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Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation #7
The Study of Theology
The Study of Theology address two major concerns -- the place of biblical hermeneutics and practical theology. The author discusses the hermeneutical implications of biblical, historical, systematic, and practical theology and presents a case for the relationship between exegesis and the other theological disciplines. However, the relationship between hermeneutics and practical theology is also essential. According to the author, "the traditional forms of theology and preaching frequently fail the tests of exegesis and contemporary theologizing while, at the same time, most contemporary theology and exegesis fails to address directly the needs of the church." Muller presents a case for the structure of hermeneutics and argues that it is essential to the church because "theological training as a whole . . . ought to reflect the life of the church and be of value to the life of the church."
Author Biography: Richard A. Muller (Ph.D., Duke) is professor of historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI.
- GenresTheology
238 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 1991
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58 people want to read
About the author
Richard A. Muller
20 books43 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Richard A. Muller (PhD, Duke University) is P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of numerous books, including The Unaccommodated Calvin and Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. He also edits the Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought series.
Richard A. Muller (PhD, Duke University) is P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of numerous books, including The Unaccommodated Calvin and Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics. He also edits the Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought series.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 30, 2024
Long review.
I wanted to like this book. Muller is brilliant, and has certainly forgotten more than I’ve ever learned. However, this book was confusing at best, and misleading at worst. For example, Muller says we cannot read John 1 with 4th century Trinitiarian dogmatics in mind, as that reading would render the text unprofitable to the original audience. This sort of statement forces the modern reader into an unwarranted place of cognitive dissonance. To be a Christian is to affirm the Trinity, either in seed form (apostles and first readers) or in dogmatic churchy language (i.e. Trinity). How exactly am I supposed to read John 1 for profit, then? He makes the same sort of move with Psalm 2.
Unfortunately, statements like this are littered through this book. He does conclude the book with a discussion on hermeneutical spiral allowing for doctrinal guardrails, but it was unsatisfactory in reconciling earlier statements in the book, in my opinion.
Hopefully I’m just inept as a reader and am misreading Muller on these points.
I wanted to like this book. Muller is brilliant, and has certainly forgotten more than I’ve ever learned. However, this book was confusing at best, and misleading at worst. For example, Muller says we cannot read John 1 with 4th century Trinitiarian dogmatics in mind, as that reading would render the text unprofitable to the original audience. This sort of statement forces the modern reader into an unwarranted place of cognitive dissonance. To be a Christian is to affirm the Trinity, either in seed form (apostles and first readers) or in dogmatic churchy language (i.e. Trinity). How exactly am I supposed to read John 1 for profit, then? He makes the same sort of move with Psalm 2.
Unfortunately, statements like this are littered through this book. He does conclude the book with a discussion on hermeneutical spiral allowing for doctrinal guardrails, but it was unsatisfactory in reconciling earlier statements in the book, in my opinion.
Hopefully I’m just inept as a reader and am misreading Muller on these points.
June 15, 2022
This book filled a huge gap in my soul that I didn’t even know I had.
So many words are repeated so often, with so little justification, about the propositions of theology with too little explanation about method and about disciplines. Leave it to Richard Muller to make the implicit explicit and to render the stodgy academic disciplines a wellspring of the life of the Church.
Before I summarize the book and its argument, I want to anticipate a few objections. First, this is a book that John Frame panned, famously, which led to Muller writing an acrimonious reply. I don’t think it’s really my place to say who was right, though I like both theologians. I tend to agree with Frame in spirit and Muller in letter, for full disclosure. That said, if Muller turns out to have not been spiritually all there with this book, I don’t think it changes what he says here that is true.
Second, one thing that this book misses in spirit—though not in letter—is a careful discussion of the place of God in theology. The purpose of all theology, for all theologians until pretty much this century, has been to know God, and Muller doesn’t really emphasize that fact all that much, though he does acknowledge it. For instance: “The archai, the ultimate or truly foundational principles available to theology were God, the principle of being or essential foundation, and Scripture, the principle of knowing or cognitive foundation” (p. 30). “[T]he older view of theology as ‘a habitus of practical wisdom’ did not at all place the end of theology within theology itself. Rather, the identification of theology as practical was intended to indicate specifically that the discipline was oriented toward a goal beyond itself!... Theology is an objective knowledge, valuable in itself (theory) that has as its goal (praxis) the union of the believer with God, the highest good” (p. 31). “In Augustine and Anslem, Tozer found two writers in whom theology and spirituality were one and the same, who identified theological study both as the search for truth and as the identification of the good and the approach to God. In the thought of these and other theologians of the past, God, Being, the good, and truth were assumed to be identical” (p. 216). Now, maybe Muller fails to put the centrality of God in this work, and I accept that as a reasonable critique, but I still found a lot of this book helpful and I certainly didn’t find it pushing me away from God.
