Skip to content

Course 25 · Lesson 1.1

The four theological disciplines and the questions each asks

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 25 outline

Module 1: Integrating Scripture and History

  1. The four theological disciplines and the questions each asks
  2. Biblical theology: the story of Scripture from creation to new creation
  3. Historical theology: how doctrine was formed, tested and defined
  4. Tracing one doctrine from Scripture through the councils

Module 2: Integrating Doctrine and Philosophy

  1. Systematic theology: coherence among doctrines
  2. Philosophical theology: clarifying and testing concepts
  3. Faith and reason: four historic accounts of their relation
  4. When the disciplines seem to conflict

Module 3: What Is Real and What Is a Human Being

  1. Creation, contingency and the God-world relation
  2. Christian metaphysics compared with materialism, pantheism and dualism
  3. The image of God and the dignity of the person
  4. Body, soul, the fall and the hope of resurrection

Module 4: How We Know and How We Live

  1. Christian epistemology: revelation, Scripture, tradition, reason and experience
  2. Christian ethics: command, virtue and natural law
  3. How doctrine shapes prayer, worship and conduct
  4. How practice tests and sometimes corrects doctrine

Module 5: Tensions and Commitments

  1. Stating a theological tension precisely
  2. Case studies: divine sovereignty and human freedom, one God and three persons, faith and works
  3. Telling a firm conviction from an open question
  4. Auditing your own commitments: reasons, evidence and uncertainty

Module 6: Building a Coherent Worldview

  1. What makes a worldview coherent: consistency, comprehensiveness and fit with experience
  2. Independent faith and historic Christianity: where they agree and differ
  3. Outlining the synthesis
  4. Drafting, testing and revising the synthesis

All courses

Program / Course 25: Theological Synthesis / Lesson 1.1

What you will learn

  • Name the four disciplines of theology (biblical, historical, systematic and philosophical) and state the main question each asks.
  • Explain how each discipline can check and correct the others.
  • Recognize which discipline a given claim or argument belongs to.
  • Describe what goes wrong when one discipline is used alone.

The big idea

Theology is not one activity but several, and each asks a different question. Biblical theology asks what the Bible itself says and how its story unfolds. Historical theology asks how Christians have understood and defined their faith over time. Systematic theology asks how the doctrines fit together. Philosophical theology asks whether the concepts are clear and the arguments sound. A worldview built on only one of these tends to go wrong in a predictable way. A worldview built on all four can be checked from several sides.

Key terms

Theology
Organized thinking about God and about everything else in relation to God. The word comes from Greek words meaning God and word or study.
Biblical theology
The study of the themes, storyline and development of the Bible’s own teaching, often book by book or period by period, in the Bible’s own categories.
Historical theology
The study of how Christians in different centuries understood, argued about and defined their beliefs.
Systematic theology
The ordering of Christian teaching by topic (God, creation, humanity, Christ, salvation, church, last things) into a connected whole.
Philosophical theology
The use of philosophical tools such as definition, logic and argument to clarify and test the concepts and claims of theology.
Doctrine
A teaching held by a church or tradition as part of the faith, such as the Trinity or the resurrection.
Synthesis
The joining of separate parts into one whole that shows how they relate.

Background

Earlier courses in this program studied one subject at a time: a book of the Bible, a century of church history, a single doctrine, an argument for or against God. That is a good way to learn, but it leaves a question open. How do the results fit together? This course is about that question, and the first step is to see that there are several kinds of theological work with different starting points and different tests.

Dividing theology into disciplines is a modern academic habit, but the work itself is old. Augustine read Scripture, argued with heretics, wrote systematic summaries of belief and used the philosophy of his day, all in one career. The medieval universities began to separate the tasks more clearly. Aquinas’s great Summa organizes doctrine by topic and constantly tests concepts. Later centuries sharpened the divisions, and today these four labels are common in universities and seminaries. They are tools for thinking, not walls. The same scholar may move among them in one chapter.

