After posting some brief thoughts on X regarding the relations between historical theology, systematic theology, and philosophy, I have been asked to say a few words about the relations between the theological disciplines. While I appreciate the recent trend that emphasizes theological retrieval, I have noticed an underemphasis in philosophical theology (described below) that needs correction for theological education to flourish.
The core of an ideal theological education as I see it includes the following disciplines, roughly described:
- Biblical studies (BS), which includes exegesis of the biblical texts in their original languages, and principles of translation and textual interpretation
- Biblical theology (BT), which depends on good BS and emphasizes the particular theologies among the various biblical writers, unified by the typology, themes, and continuity expressed by the one divine author
- Historical theology (HT), which uses good historical methods to trace the history of the church and its doctrine
- Philosophical theology (PhilT), which uses some of the tools and methods from philosophy (formal logic, conceptual analysis, etc.) consistent with orthodox doctrine and applies those tools and methods to all the theological disciplines while defending the truths of theology through apologetic method and practice
- Systematic theology (ST), which relies on BS, BT, HT, and PhilT for interpreting, analyzing, and developing the doctrine, beliefs, and commitments of theology, broadly construed
Practical theology (PT) is also an important part of theological education, but the questions and concerns in that discipline will be less relevant for what I want to say here. I have in mind an ideal theological education for academic purposes, which will differ in emphasis from an ideal theological education for practical, ecclesiastical purposes. I would put things differently if I was writing this with pastoral concerns in mind, and the fact that I’m emphasizing the academic side of theological education should in no way be interpreted as implicitly devaluing the pastoral and lay concerns of theology. And by “the academy” I have in mind seminaries, but also colleges, and graduate programs from the masters level up to doctoral degrees and postdocs.
I want to emphasize some points of agreement and common ground that should not be controversial.
Each of the disciplines above are essential to an ideal theological education, and each discipline carries its own methodology, literature, specialists, history, and technical skills that require training.
BS requires training in the original languages, BT depends on BS and all its technical skills, HT often requires knowledge of languages like Latin, PhilT requires training in formal logic, and (good) ST depends on all the other disciplines. Each of these disciplines should compromise on neither academic rigor nor on doctrinal orthodoxy, and relaxing either standard will make any discipline deficient in some way.
These interrelated disciplines also depend on each other in different ways. Engaging in ST or PhilT without HT, i.e. without having a good understanding of the historical theological conversation on some theological topic, is ill-advised. HT doesn’t always require language translation, but in some cases it does, and knowledge of the original language (e.g. Latin, Dutch) that a historical theological work was written in will obviously help one better understand the truth claims within that work. ST should never take place without a good knowledge of BS as its foundation and guard rails. I could mention other examples of dependence relations between the disciplines. My concern here is the place of PhilT as we find it in theological education. One way of assessing the dependence relations between PhilT in particular and the other disciplines is to ask, In which of these theological disciplines do you NOT use logic, reason, or arguments? The domain of PhilT includes (among other things) the methodology and practice of forming and assessing claims and arguments using logic and conceptual analysis, which makes it a fundamental, systemic practice used across all the theological disciplines, either well or poorly.
Of course, it is common for specialists in one discipline to over-prioritize their own discipline (explicitly or implicitly) when doing their work or speaking about the theological enterprise as a whole.
There are plenty of specialists in PhilT who downplay, mischaracterize, or entirely ignore HT, BS, and BT. There are plenty of specialists in HT who downplay, mischaracterize, or entirely ignore PhilT and BT. You probably have witnessed some version of this kind of pattern among these disciplines. It’s in part a product of human limitation and fallibility: no one person can be a true specialist in all these disciplines collectively, in the ideal sense.
Because of this human limitation and fallibility, theological education in the broad sense must be a social affair, where each of us depends on specialists in the different disciplines if we have any hope of achieving our theological (and hence ecclesiastical) goals. An ideal theological education in the sense described above cannot be found in a single person, but in a collection of individuals. So an institution that promotes itself as providing theological education should be evaluated by how close it gets to this ideal theological model with respect to all the disciplines. Each institution will prioritize the various parts of the theological pie chart differently, depending on the training and abilities of each specialist in its theological stable. Few institutions (if any) can have top-tier, peer-recognized specialists in each of the disciplines, but it should be obvious that all disciplines—BS, BT, HT, PhilT, and ST—should be present and accounted for in a complete theological curriculum.
