The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims On the Way

Ages ago I listened to a talk from Legion Duncan on how people in my circles who are big on going through books of the Bible should also be reading systematic theology books. The Bible guys need the theology guys. So I now try to always have a systematic theology on the go. These books are normally thick and normally takes me over a year to get through. I also read in ebbs and flows, meaning there may be a month or two between reads. Still, I think the exercise is beneficial.

Topics covered in systematic theology books generally hit the same themes of God, His Word, the person and work of Christ, salvation, the church and sacraments, end times, etc... but each one had a different approach. Wayne Grudem's is very dialectic and seeks to simply put Bible verses together with no real engagement with other theologians, John Frame's one approaches everything from three perspectives (the normative, the situational and the existential) and this one approached theology as a problem of overcoming estrangement.

We humans are down here on earth and if there is a God, he is a stranger to us. How does this gap between God and us happen? Some religions say God is in everything (pantheism and panentheism) others say we will never know nor meet this stranger (atheism and deism) but this book forwards a covenant approach to God and His interaction with us. God comes to us, He is personal and meets us to be in a relationship with us. So the way we meet God or overcome this estrangement is through His initial acting, Him telling us about Himself and Him seeking to be in a relationship with us. This is a long way to talk of revelation but is also more than that - it is a covenant relationship God seeks to have with people. This covenant idea of God wanting to meet or be with us is the main driving idea behind this book (and is argued behind the Bible itself).

Another model of thinking that was spread through this book was when thinking about God, there is a distinction between God's essence and God's energies. The classic metaphor for this is the relationship between the Sun and its rays to Earth. The rays (energy) are not God but an effect of God's power and activity. When it comes to God, He doesn't change in essence but His work (energies) can be displayed in many and various ways. In creation, God spoke and when He did His hypostatic word was his essence but the creation that was made was an act of his energies. When God works in us we receive new life, glory, righteousness etc, all of that is an effect of God's energies. This essence-energies distinction is big in the Eastern Orthodox church and can be confusing when talking about theosis (deification) something Athanasius put forward. We don't get the essence of God when we are raised to glory, but the work God will do in us to live forever is part of God's energy.

I've purposefully put in some big words above to give a little bit of the flavour of this book. It was a bit of a hard slog in parts (mostly in the front half, or maybe I got more used to the language near the end). And maybe some of the technical words could have been dropped to be clearer.

Most chapters started with an overview of the issue at hand and then it would do a bit of a deep dive into a historical survey of the opponents or debates on this topic. This could get quite lengthy before coming back out and laying out the authors position on the issue. I felt like it would have been helpful to already have working knowledge on what Barth, Moltmann, Hegel, Gunton etc argued so in some of the discussion I did skim over and kinda trusted the summaries of their position.

Michael Horton is a Presbyterian, so what you get in this book conforms to the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF), especially when it comes to the Church and sacraments. I don't have huge issues with this, but like John Frame's one, at certain points, it felt like it was an expository on the WCF as the benchmark of orthodoxy. As mentioned above, Horton engages with past and contemporary theologians as along with modern ideas such as speech act theory (something I think Sam Chan pick up on in his first book). Horton is a deep thinker and what I really did appreciate was some of his pros with sometimes quite strategic words connecting ideas and concepts that I may not have connected before.

I don't think this Systematic is for everyone - maybe for a third-year theology student for their essays. While I don't agree with everything in Grudem's systematic, I still think that one is the most accessible and worth a read (one day I might start a theology club that goes through that book). John Frame's Systematic Theology was easier to read than this one and also presented the Presbyterian position.