Sermon 82 - Systematic vs Biblical Theology
Deuteronomy 11:18
Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
Most sermons these days, at least in smaller churches, are based on biblical theology. Carl Armerding taught me biblical theology. That is, you take a passage of scripture and you mine all the wisdom that you can out of it. That's a very valid approach. Mine is a little bit different. I use systematic theology, that is, to take an idea [very often an idea from a non-religious setting or environment], and to see what the Bible says about it. Bruce Waltke taught me systematic theology. So if you don't like my sermons blame Bruce.
Biblical theology is good. It has a very solid foundation. You start with the Bible. That is always a good place to begin, and you can do your own Biblical theology, simply with your Bible reading time. Reading your Bible regularly definitely provides you with the foundations of the Christian life. The Bible teaches you about God. The Bible is our source of revelation. If there are any other revelations, they are to be judged against the Bible! Starting with the Bible is absolutely foundational, and you can't go wrong with it.
On the other hand, there's an awful lot of areas where simply reading the Bible won't give you a lot of benefit. For example, there are all those genealogies. What do they matter?
(Well, I suppose that I should say that not all of my sermons are, in fact, systematic theology. It was, in fact, in one of those genealogies that I got one of my, not just sermons, but a whole series of sermons!
I was intrigued by the fact that, in the book of Matthew, as opposed to the book of Luke, Jesus' genealogy lists women. Going back into the Bible to find out about those women, there seemed to be some very interesting common characteristics! For starters, they were all foreigners. That's got to be something interesting when you find women who don't get mentioned anyways in a Jewish genealogy that leads to an important figure. Why include these foreigners?
And I went on from there. I got four sermons out of it, and then got three more, because I have always loved the book of Ruth, and I just took advantage of the fact that she is one of the four mentioned.)
Okay, maybe objecting to genealogies wasn't the greatest place to start with this particular sermon. After all, I'm trying to point out that systematic theology is something you can do in addition to the straightforward Biblical theology. Let's get back to Biblical theology and the parts of the Bible that might not be particularly helpful.
There's all of those places in the Bible where, in the spring, the kings march off to war. Unless you're writing a Biblical movie epic, you don't particularly want to concentrate on the battle scenes. There's a lot of that stuff in the Bible. We don't do that anymore, so what does it have to teach us today?
Then there's the prophets. There are the major prophets, who really do tend to go on, and then there's the minor prophets, and there's a lot of minor prophets. And most of what the prophets are talking about is the fact that the Jews have been unfaithful, and so God has had to send armies against them and haul them off to slavery in a foreign land.
Okay, yes, there are parts of both the major and minor prophets where the prophet gets a vision long into the future, talking about the coming of the Messiah. That's all relevant to us. They were talking about Jesus. They were talking about why Jesus would come, and they were talking about what he would do when he came. It's rather steadying to take this stuff that was written five to seven hundred years before Jesus was born and show how startlingly accurate it was about noting different, and sometimes very minor, aspects of his life!
But then we're back to complaining about Israel being unfaithful, and how they had to be hauled off to slavery. Yes, the prophet said that they were going to be brought back in the not-too-distant future, but they do go on at great length about it. Over and over again.
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this. Even those passages about Israel being unfaithful, being taken away into exile, and then the promise that they will be brought back to the promised land, is evidence of God's faithfulness. God made a promise; God is going to keep his promise.
But there are other things in life.
We have difficulties and problems, and we live in troubling and complicated times. We are faced with technologies, politics, and a disastrously complicated financial and economic system that just doesn't get mentioned in the Bible. Sometimes we have to look at this, look at our difficulties, and then try to see what the Bible does say and how it addresses the problems that we are facing.
Sometimes this has to do with troubling times. I wrote a sermon on an idea from a book called "The Grieving Brain." I am grieving, and I was at the time that I wrote the sermon. I want to look at grief, but I also want to look at what the Bible might have to say about grief. I took the way that the book looked at grief and tried to see if that was consistent with the way the Bible looked at grief, and there is a sermon.
Sometimes it doesn't have to be troubling aspects. I realised that, doing a lot of walking in the early morning hours and generally speaking getting my breakfast from blackberry bushes along the way, I realised that I was having breakfast with God every morning. God was providing the breakfast in the form of the blackberries, which nobody was growing or cultivating and just sprang up.
I wrote a sermon about blackberries. Hopefully the idea that God provides for us isn't too far from what the Bible says.
And then there was a sermon when I was very troubled at how the churches were not working with each other. They weren't cooperating with each other. As a matter of fact, for the most part, they weren't even talking with each other. I found that troubling, and I tried to write a sermon about it. I didn't get very far, and then suddenly, some of the research, from my very non-spiritual and not very pleasant work in information security, sprang to mind and pretty much finished the entire sermon.
Of course, I did have to make sure that the way that I, in information security, was looking at this was in fact consistent with Biblical principles.
Most recently, I have been going through the course that I created for information security and picking out concepts which I think would make a good sermon. What I find that I'm doing is, from a background as a Christian over these many years, I will address this issue and see how it relates to our Christian life. But I do want to make sure that it is consistent with the Bible. Having written a certain amount of material and content for the sermon, I will then turn to the Bible and look up the words that I have been using and the concepts that I have been talking about in the sermon. I see what comes up out of the Bible, and it's been surprising, and really, well, heartening, to find that doing it this way, the Bible verses that come up in my searches bring out new aspects, and sometimes new depths, to what I've already written.
I still have no idea why I am writing sermons. After all, for 70 years I didn't. Well, I did write *one*, but all this time I never wrote sermons. All the time that I was married to Gloria, I was just working on that one sermon, and I don't think we ever really discussed it. I have lost the opportunity to discuss the sermons that I am creating with Gloria, which is another reason to grieve. Another loss to add to the pile of losses that is related to Gloria's death.
Recently I noted that I was writing a bunch of sermons, and I didn't know why, and it was in connection with discussing Gloria and the discussions that we had, about absolutely everything. The person I was talking to suggested that maybe writing the sermons I am still discussing things with, and teaching things to Gloria. I guess she just hasn't had as much of a chance for input anymore.
I still don't know why I am writing sermons, but I guess this is how. I am a systems analyst. A systems analyst looks at a system, finds the trouble, and then tries to propose a solution.
So, basically, this is what I am doing in the way that I write sermons. I look for trouble. I look for a troubling aspect of modern life. I look for a troubling aspect of the churches that I am going around. I look at a troubling event in the modern world, and then I analyse it, and then I go to the foundational principles of our faith and try to see if there is a solution there. I back that up with what the Bible has to say about it all.
And I guess that is systematic theology.
Someone asked me if I had a big wrap-up ending for this sermon. I don't. But I do have a small suggestion. A lot of us, in doing Bible study in a small group, decide to pick a book and plow through it no matter what. That's Biblical theology. But you could decide on a topic. Possibly a problem that we see around us, or in the wider world, or possibly just an idea or a concept that we find interesting and want to explore. And everybody gets to think about it, think about a Christian approach to it, and possibly try to find places in scripture that might relate to it. And everybody brings their ideas together next week.
Well, I think that it would be an interesting idea for a Bible study. And it would let everybody participate, and not just the study leader. (It would also take some of the pressure off the study leader.)
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