Can Systematic Theology Be Saved? Doctrine and Its Discontents

Abstract

This paper explores recent discussions on the nature and character of Christian doctrine and doctrinal arrangement within leading accounts of systematic theology, that is, the attempt to offer an integrated and cohesive account of the central commitments of the Christian faith. Through such discussion, I argue that the perennial epistemological problem systematic theology faces in its attempts to speak about a (divine) object who definitionally exceeds such speech is related to the specific ethical problem of systematic theology’s performances as a hegemonic discipline, one which often functions to exclude non-white, non-male perspectives. In light of these challenges, I contend that “positive” reasons for continuing systematic theology remain remote; systematic theology cannot be saved. Yet neither can it be avoided, lest such problems are willfully repeated and because of the ways systematic theology continues to be a leading site of doctrinal reflection within Christian education and intellectual reflection. I therefore conclude this paper by exploring two apocalyptic responses to the crises facing systematic theology which advocate for its continuation precisely by calling for its “end”.

1. Introduction

We are living in a world of ruins, to a not insignificant extent caused by ruinous theologies.

(Reichel 2023, p. 2)

[T]he question of the relationship between Christ and revolution has been doing more than burn our fingers since the white man’s world-domination has been nearing its end … But today we have to start from the fact that for more than 1500 years the churches have normally been on the side of the existing ruling order. To that extent they were involved in the wrong, the oppression, the robbery and murder, perpetrated by those in power, and not infrequently shared in the profit.

(Käsemann 2007, pp. 136–37)

Christian doctrine has many uses and discontents, but one significant use can be observed within the intellectual practice of systematic theology. While genealogies and definitions of this discipline abound, “systematic” theology can be broadly understood as the attempt to offer an integrated and cohesive account of the central commitments of the Christian faith (cf. Coakley 2013; Sonderegger 2015; Gunton 1999; Westerholm 2023). As such, one of the central ways in which Christian doctrine is both taught in the classroom and reflected upon within the academy is through systematic theology. Yet according to Hanna Reichel, systematic theology “is in crisis, and has been for a while” (Reichel 2023, p. 2). This crisis, Reichel contends, is related to a plurality of concerns regarding the relevance, viability, and identity of systematic theology as a discipline, meaning that systematic or doctrinal theology is complicated on many fronts: its moral legitimacy and intellectual coherence, the nature of its discursive history, and its consequences for Christian living.

Still, systematic theology lives on, as does the Christian faith, despite recent weathering. As Anne Carpenter observes, despite claims to the end of history, “Christians continue to be Christian; Christians continue to have and live a tradition; Christians continue to reflect on, hold, and develop doctrines” (Carpenter 2022, p. xi). In doctrinal reflection, Christians claim to “hand on divine truth in their living of history,” but also, in living such history, “hand on their wrongs” (p. xi). In the face of such wrongs, a more attractive option might be to reject or even abandon the task of systematic theology altogether. However, Carpenter suggests that to do so risks both avoiding responsibility for such wrongs and ignores the ways in which they continue to operate today. Theologians might therefore instead reflect more critically upon their own theological tradition and its various (de)formations: to reflect on how Christian doctrine inhabits history and relates to the continuation of this history within the practice of systematic theology. What exactly, Carpenter asks, “is the nature of this continuing?” (p. xi). And “what does it mean that we are alive in this history?” (p. xxi).

In the midst of such quandaries, the following paper explores recent discussions on the nature and character of Christian doctrine and doctrinal arrangement within leading accounts of systematic theology. Through such discussion, I argue that the more perennial epistemological problem systematic or doctrinal theology faces in its attempts to speak about a (divine) object who definitionally exceeds such speech is related to the specific ethical problem of systematic theology’s performances as a hegemonic discipline, one which often functions to exclude non-white, non-male perspectives. In light of these challenges, I contend that “positive” reasons for continuing systematic theology remain remote; systematic theology cannot be saved. Yet neither can it be avoided, lest such problems are willfully repeated because of the ways systematic theology continues to be a leading site of doctrinal reflection within Christian education and intellectual reflection. I therefore conclude this paper by exploring two apocalyptic responses to the crises facing systematic theology which advocate for its continuation precisely by calling for its “end”.

The entanglements of systematic theology within the twin epistemic crises of intellectual hegemony and creaturely finitude are themselves not removed from the writing of this paper. Speaking as a white male engaged in the study of theology, in questioning whether systematic theology “can be saved”, I therefore seek to recognize and further interrogate the ruinous conditions which my own positionality and structural privilege participates in. Calling for the “end” of systematic theology, then, is suggestive of a corresponding “end” to such entrenched privileges, one which resonates with the question posed by Willie Jennings: “Can White people be saved?” (Jennings 2018). The self-critical task I am proposing systematic theology must undertake therefore requires one to take seriously the distributions of power that attend the ongoing development of doctrinal reflection within systematic theology as a discipline which serves both the globalized academy and local Christian contexts.

