Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction

PART ONE

Prolegomena: Beginning to Talk about God

§1.1 What Is Theology?

§1.2 What Do You Have to Say Before You Say Anything?

§1.3 What Is the Gospel?

§1.4 The Necessity and Goal of Theology

§1.5 Is Theology Possible?

§1.6 Sources for Theology

§1.7 Toward a Gospel-Driven Theological Method

§1.8 A Final Word

Prolegomena is where you clear the deck on preliminary issues and show how you intend to set up a system of theology. It is what you say before you say anything about theology—in other words, a type of pre-theology, or a first theology. Topics dealt with here include defining theology, giving a definition of the gospel, stating the purposes and goals of theology, and outlining a theological method. These chapters lay the foundation for the rest of the volume that will explore the subject of God according to the gospel of God with its accompanying witness of the Holy Scriptures and Christian tradition.

We have been studying cheerfully and seriously. As far as I was concerned it could have continued in that way, and I had already resigned myself to having my grave here by the Rhine! … And now the end has come. So listen to my piece of advice: exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis! Keep to the word, to the scripture that has been given to us.¹

Where exegesis is not theology, Scripture cannot be the soul of theology, and conversely, where theology is not essentially the interpretation of the Church’s Scripture, such a theology no longer has a foundation.²

An evangelical theology is one which is evoked, governed and judged by the gospel.³

1. Karl Barth on the occasion of his farewell to his students in Bonn prior to his expulsion from Germany in 1935. Cited in Gordon D. Fee, New Testament Exegesis: A Handbook for Students and Pastors (rev. ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 6.

2. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, §35.

3. John Webster, Word and Church (London: T&T Clark, 2001), 191.

§ 1.1 WHAT IS THEOLOGY?

What exactly is theology? If the question is posed in a multiple-choice format, we could choose from the following options.

a.  The name of the eighth full-length album by Sinead O’Connor, released in 2007.

b.  What my father tells me to stop doing and to get a real job.

c.  The study of God.

d.  All of the above.

The answer is option (d), All of the above. However, option (c), The study of God, is technically the more correct answer, and we can unpack that a bit more. The Compact Macquarie Dictionary defines theology this way: The science which treats God, His attributes, and His relations to the universe; the science or study of divine things or religious truth.¹ Saint Augustine in the fifth century defined theology as rational discussion respecting the deity.² Charles Ryrie, a dispensationalist theologian, says theology is thinking about God and expressing those thoughts in some way.³ According to Baptist theologian Robert Culver, Christian theology is study or organized treatment of the topic, God, from the standpoint of Christianity.⁴ The Anglican theologian Alister McGrath asserts that theology is reflection upon the God whom Christians worship and adore.⁵ The Swiss theologian Karl Barth contended: Dogmatics is the self-examination of the Christian Church in respect of the content of its distinctive talk about God.⁶ All of these definitions are generally correct; however, a more precise and robust definition of theology is given by Jaroslav Pelikan, who regarded theology as, What the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches and confesses on the basis of the word of God: this is Christian doctrine.⁷

To put things simply, theology is the study of God. It comes from the word theos, which is Greek for God, and from logos, which is Greek for word.⁸ It is the attempt to say something about God and God’s relationship to the world. It is thinking about faith from faith. In a sense, theology is very much akin to the study of philosophy, worldview, religion, ethics, or intellectual history; it is a descriptive survey of ideas and the impact of those ideas.

But there are at least two key differences that distinguish theology from other intellectual disciplines like philosophy and religion. The first difference is that theology is not the study of ideas about God; it is the study of the living God. Christian theology, then, is different from the study of seventeenth century French literature, ancient Greek religion, and medieval philosophers because the Christian claims that he or she is in personal contact with the subject of study. It is one thing to discuss William Shakespeare in the classroom, but it would be quite another thing to do that if Shakespeare was standing in the classroom with you. Theology, then, is not an objective discipline (i.e., a detached study of an object) like the physical sciences, nor is it a descriptive discipline like the social sciences. Theology is speaking about God while in the very presence of God. We are intimately engaged with the subject of our study.

Second, theology is studied and performed in a community of faith. Theology is something that is learned, lived, sung, preached, and renewed through the dynamic interaction between God and his people. Theology is the conversation that takes place between family members in the household of faith about what it means to behold and believe in God. Theology is the attempt to verbalize and to perform our relationship with God. Theology can be likened to the process of learning to take part in a divinely directed musical called Godspell.⁹ To do theology is to describe the God who acts, to be acted upon, and to become an actor in the divine drama of God’s plan to repossess the world for himself.

