What Should Christians Study?: Part 1 – Theology

There are many specific areas of knowledge relevant to the study of God, God’s creation, and the Christian faith. Broadly speaking, however, there are four overarching domains of knowledge that Christians should pursue, if they desire a deeper knowledge of God, a greater love of His truth and a more effective ministry. Attaining knowledge, both in its propositional and personal modes, increases our capacity to fulfill our sacred mission, which is the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Further, knowledge brings us closer to our final goal: full communion with our Creator.

Paul points out that without knowledge, mere zeal for God can be catastrophic to saving grace:

Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God concerning them is for their salvation! ²I can testify about them that they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. ³Because they disregarded the righteousness from God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted themselves to God’s righteousness. ⁴For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

Romans 10:1-4

Of course, for Paul’s intended audience, the zealous Jews, the knowledge they lacked was that Christ Himself was the end of the law, the telos of God’s revealed Torah and of Israel’s history. But the principle of acquiring right knowledge holds just as well for those already in that end. For those already in Christ, there is still a pursuit of knowledge that must accompany our zeal for Jesus.

Therefore, to become more well-rounded thinkers about God’s Word, God’s work, and God’s world, it is helpful to have some method of organizing this effort to attain knowledge. One step to constructing a good method, is to consider the four fundamental areas of knowledge relevant to the Christian life. These four areas are: Theology (Systematic and Biblical); Apologetics (Philosophical, Historical & Cultural); Church History (pre- & post-Reformational and Global), and Biblical Spirituality (Spiritual Theology and Spiritual Formation).

Why Study Anything Other Than Scripture?

However, some might object: “Why study anything other than the Bible?” “Isn’t the Bible sufficient for all things related to our salvation and our sanctification?” My answer to the second question is without qualification: absolutely! However, we are not only called to sanctification or knowledge of our own salvation. God also calls us to evangelize and to disciple the nations (Matt 28:16-20). These two mandates on the Christian life require us to go outside the Bible for some knowledge, although never in spite of it.

And so one answer to the first question is: “because to be relevant to different cultures and different peoples in different times in human history, we need to know something about those cultures, those peoples, and about history, especially the history of ideas.” Simon Chan, in his entry on “Asian Theology” in The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, simplifies this complex dynamic of knowledge of the Word and knowledge of the world, “All theologies are local, involving the interaction of gospel, church and culture or text, community and context” (90). The Gospel is the divine Word, the church is the people of the Word in a particular place and time, and the culture is where we find ourselves ministering: text, community, context.

John Calvin implies something analogous in the opening lines of his Institutes:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 1

But to study ourselves is to study culture. Still, many Christians will protest, claiming the only thing a Christian needs to study is the Bible. After all, they say, the way an expert in counterfeit money discerns a fake is by studying the original over and over again.

Whether or not that is actually true about FBI agents who track counterfeiters, I do not know. Still, while we can never neglect studying the Bible, and while Scripture must always be at the front, center and back of our thinking, to engage with the world, we do need to understand it, even in its corruptions. We need to analyze the patient to properly see where and how to apply the life-giving medicine. And so, I concur with the early church father Irenaeus, who spent a large portion of his life studying the writings of the Gnostics, so that he could refute their deceptive heresies:

The man, however, who would undertake their conversion, must possess an accurate knowledge of their systems or schemes of doctrine. For it is impossible for any one to heal the sick, if he has no knowledge of the disease of the patients. This was the reason that my predecessors-much superior men to myself, too-were unable, notwithstanding, to refute the Valentinians satisfactorily, because they were ignorant of these men’s system; which I have with all care delivered to thee in the first book in which I have also shown that their doctrine is a recapitulation of all the heretics. For which reason also, in the second, we have had, as in a mirror, a sight of their entire discomfiture. For they who oppose these men (the Valentinians) by the right method, do [thereby] oppose all who are of an evil mind; and they who overthrow them, do in fact overthrow every kind of heresy.

Irenaeus Against Heresies, Preface to Book IV

In sum, to properly evangelize and disciple, we should extend our studies beyond just the Bible. At the same time, without the Bible as our ultimate source of knowledge and adjudicating standard of truth, we could easily get lost in endless, non-revelatory speculations about truth. To put the approach succinctly: we study the Bible as revelation and the thoughts of men as speculation, but we still study both.