2. Typologies of the Problem: Is Systematic Theology a White Male Discipline?

Systematic theology is a contested and diffuse category of Christian thought. Indeed, as both an intellectual exercise and academic discipline, what precisely constitutes “systematic” or doctrinal theology apart from other forms of theological inquiry—say, biblical studies, practical theology, or theological ethics—is far from settled. As Oliver Crisp demonstrates, the problem remains that “there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for systematic theology” whereby “no description under which ‘such and such counts as systematic theology’ [is] agreed upon by leading members of the systematic theology guild” (Crisp 2019, p. 18) This leads to a “wide divergence … about the nature of systematic theology, and about its relationship to philosophy, the social and natural sciences, and other intellectual disciplines” (p. 18). From the outset, developing a typology of or disciplinary boundary for systematic theology is fraught with difficulty.

At the same time, the development of such typologies or boundaries becomes a critical site of methodological contestation for systematic theology; what does and does not constitute legitimate “systematic theological reflection” is itself often the very question which unsettles the discipline within contemporary debate. Crises of method abound as soon as one sets upon the task of defining, interpreting, or even beginning to do systematic theology. These methodological crises are themselves tied to crises related to the historical performance of systematic theology and its (elusive) methodological deployments. Leading paradigms of what actually constitutes systematic theology tend towards androcentric and Eurocentric biases, biases that reveal not merely issues of representation but critical gaps within systematic theology as a form of intellectual hegemony.

Within his own contributions to systematic theological method, Crisp offers a threefold typology of leading paradigms within systematic theology today, each paradigm traceable to an earlier German tradition or figure. The first school identified by Crisp might be called the “dogmatic” approach, a way of conceiving systematic theology as the ordered metaphysical reflection on God in se. Lying broadly within one type of trajectory set by interpreters of Karl Barth, Crisp characterizes the dogmatic approach through the work of John Webster. For Webster, Crisp writes, “theology ought to be about the triune God” which goes about its task “in an appropriate, worshipful manner by means of the Word of God” (Crisp 2019, p. 19; see also Webster 2009). In this task of responding to and articulating God’s own character and works, systematic theology gathers up “a breadth of different tools from allied disciplines like biblical studies, historical theology, and, perhaps, philosophy” yet remains distinct from such disciplines (Crisp 2019, p. 19). The dogmatic approach and its interpretative tools, therefore, firmly belong “to the discipline of systematic theology (rather than critical theory, or sociology, or whatever),” a distinction which is found in its consistent guiding attention upon “Theology Proper—that is, the doctrine of God” (p. 19). The final arbiter that secures or guarantees the dogmatic approach is therefore divine revelation itself; divine agency is frequently invoked and directly connected to the type of knowledge systematic theology is concerned with. The “dogmatic” systematic theologian therefore attempts to speak of God directly through means of a redeemed intelligence.

The second school identified by Crisp might be called a classic “liberal” approach, a way of conceiving systematic theology as the ordered intellectual reflection on the faith expressed by Christians within Christian communities. Owing more to the intellectual legacy of Friedrich Schleiermacher, this second approach is typified for Crisp by Brian Gerrish. For Gerrish, Crisp maintains, systematic theology is determined by a “focus on religious experience rather than upon doctrine” (Crisp 2019, p. 19; see also Gerrish 2015). Here, systematic theology “is primarily concerned with Christian faith” as it is practiced in local communities and so reflects on doctrine and doctrinal history in order to test its “adequacy … relative to the faith Christians express” (Crisp 2019, p. 20). Its sources therefore include biblical and traditional texts but might also expand to other forms of applied knowledges more directly concerned with the practice of Christian ministry within one’s context. Systematic theology, then, “is a second-order attempt to express or capture something of [Christian] faith” (p. 20). The final arbiter or authority of the liberal approach is the community of faith itself who responds to divine revelation. The “liberal” systematic theologian therefore seeks to account for the ways in which God is understood and expressed within Christianity and Christian communions.

The third school identified by Crisp, what might be termed a “revisionist” approach to systematic theology, unlike the “dogmatic” and “liberal” approaches, problematizes understandings of theological knowledge as a response to divine revelation. Instead, the revisionist approach contends that systematic theology ought to critique and revise traditional appeals to God in light of one’s contemporary context and needs. Exemplified in the work of Paul Tillich, this third approach is represented for Crisp by Gordon Kaufman. Kaufman, quite unlike Webster or Gerrish, “maintains that God is a symbol” which contains powerful ways of talking about human values and aspirations (Crisp 2019, p. 20; see also Kaufman 1993). Theology in this third paradigm is therefore understood as “a human activity directed God-ward” rather than as an attempt to interpret a “revelation bequeathed to us” in which humans seek to construct and make meaning out of a God-talk that serves contemporary life (Crisp 2019, p. 21). The final arbiter of this approach is therefore the human subject itself engaged in the creation of such knowledge; theological knowledge is essentially immanent and self-contained. The “revisionist” systematic theologian therefore seeks to speak of God as a means of speaking about ultimate matters for human beings.

