I’m thankful for Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.

Like many Christians of my generation, I acquired the hefty gold and blue tome as a student, and gratefully searched it for answers to that avalanche of questions that is part and parcel of suddenly rubbing shoulders with a much wider cross-section of the church. Amongst those spiritual growing pains, I’m thankful that I had an easy to navigate book, written in language simple enough to quickly grasp, and familiar enough to someone from an low church evangelical context to sound unthreatening. I think the Spirit used it to support my theology where it needed real grounding, and ground it in Scripture, and correct much that needed correction.

The book has come in for plenty of criticism in the past ten years, related to both specific positions taken in the book (denial of eternal generation and impassibility) and more wide-ranging issue with his methodology. Grudem has revised some of the specific problematic positions in the second edition, and doubled down on others. Over the past year, as I taught systematics with Grudem (Bible Doctrine, the shorter version of the original Systematic Theology), a number of things stood out for me about his way of doing theology and the specific positions he ends up taking. So while I continue to teach this year with it, I’m jotting down some of those observations.

Given the position Grudem occupied as the go-to systematics reference book in evangelical circles in the UK over the past 25 years (having particular influence in and through UCCF), the way he does theology both reflects and has impacted much of that world. Reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses, then, seems a worthy exercise in self-examination.

The nature of Systematic theology

Reflecting on the nature of the task of systematics or dogmatics is obviously pretty par for the course as the first move in most such works, and Grudem is no different. As he frequently will do, he offers a definition which he then expands and defends. “Systematic Theology is any study that answers the question “What does the whole Bible teach us today?” about any given topic” (21). It therefore involves “collecting and understanding all the relevant passages in the Bible on various topics and then summarising their teaching clearly, so we know what to believe”.

The definition, as characteristic of the rest of the book, is simple and clear. And there is plenty of helpful material in the chapter. I particularly enjoyed the focus on prayer and humility, and Grudem’s insistence that the spiritual qualities of the theologian are paramount in the task of theologising.

What also comes through from the start is that Grudem practices what he preaches: the way to do theology is to assemble and collate Bible verses that treat the topic under discussion. Some verses are examined in depth and some simply stated, but there is always some attempt at comprehensiveness in attempting to consider every major passage relevant to the topic (and point to most of the rest that touch upon it). This too, is a certain strength, in that the full Scriptural data on each area is brought to the attention of the reader, a worthy aim for a reference book.

But as hard as it might sound for a Protestant to argue against this, it is problematic. Grudem’s operating assumption is that doctrine can be extracted from the Bible quite straightforwardly, requiring only the right spiritual posture and hard work. This comes through even in the title of the shorter version of the book, “Bible Doctrine”. The genuine advantage of this title is that it emphasises Scripture as the single source of doctrine (which it is!). But the implication is that as long as I, the individual Christian, squeeze the Bible hard enough, pure doctrine will flow out.

What is missing is the role of the church and of tradition. Historical theology, for Grudem, is a separate task which can provide assistance to the work of systematics but is treated as an optional extra. So when Grudem wants to, he can cite historical authors in support of his arguments, but when he wants to diverge from them he shows no particular worry in so doing. Tradition is not only not the supreme authority, it has no authority whatsoever – it is merely useful in some cases, and unhelpful in others. The individual with their Bible is fully equipped to decide what to keep and what to jettison.

There are several problems with this. To start with, it’s not honest. In reality, Grudem’s presentation of doctrine (as he admits from time to time) is thoroughly historically conditioned. He stands on the shoulders particularly of Reformed theologians and their confessions, and they stood consciously (and much more openly!) on the heritage of the generations prior to them. No amount of squeezing by an individual believer with the purest of spiritual motives, even Grudem himself, could produce it from scratch with nothing but a Bible and a pen. But Grudem’s method seems to imply it should – this is just Bible Doctrine after all.¹

But more than that, it encourages individualism by envisaging the believer on their own as the normative scenario for arriving at right doctrine. Just list out the relevant Bible verses, after all, and the truth should emerge by putting them alongside each other. Doing theology in community is mentioned (35), but tellingly it is not a church context, but just other believers in general in view. Perhaps any suggestion that church tradition or teachers in a particular church should exercise an authoritative role in theology whiffs too strongly of Roman Catholicism to come in here.²

What is the alternative? To recognise that there is a theological, Scriptural, Protestant case for giving tradition a necessary, integral and authoritative role in theology – while maintaining that Scripture is the only supreme authority. Such an approach gratefully, openly, and unapologetically receives doctrinal structure and content from tradition, and privileges a church context for the work of theology, while ensuring that Scripture functions as the norming norm among those subsidiary norms. It consequently produces Reformed (for example) Dogmatics rather than Bible Doctrine.

These themes immediately resurface in Grudem’s doctrine of Scripture, at which we will look next time.

1. At times, his chapter structures are dependent upon a prior source in an unacknowledged way – his headings and discussions often mirror Bavinck’s, for example, for both good and ill (though it’s entirely possible this is Bavinck filtered subconsciously through John Frame, whom Grudem credits with significant influence on his thinking). Conversely, at other times Grudem does not always accurately represent the consensus behind the position he abandons. To say, for example, that “sometimes…theologians have spoken of… impassibility” (165) hardly gives the reader the sense that God’s impassibility was taken for granted by all Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians and is inscribed in not only the Westminster Confession but the 39 Articles, and so is a matter of confessional orthodoxy for Anglicans.
2. One further unhappy implication of Grudem’s method will be that a traditional theological position that seems less straightforwardly squeezable from the Bible is automatically suspect – hence the rejection of eternal generation, impassibility and a number of other moves Grudem takes.