In most cases, public theological education—in the church, in parachurch organizations, in publications, in the digital world through blogs, podcasts, and social media, etc.—is downstream from academic theological endeavors. By “downstream” I mean a direction of influence, an order of causation, and a dependence, where whatever theological education goes on at the academy and institutional level has various effects on the way theology gets learned and pursued outside the academy.
There are volumes more to say on ideal theological structure and education, but now I’ll just briefly describe how I compare that ideal to the actual, current state of theological education broadly, from my admittedly limited perspective. And the scope of what I say here will be intentionally narrowed to my own context in the broader Reformed world, however defined, which includes institutions, churches, publications, and public theological discourse. What I say below will apply to some pockets in that theological world, but not necessarily all.
As an observer of the theological landscape, I have noticed that especially in the last 5+ years, there has been a heavy emphasis on theological retrieval for theological education within the academy and for the general public. Roughly, this retrieval seems to involve a family of claims and methodologies that includes multiple purposes. Among those purposes, it aims 1) to retrieve past sources, particularly from the patristics and the medieval period, 2) to help us better understand a theological topic or issue, and 3) to look at the methods, philosophies, and logic from past sources as normative templates for how we should practice theological endeavors today. Though I don’t want to conflate theological retrieval and HT, there is significant overlap between the two.
What I love about the retrieval trend is that it seems to have made a positive impact on theological and historical literacy in both academia and for the broader public. This trend has been at least partly responsible for English translations and republication of some of the best works of theology from the past (think Junius, van Mastricht, Charnock, etc.), opening new opportunities for both academic and broader theological engagement and education. It has always been completely obvious to me that when engaging a theological topic, it’s a good idea to access the historical conversations surrounding that topic, if for no other reason than efficiency: why repeat what has already been said, or what has probably been said better, or run the risk of any error that has already been addressed? I remember Darryl Hart at some point using the helpful analogy of walking in on a party, to illustrate the obvious importance of historical background. I won’t get this exactly as he put it, but imagine being at a party and hearing a conversation going on about some topic, and instead of listening you immediately go over mid-conversation and interrupt everyone to share your thoughts, as if the people there had not already talked about whatever point you thought was novel and interesting. The problem is not only that doing so is merely wrongheaded, but there is a sense in which it is unethical. You have an obligation to listen to a (historical) conversation as a whole before presuming your point makes some important contribution to it.
As I understand it, the retrieval trend is partially a reaction to a genuine historical ignorance or even an anti-historical constituency within some pockets of the theological world. Writing as a Presbyterian, generally speaking we don’t have this problem to the same degree as non-connectional institutions, owing to our historical confessional standards and, we believe, normative biblical examples of connectional ecclesiological oversight that, at the structural level, requires our institutions and pastors to have some knowledge of theological historical context. So I understand that at least some of the HT emphasis out there rightly seeks to correct an unfortunate HT gap that permeates the non-connectional theological world.
But I have two main concerns with this HT trend (for lack of a better term for it) as it currently stands. The first involves some form of overinflation of past sources in a few different ways. It can manifest as uncritical veneration of a historical figure, like Aristotle or Aquinas, or of an historical era, like the 17th century or the entire patristic to medieval period. The irony with this trend is that a better understanding of the history of philosophy, which would include contemporary philosophical figures and topics, would in many cases prevent such uncritical veneration of individual philosophical figures and eras. Within this trend you see advocates for “the great tradition” and anything that includes the word “classical”, terms which are often used like measuring rods with no hash marks, where all kinds of claims or persons or entire eras are accused of falling outside this “great tradition” or “classical theology”, with no clear markers for assessing whether such an accusation has any merit.
