Systematic Scholarship

We are accustomed to regard theology as the queen of the sciences, and Systematic Theology as queen among the theological disciplines. But these are not days in which lofty claims are readily allowed; and we need not be surprised to discover that those which Systematic Theology advances are not permitted to pass unchallenged.

It is little that her sister theological disciplines are sometimes found resisting her high pretensions and declaring that they will no longer have her to rule over them: although no more here than elsewhere is the spectacle of conflict between sisters edifying, nor more here than elsewhere is it likely that a family will add much to its strength by becoming divided against itself. Systematic Theology may look on with an amused tolerance and a certain older-sister's pleased recognition of powers just now perhaps a little too conscious of themselves, when the new discipline of Bible Theology, for example, tosses her fine young head and announces of her more settled sister that her day is over.

But these words have a more ominous ring in them when the lips that frame them speak no longer as a sister's but as an enemy's, and the meaning injected into them threatens not merely dethronement but destruction. The right of Systematic Theology to reign is not the only thing that is brought into question in these days: its very right to exist is widely challenged.

There are few phenomena in the theological world which are more striking indeed than the impatience which is exhibited on every hand with the effort to define truth and to state with precision the doctrinal presuppositions and contents of Christianity.

B.B. Warfield, "The Right of Systematic Theology" (1897)

Is the Reformation over? Maybe a better question we evangelicals should ask ourselves is, Why we do not possess such a thorough, clear, and God-centered account of our faith as the Catechism offers to Roman Catholics?

The answer, I would suggest, is very simple and straightforward: one cannot abandon elaborate theology as a point of principle in order to build a transdenominational movement and then hope to produce something akin to the Catholic Catechism which, by definition, requires an elaborate theology to express; it simply cannot be done. And that takes us back to the problem at the heart of the discussion as set up in this book: we are comparing apples and oranges--a self-conscious church body, which feels no shame over its history and its clear doctrinal positions, and a transdenominational movement which cannot agree on more than the merest of Christianity.

This historical and intellectual coherence and depth in Catholicism is something which the authors highlight, along with liturgical aesthetics, as providing much of the context for evangelical conversions to Catholicism. Here, I find myself in sympathy with the problems described as part and parcel of some trajectories of evangelicalism (the reinvention of Christianity every Sunday, the consumer-oriented worship styles, the overall intellectual superficiality and banality of evangelical approaches to theology, to history, to tradition, and to culture); yet I still disagree with those individuals who see conversion to Rome as the answer.

I would want to argue that conversion to confessional Protestantism is at least worth a glance as another option before deciding to throw one's whole lot in with Rome. Confessional Protestantism has a historic, creedal integrity; it takes history seriously; it refuses to assume that the latest pulp evangelical primer on postmodernism is an adequate basis for ditching the whole of its tradition; and it wants to take seriously what the church has said about the Bible over the centuries.

As the work of scholars such as Richard Muller has indicated, confessional Reformed Orthodoxy, for example, has theological moorings in an intelligent interaction with, and appropriation of, the best theological and exegetical work of the patristic and medieval authors, as well as the correctives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Yet this careful scholarship is so often aced in the evangelical culture by popular potboilers which tell a very different story. Thus, post-conservative evangelicals may take the worst bits of Hodge, read them back into Turretin, mix in a faulty understanding of scholasticism as an adumbration of Enlightenment rationalism, repeat, Mantra-style, superficially learned and portentous phrases such as "Cartesian dualism" and "modernist mindset," and extrapolate from there to dismiss the whole of confessional Reformed Orthodoxy; but that is just one more example of the cod-theology which passes for scholarship in some evangelical quarters.

-- Carl Trueman, "Review of Is the Reformation Over?" (Nov. 2005)