality; and (4) those “which 
ready us to deal with difficulty in the pursuit of intellectual goods.” Intellectual 
patience fits into this final category of virtues. 
Webster beings with a consideration of patience more broadly and a 
definition generally: “Patience is that excellence of character by which, for the 
sake of some good end, we tolerate difficulties, and encounter obstacles to present 
happiness with equanimity, collectedness and steadiness of purpose.” He notes the 
regular appearance of patience in biblical paraenesis (citing ) and in the literature 
of early Christian moral teaching (noting discussions in the works of Tertullian, 
Cyprian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Thomas, John Owen, and Thomas 
Goodwin). He finds a focus upon the distinctiveness of patience in the Christian 
matrix (what Revelation will refer to as the “patience of the saints,” in ), over 
against its pagan iterations in late antiquity, in such texts. 
Why is patience distinctive amongst Christians? Webster notes that it is “an 
excellence of reconciled creatures.” First, it is an excellence for creatures, those of 
us who receive life and blessing from another at his behest. Second, it is an 
excellence of those who have been lost to sin and found by the righteous and holy 
God who has intervened by Word and Spirit to reconcile us unto himself. As with 
the essays in his second phase, so here he locates a reality as requiring 
consideration within the full history of creation, fall, and redemption. Such 

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25 
consideration reminds us that “human patience is an effect of a divine cause.” That 
broad statement merits at least a brief unpacking, which Webster offers: 
Patience Christianly understood has distinct causes and acting subjects. It is 
not a straightforward effect of human nature. This is because, on the one hand we 
are creatures and so only live and move through another’s love, and, on the other 
hand our created nature has suffered such depredation that, though some aptitude 
for patience remains as a residue of our integral state, its completion is out of our 
reach.
Again, notice that it is a creaturely excellence and natural: we are patient, 
and such patience accords with our nature. But it is “not a straightforward effect” 
of our nature; it is not “instinctual” or obvious, but it must be elicited by God. 
Why? Both our given nature and, more so, our “depredation” through sin leave its 
reality to the action of God. 
Patience, a human virtue, must be traced back or reduced to divine action. 
Webster here is highlighting its gracious character. And it is not merely an 
impersonal gift, for he specifically comments upon its Christological and 
pneumatological derivation. It is the cultivation of human habits and character 
traits, of a very manner of being morally speaking, which flows from triune 
engagement of the human self. Webster’s Augustinian and Reformed heritage finds 
expression here in the way in which he insists upon reducing even a human 
excellency and moral quality ultimately to divine enactment. 
And yet, “in patience, as in all things, God so moves us so that we live and 
move.” He refines the language of causality here to speak of God’s enactment 
being an internal work rather than merely an extrinsic imposition. He does admit, 
of course, that God works extrinsically; for example, he speaks of the “exemplary” 
work of God in calling us toward patience through the example of God, of Christ, 
and of the saints. But God’s gracious work toward our being made patient does not 
find its completion in such didactic or even exemplary work. God works within us 

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as well, and he does so in such a way that we are not stifled but elicited to genuine 
human action befitting our given nature. This dynamic has marked any number of 
essays by Webster in recent years; he draws here upon patristic teaching (notably 
Augustine), its medieval development (especially in Thomas and Bonaventure), 
and its Reformed elaboration (especially as found in Calvin, Owen, Bavinck, and 
Barth). Elsewhere he has made much of the language found in 
Ephesians 1
 to this 
point, highlighting the appearance of the phrase “in him you also” as well as its 
elaboration throughout the first chapter.
The lecture proceeds to address the objects, ends, operations, opposed vices 
of patience, and injunctions to its exercise. Noting that his focus upon 
distinguishing features of specifically Christian patience may seem “isolationist,” 
he nonetheless observes that this is both unavoidable but also not simply to divide 
Christian and pagan patience. It is unavoidable, because one must “indicate a 
whole anterior realm of moral nature and culture, of goods and intentions, to which 
the moral act gives practical assent and expression.” But it is not the whole story, 
for “the moral worlds of believer and unbeliever . . . exist at different stages in the 
history of human renovation.” The lecture concludes by reflecting upon the 
“temporal character of our created intellect,” which requires the exercise of 
patience over the journey; upon our “insufficiency” and “dependence” as creatures, 
requiring our “acknowledgement and embrace of this condition” in patience; and, 
finally, upon the social character of our intellectual action which demands certain 
postures in our exercise of intellectual agency. Notably, “patience involves 
deference to traditions of inquiry, the remains and echoes of companions long 
gone.”
Second, Webster spoke at a day conference in St. Andrews on the question 
“What Makes Theology Theological?” In providing his answer, he both elaborated 
upon and furthered his earlier advocacy of purportedly “Theological Theology.” In 
this brief essay, Webster only adduces cultural observations regarding modernity in 
his concluding remarks. The bulk of the argument focuses instead on identifying 