Some Thoughts On The Four Categories

Since these four categories are very broad, it is good to point out that within each domain there are a number of disciplinary subsets. This part of discipleship is related to the German idea of wissenschaft, meaning particular knowledge that can become increasingly analytic and atomized. For example, today one is usually not just a “Bible scholar,” but instead a “New Testament” or “Old Testament” scholar. And then, within those domains, one tends to specialize in an even more particular subset of knowledge: e.g., textual criticism, Pauline studies, Septuagint studies, etc.

All of these sub-disciplines are relevant to becoming an expert in the larger domain of Biblical Theology, and, as such, they can all lend to an increase in biblical knowledge. In turn, knowing the Bible better tends to help us know its Author better. Of course, this kind of analytical knowledge is good only insofar as we continually submit our studies to the Person of Jesus Christ and the program of the Holy Spirit. For while Paul warned that having zeal without knowledge can lead to spiritual bankruptcy, he also warns that knowledge can puff up, and, in doing so, become quite counterproductive in our mission to the world (1 Cor 8:1ff).

In this series, I will not dive into the manifold sub-disciplines of each broader category. Instead I will only consider these four overarching domains in an effort to help beginners focus their studies. Clearly this is not the only way to study Christianity, but it may be one way to train the mind for the sake of the Gospel. In this first of four (or so) blog posts, I will outline the Christian’s main discipline, the study of Theology.

Theology

Theology is our primary pursuit. The study of God is what we are essentially about as Christ followers. Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has stated succinctly that theology is simply “speaking well of God.” As such, we must do theology well in order to serve God well. However, the theological domain entails two kinds of theology, both with their own distinct approaches to the ultimate goal of knowledge of God. These are Systematic and Biblical theology.

Systematic Theology: A (Very) Short History

Systematic theology begins to crystallize roughly in the early Middle Ages, starting with the publication of Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences, written sometime prior to 1160. This work dominated systematic theology until the Protestant Reformation. Before Lombard’s Sentences, St. Augustine was the most influential systematic theologian of the Western Church and was so for its first 900 years. Augustine’s theology still impacts us today and for good reason (because he got almost everything right).

After Augustine and Lombard, Thomas Aquinas was the greatest pre-Reformation systematic theologian in the Church’s history, writing his main work, the Summa Theologica, in the mid-13th century. Of course, for most Catholics, Aquinas is still the greatest systematic theologian (and they might be right on that count). The practice of writing systematic theologies, however, did not end with the Reformation. If anything, it was only just beginning as it would take a certain Germanic mindset to further develop the structure of systematic theology.

The earliest systematic, theological writings that were particularly Lutheran or Reformational, were composed by Philip Melanchton, Martin Luther’s close associate. Before the Reformation, the main theologies that influenced the Church’s doctrine and practice were developed in large part by Augustine, the early Church Fathers, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas and some other Scholastics (Anselm, Bonaventure, Scotus, Abelard). Melanchton was the first Lutheran systematic theologian after Luther’s “break” with the Roman version of the church. However, it was really the Reformed confessions that further developed the discipline of systematizing theological concepts, arguments and conclusions.

John Calvin was the first complete reformational systematic theologian. He wrote his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1559, setting the stage for some of the best theological writing in the Church’s history by 17th century Puritans like: Francis Turretin, John Owen, Richard Baxter, and Stephen Charnock. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Protestant tradition of systematic theology was carried on in the Americas by men like John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, W.T.G Shedd, Charles Hodge, and B.B. Warfield (the so-called “Princetonians”).

Finally in the 20th century, there are three German thinkers whose work dominates academic theology, greatly shaping contemporary, western, Protestant religion (for better or worse). These are Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann.

Other very influential, systematic theologians of the 20th century include:

Reformed Theology: Herman Bavinck, G.C. Berkouwer, Abraham Kuyper, Louis Berkhof, John Frame, Millard Erickson, Michael Horton and Kevin Vanhoozer
Lutheran Theology: Robert Jenson, George Lindbeck
Weslyean/Methodist Theology: Thomas Oden, William Abraham
Anglo-Theology (various denominations): T.F. Torrance, John Webster, Alister McGrath, Colin Gunton, Sarah Coakley
Roman Catholic: Hans Urs von Balthasaar, Henri du Lubac, Ludwig Ott, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), and Bernard Lonergan.

