Systematic theology

Abstract

Systematic theology focuses on the logos (reasoned discourse) of theos (God), setting out the varied ideas of the Christian faith in a coherent, comprehensive, and well-ordered manner. Its task is “to articulate the content of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the context of a particular culture” (Clark 2003: 33). The motivation behind systematic theology is as ancient as the Evangelist’s desire to produce “an orderly account” of the events concerning Jesus Christ, so that God-lovers (“Theophilus”) everywhere would know the truth about what they had been taught (Luke 1:1-4). The urge to provide an integrated, comprehensive, and coherent description of what Christians believe is the significance of the events concerning Jesus Christ is part and parcel of faith’s search for understanding, yet the search has produced a variety of orderly accounts: not only chronological and geographical, but also topical and logical. The origins of systematic theology are often said to lie in the medieval university, where Thomas Aquinas put Aristotle’s logic and categories (e.g., substance, essence, existence) to work on the revealed truths of Scripture in the service of a science of God for the community of faith, and hitherto informal readings of Scripture (lectio) gave place to a formal pattern of argumentation (disputatio). Yet examples of orderly accounts of Christian teaching are even more ancient: Origen, Augustine, and John of Damascus each wrote summaries of Christian doctrine that roughly followed the order of the Apostles’ Creed, which in turn followed the sequence of God’s revelatory and redemptive acts as recorded in Scripture. The challenge of systematic theology derives from its unique object: can there be a “science” of God, including everything else in relation to God? After all, the subject matter of Luke’s Gospel is not a philosophy but a series of space-time events - the words and works of God; the triune economy of revelation and redemption - that identify the God who transcends space and time. How does one give an orderly account (i.e., “systematize”) the free, loving actions of one who exists outside the created order? There is one God, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, yet many systems of theology - a diverse offering that raises the modern suspicion that “systems” are something theologians invent, not discover. Christian faith would seem to resist systematization even as it calls for it. Modern theology is heir to a number of orderly accounts that set forth the comprehensiveness, consistency, and coherence of Christian teaching (“doctrine”) set forth in Scripture and tradition (i.e., creeds and confessions). Accordingly, the burden of the present chapter will be to examine the effect of the qualifler “systematic” on doing theology. In particular, how do theologians move from Scripture as a multigenre literary source to highly organized conceptual articulations of Scripture’s teaching? How does one turn the literature of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology, and various doctrines?