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the nature of Christian theology by tending to its object, principles, ends, and 
requisite virtues. 
As to the object of theology, Webster returns to his earlier emphasis upon 
“God the Holy Trinity and all other things relative to God.” First, he addresses God 
in and of himself and then God in his works as the primary object of theological 
study. This twofold identification had occurred earlier in the second phase of 
Webster’s work, where he emphasized the need to say rather more than is 
commonplace about the inner life of God. He has argued that such is needful lest 
we wind up talking of divine works (particularly external works of the Godhead) 
without any depth, that is, eternally speaking. So he argues for the need to do some 
speculative theology in this regard, directed at knowing God in himself, though he 
never suggests that we reach that speculative end by idolatrous means, that is, from 
any conduit other than God’s own self-revelation through the works of his gospel 
economy. While he affirms a speculative task in terms of content, then, we might 
say that he agrees with Calvin and the Reformed emphasis on opposing a 
speculative method. Yet the knowledge of God also includes God’s works, which 
he has performed in our midst and through which he, in and of himself, is only 
ever known. Again, though, “the nature of God’s works ad extra cannot be grasped 
without immediate reference to God’s intrinsic self-satisfaction which is their 
principle or ground; put differently, the temporal divine missions are intelligible 
only as derivative from the eternal divine processions.”
Because the knowledge of God himself includes his external works, and, 
furthermore, because “all things are from him, through him, and unto him” , 
theology also includes knowledge of everything else. “Theology treats things other 
than God, not because there is a world, but because there is God and there is a 
creation.” Thus, things are spoken of theologically only in as much as they relate to 
God; “theology is a comprehensive science, a science of everything. But it is not a 
science of everything about everything, but rather a science of God and all other 
things under the aspect of createdness.” Matters of sequence and proportion are 

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shaped by understanding this double aspect of the object of theology, as well as the 
way in which “All things” are included in theology’s study only as part of the gaze 
we give unto God himself. Webster notes that we oftentimes find this firm focus 
upon God and on other things only in him to be difficult, and he does note cultural 
challenges in that regard (naturalism and the like). But he also raises spiritual 
maladies to the fore in giving a “spiritual history of this neglect: complacent 
satisfaction with consideration of creatures and creaturely histories apart from their 
cause; preference for surfaces rather than origins; reluctance to allow the intellect 
to follow divine instruction and be conducted to God. Such defects impede 
theological inquiry; sometimes they defeat it.”
Webster then turns again to the principles of theology. First, he addresses 
the reality that God is a “God of knowledge” and that theology is foremost a reality 
within the Godhead: Father, Son, and Spirit know one another fully. Second, the 
triune knowledge, while singular and unique, is not incommunicable, for God is a 
self-revealing God who makes common (that is, who communicates) his own 
wisdom to his creatures. Here Webster discussions the divine missions of the Son 
and the Spirit, noting that their internal processions extend outward into 
expressions of divine love and beneficence whereby God’s own wisdom comes to 
the possession of human creatures in the Son and by the Spirit. Such divine 
instruction is “not immediate, but mediate, served by creaturely assistants and 
accommodating itself to the forms of creaturely intelligence. 
2.4. Principles toward a Theological Theology 
Webster had not announced publicly the scope and sequence of his 
forthcoming multi-volume systematic theology, much less published that material, 
at the time of his death. Other works of significance were, as noted earlier, 
forthcoming as well. Any assessment is, therefore, duty-bound to note that he 
considered his published work as provisional to those intended works. Further, 
some have suggested that Webster had undergone a shift, having previously 
endorsed a more consistently Barthian theology and recently turned to divergent 

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sources, principles, and architectonic schema. It has even been suggested that he 
has begun leading a “New Reformed Scholasticism” in recent years.
We have observed developments as his methodological principles have 
been enunciated in these three phases. Specific concern to tease out the schematic 
shape of the economy for thinking about God’s Word and about human reason 
came to mark his approach in the second phase and has been sustained to this 
point. For instance recent work has been willing to pair his earlier emphasis upon 
Holy Scripture as the sanctified word employed by the divine voice with a more 
recent return to teaching on inspiration of texts drawn primarily from post-
Reformation Reformed Orthodoxy (with affirmation of its verbal, plenary 
character and with correction offered to the criticisms of that tradition by Barth and 
Torrance). Similarly, this has put flesh on his earlier calls to offer an anthropology 
of inquiry that attends to the Christian difference, as noted in the very first phase of 
his work but not elaborated therein in any way. Similarly, the need to attend to the 
perfection of God in and of himself has marked his work in the second and third 
phases, extending his comments on how God is the ontological principle of 
theology. In the second phase, this primarily took the form of considering God’s 
aseity. In the third phase, this has also taken specifically Trinitarian form by 
elaborating the doctrines of divine processions and divine missions, drawing 
primarily from the Thomist tradition. Finally, his anthropology of inquiry has been 
extended in the most recent phase to include extended reflection upon virtues and 
vices which attend the intellectual calling of the theologian. Whereas practices and 
cultural values were noted early and often in the first phase, specific concern to 
extend reflection upon moral characteristics has developed over years and has 
drawn on patristic ascetical and medieval and Puritan spiritual writings in recent 
years. 
Yet such additions and extensions do not negate the underlying continuity 
of Webster’s methodology through its various phases and multiple iterations. 
Indeed, it is that abiding continuity of approach that renders an interim report such 

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as this one viable, with his magnum opus and several other major books still 
forthcoming. Each of these adjustments truly is an extension to and elaboration of 
his concern to pursue a theological theology whereby the object determines the 
shape of inquiry, precisely because the object is active and communicative. 
Theologians doing work in these and other areas of inquiry will need to attend to 
Webster’s thought; awareness of the underlying continuities as well as developing 
layers of concern, which have been sketched in this introductory essay, will enable 
more fruitful engagement and critical reflection. 

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