Obviously I am only scratching the surface here, and I have mentioned nothing of Eastern Orthodox systematics or of African and Asian systematic theology. But as I am not well versed in those areas, I will let others fill in the lacunae I leave open. I would rather say nothing that to try to speak out of ignorance.

Systematic Theology: What It Does

Systematic Theology in principle tries to answer broad, categorical questions related to various and sundry aspects of God, God’s creation, and God’s revelation. These aspects are often called theological loci, and the traditional loci of a given theological system are usually the following. They are often, but not always, found in this order:

Prolegomena (Usually preliminary concerns related to the idea of truth and knowledge, i.e., to Religious Epistemology)
Doctrine of Revelation (General Revelation, or Natural Theology, and Special Revelation, or Bibliology)
Doctrine of God (Trinity, God’s Attributes, also called Theology Proper)
Doctrine of Creation (Nature & Anthropology, Angelology & Demonology)
Doctrine of Sin (Hamartiology)
Doctrine of Christ (Christology)
Doctrine of Salvation (Soteriology)
Doctrine of the Church (Ecclesiology)
Doctrine of Last Things (Eschatology)

Obviously the order of these categories and their number can shift according to the intentions and logic of a particular theologian. Karl Barth, for example, famously began his 12-volume Church Dogmatics with the Doctrine of “The Word of God,” or God’s act of revelation in Jesus Christ, leaving little to no room for natural theology as it relates to God’s existence. That might raise an important question in the reader’s mind, namely: “why would one theologian start at one place, while another starts somewhere else?” Nevertheless, these loci are the ones treated by nearly all systematic theologians.

In sum, systematic theology is the attempt to give an orderly account about God and His creation using Scripture, Historical Tradition, Reason (philosophical and scientific reasoning) and experience to answer the most central questions of the Christian faith. However, this is a very different endeavor from systematic theology’s counterpart: biblical theology.

Biblical Theology: What It Is

Unlike Systematic Theology, Biblical Theology focuses all its efforts on the study of the Bible, or what systematic theologians call Special Revelation. It looks at the Bible and how it was formed (the canon of Scripture and the composition of individual books or corpuses); how its parts work together (Old and New Testament intertextuality); its original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek), its sources and literary forms; and how individual books should be studied, scrutinized, and analyzed for their own sake, separate from other, more systematic considerations. This means it is not necessarily the task of the Biblical Theologian to consider or argue for how a passage, part of a book, or book of the Bible fits into some broader theological system.

Biblical Theology tries to understand particular parts of the Bible, especially particular books, passages of books, or even phrases and individual words, in their immediate context. Thus, biblical theologians focus on very specific things like Paul’s theology of ministry in the pastoral epistles, or even the authorship of the pastoral epistles.

Typical biblical theological pursuits are:

Lexicography (the study of semantics, grammar, and syntax of the biblical languages)
Form criticism & Redaction criticism (controversial areas of Higher Biblical Criticism that are concerned with the origins of biblical books and passages)
Textual criticism (manuscript studies, also called “Lower Criticism”)
Critical and expository work of particular books or authors (e.g. commentaries, Pauline studies, Johannine theology, etc.)
Comparative historical/literary studies (e.g. Ancient Near Eastern culture, Greco-Roman biography)
Hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation, which is a foundational philosophical undertaking that relates to all other biblical studies)

Biblical Theology: A (Very) Short History

Biblical Theology is often said to have begun with J.P Gabler’s 1787 inaugural address at the German university of Altdorf (see Andreas Köstenberger’s article), where biblical studies was delineated from systematic theology. This segregation of the two disciplines eventually included its evolution into Old Testament and New Testament studies, and then even more distinct divisions (as alluded to above).

Historically, Biblical Theology has been dominated by German-language scholarship. Names like Bauer (F.C., Bruno, and Walter), Bornkamm, Käsemann, Jeremias, Strauss, Wrede, Schweitzer, Wellhausen, Bultmann, von Rad, Noth, and many more are often synonymous with the interpretive paradigms they helped to create. Some of these paradigms often go under the title “Higher Biblical Criticism” or HBC. However, many of these great bible scholars also brought philosophical presuppositions to their discipline. These often modernist presuppositions tended to downgrade the Bible; perceiving it not as divinely inspired revelation of a transcendent God to man, but as merely the production of human intellect under particular historical and culture conditions.

