Systematic theology has long been treated as the crown of theological inquiry among Evangelicals— but what if its universalist ambitions are precisely what untether it from the communities theology is meant to serve?
A recurring moment in my hermeneutics course arrives when students encounter Grant Osborne’s The Hermeneutical Spiral — and with it, his claim that systematic theology is the proper end toward which hermeneutics and biblical theology are both pointing.1 It is a claim worth lingering over, and worth challenging.
The challenge is not a dismissal of systematic theology as a genre. It is a more precise concern: systematic theology is, by its own nature, a theology from nowhere specifically, written for nowhere specifically. It addresses no particular congregation, no defined confession, no bounded community of faith. It is, in this sense, a theology untethered.
This is precisely why Karl Barth chose to title his monumental work Church Dogmatics — not systematic theology, but dogmatics, and not merely dogmatics, but the church’s dogmatics. The word belonged to a community. It was the word that community had been given and must hear again and again as it wrestles with the witnesses of Scripture.
Dogmatics, in this older sense, belongs to a church. Confessional theology belongs to a tradition. Both are moored to actual communities with actual histories, actual statements of faith, and actual creeds that have been argued over, refined, and received across generations. Systematic theology, by contrast, typically functions as if it were above all that — as if organizing theological topics with sufficient rigor could produce something universal and tradition-neutral.
The problem of topic-driven reading
One practical consequence of systematic theology’s method is that it forces all texts to be heard through its predetermined categories (which is also an issue of any approach at some level). The topical structure is set in advance; Scripture is then mined to populate each topic. What falls outside those categories tends to remain unengaged — not because it lacks significance, but because it simply did not fit the system’s organizational logic.
This is no small matter. The texts that a given systematic framework ignores are not ignored by the communities that have lived by them. The silence of a systematic theology on a subject is not neutral. It shapes what students come to regard as theologically significant — and what they learn to overlook.
The curious case of Evangelical seminaries
What makes this worth pressing is the contemporary Evangelical habit of adopting a generic systematic theology as the textbook for teaching theology itself — as if that particular volume were simply the theology that students must internalize to do the church’s work in the world.
Consider Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, a fine and widely used textbook. The title is confident: Christian theology — not Baptist theology, not one theologian’s theology, but Christian theology. And yet it is, inevitably, a theology shaped by the Baptistic commitments of Millard Erickson. It could not be otherwise. The choices embedded in every chapter — what to include, how to frame disputes, which conclusions to draw — all reflect the particular tradition in which Erickson stands. The universal claim in the title does not match the particular realities of the text.
Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology,3 used widely across Evangelical institutions, including many in Assemblies of God circles,4 has a genuine advantage: each chapter at least gestures toward other theological traditions, giving students some sense that the church has spoken on these questions in more than one voice. That is a real contribution. And yet, in the end, Grudem’s systematic theology is Grudem’s theology. It is a theology of Wayne Grudem that has been received by portions of the church as if it were a theology of the church, as if it carried the weight of the tradition rather than of one thoughtful and prolific theologian. These two things should not be conflated.
The question is not whether Grudem or Erickson offer good theology. The question is whether their theology is the same kind of thing as what a community of faith, gathered around shared confessions over centuries, has produced and received as its own.
Systematics, confession, and community
None of this is an argument that churches should limit their theology to their own confessions, or that theologizing must stay within the bounds of whatever creeds a tradition has officially received. Theology always reaches beyond what has already been settled. That is part of its vitality.
The more modest point is this: to treat systematic theology as the way to do theology — as the queen’s throne rather than one province in a larger kingdom — is to mistake the part for the whole. Systematic theology is one legitimate mode of theological inquiry. It is not the destination toward which all other modes are pointing.
What it is not, and cannot be, is a theology that speaks on behalf of any particular community of faith. It is written by individuals, organized around the questions those individuals found most pressing, and is always at some remove from the actual life of any actual church. That remove is not a flaw to be corrected — it is a feature of the genre. But it means systematic theology should be received with appropriate modesty about what it is and what it is not claiming to do.
The queen of which sciences?
Osborne’s description of systematic theology as the “queen of the sciences” is worth examining directly, because it reaches for a historic claim that does not quite fit its new application.2
The original ascription of theologia as queen of the sciences belonged to the emergence of the medieval university, when theology was considered foundational to all other intellectual pursuits — to the pursuit of goodness, of truth, of knowledge, of human purpose. In that context, theology was not systematic theology in the modern sense. It was the great tradition of reflection arising from the church’s encounter with Scripture, refined through centuries of liturgy, argument, and confession. It was theology that belonged, in some meaningful sense, to the community of faith.
To transfer that crown to the modern genre of systematic theology is to quietly change what is being crowned. The queen of the medieval university was not one professor’s organized treatment of selected topics. She was something older, larger, and more communal than that. When Osborne applies the title to systematics, he imports the prestige of that older tradition and attaches it to something that, in important ways, differs from it.
This should not be heard as my arguing for or against, for example, the seeming Aristotelian type claims of Thomas Aquinas regarding the place of theologia in the emerging universities of Europe, but only an admission that Osborne has shifted the language game without proper consideration of what it may have indicated historically.
Toward a more honest reckoning
None of this requires that systematic theology be abandoned or devalued. It remains a useful tool — it can clarify, compare, organize, and provoke. What it requires is honesty about what systematic theology is: the work of individual thinkers, organized around their own questions, addressed to an audience broader than any single church, and necessarily unmoored from the specific confessions that ground a community’s identity over time.
The alternative is not to replace it with something else but to set it back in its proper relation to the other modes — e.g., biblical theology, historical theology, dogmatics, confessional theology — none of which merely lead up to systematics like tributaries to a river. Each has its own integrity, its own community of accountability, its own way of listening to the witnesses of Scripture. Each is also not (nor can ever properly be) the work from nowhere for nowhere in particular, as if the community and communities to which they belong are not the ones to which they serve or to which they do well to offer themselves in service of.
When hermeneutics and biblical theology are understood as pointing toward systematic theology as their goal, something is lost: the sense that theology’s first loyalty is to the church, to specific communities, to people who have gathered around specific confessions and specific practices and who need not a universal theology of nowhere, but a living theology of here.
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Grant R. Osborne. The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. Revised and Expanded (IVP Academic, 2006), 374.
Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral, 274.
Grudem, Wayne A. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. Second edition (Zondervan Academic, 2020).
The Assemblies of God has had numerous iterations of types of “Systematic Theology” written by various members, where nearly all of them sought at some level to follow what was the confessional statement of faith for some variant of the AG (while offering other conversational bits):
Pearlman, Myer. Knowing the Doctrines of the Bible. Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1937. (Revised edition published by Gospel Publishing House, 1948.)
Riggs, Ralph M. We Believe: A Comprehensive Statement of Christian Faith. Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 1954.
Menzies, William W., and Stanley M. Horton. Bible Doctrines: A Pentecostal Perspective. Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1993.
Horton, Stanley M., ed. Systematic Theology: A Pentecostal Perspective. Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 1994. Revised edition, 1995.
Higgins, John R., Michael L. Dusing, and Frank D. Tallman. Introduction to Theology: A Classical Pentecostal Perspective. Kendall Hunt, 1993, 2008.
Yong, Amos. Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014. [Perhaps this latter should not be included as it intentionally sought broader confessionality but drew upon the World Assemblies of God Statement of Faith rather than a singular national church’s statement.]
