Toward Systematic Theology: Problems and Possibilities for Christian Theology in the Academy

Abstract

This article comprises a set of reflections on the future of systematic theology in academic institutions. It identifies three long term trends that have been shaping the current institutional context of the field, and the ways theology has (partially) responded. The article next identifies developments in some of Christian theology’s more important academic conversation partners that are promising potential sources for its continued vitality. In the third part, theology’s future direction is generally indicated by asserting that successful theologians are going to be those who find ways to bridge the current cultural fault-line in the academic field. In the final parts, this general suggestion is made more specific by naming four developments in a future systematic theology (concerning the God–world relation, the interconnection of core doctrines, the anthropology of salvation, and the hermeneutic of scripture) that can meet the challenges and exploit the possibilities named in the first three parts.

Christian systematic theology as an academic field of specialization is today a notoriously diverse and disjointed enterprise. Its current profile is so ill-defined that even describing it is a challenge, much less prophesying probable futures. But in the interest of initiating a larger conversation the following observations, brief and biased though they are, are offered for consideration and critique. In a first section, three long-term trends will be identified that have been shaping the institutional context of the field, and that will probably continue to do so in the near future. After briefly sketching general ways theology will respond to these pressures, the second section of the essay will highlight a series of developments in some of Christian theology’s more important academic conversation partners that arguably are promising as potential sources for its continued and increased vitality. The third section speculates generally on theology’s future direction, asserting that successful theologians are likely to be those who seek to overcome what will be characterized as the main fault-line in the field at present. Given both the challenges and possibilities outlined in the first three sections, the concluding sections propose (contentiously, no doubt) four desiderata for future scholarship in Christian theology that will be vital for its future success. Conceptualizing a foundational vision of divine creation; articulating the basic Christian claims as a unified complex; theorizing those claims via a theological account of the human person; and rooting those claims in a thoroughly historicized hermeneutic of scripture: these are four paths toward a more systematic theology.

Long-Term Trends Shaping the Current Theological Scene, and Some Broad Responses

Christian theology in the mode usually called systematic or doctrinal can be characterized as follows. It is the articulation and interrelation of the basic claims and styles of action that define Christian religious practice as a living tradition. These elements should be measured against the norms carried by some Christian community (however defined); they should be arranged in some kind of encompassing pattern; and they should be interpreted in terms broadly comprehensible and in some degree persuasive to contemporary persons. The goal of these operations is to maintain a Christian contribution to the collective work of illuminating our society and our world, and thereby secure the flourishing of the Christian project. Whatever its deficiencies, this definition is probably flexible enough to capture most of what has gone on in the academy for the past several centuries under the name of Christian theology, but three trends apparent especially since the mid-20th century have begun to alter the way it is done.

The first trend is the rise of the lay theologian. Increasingly, and remarkably from a longer-term historical perspective, Christian theology in the academy is not being taught or studied exclusively by persons ordained to leadership in churches, or even planning such ordination. Of course, this varies dramatically depending on the institution, but the audience envisioned by theological educators is just as likely to be the particularly reflective or self-aware lay practitioner of the faith rather than the ecclesial office holder. The second trend is closely related, namely, the decline of the dedicated theological faculty as traditionally conceived. The long-term drops in church membership and pastoral vocations have led to contractions in the number and size of many seminary-type faculties, as well as to the threatened marginalization of university theology faculties. As for the third long-term trend, there has apparently been a dramatic decline among theological students in the relative depth of their formation within their communal religious practice, the degree to which their lives and minds incorporate as second nature the basic traditions to which they claim allegiance. They often do not know the history and distinctiveness of their communities; more than that, some do not really know how to pray or read their Bibles or formatively appropriate their liturgies in a way informed by the theologies of those communities. The increasingly multi-traditional nature of many Western societies is familiar, but at issue here is a kind of de-traditionalizing, especially among the formerly dominant religious cultures. As for its causes, the sociologist will surely have more to offer than the theologian.

Though these trends may make for gloomy reading, good systematic theology in academic settings will not disappear any time soon and indeed can continue to thrive. Yet it will not easily do so if it merely ignores these trends for, though they might stall or even reverse themselves, it would not seem prudent to assume they will. Moreover, these developments are in themselves ambiguous. They might just have a positive side, a side that will become more visible if theology asks how it might respond to them. Many theologians have been adjusting to these challenges already and the trends have been underway for decades, but it is worth laying out what seem the proper responses, even if they will be familiar to many. What might Christian theology in an academic context, especially systematic or doctrinal theology, look like under these conditions, compared with its still prevalent appearance?

