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In this paper, it is argued that a significant development takes place in the second half of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, a development that we might call the orthodox Christian invention of religion. The paper examines effects of this development as it touches on Jewish religious historyas well.

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The historiography of Judaism in the rabbinic period (together with its implications for the history of Christianity) had been, until quite recently, founded on the assumption that the kind of historical information that rabbinic legends could yield was somehow directly related to the narrative contents that they displayed, which were understood as more or less reliable depending on the critical sensibility of the scholar. This scholarship was not, of course, generally naïve or pious in its aims or methods. A recurring question within such research had to do with the question of the credibility of a given text or passage of rabbinic literature or the recovery of its “historical kernel.” For the method or approach that I take up, all texts are by definition equally credible, for the object of research is the motives of the construction of the narrative itself, that is taken to attest to the political context of its telling or retellingrather than to the context of the narrative's content. All texts inscribe the social practices within which they originate, and many also seek to locate the genealogy of those social practices in a narrative of origins, producing a reversal of cause and effect. This reversal is a mode of narration that is particularly germane to the project of replacing traditional patterns of belief and behavior (“We have always done it this way”) with new ones that wish nevertheless to claim the authority, necessarily, of hoary antiquity—in short, to the invention of orthodoxies.

lively and interesting essay in the volume, and the most important because, though in one sense an essay in method, it breaks out of the confines of method. Evangelical theology must be biblical, Vanhoozer argues, and that means it must be an interpretive enterprise. That does not mean that theologians can simply summarize what Scripture teaches or repeat its statements verbatim. Rather, theology is part of the dramatic dialogue that makes up the history of redemption; it must always be responsive to, correspond to, and participate in the prevenient word of God, but it is responsive in a joyful, creative, eucharistic manner. He envisions evangelical theology by analogy with drama, and offers a "three-act" survey of theology.InAct One, he reformulates the central "Scripture principle" of evangelicalism by arguing that Scripture is a "set of communicative acts" rather than a treasure house of theological propositions. Communicative acts always have propositional force, but they are not only propositions, and reconceiving God's revelation as communicative action helps to overcome false dichotomies between propositional and personal revelation, between word and action. Act Two outlines a program for a "sapiential systematics," whose goal is not merely to communicate theory or to train instrumental reason but to form judgment, to shape readers who possess the "canonieal competence" to deliberate and form judgements in non-canonical situations. This leads to his proposal in Act Three that the purpose of doctrine is "direction" (again, in a theatrical sense), instruction concerning one's proper role in the drama of redemption. Theology trains actors to interpret texts, and interpretation here means embodied action on the stage of life. Vanhoozer's proposal shows none of the fears of "chance" that always plagues discussions of "method"; a theology conceived as dialogue cannot be controlled, defined, delimited, or bounded ahead of time; dialogues are always bound to run over the banks. The metaphor of"drama" is far more fruitful than "belief-mosaic," for it reinforees the fact that the theologian exists to moti