Evangelical theology, then, is the drama of gospelizing. By gospelizing I mean trying to become what the gospel intends believers to be: slaves of Christ, vessels of grace, agents of the kingdom, and a people worthy of God’s name. Dedication to the art of gospelizing is crucial because evangelicals need to recapture a passion for biblical formation: a desire to be formed, reformed and transformed by the truth and power of the gospel.¹⁰ To pursue Kevin Vanhoozer’s image, the task of theology is to enable disciples to perform the script of the Scriptures, according to advice of the dramaturge the Holy Spirit, in obedience to the design of the director, Jesus Christ, with the gospel as the theme music, and performed in the theater of the church. The company of the gospel shows what they believe in an open-air performance staged for the benefit of the world. The purpose of gospelizing is to ensure that those who bear Christ’s name walk in Christ’s way.¹¹ Consequently, theology is the task for disciples of Jesus to begin excavating the manifold truth of the gospel and to start reflecting the spiritual realities that the gospel endeavors to cultivate in their own lives.

1. Arthur Delbridge and J. R. L. Bernard, eds., The Compact Macquarie Dictionary (Macquarie, NSW: Macquarie Library, 1994), 1045.

2. Adugustine, Civ. 8.1.

3. Charles Ryrie, Basic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Victor, 1986), 9.

4. Robert Culver, Systematic Theology: Biblical and Historical (Fearn, Ross-Shire: Mentor, 2005), 2.

5. Allster McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 137.

6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God (trans. GW. Bromiley; London: Continuum, 2004 1932.), 1/1:11 (hereafter: CD).

7. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 1:1.

8. Note that theology proper is discussion of the Doctrine of God, whereas general theology is the discussion of all matters in relation to God.

9. Here I am playing on the Stephen Schwarz musical also called Godspell (1970). On theology as drama, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005).

10. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Evangelicalism and the Church: The Company of the Gospel, in The Futures of Evangelicalism: Issues and Prospects (ed. C. Bartholomew, R. Parry, and A. West; Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, 2003), 72.

11. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 16, 102, 442.

§ 1.2 WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY BEFORE YOU SAY ANYTHING?

1.2.1 INTRODUCTION TO PROLEGOMENA

1.2.1.1 DEFINITION AND TASK

For Christians, theology is studying God as he is known according to the perspective of the church’s faith. Now if you are going to engage in a study of God, before you formally begin, you need to say something about how you intend to undertake such a study. This is what theologians call prolegomena. The designation prolegomena derives from the Greek word proleg?, which means things spoken in advance. So theological prolegomena is what you say before you begin to say anything about God.

Prolegomena is a type of pre-theology theology. It lays the groundwork for engaging in a systematic study of God. The task of developing a prolegomena has a long and distinguished history. When many of the Christian apologists in the second and third centuries tried to talk about Jesus and God to Greeks, they did so by appealing to a shared theory of knowledge in philosophy in order to commend the Christian faith. Justin Martyr appealed specifically to Plato and Stoic philosophers as containing wisdom that agreed with Christian beliefs.¹ This established a common ground for a discussion about God between a Christian leader and a philosophically minded pagan. For many early Christian thinkers their main task was apologetic, defending and commending the faith, rather than constructing a preface to a system of doctrine. Yet the idea of establishing a theory of knowledge, often called epistemology (i.e., the study of knowledge and knowing), has remained at the forefront of prolegomena. A prolegomena ordinarily addresses questions like Is there a God to be known? and How do we know God?

1.2.1.2 PROLEGOMENA IN CHURCH HISTORY

The form and function of prolegomena has usually been driven by the reigning philosophical framework of the day. For instance, in the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1224–1275) held to a view about there being portals of the faith in philosophy, which gave access to Christianity, and dealt with the Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine.² Aquinas was writing at a time when Europe was experiencing a fresh encounter with Aristotle’s philosophy. Aquinas’s ideas were built on that philosophy, and by switching the default background philosophy from Plato to Aristotle, Aquinas precipitated the need for a different prolegomenon couched in the terms of the new philosophy. For example, Aquinas used philosophical proofs taken from Aristotle to argue for the existence of God. Philosophy established that there was a God to be known; Christian theology then explained what this God was like.

