Children of Adam

I will never be a Systematic Theology fan, much less actually engage in it myself. Seminary courses have convinced me of that. What a misguided use of energy and brainpower.

We are children of our father Adam.  We practice gardening, farming and animal husbandry.  We classify, we categorize, we identify processes and codify procedures; we apply, assess, adjust and repeat.  We are botanists and zoologists, biologists and geologists. But when we try to take the same approach to THEOlogy.. we are doomed to failure, out of our depth, grasping for what is beyond our reach. You can classify the finite, the natural. But you can't classify the infinite, the supernatural.  You can reduce natural processes to repeatable steps, and optimize them.  Sometimes you can get lucky and even do this with people - for a while.  But you definitely can't apply the natural or the behavioral sciences to the Person of God, as if God were subject to Newton or Darwin or Pavlov or Skinner.

Still, it doesn't stop people from trying, from Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin to Erickson. And none seem to make any significant improvements over the efforts of the others. They all miss the mark. Systematic Theology: 1,600 years of chasing after the wind.

I, for one, won't add to the muddle.  Vive le mystère!