Ligon Duncan likes Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology. But he just can’t understand why some folk seem to have ST run a very poor second to BT. It’s a trait that is evident in Sydney evangelicalism. Whether it’s the accusation that the Bible is treated like a bank of data to be mined and not a narrative of salvation-history, or that it represents a tendency to prefer ‘direct-statement’ evidence in theological argument, systematics is implied to be something imposed on the text, while biblical theology derives its observations from organically.
Due to the influence of Sydney evangelicalism, biblical theological motifs have been supplanting covenant theology in some areas of the Presbyterian Church.
Read the following, which is excerpted from a transcript of Duncan’s address to the 2008 Together For The Gospel conference on Sound Doctrine. (Published as part of Proclaiming A Cross Centered Theology) He puts the basic ideas used to suppose the superiority of biblical theology to systematics to the sword in a thorough and elegant manner:
The Bible is not a storied narrative. It is God’s one Word to His people coming to us in a library, a collection of sixty-six separate items written in three languages, composed and collected over about fifteen hundred years, containing a stunning variety of literary types: written history, personal memoirs, sermons, letters, hymns, prayers, propositions both moral and theological, creeds love poetry, philosophy, family trees, visions, tales, statistics, public laws, rubrics, rituals, inventories, individual and corporate commands and directives and more.
It is not a storied narrative. Indeed, we have to put the meta-narrative, the big picture, together, and to do that we not only derive it from specific passages that rehearse the overarching story, but we also do it with biblical (redemptive-historical) and systematic (summarising topical) theology… …The minute you admit that it is God’s one Word – one message coming to us in diverse form – and reckon adequately with that reality, you immediately see why systematic theology is both necessary and unavoidable.
By the way, when you hear someone touting story and narrative over doctrine and propositions because, they opine, “this generation prefers narrative to proposition,” then remember two things. First, this is not the first generation in history to like stories. Do you think that when seventeenth-or-eighteenth-century dads tucked their children in bed at night that their bairns begged, “No stories tonight, Dad; we’d like syllogisms instead”? “Logic please, Pop.” “No scary tales, sir. Restate those propositions one more time.” Heavens, no! We’ve always liked stories. Second, oral cultures often used stories to convey doctrinal, moral, and social propositions.
When a congregation member comes up to you and says, “Pastor, tell me, what does the Bible say about angels?” he doesn’t want a storied narrative. He wants a brief, biblical summarization that takes into account the shape of all the teaching of Scripture on that particular topic. That’s what systematic theology does. You do it all the time as a pastor. So when your congregation member asks you, “Pastor, what does the Bible teach about the assurance of salvation?” or “Pastor, what does the Bible say about what happens to us when we die?” your answer is indebted to systematic theology, and you are doing systematic theology when you ask and answer those kinds of questions. Systematic theology answers the questions, what does the whole Bible teach us today about X? Doctrine is what the whole Bible teaches about a particular topic; systematic theology is the attempt to look carefully at what the Bible teaches about those doctrines, to summarize them helpfully, and to relate them one another in a way that does justice to the teaching of the whole Bible.
Furthermore, the idea that biblical theologians think as exegetes while systematic theologians think as logicians is, well, laughable.
Finally, the idea that ST is based on factors external to the text while biblical theology is organised by factors within the writings themselves is also an inadequate and misleading characterisation.
Duncan goes on to outline that systematic theology was practiced by those who are part of the biblical narrative itself, and demonstrates the necessity and legitimacy of the field today.
Get hold of the book and read the whole essay. The recording of the talk itself is available online.
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