Preaching and Biblical, Systematic, Historical, and Pastoral Theology (Part 1b)

Don Carson continues to explore the vital role of systematic theology in the context of preaching. He discusses how a structured understanding of Christian doctrines and principles can enhance the depth and clarity of sermons, connecting the scriptures to a broader theological framework. This part of the series delves into the practical application of systematic theology in addressing contemporary issues and challenges faced by the church, emphasizing its relevance to both pastors and congregations.

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By way of review, systematic theology tends to ask and answer atemporal questions: What is God like? What is sin? What does the cross achieve? And so on and so on. It is less concerned for the theological structure, literary form of particular biblical books and corpora, and it is less concerned to track out the storyline. These are the domains of biblical theology, but now some characteristics of systematic theology to bear in mind in preparing to preach, and then tomorrow I’ll go a little further over some practical points for the preacher that stem from this.

1. At its best, systematic theology synthesizes the whole.

It melds together and, thus, it authorizes comprehensive synthesis. It’s a way of reminding ourselves there is finally one mind behind the whole thing. When we’re doing our biblical theology, we may be so careful, rightly in a sense, to distinguish Johannine theology from Pauline theology or so careful not to read Paul back into the Psalms while still seeing how the Psalms rightly go forward to Paul that we are dealing with the characteristics of the individual human authors and just beginning to lose sight of the fact there is one author behind the whole.

When you start thinking synthetically over the whole, you are driven all the time to remember this is not just “Paul tells us that” but “God tells us that.” The fact it is a synthetic discipline over the whole means we will be driven to remind ourselves there is one mind behind the whole Bible.

That’s why, incidentally, today in academic circles when people go and do a PhD in “systematic theology” in our major universities, by and large they’re not doing systematic theology as you and I think of systematic theology. The overwhelming majority of secular university dissertations on systematic theology are in fact on prolegomena, epistemology, and the like, or they will write learned disciplines on comparing and contrasting Barth and Calvin on accommodation, and they call it a systematic theology degree.

That’s really historical theology in my books; it’s comparing two historical figures, whereas systematic theology as it was understood before about 100 years ago is essentially constructive. (I’m going to come back to this point in another way.) It’s actually saying, “This is what the Bible teaches,” whereas modern systematic theology of an academic sort in secular universities almost never says that. It’s afraid to say that. It’s always talking about the thought of some individual or comparing things or prolegomena or epistemology or whatever.

That’s not the way I’m using the category systematic theology. I’m using the category systematic theology in the older sense of dogmatic theology, synthesis of the whole. When one does that sort of work, one is forced, likewise, to do some reconciling things. How do you put together James and Paul on justification? What is the contribution of Luke/Acts to justification as compared with Paul to justification?

Because your commitment in systematic theology is to synthesize the whole. That is part of your job, so now you are thinking so comprehensively that when you are preaching one part in line with biblical theology that you’re emphasizing those themes, your input from systematic theology is saying, “Yes, but what about other parts in complementary ways of looking at things? How do you put these things together?” Do you see?

Systematic theology is forcing you to remember there is a whole canon out there, and at the end of the day you don’t want to say just what God says in one place about something; you want to think through how you put the pieces together so you say something holistic about something. The implication of that for preaching should be obvious and huge.

While you’re working on your Isaiah theology as you’re expounding Isaiah, you don’t want to say things in such a way that you are actually excluding other things that are said about God. You’re preaching through Isaiah 40 and following, those magnificent chapters that talk about the transcendence of God in spectacularly generous terms and so on, yet the fact remains that Hosea is also an eighth-century prophet which pictures God as a cuckolded lover. It’s astonishing. It’s not exactly the picture of God in Isaiah 40 and following.

You don’t want so to expound Isaiah 40 and following by just saying, “God should not be reduced to our small terms. He does not have emotions as we do. He is the God who.…” Whatever, whatever, whatever. There’s a doctrine of impassability there, but you have to figure out how to get that one right so you can make sense of Hosea as well, who was at least a near contemporary.

The discipline of systematic theology is forcing you not to say stupid things built on just one book or one passage or one corpus, forgetting there is a bigger, holistic picture out there. There may be some places in your sermon where you may even acknowledge there is another tract, another line that needs to be brought in to complement something. You don’t have to do it every time, because then you run the danger of losing the powerful grip of the individual local passage, but you don’t want to word it in such a way that you’re excluding complementary things either, and in some cases you may want to do a bit of holism.