Third, Muller ends up beating up on Evangelicals dismissive of theology and history. There is a huge part of me that, although wanting to keep theology and practice in harmony, wants to also recognize that some people and even some Churches may not need as much of it. There is a worthwhile critique of Evangelicalism as it now stands, but I don’t want to do a witch hunt of the unwashed masses of Evangelical Christianity that don’t have as much. This is how I think of it: the body has many members, and some members are going to have their horizons in their intellect, and so there should be a large portion of our body engaged in Reformed theology. But there are also other members who won’t care so much and who would only be discouraged by it.
Enough caveats: what does Muller say? Muller’s task in this book is basically to outline both the distinctiveness of the different fields of Christian theology AND how they should all be integrated together in the life of the Church. It’s a pretty daunting task, but Muller really does a nice job. He begins, fittingly for a Protestant, with how to read Scripture. He argues that exegesis should be grounded in “linguistic, historical, exegetical, and theological elements” (62). He argues that linguistics should put us in the thought-world of the text, through vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. However, linguistics are “only a preparation for historical and exegetical study. History functions as the background for exegesis, and exegesis functions, at least in part, to uncover the history” (65). Radically, Muller says that “the exegesis of the patristic and medieval periods, and even of the Reformation period, was frequently determined by then-contemporary theological confession rather than by a clear sense of the original historical setting of the text” (65). Whoa! Even the Reformers were wrong. Of course, the Reformers began this, with Calvin insisting on interpretations that the Jews would not make fun of us for. Muller even says that we should not grammatically read Old Testament “in terms of New Testament and Church usage” (66). He even says that we should not let the Trinity interpret Genesis 1 or use orthodox Christology to interpret Isaiah (74). The key is Muller wants good history to be done (i.e., read the text in its time and its context).
The radical implications of this claim become clear when Muller moves from exegesis to Biblical theology. After exegesis and linguistics comes biblical theology. I didn’t really know this, but biblical theology started with Protestant theologians gathering “texts related to particular doctrinal concerns into a compendium of biblical doctrine” (p. 87). Since then he argues that it becomes problematic to do a Biblical theology on the basis of Christian theology. Rather, Biblical theology should be historical (surprise!) and function as a distillation of the Old Testament and New Testament teaching in its original historical context: “it appears as the final exegetical task … designed to draw biblical study together by making sense of the whole” (94). Muller says that this avoids the problems of imposing things like the ordo salutis upon Scripture by asking whether it is a strictly speaking “biblical” concept. A lot of confusion in the world would be solved by being careful here.
When he turns to history, Muller makes some interesting arguments: Muller had already argued that determining the bounds of the canon is not part of biblical exegesis. Rather, it is the result of theology, which comes from history, not from the Scriptures themselves. Even good history, though, should not simply assume that the text is preserved: it should look carefully at the textual evidence and see that the texts are, in fact, good or not. As he puts it, “investigation must precede the doctrinal statement and in fact supply the information from which the doctrinal statement takes its shape and on which it rests” (99).
Again historical work looks carefully at theologians in their context, does not judge at first whether they are right or wrong, and does not use scholarly constructs like periods to misread them (and certainly not any theological generalizations about their era either). In fact, Muller even says that the same grammatical, contextual, and critical method is used by the best historians of all stripes—including non-believers (109). It is historical theology that actually tells us about how the canon was recognized, and in fact it is Protestant sola scriptura that makes us more attentive to history (113). This also makes him want to keep theology in conversation with the history of religions and comparative religion.
Muller moves on from history to systematic theology which he defines as “the broadest usage for the contemporary task of gathering together the elements of our faith into a coherent whole” and thus it is “all of the contemporizing, constructive disciplines” (124). This makes it separate from dogmatics, which is restricted to dogmas such as the Trinity, Christology, human nature, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology: systematic theology includes “philosophical questioning, presuppositional statement, argumentative defense, and cohesive analysis in the present context” (125). Thus, it cannot be isolated but must include “dogmatics, apologetics, philosophical theology, philosophy, and phenomenology of religion” (126) and integrate them with the results of Biblical study.
