My suspicisions about systematic theology
Marika Rose’s latest post over at Open Table Theology (a fine new community blog you should all subscribe to, by the way) got me to thinking about my love-hate relationship with systematic theology.
It’s not that I reject systematic theology wholesale. I understand that at its best it is very important for a robust understanding of the Christian tradition and I utilize it myself and often rely on key systematic figures in my own thought. But still, there’s something about it that doesn’t quite set right with me.
My main objection is that systematic theology is largely a modern enterprise, meaning a couple of things. First, it is beholden to a rational, and sometimes positivist, worldview which tends to treat the divine as some sort of scientific object to observed and dissected from a distance rather than a reality to be participated in. Hence the expression that theology is the “queen of the sciences.” To suggest that theology is a science at all, let alone the superior one, is already to posit a certain type of form and method that is always chasing objectivity. Naturally, the need to delineate and taxonomize things into neat little air tight systems comes next. So theology is fractured into all sorts of sub-genres and compartmentalized into different categories and groupings. Again, I don’t want to categorically reject the categories. They aren’t inherently bad. At their best they help to point us in the right direction, but I think they more often than not tend to serve as conceptual idols, as do our systems.
And I guess that’s my biggest beef. That systematic theology, as good and as helpful as it may be, is prone to creating conceptual idols and constructing impenetrable systems that resist any contribution from someone not perceived to be an “expert” by an esoteric — and often parochial — community. And if we agree that all theology is political then I think we will most definitely find that systematic theology is often used to reinforce the status quo at the center rather than identifying with those on the margins; and as Leonard Sweet has said, “a move to the center is a move away from Jesus.” So at its worst systematic theology serves as a handmaiden to the political status quo. In that respect I think Walter Brueggmann was really on to something when he wrote that “empires prefer systematic theologians” in the first edition of his The Prophetic Imagination (interestingly, that line was removed in the second edition; I’m in the process of trying to figure out why). Augustine’s early development of just war theory in the fourth century as the church was beginning to gain rapport with the Roman Empire would be a prime example.
Again, I don’t say any of this to negate the worth and usefulness of systematic theology. I affirm that. But I’m still suspicious. Suspicious that when we create systems and taxonomies we tend to hold them much too tightly as if they themselves are without error. But all our models are fallible. Period. The temptation is to construct an appealing system and then cram God into it. I think it should be the other way around. What I see God doing in Jesus is rupturing every human system and every finite construction with an un-tamable type of dynamism and vitality. Those systems are, I think, only useful insofar as they point us toward the divine, but too often we mistake the systems themselves for the divine. When it’s all said and done we have to be able to say along with Thomas Aquinas (who was the first systematic theologian and wrote perhaps the most epic systematic theology ever) that our systems, constructions, and taxonomies are “all straw” in comparison to the great mystery and paradox that is this ultimate reality in which we all share.
So I wonder, if systematic theology in its current state is in fact hopelessly beholden to a modern worldview as I suspect it is, what might a postmodern systematic theology look like? Or is that even possible? What think you?
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