This paper examines the historical processes by which Scripture and theology, once practiced as a unified intellectual and ecclesial activity, became separated into distinct and often competing disciplines. It argues that classic Christian theology understood biblical interpretation, doctrinal reflection, and ecclesial life as mutually informing dimensions of a single theological enterprise. Patristic and medieval authors operated within this integrated framework of the via antiqua, in which Scripture, liturgy, and doctrinal teaching were coordinated expressions of the Church's reception of divine revelation.
The study then traces the gradual fragmentation of this unity through a series of intellectual "revolutions" from the late Middle Ages into modernity. Nominalism reconfigured metaphysics and weakened confidence in the intelligibility of creation; conciliarist and Reformation debates reshaped the relation between Scripture, Tradition, and ecclesial authority; rationalism and critical methods recast the Bible as a primarily human text; and Enlightenment anthropology shifted the locus of certainty from revelation to the autonomous subject. Gabler's distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology did not initiate these developments but crystallized a trajectory already set in motion by broader movements of the via moderna.
The paper also engages Ratzinger's diagnosis of a "biblical interpretation in crisis," which considers the consequences of this separation and raises central questions: What is lost when exegesis is detached from doctrinal coherence, or doctrine from the canonical and liturgical imagination? How did the modern disciplinary configuration reshape the Church's understanding of revelation and theological reasoning?
By offering a synthetic account of the "great divorce," the paper seeks to clarify the historical forces that produced it and to suggest how contemporary theology might envision a renewed integration of Scripture and theology.