Muller argues something which I have never really seen a Reformed theologian do: that dogmatics should not “impose itself as a methodological rule on biblical or historical study” (129). This is particularly illuminating since I feel justification or perhaps the ordo salutis have become more a grid than a distillation recently, at least in common preaching. This obviously would exclude the ways the Trinity is made the be-all end-all of much modern theology. Dogmatics is based on the bible for topics and on history for materials. Philosophies “provide the critical and collateral standards for formulation” (131). This allows Muller to come up with a very elegant way of integrating biblical and historical theology. For instance, the terms “Son of Man” and “Son of God” mean something very specific in the original context, but the terms are not really the same thing as they mean in dogmatics. At the same time, this need not mean that our dogmas need change if the formulations that we have come up with bear out the general exegesis of Scripture (i.e., is Jesus God and man, according to Scripture, even if these two terms do not mean what they once were exegeted to mean?)
Muller defines philosophy and phenomenology of religion as fields on the edge of theology. Philosophical theology is “the philosophical discussion of topics held in common by theology and philosophy” (138). This means that theology proper and anthropology are part of philosophical theology, but not the Trinity or soteriology (ibid). They are for Muller “propaedeutic,” that is, preparatory. He then moves on to ethics and apologetics, and argues that they flow in and out of theology. They cannot be preparatory or axiomatic, but they can take the material of theology and apply it to the contemporary situation and even refine theology in some ways.
He moves on to practical theology, asking how they can be integrated with psychology. He argues that pastoral counseling should draw on these fields, but it should also consider theology and basically what the Bible says. I probably got most nervous at this section, since in my lifetime it seems like this field has gotten too specialized and too hung up on details and words and less on truth and encouragement. Still, Muller is right that all of theology should ultimately be brought to bear into people’s lives.
In the last chapter, Muller argues for the unity of theology. At first he makes a very helpful argument that theology is a science performed in community. This means that theology at its best is academic and worshipful. He then discusses the issue of hermeneutical circles—that is how can we understand the parts of a text without knowing its whole, when we only know the whole because of the parts. This is a problem that is particularly vexing, since if you misunderstand both the parts and the whole, then how can you get to the truth? Muller really puts on his scholar hat and argues that we should be looking at the context of the text, including the “broader historical, cultural, and social study” (191). In other words, careful history. Only then can we find the “significance” of the text and bring that into the life of the Church.
Muller finally argues for the importance of theology being contextualized by the culture which it is speaking to, and shows various ways that the atonement was “developed” in conversation with the cultures in which it arose. I felt this was a weaker section, not because it wasn’t inspiring (I love seeing how ransom theory, satisfaction, and penal atonement were natural in their cultural contexts), but I get nervous about the kind of simple “this spoke to their culture” thing instead of saying “this is what made them see the truth about the cross.” As Lewis noted, to tie a view to its historical context is often seen to explain the view. I also am more nervous about “contextualization” because of some crappy versions of it nowadays, but I do agree with Muller that it’s a difficult art, actually, and that application may be as difficult an art as exegesis. More of this!
This was a great book for a simple reason: it presents us with a world of inquiry and a call to theological integration. It is not that integrated theology has been tried and found wanting, rather an integrated theology has not been tried.
So many words are repeated so often, with so little justification, about the propositions of theology with too little explanation about method and about disciplines. Leave it to Richard Muller to make the implicit explicit and to render the stodgy academic disciplines a wellspring of the life of the Church.
Before I summarize the book and its argument, I want to anticipate a few objections. First, this is a book that John Frame panned, famously, which led to Muller writing an acrimonious reply. I don’t think it’s really my place to say who was right, though I like both theologians. I tend to agree with Frame in spirit and Muller in letter, for full disclosure. That said, if Muller turns out to have not been spiritually all there with this book, I don’t think it changes what he says here that is true.