2. Systematic theology is less sensitive than biblical theology as far as corpus distinctions are concerned, but it is more passionate about constructing the whole and must not be despised by specialists in biblical theology.

It correspondingly facilitates talk about God and all that he is doing in such a way that we become passionate, not only to understand individual texts, or not only to understand how, let’s say, God is treated in a particular text, but how the whole is to be thought about.

For those of us who have been trained in biblical theology, and many in the evangelical schools of the antipodes are trained in biblical theology owing in part to the influence of Moore but now increasingly to the influence of Ridley and so on, there is not a corresponding respect always for systematic theology. It’s a huge mistake. I could give many illustrations. We might pick up a couple of those later.

3. Ironically, systematic theology is more likely to be culturally located and culturally dependent than biblical theology.

Let me explain. This one needs unpacking. Every discipline, including biblical theology, is culturally located in some sense. I sometimes say there are only two kinds of perspectivalists: those who admit it and those who don’t.

That is to say, the only non-perspectivalist is omniscient. God is non-perspectival. That is, he knows everything. He looks at everything from all conceivable angles. He knows all that has been, all that is, and all that would be. He even knows what things would have happened under different conditions. Lots of biblical texts affirm all of that, so he is completely non-perspectival.

If you’re finite, and I assume most of us in this room fall under that category, then necessarily you’re perspectival. Do you see? Add to our finiteness our sinfulness and our cultural location and this sort of thing, and then there is no discipline human beings think about that is not perspectival. Of course.

When you’re doing your biblical theology, inevitably you’re shaped in some ways by the limitations of your background and what has been taught to you and what you’ve read so far and so forth. When you’re doing your biblical theology, likewise, in some sense, you’re perspectival. Fair enough.

But as a discipline biblical theology is ideally so tied to the texts and to the categories of the text, to the language, the vocabulary, the themes of the text, that in some ways it is more immediately self-controlling, whereas systematic theology, precisely because it’s trying to do the whole, is looking for ways of synthesizing things, and you cannot, when you’re taking a synthesizing step, merely go to a proof text to show you how to do it.

It’s taking a text from here and a text from here and a text from here that are saying somewhat different and adjacent things, and how do you put them together? That means automatically you are more likely to be influenced by non-textual factors as you try to do your synthesis. Systematic theology is automatically more likely to be culturally dependent than biblical theology. That can be a bad thing. It means you can get on a current hobbyhorse.

Now everybody’s concerned about how the Bible speaks to ecology and stewardship in creation and all of that sort of thing. Nobody was doing that 25 or 30 years ago. Now everybody is doing it. You start asking yourself, “Does that mean Christians in the 1930s really got it all wrong, or does it mean we’re getting it a little wrong and distorted today?” That’s one of the contributions that comes from historical theology, that we’ll worry about tomorrow, but it’s a reflection of the fact that our theology is more culturally dependent.

The positive spin on that, however, is systematic theology is thus more culturally located precisely because biblical theology is trying so hard to deal with the categories in the text itself, it is at least potentially in danger of becoming antiquarian, whereas because you’re doing this synthetic thing in systematic theology, good systematic theology that is not merely repeating the traditions of the fathers, good systematic theology is likely to be more sensitive to the currents around us that need addressing, that need thinking about, that need analysis.

Do you see? So you start addressing some facet or other of postmodernism or some facet or other of globalization or whatever, and you start asking the question, “What does the Bible say about that?” Did you hear that? What does the Bible say about it? So now you have the whole Bible, the whole of Christian thought, the whole of Christian thinking about it. Do you see?

In one sense, you are not only more culturally dependent in your analysis and synthesis, but you’re more likely to be culturally sensitive to the needs and questions of the time in really good systematic theology. You are addressing the problems that are arising right now in really good, rich systematic theology.

That’s why systematic theology must never be a discipline that is learned only by studying dead systematicians. If you study only dead systematicians.… In effect, the older your systematics gets, actually you’re doing more historical theology, which is something again I’m going to come to tomorrow. You’re really looking up how somebody else put it together in the past, which is worth doing. We will come to the discipline of historical theology, as I say, tomorrow.

Yet, good systematic theology is demanding that you put holistic structures together now, which presupposes you’re doing good exegesis and good biblical theology and rereading and rereading and rereading the Bible. Inevitably, you are doing so from the matrix in which you yourself now exist.

Thus, systematic theology is more likely to be not only culturally dependent but culturally located than biblical theology. It will also deal with synthetic matters that generate a doctrine like the Trinity, undoubtedly, but it will also be cast in such a way that it addresses the concerns and frames of reference of our age as well.

4. The best systematic theology is constructive systematic theology.

That is, unlike the traditions of the more liberal academic world where so-called systematic theology is really examining prolegomena issues of epistemology and the like or comparing a Calvin and a Barth or a Luther and Zwingli or a Luther and a Tom Oden today or whatever, in constructive systematic theology you are actually asking the question, “What does the Bible as a whole say about something?” or otherwise put, “What says the Lord?” What does God say? What should we believe? What should we do?

Transparently, there’s a list of things we should learn and believe and do coming out of biblical theology. I’m not denying that, but inevitably, out of biblical theology it’s coming out of one stream of biblical thought at a time. It’s not asking the synthetic questions. Systematic theology is asking the synthetic questions.

For example, there is a great deal in the history of Western evangelistic preaching coming in part out of the Reformation and in part out of the Puritans, refracted down through both the Reformed and the Wesleyan tradition, that says to preach evangelistically in a responsible way is to preach the law first and then to preach the gospel. Often Galatians 3 is cited for justification for this view.

There’s a lovely letter in Wesley … (I dug it out the other day to refresh my mind on it. I’m going to publish it sometime. It’s one of those things that gets lost, but it’s there, and it’s really quite wonderful.) Wesley is writing to a young man about how to preach the gospel in any place when he first goes in on his horse after the poor horse has done 50,000 miles or so and he’s supposed to preach the gospel in some place. He says, “The first thing I do when I get to some new place is to make a general declaration of the love of God and the gospel and so on.”

Then he says, “I preach the law. I preach it firmly. I preach it in detail so men and women may know why they are lost, what the standards of God are, what the holiness of God is, how far they have fallen short, in what they are guilty. They must see their need of Christ. If they do not see their need of Christ, they will not cry to be saved. You do not ask for forgiveness unless you know you’re guilty. You do not ask for life unless you know you are consigned to death. You do not ask to be found unless you know you’re lost. Preach the law.”

Then he says, “I keep preaching the law, and when I see a few people moved to tears of desperation, I preach more law. Then when quite a number of people in the congregation are beginning to be moved by conviction of sin and there are shades of despair here and there, I mix a little grace, but only when virtually the entire congregation is awash in tears and self-examination, crying out as on the day of Pentecost, ‘What shall we do?’ Then I preach grace fully, freely, richly so men may see that our hope is in Christ and in Christ alone.”

He goes on and on and on. Then he adds, “And quickly do I admix law lest men should presume.” Whether you buy into things quite that way or not is not my point. In my view there are both some good things and some slightly off-track things there, but nevertheless, that is the heritage that has come down to us in a lot of our evangelistic preaching even if we don’t go quite that far.

People have to see that they’re lost, then you preach grace, and that’s how they get saved. The way you respond to that is repentance and faith and you’re in. That’s how you preach. But if you’re doing constructive theology that is not merely following the traditions of the fathers (that’s coming out of historical theology) so that you’re thinking deeply about sin, an interaction with the people of our age and how they look at things (what are their categories?), then you may in fact come out with a sort of approach of a Tim Keller.

It’s not that Tim Keller won’t say anything about law. You see, he never begins with law, because, in an age largely feeling the impact of postmodern assumptions, law is arbitrary, law is manipulative. You say, “This is what the law says,” and you’re going to find an awful lot of 20-somethings who are going to say, “Says who?”

“So begin instead,” he says, “with idolatry,” because idolatry, biblically conceived, has to do with betrayed relationships, and the 20-somethings do understand that, so that idolatry is everything that displaces the centrality of God, everything that claims ultimate allegiance whether the thing is good or bad.

