Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 23:2 (Summer 2019)
Article: Will The Son Rise On A Fourth Horizon? The Heresy Of Contemporaneity Within Evangelical Biblicism And The Return Of The Hermeneutical Boomerang For Dogmatic Exegesis
Author: Matthew Barrett

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Will The Son Rise On A Fourth Horizon? The Heresy Of Contemporaneity Within Evangelical Biblicism And The Return Of The Hermeneutical Boomerang For Dogmatic Exegesis

Matthew Barrett

Matthew Barrett is Associate Professor of Christian Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, as well as executive director of Credo Magazine and host of the Credo Podcast. He is the author of Canon, Covenant, and Christology: Rethinking Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel (IVP, 2020); None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Baker, 2019); 40 Questions About Salvation (Kregel, 2018); and God’s Word Alone (Zondervan, 2016). He is the editor of The Doctrine on which the Church Stands or Falls: Justification in Biblical, Theological, Historical and Pastoral Perspective (Crossway, 2019); Reformation Theology (Crossway, 2017) and The Five Solas series (Zondervan).

Evangelical Skepticism Towards Dogmatics

Several years ago, I was a lecturer in systematic theology in the United Kingdom (UK).1 Students came from sending churches across the UK and when they graduated some accepted leadership positions within the Church of England, still others within independent churches. Prior

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to the UK, I taught theology in California, and before that in Louisville, Kentucky, only to now teach in the Midwest. It is not uncommon for a curious educator to ask, What are the major differences between the state of systematic theology in the States and the UK? My answer is always the same: systematic theology has yet to take off in the UK, at least in the way it has in the States. In many, though not all, institutions in the States, systematics is considered an essential component to theological education, but in the UK there is a conspicuous skepticism that characterizes many evangelicals, and this skepticism is manifested in how those same evangelicals fail to see the need for theological institutions, particularly ones where students are required to take classes in dogmatics.

To teach systematic theology was to invite criticism from evangelicals skeptical of its necessity in the first place, not only in the academy but in the church. One theologian warned me ahead of time that there would be push back from incoming students who had been taught in their sending churches to “suffer through all the theology bits” in order to get to what really matters: studying the Bible. That was the mentality of many students at the start of their theological education; sadly, it remained the mentality of many graduates, too entrenched in the hermeneutics of cultural Christ...