Second, one thing that this book misses in spirit—though not in letter—is a careful discussion of the place of God in theology. The purpose of all theology, for all theologians until pretty much this century, has been to know God, and Muller doesn’t really emphasize that fact all that much, though he does acknowledge it. For instance: “The archai, the ultimate or truly foundational principles available to theology were God, the principle of being or essential foundation, and Scripture, the principle of knowing or cognitive foundation” (p. 30). “[T]he older view of theology as ‘a habitus of practical wisdom’ did not at all place the end of theology within theology itself. Rather, the identification of theology as practical was intended to indicate specifically that the discipline was oriented toward a goal beyond itself!... Theology is an objective knowledge, valuable in itself (theory) that has as its goal (praxis) the union of the believer with God, the highest good” (p. 31). “In Augustine and Anslem, Tozer found two writers in whom theology and spirituality were one and the same, who identified theological study both as the search for truth and as the identification of the good and the approach to God. In the thought of these and other theologians of the past, God, Being, the good, and truth were assumed to be identical” (p. 216). Now, maybe Muller fails to put the centrality of God in this work, and I accept that as a reasonable critique, but I still found a lot of this book helpful and I certainly didn’t find it pushing me away from God.
Third, Muller ends up beating up on Evangelicals dismissive of theology and history. There is a huge part of me that, although wanting to keep theology and practice in harmony, wants to also recognize that some people and even some Churches may not need as much of it. There is a worthwhile critique of Evangelicalism as it now stands, but I don’t want to do a witch hunt of the unwashed masses of Evangelical Christianity that don’t have as much. This is how I think of it: the body has many members, and some members are going to have their horizons in their intellect, and so there should be a large portion of our body engaged in Reformed theology. But there are also other members who won’t care so much and who would only be discouraged by it.
Enough caveats: what does Muller say? Muller’s task in this book is basically to outline both the distinctiveness of the different fields of Christian theology AND how they should all be integrated together in the life of the Church. It’s a pretty daunting task, but Muller really does a nice job. He begins, fittingly for a Protestant, with how to read Scripture. He argues that exegesis should be grounded in “linguistic, historical, exegetical, and theological elements” (62). He argues that linguistics should put us in the thought-world of the text, through vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. However, linguistics are “only a preparation for historical and exegetical study. History functions as the background for exegesis, and exegesis functions, at least in part, to uncover the history” (65). Radically, Muller says that “the exegesis of the patristic and medieval periods, and even of the Reformation period, was frequently determined by then-contemporary theological confession rather than by a clear sense of the original historical setting of the text” (65). Whoa! Even the Reformers were wrong. Of course, the Reformers began this, with Calvin insisting on interpretations that the Jews would not make fun of us for. Muller even says that we should not grammatically read Old Testament “in terms of New Testament and Church usage” (66). He even says that we should not let the Trinity interpret Genesis 1 or use orthodox Christology to interpret Isaiah (74). The key is Muller wants good history to be done (i.e., read the text in its time and its context).
The radical implications of this claim become clear when Muller moves from exegesis to Biblical theology. After exegesis and linguistics comes biblical theology. I didn’t really know this, but biblical theology started with Protestant theologians gathering “texts related to particular doctrinal concerns into a compendium of biblical doctrine” (p. 87). Since then he argues that it becomes problematic to do a Biblical theology on the basis of Christian theology. Rather, Biblical theology should be historical (surprise!) and function as a distillation of the Old Testament and New Testament teaching in its original historical context: “it appears as the final exegetical task … designed to draw biblical study together by making sense of the whole” (94). Muller says that this avoids the problems of imposing things like the ordo salutis upon Scripture by asking whether it is a strictly speaking “biblical” concept. A lot of confusion in the world would be solved by being careful here.
When he turns to history, Muller makes some interesting arguments: Muller had already argued that determining the bounds of the canon is not part of biblical exegesis. Rather, it is the result of theology, which comes from history, not from the Scriptures themselves. Even good history, though, should not simply assume that the text is preserved: it should look carefully at the textual evidence and see that the texts are, in fact, good or not. As he puts it, “investigation must precede the doctrinal statement and in fact supply the information from which the doctrinal statement takes its shape and on which it rests” (99).
Again historical work looks carefully at theologians in their context, does not judge at first whether they are right or wrong, and does not use scholarly constructs like periods to misread them (and certainly not any theological generalizations about their era either). In fact, Muller even says that the same grammatical, contextual, and critical method is used by the best historians of all stripes—including non-believers (109). It is historical theology that actually tells us about how the canon was recognized, and in fact it is Protestant sola scriptura that makes us more attentive to history (113). This also makes him want to keep theology in conversation with the history of religions and comparative religion.
Muller moves on from history to systematic theology which he defines as “the broadest usage for the contemporary task of gathering together the elements of our faith into a coherent whole” and thus it is “all of the contemporizing, constructive disciplines” (124). This makes it separate from dogmatics, which is restricted to dogmas such as the Trinity, Christology, human nature, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology: systematic theology includes “philosophical questioning, presuppositional statement, argumentative defense, and cohesive analysis in the present context” (125). Thus, it cannot be isolated but must include “dogmatics, apologetics, philosophical theology, philosophy, and phenomenology of religion” (126) and integrate them with the results of Biblical study.