Though loose and heuristic, Crisp’s threefold typology of contemporary methodological options within systematic theology represents something of a typical rendering to the discipline in its current Anglo-American practice. This conflicting set of approaches of the task of systematic theology outlined by Crisp, while sharing common intellectual heritages, sharply highlights the difficulty in developing a neat typology of the discipline and illustrates a self-generating crisis of identity. But beyond this internal conflict, further problems arise. For example, though representing quite divergent perspectives, all of Crisp’s named systematic practitioners share something in common: they are all white men from Europe or North America. Though systematic theology itself is surely more than just theological inquiry restricted to the insights of white men from the Global North, this is not the immediate impression a newer reader might receive from Crisp’s own typology of the discipline. This lacuna itself indicates part of the challenge in addressing what systematic theology actually is, whose interests it serves, and therefore what type of crisis it might find itself in. If Crisp’s omission proves to be more than superficial, as I shall now contest, such an androcentric, Eurocentric rendering of systematic theology presents a profound challenge to the ongoing moral legitimacy and viability of the discipline in its current form.

Indeed, such a positioning of systematic theology offered by Crisp recalls longstanding criticisms that the discipline itself is nothing more than a mostly white, mostly male, mostly Euro-American form of theological discourse, one which, despite these particularities, renders itself universal. As Justo González observes, “North American male theology is taken to be basic, normative, universal theology, to which then women, other minorities, and people from the younger churches may add their footnotes. What is said in Manila, is very relevant for the Philippines. What is said in Tübingen, Oxford or Yale is relevant for the entire church” (González 1990, p. 52). As such, those who inhabit positions of structural and systemic privilege—white, European men—are granted the freedom to practice “systematic theology” as a universal discourse rather than as “a systematic theology” in particular. This freedom, however, does not extend to those who inhabit positions of structural oppression or marginalization. The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, for example, claiming to offer “a thorough survey of the state of the discipline and its prospects,” solely features contributors from Western Europe, the UK, and North America (Webster et al. 2007, backmatter). Of the 37 chapters, only 8 are written by women and all authors present as white. While systematic theology is certainly not only practiced by white male theologians from the Global North, it is often functionally restricted to theologians that reflect such social positionalities. This itself is related to wider configurations of geopolitical power and the politics of intelligibility and legitimacy. As Renie Chow Choy argues in her study of diasporic Hong Kong Christian identities, in ways that echo González, while a “Sri Lankan Catholic must understand Rome” or a “Trinidadian Anglican must understand England”, such a transfer of knowledge does not go both ways (Choy 2021, pp. xiii–xiv). An “Italian Catholic,” for example “doesn’t necessarily have to understand sixteenth-century Sri Lankan Catholics” nor does “an English Anglican … have to understand nineteenth-century Trinidadian Anglicans” (pp. xiii–xiv). The flow of power and legitimacy of tradition only flows one way: from North to South, from Europe to the world, from the “west” to the “rest”. “Owing to the history of empire,” Choy argues, “Western Christianity has an explanatory power which Christianities of the ‘Global South’ do not,” meaning that “its history is not essential for explaining much about Catholic and Protestant dogma, polity and spirituality” (pp. xiii–xiv).

Defining “who” and “what” counts as systematic theology is therefore problematized on two fronts, one owing to the wide diversity of intellectual and theological approaches to the discipline itself and another to the androcentric and Eurocentric strictures in which it takes place. Yet if “systematic theology” is difficult to define, so too are theological approaches which seek to challenge it. Vítor Westhelle, for example, offers a broad definition of “liberation” theology—including that of “third world theologies, North American black theology, feminist theology, womanist theology,” and so on—as any type of theological inquiry that seeks to “challenge … dominant Western academic theological productions” (Westhelle 2007, p. 312). As such, liberation theology “is not a definable concept but a catalytic notion for theologies that challenge the hegemonic theological canon” and so can only be approached through a “via negativa” (p. 311). Assuming that such hegemony can arise from what Crisp and others identify as “systematic theology,” we might therefore summarize the “liberationist” critique of systematic theology as such: Systematic theology arises as a form of theological inquiry that originates in modern Europe, particularly Germany, and its transmission within contemporary Anglo-American Protestant thought. In this transmission, however, systematic theology renders itself universal, ignoring its particularity as a historical and traditioned form of theological speech. It therefore creates categories of legitimacy and authority premised on its own particular expressions now hidden behind an assumed status of universal applicability and scope, thereby overdetermining its own historical contextuality. Still, by framing such critiques negatively, we are no closer to an actual definition of what systematic theology is. Westhelle’s own definition of theological approaches which challenge such systematic hegemony is similarly set within a crisis of identity.

