A Theology: What do we need?

What is needed to write an adequate and responsible and biblical “theology,” a systematics if one wants to use that term? Because so many shifts have occurred in the last 50 years or so many of us are dissatisfied with theologies as they now operate. What do you think we need in a theology?

Some readers of this blog are old enough to have grown up with some “classics” in systematics. In college I learned that there were two standard theologies that I needed to own, read and use — A.H. Strong’s Systematic Theology, a Baptist-based theology, and Charles Hodge’s 3 volume Systematic Theology. So I bought them and used them and read huge portions — many portions quite incomprehensible in prose and concerns. While in seminary I learned about more and more theologians, like Barth and Pannenberg (I don’t remember much about Moltmann) and then more (American) evangelical types like Donald Bloesch and Millard Erickson. As you know, many theologies — I’m thinking here of Strong and Hodge and Bloesch and Erickson — organize by the famous loci, that is, topics in the order of a logical system of thinking: God, man, Christ, sin, salvation, ecclesiology and eschatology, with Scripture either coming first as prolegomena or in some convenient early place.

Augustine’s works were not so much a systematics; Calvin’s had a different order; Luther didn’t write a systematics. Like Luther, Wesley never came close. Edwards conceived of a systematics along a different line — the history of God’s redemptive work in the cosmos.

Today many conservatives read theologies like Wayne Grudem’s or Michael Horton’s newer one, which are more or less arranged along the same plot of salvation. So, I’m wondering what you think the best “order” or “arrangement” ought to be?

What happens to “systematics” when narrative or story form the notes? Who do you think is doing theology well these days?

All of this sets up a series I will begin on Michael Bird’s new theology called Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction. (Mike is writing Romans for the Story of God Bible Commentary.) Here is Mike Bird’s order, one structured around the gospel:

Prolegomena on God talk
The God of the gospel
The Gospel of the kingdom: the now and not yet
The gospel of God’s Son: Lord Jesus Christ
The gospel of salvation
The promise and power of the gospel: the Holy Spirit
The gospel and humanity
The community of the gospelized