Is There Madness in Method: Some Rather Deranged Ramblings

I have never been inclined to reflect on methodology too much, being sympathetic to Hazlitt’s dictum that “we never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.”¹

Polanyi’s idea of the progressive displacement of knowledge away from the knower runs along rather similar lines. He wrote of a blind man who initially is preoccupied with the process of learning to handle his stick but as he gains experience he is no longer conscious of that but is attentive to the feel of the ground, with its various contours, at the far end of the stick.²

Similarly, analogy can be made with driving a car, at least one with manual controls as is the norm in the UK. While learning to drive one is preoccupied with hand and foot co-ordination. As experience grows this becomes second nature to the extent that one pays no attention to it but is focused on the road, the general terrain, and the relationship of the car to other road users. If, instead, one were to refocus attention on the relationship of hands and feet to the controls of the car there would be an increased likelihood of an accident.

In both these cases, attainment of skill or knowledge is connected with a focus away from oneself to the object for which the skill is needed or to which the knowledge is directed.

The Question of Method

One can argue that preoccupation with method or with similar mechanics is an inhibiting element and prevents optimal attainment. Hazlitt continues, “This is the reason why it is so difficult for any but natives to speak a language correctly or idiomatically.”³ Personally, I am gratified that Jürgen Moltmann has expressed that he has paid very little attention to methodology;⁴ perhaps that explains why Pannenberg could rightly accuse him of exegetical irresponsibility!⁵

However, in recent years the question of method has surfaced for me in one particular way and I have been able to identify a factor that has been overwhelmingly overlooked in—how shall I describe it?—conservative Protestant circles. In my first book, The Work of Christ,⁶ I intended my chapters on the history of discussion of the atonement to precede the account of the biblical material. The publisher overruled me—“surely not!” He produced no argument in support. At that time I had little clout and went with the flow. My latest offering, The Holy Spirit,⁷ does adopt that order—the historical discussion preceding the biblical—and with no such disagreement as far as I can tell. The book has been released recently and no doubt you are frantically racing to click on Amazon to obtain your copy, if you haven’t one already.

This small matter could easily be dismissed as a purely technical question with positive and negative arguments on both sides, something of merely incidental interest, only of concern to a handful of pedantic nerds. I’d suggest strongly that this is not the case; in the immediate context it may be a minute issue but it portends a much larger, indeed huge, difference, with ramifications that could conceivably extend right across the theological spectrum.

My book has the following outline. The first section is a historical survey of discussion in the church. The focus here is that the Trinity is indivisible and so the works of the Spirit are inseparable from those of the Father and the Son. These commitments, at the heart of the faith of the church for centuries, are vital to appreciate when we come to consider the biblical testimony. It is absurd to assume that we must ground everything on our own exegesis of the Bible, while ignoring the cumulative wisdom of the people of God down through the ages. That route frequently leads to disaster. It is an attempt to reinvent the wheel. It can regurgitate old errors and heresies in new forms.

Such an account as I have suggested is not a merely antiquarian exercise. It is vital for us to ensure that our own thinking is within the parameters shaped by more than fifty generations of those who have gone before us. How else can we be clear that our experience and ideas are demonstrably Christian? We have two millennia of accumulated wisdom, biblical exegesis, and concentrated thought to guide us. While not all of it may seem fruitful, much if not most will. Moreover, the ancient creeds are themselves the fruit of painstaking biblical exegesis, challenged, corrected and recognized in the day, confessed down the years throughout the church.

The second section is biblical, tracing the pervasive and increasing stress on the Spirit in creation, the history of redemption, the life and ministry of Christ, the work of the apostles, and the establishment of the church, ultimately extending to our own transformation and eventual resurrection. The book comes to its climax with a short chapter that asks how we are to discern where the Spirit is at work.  Finally, I have included an appendix on modern developments relating to our understanding of the Spirit.

Church Dogmatics

For the reasons I have mentioned, my preferred title for my systematic theology had been Church Dogmatics. The publisher overruled it, and I agreed on that, since such a title would hardly resonate with the general book buying public. It might also have seemed to some to be apeing Barth.

However, the distinction between those titles is a real and substantive one and clearly spills over into the latest book and has impacts that go beyond. ‘Church dogmatics’ indicates that the discussion is to be based upon, and interact with, the past teaching of the church, from the ecumenical creeds, the writings of the fathers and medievals, the Greeks, the Reformers, Puritans, and the Reformed tradition, viewed in the light of the ongoing witness of the whole church in its creeds and confessions. Any proposals of a biblical or constructive nature are to be seen as grounded on that basic premise. This was the practice of the Westminster divines. Self-consciously operating in a way that sought harmony with the contemporary Reformed churches on the Continent, the records of debate show that they were constantly citing authorities from the whole church, even referring to Robert Bellarmine, the leading spokesman of Rome in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with respect.⁸ This is the orientation of Douglas Kelly’s systematic theology: “grounded in holy Scripture and understood in the light of the church.”⁹ It is reflected in Calvin and a host of others.¹⁰ It is a ressourcement, a retrieval of the tradition, the sources, an orientation which, is of course, a growing feature in theology over the last few decades. Tradition, seen as the past teaching of the church, only became a problem when Rome accorded it equivalent status to Scripture.

