Virtuous reading

John Webster ( Word and Church: Essays in Church Dogmatics ) notes the limits of current theories of hermeneutical “virtues.”  While they push in the right direction by reminding us that “fitting reading of a canonical text requires the acquisition of moral and spiritual habits and not simply right critical terminology,” Webster believes that  ”it remains doubtful whether virtue theory can successfully break free of the tug towards immanence; these accounts of hermeneutical activity still threaten to leave us within the relatively self-enclosed worlds of readerly psyches and habit-forming communities.”  His robust theological account of canonicity implies that we need “a much more vigorously charismatic-eschatological understanding of habits and their acquisition than has been offered in the quasi-Aristotelian accounts so far produced.”