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Systematic theology

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Systematic theology is the study of Christian theology organized thematically (as opposed to historically, as in Historical Theology or Biblical Theology — according to some uses of the latter term).

Contents

History

The attempt to set out the varied ideas of the Christian religion (and the various topics and themes of the diverse texts of the Bible) in a single, coherent and well-ordered presentation is a relatively late development. In Eastern Orthodoxy, an early example is provided by John of Damascus's 8th century Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in which he attempts to set in order, and demonstrate the coherence of, the theology of the classic texts of the Eastern theological tradition. In the West, Peter Lombard's 12th century 'Sentences', in which he collected thematically a large series of quotations from the Church Fathers, became the basis of a medieval scholastic tradition of thematic commentary and explanation - best exemplified in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. A Protestant tradition of thematic, ordered exposition of the whole of Christian theology (Protestant Orthodoxy) emerged in the 16th century, with Philipp Melanchthon's Loci Communes and John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.

In the 19th century, primarily in Protestant circles, a new kind of systematic theology arose: the attempt to demonstrate that Christian doctrine formed a more tightly coherent system grounded in some core axiom or axioms. Such theologies often involved a more drastic pruning and reinterpretation of traditional belief in order to cohere with the axiom or axioms. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for instance, produced Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsatzen der evangelischen Kirche in the 1820s, in which the core idea is the universal presence amongst humanity (sometimes more hidden, sometimes more explicit) of a feeling or awareness of 'absolute dependence'; all theological themes are reinterpreted as descriptions or expressions of modifications of this feeling.

A department within King's College London called the Research Institute in Systematic Theology is prominent in author Dan Brown's bestselling novel, "The Da Vinci Code". The novel boasts of it possessing "one of the most complete and electronically advanced religious libraries in the world," (pg. 407,) and is used by the novel's protagonist, Robert Langdon, to discover the location of a tomb of a knight located in London. However, a Channel 4 program critical of the book called The Real Da Vinci Code discovered that the department was, in fact, an informal group of teachers and students and that the advanced electronic library was actually the college's computer system and the academics' personal systems.

Contemporary usage

There are three overlapping uses of the term 'systematic theology' in contemporary theology.

In all three senses, systematic theology will often touch on some or all of the following topics: God, revelation, creation and Divine providence, Theodicy, Theological Anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, sacrament, Pneumatology, Christian life, Heaven, and other religions.

Resources

See also

External links

 

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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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