Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 48:192 (Oct 1891)
Article: Christian Experience As A Source Of Systematic Theology
Author: Frank Hugh Foster

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 586

Christian Experience As A Source Of Systematic Theology1

Rev. Frank Hugh Foster

The Christian may be conceived as standing at the centre of three concentric circles. The first and largest of these is the world, the sum total of all the revelations of himself which God has made, and of the impressions of a religious nature which man receives. The second circle is that embracing the special community in which he stands by virtue of his Christian faith, the congregation of believers, or the church, a community with a distinct history and with characteristic experiences of its own, fitted by these to have, and thus naturally possessing, a body of doctrines called a Theology. The last circle is that in which he is brought into the immediate presence of God by special divine revelation given in the Bible. In the broadest sense the relation of these three circles is “that indicated by their concentricity: the world includes the church, and the church embraces the Bible; but for convenience’ sake we may distinguish and say that the Christian receives impressions from three different sources, which thus determine his theological ideas, the Bible, or revelation in the special sense, the Church as the congregation of believers, and the World, a term which may include all those multifarious sources of impressions which are not conveyed by the other two sources, and for which

BSac 48:192 (Oct 1891) p. 587

the name Reason may be substituted, in the sense that there is a source of theological knowledge in the operations of the human reason upon all the facts presented to us in the universe apart from the special contributions of the church or the Bible. Each of these sources has its own peculiarities and limitations. Unaided reason has accomplished but little in the construction of positive Christian doctrine, though it is of the utmost importance in their development and defence. Christian experience gained within the communion of the church has its limitations in the subjectiveness, ambiguity, and distortion with which its utterances are often accompanied. The Bible needs interpretation into the language and thought of our own day; but then it is the purest source of doctrine, and more than that, it is the norm, the rule, to which the results gained by a study of the other sources must be brought for correction or for confirmation. The three sources taken together, yielding a beautiful harmony as they do, form in combination the proof of the Christian system, a proof which grows stronger with the process of time.

It is with this general view of its relations that the present article would treat Christian experience as a source of doctrine.

At the outset of the theme, as ...