Webster on the Relationship between Exegesis and Dogmatics

I really like the way John Webster articulates this warning against overconfidence in the independent value of "retrieval" or dogmatics:

• Exegesis funds but also governs theological reason
• Dogmatics is complementary but strictly subordinate
• Dogmatics is a "lightweight" task that must bend to the biblical idiom

Quotation of his remarks: 

At the center of this articulation of the Gospel as the norm of the sanctorum communio are two fundamental tasks, namely exegesis and dogmatics. 

Of these tasks, exegesis is of supreme and supremely critical importance, because the instrument through which the risen Christ announces his Gospel is Holy Scripture. Exegesis, the attempt to hear what the Spirit says to the Churches, is that without which theological reason cannot even begin to discharge its office. To this primary activity of theological reason, dogmatics is complementary but strictly subordinate. 

One of the most disorderly developments in theology after the period of the magisterial reformers was the development of a notion of dogma as an improvement upon Holy Scripture—as the replacement of the informal and occasional language of Scripture by conceptual forms at once more clearly organized, better warranted and betraying a greater degree of sophistication. With that account of dogmatics I have become distinctly ill-at-ease, preferring a much more lightweight understanding of the dogmatic task. 

Dogmatics is about the business of setting forth 'commonplaces', a series of loosely organized proposals about the essential content of the witness of Holy Scripture, which serve to inform, guide and correct the Church's reading. Far from improving upon the scriptural material, dogmatics gives place to it. Like preaching (to which it is closely related) dogmatics is an attempt at reading, one whose goal is not 'interpretation' (transposing Scripture into some alien frame of reference or arguing in favor of its experiential viability) but simply hearing afresh the scriptural Gospel.

—John Webster, "Discovering Dogmatics," in Shaping a Theological Mind, 135.