a time to tear down | A Time to Build Up » systematic theology

Harvie Conn on Something Much too Plain to Say but All Too Often Forgotten

Pete Enns — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:12:38 +0000

[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 from each other. If I tell the truth apart from love and piety, I am not “doing the truth” at all–and consequently I am not telling the truth, according to Scripture….

Theologizing, in this sense, can never be “objective.” It is created out of covenant commitment to the covenant God. Sovereign grace bestowed creates reciprocal responses of faith, love, and obedience. In creating a response, grace testifies to divine initiative. That the response created is reciprocal testifies to the human obligation involved….

As we have said elsewhere, too often theology has lost this praxeological dimension. It has become known as an abstract discipline, not as a “conscientizing” instrument. Brevard Childs reminds us that the eschatological “now” of our stance between the already of Christ’s first coming and the not yet of His second coming can be manipulated to separate the history of redemption from our place with Peter, Paul, and John in that history [Biblical Theology in Crisis, Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970, pp. 123-28]. If theology is to be biblical theology, its focus is not simply the self-assurance of an exegetical job well done. it calls for the reappraisal of those demands and solutions we originally brought to it at the initiation of our participation in the “hermeneutical spiral.” Theologizing is the task of each new generation standing in its particular moment of history, it searches the Scriptures in order to discern the will of God and strives to receive guidance on its way toward the obedient life that must be pursued within the concrete issues of the world’s concrete cultures (EWCW, pp. 232-33).

Harvie Conn: Some Rhetorical Questions on Biblical Theology

Pete Enns — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:03:55 +0000

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” so captive to the encumbrances of Western categories and methodologies that we must now, for the sake of a truly emic theology, discontinue its use or look to biblical theology to reinforce its strengths and minimize its weaknesses? Can we use “biblical theology” “to designate the comprehensive statement of what Scripture teaches (dogmatics), always insuring that its topical divisions remain sufficiently broad and flexible to accommodate the results of the redemptive-historically regulated exegesis on which it is based” [Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. "Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology," The New Testament Student and Theology, John H, Skilton, ed. (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1976), 49] and, we would add, to reflect the varieties of the world’s contextual agendas? Is it possible that biblical theology can return us to a methodology more in keeping with the organic, historical character of special revelation itself?

Such a biblical theology will not demand formulations expressed only in the categories and images of the Bible itself; as we have said, it clearly affirms the place and role of the contemporary communicator. From a redemptive-historical perspective the interpreter affirms not only that he or she stands in the same continuum of the presence of the kingdom as, for example, the apostle Paul; the interpreter also affirms that, just as biblical theology demands fullest justice to the cultural context of redemptive history, so the commentator too must look to his or her own situational content with care. Our contemporary setting is part of that flow of redemptive history that is addressed by the Scripture. (EWCW, pp. 227-28).