Analyzing Doctrine

Toward a Systematic Theology

Oliver D. Crisp

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781481309868
• eBook ISBN: 9781481309882
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In  Analyzing Doctrine Oliver Crisp carefully considers the relationship of systematic theology to analytic philosophy, arguing that the tools of analytic philosophy can be fruitfully applied to traditional systematic theology. Doing so, as  Analyzing Doctrine reveals, creates a distinct and rich analytic theology.
 
Analyzing Doctrine employs traditional themes of systematic theology to structure Crisp's analytic theological analysis. Crisp examines the doctrine of God, the mystery of the Trinity, and God's intention in creating and relating to the world. He then addresses the incarnation, original sin, the virgin birth, Christ's two wills, salvation, and, finally, the resurrection. In the process of making his constructive case, Crisp engages a range of historic theological voices from the tradition, as well as contemporary biblical studies and systematic theology.
 
Clear, accessible, and engaging,  Analyzing Doctrine establishes analytic theology's place in the architecture of systematic theology while also challenging some of its misconceptions. By seamlessly weaving together Christian tradition and analytic philosophy to construct his theology, Crisp argues for the integral role that analytic theology plays in the theological imagination.

1

Analytic Systematic Theology

The emergence of systematic theology as analytic theology was . . . an accident waiting to happen.

William Abraham1

Since the publication of the original symposium in which William Abraham’s essay appeared in 2009, analytic theology has emerged as a serious intellectual enterprise that includes a monograph series, several professional journals, a recently published introductory text, and an ever-increasing number of articles, essays, monographs, and edited books that address a wide range of topics in contemporary doctrinal theology from the arcane heights of the Trinity, incarnation, and atonement to theological practices of spiritual theology, prayer, and liturgy.2 Perhaps it was “an accident waiting to happen.” But are the results really theology? Is analytic theology actually systematic theology, or is it something else? That is one of the most persistent questions that has been asked of practitioners of analytic theology by those who are non–analytic systematic theologians in the last decade. In his 2009 response to this question, “Systematic Theology as Analytic Theology,” William Abraham answered in the affirmative that “analytic theology can be usefully defined as follows: . . . systematic theology attuned to the deployment of the skills, resources, and virtues of analytic philosophy. It is the articulation of the central themes of Christian teaching illuminated by the best insights of analytic philosophy.”3 That is a good place to start. He goes on to elaborate how analytic theology might approach topics of systematic theology, focusing on the doctrine of God and Anselm’s vision of the divine. Nevertheless, the worry that analytic theology is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing—that is, philosophy pretending to be theology—has persisted.

The same topic has been taken up and elaborated upon by Thomas McCall in his more recent book An Invitation to Analytic Christian Theology.4 Like Abraham, he thinks that “theologians should be able and willing to do analytic theology. They should, in other words, do theology that is able and willing to employ the skills and tools of the analytic tradition [of philosophy].” What is more, McCall urges analytic theologians to do theology. He writes,

Analytic theology—as theology—should be (to borrow John Webster’s phrase) “theological theology.” It should be grounded in Holy Scripture, informed by the Christian tradition and attentive to the potential and pressing challenges faced by God’s people in the world. But there is more—analytic theology should be oriented toward its proper end, and analytic theologians should be attentive to the proper approach and posture of theology.5

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am sympathetic to both Abraham and McCall, and applaud McCall’s notion that analytic theology should be a properly “theological theology.” Nevertheless, even here there is some indication that analytic theology is still not always regarded as proper theology, and even that some practitioners of analytic theology may not be doing genuine theology after all—hence McCall’s injunction that analytic theologians do theology, which I take to be a plea for practitioners of analytic theology to do genuine theology rather than ersatz theology, or philosophy dressed up as theology. Such a concern would only arise if there was some uncertainty about whether analytic theology is a species of theology.

This opening chapter is a further attempt to address the question of whether analytic theology is systematic theology. Because I think this is an important matter, and because it seems to me that there is still widespread misunderstanding about the nature and scope of analytic theology among nonanalytic practitioners of systematic theology, I venture to think that yet another attempt to address this question is worthwhile, in the hope that we may get past this largely formal matter and onto more productive material ones.

What Is Systematic Theology?

