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Reformed Classicalist

Muller's Study of Theology: Part 1

RTS Papers / Advanced Exegesis / Spring 2019


A SUMMARY OF THE WORK


Richard Muller’s book on The Study of Theology takes on many objections to and departures from a unified theological curricula. He begins with an instructive anecdote. A new graduate from his seminary gave a speech extolling the virtue of his practical ministry degree. The secret to its success: no theology! Such would be irrelevant to the “real world” church work he was getting into. Running through Muller’s opening are two perceived “challenges” and two perceived “failures” to meet those challenges. Let us call the first pair (1) the “problem” of modern context and (2) the “problem” of ministry context. And we will call the second pair (3) the “impotence” of critical-historical exegesis and (4) the “impotence” of credal-systematic formulations. The assumption is that classical theology has failed. These alleged tensions are also not to be separated from the problems of seminary curricula and its fourfold division of biblical, historical, systematic, and practical theology.

What Muller wants to argue for is an “interpretive unity” [544], not simply from our presuppositions to the text of Scripture, nor even in our doctrine flowing to practice, but in how each of the theological disciplines interrelate.

The book has four main sections. Muller begins by working through some preliminary assumptions about the boundaries between that fourfold division of theology: How are they related to each other and how have they been repositioned or critiqued over the centuries? What do we lose if theological diversity (specialization) is pressed to the detriment of a well-rounded theological education? This is explored in particular about the alleged tensions between theory and practice.


Three authors on these matters are surveyed: Gerhard Ebeling’s Study of Theology (1978), Edward Farley’s Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (1983), and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Theology and the Philosophy of Science (1976). While these three theologians have basic differences, each undermines the classical view of theology as a unified, objective science about God: rooted in what God knows and thus reveals to us in his word. On all sides, it seemed, dogma had to be excised like a cancer of irrelevance and prejudice. In the Enlightenment this meant that “scientific” theology, in order to be objective, could not have theological biases. This was true whether one was doing historical theology, largely now deconstruction of creeds, or religious anthropology, or else critical, biblical scholarship. Orthodoxy was suddenly the ultimate bias.


In the middle two sections of the book, Muller examines the theological disciplines themselves: the biblical and historic in Chapter 2 and the dogmatic and philosophical in Chapter 3. Apologetics and ethics are treated in the latter as well. The fourfold division within theology cannot be rooted either in the university version of something similar (e. g. the classical quadrivium) or in the theory-versus-practice divide. The former is derived itself and the latter leads to the absurdity of pragmatism.


Biblical theology is foundational. Nearly all schools maintain this; so what makes this prioritization of Muller significant? Linguistic studies provide a window because words are signs of concepts [573-75]. The grammar of Hebrew and Greek is therefore preparatory for the historical and exegetical component. Biblical theology progresses, according to Muller, by drawing out the unity, diversity, and trajectory of the narrative, without ignoring its minute forms [586]. By “trajectory” I take him to mean something like the redemptive-historical angle. As a distinct discipline, biblical theology emerged in the modern era as a “historically conscious” step between exegesis and system [587].


Historical theology contributes in being the hermeneutical spiral stretched out over the ages; the “link between us and the text” [593]. There is much more meaning to be found in exegeting historical context in which doctrine emerged, he argues, than there is in examining the ideas that shaped history. At any rate, church history encompasses the whole history of exegesis and doctrinal analysis. We are better equipped to see how doctrines might go naturally together, as Muller’s example of how the Reformers completed Anselm’s model of atonement by adding legal satisfaction to the notion of honor repaid. This makes justification by faith alone a perfect corollary to penal substitution. We learn this in a straighter line through reading history.


Dogmatic theology may be conceived of as a summary of all that the church believes about the faith, though that label emerged throughout the modern era. Dogma is characterized by its regulative character. It is not merely descriptive. Nor is it simply a topical arrangement, restarted by each theologian. The whole point is that biblical and historical theology are the twin foundations and dogma the “end product.”

By “end” we do not mean “final product” as in the caricature of those critics of systematic theology. In that straw man, our systematizing make us and “our system” a finished product: our minds a "mirror image" of God's. Rather it is the aim of all the research and reflection, and it is eager for continued growth.

In the final section Muller comes full circle to the issue of theological unity. The classical fourfold model ought to be retained so long as we proceed from biblical to historical to systematic, and so long as we do not attempt to do any of them in isolation.


CRITICAL EVALUATION OF MULLER


Although I will be in total agreement with Muller’s basic thesis, nonetheless some critical questions and differences are worth mentioning: (1) Muller’s aversion to classifications for a unifying model [544] seems counterproductive to his goals, which goals I happen to share; (2) there is some lack of clarity in what he retains and rejects from Pannenberg’s model [cf. 558; 572]; (3) he joins those voices who deconstruct the “ideas-shape-history” tendency as Hegelian by going too far to the other extreme [594]; and (4) there is [with Kaiser] a partial restriction of meaning to human authorial intent, extending even to the issue of Christological interpretation of Old Testament texts. Since that fourth and final category delves more into hermeneutics proper, we will devote the entire third section of this paper to answering it.


What about my first three critiques?


First, what may seem like a resistance to “labels” is really not, but rather a caution against all-controlling centers to dogma. I want to assume that he excludes genuine principia from this. Certainly God ought to be a controlling factor to all else. On the other hand, there have been categories throughout history that are read into every text where they are not [612]. That can even be done with Christ in an imbalanced way, not simply with predestination or justification. If it is simply a false center that Muller has in mind, there is no disagreement. But he hardly gives us a principle here for discerning between the true and the false in this matter.


Second, in his analysis of Pannenberg, he identifies two pillars of his model, and he retains the place of history but not that of prior demonstration. Recall that God was not a first piece of the puzzle to “prove” before coming to the text. Pannenberg simply uses history to do that. Is Muller against anything filling that role? He is not against apologetics. This second critical point extends to the matter of boundaries between apologetics, dogmatics, and ethics. It is not clear where Muller stands on finer details of this question, though he grants that all three wind up informing the others. One example that he is very clear about is how biblical law (dogma) informs ethics. Exactly which moral precepts inform contemporary civil law depends on how one’s dogma handles the forms, uses, and perpetuity of biblical law [622-23]. So there must be a distinctly Christian ethics even if it shares principles with the secular brand. Likewise with apologetics. Though he asks the question that Bavinck articulated so well (and which Van Til pressed), namely: Is the place of apologetics as prolegomena or a result of dogmatics?


Third, historical theology is not evaluative but descriptive. It seeks, to use one of his examples, “the precise exposition of Arius’ theology, including the way in which it arose” [594], and so forth, rather than what is erroneous or dangerous about it. Now if all Muller means to do (which I assume it is) is to draw the clearest line of demarcation between the respective crafts of historical and dogmatic theology, well and good. However to fall short of such a clear statement that avoids extremes will only encourage a divorce of the two and an imbalance resulting either from the proclivities of the reader or the rhetoric of the author.


I think Muller ought to at least have been clearer. All of this is meant to correct the privileging of ideas over history (as if such must be Historicism), but in my judgment it swings the pendulum back to ideas as merely passive constructs of historical circumstance. My basic evidence than Muller leans too much in that direction is how he does the same with meaning in the Scripture. That brings us to our final critique of Muller: historical background as the key to authorial intent.



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Richard A. Muller, “The Study of Theology” in Moises Silva, ed., Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996)

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