To say that systematic theology is a solely “white male discipline” is surely a caricature. Yet it also expresses both felt perceptions and material realities within ongoing systematic theological debate, especially as it relates to what (and who) gets to be considered “genuine” systematic theology. Christian theology as such therefore finds itself at a methodological impasse, one which often ultimately serves to further dichotomize “systematic” or “contextual” theologies, theologies of the Global North and the Global South, theologies of white, European men (sometimes women) and all “others”. As Hanna Reichel observes, tensions between “systematic” and “contextual” or “liberation” theologies come to rely on a self-justifying form of circular reasoning that actively exclude the other side from their considerations. As such, “a stalemate ensues by measuring each other according to a different epistemic standard of what counts as critical and rigorous scholarship” (Reichel 2023, p. 46). Each side of this impasse contends that it is “performing well by its own standards” while “find[ing] the other lacking” (p. 46). Systematic theology is caught, then, in an ongoing crisis of identity and definition which is tied to its hegemonic performances as a “white male discipline”.

3. The Theological Subject: An Impasse in the Discipline

Relating the tendencies of systematic theology to be conceived of as a “white male discipline” to the material political performances of systematic theological discourse requires further investigation. After all, if the problem was simply the innocent overrepresentation of one type of social positionality within systematic theology—the white male subject—redressing such a problem could be conceived of in a relatively straightforward manner. For example, such a problem of overrepresentation could be addressed through various means of increasing alternative representations, diversifying bibliographies, and including historically marginalized theological perspectives within contemporary systematic theological debate. Though such endeavors are no doubt worthwhile, they risk neglecting a more robust account of the formation of such hegemonic overrepresentations within the production of theological knowledge itself. As Gayatri Spivak argues in her classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, any “subject” involved in producing knowledge does not participate in a socially innocent or neutral process. Rather, the various ways in which subjectivity is itself configured and legitimized—who gets to “speak” and what is counted as “speaking”—is indelibly tied to the histories of European empire and domination (Spivak 1988).

The white male hegemony of systematic theology therefore points to not only challenges in method but also one which relates to the production of systematic theology as an academic discipline and the relation of this production to wider systems of oppression and structural violence. Reichel, for example, utilizes Miranda Fricker’s concept of “testimonial” and “hermeneutic” injustice to describe the ways in which systematic theology functions to not only exclude marginalized perspectives but, via the process of such exclusion, reify and support wider political oppression. Fricker argues that “epistemic practices … are, of necessity, played out by subjects that are socially situated,” meaning that any investigation into the structure of knowing “puts questions of social identity and power center stage” (Fricker 2007, p. vii). Such a recognition reveals “a certain ethical dimension to epistemic life—the dimension of justice and injustice” (p. vii). This leads Fricker to expand upon the ways “epistemic injustices” play out “testimonially” and “hermeneutically” within the construction of knowledge. While testimonial injustice occurs “when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word,” hermeneutic injustice “occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (p. 1). These two forms of epistemic injustice work together in ways that both discredit the testimony of marginalized communities within the construction of knowledge and develop structural forms of reifying and enforcing such discrediting and dismissal. Questions of knowing are therefore not contained to the level of knowing itself; configurations of epistemology come to influence and support wider structures of discrimination and oppression.

Reichel draws Fricker’s analysis into leading critiques made against systematic theology. As I have explored, because of its androcentric and Eurocentric foundations, systematic theology often functions as a “white male” discipline that excludes other types of political and social positionalities. “At best,” Reichel concurs, “there ensues a lack of attention, lack of fit, and lack of relevancy of Systematic Theological work to ‘outsider’ experiences” (Reichel 2023, p. 38). This “lack of fit” might be understood as a type of testimonial injustice, one in which the representative spread of those who work within systematic theology is often restricted to white, European men. Yet this representative spread itself only tells half the picture; testimonial injustice is tied and leads to forms of structural and hermeneutic injustice. “At worst,” Reichel therefore seeks to show how systematic theology may perpetuate “the marginalization of, discrimination against, or even outright rejection of [outsider] agents and their experiences as theologically valid, testimonially reinforcing the cycle of hermeneutic injustice” (p. 38). In this way, “hermeneutic injustice leads to the perpetuation of material injustice—political, economic, sexual, racial—against marginalized communities, with theological support” (p. 38).