Let us begin by thinking about the nature of systematic theology. My central claim here is that analytic theology can (and should) be practiced as a species of systematic theology. It is such analytic systematic theology that this volume is interested in. This seems to me to be the central claim of McCall’s invitation to analytic theology as well. But it is subtly different from that offered by Abraham. Whereas Abraham maintains that analytic theology just is systematic theology of a particular variety, my claim is more modest: analytic theology may be practiced as a form of systematic theology, and should be received as such by the systematic theology guild when it is practiced in this way. Nevertheless, this is consistent with the notion that analytic theology may not always be a species of systematic theology. To see why this may be the case, consider the fact that someone may work on natural theology with the sensibilities and ambition of a practitioner of analytic theology (and many today do so). Yet on one widely accepted way of thinking about the project of natural theology, it does not fall under the description of systematic theology because it involves reasoning about matters theological without recourse or appeal to special revelation or ecclesiastical tradition, using evidence and premises that are accessible to all reasonable human beings, irrespective of theological persuasion.

There is now overwhelming evidence for the conclusion that analytic theology is being practiced as a species of systematic theology in the published body of work being produced by practitioners of analytic theology. Nonanalytic theologians may claim that such analytic theology is not, in fact, genuine systematic theology. But in order to make good on this objection, the practitioner of systematic theology would have to be able to show that nothing that falls under the description of analytic theology as it is understood by its leading practitioners is within the bounds of what falls under the description of systematic theology as it is understood by its leading practitioners. The problem here is that there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for systematic theology, no description under which “such and such counts as systematic theology” is agreed upon by the leading members of the systematic theology guild. In fact, there is wide divergence among members of the systematic theology guild about the nature of systematic theology, and about its relationship to philosophy, the social and natural sciences, and other intellectual disciplines. Because there is such difference of view about the nature of systematic theology among members of the systematic theology guild, judging whether analytic theology falls within the bounds of systematic theology is not quite as straightforward as it might at first appear. For if there is no agreed criteria for what constitutes a particular intellectual subdiscipline like systematic theology, then judging whether a particular work counts as an instance of the particular discipline in question is a rather difficult task.

To make this point sharper, let us consider some representative examples of contemporary systematic theology. I have chosen to focus on three theologians whose work marks them out as inheritors of different approaches to the theological task in modern theology.

John Webster

Since we have already mentioned him in passing, let us begin with the late John Webster’s view of the nature of systematic theology, which is currently one of the most influential. In a recent paper entitled “What Makes Theology Theological?,” he writes that “an understanding of the nature of theology comprises, inter alia, an account of theology’s object, its cognitive principles, its ends, and the virtues of its practitioners. Acts of creaturely intellect are theological to the extent that they are directed to this object, operate on the basis of these cognitive principles, pursue these ends, and are undertaken by persons in whom these virtues may be discerned.”6 Theology’s object is primarily God and secondarily the works of God in creation; its cognitive principles are intellectual acts like reading and interpretation, historical inquiry, conceptual abstraction, and practical judgment.7 In an earlier essay, entitled “Principles of Systematic Theology,” Webster puts it like this: “The Holy Trinity is the ontological principle of Christian systematic theology. Its external or objective cognitive principle is the divine Word, by which . . . God’s incommunicable self-knowledge is accommodated to the saints. The internal or subjective cognitive principle is the redeemed intelligence of the saints. Systematic theology is thus ectypal knowledge . . . and a subaltern or subordinate science. Its matter is twofold: God, and all things in God.”8

From these different essays a fairly cohesive account emerges. According to Webster, theology ought to be about the nature of the triune God and focused upon understanding him in an appropriate, worshipful manner by means of the word of God. Then it should be about God’s works in creation, understood by means of redeemed intelligence. It brings a breadth of different tools from allied disciplines like biblical studies, historical theology, and, perhaps, philosophy to bear upon the theological task. But its principles, goals, and aims are all properly theological, both in the sense of belonging to the discipline of systematic theology (rather than critical theory, or sociology, or whatever) and in the sense of being focused principally upon Theology Proper—that is, the doctrine of God.

Brian Gerrish

Let us turn to another contemporary conception of the theological task. This time we consider Brian Gerrish, himself a Reformed theologian like Webster, though of a Presbyterian rather than Anglican persuasion. In his recent one-volume systematic theology Christian Faith: Dogmatics in Outline, Gerrish begins with the following dogmatic thesis statement: “Christian dogmatics, as part of Christian theology, has for its subject matter the distinctively Christian way of having faith, in which elemental faith is confirmed, specified, and represented as filial trust in God the Father of Jesus Christ.”9 In his second chapter on the definition of dogmatics, the dogmatic thesis statement reads, “Christian dogmatics is distinguished from every other part of Christian theology as the theoretical, critical, and systematic discipline that seeks to establish the unity, and to test the adequacy, of the beliefs and dogmas in which Christian faith is expressed.”10 Here the focus is on religious experience rather than upon doctrine. Systematic theology, or dogmatics (the words are apparently interchangeable for Gerrish11), is primarily concerned with Christian faith. Doctrine (here, beliefs and dogmas) is a second-order attempt to express or capture something of this faith, so that systematic theology (i.e., dogmatics) is tasked with testing the adequacy of these doctrines relative to the faith Christians express.