In a first response to the trends just identified, theology will have to relate doctrines more fully and carefully to their authoritative sources and to their modes of lived appropriation, since students can no longer be assumed to have tightly defined ecclesial identities or to have deeply internalized their traditions. Theology cannot itself do catechesis, for that is not its job, but it can pay more attention to what it means for human subjects to exist into the communal teachings it deals with. The good side of this necessary theorization of religious existence is that theology can promote more awareness among non-believers of the lived meaning of religious claims, and more self-awareness among believers in their appropriation of tradition, not to mention playing a role in heightening ecumenical awareness and eroding traditional prejudices and ignorance between Christian groups.

Second, theology will respond to the trends discussed above by taking account of what might be called the apologetics of everyday existence. This means the ways in which the Christian message holds or gains space in society through the millions of unofficial life-choices, political and cultural commitments and personal encounters of lay believers. Christian beliefs and practices must be shown by the theologian to make a certain kind of sense, politically and intellectually and personally, within society more broadly, and this is not quite the same thing as the academic theologian’s more traditional role of training future catechists, preachers and institutional leaders for religious communities, though that will remain of great importance.

A third and final reorientation will be needed in response to the long-term shifts. If many academic theologians will no longer be able to do their work within large faculties dedicated to the full range of traditional specialties, then they will need to do theology in closer conversation with non-theological fields. Theology will find it increasingly difficult to justify its place in higher education if it appeals solely to professional training. However, by being forced to operate more ‘at large’ in the academy, beyond the traditional faculty cohort with its comforting cushion of shared assumptions, theologians might learn how to make the case that theology’s role in the academy’s task of intellectually illuminating our world is not only methodologically defensible but materially indispensable. It might be added that the Christian theologian who finds herself less grounded in a special faculty might benefit from the need to engage with religious teachers from other confessions, and well as non-confessing students of the religious phenomenon.

It is likely that Christian theology as an academic enterprise is already benefiting from these opportunities hidden within its current challenges; in spite of the ominous trends, its collapse is not necessarily imminent. Indeed, theology faculties in leading universities can be crucial catalysts for creative theological work that is responding to those challenges. This is naturally the case especially when the theology faculty is a constituent part of a full university, but some of this catalytic intellectual encounter is possible wherever there is academic proximity even without institutional unity. Regardless, promising new theological developments are most likely to be found along the trajectory determined by response to the regnant pressures. This first section has made three points: Christian theology in the future will need to incorporate some conceptualization of how doctrine is lived and carried by groups and individuals; it will need to justify in social and cultural terms the persistence in everyday life of public religious commitment; finally, it will need to be especially alert to other areas of academic inquiry that directly inform, or should directly inform, the analytic, interpretive and constructive work it performs on past and current traditions.

Promising Developments in Some of Theology’s Academic Dialogue Partners

The second section takes off from this last point. It is apparent that several disciplines are undergoing particular shifts that make fruitful conversations with systematic theology more likely than in the recent past. Some important theological developments in the near future will surely flow out of such conversations. A few exemplary dialog-partners will now be taken up in turn: religious studies, philosophy of science, philosophy more broadly, and finally biblical studies.

‘Religious studies’ will be understood here as the analysis and comparison of religious traditions as thoroughly human cultural phenomena amenable to explanation via the tools of the historical and social sciences. Now that these studies have found an established place within many universities, it is possible to see a new generation of younger religious studies scholars who are no longer marked by the urgent need to establish the distinctness of such study over against the more ‘committed’ or ‘internal’ stance of theological scholarship. As the field has matured, aggressive policing of the border between theology and religious studies has come to seem less a priority, and thus many scholars are able, without endangering the non-committed stance of their discipline, to view the intellectual frameworks in which religious practitioners themselves situate their practice as not simply opposed to humanistic inquiry, to be dismissed as folklore, but as ingredient in the human phenomenon of religion and an integral part of the interpretation of that phenomenon. In other words, historians, anthropologists and sociologists of religion are, here and there, pondering the possibility that, in the theorization of religion, its practitioners are of interest not just as objects of theory, but as subjects of it, producers of it. ¹

