Panel: SCRIPTURE & THEOLOGY 2025: EXPLORING METHODOLOGICAL INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BIBLICAL STUDIES AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY



35.9 - HOW TO KNOW GOD? INDICATIONS OF METHOD ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND THEOLOGY FROM A GREAT UNPUBLISHED BOOK BY ROMANO GUARDINI

AUTHORS:
Osto G. (Higher Institute of Religious Sciences of Padua ~ Padova ~ Italy)
Text:
The Archives of Romano Guardini (1885-1968) contain hundreds of unpublished typescript pages. During the years of his teaching in Berlin (1923-1939), he deepened and implemented his own epistemology in the relationship between the Bible and Systematic Theology, starting with his interest in historical-critical methods (A. Harnack, E. Troeltsch) and the rediscovery of the centrality of Revelation (K. Barth, K. Adam). A large, almost completed book of 540 typewritten pages is entitled 'Die christliche Erkenntnis in Bewusstsein des Neuen Testamentes'. The first part of the unpublished work deals with questions of theological gnoseology and biblical hermeneutics, proposing a balanced and original approach that, after a century, we could call 'canonical biblical theology'. The development of the wide-ranging essay then presents the exploration of the 'knowledge of God' starting from the style of Scripture, which itself becomes a theological style both on the 'objective' side - the deepening of God's Revelation - and on the 'subjective' side, i.e. the life of the believing subject, whose existence - in faith, love and hope (last three chapters of the work), becomes the existential concretisation of the lived 'knowledge' of God, that transforming and integral 'knowledge' as it is understood by the Bible where to know is to enter into deep relationship.