This lesson sets out the four disciplines side by side. The next lessons take them one at a time and then ask what happens when they seem to disagree.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Biblical theology asks what the text says and how its story runs

Biblical theology stays close to the Bible’s own words, forms and storyline. It asks questions like these. What does Isaiah teach about a coming king? How does Paul use the word justification in Romans? How does the theme of covenant develop from Abraham to Sinai to the prophets to the New Testament?

Its strength is that it keeps teaching tied to the text and to the Bible’s own categories. Its limit is that the Bible is not arranged as a textbook. It rarely defines its terms in later philosophical language, and it does not directly answer questions that arose centuries later.

Step 2: Historical theology asks how the church understood the faith

Historical theology studies how doctrine took shape. It asks who said what, in answer to which problem, and what was decided. The Council of Nicaea in 325, for example, met to answer a dispute about whether the Son is fully God. Understanding the dispute explains why the creed uses the words it does.

Its strength is memory. It reminds a student that most new ideas have been tried before and that old words carry the scars of old arguments. Its limit is that history alone does not say who was right. Councils can be studied without being accepted, and Christian traditions differ about how much authority church history carries.

Step 3: Systematic theology asks how the doctrines fit together

Systematic theology gathers teaching by topic and asks whether it hangs together. What follows about salvation from what is believed about sin? What does the doctrine of creation imply for the doctrine of the resurrection of the body? Works such as Aquinas’s Summa, Calvin’s Institutes and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are systematic in this sense, though they differ widely in approach.

Its strength is coherence. Its danger is that the desire for a tidy system can flatten the Bible’s variety or force an answer where the sources are quiet.

Step 4: Philosophical theology asks whether the ideas are clear and the arguments sound

Philosophical theology asks what a term means and whether a claim can be defended. What does it mean to say that God is all-powerful? Can a being who exists outside time act in time? Is an argument for God’s existence valid, and are its premises true?

Its strength is precision. Its limit is that arguments can only be as good as their starting assumptions, and a concept that is clear can still be wrong. Christians have also disagreed about how much philosophy should shape theology at all.

Step 5: How the disciplines check each other

Each discipline can test the others. A systematic claim that cannot be found in or reconciled with the biblical text needs scrutiny. A new biblical interpretation that no Christian before the nineteenth century held needs a historical explanation. A historical definition that contains a contradiction needs philosophical attention. A philosophical argument that conflicts with the plain sense of a central biblical teaching raises the question of which has gone wrong.

That is why synthesis is not simply addition. It is a process of mutual testing, and the process does not always end in agreement. Sometimes it ends in a clearly stated disagreement, which is also useful.

  1. Which of the four disciplines have I used most in my own study, and which least?
  2. When I make a theological claim, which discipline am I relying on to support it?
  3. What would a purely biblical argument miss that a historical argument would catch?
  4. Where might a tidy system be forcing an answer the Bible does not give?
  5. Which belief of mine has been tested by only one discipline?
  6. Which discipline do I trust most, and could that trust be a blind spot?

Examples

A doctrine seen four ways: the Trinity

Biblical theology collects the texts in which Father, Son and Spirit are distinguished yet linked, such as Matthew 28:19. Historical theology follows the fourth-century debates leading to the Nicene Creed. Systematic theology asks how the Trinity bears on creation, salvation and prayer. Philosophical theology asks whether three persons in one being is coherent and what the terms mean.

A claim checked by history

A student reads a verse and concludes that a certain practice is required. Historical theology asks whether Christians in earlier centuries read the verse that way. If none did, that does not prove the reading wrong, but it is a reason to examine it more carefully. (A constructed example.)

A system checked by the text

A theological scheme holds that every event is fully controlled in a way that makes human choices unreal. A biblical theologian points out how often Scripture addresses people as responsible for what they choose. The scheme must either account for those texts or be revised. (A constructed example.)

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching holds that Scripture and sacred tradition together form one deposit of faith, interpreted by the teaching office of the church. Theology is therefore expected to draw on both the text and the church’s continuing understanding of it, and reason is honored as a partner of faith. A Catholic would say that the disciplines serve the church’s teaching and are checked by it.