Gordon Kaufman

A third example of a contemporary systematic theologian, with a rather different understanding of the nature of systematic theology from those of Webster and Gerrish, is the Harvard theologian Gordon Kaufman. In his constructive theology In the Face of Mystery, he maintains that God is a symbol, a value to which we aspire in our thinking about our own lives and worldview in relation to God. We do not have any unmediated access to the divine. Our thoughts and conceptions of God are our own, not the product of some immediate revelation. Consequently,

Theologians should attempt to construct conceptions of God, humanity, and the world appropriate for the orientation of contemporary human life. As we have been observing, these notions are (and always have been) human creations, human imaginative constructions; they are our ideas, not God’s. What is needed in each new generation is an understanding of God adequate for and appropriate to human life in the world within which it finds itself, so that human devotion and loyalty, service and worship, may be directed toward God rather than to the many idols that so easily attract attention and interest.12

Kaufman eschews the tradition-bound biblicism of the past as an outmoded way of thinking of the constructive theological task. Instead, he regards systematic and constructive theology as disciplines concerned in each new generation with the forging of imaginative ways of thinking about the divine that are adequate for particular communities and people. But for Kaufman, theology is very much a human activity directed Godward. It is not about rightly discerning the meaning of some deposit of revelation bequeathed to us.

In assessing these three examples, we can see that Webster’s view is similar to, though not identical with, a certain post-Barthian trajectory in contemporary theology often called “dogmatic theology.” As we have already noted, Gerrish is also concerned with this task. It is just that he conceives of it in rather different terms as principally about Christian faith and only secondarily as the conceptualization of that in doctrine. This has a greater affinity to Schleiermacher and to the classical liberal tradition than to Barth. Kaufman’s project is much more clearly revisionist in nature, and owes more to the sort of theological trajectory in modern theology traced by the likes of Paul Tillich. But this, too, might be thought of as a piece of systematic theology if we include within the bounds of systematic theology the task of theological construction—which I think we must. Although that may not be the whole of systematic theology, it is often thought to be a part of it, and Kaufman’s position is one live option for those engaged in systematic theology as conceptual construction, or world building.

As these three cameos indicate, there is very limited agreement among these practitioners of systematic theology regarding the nature of their task. Is systematic theology principally concerned with understanding the mystery of the triune God as apprehended in Scripture? Or is it primarily about Christian faith and only secondarily about doctrine as that doctrine expresses something of the faith experienced? Perhaps it is neither of these things. Maybe systematic theology is about imaginative human construction instead—the attempt to build an intellectual tower of our own making toward God. Or is it something else, some other way of thinking about theology that we haven’t even addressed?

Advocates of analytic theology might be tempted to argue ad hominem that if practitioners of systematic theology don’t have clear criteria for what counts as systematic theology, then it is rather difficult for practitioners of analytic theology to know what it is that is missing from analytic theology that means it is not an instance of systematic theology. However, let us leave that to one side. Instead, it may be more fruitful to consider what these different accounts of systematic theology share in common. Despite their significant areas of difference, it looks like they all share the following (perhaps more than this, but at least this much):

SHARED TASK: Commitment to an intellectual undertaking that involves (though it may not comprise) explicating the conceptual content of the Christian tradition (with the expectation that this is normally done from a position within that tradition, as an adherent of that tradition), using particular religious texts that are part of the Christian tradition, including sacred Scripture, as well as human reason, reflection, and praxis (particularly religious practices), as sources for theological judgments.

Let us call this the SHARED TASK of systematic theology, or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Analytic Systematic Theology
• 2. Picturing God
• 3. Divine Simplicity
• 4. Trinity and Mystery
• 5. God’s Eternal Purpose
• 6. Incarnation Anyway
• 7. Original Sin
• 8. Virgin Birth
• 9. Christ’s Two Wills
• 10. Salvation as Participation
• 11. Bodily Resurrection
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index