This leads Reichel to question the underlying effects of systematic theology as an intellectual discipline and practice of the Christian faith. “Beyond issues of intent and responsibility,” they observe, “the question remains if and why Systematic Theology’s critical methodological apparatus is unable to prevent or even recognize its systemic complicities and recurrent bad effects … If it consistently and persistently inflicts harm, this might indicate not a failure of applying Systematic Theology’s method, but its efficient functioning: not a bug but a feature” (p. 37). Reichel’s account helps intensify and deepen the critique that systematic theology can function as a type of hegemonic theological discourse, one which seeks to support and reify systems of exclusion and oppression. As such,

The insights into testimonial and hermeneutic injustice challenge Systematic Theology’s self-understanding as methodologically rational, objective, neutral, and universal … The fact that Systematic Theology’s methodological paradigm is contextually dependent and has cultural, historical, intellectual particularities neither surprises nor makes it suspect per se … However, it is the unreflected nature of its contextuality and the conditions of its knowledge production [that make it] … problematic … The unacknowledged nature of these epistemic conditionings makes them effective in the first place as well as immunizes them against critique.

(pp. 38–39)

Critics of systematic theology’s unreflected particularity therefore push “for expanding the analysis to take the contextual conditioning, power dynamics, and real-life effects of cognitive systems into account, instead of merely asserting their inner coherence and explanatory potential” (p. 40). When such criticisms are raised, systematic theologians tend to either ignore such critiques or illicit “various kinds of irritated, paternalizing, and domesticating responses” (p. 41). But as Reichel suggests, the “primary issue here is not gatekeeping as such. It is that the disciplinary and confessional standards of Systematic Theology—central to its method—immunize the discipline against critique and self-reifying ways while in turn dismissing [such critiques] as ‘bad theology’” (p. 41). What is required, therefore, are forms of systematic theology that not only account for the contextuality and particularity of systematic theology itself but more critically account for the ways in which systematic theology thereby closes itself off from critique.

4. What Type of Inquiry Is Systematic Theology?

Systematic theology faces crises related to contested methodological and moral questions. Yet theological speech itself is enclosed in a wider crisis of knowing, that is, the crisis of venturing to speak of a God who exceeds all human speech. As André Dumas notes within his classic study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological method: “Theology is an attempt to speak about God in such a way that one is really speaking about God and really speaking about him” (Dumas 1971, p. 2). It “thus walks a tightrope between two risks—the risks that its God will vanish or that its speech will become inaudible” (p. 2). In other words, Dumas questions, “does theology speech really describe God, or, to put the matter negatively, does it not waste its time on repetitions that may sound beautiful but only elaborate or eternalize something that is merely human?” (p. 2). While theology is itself “in crisis”—crises related to ongoing disciplinary confusion and historically problematic deployments as a form of white male hegemony—there is also a “crisis of theology,” that is, the crisis of speaking of divine things through finite human thought and language which consistently risks domesticating divine agency and being.

Yet this wider “crisis of theology” is not distinct from theology “in crisis”. For example, Scott Kirkland contends that there is a generative relation in Karl Barth’s early dialectical theology of crisis which “understands the failure of the theological academy in supporting WWI is as political as it is theological, and vice versa” (Kirkland 2018, p. 32). Specifically, Kirkland argues that the first edition of Barth’s Epistle to the Romans shifts an earlier dialectical material rendering of world history to instead interpret history “as the consequence of a prior theological alienation,” the alienation of the fall and of divine judgement (p. 37). This leads to a rendering of “history as Krisis,” that is, “history standing under the divine negation” (p. 44). In disrupting the project of liberal theology, Barth is not merely “relativizing the tools of historical or rational theological inquiry” but rather “exploding them from within the radical interruption that is the cross” (p. 45). In this way, it is “impossible to disentangle Barth’s well-documented objection to his teachers’ methods of historical-theological inquiry here from their decision to back the Kaiser’s war” (p. 45). The failure of liberal theology during the First World War was therefore a failure to register the critique of divine judgement and impossibility of speaking a true word divorced of God’s Word over humankind. The impossibility of theology is related to the impossibility of political action; all that remains is the ever-present fallibility of human attempts to know and love divine and human others, an attempt which Kirkland argues the early Barth makes.