During the Reformation there was a concerted effort to make Scripture the bedrock of all knowledge of God rather than to rely on philosophical specters or humanly devised systems of thought. Martin Luther spoke ferociously against any reliance on philosophy in Christian theology. John Calvin began his theological textbook with an account of the knowledge of God. The first thing Calvin did in his Institutes of the Christian Religion was to ascertain how it is that persons can actually know God. His answer referred to the revelation of God through nature, Scripture, and the testimony of the Spirit.³ Calvin emphasized, predictably, the Scriptures: If true religion is to beam upon us, our principle must be, that it is necessary to begin with heavenly teaching, and that it is impossible for any man to obtain even the minutest portion of right and sound doctrine without being a disciple of Scripture.⁴

The key Reformation contribution to the subject of theological prolegomena was the assertion that theology should commence with a description of the mode of God’s self-communication of himself to his creatures. We have to remember that the Reformers themselves were not immune from the philosophical currents washing over Europe at that time. The return to Scripture as an authority was possible only amidst the politics of emerging city-states, was indebted to budding rationalistic philosophies, grew out of a new humanism with its penchant for critical history, and was arguably an acute expression of medieval nominalism that was skeptical toward religious authority.

While the Reformers claimed to have thrown off the weighty yoke of medieval philosophy (esp. Platonic and Aristotlean realism), they had done so only by smuggling in a more anthropocentric philosophy that would eventually flower into a refined philosophical rationalism. While exposing the weaknesses of making ecclesiastical authority the ultimate ground of truth and moving religious authority to the sphere of inscripturated revelation, the Reformers paved the way for the same attacks on ecclesiastical authority to be leveled at Scripture as part of the questioning of religious authority. Thus the Reformers’ return to Scripture did not remove the problem of philosophical imposition on theology; in fact, it eventually yielded an even more antireligious philosophy in succeeding centuries.

Although the Reformation brought about a spiritual renewal in both the Protestant and Catholic churches, it was largely based on a crisis of authority, specifically, religious authority. Earlier, the Renaissance had been a movement of cultural rebirth within segments of medieval Europe, where new intellectual forces in science, literature, and art began to flourish. The explosion of learning combined with new discoveries in science led to a questioning of the source of intellectual authority. One feature of the Northern Renaissance, in contrast to the Italian Renaissance, was that it was interested in deepening religious convictions. The intellectual tools of the burgeoning humanities were rigorously applied to religious matters, which led to a questioning of religious authority with specific skepticism leveled at many claims of the Roman Catholic Church. The most immediate result was, of course, the Protestant Reformation. However, post-Reformation intellectuals began not just questioning the claims of religious institutions like the Catholic Church, but they started questioning the very notion of a religion of revelation. Beliefs that did not purportedly align with the scientific method or looked as if they were rooted in myth and superstition were regarded as unreasonable. This Age of Reason, otherwise known as the Enlightenment, marked a period characterized by rationalism, empiricism, the advance of human learning, and the questioning of religious dogma.

The Enlightenment eventually established the intellectual period that is commonly called Modernity. We could say that Modernity lasted from the fall of the French Bastille in 1789 to the Fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.⁵ Modernity had several philosophical characteristics.⁶ First, reason itself was viewed as universal and unassailable. Truths ascertained by way of reason—as opposed to beliefs derived from tradition or superstition—were universally and incorrigibly true.

Second, the two main schools of thought within Modernity were rationalism (knowledge is arrived at by building on self-evident truths) and empiricism (knowledge is attained by building on sense data). Both schools assumed a certain foundation for all knowledge. It was on the basis of these foundations that one could establish further truths.

Third, there was a large emphasis on intellectual and cultural progress. It was thought that the world could be made better through reason. Once we got the foundations right, once we refined our methodology, there would be no limits to what humanity could discover or achieve. This could be seen in the way that people spoke of the assured results of science, philosophy, medicine, and so on. Progress was the great meta-narrative or big story of Modernity that saw itself as leading Europe out of the so-called darkness of the Middle Ages and into a time of intellectual light.