Orthodox

Orthodox theologians usually stress that theology is first of all participation in the life of the church, in worship and prayer, and only then a matter of academic method. Many caution that systematic and philosophical tools, useful as they are, can never exhaust the mystery of God. The fathers and the councils hold a central place.

Protestant

Protestant traditions generally give Scripture the highest authority in theology, with the principle that the church’s teaching is to be tested by the Bible. Biblical theology therefore holds a leading place, though Protestant scholars have also been serious students of history, system and philosophy, and the confessions of Reformed, Lutheran and other churches are systematic summaries.

Secular scholarship

In university departments, biblical studies and church history are usually pursued as historical disciplines that do not require belief, while philosophy of religion tests arguments on their merits. Many scholars hold that theology as a normative discipline, one that says what ought to be believed, belongs to communities of faith. Others question whether it can be called a discipline of knowledge at all.

Why it matters

A person who knows only one discipline often mistakes a partial view for the whole. A Bible reader without history can treat a new idea as ancient. A historian without the text can forget that councils are not the final authority for every tradition. A system-builder without philosophy can hide confusion behind confident words. Knowing the four disciplines gives a student a way to ask, about any claim, who has examined it and from which side.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Biblical theology is just reading the Bible without any theology.

Correction: Every reader brings questions and assumptions. Biblical theology is itself a disciplined kind of theology, and it makes choices about how to relate the books of the Bible to one another.

Misunderstanding: Systematic theology replaces the Bible with philosophy.

Correction: Most systematic theologians aim to organize what the Bible teaches. The real question is whether a particular system stays faithful to the text, and that can be tested.

Misunderstanding: Historical theology means that the oldest view is always right.

Correction: History shows what was believed, not what is true. Some traditions treat the early church as especially authoritative, but they still argue for that on theological grounds.

Misunderstanding: Philosophy is a foreign intruder in Christian thought.

Correction: Some Christians have thought so, but the major traditions have all used philosophical terms, for example the language of substance and person used at the early councils. The debate is about how far and in what way.

Knowledge check

What main question does each of the four disciplines ask?

Biblical theology asks what the Bible says and how its story develops. Historical theology asks how Christians understood and defined the faith over time. Systematic theology asks how the doctrines fit together as a whole. Philosophical theology asks whether concepts are clear and arguments sound. Each question is different, and a full account of any doctrine usually needs all four.

Give one example of how one discipline can correct another.

A systematic scheme may imply that human choices are not real. A biblical theologian can point to the many texts that treat people as responsible. The scheme must then explain those texts or change. In the other direction, a new interpretation of a verse can be tested by asking whether any earlier Christians held it, which is a historical question.

Why is synthesis more than adding the disciplines together?

Because the disciplines are asked to test one another. Synthesis means working out where the results fit, where they conflict and what should be done about the conflict. Sometimes the outcome is agreement, sometimes a revised view, and sometimes a clearly stated unresolved tension.

What is the typical weakness of using only historical theology?

History shows what Christians believed and why they argued, but it does not by itself show who was right. A student who relies only on history may treat a long-standing view as correct for no other reason than its age, or may study councils without asking whether the text supports them.

Do Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians use the disciplines in the same way?

They use the same disciplines but weigh them differently. Protestants generally give the Bible highest authority, Catholics hold Scripture and tradition together under the church’s teaching office, and Orthodox Christians stress worship and the witness of the fathers and councils. All three make use of history, system and philosophy.

Think it through

  1. Think of one belief you hold strongly. Which discipline did you rely on to reach it?
  2. Which kind of error do you think you are most likely to make: reading too narrowly, trusting history too much, building a system too fast, or leaning too hard on an argument?
  3. How would your view of a favorite doctrine change if you had to defend it to someone who works in a different discipline?

Independent assignment

One doctrine, four questions

In your own notebook, write 400 to 600 words. Choose one doctrine you know reasonably well, such as creation, the incarnation or the resurrection. Write one paragraph for each discipline, stating the question it would ask about that doctrine and giving one piece of evidence or reasoning it would offer. Then write a final paragraph naming which discipline has been weakest in your own understanding and what you will read to strengthen it. Keep the work in your notebook.

Further study