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From
Christian Doctrine to Systematic
Theology
COLIN GUNTON*
Abstract: Christian thought is uniquely resistant to systematization, yet over
the centuries has produced remarkable systematic accounts of Christian truth,
including those of the patristic and medieval eras before Christian theology
became systematically self-conscious in modernity. The more recent fate of the
notion of system is traced in Schleiermacher, Hegel and Kierkegaard, and an
argument advanced that systematic theology is the expression of personal skill
learned in community, and its unity and integrity are aesthetic and moral as
much as rationalistic
Setting the scene
Some time during the last decade or two, courses in the University of London
ceased to be called Christian doctrine and became systematic theology. A rose by
any other name? The vagaries of fashion? Or something substantive, however
elusive? One way of approaching that question is to survey the influences behind
the change, which were several. The addition, during the early 1970s, of a
substantial Roman Catholic institution into the University had some effect, as did
the frequent urging, particularly by Stephen Sykes, that the English would do well
to forget the insularity that had divided them from the German tradition since some
time in the nineteenth century.
1
It was also the case that for some time a shift had
been taking place in theological priorities from the biblical and patristic studies that
had so dominated the empirical British to a greater preoccupation with modern
questions, perhaps inspired or, better, given impetus by the publication in 1963 of
that celebration of popularised Bultmann, Tillich and Bonhoeffer, J.A.T.
International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 1 Number 1 March 1999
Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
*Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Kings College, Strand, London WC2R
2LS, UK.
1 Stephen W. Sykes, ed., England and Germany. Studies in Theological Diplomacy
(Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1982).
Robinsons Honest to God.
2
Whatever be the confluence of streams that brought
about the change, it is a real one.
But what of the substance? Is there a difference between Christian doctrine
and systematic theology? Both conceptions carry overt and hidden freights,
deriving at once from their history and their usage. Christian doctrine has the
advantage of being straightforward, referring to those things taught by Christians or
Christianity, if there be such an entity. But there are difficulties. The title can
suggest a body of teaching conveyed either authoritatively, ahistorically even, as a
given and changeless totality; or critically, as a body of truth once believed but now
the subject of criticism in the light of modernitys superior wisdom. (Indeed, it
might be suggested that it is the waning of the star of the latter approach,
increasingly revealed as jejune, that has precipitated the waxing of what has come
to be called systematic theology.) In sum, the suspicion is that Christian doctrine
sins against the modern canon of what is acceptable by being static.
But there are complications. Increasingly popular in recent times have been
courses on modern theology, using texts such as Types of Modern Theology
(1937) and its various successors.
3
These tend to operate as comparative or
developmental studies of an objective kind, rather like old fashioned courses in
comparative religion, describing and classifying different approaches to modern
theology, usually beginning with Schleiermacher or the Enlightenment, and moving
on to the latest trends. Such courses are in general spectator courses, observing
rather than participating, though certainly containing a critical component. Yet they
give a clue to what is distinctive about systematic theology, in their concern with
such things as method, epistemology and cultural context, none of which may be
prominent in Christian doctrine as traditionally taught.
The salient fact is, however, that what we now call systematic theology in part
emerged out of an epistemological and cultural crisis. In order to engage with that,
let us broaden the historical and intellectual purview by observing that two
apparently contrary features mark the history of Christian theology, almost uni-
versally. The first is that Christian thought is uniquely resistant to systematization;
and the second that the pursuit of theological truth, and sometimes of theological
system, has generated over the centuries a series of outstanding intellectual talents,
2 J.A.T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963). Here a personal
reminiscence will perhaps be allowed. At the time of publication, I was a third year
classics student, already being pushed towards ministry by a range of influences. Honest
to God was a heady brew, putting before the reader in no doubt over-simplified form the
questions raised in modern theology. Yet its superficial use of Bonhoeffers most
experimental writing, assimilating it to Tillichs theology of inwardness, was recognised
by some of its early reviewers. See in particular Barths often witty remarks peppering
many of his Letters 19611968, trans. J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt (Edinburgh: T
& T Clark, 1981). It was almost as if the English had discovered their Schleiermacher
after one and a half centuries of sleep, even though much of the content was to be found
in earlier British theology.
3 H.R. Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology (London: Fontana, 1964; first edition,
1937).
From `Christian Doctrine to `Systematic Theology 5
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
the equal of any other discipline or art form. Let us review something of each of
them, for they are two of the keys to the answer to the question we are approaching.
First, Christianity is a gospel, not a philosophy. Christian theology therefore
derives from a form of divine action, mediated historically, yet involving the
mysterious claim certainly so to a certain kind of philosophical mind that finite
particulars are vehicles for the self-presentation of the eternal and infinite God.
Intellectual activity involves, therefore, engagement with essentially elusive
historical events, questions about which we shall encounter in our discussion of
the nineteenth century.
Second, it may be asked: whence, then, comes the intellectual appeal? For
Anselm, as Barth has pointed out, it is his very faith that drives him to want to
understand.
4
In the relatively crisis-free atmosphere of the Middle Ages, where
Bible, creed, church and tradition were held to constitute a seamless whole, that
was a relatively straightforward matter. Before and after, things are different. The
intellectual side of early theology and we shall leave on one side for now the
question of whether it is properly described as systematic, or whether that epithet
should be reserved for the later period arose out of two features of the churchs
life, internal ecclesiastical crisis and the churchs relation to the cultures of the
surrounding world. It is an almost universal characteristic of early Christian
theology that it was prepared to accept the challenge of Jewish and Greek criticisms
and objections without taking refuge in fundamentalism or sectarianism. From the
beginning, Christianity is universal and missionary in scope, driven by a sense of
eschatological urgency that generated a unique blend of the particular and the
universal. When the urgency was to all intents and purposes lost in the
Constantinian settlement, albeit recurring from time to time in Christendom in
outbreaks of millennial enthusiasm, the systematic theme remains, but is, so to
speak, shifted into another key. Despite all the differences that the institutionaliza-
tion of the faith brought in its train, a combination of particularity and universality
remains. Just as the patristic era represents in one respect an attempt to respond to
the enquiry of how the gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus had universal
significance, so the Middle Ages represents in its own distinctive way the one
inescapable feature of the intellectual enterprise that is Christian theology: its
indisputable relation to the culture of Greece and its artistic, philosophical and
scientific successors.
Hellenism, however, was not monolithic, and all generalizations are dangerous.
There are many sharp differences within the thought world of Greece, as the
example cited by Barth has made clear, of the difference in theology between Plato
and the Athenian tragedians.
5
And yet there are features of Greek thought which
have marked the Christian conversation with culture at all times. Greeces is a
theology of recollection and although this marks more strongly its Christianization
4 Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens lntellectum, trans. I. W. Robertson (London: SCM
Press, 1958), p. 18.
5 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, translation ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance
(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 19571969), II/2, p. 555
6 Gunton
Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
by Augustine than it does classical Greek thought inwardness. Recollection
implies that truth is somewhere in ones past, to be sought in a quest for that which
eternally is; inwardness implies that the means of the quest is already intrinsic to the
inner being of the enquirer. Content, therefore, does not need to be given from
without. Compared with this, we might say that the Bibles is a theology of
revelation and promise, coming from without and from the future as well as the past.
Does this mean that there is nothing in common between Athens and Jerusalem, as
Tertullian famously asked? If there is not, what enables the conversation to take
place? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that both worlds had, and have,
theologies of revelation. There may be something in Heraclitus etymological
derivation of the Greek a$ kghe| as so+ lg+ kghom true as that which is not
hidden possibly carrying suggestions of truth as unveiling, in which case there is a
parallel with such biblical narratives as those in Exodus 334. At any rate, both
cultures evidence a consciousness of divine disclosure, a common feature despite
differences of mediation and content. Modern thought has tended to oppose reason
to revelation, but for the world of ancient philosophy reason is the medium of divine
revelation, through attention and recollection. In the ancient world, accordingly,
oppositions and conversations between theology and culture operated over a far
wider range of features.
The result is that the differences need to be understood within some concerns
shared in common. Let us examine something of how the confluence began.
Although there is a sense, to be outlined later, in which Irenaeus is a model for
systematic theology, the first self-consciously systematic theology was that of
Origen of Alexandria. Having outlined the beliefs of the church, he concludes the
preface to Book 1 of the De Principiis:
Everyone... who is desirous of constructing out of the foregoing a connected
body of doctrine must use points like these as elementary and foundation
principles... Thus by clear and cogent arguments he will discover the truth
about each particular point and so will produce, as we have said, a single body
of doctrine, with the aid of such illustrations and declarations as he shall find in
the holy scriptures and of such conclusions as he shall ascertain to follow
logically from them when rightly understood.
6
Origens stress on unity and connectedness indicate what I shall call a strong
conception of system, involving internal coherence and a definite logic, and it
derives, as Nicholas Rescher has shown, from Aristotle. Describing this somewhat
anachronistically as the Euclidean model, whose influence and historical
prominence it is almost impossible to exaggerate, Rescher shows that what has
come to be called foundationalism has a long history:
This geometric model of cognitive structure holds that the organisation of
knowledge must proceed in the following manner. Certain theses are to be
6 G.W. Butterworth, ed., Origen on First Principles (London: SPCK, 1936), p. 6.