Stephen Charnock on Christ and the theodrama

I know that posting quotations isn't proper blogging, which should involve at least some original writing. It's just typing stuff out. But I couldn't resist this one, which I came across when reading A Puritan Theology: Doctrine for Life, by Joel Beeke and Mark Jones. Puritan divine, Stephen Charnock sounds a bit like a seventeenth century version of theodramatist-in-chief, Kevin Vanhoozer (interviewed here). Charnock places Christ at the dramatic centre of the communicative action of God,  

Christ is the stage wherein all the attributes of God act their parts. (From Charnock, The Knowledge of Christ, in Works; 4:139). 

As Vanhoozer more recently put it,

Thinking of doctrine in dramatic rather than theoretical terms provides a wonderfully engaging and in integrative model for understanding what it means to follow – with all our mind, heart, soul and strength – the way, truth and life embodied and enacted in Jesus Christ. (From Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 16.)

Admittedly, for Charnock  drama is a one-off handy metaphor, rather than the key idea that shapes his theologizing, but is is interesting to note this Puritan precedent for Vanhoozer's  theodramatic proposals.

Kevin Vanhoozer's follow up to Remythologizing Theology is  Divine Action and Providence, his contribution to Zondervan's promising looking 'New Studies in Dogmatics' series.