There is a categorical difference in scholarship between endorsing, say, Aristotelian metaphysics as a preferred metaphysical theory (even granting total consistency within Aristotle’s own view, which is dubious at best) after surveying many different metaphysical options like platonism, nominalism, bundle theory, necessitism, mereological universalism, and so forth on the one hand, and auto-endorsing Aristotelian metaphysics and assuming it is normative for today, merely because the medievals or Reformed scholastics used Aristotelian language as the most obvious terminological option within their uniquely situated, historical philosophical context. The former is a respectable, informed position. The latter is a telltale sign you’re dealing with someone who has very little, if anything, to offer theological education, methodologically or in content.
The second concern involves the error I mentioned above, where ST and the other disciplines get reduced to some form of HT, resulting in an imbalance among the disciplines in favor of HT over the others.
For purposes here, I understand HT to be primarily descriptive, in the sense of describing the historical beliefs, events, and practices throughout the history of theology. While again, ST depends on HT, I understand ST to be more epistemologically normative, focused on what we ought to believe, which involves comparing and assessing claims and arguments after doing whatever due diligence is required through BS, BT, HT, and PhilT. Because of this dependence relation between ST and the other disciplines, ST may be the most demanding discipline, because in its purest, most ideal form it includes all the other disciplines as prerequisites.
What the church has believed, what we ought to believe, and what we ought to practice are all intertwined and overlapping, but here I want to stake out some conceptual territory that can then apply to broad theological education. Ask yourself the following question:
Would you characterize the current broader theological world as generally competent in its knowledge and application of critical thinking, formal logic, philosophical literacy, and conceptual analysis?
Now ask this question:
How much of the broader theological world regularly attempts and engages in the practices of critical thinking, formal logic, philosophical literacy, and conceptual analysis?
I think a good chunk of it, and frequently.
BS constructs and assesses arguments. BT constructs and assesses arguments. HT constructs and assesses arguments. ST constructs and assesses arguments. If only there was some discipline where, within it, you could find vast amounts of literature solely dedicated to the methodology and practice of constructing and assessing arguments…
Enter PhilT.
Philosophy proper is in the business of conceptual analysis and (among other things) constructing and assessing arguments using well-founded, rigorous tools informed by formal logic. My claims here are that 1) in an ideal theological education, PhilT is used throughout the other disciplines in a way more comprehensive and pervasive than the other theological disciplines, and 2) given the current state of theology more broadly and the emphasis on HT over the past few years, PhilT now deserves its own strong, intentional emphasis in academic and broad theological education, if our goal is to strengthen this theological enterprise through education inside and outside the academic halls.
From what I observe within the theological world, I know that many theologians at least want to be perceived as being philosophically and logically literate and competent. For example, I read the first few pages of one book recently where the author says, “I am not a theologian or philosopher”, while in many other contexts (including his employment) his constructed, public persona goes on to make all kinds of theological and philosophical claims that ironically do count as evidence that he is neither, despite quite obviously seeking the status that comes with those disciplines. You will see theologians, academic and otherwise, quote Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and talk about logical fallacies with a confidence greater than a veteran philosophy professor. One downside of the overemphasis on HT and the underemphasis on PhilT within theological circles is that often you will find theologians conflating some combination of Aristotelian categorical logic, along with informal logic, with the field of logic as a whole. The thought seems to be that if we just look to the medieval period or the 17th century for logic lessons, we will have all we need for an adequate knowledge of the discipline. But again, ironically the most introductory look at the history of logic and the philosophy of language reveals that the entire discipline irrevocably changed and exploded around the late 19th century after Cantor, Frege, Russell, and others. Logic is a science; the difference between logic today and logic in the ancient and medieval context is the difference between medicine today and medicine in the ancient and medieval context. And to evaluate whether that claim is in fact the case takes some knowledge of formal logic as we find it today: quantified logic, modal logic, deontic logic, plural logic, non-classical logics, and so on, undergirded by set theory. But many theologians ignore contemporary logic because it takes a good amount of technical training. Or in many cases, they simply haven’t been introduced to the formal logic world, because you simply don’t find many within the theological world who have done the necessary training in formal logic required to speak about it competently.