Fourth, Modernity also led to naturalism, which is distinguished by the rejection of all supernatural explanations and the belief that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect. The upshot of Modernity was that it resulted in religious skepticism, deism, and atheism. Symbolic of this age is that during the French Revolution, Notre Dame was rechristened as the temple of reason and a Parisian courtesan was enthroned as the goddess of reason. God had been displaced by a human-centered reason. Ironically, Christian theology, once queen of the sciences in the great universities of Europe, now struggled to sustain its existence in the wake of criticism and neglect.

In the post-Enlightenment era, Christian theology had to find a way to do theology in light of the modernist critique of religion based on divine revelation. Before theologians could even begin to do theology, they had to establish that there was a God to know, that Christianity was reasonable, and that Christianity was scientific. Many theologians retreated from the challenge and embraced the modernist perspective in relation to religion. It was possible to salvage Christianity by adopting basically one of two options.

First, one could become a deist and believe that God created the world but thereafter left it to its own devices thereby eliminating the supernatural altogether. Or, second, one could adopt a more liberal approach, where Christian theology was the attempt to provide a grammar and philosophical explanation for the religious feelings that people experienced. That led to a denial of key doctrines like the incarnation, it required a reinterpretation of miracles as symbolic myths, and it altered what was meant by redemption. Not all theologians bowed the knee to Modernity. Some theologians attempted to meet the challenges of Modernity by using the very weapons that Modernity was employing against Christianity. It is here that we enter the golden age of the prolegomena, when theologians in the modernist era strove to demonstrate the rationality of Christian theism as part of their preface to Christian theology.

A good example of a systematic theology written amidst Modernity is that by the Princeton theologian Charles Hodge (1797–1878). Hodge’s introduction is both a reaction to Modernity, yet also an appropriation of it.⁷ Hodge began his Systematic Theology by describing theology as a science in a manner similar to astronomy, chemistry, or history. The realm of nature contains facts, and those facts are to be discovered by science. What is true of other sciences is true of theology. The Bible contains facts, ideas, and principles. It is the task of the theologian to collect, authenticate, arrange, and exhibit these facts and to show their relationship to each other.

Scientific facts are discovered by a method, so one must get the methodology right. Charles Hodge rejected the speculative and mystical methods used in theology in favor of the inductive method. In this method, one assumes the competency of one’s own powers of observation and the lucidity of one’s mental faculties, and then proceeds to discover the facts of the Bible. The collection is undertaken carefully and comprehensively just as it would be for any scientific field. Hodge also found it necessary in his introduction to discredit other worldviews that inhibit theology: rationalism, mysticism, and Romanism. Thereafter, Hodge endeavored to show the superiority of the Protestant doctrine of Scripture over the Roman doctrine of church tradition. When he gets into the doctrine of God, Hodge establishes how God is known as something innate, by way of reason, and in the supernatural. You can see the basic outline of Hodge’s prolegomena:

Establish theology as science

Show that theology has a scientific method

Define theology and show its necessity

Criticize competing options

Establish bases for beliefs

Charles Hodge’s introduction to theology is a defense of theology as a scientific discipline on par with other scientific disciplines. Hence his words: The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his storehouse of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches.⁸ Hodge legitimizes theology against the modernist critique by using the philosophical framework of Modernity.

1. Hodge assumes fixed laws of nature that contain facts that can be excavated. The facts of nature are acquired when a person of sound observational skills constructs the proper methodology for the investigation.

2. God has implanted certain first principles into the human constitution, such as a capacity for moral and intellectual reasoning. These first principles are the beginning point of knowledge. They are not arbitrary; rather, they are tested by universality and necessity. These first principles enable someone to investigate sources of nature and revelation in the first place.

3. For Hodge belief in God is intuitional and self-evident, and thus one may reject atheism, polytheism, and pantheism from the outset.

4. The Bible is authenticated by its inspiration through the Holy Spirit. The task of theology is to unearth facts and ideas from the Bible.

5. The reason why other theologies or philosophies do not work is because they reject the source of theology, that is, the Bible, or because they have an erroneous methodology, for example, Roman Catholicism with its affinity for tradition.

Consequently, Hodge imbibes several modernist impulses even when his theology is defined over and against Modernity.

It might seem clever to try and outplay Modernity at its own game. It is perhaps a necessity to take captive the usable elements of modernist philosophy and to press them into the service of Christian theology. Charles Hodge and others made a jolly good attempt at precisely this kind of theological project. He and others tried to walk the line between being in Modernity but not of Modernity. The problem is that they allowed Modernity to define the rules of the game. They enabled Modernity to set the agenda for theology, including its beginnings, task, and method. They also ran the risk that the failings of Modernity with its claim to unbridled access to absolute truth could also become the failings of Christian theology. By showing that the Word of God aligned with reason, they were in the end subjecting the Word of God beneath reason.

