[A note to newer readers: For the last couple of months I have been posting a series of quotations from the book Eternal Word, Changing Worlds by my teacher and mentor, the late Harvie Conn.] Doctrine and Christian living, faith and life, “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxis” cannot be separated, held in balance, or even considered apart [...]
Is it possible that biblical theology can provide a way of escape from the inherited dangers of “systematic theology”? Can we find here that sense of freedom, of openness to new approaches to the Bible as the Scriptures are brought into contact and confrontation with the world’s diverse cultural and social contexts? Is “systematic theology” [...]
We now suggest that eschatology, oriented toward the central significance of the coming of Christ in the history of redemption, provides us with more than a static theological formulation. It has deep and dynamic implications for the methodological significance of contextualization. It reminds us, to quote Vos, that “we ourselves live just as much in [...]
Biblical theology reminds us of the Christ-centered heart of the Scripture, of its history as the history of redemption. Theologizing, as the application of that redemptive history, then becomes eschatological in a deeper sense than we usually think. it is an eschatology defined not only with reference to the second coming of Christ but inclusive [...]
Biblical theology’s focus on revelation as a historical activity underlines the dynamic, rather than static, character of revealed truth. John Murray speaks of the “tendency to abstraction” on the part of systematic theology, the tendency to historicize, to arrive at “timeless” formulations in the sense of topically oriented universals. This danger becomes even more real [...]
Systematic theology is not simply a coherent arrangement of supracultural universals. it is a compilation of the Western white history of dogma. And that history, in the process of compilation, has lost its missiological thrust. The effect of this process on the Western churches is similarly destructive of missions. Seeing theology as an essentializing science [...]
