Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God > Status Update

"But there were problems in relating abstractness to concreteness. As it turned out, focusing on higher and higher abstractions was not the road to perfect knowledge It was, in fact,
a path that had many disadvantages. The man who spends his time thinking about "being-in-general,'' ignoring specific features of individual things, will not, it turns out, know very much at all. Someone who thinks a lot about "dogness,' without learning anything about individual dogs, will be ignorant in certain significant respects. Abstract terms do add a generality to our knowledge, but they subtract specificity. In one sense, the higher you go on the abstraction ladder, the less you know about specific things. "Coby' denotes a specific dog; "Welsh corgi' does not. "'Welsh corgi' denotes certain specific properties of a certain kind of dog; "dog" does not. Thus, when a philosopher seeks knowledge by reaching into the higher levels of abstraction, he often fails to say anything important about the world in which we all live, the world of specific realities."

We should "look at Scripture in three different ways that correspond to the metaphors of Scripture as "picture," "window," and "mirror." (i) Scripture may be seen as canon, as an object of interest in itself because of its unique character as the Word of God. As such, it is the object of literary analysis. We analyze its character as a literary object, just as an art critic analyzes the characteristics of a painting—hence the metaphor Scripture-as-"picture." (ii) Scripture may also be seen as a means of showing us God's mighty acts in history for our salvation. As such, it is of interest not only for its own sake but as a means of showing us something else, namely the divine activity described by the canonical text. As such, we can represent Scripture as a "'window,'' something we look through to see something else. Corresponding to the "literary analysis" of Scripture-as-picture, Scripture-as-window is the object of historical analysis. (iii) Finally, we may look at Scripture as a means of meeting our own needs, answering our own questions, addressing our interests—topics of concern to us. To do this is to engage in thematic or topical analysis, and the appropriate metaphor at this point is Scripture-as-mirror."

Frame then correlates Exegetical Theology with Scripture as Painting (Normative Perspective), Biblical Theology with Scripture as Window (Situational Perspective), and Systematic Theology with Scripture as Mirror (Existential Perspective).