The relationship between the crisis of systematic theology’s historical failures and the more perennial crisis of speaking of God remains unsettled. Despite frequent confessions of finitude, systematic theology often positions itself as a type of “ultimate” form of theological knowing to which all other forms of theological and even nontheological knowing are derivative. In positioning itself in such terms, systematic theology tends to reify or close itself off from further critique—usually by either dismissing such critique as irrelevant or by positioning such critiques (say, from “liberation” or “contextual” perspectives) as subordinate to the higher vision which systematic theology itself enacts. Linn Tonstad argues that leading accounts of how systematic theology ought to function in relation to the modern university and the “age of criticism” result in a distinctly competitive approach which ultimately “refuses the painful recognition of theology’s own idolatrous tendencies” (Tonstad 2020, p. 504). Though systematic theology could approach modern critiques of itself from other disciplines as ways of honing its own attempts to witness to an infinite God, it instead often provides a defensive counter-attack on such modern critiques by claiming that they themselves do not truly understand the inherent complexity and mastery of systematic theology as a form of ultimate knowledge. Tonstad therefore claims that in “rejecting accusations of idolatry and bad faith by turning them on one’s opponents, one invites their application to oneself” (p. 507). This means that overly hasty dismissals of critiques of systematic theology from various hermeneutics of suspicion indicate a wider failure to honestly confront the inherent limitations of all God-talk: “Because theology, faithful to divine self-revelation though it may wish to be, is not identical with such revelation, it too cannot but participate in [creaturely] incompletion. No theological system can then claim finality either for itself or for its claims with any specificity; but such incompletion should be considered good, since temporality, movement and change are intrinsic to the goodness of creation as such” (p. 510). The possibilities of recognizing this inherent limitation to systematic theology, however, are thwarted by a general aversion to admit such restraint. As Tonstad avers: “In truth, theology’s failures are not merely occasional, but both structural and theologically significant,” and so cannot be so readily dismissed (p. 508).

As such, leading accounts of systematic theology often overdetermines its own confessed abilities to account for a God who exceeds all human accounting, refusing to recognize the very limitations it often claims to possess by dismissing external critiques of its historically problematic performances. This itself creates forms of hegemonic theological discourse that draws all other forms of inquiry into itself and so entrenches the performance of a white male identity within the discipline. Consider, for example, the following description of theological study from David Bentley Hart, quoted in an introductory textbook to systematic theology:

Theology requires a far greater scholarly range than does any other humane science. The properly trained Christian theologian, perfectly in command of his materials, should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have a complete formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the texts and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should be thoroughly trained in philosophy, ancient, medieval and modern, should have a fairly broad grasp of liturgical practice in every culture and age of the Christian world, should (ideally) possess considerable knowledge of literature, music and the plastic arts, should have an intelligent interest in the effects of theological discourse in areas such as law or economics, and so on and so forth.

(Hart 2009; quoted in Bird 2013, p. 26)

Here, Hart understands systematic theology to be a kind of “final” or “complete” type of intellectual undertaking, one which synthesizes and draws together an enormous set of linguistic, historical, philosophical, and liturgical disciplines. The theologian therefore requires “mastery” over such disciplines, resulting in a “complete formation” and perfect “command” over the materials set before “him,” being neither limited by one’s specifical historical moment or cultural context. According to Hart, such theological inquiry is apparently unbounded in its scope, becoming a form of “meta-theology” able to position and determine other forms of theological and nontheological inquiry.

While Hart’s fairly brazen description of the theological task could be taken as an outlier, it expresses sentiments that can be observed both formally and informally within theological studies in general. Indeed, I first came to this quote in the very first year of my own theological studies through the textbook assigned for classes in systematic theology: Michael Bird’s Evangelical Theology. In quoting Hart at length, Bird himself concedes that he does not “presume to think that [he has] all these qualifications and proficiencies” (Bird 2013, p. 26). Indeed, “only a polymath could” (p. 26). But Bird’s very appeal to Hart undergirds a wider understanding of what the systematic task requires. For example, Bird claims that “systematic theology should, in its ideal state, be an aid and clarification to exegesis and to be undertaken by those with a solid grasp of biblical studies” (p. 26). Yet through his appeal to Hart, Bird betrays a wider understanding of biblical exposition as something of a preparatory stage for a wider systematic theology: while scripture, for Bird, functions as the normative canon to which systematic theology must draw, systematic theology nonetheless must go beyond the mere compilation of biblical texts developed in a system of thought. Even if he chastens Hart’s claim to complete mastery, the general assumption remains that systematic theology serves as a type of final meta-theology to which all other Christian (and even non-Christian) thought is subordinate. The task of the systematic theologian, then, is to gather up all forms of preparatory inquiries—biblical studies, linguistics, philosophy, or ministerial studies—into a complete theological system that offers something of a “final word”.

This attempt to offer a “final word” on matters of Christian doctrine is problematic on two fronts. The first front relates to Christian theology’s object—God, and things related to God—who, by definition, always exceeds systematic theology’s apprehension and articulation. The second epistemological challenge relates to the compromised historical performance of systematic theology as a dominant discipline associated with “white male” hegemony. Yet these two challenges which face contemporary systematic theology cannot be thought of as entirely distinct. Instead, the archetypal image of the systematic theologian as a “master” of discourse is related to histories of colonial exploitation and racial capitalism, related to the white, land-owning man who was at the center of Europe’s exploitation and domination of the Majority World. As Jennings argues, there is “an image of an educated person that propels the curricular, pedagogical, and formational energies of … theological education,” the image “of a white self-sufficient man, his self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery” (Jennings 2020, p. 6). This image is one which claims finality when there is none, seeks to possess and know that which is ultimately unknowable, and renders itself an image by which the world’s lesser peoples can be judged. In its claim to offer a final word, systematic theology (at its worst) feeds this image, the image of the symbolic white male body.

