Brian Hamilton-Vise

I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin

Biblical, Systematic, and Historical Theology: A Reflection on their Relationship

Systematic theology is a reflection on and elaboration of the biblical texts (and their interpretations); biblical theology is the root of systematic theology while also being read in light of it. As the early church had it: the rule of faith is derived from the Bible, and the Bible must be properly read through the rule of faith. It’s circular but not vicious, indeed necessary for us who take these texts to be truthful witnesses to the God become flesh in Jesus Christ.

For example, Trinity in the Old Testament: if we really believe that God is triune, and we really believe that our same God was the one who chose and trained Israel, then we believe that Israel’s God was triune–and we should expect to find hints of this in their Scriptures, despite our conviction that God’s trinity didn’t become obvious until Jesus became human. This isn’t eisegesis; it’s an interpretive key rooted in the text itself. Still, collapsing biblical and systematic theology shouldn’t mean that what we’re really doing is systematic theology and co-opting the texts to serve our systematic purposes. Rather, a ‘systematic reading’ of the Bible only reflects our conviction that the God we read about in Romans is the same God that we find in the Exodus is the same God we find in Genesis and Revelation.

Can we really do biblical theology as a ‘simple’ interpretation of the texts? Even a theological reading of one circumscribed text (Scripture) has to make connections between concepts (reason), mediated socio-linguistically (experience), with critical and/or deferential reference to our own ways of thinking (tradition). Remember: doctrine is only a reading of the biblical text that’s been ‘settled’–a point of reference that the church decided was necessary to properly understand the texts. Its origin is not alien to the biblical text but precisely rooted there. So–if we trust the early church’s decisions on such things–we need not feel like we’re restricting our reading to pre-formed ideas; we’re rather using the hard-won wisdom of the church to dig deeper in our interpretations. On the other hand, the church is confident that if you begin without these guides but still with a confidence in the truthfulness of these texts, the same conclusions will win out–it just may take three or four hundred years, like it did in the beginning.

I’m less clear on the role of historical theology. We’re not interpreting normative texts this time, so we aren’t necessarily convinced beforehand that we’re going to find the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ. At the same time, we’re not modern historians who feel the need to bracket all theological and pastoral concerns when reading our older texts. We’re not historians of thought but rather Christian historical theologians, so our task remains concerned with the level of normativity even while we’re persistently concerned with historical accuracy. What’s our primary task: making sure we ‘have it right’ with the text, or allowing these past witnesses to instruct us in the faith and to correct them when necessary? There’s no necessary dichotomy between these two, of course. Getting the text right could be compared to listening closely to a friend in a conversation, not because getting what they’re saying is the end-goal but because the members of the body of Christ think it fruitful to be instructed by one another. And (hopefully) the conversation, to bring it back to where we started, is about how to read the biblical texts faithfully in a way that lets them be ‘useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.’ In other words, historical and systematic theology as biblical theology: an ongoing conversation and exposition of what we find in Scripture.

3 March 2007 | Comments (5)
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» On 4 March 2007, andrea m. dalton said: 
<p>Your summarizing point, that historical and systematic theologies are biblical theologies, seems true.  Rather than a sub-theology that merely provides resources for systematic theologians to use, biblical theology is a theology that stands alongside historical theology and systematic theology, an equally critical and constructive task of the church.</p>

<p>Still, there is a reason why we call these things &#8220;biblical,&#8221; &#8220;systematic&#8221; and &#8220;historical&#8221;.  I want to say that thedifference is the degree to which we allow the &#8220;settled&#8221; readings of scripture to govern our theologizing &#8211; the extent to which we <em>explicitly</em> refer to them &#8211; and which &#8220;settled&#8221; readings we let govern us. While in biblical theology, even Old Testament theology, I may expect to find hints of a Trinitarian God, I do not attempt to systematize these or settle them according to a doctrine of the Trinity. Regardless of whether or not, withholding the guides of doctrine, we would in four hundred years draw the same conclusions, the church must continue to read the text with less than explicit reference to the guides; we must read the text as the text itself. This is biblical theology, in its purest sense. Systematic theology works with biblical text and guides more explicitly. Regardless of how appropriately aware systematic theology is that the practice of theology is never exhaustive or complete, it is nevertheless more concerned with conclusions than biblical theology is. Historical theology, I&#8217;m still trying to figure out&#8230; though I suppose the role of history as a discipline may play a similar role of limitation in historical theology as literary criticism does in biblical theology. So perhaps historical theology, like biblical theology, must also resist coherence in a way that systematic theology does not?</p>