Muller argues something which I have never really seen a Reformed theologian do: that dogmatics should not “impose itself as a methodological rule on biblical or historical study” (129). This is particularly illuminating since I feel justification or perhaps the ordo salutis have become more a grid than a distillation recently, at least in common preaching. This obviously would exclude the ways the Trinity is made the be-all end-all of much modern theology. Dogmatics is based on the bible for topics and on history for materials. Philosophies “provide the critical and collateral standards for formulation” (131). This allows Muller to come up with a very elegant way of integrating biblical and historical theology. For instance, the terms “Son of Man” and “Son of God” mean something very specific in the original context, but the terms are not really the same thing as they mean in dogmatics. At the same time, this need not mean that our dogmas need change if the formulations that we have come up with bear out the general exegesis of Scripture (i.e., is Jesus God and man, according to Scripture, even if these two terms do not mean what they once were exegeted to mean?)
Muller defines philosophy and phenomenology of religion as fields on the edge of theology. Philosophical theology is “the philosophical discussion of topics held in common by theology and philosophy” (138). This means that theology proper and anthropology are part of philosophical theology, but not the Trinity or soteriology (ibid). They are for Muller “propaedeutic,” that is, preparatory. He then moves on to ethics and apologetics, and argues that they flow in and out of theology. They cannot be preparatory or axiomatic, but they can take the material of theology and apply it to the contemporary situation and even refine theology in some ways.
He moves on to practical theology, asking how they can be integrated with psychology. He argues that pastoral counseling should draw on these fields, but it should also consider theology and basically what the Bible says. I probably got most nervous at this section, since in my lifetime it seems like this field has gotten too specialized and too hung up on details and words and less on truth and encouragement. Still, Muller is right that all of theology should ultimately be brought to bear into people’s lives.
In the last chapter, Muller argues for the unity of theology. At first he makes a very helpful argument that theology is a science performed in community. This means that theology at its best is academic and worshipful. He then discusses the issue of hermeneutical circles—that is how can we understand the parts of a text without knowing its whole, when we only know the whole because of the parts. This is a problem that is particularly vexing, since if you misunderstand both the parts and the whole, then how can you get to the truth? Muller really puts on his scholar hat and argues that we should be looking at the context of the text, including the “broader historical, cultural, and social study” (191). In other words, careful history. Only then can we find the “significance” of the text and bring that into the life of the Church.
Muller finally argues for the importance of theology being contextualized by the culture which it is speaking to, and shows various ways that the atonement was “developed” in conversation with the cultures in which it arose. I felt this was a weaker section, not because it wasn’t inspiring (I love seeing how ransom theory, satisfaction, and penal atonement were natural in their cultural contexts), but I get nervous about the kind of simple “this spoke to their culture” thing instead of saying “this is what made them see the truth about the cross.” As Lewis noted, to tie a view to its historical context is often seen to explain the view. I also am more nervous about “contextualization” because of some crappy versions of it nowadays, but I do agree with Muller that it’s a difficult art, actually, and that application may be as difficult an art as exegesis. More of this!
This was a great book for a simple reason: it presents us with a world of inquiry and a call to theological integration. It is not that integrated theology has been tried and found wanting, rather an integrated theology has not been tried.
August 26, 2016
"The task of theological formulation in the present day is to draw together into an interpretive Unity the various elements of theology introduced, from within the community of Faith, a contemporary science of the Christian religion."
November 5, 2019
I do not know Dr. Muller personally, but I have great respect for him because of his PRRD. PRRD is a treasure trove of reformed thought and theology. Dr. Muller has spent far more time in the primary sources than most of us will ever be able to, so we owe him a great debt of gratitude for that. He is giving us a historical theology, and because he is so immersed in the thoughts of the past, he does an excellent job in bringing those for us to confront.
Dr. Muller's understanding of theology proper, however, is deficient if this book is any indication. Perhaps the title though, is misleading - he appears to be talking about the "study of the study of God." However, I don't this is an adequate excuse for missing what theology is about.
Here is his conclusion in his final paragraph:
"The task of theological formulation in the present day is to draw together into an interpretative unity the various elements of theology and to produce, from within the community of faith, a contemporary science of the Christian religion that recognizes as its proper object the construction of a view of reality suitable to the perpetuation of Christian culture."