In contrast, ‘systematic theology,’ or biblical theology for that matter, as abstracted from the history of discussion, could be, and sometimes is, simply the thoughts of the author, based on his or her own biblical exegesis, arranged in a concerted and logical order. However well done it might be—and it can be very well done—it is no more than a concatenation of the thoughts of the individual author without necessarily having the benchmark of the considered conclusions and questions of the previous fifty generations as a check. Too frequently also, an expositor’s biblical exegesis can be equated with Scripture itself.

It would be foolish, as well as imperialistic, to argue that my proposal is the only way to proceed. There are a wide range of options, dependent as much on the interests and predilections of each person. Nevertheless, fruitful work in our own day can only be deepened by interactions with the main players of the past in the primary sources.

A Call to Ecumenical Orthodoxy

In line with this, I contend that a wide interaction with a range of churchly perspectives is both enriching and effective in guarding against a limited and increasingly sectarian trajectory. When I was in my very early twenties, my father wisely advised me that my ministry would be more effective if I were to interact at first hand with ideas and authors with whom I might not necessarily agree. He referred to one author we both knew whose written contributions had greater richness and depth due to the breadth of his reading.

Perhaps an analogy might be made with incest. If sexual relations were to be confined to members of one’s own biological family the ultimate result, ethical questions apart, would be genetic degradation. It seems to me that if theological relations were limited to those with whom one was in agreement a corresponding degradation would follow. Inbreeding is not good. At an academic conference many years ago, in conversation with some friends, one of our number suggested that a certain theological tradition was engaging in what he called ‘incestuous scholarship.’ Whatever the nature of such interactions, the result is ultimately sterile.

In short, cross-fertilization is generally a positive thing. This is the nature of being part of the one holy catholic and apostolic church. As no one of us is the perfect exemplification of what it is to be a regenerate Christian, for we are only in the process of being sanctified as part of the church of Christ, so we need the insights and contributions of other parts of Christ’s body. The same might apply on a wider scale.

This is not a call to relapse into a weak minded version of the fuzzy ecumenism of the World Council of Churches, with which we are doubtless familiar. That would to plunge into a morass of relativism. Rather, as Paul wrote, we are to “test all things, hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). Moreover, there are many such “things” being mooted today that are certainly not good. The appalling attitude of the bishops of the Church of England to same-sex ‘marriage’ and gender identity is the most obvious; you can probably provide a lengthy litany of other such capitulations to the spirit of the age. I am talking throughout of ecumenical orthodoxy. The Westminster Confession and Catechisms are, to my mind, the most extensive and elaborated confessional documents to be found. Their theology is mine. However, the divines saw themselves as heirs to the great tradition of the church, understood under the authority of Scripture.¹¹

So Athanasios is ours, Gregory of Nazianzus is ours, Cyril, Augustine, Anselm and Thomas are ours too. We can find friends from a range of places. They may be wrong on this or that, sometimes more wrong than others. So too are Calvin (I have written of what I think are some appalling things he wrote), Knox, Warfield and . . . so am I, so are you.

In all this, I echo the statement made back in 1938 by the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary, writing in the first edition of its theological journal:

We stand today in the Christian Church as debtors to nineteen centuries of Christian history, thought, and experience. It would not only be futile but wrong to try to dissociate ourselves from the great stream of Christian tradition. Other men laboured and we have entered into their labours. It is only by thorough acquaintance with and appreciation of the labours of God's servants in the centuries that have passed that we can intelligently and adequately present the Christian Faith in the present.

But while we cling tenaciously to the heritage that comes to us from the past we must ever remember that it is our responsibility to present the Christian Faith in the context of the present. The position we maintain, therefore, necessarily involves the bringing of every form of thought that may reasonably come within the purview of a theological Faculty to the touchstone of Holy Scripture and the defining of its relations to our Christian Faith.¹²

Very well said, the more recent past speaking to the present as we too enter into their labours!

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Notes:

1. William Hazlitt, “On Prejudice” in The Collected Works, vol. 12 (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1904), 398.

2. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Londong: Routledge, 1958).

3. William Hazlitt, “On Prejudice” in The Collected Works, vol. 12 (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1904), 398.

4. Jürgen Moltmann, “The Adventure of Theological Ideas,” Religious Studies Review 22, no. 2 (1996): 102-105.

5. See Kevin J. Bindwell, The Church as the Image of the Trinity: A Critical Evaluation of Miroslav Volf's Ecclesial Model (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 32-33.

6. Robert Letham, The Work of Christ (Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).

7. Robert Letham, The Holy Spirit (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2023).

8. Chad Van Dixhoorn, ed., Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:140.

9. Douglas F. Kelly, Systematic Theology, vol 1., Grounded in Holy Scripture and Understood in Light of the Church (Fearn, SCT: Christian Focus Publishing, 2008).

10. Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

11. Robert Letham, The Westminster Assembly: Reading its Theology in Historical Context (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009).

12. Paul Woolley and John Murray, ed., "To Our Readers," Westminster Theological Journal 1, no. 1 (1938).