<p>Also, I&#8217;d like to press the point that if we started with only the Bible, eventually we would end up with the same doctrines, it might just take a few hundred years. Perhaps what I want is clarification as to what &#8220;the same conclusions will win out&#8221; means exactly. Without Greek philosophy context, would we really use the language of nature and substance? Would we argue about whether Jesus Christ was of the &#8220;same substance&#8221; or of a &#8220;similar substance&#8221; to the Godhead? I believe these discussions and their &#8220;settled&#8221; outcomes are absolutely crucial to our understanding of theology. Even though we&#8217;re not working out of a Greek philosophical context, these conversations and the doctrines that arose from them are useful to us in that they communicate something that would take us years to figure out: a way of piecing together the humanity and divinity of Christ, and the Godhead, Christ, and Holy Spirit. I press this point because Mennonites require much persuasion as to what 4th century Athens has to do with Jerusalem, or Elkhart, and because I would like to work on persuading them.</p>
» On 4 March 2007, Spencer said: 
<p>Your question &#8211; &#8220;why historical theology&#8221; &#8211; is an interesting one.  To answer it, I think, requires asking some questions about &#8220;trust[ing] the early church&#8217;s decisions,&#8221; namely 3: Who is the church? (I purposefully omit the &#8220;early&#8221; until the third question is answered); Why do we trust it?; When do we stop trusting it?</p>

<p>Who is the church?    Is it just the fathers who were gathered at Nicea, or is it everyone who falls within the boundary of the church, however we conceive of it?  Rahner is right to prioritize the indefectibility of the Church over the infallibility of special acts of the magisterium (in this more ecumenical context, we can substitute &#8220;the general trustworthiness of the conciliar proclamations of the [early] church&#8221;).  But how can we understand the indefectibility of the church?</p>

<p>To answer that question is to answer the second question above:  Why can we trust the church&#8217;s decisions?  Looking at indefectibility &#8220;from below,&#8221; Newman says that Christian knowing is an intellectual habit which is enabled by faith  in all believers, therefore there is a sensus fidelium which grounds the trustworthiness of special offices of proclamation in the church (e.g., councils).  The point here is that the Fathers of Nicea didn&#8217;t have some kind of intellectual superpower which made them more capable of proclaiming doctrine than the laity.  Insofar as they were more capable than the average man, it was only because they had better perfected the exact same sensus fidei that everyone else in the church has.  Any given official proclamation of the church is preceded by many unofficial proclamations of those who are enabled by the sensus fidelium.  </p>

<p>If this is true, then historical theology begins to make a little more sense.  We try our best positively to understand on their own terms the theologies of other times and places because these theologians were equipped with the same sensus that made Nicea (or Constantinople or Chalcedon) trustworthy.  Of course it would be absurd to say that Augustine&#8217;s ennaration on psalm 52 is as authoritative as Chalcedon.  But that flows naturally from the fact that Augustine is just one person, whereas Chalcedon attempted to articulate the belief of the whole church &#8211; or, we might say, of the Tradition.  If a council is authoritative because it is a summary of the many senuses of the many faithful, the broad outlines of the Christian Tradition should be equally authoritative.  </p>

<p>And so, historical theology makes sense on two levels: 1) We must understand the historical theologies on their own terms because every theologian is equipped with the sensus fidelium &#8211; and the great theologies are expounded by theologians who have formed this intellectual habit well; and 2) We must understand the motion of broad movements of doctrine, idea, and theology within the church in order to locate the authoritative Tradition, even if it hasn&#8217;t been articulated by a council.</p>

<p>I will leave my third question &#8211; when do we stop trusting the church &#8211; unanswered.  The answer will tell us which periods of church history are more worthy of study than others, but it is too long and confessional-specific to even be attempted here.</p>
» On 4 March 2007, Brian Hamilton said: 
<p>Thanks, friends, for these thick responses. I&#8217;ll respond to yours, Andrea, in a new post&#8212;since you&#8217;ve got it going on your blog, we can keep this as a more formal conversation. I&#8217;ll answer yours here in the comments, Spencer. (Too bad online introductions are impossible; we need to get some Elkhart-South Bend grad student ecumenism going so friends from both places can meet.)</p>

<p>I like what you&#8217;re doing, Spencer, grounding our trust in past theologians in the <em>sensus fidelium</em>, magnified and communally confirmed in things like ecumenical councils or local confessions. The question I was trying to answer, still, was about the relationship between historical theology and the other major disciplines, particularly what I believe should still be its grounding in biblical theology. The <em>sensus fidelium</em> (if you&#8217;ll allow me to display my sociological rather than mystical bias) is given and learned through the one act of worship and reading Scripture. Liturgical theology thus enters the fray. This could be a confessional difference in ways of reading history, I&#8217;m not sure, but this way would also suggest an answer to your third question: we stop trusting the church when she departs from the baseline standard of faithfulness given in Scripture.</p>