While there has been this often helpful emphasis on the history of theology to help us better understand theological concepts, I find that a similar emphasis on the history of philosophy to help us better understand philosophical concepts is either lacking or misused, because too many in the theological world have neither a grasp of the history of philosophy nor philosophical concepts within the philosophical literature. It isn’t uncommon to see words like “metaphysics”, “ontological”, or “actuality/potentiality” (for example) being used in broader theological conversations in ways that betray a lack of awareness of 1) what those philosophical terms ordinarily mean, and 2) the conceptual terrain and debates surrounding those philosophical terms. But this is not an unfixable problem. The solution must take place at the institutional level, getting recognition and buy-in for prioritizing a rightly ordered PhilT infusion into the faculty offices and curricula. If that occurs, it is easier to envision a theological world where the broader public then benefits through public theological education that emphasizes and encourages critical thinking, formal logic, philosophical literacy, and conceptual analysis. An analogy may help: if I wanted to pursue competence in economics, psychology, or sociology (just to name a few), I would need to get technical training in statistics. Statistics is not entirely viewpoint neutral, and you don’t use it in every case within each field, but it plays an important role within those fields. Logic plays an important, similar role in the theological disciplines to the role statistics plays in the sciences.
In closing, I want to emphasize again the importance of all the disciplines working together in their respective roles and strengths, all of which are necessary for theological education, and individually none of which are alone sufficient for it. I think of figures like Herman Bavinck and Geerhardus Vos as model theologians who balance the disciplines in their works. John Murray’s article “Systematic Theology” gives timeless principles for understanding the relation between BT and ST. “The Case for Calvinistic Hermeneutics” by world-renowned biblical studies scholar Moises Silva helpfully examines the necessary relation between BS and ST. Mark Jones’s A Puritan Theology is a master class in using HT for ST. Contemporary figures like James Anderson, Ross Inman, and others skillfully apply the tools from analytic philosophy to HT and ST. Richard Gaffin’s work continually serves as a timeless template for integrating BS, BT, and ST. And I could go on.
While a heavy emphasis on HT has perhaps led to greater historical literacy, and has course corrected an overall lack and respect for HT within some circles, I am concerned that we’re now seeing some overcorrections to the exclusion of the other disciplines, and a hypocrisy of sorts with respect to the quality of what currently gets represented as PhilT. Philosophy takes a lot of work and training, more than cherry-picking a few historical sources as they relate to the theology world. Philosophy also contains a lot of junk. (The other disciplines also see their fair share of junk, in the academy and more broadly.) Theological education—both inside the halls of its institutions and outside those halls teaching the broader public—needs specialists trained in philosophy proper and PhilT doing the hard work of mining the gold from the world of philosophy and leaving the rest. Too many theology professors teach courses on philosophy or (what they understand as) logic with little to no training. We’re typically not ok with that for the other disciplines like biology, mathematics, or economics, and I’m not sure when we started being ok with it for PhilT. Theological education will be far better off if we start emphasizing the systemic importance of rigorous, informed PhilT that can support all the other essential theological disciplines.
For those interested, here are the core claims put into (very rough) propositional form. No doubt there is a much cleaner version of this argument that uses more fine-grained logics. The first part of the argument addresses ideal theological education, while the second part involves practical theological education. I argue that PhilT is essential for learning any of the disciplines, and theological education has been weakened. In the first argument, I assume 1 and 2 and use modus ponens to get 3. In the second argument, I assume 1 and 2 and use modus ponens to get 3, and I assume 4, and with 4 and 3 use modus ponens to get 5. The form of all this is valid, so challenges to whether the arguments are sound will need to focus on the truth of the assumptions.
p: Each discipline (BS, BT, HT, PhilT, ST) employs critical thinking, logic, and conceptual analysis.
q: PhilT uniquely specializes in critical thinking, logic, and conceptual analysis.
r: PhilT is essential for learning any of the disciplines.
- (p ∧ q) → r
- p ∧ q
- ∴ r
s: Theological education in practice has heavily emphasized HT.
t: Theological education has consequently led to an underemphasis in PhilT.
u: Theological education has been weakened.
- s → t
- s
- ∴ t
- t → u
- ∴ u