A second academic field of interest where things are looking up from a systematic theologian’s perspective lies in the conceptual foundations of the natural sciences. Engagement with an array of natural phenomena at the limit of classical dynamics in different ways (cosmological origins, quantum interactions, matter in its living state, complex systems, human cognition and consciousness) has steadily pushed many physicists and biologists and their philosophical interpreters beyond monolithically determinist accounts of causation. There is an openness to modelling phenomena in ways irreducible to agglomerations of micro-states, as involving hierarchical levels of order, the unanticipatable emergence of properties, and in general the real causal and dynamic role of large-scale patterns instead of their demotion to mere epiphenomena of the endless churn of particles and basic physical forces. To be sure, theological caution is in order in face of some of the more wide-eyed claims for work being done on these lines, both because they will need much more scientific testing but also because their partial appropriation by theological amateurs always risks naivete and dilettantism. But many theologians, especially those (like this author) inspired by Thomism, will judge this surprising renaissance among scientists of what Aristotle called ‘form’ or formal causality to be a promising development for theology. ² To the degree that this is combined with a chastened taste among some for hard reductionism and the overall willingness to entertain bigger questions of meaning, all the better.

Next, expanding the field of vision a bit, is the academic discipline of philosophy as a whole; here is a third field where things look a bit more promising of late for the theologian. The special relationship between Christian systematic theology and philosophy is of long standing, of course, and has never been out of play. But there is a recent development that can only be to the good of theology, namely the steady erosion within the culture at least of Anglophone academic philosophy of a hard and principled distinction between so-called analytical and so-called continental modes of thought (with their associated canons of classic texts). Not that such a distinction does not still hold sway in large swathes of the philosophical profession, but today for many creative philosophers of either one of the broad traditions not so much is felt to be at stake in ignoring or denigrating the other one. This is significant theologically, first, because the models of argumentation characteristic of each tradition, the analytical and the speculative or constructive, are both necessary; second, because particular theological investments in philosophical conversations need no longer risk immediate irrelevance due to their choice of dialogue partners; and third, more polemically, because when theology seeks to challenge all that is distorted in the cultural and political self-image of modern society it will more easily discover the ways in which both philosophical traditions have been mutually complicit in those distortions, and yet might also benefit from a vista in which each tradition partially exposes the myopia of the other. ³

In a book on theological method I tried to explain why, in theological terms, theologians must experiment with non-theological schemes of meaning, regardless of the difficulty of doing so. ⁴ On a related note, what has been suggested here is that, as Christian academic theology seeks to secure its intellectual space within the university, it will increasingly need to be openly engaged in interrogating and allowing itself to be interrogated by other fields of inquiry, without losing its particularity. It can now do so more freely and with less defensiveness thanks to current developments in the study of religion, in the scientific theorization of nature, and in philosophy. A fourth and final development, however, touches on a closer neighbor of systematic theology, namely biblical studies. To develop a point made earlier, Christian theology needs to pay more attention than it often does nowadays to the ways its claims are normed or authorized by its communal sources of meaning. The Bible as a putative locus of divine disclosure to the community is naturally often invoked in theology, but too often in vague and haphazard ways. Yet hard thinking must lie behind any claim to scriptural guidance; there must be some sense as to how theoretical construals of its authority on one hand, and particular strategies of reading or interpretation on the other, come together in a coherent whole. ⁵ One reason this systematic task is so often fudged is because theologians find it hard to appropriate the biblical text once it has been ‘processed’ by contemporary biblical scholarship. The divorce between biblical studies and theology, though widely lamented for what seems like forever, thereby continues. But there has been promising ferment for some time at the border between them, evidenced on one side by the proliferation of explicitly theological commentary by scripture specialists or theologians, and on the other by systematic theological explorations of the hermeneutics of scripture along various axes (canonical, neo-figural, liberative, scriptural reasoning, etc.). ⁶

Even so, there is still much progress to be made here, mainly because, from the theological side, a lot of the thinking seems to underestimate the way modern historical consciousness has reconfigured Christianity’s generative text. Whatever the theologian might wish or think, the pre-modern Bible is simply no longer available. In particular, there are two grounds on which any systematic theology seeking a theory of scriptural authority must be deeply and irreversibly challenged by the stark humanization of the biblical texts. First, any theological account that sees in the Bible a medium for the normative disclosure of the divine must indicate how interpretive access to that disclosure is possible in face of the irremediable textual complexity of scripture. In other words, the theologian must suggest how in practice the Bible can become a single scripture in and through its dispersal across multiple texts that are disparate, culturally distant, scientifically dubious and often morally ambiguous. Second, the systematic theologian must decide how much of the narrative of the Bible can function normatively in light of the questioning or even denial of its factual claims at the hands of informed historical judgment. In particular, what sense can be made of the Old Testament as Christian scripture in light of the plausibility of more skeptical reconstructions of Israel’s past; or what can be the scriptural force of the gospels when the Jesus narratives confront the historian as a tissue of theologically driven assertions floating beyond the very possibility of corroboration? The best theological work of the future will need to situate its reflections on Christian teachings within a scheme that satisfactorily addresses these foundational questions. Fortunately, the current salutary state of frustration about the separation of biblical and theological studies, from both sides of the disciplinary divide, suggests that this kind of work will be increasingly welcomed.

