2,000 Years of Christian Theology

Below is the Author’s Introduction and Table of Contents to whet your appetite for the book.

Author’s Introduction

Theology’s origin is in the eternal mind of God as He thought about Himself. And because He is Jehovah, the God who reveals Himself, He spoke theology into time and history when He revealed Himself in prepositional revelation to Adam and Eve, and they began thinking about God in terms of His spoken Word.

Since God is omniscient, personal, rational and thoroughly self-conscious that revelation is systematic. Rushdoony explains:

Systematic theology is “not an attempt to systematize scattered ideas or truths found in the Bible, but is rather a setting forth of the inescapable unity, God’s being, His revelation and His purpose. - Systematic means that the presupposition of theology is not the mind of autonomous man but the sovereign God of Scripture... it presupposes the triune God as the only ground and means of reasoning and proof... Systematics denies the concept of neutrality. There are no neutral facts, no neutral thoughts, no neutral man nor reason. All men, facts and thinking either begin with the sovereign and triune God, or they begin with rebellion against Him.”

God created man in His image to receive, understand and love that theology - the word from God about God - so that as man applies that theology to life he thinks and lives out God’s thoughts after Him.

As man receives that self-revelation of God in the Bible he must now try to understand and explain it and to do so in such a way that it is correctly understood and explained so as to communicate to God’s image bearers in the variety of their cultural contexts.

As history unfolds and the Holy Spirit leads the church into all truth, godly man’s understanding of that theology becomes more and more accurate and more and more complete, although it will never be perfect or exhaustively understood, though that is the goal toward which he is always reaching. Even in heaven, when our understanding of God is perfected, it will never be exhaustive. An exhaustive understanding of God is found only in the mind of God. Hence, understanding and explaining the theology of the Bible as accurately and comprehensively as possible to the glory of Christ, with the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, is the life-long work of Christians and the history-long work of the church.

In that process, historical theology plays an important role. I should say that I am using the word “theology” in two ways:

  1. The revealed truth of God in the Bible, and

  2. The result of our faithful study of God’s revealed truth in what we believe, confess and teach.

The contexts of these words should make clear in what sense I am using them.

What role does historical theology play in the process of understanding and proclaiming the Bible?

First, it enriches our understanding of the Bible as we learn from what the Holy Spirit has taught Christ’s church through the centuries.

Second, the study of historical theology also has a humbling effect on us as we study the Bible in its light. We learn that our individual theological conclusions drawn from our personal study of the Bible are all too often shallow, out-of-balance, narrow, imprecise and incorrect. Historical theology gives us insights and perspectives we probably would not have thought of by ourselves. It helps us see the depth, breadth and interconnectedness of Biblical truths we might never have seen ourselves.

Third, the study of historical theology gives us a sense of history and the gradual maturation of the church in her relation to the written word of God. We see her hammer out Biblical truths with increasing precision as she answers heresy. We see her struggle against synthesis with the cultures in which she finds herself - sometimes resisting successfully the influences of synthesis and sometimes surrendering to it. We watch how she speaks theology relevantly or irrelevantly into the various cultures of history and we sometimes see her converting cultures by her courageous proclamation of her theology.

Therefore, fourthly, historical theology motivates us to careful study of the Bible and to courageous speaking of Biblical truth in our day with the prayer that God would use our efforts today as He used the efforts of our spiritual fathers to convert our cultures to Christ.

This historical theology module will be different than most standard courses on the subject. My lectures will not consist of a comprehensive, chronological study of the development of the church’s theology. Good books are available to provide you with such information. Three of my favorites are:

  1. Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines (Banner of Truth, 1969)

  2. William Cunningham, Historical Theology, 2 Vols. (Banner of Truth, 1969)

  3. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 Vols.(University of Chicago Press, 1971)

The purpose of this course is to study the history of Christian theology as it has shaped the distinctive theology, ethics, and worldview of historic Christianity. Hopefully, we will show that the distinctives of our theological perspective are not new, but deeply rooted in the history of the church, so we can say with Charles Hodge of old Princeton Seminary, “We do not teach anything new here”, and hopefully we can say it with greater accuracy.

A word should be said about the nature of my instruction in this course. The instruction will be by lectures not sermons. All seminary education should be by lectures not sermons. Lectures are edification in the truth by instruction - indicative more than imperative - with less exhortation and admonition than a sermon. Sermons by their very nature require repetition. In a lecture, too much repetition or exhortation or imperative statements limit the time that can be spent on instruction in theology and history. After all, the purpose of lectures is not only to edify by instruction, but also to prepare the seminary student for ordination with as broad and deep an understanding of theology, ethics, ministry, etc. as possible, in order to lay a solid foundation in truth for a lifetime of studying, lecturing, obeying, defending and preaching the Bible. Also, in our study of historical theology, we will study something of the men whose theology we consider and see how their theology has affected their lives.

Our study of the history of theology since the completion of the Bible will be something like this:

  1. We will begin by studying some of the theology of the early church, with its ecumenical councils, its wrestling with heresy, and its attempts at being effective in preaching the gospel, focusing especially on Athanasius, Anselm and Augustine.

  2. From the early church we will go to medieval history and study Roman Catholicism and especially the nature of medieval scholasticism and its effects on modern evangelicalism. We will also deal briefly with the two groups in the Middle Ages who did not submit to the supremacy of the pope: Celtic Christianity and the Waldensians.

  3. We will spend the most time on the Reformation of the 16th Century, especially on John Calvin and those associated with him. Outside the Bible these men have been a primary influence on the shaping of our theology.

  4. After that, we will give a few lectures on the two hundred years after Calvin, most particularly on Reformed Scholasticism, the Synod of Dort, and the Westminster Standards.

  5. We will give a couple lectures on the impact of the Great Awakening and the Southern Presbyterian Church on the Presbyterian doctrine of children of the covenant; on the creation of the doctrine “the spirituality of the church”; and the development of the doctrine of adoption.

  6. We will also study the impact of classical philosophy on Christianity with the introduction of natural law theory. We will look particularly at synthesis in New England Puritanism.

  7. We will look briefly at the development of the doctrine of adoption by the Southern Presbyterian Church.

  8. Some time will be spent on post-modernism.

  9. And finally, we will conclude with Rushdoony’s discussion on the purpose of theology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. Early Church Infants

  2. The Apostles' Creed

  3. How the Early Church Battled Heresy

  4. Athanasius and the Incarnation of God

  5. Augustine of Hippo

  6. Anselm and The Atonement

  7. The Isle of Iona & the Global Advance of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ

  8. Medieval Scholasticism

  9. The Sola's of the Reformation

  10. Luther & Calvin

  11. John Calvin on Justification by Faith Alone

  12. John Calvin on Prayer

  13. John Calvin on Worship

  14. Calvin’s Doctrine of Biblical Law

  15. Calvin and Servetus

  16. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church

  17. Zwingli and Calvin

  18. Bullinger and Calvin

  19. Vermigli and Calvin

  20. Viret and Calvin

  21. Martin Bucer: The Forgotten Reformer

  22. Beza and Calvin

  23. Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples and John Calvin

  24. John Calvin, Evangelism and World Missions

  25. John Knox and Samuel Rutherford

  26. Reformed Scholasticism

  27. The Synod of Dort (1618-1619) and the Five Points of Calvinism

  28. The Holy Spirit in the Westminster Standards

  29. The History of the Reformed Doctrine of Children in the Covenant

  30. Natural Law or Biblical Law?

  31. Anti-Paedocommunion

  32. The Contribution of Rousas John Rushdoony to Systematic Theology

Endnotes