Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 28:1 (Spring 2024)
Article: Editorial: Retrieving The Past For Faithful Theological Formulation today
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

Editorial: Retrieving The Past For Faithful Theological Formulation today

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and he is the author of numerous essays and articles and the co-author with Peter Gentry of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd edition (Crossway, 2012, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015); the co-editor of Progressive Covenantalism (B&H Academic, 2016); the author of God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Crossway, 2016) and Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Zondervan, 2017); the co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ (Zondervan, 2018); and the author of The Person of Christ: An Introduction (Crossway, 2021) and Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, vol. 1 (B&H Academic, 2024).

A number of years ago, we devoted an issue of SBJT to the subject of “retrieval” for the purpose of helping today’s church to think in a more faithful way in our doing of theology. As repeated polls have demonstrated, although we have an abundance of biblical and theological resources at our disposal, the knowledge of sound theology in our churches is lacking and waning. In many ways, today’s Western church is rich in biblical and theological resources but impoverished spiritually, which is reflected in a lack of basic theological understanding. Ultimately, what is needed to remedy this situation is a greater emphasis on the faithful exposition of the “whole counsel of God” which leads to a renewal of sound theology and its application to our current context. In other words, what the church desperately needs today is more Bible and theology, not less. This is true not

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only in our local churches but also in our theological institutions, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Unfortunately, in both contexts, it seems that the trend is toward less Bible and theology, which is certainly not what we need.

Part of the solution to recovering more Bible, and specifically sound theology, is learning from our predecessors. This is the positive and constructive use of “retrieval.” One way of defining retrieval theology is the definition given by Kevin Vanhoozer: Retrieval theology is “theological discernment that looks back in order to move forward” (Biblical Authority after Babel [Brazos Press, 2016], 23). This is a helpful way of defining “retrieval” since it reminds us that we are not simply repeating the ...