Let us take stock of the discussion so far. The first section laid out some challenges for Christian theology in the academy, and now the second has noted some of the most promising avenues for its cross-disciplinary fertilization. It could fairly be complained that so far not much has been said about systematic theology itself, or its future. That will be remedied in what is to follow. The third section will identify the major ideological divide in the field of academic theology, suggesting that the maintenance of this division, even a kind of fixation on it, is blocking an adequate response to the problems and opportunities outlined up to this point. Finally, on the assumption that the best new developments in systematic theology will be precisely those that transcend or bridge this rift, the remaining sections will survey four such ways forward that are most to be anticipated (or at least hoped for).

The Cultural Divide in Contemporary Theology

To set up the discussion in this third section it will be necessary to indulge in a bit of mapping; though such an attempt can only be of limited value due to the chaotic sprawl of theology today, it will prove illuminating if kept general and tentative. Most Christian theology in North America or Europe seems to be done in one of two registers. On one side are those who consistently appropriate concepts or theoretical apparatus from non-theological fields, using critical theories that claim to decipher and emancipate basic spheres of human meaning-making: cultural production, economic and political organization, gender and sexual identity. ⁷ For such theologians theology means using these new tools to subvert and reconstruct Christian positions taken to be complicit with the malformation diagnosed by their chosen theory, but in the name of the renewal of Christian faith and practice. On the other side stand those theologians who suspect or insist that the seeds of renewal in principle already lie within the traditional complex of Christian belief, often defined in explicit opposition to the assumptions of secular modernity. Here there are varieties of postliberals and scriptural reasoners, ressourcement folk who seek the creative retrieval of the Fathers or Scholastics, and those inspired, more or less vaguely, by one of the recent big systems, especially Barthians and Balthasarians of various flavors. ⁸ In addition to these two large groupings smaller specializations could always be added, such as experts in comparative theology, or those in dialogue with the natural sciences; yet their broader assumptions will often locate them within one of the two main groupings. ⁹ The main point of the broad categorization is that these two registers have evolved into distinct theological cultures that communicate with each other only reluctantly and with difficulty. What will be argued here, however, is that future new developments in theology will be made most reliably by those who straddle this divide in some way.

The reason is that the field is running up against the limits of what either of these theological modalities can achieve on its own. Theologians in the second (‘doctrinalist’) register are threatened with an intellectual insularity that is dangerous at a time when the ecclesial cultures upon which they rely to provide plausibility structures are hampered by the weak traditioning mechanisms referred to in the first section. Also, these theologies can all too easily assume that modern intellectual challenges are neutralized by the mere assumption of an ‘insider’ or non-apologetic stance, challenges such as historical critiques of the Christian narrative, naturalized anthropologies and epistemologies, or the discovery of the permeability and semantic instability of all cultural constructions (doctrinal utterances not excluded). On the other side, theology in the first (‘emancipatory’) register has for the most part failed to deliver the revolutionary reshaping of theology that it excitedly announces. While some of this may be due to traditionalist inertia within the field, much is due to weaknesses internal to the emancipatory approach itself. First, there is too much wholesale importation of methods and critical schemes with insufficient explicitly theological criticism of the often hidden array of assumptions that are attached to them. Second, too much of the actual work so far has failed to make an impression outside small circles because it is allowed to remain a foreign body in the theological project; that is, it is applied in a piecemeal and ad hoc way to this or that specific doctrine or practice, not systemically appropriated and naturalized within a larger pattern of recognizably theological assertions. Not just theory but method is at stake here. Much is made of ethnography, for example, or other tools of social science as potentially transformative for theology. ¹⁰ The promise is there, without doubt, but unless their use is controlled by an explicitly theological conceptual framework the result is just statistics or close description of particular communities without any way of cogent extrapolation to larger implications.