5. Two Critical Responses: Systematics and the “End” of Doctrine

In light of these challenges, then, can systematic theology be saved? Alternative approaches within more radical forms of theology provide a firmly negative answer to this question. But this does not mean that systematic theology is over. Instead, a more productive response to these question lies in its reframing altogether: perhaps “saving” systematic theology from its failures was never the point. Instead, perhaps theology itself is just that type of knowledge ordered towards an end which always exceeds its frame. The interrelated epistemological challenges of speaking of an infinite God and the hegemonic performances of systematic theology as a white male discipline are not so much challenges to be overcome but failures which point to a more fundamental dynamic relating to Christian doctrine. To conclude, I will briefly examine more recent approaches to the crises that face systematic theology that call for the “end” of systematics itself rather than call for its ongoing maintenance in the work of two constructive theologians: Marika Rose and Linn Tonstad.

“Theology has failed,” Marika Rose writes. “On this, theologians agree, even though (or perhaps because) there is no consensus as to what theology is, what it is trying to achieve, or what it looks like” (Rose 2019, p. 2). Rose thus identifies a relationship between the historical failure of theology itself and the failure to identify what theology is—a tension related to the twin challenges of speaking of an infinite object in the midst of a historically problematic subjectivity. Theologians may temper this claim by saying that it is “specifically, the systematic theology of the white, male, heterosexual, Western world which has failed” because it is precisely these hegemonic forms of theology which have contributed to gross inequalities, structural, and epistemic violence. But this misses the more fundamental way in which failure, at least according to Rose, may be said to constitute Christian identity itself. If theology has indeed failed, it “is not always clear exactly when the rot set in” (p. 1). Perhaps it was related to the displacement of divinity as the “queen of the sciences” during the period of the European Enlightenment. Maybe the blame lies with the Reformation itself in which the individual believer was granted improper authority over the church tradition. Or, further back still, perhaps the corruptions of theology ought to be understood in the clash between early Christianity and Greek thought, or the establishment of Christendom under Constantine, or even the Apostle Paul’s perversion of Christ’s original message. Yet Rose bypasses all these common narratives of blame, instead arguing that “it is tempting here to go back a little further in time to consider the consistent thickheadedness of Jesus’s disciples: their faithlessness, their obtuseness, their blundering and stumbling” (p. 1). Or maybe the fault lies in the “disasters of Abraham’s descendants,” the unfaithfulness of God’s chosen people in their failure to live by God’s ways, a lineage which leads one right back to the earliest origins of human failure in the Garden of Eden itself (p. 1).

These failures of faith therefore suggest a different type of relationship between failure and theology, one in which the “question of failure is necessarily bound up with the question of what it means to be faithful, knowing that perfect fidelity is impossible” (p. 11). Instead, failure can be understood “not as a limitation but a positive condition of being” (p. 12). For example, Rose considers the inclusion of five women in the genealogy of Jesus as presented in Matthew: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary. As “foreigners, idolaters, and adulterers,” suspicious women who transgress gender and sexual norms, “they represent Israel’s failure to be racially, religiously, and sexually pure. And yet all are, not despite but because of this, righteous and heroic figures; all, in different ways, ensure the continuation of Israel, its identity, it’s claimed to be faithful to its calling” (p. 12). In each of these women’s stories, their failure to represent the gendered, sexual, and racial ideal of Israel brings forth subversive and new ways of being faithful to Israel’s God. It is precisely their own betrayal of and unfaithfulness to idealized standards of fidelity and legitimacy that creates something new. In other words, failure provides a new “end” to which faithfulness itself might be ordered and understood (cf. Helmer 2014).

In the context of the discussion above, we have seen how epistemological questions related to theology’s subject matter and questions of epistemic justice are related. Though systematic theology may claim to represent a finite and limited human word on matters ultimately incomprehensible, leading accounts of systematic theology often claim to represent something of a final word which gathers all up all other forms of discourse and inquiry. This presentation of systematic theology as a comprehensive “master” discourse is not innocent; rather, it reflects the androcentric and Eurocentric underpinnings of the discipline’s modern history and development. In this form, the “end” to which doctrine is ordered therefore becomes limitless, an end which becomes politically and socially identified around the white male body. The necessary and even constitutive dynamic of failure thus provides a radical challenge to systematic theology’s false claims to finality. Instead of imagining some pure form of doctrinal reflection divorced from the material failures and structural violences of modern history, failure can instead become a renewed site of creativity and reclamation.

