That’s the old phrase reserved for systematic theology when people regarded it as the culmination of human thought about special and general revelation. Charles Hodge, Benjamin Warfield and the Old Princeton faculty more generally regarded systematic theology as the telos of biblical and theological investigation.
Warfield worried, however, that biblical theology would displace systematics:
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 Biblical 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.
In that new environment, the queenly status of systematics might have more to do with sexual orientation and the politics of identity rather than with a hierarchy of knowledge.
After reading the exchange between Dick Gaffin and Clair Davis regarding recent faculty developments at Westminster Theological Seminary, I am still convinced that an important difference between Old Princeton and contemporary Westminster is the status accorded systematic theology. Gaffin and Davis both debate how best to interpret Geerhardus Vos and the proper hermeneutic associated with redemptive historical exegesis, but systematic theology is distant from their concerns.
Of course, faculty at the Reformed seminaries are supposed to subscribe the “system of doctrine” taught in the Westminster Standards and/or the Three Forms of Unity. But whether all faculty are equally willing to teach and defend that system of doctrine — say in Sunday school or even in their own non-ST classes — is another question altogether. I mean, are the advocates of a Christotelic or Christocentric reading of the OT prepared to teach and defend limited atonement or the eternal decree? And if all seminary faculty were willing to contend for those doctrines, would the disputes among the Vossians have taken on such magnitude?
I am well aware that it is easy and a bit of a cliche to quote Machen the way that political conservatives quote the American founders. (Here goes Machen boy again.) But I wonder how many seminary faculty would agree with this assertion from Machen’s first address about WTS?
. . . biblical theology is not all the theology that will be taught at Westminster Seminary, for systematic theology will be at the very center of the seminary’s course. At this point an error should be avoided: it must not be thought that systematic theology is one whit less biblical than biblical theology is. But it differs from biblical theology in that, standing on the foundation or biblical theology, it seeks to set forth, no longer in the order of the time when it was revealed, but in the order of logical relationships, the grand sum of what God has told us in his Word. There are those who think that systematic theology on the basis of the Bible is impossible; there are those who think that the Bible contains a mere record of human seeking after God and that its teachings are a mass of contradiction which can never be resolved. But to the number of those persons we do not belong. We believe for our part that God has spoken to us in his Word, and that he has given us not merely theology, but a system of theology, a great logically consistent body of truth.
That system of theology, that body of truth, which we find in the Bible is the Reformed faith, the faith commonly called Calvinistic, which is set forth so gloriously in the Confession and catechisms of the Presbyterian church. It is sometimes referred to as a “man-made creed.” But we do not regard it as such. We regard it, in accordance with our ordination pledge as ministers in the Presbyterian church, as the creed which God has taught us in his Word. If it is contrary to the Bible, it is false. But we hold that it is not contrary to the Bible, but in accordance with the Bible, and true. We rejoice in the approximations to that body of truth which other systems of theology contain; we rejoice in our Christian fellowship with other evangelical churches; we hope that members of other churches, despite our Calvinism, may be willing to enter into Westminster Seminary as students and to listen to what we may have to say. But we cannot consent to impoverish our message by setting forth less than what we find the Scripture to contain; and we believe that we shall best serve our fellow Christians, from whatever church they may come, if we set forth not some vague greatest common measure among various creeds, but that great historic faith that has come through Augustine and Calvin to our own Presbyterian church. (“Westminster Theological Seminary,” 1929)
Of course, Machen could be wrong about systematic theology. If so, a biblical theologian might want to step up and say so and explain why. Machen’s not the pope.
But if he is right about systematic theology being as biblical as biblical theology, if he’s right about it forming the center of the theological curriculum, and if he’s right about Calvinism (as the WTS affirmations and denials — see pp. 9 and 10 — suggest), then the debates about Vos and the proper way to read the Old Testament look less important than they have become. The real test is not whether you get Isaiah or Vos right, but whether or not your teaching and writing supports the system of doctrine taught in the church’s standards. If that were the criterion for appointment and promotion, the debate between Gaffin and Davis might be better left for the attendees at the Evangelical Theological Society.
I am far from either a systematic or biblical theologian, but I get the sense that the movement to modify classical theism is not unrelated to the issues you discuss above. Would you say that the debate about divine simplicity, immutability, and impassibility is another front in the biblical theology-systematic theology war?
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As someone once remarked, biblical theology is the gadfly that keeps the horse moving but systematics is the horse that carries you to your destination.
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Jesse, my sense is that the debates over divine attributes do reflect a discomfort with ST and its “scholastic” ways. But BT has been questioning ST longer than that.
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For this unlettered reader, both are very helpful in my personal studies of theology, but STs have clearly been more useful.
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But if the question is a doctrinal and or methodological question concerning whether Scripture is most basically divine revelation or a human book one does have a confessional concern. I seem to remember the WCF saying something about the Bible being fundamentally divine revelation. I am not saying any of the current parties involved would deny revelation, just saying that the nature of Scripture and revelation are both BT and systematic concerns/categories. Talking in BT terms versus Protestant Scholastic terms doesn’t necessarily mean one is talking about two unrelated topics.
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The history of the discipline, usually set out in painstaking detail in opening chapters of a good BT, demonstrates a lot of room for what the elect on here would call heretical at the very least.
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Hodge, ST, p 167–The Scriptures present the regular development, carried on through centuries and millenniums, of the great original promise, “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.” This development was conducted by some forty independent writers, many of whom understood very little of the plan they were unfolding, but each contributed his part to the progress and completion of the whole…..If the Bible be the work of one mind, that mind must be the mind of God. Only God knows the beginning from the end. Only God could know what the Bible reveals. No one, says the Apostle, knows the things of God but the Spirit of God.”
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The history of theology and biblical studies, usually set out in painstaking detail in opening chapters of a good theology book, demonstrates a lot of room for what the elect on here would call heretical at the very least.
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I have difficulty seeing how a hermeneutic that first views the OT as if it was not divine revelation in its first reading (starting point) is consistent with the WCF that argues that Scripture at its most basic is the divine Word of God. It seems to me that the WCF starting point IS divine Word and deed. The starting point cannot be both divine and human authorial intent. Likewise Vos sets out the primacy of divine revelation in the first 11 pages of his BT as the basis for Reformed BT, which I see as a development of Reformed Covenant Theology which is also described in Protestant Scholastic terms in the WCF.
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When he wasn’t obsessing over the Queen of the Truck Stop, Doug Sowers often spoke of theology as being the Queen of the Sciences.
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Can anybody point me to the “Classics Comic Book” version of this debate?
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“The real test is not whether you get Isaiah…right”
amazing. Yeah, that Isaiah guy, he’s not the pope!
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I hear that Isiah may be going back to management with the Knicks
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P Duggan, so if you get Isaiah right you get the Bible right? Which Isaiah?
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thanks oldlife!
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