The response to this debilitating dichotomy in academic theology goes beyond the predictable claim that we need both new critical tools or methodological insights and to uncover and preserve the internal logic of belief encoded in our classics. True as that no doubt is, more must be said: not only is either of these orientations problematic in isolation, fruitfully connecting them will demand a ‘systematic’ integrating stance construing the total Christian reality for the contemporary situation. Such a theological foundation would ensure that the divide is not merely traversed in a sporadic way but truly transcended. With that in place, the desirable developments in academic theology to be surveyed in the remainder of this essay will be positioned to change its current profile in higher education, where theology in the ‘emancipatory’ register can appear as an insatiable importer of theory whose own intellectual products find no external market, while theology in the ‘doctrinalist’ mode looks like a stubbornly isolated mass taking up precious space, an obsolete residue of the past. These new ways forward for academic theology will try to make it less a mimic on one side, or a relic on the other, and more a part of the larger conversation. Each can be seen as moving the field ‘toward’ a more systematic theology. The remaining sections will present four of these desiderata; each is urgent for a Christian theology that hopes to remain faithful to its tradition, to confront the challenges described so far, and to exploit the opportunities that have been suggested. These are four ways forward for theology in today’s academy, paths toward systematic theology.

A First Task: A Foundational Vision of Divine Creation

A first imperative for a future, more systematic theology will be especially apologetic in orientation: interpreting in credible terms a proper conceptuality of creation, or of God’s relation to the world. Such an interpretation will do justice to the radical uniqueness and consequent theoretical elusiveness of this relation, as well as arguing for its philosophical defensibility and its distinction from the extrapolations of physical cosmology. One of the most promising lines for this, at least from the perspective of this author, lies in developments of the Thomist tradition of creatio ex nihilo along trails blazed by thinkers like David Burrell among many others. ¹¹

Why privilege the doctrine of creation in this way, and why specifically creation ex nihilo? A theology that aims toward more ‘systematic’ status must seek to coordinate the claims of the Christian faith with two other complexes of meaning. First, Christian truth claims must be connected with the founding events of the faith. The self-validating divine disclosure grounding the claims has been delivered in those events; the authoritative witness to those events is continually made accessible to Christians today in its communal reading of scripture; and that reading itself is shaped and normed by the creeds and dogmatic decisions of the spirit-guided teaching office. In short, theological assertions concerning the real are to be coordinated with ecclesial doctrine. Second, because systematic theology attempts to guide the church’s witness in such a way that its claims can be heard and understood in the midst of its cultural setting, it must coordinate Christian truth claims with our culture’s regnant modes of theorizing and expanding knowledge generally. ¹² This at the very least means some kind of critical accommodation with contemporary natural science, part of the apologetic dimension just referred to.

It is not often noted, however, that this double coordination required of a systematic theology involves a demanding integration of quite distinct theoretical languages. The basic claims made by the church about God, creation, incarnation and redemption, eschatology, etc. are held to be authentic accounts of the real and common world we all inhabit. As assertions about the ultimately real and its most fundamental categories, they are, broadly construed, metaphysical (or ontological) in nature. However, on the one hand, the authoritative and existentially meaningful semantic form of these claims is that of doctrine. That is, the basic truths of the faith are communicated to, circulated among and assimilated by believers in their most authentic form in the scripturally shaped language of prayer, praise and liturgy; this language in turn roots its meanings in a centuries-long and quite specific history, the history of God with God’s people. If the truth claims embedded in liturgical and doctrinal life are to be articulated today to those outside the circle of belief, there will need to be a careful translation of doctrinal language into a more generally accessible transcendental or metaphysical idiom, without loss of essential meaning. On the other hand, the conceptual language of Christian assertions about the world cannot be assumed to occupy the same semantic field populated by the measurements, generalized laws and postulated entities of scientific theory. ¹³ Yet both of these languages attempt to speak of the objective cosmos we inhabit. So here, too, systematic theology will need to engage in a delicate disentanglement of distinct epistemic assumptions, evidential warrants, and rules of reference if it is to establish the ultimacy of its truth claims without confusing itself with or needlessly clashing with the discourse of natural science.

The doctrine of creation is the basic locus within systematic theology in which the relation of the world to its ultimate ground, the Creator, is articulated. It is therefore the most promising theological territory on which to clarify and calibrate the different languages, doctrinal, metaphysical and scientific, which impinge on Christian truth claims. Maintaining with all due rigor the unique mode of radical dependence of the world upon God, and how this dependence has been salvifically mediated to the living community of faith (doctrine), is the foundation on which this dependence can in turn be rationally conceptualized as truth for all (metaphysics), and can be shown to complement and affirm rather than replace our best knowledge about the workings of the natural cosmos (science). In this connection, commending the traditional claim of creation from nothing (over against process or other postclassical theisms, for example) is not just a reflection of this author’s Thomistic commitments. It is rooted in the conviction that systematic theology will find no other conceptual vehicle for its truth claims about the relation of God and world that is, on the one hand, more naturally connected with the doctrinal idiom of prayer and liturgy, and, on the other, better able to maintain a proper balance of distinction from and harmony with scientific discourse.