Linn Tonstad similarly develops forms of systematic theology that rely upon and even celebrate the ways in which failure can be understood to constitute Christian identity and theology. Offering a detailed analysis of the ways in which modern doctrines of the Trinity continually repeat and reinscribe fallible or disordered structures of human relationality into the Godhead, Tonstad seeks to reject reified or pure performances of doctrine within systematic theology outright. Instead, drawing off the insights of queer theology and theory, Tonstad contends that only in embracing the failure of theology to both adequately articulate the divine subject and perform a version of Christianity untouched by modern horrors can systematics be free to actually speak of God. Also drawing from the stories of women in Christ’s genealogy, systematic theology in such a mode rejects the decency provided by the normative strictures of white (hetero)masculinity and instead revels in its marginal identity and blessed finitude. Here, the “faithful are invited to infidelity, to refusal of the logic of betrayal that structured Rahab’s disidentification with her people and re-dentification with the colonial other” (Tonstad 2016, p. 138; cf. Althaus-Reid 2003).

For Tonstad (as for Rose), such concerns are motived by a renewed sense of the apocalyptic within contemporary theological discourse. Though definitions of the term “apocalyptic” are broad, an apocalyptic mode of systematic theology can here be understood as a type of theological discourse which seeks to register the radical critique made of human forms of power and exploitation precisely through sharp contrast to the imminent rule of Christ. The various malformations and corruptions of present-day human empires and civilizations stand in sharp relief to apocalyptic images of the final judgment and new rule of God in which the crucified Lamb stands at the center of all things (cf. Rev 5:6). By considering all things in such a light, apocalyptic theology is less pressed to develop pristinized forms of doctrine and instead to more critically consider its “end”.

Calling for the “end” of systematics indicates a type of continual interrogation of the ways in which questions regarding the construction of theological knowledge can never be divorced from the positionality in which one speaks. While there is doubtless need for systematic theology to listen to “external” critiques of its failures or limitations, there is at the same time no “pure” or neutral vantage in which to receive or interrogate such judgments. Instead, one of the tasks in facing our crisis today can be found in the honest interrogation of our own theological traditions and the figures who populate them. As Rose writes elsewhere,

When we find ourselves longing for the end of the world, and of the violence which constitutes it, it is easy to think that desire itself means we are no longer part of the world we want to end. But however much we hate the world we find ourselves in, however much we long for its destruction, we have to grapple with the fact that we are part of the very thing we are trying to destroy. If we don’t understand how we have been formed by the various systems and structures we struggle against, we will end up reproducing them.

(Rose 2023, p. 10)

In seeking to move too quickly beyond the inherent contradictions of past theological traditions—either through a willed ignorance to their often-violent attendant histories or by the assumption that we can simply transcend them and do better on our own—systematic theology today therefore risks both failing to learn from its past and so repeat mistakes from the past. If, as Rose contends, “we cannot disentangle ourselves from how we have been made by those around us”—in both good and bad ways—then part of the task for any theological project today is to continue grappling with what has come before (p. 204).

6. Conclusions: Can Systematic Theology Go On?

Systematic theology, then, has to end. But this does not mean that the task of systematics or doctrine is finished. As Adam Kotsko contends, theology “names an irreducible necessity of human thought and community, one that too many people of good will have dismissed as irrelevant or somehow inherently oppressive” (Kotsko 2021, p. xvii). The danger with this dismissal is that it risks “ceding the power of theology to the liars, fools, and sadists who have transformed our world into a living nightmare” (p. xvii). In this way, Kotsko maintains, theology “is not a scholarly game or an edifying spiritual discipline, but a world shaping force of great power. Lives are at stake when we do theology—and if we don’t do it, someone else will” (p. xvii).

Kotsko’s admonishment about those who wish to abandon the task of theology names what is at stake within the task of theology: theology is not merely an enjoyable academic or even spiritual exercise, it is an understanding of reality that determines one’s vision of life, for good or for worse. Systematic theology has real-life effects, effects which are inherent to and passed down within its reproduction. Yet Kotsko’s self-appointed redress also points to some of the very limitations of a theological approach yet to fully reckon with the entanglements of theology and modern history. It is here in which fostering a more self-critical apocalypticism may be of use; it is precisely this profound need for self-critique, for the sense in which we too are part of the demonic enslavement of creation and its beings through structures of violence and oppression, that we might turn to a type of apocalyptic theology (e.g., Siggelkow 2018). In this way, ready assumptions about who exactly populates and inhabits the “we” Kotsko appeals to is suggestive of a Euro-American theological guild which is yet to fully reckon within its participation within the structural violence of a world order centered around the white male body, the knowing theological subject par excellence who continues to enjoy enormous privilege, resource, and authority to enact and perform theology—a privilege the writing of this very paper has participated in. Further attention to this feature—still largely ignored within systematic theological debate—might reveal in fact that our own attempts may have themselves been implicated in transforming the world into a nightmare, one which resists the impending divine judgement over all human history.