Taking this at face value, Muller is suggesting that theological work should be an irenic effort, developing a kind of system of knowledge about religion from a Christian perspective. This is easily recognizable as drawn from the liberalizing of theology, where theology becomes pyschology. It is very interesting that Muller chooses to say "the proper object" as "construction of a view of reality." It would take too much time to unpack this in its details and the implications are that theology is left with a mere task of "constructing a worldview."
19th and 20th century liberalism stripped theology of its true object (God) and placed a new object (man and his religious feelings) as the object of study. Dr. Muller, consciously or unconsciously, is channeling this aberrance of thought. "Theologia" has always had, as its proper object, God himself - Augustine says, in effect, theology is saying God's words he has spoken to us about himself back to him. The short way to say this is that theologians are studying God, who he is and what he has done. The modernistic move to make theology a mere expression of the inner psychic workings of humanity is a sad substitute for the created purpose of humanity.
In Dr. Muller's defense, it is possible that this is all assumed and subsumed under his phrase "within the community of faith." However, this series is called "foundations of contemporary faith," to miss the foundations of theology (the principia of God and his Revelation) in a study of theology is not a small, but a central mistake. Moises Silva in the preface, notes the Dr. Muller is merely raising questions about problems in the field, not necessarily giving solid answers. But if this is so, he clearly misses the greatest problem in theology today: the full onset of liberalism grown mature, where God himself is no longer the object of our study and devotion.
Dr. Muller's understanding of theology proper, however, is deficient if this book is any indication. Perhaps the title though, is misleading - he appears to be talking about the "study of the study of God." However, I don't this is an adequate excuse for missing what theology is about.
Here is his conclusion in his final paragraph:
"The task of theological formulation in the present day is to draw together into an interpretative unity the various elements of theology and to produce, from within the community of faith, a contemporary science of the Christian religion that recognizes as its proper object the construction of a view of reality suitable to the perpetuation of Christian culture."
Taking this at face value, Muller is suggesting that theological work should be an irenic effort, developing a kind of system of knowledge about religion from a Christian perspective. This is easily recognizable as drawn from the liberalizing of theology, where theology becomes pyschology. It is very interesting that Muller chooses to say "the proper object" as "construction of a view of reality." It would take too much time to unpack this in its details and the implications are that theology is left with a mere task of "constructing a worldview."
19th and 20th century liberalism stripped theology of its true object (God) and placed a new object (man and his religious feelings) as the object of study. Dr. Muller, consciously or unconsciously, is channeling this aberrance of thought. "Theologia" has always had, as its proper object, God himself - Augustine says, in effect, theology is saying God's words he has spoken to us about himself back to him. The short way to say this is that theologians are studying God, who he is and what he has done. The modernistic move to make theology a mere expression of the inner psychic workings of humanity is a sad substitute for the created purpose of humanity.
In Dr. Muller's defense, it is possible that this is all assumed and subsumed under his phrase "within the community of faith." However, this series is called "foundations of contemporary faith," to miss the foundations of theology (the principia of God and his Revelation) in a study of theology is not a small, but a central mistake. Moises Silva in the preface, notes the Dr. Muller is merely raising questions about problems in the field, not necessarily giving solid answers. But if this is so, he clearly misses the greatest problem in theology today: the full onset of liberalism grown mature, where God himself is no longer the object of our study and devotion.
October 9, 2025
I enjoyed his closing section on contextualization. He argues that contextualization has accurately been at play in church history by looking at figures such as Irenaeus and Augustine. I disagreed where he says that we cannot see the Trinity in places like Gen. 1 & Ps. 2 because the Biblical authors would not have seen the Trinity there. This was not an easy read.
July 3, 2012
Muller is a first class Reformed Scholar. He argues for the need for "interpretive unity" between Biblical, Historical, Systematic and practical theology for the church to carry it's heritage into a new cultural situation of modern culture. As a historical theology scholar, Muller was refreshingly critical of those who want to hold onto historical formulations of theology, and not listen to the work of modern exegesis, and it's bearing on the present.
July 3, 2012
It's been a long time since I read this, but Richard, who was my second mentor, has a great story here about a DMin grad speaking. The graduating student noted the joy he had in moving through his DMin without having to study theology. Theology -- such an irrelevant topic to ministry! I agree with Richard that this student has an impoverished sense of the life of faith.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews