Systematic Theology by Anthony C. Thiselton (review)

In his book Systematic Theology, Anthony Thiselton, a prominent Christian theologian and priest of the Church of England, unfolds his encyclopedic knowledge of Christian theology and deals with a wide range of theological and ecclesiological teachings in church history. Despite the very broad scope, the chapters are richly detailed and informative, and they provide helpful bibliographies for further reading and research.

In comparison to typical systematic theology textbooks, Thiselton's work looks quite concise. The reader, however, will be surprised by the virtuosic theological skill with which he handles Christian theology, from the early church fathers to the modern theologians. This compact work consists of fifteen chapters devoted to making theology fertile, not an arena for competition among inhumane theories about Christian faith and God. Due to the characterization of systematic theology as "systematic," it is often misunderstood to be a fossil—something that cannot properly explicate the living God, but stereotype God anthropologically.

Thiselton, understanding that the "system" has been treated by modern systematic theologians as a "freezing" or "abstract" production (2–28), argues that systematic theology need not be an abstract or static system divorced from life (5). The system has always been there, ever since the beginning of the church, and this book is a very systematic work undergirded by Thiselton's own system of speaking of God and doing theology well.

Thiselton argues that systematic theology as a method is just a means for truth to infuse the dryness of system with life (18–28). He clarifies that active Christian theologies must be based on act and life. In this understanding, for Thiselton, speech-act theory is the method connecting dry theory with life, "pastoral connections with doctrine" (22). Hence, Thiselton describes God's self-revelation in the Old Testament as continued in God's "action" (41), not only in the New Testament, but in church history. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is still acting for and with us. This "continuity of action" (41) makes Christian theology and therefore faith alive. For Thiselton, Christian faith is obviously practical life, due to God's always acting to love us through grace for and with us. Thus, Christian theology needs to explain "the most practical concerns and assurances that relate to practical life" (79). That is the tradition of the apostles and the church: "the witness of the Holy Spirit actualizes the Bible, apostolic tradition, and the message of the cross day by day" (100).

This Christian witness does not imply modernistic individualism, which Thiselton rejects. Rather, his theocentric notion of Christian life is communal, for "there would be no self-consciousness without community" (317). The Christian vocation is a means to "represent God to the world" and "to present those qualities that characterize God in a visible way" (140). In all his works, Thiselton points toward the church and its "marks" (321), which are one, holy, catholic, and apostolic (321). They involve total dependence on God's mystery, according to Thiselton—the divine act of God in the sacraments of the church. The sacraments are our plea as well as our church act, as we ask God "to act as a participant in" our "woe" (332). Thus, sacraments are not about theoretical disputes between the Catholics and Protestants, or even among Protestant churches, but about "implications" "in a particular context" (326). Hence, Thiselton emphasizes the foundation of the sacraments as God's "promises" (326), in which we remember that God is acting for and with us, so that we live by God's mystery as God's people and as one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.

Thiselton is aware of the limits of this book, in which some degree of simplification is inevitable. For instance, although it is evident that Jürgen Moltmann's panentheistic features dominate his whole system, Thiselton does not give an account of the theological differences between Moltmann's and Karl Barth's theology. Instead he traces Moltmann's "nihil" as the self-limitation of God...