It was this liberal Protestant theology that emerged out of biblical studies that Karl Barth was responding to in his day, and that has been responded to for over 100 years now by other bible scholars and theologians (mainly from the English-speaking world). The difference maker for theological apologists, especially as we reply to challenges about the reliability and authority of scripture, will often be in discerning which aspects of HBC we can accept into our systematic theology and which we must reject based on prior, necessary and independently grounded, metaphysical commitments.

Good and Bad Biblical Theology

To know the difference between useful HBC and corrosive HBC, and how one decides on one view or the other, can mean winding up in the scholarly camp of someone like a Bart Ehrman, as opposed to that of a Craig Keener. Thus, while we must engage with liberal, or critical, bible scholarship, there are also excellent contemporary, theologically conservative scholars we can access. For example:

Old Testament: John Walton, Daniel I. Block, Tremper Longmann III, Kenneth Matthews, Gordon Wenham, Bruce Waltke, Derrick Kindner, Edwin Yamauchi, Nahum Sarna (Jewish), Jacob Milgrom (Jewish), Jeffrey Tigay (Jewish), Brevard Childs, H.G.M. Williamson, Gerhard von Rad (a liberal, but a huge name in 20th century OT studies), John Goldingay, and Michael Heiser.
New Testament: F.F. Bruce, N.T. Wright, Richard Hays, Richard Bauckham, Craig Keener, Michael Kruger, Andreas Köstenberger, Michael Bird, Peter O’Brien, D.A. Carson, Michael Licona, I. Howard Marshall, Darrell Bock, Ben Witherington III, Jocahim Jeremias, Leon Morris, E.P. Sander, James Dunn, Moises Silva, Robert Jewett, and Ramsey Michaels.

Because OT and NT studies are so specialized, there are simply too many people in the field to give an adequate list. However, those I have listed are all highly regarded Evangelical scholars (unless otherwise indicated in parentheses). For additional biblical theological resources, these surveys edited by Tremper Longman III, and D.A. Carson are indispensable for anyone looking to go deeper into the Biblical texts: Old Testament Commentary Survey, and New Testament Commentary Survey. These surveys will also save pastors a great amount of time when looking for commentaries to prepare for their sermons.

Conclusion: Theology is both Systematic and Biblical

As Biblical Theology grew into its own discipline, it tended to become increasingly separated from the more abstract, conceptual work of systematic theology. This occurred to the point that today there is a movement in Evangelical and Roman Catholic circles to reconnect the two disciplines. The proper balance of Systematic Theology (also known as “Dogmatics”) and Biblical Theology safeguards against Christian thought that is too atomistic or fragmented (too biblical), or theology that is too broad and abstracted from the words of the Bible (too systematic).

John Webster lays out this dilemma:

We may be led to say something like this: Scripture is not simply one of a set of immanently-conceived communicative practices, a “historical” or “natural” entity of which a sufficient description can be given by identifying the natural properties of texts and their agents (whether authorial or interpretative). Nor is Scripture a historical or natural entity upon which we superimpose “religious” evaluations that encourage “spiritual use” or “theological interpretation.” Rather, without in any way denying the natural properties of scriptural texts, we may say that Scripture’s place in the divine economy of redemption and revelation is determinative of its nature. This nature, in turn, directs its reception.

Webster, “Biblical Reasoning” in ATR/90:4, 739-74

In other words, while the Bible has features that are entirely natural and immanent and that we can study using our standard historical methods, we cannot exhaustively describe the Bible by just this method of inquiry. The Bible is also part of the divine economy, of God’s redemptive work in the world, and its nature is as much this as it is a human production. We must receive the Bible, therefore, as a divine and humanely authored library. Thus, in spite of the challenge of balancing these two modes of theologizing, both are necessary, for in the divine economy of God’s revelation, everything really does hang together.

To conclude, the goal of any born-again Christian will be to think theologically about the Bible, i.e., understanding it always as God’s Divine Word to man. At the same time it is crucial to think biblically about Theology. We must ensure that when we teach theological doctrines, we ground them firmly in the revealed Word of God.

Without thinking theologically, we can get into an academic and purely analytic study of the Bible that leaves no room for its divine Author. Without thinking biblically, we can get a view of god that is very far removed from the God of the Bible, Who was, and Who is, and Who is to come.

In the next post, I will discuss the second most important area of Christian study: Apologetics.