But whose reason is authoritative in the end? Whose science is the benchmark for all truth: an atheist scientist like Richard Dawkins or a theistic scientist like John Polkinghorne? Reason and science are not religiously neutral fields. One can believe in reasonable beliefs and one can believe in scientific pursuits. I only wish to point out that what is considered reasonable and what is considered scientific are debated, constantly in flux, and often freighted with other Trojan beliefs.

This brings us to another response to Modernity in the theology of Karl Barth. Barth began his Church Dogmatics by discussing the topic of Church, Theology, Science. Barth was ambivalent as to whether theology actually is a science. On the one hand, theology does not have the same subject-object relationship as you find in the natural sciences. Yet on the other hand, theology may prove to be a science, perhaps even more scientific than the other sciences, because theology is concerned with the pursuit of truth and protests against secular definitions of what constitutes science.⁹

Nonetheless, Barth is clear in his rejection of modernist prolegomena for three reasons.

1. We should not assume that the modernist objection to Christian belief is any more vociferous than pagan critiques of Christianity encountered by the ancient church.

2. The church measures its talk about God by way of reference to divine revelation and not by the standard of godless reasons.

3. Prolegomena makes theology hostage to relevance and becomes reducible to theological polemics or theological apologetics. Although the conflict of faith and unbelief is significant, theology must be grounded in its own discourse about God.¹⁰ Our response to unbelief is not apologetics but declaring the revelation of God.

There is a theological prolegomenon, but it is not what one does before theology; rather, it is what one does first in theology. According to Barth: In the prolegomena to dogmatics, therefore, we ask concerning the Word of God as the criterion of dogmatics. By this he means that the first thing that you should do in theology is to establish the doctrine of the Word of God as the grounds for dogmatics (i.e., you identify the Triune God as the God who speaks).¹¹ Winfried Corduan aptly summarizes Barth: Therefore, prolegomena does not prepare the way for theology but is the first part of theology itself. It does not lay the groundwork for content: it already consists of content. Prolegomena, for Barth, describes the initial contact of God with man.¹²

The shape of prolegomena began to change again with the advent of Postmodernity. The intellectual and cultural edifice called Postmodernity is notoriously hard to define. In one sense it is a rejection of Modernity, but in another sense it is the intensification of Modernity. Postmodernity eschews the modernist claim to absolute knowledge, while magnifying the notion that man is the measure of all things. Modernity constructed a certain metanarrative and developed a particular epistemology. That large-scale narrative was about the gradual advance of Western civilization from the darkness of the Middle Ages through its scientific and cultural achievements. Yet this created a certain cultural hegemony and arrogance that was self-serving and self-authenticating. The optimism of progress ended with World War I, and the aftermath of World War II left people searching for a new basis for values other than science.

At the same time, there was a crisis of knowledge in twentieth-century philosophy. Modernity maintained that you know things either one of two ways. Either all knowledge is self-evident (like 2 + 2 = 4) or acquired through sensory perception and inference (like kicking the stone in front of you to know that it is there). This was the foundation for all knowledge. However, people began to point out that this theory of knowledge was itself neither self-evident nor empirically verifiable. Therefore, by its own criteria, foundationalism was not actually true! Intellectual leaders began then to speak of being postfoundationalist and advocated instead that the legitimacy of truth claims did not rest on a correspondence of a truth claim to any single reality (whose reality?), but truth claims were true if they were internally consistent and had pragmatic value for a given community.

French philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida became the philosophical high priests of this new intellectual climate. Foucault argued that all claims to truth were not neutral but were de facto claims to power. Derrida asserted that there is no single interpretation of a text, only interpretations, as one can use a text for anything or one can expose the ideology behind a text. Hence a new and more self-critical rationalism was needed—enter stage left, Postmodernity.

Postmodernity is the ultimate synthesis of the philosophical skepticism of all knowledge claims by Immanuel Kant and the anthropocentric nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. No one has a God’s-eye view of reality. We see reality not as it is, but only as it appears. There are realities that are perceived or constructed, but no single reality. Truth in Postmodernity is not the correspondence of ideas to reality, but is the coherence of a proposition to other propositions. Truth becomes relative to its own circle of claims and constituents. Absolute truth is absolutely dead. The absoluteness of truth is replaced by a view of truth as pluralistic and relativistic, regardless of whether the truth claims put forward are religious, political, economic, or ethical.