A Second Task: Articulating the Central Christian Claims as a Unified Complex

Theology’s flourishing in the academy of tomorrow will involve another approach toward ‘systematizing’ itself. It will seek to clarify the central complex of Christian claims, to articulate doctrines of God, the human being, and salvation as thoroughly interlocking and as necessarily ordering and conditioning the endless investigations and applications into which theology threatens simply to dissolve. Basing one’s more detailed work upon a foundational vision of this kind is an essential step toward systemic integration. It should be added that in this second task the doctrine of creation, once again, will have a seminal role to play.

As earlier stipulated, a theology attempting to be systematic will aim to arrange the fundamental claims of the Christian faith, with their accompanying practical injunctions, into some kind of comprehensive pattern. One result of the already discussed challenges of the institutional and cultural setting of Christian theology today has been the erosion of such an integrating vision. The increasing detachment of theology in the academy from communal belief and practice is one factor here, exacerbated by the ever-present tendency of advanced academic training to encourage specialization in research; the result is a population of theological practitioners who are never compelled in their writing or teaching to develop a global vision of the Christian message and its traditional elements. This temptation to inhabit micro-territories of expertise is even stronger due to the split in theological culture described earlier, which has not only left large numbers of academic theologians with the vague conviction that the traditional doctrinal topics are ethically retrograde and passé, but has also encouraged the rooting of theological work in non-theological critical discourses, held to provide superior intellectual orientation because they are deemed progressive and more relevant to contemporary concerns.

Whatever the causes, this proliferation of theological writing and teaching that eschews the systematic impulse, and in particular the integrating task of bringing together all the main Christian claims into a single scheme, is a deficit in Christian theology. Of what use is even the most elaborated discussion of a particular theological theme, whether creation or eschatology, Christology or pneumatology, theological anthropology or ecclesiology, if little consideration is given to how this particular position might accommodate even the fundamental assumptions underlying the other necessary elements of the creed, much less their more elaborated theological implications? Troublingly, the fragmentation of the field of theological investigation is not only a result of the trends already identified, but also a reinforcement of them. The cultivation of some kind of integrated vision of the whole theological project that is being urged here is not, it should be said, a demand that every theologian must develop a detailed position on every important topic in the field, much less produce a ‘system’ in the philosophical sense (meaning a tightly theorized elaboration of the total field of doctrine, with mutually implicated positions drawn logically from a set of grounding principles). It is rather a reminder that the different claims of the faith grow out of a fundamental act of God vis-à-vis the world; so in the presentation of any particular doctrine the other doctrines are all at least implicitly present, and their hidden pressure must leave its traces on the specific treatment. ¹⁴

The doctrine of creation plays a special role in this (at least) implicit theological coordination of doctrines. Because the doctrine of creation must lay out how the created order as such is understood to relate to God, it in effect sets the ‘ground rules’ for how events in the world, including God’s gracious and trans-natural effects active within historical and human reality, are to be related to the divine agency. The causal layering involved is delicate, and immediately implies certain constraints on how events can both be attributed to divine intention and yet also remain embedded within their immanent created contexts. How creation is conceived, therefore, will bring with it a set of expectations as to the nature of how God acts to govern and elevate created entities, and this in turn becomes a framework within which every other doctrine takes shape, disciplining the merely imaginative possibilities for their development. The enormous achievement of Aquinas is exemplary for how a vision of the God–world relation can serve as a kind of force field pervading the entire dogmatic system. ¹⁵

A Third Task: Theorizing Christian Claims via a Theological Account of the Human Person