It can be something really sleazy and bad that claims your ultimate allegiance, but it can be something that is itself intrinsically good but once it becomes absolute in your life it becomes bad, because it has de-Godded God, and then he works it out sociologically and family relationships and work and pleasure and what you’re seeking and what your values are and where you’re heading in life. Do you see?

His most recent book is a lovely little thing called Counterfeit Gods, but he has been doing this sort of thing for years and years and years and years, and after all, that too, when you start putting things together in a systemic way, in a systematic way, has a lot of sanction to it. Part of Paul’s argument in Romans is that sin reigns from Adam to Moses before there is law.

The law comes along and turns the rebellion into transgression to use the language of Galatians 3, but before there is transgression of specific laws, there is still idolatry. There is still the de-Godding of God. Do you see? They’re still defying him. It is a more primordial way of thinking about sin.

In fact, there are a quite a lot of ways of thinking about sin in the New Testament and in the Old Testament as well. Not only breaking of law, which is such a big thing in the Protestant tradition, not only idolatry, which is the most fundamental category of all, but also shame, and there are many cultures in the world that are first and foremost not guilt cultures but shame cultures. You lose face.

I think you could argue the account in Genesis, chapter 3, includes both guilt and shame, and if you are wise in your preaching then you want to put across in some way or another (not necessarily in every sermon on sin but at some point or another) how sin embraces quite a lot of different dimensions: betrayed relationships, idolatry, transgression of specific commands, loss of face before God, loss of face before each other, shame, in other words.

Sometimes it is cast as illness that debilitates us and sometimes it is cast as dirt from which we must be cleaned and sometimes it is cast as that which debauches the glory of God and so forth. Do you see? There are many different ways to think about sin, and if you are thinking systemically, you’ll be thinking along those lines.

If you are merely thinking through the particular passage at hand, you may be forced to think about only the categories of sin that are used in this particular passage, but that is why systematic theology, when it is done well, when it is constructive systematic theology, when you’re trying to put all the pieces together in reflective interaction with what’s going on in your culture.… That’s why systematic theology so conceived stands behind good apologetics.

Where systematic theology is merely antiquarian you don’t get that constructive element in it. We’ll listen to what historical theology has to teach us tomorrow, but nevertheless, the best systematic theology is constructive systematic theology. If somebody takes a look at our website (somebody who was asking about the Gospel Coalition), we have what we call the Foundation Documents that are now translated in about 20 languages. They’re all on the website.

The Foundation Documents are put into 17 pages: a one-page preamble, a statement of faith, and then a theological vision of ministry. The statement of faith is heavily indebted to biblical theology. It uses biblical categories. It follows the Bible storyline. It is much less indebted to historical theology than most statements of faith, although people will see the connections. Yet, there are parts of it that are deeply indebted to the best of contemporary systematic theology.

You see, almost all statements of faith this side of the Reformation begin with Scripture and revelation, what are often called prolegomena. That is, you begin with epistemology. We don’t do that because we have listened enough to what postmodernism is rightly saying, though it says many foolish things, that we begin with God. That’s a function of having thought through things out of the synthesis of systematic theology. Do you see?

5. The best systematic theology forces us to think hierarchically about theology.

You can get some of that in good biblical theology, but systematics forces it on you. That there is biblical mandate for this is reflected in what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, “Now I want to remind you of the matters of first importance,” which presupposes there are also matters of secondary importance. Do you see? That is, the non-negotiables.

I remember when I was a young man. My first degree was chemistry and mathematics. I was in science. I was heading off to Cornell for organic synthesis. That’s where I was heading, so I had to give quite a lot of reflection at the time to what I thought of Genesis 1 to 11 and scientific issues in general and so forth.

One of the books that helped me most greatly at the time was a book by Francis Schaeffer called Genesis in Space and Time. If you haven’t read it, it’s still worth reading to this day. It’s a very simple book with a very simple argument. What Francis Schaeffer advises is to ask yourself what is the least that Genesis 1 to 11 must be saying for the rest of the Bible to be both true and coherent? Let me repeat that. It’s extremely important.

What is the least that Genesis 1 to 11 must be saying for the rest of the Bible to be both true and coherent? That’s not saying what is the most it must be saying? It may be saying a whole lot of other things. It is not asking you to resolve every complicated dispute about the relationship between science and the Bible and so forth.

