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Let's be systematic about this!Better than sex, better than skiing, systematic theology is probably the most exciting activity known to man. To the enthusiastic disciple of King Jesus, that is. 1. The only life worth living is the life of love for God. We are designed and intended and commanded to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. That is what life is about and all that distracts from or denies that is a waste of time, space and breath. 2. The life of love for God is a life of a reoriented and renewed mind. Loving God with our mind doesn't mean - though, admittedly, it sounds this way - loving God with a separable 'bit' of us. It means that I - the whole person that I am - love God in what and how and why I think, consider, pay attention to, imagine, remember, believe and so on. But these are the dimensions of human life - conscious and 'cognitive' - to which the revealed and verbally expressed truth of God comes. And God's greatest works of reconstruction and renewal of the human person are done by his (Spirit-energised) spoken word, his truth (God sets us free and sets us apart and shapes us in Jesus's image by his word of truth). So it is in this dimension of life that the best things that can happen to us begin and continue to happen to us. It is, therefore, the case that not only is the only life worth living the life of love for God but that the really key issues in the life of love for God are issues of his truth doing its full and proper work in our lives. That is why Bible-believing churches are always on about preaching the gospel and teaching the Bible and Word-based ministry and the rest of it. 3. Home base for a reoriented and renewed mind is where connection, consistency and comprehensiveness meet. God has built our minds in such a way that we long to make connections between the truths we hold, experience consistency between them and see them reaching comprehensively to all of life. This longing is distorted and suppressed by sin which is why sin manifests in compartmentalisation, self-contradiction and small-mindedness. But still we love to see the connections between things and we experience those delightful jump-out-of-the-bathtub-and-run-naked-down-the-street-crying-'eureka' moments not so much when we learn something entirely new as when we put things together in a way which we had not previously done. The lights were switched on, or the penny dropped. Likewise, in spite of our sinful desire to suppress the truth, it is deep in us that two contradictory things cannot both be true in the same way at the same time. We are churned up (experience 'cognitive dissonance' is the fancy phrase) when we try and hold two contradictories at once: 'Man Utd won the premiership last year' and 'Man Utd did not win the premiership last year' or 'my husband is having an affair' and 'my husband is not having an affair' simply cannot both be held true in the same way at the same time. Period. And there's also something in us which wants our access to truth to have a comprehensive reach. We would not buy a worldview in the marketplace of ideas which helped us with our family life but was silent or plain wrong in the working world; or which spoke powerfully to men but made absolutely no sense whatsoever to women. And the desire for and possibility of this connection, consistency and comprehensiveness, which are marred by sin, are restored (progressively) in Christ. It is only in him that they can be found. They meet around the fire and the feast that is the gospel of Jesus where the active, excited, Jesus-centred mind recognises that a) all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ; and b) Christ is to have the first place in all things; and c) the church is to teach all things that Christ has commanded us. And precisely because all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him, it is in the light of Christ that we can make connections between all truths, in obedience to Christ that we can and must show consistency between the things we believe, and in confidence in Christ that we may seek to apply the truth with a comprehensive reach. 4. And systematic theology is exactly this endeavour to make connections, show consistency and seek comprehensiveness between all the truth and truths of God which are in Christ. In other words, it is part of God's huge purpose to put all things under the feet of Christ and part of our huge privilege of falling in with God's huge purpose. As I said, better than sex, better than ski-ing and better than pretty much anything else you could imagine as well. Say that again... Something suspicious?Madly, sadly and badly, though, some Christians seem to be suspicious of 'doctrine' or 'systematic theology' as though there these were inherently 'carnal' or as though they constituted some 'dark arts' favoured only by false teachers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that false teachers are almost invariably false teachers precisely because they are such bad systematicians. They do not make the right connections or they fail to be consistent or they fall short of Christ-centred comprehensiveness. False teaching is not a result of doing systematic theology; it is, rather, the consequence of failing to do systematic theology. 'Resistance to system' arises for other reasons too. The Christian who is (rightly) committed to close exegetical studies or the Christian who has just (rightly) fallen in love with seeing the bible story of salvation as a connected whole both fear that 'systematics' will elbow out the disciplines of paying careful attention to the text of Scripture and of placing truths within the story of salvation. But although it is true that some who are doctrinally oriented fail in these ways, this, too, is not a result of 'systematics' but rather a result of 'bad systematics'. Good systematicians (like Calvin or Dabney or Packer - see below) are the very ones whose love for and submission to Scripture ensures that they will be most careful with the text and context of Scripture. Less commendably, the intellectually lazy hide behind the importance of 'not claiming to know all of the answers', of 'holding deep truths in tension', of 'leaving room for loose ends', and of 'bowing before the ultimate mystery of things'. There is truth in these phrases - when we have done all that we can delving into Scripture and thinking as rigorously as possible in dependence on the Spirit. But, used in response to the mere mention of systematics, they represent a resistance to system which is really little more than a resistance to making the effort required to think with coherence or to speak with precision or a failure to believe in the sufficiency of Scripture. It's not just about books...And now, having asserted the importance and pleasure of systematics, what follows? Yes, I'll mention some books below for you to read (and it'd be great to ask your church leaders for their favourites too). But please, go ahead and fall down sewers, eat bowls of cockroaches, skydive without a parachute or whatever else, but never, never, never reduce systematic theology to reading books. Think, talk, sing and pray about the glories of God's character and God's activity as revealed and known in the Lord Jesus Christ and you are 'doing theology'. Do these things making ever more exciting connections, with ever greater consistency and with ever broader comprehensiveness and you are 'doing systematic theology'. Do these things with an unbreakable resolve to submit to the teaching of the Bible at every point and with a wholehearted intent to be a doer and not a hearer only and to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and you are a great systematic theologian. But you won't care about that because your ambitions don't relate to being a 'great' anything yourself. They relate to the great God who has created you, redeemed you and destined you for glory. For the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, then, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, embrace, pursue, explore and practise 'systematic theology'. It's not a hobby for the train-spotting sort; it's a high calling for the world-transforming, kingdom-seeking, Christ-loving sort. And life this side of glory doesn't get much better than that. RecommendedJohn Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion David Field,
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