From this articulation of the central Christian vision of God’s saving acts and ends in this world, a third specific task should follow for a systematic theology worthy of the name. A need identified in the first section was closer attention to the way in which Christian doctrines are not simply intellectually defensible, but also transformative of selves and communities, i.e. what they have to do with salvation. Here a critical role needs to be played by theological anthropology. Theology in the future needs to operate with a more detailed and philosophically informed model of human subjectivity, of the concrete embodied individual as the locus of feeling, perception and intellection, if it is going to specify the salvific import of claims about God, Christ or the eschaton. ¹⁶ One vital part of this anthropological work will be an enhanced appreciation of gender difference and gender construction, using the proliferating results of the study of this quite basic reality to overcome the remarkable theoretical invisibility it has suffered from for centuries. ¹⁷ Arguably, this anthropological work will also need to be infused with a newly humanistic spirit. Someone who embraces the Christian message will be at least in some sense a fairly unabashed humanist; correspondingly, it is to be hoped that theology will move to a more careful reassertion of the ontological uniqueness and centrality of the human individual, shaped by but ultimately overcoming that great anti-humanist tide that has flowed since the mid-20th century. There are different streams of this anti-humanist current: philosophies of deep ecology and critiques of the anthropocene; structuralist and post-structuralist dismantlings of the self; and accounts of human consciousness within evolutionary psychology and cognitive science that anticipate its exhaustive reduction to sophisticated data processing. ¹⁸ Theological anthropology will have to take the undeniable insights imbedded in these trends, while nonetheless insisting on human selfhood as a unique form of what might be called ‘local transcendence.’ Even while newly sensitized to the ethical risks of anthropocentrism, Christian theological anthropology cannot escape the fact that the human, both as vehicle of the eternal Word’s enfleshment and as consummated in the vision of God, remains structurally central within the church’s witness.

Even these briefly indicated examples should suggest the broader possibility that theological anthropology might prove especially promising as a link between the currently alienated subcultures of theology earlier lamented. For, on one hand, a systematic theological account of the human person is a necessary element for more traditionally or doctrinally minded approaches. The structure of embodied human subjectivity, along with its individual and communal dynamics, is a point of intersection for any number of critical theological positions on freedom and the fall, original and actual sin, the infused virtues of grace, the assumption of human nature by the eternal Word, and the eschatological Kingdom. Indeed, at the heart of the Christian message must lie an understanding of how the redemption or salvation of human beings is the ultimate end and desire of the human as human; the very shape of the self must be such as to render communion with the infinite God its manifest consummation. On the other hand, those theologians who creatively appropriate the resources of philosophy, ethics, political and social critique, and gender or sexuality theory, can find in theological anthropology a natural point of entry into the entire doctrinal complex. Here as nowhere else there is a potentially generative overlap between the claim of the gospel and the humanist investigation of the myriad distortions of human self-understanding and collective belonging brought about by exploitive economic systems, disfiguring cultural presumptions and mechanisms of violence. Each theological investment in such ‘borrowed’ critique is a witness to the reality of original sin, and a contribution to unfolding the full meaning of salvation, and hence of the gospel.

Two areas in particular, each highlighted in the Thomistic tradition, might well be exploited to construe the anthropological dimension of a future systematic theology. The already mentioned uniqueness of the human lies in a set of capacities, traditionally named intellect and will, that allow both a cognitive connection with the real, and a creative and open-ended active intervention in the real, that are not totally conditioned by the embodied, perspectival location of the knower, or by the social, psychological and environmental forces impinging on the agent. Humans exercise, in short, a situated or ‘local’ transcendence that enables a limited but real grasp of general truth beyond perspectival bias, and an agency partially liberated from natural causal mechanisms. Traditionally these capacities were explored metaphysically, but a creative Thomism will develop the inherent connection (symbolized by ‘the word’) between the universal reach of intellect and the generalizing semantic reach built into language. Tying the metaphysical semi-transcendence of human being back into the structures and meaning-making practices embodied in material symbols will be an important bridge in systematic theology between its own anthropology and the world of intellectual discourses making up contemporary intellectual culture.

Another key area of theological anthropology that seems ripe for future exploitation in a systematic theological mode once again has a Thomistic inflection. Embedded within and restlessly driving all the exercises in piecemeal transcendence just described is an unlimited impetus to know being as such, pursuant to enjoying the fullest union with it. This impulsion has been theorized in the wake of Aquinas as finally incapable of any finite satisfaction; it is the natural desire to see and embrace God in God’s infinite being. The great ferment in early 20th-century theology associated with names like Blondel, Rousselot and De Lubac correctly saw in this dynamic element of theological anthropology the key to critically appropriating the modern insights (accumulating from the Renaissance onward) into the endless self- and world-creating capacity that defines humanity. ¹⁹ Re-engaging with this theological insight is essential if theology is to avoid meeting the modern and postmodern expansion of the creative historical scope of ‘the human’ with incomprehension or hostility, and is instead to discover in it that dimension of human transcendence that can link the myriad human struggles for meaning today with the classical notion of humanity’s constitutive desire for God that animates every Christian doctrine.