It is asking you to answer the question what is the least it must be saying for the rest of the Bible to be true and coherent? That forces you to think through what the most important things are, and it’s the important things you should be preaching. You may have a specialist seminar in your church some weekend on pushing further about these things to think about them more holistically and more deeply and so on, but what you should be preaching most profoundly, most prophetically, most consistently all the time is what the most important things are.

6. Systematic theology ideally should be grounded in and integrated with biblical theology.

There’s a huge amount that could be said about that. I once wrote a chart 25 years ago (you’ll have to watch my hand write on this imaginary whiteboard here) where I began with text and exegesis to generate biblical theology with input from historical theology to generate systematic theology.

You would like to think it is a kind of straight line all the way through, but in fact, it’s not a straight line all the way through. The text itself is finally authoritative (okay, we’ll agree with that), but the reality is there are back-loops everywhere so that, in some ways, your biblical theology is going to be shaped and constrained by what you learned from systematic theology.

Yet, at a certain level, there is a kind of priority to this straight line all the way through, even though there are a lot of back-loops, because that which is closest to the text and the unpacking of the text in the text’s own terms is most likely to be most immediately faithful to what God has actually said in the text, and the further out you go along these lines doing bigger and bigger syntheses and so on, the more likely it is you’re introducing wobbles. That’s true.

Systematic theology needs to be rechecked all the time by exegesis, by biblical theology. There are some systematicians (I’m sure not at Ridley) in some institutions who manage to teach systematic theology without ever opening their Bibles. They will say, “Today we’re going to concern ourselves with the Trinity.”

They’ll go through the homoousion debates, and they’ll go through contemporary Trinitarian contributions by the lovely chap at King’s College in London who recently died and wrote so much on the subject and how we should think about this and that and the implications of relationships and on and on (all of which might be very helpful, but where’s the Bible?), whereas I would want to argue the best systematic theology opens up the Bible first and looks at a number of texts that forces us to think about these things and learn some input from historical theology and how these things have been debated before I try to produce some kind of synthesis.

The best systematic theology is going to be deeply rooted in the line through exegesis to biblical theology. There are a lot of examples that could be given along those lines too. Let me mention just one on the fly. In the history of Reformed theology, justification and sanctification are often set over against each other. That is to say justification is that declarative act of God by which you are declared just on the basis of the cross work of Christ.

This does not mean you are just. It has to do with your status. You are simul justus et peccator, simultaneously just yet a sinner still. Sanctification, by contrast, is that process by which you are increasingly conformed to the likeness of Christ. Isn’t that we learn both in our historical theology and very frequently in our systematics classes?

But, of course, if you’ve done more biblical theology, you’re going to raise at least a few question marks here and there over this, because you can’t help but see even in Paul, for example, that sometimes people are said to be sanctified who are singularly unsanctified. The church in Corinth is those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus. Good grief! If that’s a sanctified church, I’d hate to see what an unsanctified one is. Do you see?

They’re arguing. They have party politics in it. Somebody is sleeping around. They can’t agree on the doctrine of the resurrection. Yet, they’re sanctified in Christ Jesus, which is why Calvin, for example (he didn’t use these categories, but this is what he meant), could distinguish between sanctification as the process by which we are made more holy and positional sanctification or definitional sanctification when you’re sanctified by virtue of the fact you’ve been set aside for God by God.

If you’ve done your exegetical homework first, you will be aware of those kinds of distinctions, so when you formulate your doctrine of sanctification, you will avoid this simple reductionism that picks up only one arm of the discussion. If you’re doing evangelism according to systematic theology, often you think, “God, sin, the cross, and faith.” That’s the way almost all tracts work that are based on systematics. God, sin, the cross, and faith.

If you build evangelism out of biblical theology, it tends to be instead, “Creation, fall, the cross, and consummation.” In my view, one of the most urgent things that is needed in rich evangelistic portrayal today is something that melds those two together because there are decided weaknesses with both of them. We can pick that up in discussion later.

7. Systematic theology lends itself to worldview formation.

Systematic theology at its best lends itself to worldview formation, and that enables you to think holistically about how to interact with the world in which we live. I’ll tease that out a bit more tomorrow before we head for discussion and reflections on historical theology.