<p>Your two ways of making sense of historical theology are helpful. To push this point, we can keep them connected with biblical theology by understanding the intellectual habit of the <em>sensus fidelium</em> to have be sharpened precisely by the practice of a liturgical/doxological reading of Scripture, which gives them eyes to see.</p>

<p>I do hope you&#8217;ll try to answer the third question, I haven&#8217;t been able to grasp the theological understanding of history that allows some Catholics to see the first millennium as so trustworthy and such a drastic shift occurring in Suárez or even Scotus. If a &#8216;fall&#8217; of theology is possible after Aquinas, is it possible in principle that something similar could have happened before?  (Like, say, around Constantine?)</p>
» On 4 March 2007, Spencer said: 
<p>I apologize in advance for how ridiculously long this post is.</p>

<p>Newman says that the intellectual habit of faith is made possible by apprehending the &#8220;image of Christ.&#8221;  By this he means the simple vision of Christ as redeemer in which all of the mysteries of the faith are summed up.  This image becomes the guiding light of our theological reasoning process and we (ideally) get better and better at this theological phronesis.  If we think of the liturgy as the means by which the church continually represents this image to itself, then we can see that liturgy is the training ground of the sensus fidelium (which I would italicize if I knew how).  But if the sensus fidelium is the ground of Tradition, then the liturgy can rightly be seen to be a motor of the development of doctrine.  It is where we, like Mary, ponder these things in our hearts.  </p>

<p>I would not simply equate liturgy with the reading of the Bible, though.  The Bible is an important aspect of liturgy and cannot be read properly when divorced from the liturgy. Incidentally, this is why I put less stock in the biblical theology guild than Andrea does &#8211; it is almost a presupposition of that guild to take the Bible out of its confessional/liturgical setting.  But, for Catholics, the liturgy also includes the Eucharist which makes Christ present to us in a way that the Scriptures do not and cannot (not that the Eucharist is opposed to the Scriptures &#8211; both are celebrated on one table.  This is why the book of the Gospels rests on the altar until it is taken up and read by the priest at the lectern).  </p>

<p>This has huge implications for the practice of systematic theology.  If thinking about God is made possible by the intellectual habit of faith (the sensus fidei), then systematic theology cannot be done without a personal tie into the liturgy.  The systematic theologian must be habilitated by the Eucharist and by the Scriptures as the proclamation of the Church.  The theologian may make fruitful use of more historical-critical approaches to the Bible, but these approaches must always be suboordinated to the Bible as Christian proclamation.  All of this theologizing must be done in continuity with the Tradition that is the unbroken fruit of contemplation of these realities by those who have gone before us in the faith.</p>

<p>This gets me back to the third question.  If the same Eucharist (including the proclamation of Scripture) has fostered the same intellectual habit of the sensus fidelium from the beginning of the Church until now, then the  Church remains trustworthy through both millennia of Christianity.  But to say that the Church remains trustworthy is different from saying that individual theologians remain trustworthy.  The sensus fidei is the sensus fidelium &#8211; it is shared by all the faithful who  participate in the liturgical life of the Church, not just those who have been educated at a university.  Tracing the Tradition along the groves etched into the Church by this sensus means watching as it runs through the entire People of God and representatively proclaimed by the appointed Magisterium.  When a theologian expresses and explores this Tradition &#8211; especially when he has been proclaimed a Doctor of the Church &#8211; he or she is to be listened to attentively and docilely.    When theologians do not express this Tradition,  they are worth listening to with the intent to correct.  Theologians can be judged by their continuity with the Tradition that precedes them, by the faithful that are contemporaneous with them, and by the Magisterium which authoritatively judges them.  But the fall of individual theologians is to be distinguished from the fall of theology, as the fall of academic theology is to be distinguished from the fall of the theology of the Church, which would be possible only if the Church could lose the Eucharist.  If Suarez or Scotus, upon examination, turn out to be abberations in the Tradition and at odds with the Magisterium, then they are to be judged less favorably than those who flourish in the garden provided by the Church.  </p>

<p>I apologize both for the length of this post and that, despite the length, I have not managed to detail these positions to the requisite degree.  But I&#8217;m too tired to really revise.  Sorry.</p>
» On 6 April 2007, andrea m. dalton: on the relationship between biblical, historical, and systematic theology posted in response:
[...] I posed him on the relationship between biblical, historical, and systematic theology can be found here. His summarizing point, that historical and systematic theologies are biblical theologies, seems [...]

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Brian Hamilton-Vise is a Ph.D. student in moral theology at the University of Notre Dame, where his research is in the history of Christian political and economic thought. His side interests are in the development of negative theology and in recent political theory. Email him at bdhamilton@gmail.com.

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