A Fourth Task: Rooting Theological Claims in an Historicized Hermeneutic of Scripture

The final area of promise for a more ‘systematic’ theology recalls what was said from the beginning about the necessity of connecting theological assertions in a principled way to the authoritative sources of the church’s proclamation and praxis, especially referring to scripture as the ultimate deposit of the divine disclosure of God’s saving way with this world. Naturally, any systematic approach to the theological task will see the need to theorize the nature of revelation as an act of God, and to possess some general understanding of what is meant by the inspiration of scripture and the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit guiding and guaranteeing the communal appropriation of its message. But at issue here are two more specific developments in this long-recognized task that appear especially urgent.

First, it is one thing to propose some broad idea of how God enlightened the authors and communities responsible for producing and preserving the biblical writings. It is quite another to consider in detail how those writings, in their extraordinary variety of historical provenance, literary genre, and authorial intent, can be interpreted collectively as a unified ‘word of God,’ a single address to the believing community. In other words, it is not just a theoretical task of systematic theology, but a most practical one, to articulate a theological hermeneutic that will concretely guide how to read this patchwork of ancient documents, not as so many sources allowing a reconstruction of the past, but as a harmonic living witness to God’s identity and to the nature of God’s saving action upon and envisioned goal for this world. ²⁰ Only as more careful attention is devoted to how verses, passages, and books are to be read within the context of the whole and without evading their fully human historicity, as specifically conditioning and authorizing our Christian existence and message here and now, will the Bible be an effective guide to the theologian, instead of a depository randomly drawn upon for one’s personally favored themes and inspiring epigrams. The systematic theologian must attend to how the reading of scripture as a whole logically warrants her claims. ²¹

This task will require overcoming one kind of theological isolationism already mentioned, because it can only proceed by way of an informed awareness of biblical studies. The second pressing task, too, invites systematic theology to engage other discourses, but this time it is history and the philosophy of history that must be taken into account. The Bible is a fabric of interwoven accounts about the past, witnesses to the acts of God over the centuries, centering particularly on the chosen people of Israel and the traumatic crisis of identity it undergoes when the eternal Word of the electing God is spoken into its midst. Clearly, the claims of the gospel cannot be disentangled from the real occurrence of certain past events. But which events, precisely? The enormous advance made by modern thought in understanding not just ancient cultures, but also the complex norms and assumptions of ancient writings purporting to record history, has made it impossible for many theologians to simply accept the literal truth of many events recounted in the Bible. And yet the connection with actual occurrences cannot in principle be dissolved. So systematic theology cannot avoid giving some kind of account of how the scriptural witness can be infallibly true, even when the factuality of many of its historical claims is called in doubt. If God acts in the world in and through the seamless causal web of evolving events, yet truly acts beyond the capacities of the finite order, what does this mean for providence, for miracles, for Christology? In short, theological principles of critical interpretation must be developed that can interrelate the revelatory authority of scriptural narrative to the related but distinct question of which facts are necessary presuppositions of the truth of dogma. ²²

Something resembling the four kinds of procedure outlined in the preceding sections seems urgently called for in light of the challenge to academic theology today. The increasing institutional curtailment on theology mentioned earlier in the essay (i.e. the decline of dedicated theological faculties) threatens to combine with the fissure within its current academic culture (i.e. postliberals and doctrinalists versus emancipatory analysts privileging outsider perspectives) to dissolve the creative nexus that gives theology its power. If Christian theology cannot hold together deep (and explicit) ecclesial faithfulness with the most honest and fearless appropriation of ‘the world’s’ insights and instruments, then these poles will fall apart into inert extremes: either a seminary exercise (meaning institutional indoctrination for clergy), or a shapeless, alienated critique of Christian culture (meaning a marginal academic specialty fighting for a toehold within the shrinking space afforded to the ‘humanities’). As the classical organization of theological fields becomes less fixed, ‘systematic theology’ in the future will be not so much a defined discipline as a spirit, an ideal to strive for. It will have to be a theology more self-aware and intentional about maintaining contact with the intellectual world in service to the doctrinal integration of the Christian proclamation. For if the church must be present to the world as its sacrament, as the effective because readable ‘sign’ of the Kingdom, then the goal of a systematic theology will always remain: to form an ecclesial discourse in which the gospel can be heard as news, as good news, here and now, in this cultural moment.