Communities create meaning by the stories, language, myths, and symbols of their linguistic frameworks. When applied to theology, this means that theology is nothing more than a language game. Theology is doing things with words that make sense in a faith community, but it has no truth value outside that community. The confession that Jesus is Lord is to orientate oneself toward an experience of Jesus Christ as a sovereign master, but it has no meaning outside that linguistic frame of reference.

Postmodern theology tends to reject any prolegomena. For postliberal theologians like George Lindbeck and Hans Frei, Christian theology is a language, and you either speak it or you don’t; thus, there is no need for any attempt to justify theology with a prolegomena. Evangelicals have responded to this in several ways. Some, like Stanley Grenz, attempt to use Postmodernity as best as they could to structure and inform a generous Christian orthodoxy.¹³ Kevin Vanhoozer has taken postmodern literary theory seriously and attempted to set up a theology by establishing a theory of hermeneutics and divine speech-acts that adequately allows for a theory of revelation.¹⁴ Alister McGrath has recently attempted to reinvigorate the idea of theology as science. This is not a return to the modernist naiveté that scientific truth gives a God’s-eye view of reality. McGrath is a chastened foundationalist (i.e., truth can be objectively known, but never known apart from the knower!), so he is well aware of the shortcomings of science. McGrath’s project involves identifying nature as a crucial locus for theology; he opts for a critical realist approach to epistemology, where we can know an objective reality but never independently of ourselves, and he draws parallels between the pursuit of reality in science and theology.¹⁵

1.2.1.3 DO WE NEED A PROLEGOMENA?

What shall we say about prolegomena—yea or nay? And if there should be a prolegomena, what should it be? I think that prolegomena has a place in theology if only for the purpose of orientating ourselves to the theological task. Prolegomena is a bit like a map at a shopping mall that says, You are here. Knowledge of God must begin with knowledge of where we are and how we got here. Consequently, I reject the modernist approach to prolegomena of justifying theology as a science and establishing the existence of a God to be scientifically studied. In the place of philosophical justification, I prefer the Barthian approach of asserting the fact of divine revelation as the counterpoint to unbelief.¹⁶ If prolegomena is concerned with orientating ourselves to the theological task and setting forth the divine revelation, then the primary function of an evangelical prolegomena should be a setting out of the gospel. The gospel explains why we are in the theological race in the first place, and the gospel is the nexus into the reality of the God who has revealed himself.¹⁷

Evangelicalism is defined theologically by the gospel, and it has always been concerned with spiritual and missional renewal through the gospel. That is hardly a new agenda for Christian churches. The Reformation was concerned with restoring the gospel to the church. The magisterial Reformers linked the christological foundations of the church with its gospel message, since it was the preaching of the gospel that mediated the saving presence of Jesus Christ. The Reformation bound the gospel to the center of the church as the ever-present and effervescent force within the church united by Spirit, Word, and Sacrament. That is why evangelicals, as the heirs to the Reformers, take their name from the very evangel that brought them into the experience of redemption. Therefore, we need a gospel-driven theology in order to yield a gospel-soaked piety and gospel-acting church. As Grenz wrote:

To be evangelical means to be centered on the gospel. Consequently, evangelicals are a gospel people. They are a people committed to hearing, living out, and sharing the good news of God’s saving action in Jesus Christ and the divine gift of the Holy Spirit, a saving action that brings forgiveness, transforms life, and creates a new community. As a gospel people, evangelicals continually set forth the truth that the center of the church is the gospel and that the church, therefore, must be gospel centered.¹⁸

To set forth the gospel in our prolegomena is to establish the beginning, center, and boundary of evangelical theology. An evangelical theology begins with the gospel because the gospel establishes the hermeneutical horizons for its talk about God and constitutes the purpose or raison d’être of the church’s existence. As Andrew McGowan points out, the gospel is not just caught; it is genuinely taught as the most elementary statement of the Christian faith, just as the Colossians were taught the gospel by Epaphras (Col 1:6–7).¹⁹ The gospel is the driving force behind doctrine and its actualization within the Christian community. Theology has its agenda and energy derived from the good news of Jesus Christ. It is, dare I say, the beauty of the gospel that matures our theological reflection on who God is toward us in Jesus Christ. As John Webster puts it:

The best evangelical theological work emerges from the delight in the Christian gospel, for the gospel announces a reality which is in itself luminous, persuasive, and infinitely satisfying. That reality is Jesus Christ as he gives himself to be an object for creaturely knowledge, love, and praise. To think evangelically about this one is to think in his presence, under the instruction of his Word and Spirit, and in the fellowship of the saints. And it is to do so with cheerful confidence that his own witness to himself is unimaginably more potent than any theological attempts to run to his defense.²⁰

1.2.2 AN EVANGELICAL PROLEGOMENA

The evangelical theological project is to construct and live out a theology that is defined by the good news of Jesus Christ. If we accept the premise that the gospel is the most significant story in the life of the church, then evangelical theology should accordingly be a theology of the gospel.²¹ Peter Jensen explores this theme further:

Responsible theologians ought to order their teaching by the gospel, and also to ensure that whatever else their theologies may contain, the reader can see what the essence of the gospel is. The failure to make the subject of the gospel explicit in some theologies means that the reader may not know in the end what the heart of the Christian message is. It is by an exposition of the gospel that the theologian earns the right to proceed, since the gospel is the most significant revelation of all.²²

Consequently, we need to set out the gospel at the beginning of an evangelical theology for several reasons:

1. A theology that begins with the gospel will be defined and shaped by the gospel. Harry Emerson Fosdick famously said: He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.²³ The beginning point of theology is so crucial because where one starts determines where one ends up. If we begin with the gospel and proceed to unpack its significance in all that follows, we are set for developing a theology that allows the gospel to inform and drive all aspects of Christian belief and practice.

2. The gospel possesses an experiential and logical priority over all other doctrines. Our reception of the gospel is the point where we first experience the salvific benefits of being in a redemptive relationship with God. Theology should begin at the point where faith itself begins, with the gospel of salvation. The gospel is the point where experience and theology first meet. Additionally, the gospel possesses a natural, logical priority in systematic theology since it explains why we have other doctrinal loci for investigation. The subfields of theology—Christology, eschatology, ecclesiology—must all spring in some sense from the gospel. In regards to the priority of the gospel, Peter Jensen comments:

The gospel stands at the beginning of the story that explains why there are Christians at all, on the boundary between belief and unbelief—often, for the hearer, prior to a knowledge of the Bible itself. For the person entering from the outside, the gospel is the introduction to the faith, the starting-point for understanding. It then rightly becomes the touchstone of the faith. Since this is where faith begins, it is essential that faith continues to conform to it.²⁴

3. Commencing with the gospel will hopefully inoculate us early on against unwholesome deviations of Christian belief caused by either liberalism (a compromised gospel) or fundamentalism (a legalistic gospel) that might infiltrate our theological thinking.²⁵ As such, an evangelical theology should be a theology that is from the outset vigilant in guarding the good deposit of the gospel by sounding out the gospel as the overture to the theological opera that follows (1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:12–14). Donald Bloesch commented: A renewed theology will be evangelical, that is, centered on the gospel of reconciliation and redemption as attested in Holy Scripture.²⁶

4. The gospel naturally lends itself to being the integrating point of Christian theology. There are indeed a number of proposals for the integrative motif or organic principle on which a theology is to be based. For Luther this was justification by faith. John Calvin focused on the glory of God. John Wesley was captivated by God’s universal grace. Karl Barth saw the coherence of theology in the self-disclosure of the Triune God. Reformed systems emphasize the covenant as the center, while Dispensationalists find primacy in the kingdom. More recently, Millard Erickson posited the integrating motif of his theology as the magnificence of God, and Stanley Grenz regarded it as the community of God.²⁷

5. On a robustly evangelical reading, the contours of the New Testament point to the gospel as the integrative core to Christian belief. Theology proper seeks to understand the God revealed in the gospel of God (Rom 1:1; 15:16; 2 Cor 11:7; 1 Thess 2:8–9). As Karl Barth commented: "What the word ‘evangelical’ will objectively designate is that theology which speaks of the God of the Gospel."²⁸ Christology is unpacking the manifold significance of the life and work of Christ as narrated in the four Gospels and taught in the one apostolic gospel of Jesus Christ (e.g., Rom 1:3, 9; 15:19; 1 Cor 9:12; 2 Cor 2:12; 9:13; 10:14; Gal 1:7; Phil 1:27; 1 Thess 3:2). Christian ethics mean living a life worthy of the gospel (Phil 1:27) and exercising obedience that accompanies confession of the gospel (2 Cor 9:13). According to Oliver O’Donovan: The foundations of Christian ethics must be evangelical foundations; or, to put it more simply, Christian ethics must arise from the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Otherwise it could not be Christian ethics.²⁹

