Why systematic theology?

One of the comments that I often receive is that all I care about is studying and history.  It just isn’t practical.  What about what Jesus does for me every day?  The question is based on a faulty premise, that doctrine is not practical.  In every letter written by Paul in the New Testament, he always starts with doctrine or the indicative before moving to the practical or imperative.  In fact, it has been said of Paul that he could turn a pure law passage back into indicative effortlessly.

Indicative is a type of voice in the conjugation of verbs.  This is the voice used to make statements of fact.  We use the indicative voice to describe people, ideas or events that are objective observations.  It is like watching the evening news.  Everything on the evening news is basically in the indicative voice.

Imperative is a type of voice used to make commands.  We make rules in the imperative voice.  Law is written in the imperative voice.  Imperatives often have rewards and punishments attached to them, blessings and curses in our context.  The Law of the Old Testament is obviously written in the imperative voice.

A systematic theology is a paradigm for interpretation of the Bible.  We all have a paradigm, whether we recognize it or admit it or not.  We all have preconceived ideas that we bring to the table.  Whether we formalize these ideas into a systematic theology or not, these preconceived ideas color how we interpret the Bible.  It is important to identify these biases and recognize how they affect our understanding of scripture.

The systematic theology system that I will be using is Covenant Theology.  My main presupposition is that the whole Bible, including the Old Testament, is about Jesus.  The story of Jesus in the Bible will be referred to as the Redemptive History of the Bible.  Covenant theology assumes that this Christocentricity  exists throughout the whole Bible.  In some discussions, we will see that not all systematic theology systems have this same assumption.  Some systems with have a shifting focus or center.  Other systems will assume a man centered system.  The consequences of these presuppositions on the scripture will prove to be drastic.

A common retort I hear is that some people just like to jump around the Bible and the Holy Spirit will lead them to a verse that “speaks” to them.  While the Holy Spirit may actually choose to work in this way from time to time, this manner of Biblical inquiry has several presuppositions at work as well.  The first and perhaps most basic is that effective use of this strategy assumes a vast and well working knowledge of the text.  The absence of such a background or overview will pluck verses out of context.  This has the potential to do great violence to major themes of the Bible.  Would you pull a line out of a recipe, read it, and assume that you now know how to make cakes?  Oh, by the way, the recipe was for linguine.  You would have known that if you had read the whole recipe.  Context matters.

Imagine for a moment that you are solving a jigsaw puzzle, a really tough one with 5000 pieces.  Some people go about solving the puzzle by finding all the edges and making the frame first.  Others sort by colors and put patches together and then arrange these larger chunks.  Still others hold up the box top and try to figure out where a piece must belong and then sort of place the piece by an implied Cartesian coordinate motif.  Each of these techniques is a system.  A jigsaw puzzle of this complexity demands a systematic approach of some sort.  Such are the riches of the Bible.  We must come after the problem from some systematic approach in order to make sense of it.

Finally, there is the issue of consistency.  One of the key components of logic systems is consistency.  It really chaps me when Christians are so quick to cede the logical ground to atheists and non-Christians.  Logic and consistency are your friends.  If you always go running to fuzzy feelings and nonintellectual approaches to your faith, who exactly are you going to convince anyway?  Will you succeed in convincing yourself?  Really?  Systematic theology has the great advantage of giving you a framework on which to hang the doctrine so that you can make sense of it.  When learning any subject, the first time through you are just memorizing facts.  They don’t really stick very well.  Then, towards the end, something clicks and you start to see the big picture.  Then, when you go back through the facts a second or third time, it is much easier and more of the facts stick.  This is as true with algebra and economics as it is with theology.  Learn to be consistent in your theology.  God does not create contradictions.  That would not be consistent with our view of God.

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