6. The study of the Holy Spirit focuses on new birth as the promise of the gospel (Acts 2:38; Rom 5:5). The study of salvation seeks to unpack the polyphonic richness of the gospel of salvation (Rom 1:16; Eph 1:13). Apologetics is the defense of the gospel (Phil 1:16). The study of the church is the doctrine of the gospelized community, while missiology is the art of gossiping the gospel. Theology and mission are weaved together, so much so that for Barth, the object and activity with which dogmatics is concerned is none other than the proclamation of the Gospel.³⁰ In terms of applied theology, Derek Tidball writes: The gospel determines everything about the pastor—his motives, authority, methods, and character are all governed by the good news of Jesus Christ.³¹ The gospel links together the various subfields of Christian theology. The scarlet thread running through an evangelical theology is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

7. The Christian canon is gospel-shaped. The canon is enclosed by the gospel. At the beginning of the canon we find the protoevangelium of Gen 3:15, where the off-spring of Eve will crush the head of the serpent that typologically prefigures the birth and victory of Jesus Christ. Then at the back end of the Bible, there is the announcement of the eternal gospel in the Apocalypse of John, which is heralded to every person in creation (Rev 14:6). The New Testament itself begins with four books called Gospels. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, his most systematic letter, starts with a statement of the gospel in Rom 1:3–4. In this light, Romans sets up a template to follow in doing theology, a theology that originates with the gospel itself.³² The gospel opens and closes the Christian canon, so our theology should also reflect a gospelesque architecture.

8. The gospel is also a hermeneutical lens through which we read Scripture. Because the gospel is according to the Scriptures, we must read the Scriptures according to the gospel. As Francis Watson declares: "To be ‘evangelical’ is to read Scripture in the light of the euangelion that lies at its heart."³³ We learn about the gospel from Scripture, but we also go back and read Scripture in light of the gospel.³⁴

In the end, evangelical theology is a theologia evangelii—a theology of the gospel. The gospel comprises the beginning point, boundary, and unifying theme for all theology. It is also the interpretive grid through which our reading of Scripture takes place. The first word in theology should be the word of the gospel (Acts 15:7 RSV). Perhaps our chief example is Irenaeus, who regarded the gospel handed down to us in the scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.³⁵ Similar also is the Heidelberg Catechism, which asks and answers:

Question 22. What is then necessary for a Christian to believe?

Answer: All things promised us in the gospel, which the articles of our catholic undoubted Christian faith [as in the Apostles’ Creed] briefly teach us.

Doctrine is that which springs from the word of the gospel and provides the basis for the core teachings of the faith shared by all major Christian groups. Obviously an evangelical theology is one that lunges, leaps, works, worships, prays, and preaches from the gospel itself. Where a theology cannot trace its trajectory back to the gospel, there it is not evangelical. The gospel is the rule of faith for the evangelical churches as it provides the lens through which we understand the mission of the Triune God and his work for us in salvation.

FURTHER READING

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God. Trans. G. W. Bromiley; London: Continuum, 2004 [1932], I/1.3–44.

Bavinck, Hermann. Reformed Dogmatics. Volume 1: Prolegomena. Ed. J. Bolt; Trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003.

Berkhof, Hendrikus. Christian Theology: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith. Trans. S. Woudstra; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979, pp. 1–6.

Campbell, Ted A. The Gospel in Christian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Carson, D. A., and Timothy Keller, eds. The Gospel as Center: Renewing our Faith and Reforming our Ministry Practices. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012.

Gibson, Jim, and Michael Bird. Quest for an Evangelical Prolegomena to Theology. Pp. 95–106 in Proclaiming Truth, Pastoring Hearts: Essays in Honour of Deane J. Woods. Ed. R. T. Stanton and L. J. Crawford; Adelaide, Aus: ACM Press, 2003.

Lints, Richard. The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.