Do you think there has been a lot of polarization where systematicians aren't always very good exegetes and exegetes aren't very good systematicians? These groups are sort of suspicious of each other, and sometimes that filters into the ministry and the pulpit. Is the forest and the trees analogy useful here? You either sacrifice the trees to the forest in some systematic approaches, or you have painstaking detail on this tree and that tree, but no sense of a forest. Is that the balance we need to strike?
That's certainly part of it. I think also that the danger springs from a culture of specialization--more and more knowledge about less and less--so that a person who really is on top of the exegetical literature quite frankly just doesn't have time to be right on top of the systematic literature, and vice versa. I've some-times told students who say they want to do a Ph.D. in systematic theology, that one doctorate won't do--they'll need at least five: one or two in New Testament, at least one in Old Testament, a couple in church history, one in philosophy, and then they can do one in systematics. That's the problem--the nature of the discipline is integrative and synthetic. If instead people do systematics without any grasp of Scripture, they're likely to cut themselves off from what they confess to be their authority base, and so they're not really rigorous.
On the other hand, it has to be said that there are large numbers of New Testament scholars and writers who think so atomistically that they're ashamed to link two thoughts together. Everything has to be peculiarly narrow. If they can't find a whole system in a particular text, they don't dare link it to some other text where they might help to construct a system. Everything is atomistic.
So if we end up having suspicions of any kind of organization of Scripture, then we're going to have trouble with the analogy of Scripture interpreting Scripture--we're going to become masters of irony in Matthew or experts on the Johannine understanding of "X." But to see the Bible as a canonical unity is what is increasingly difficult these days and that affects systematic theology.
It not only affects systematic theology but is implicitly a denial without explicitly saying so; it is an implicit denial of God's authorship of Scripture. If there's one mind behind Scripture, then even after you've put in all of the explanations about the diversity of genre, vocabulary, idiolect, historical position and stance, and all the rest, there is still one mind behind Scripture. And unless that mind is schizophrenic or utterly confused or terribly fragmented, none of which presumably we want to postulate about God, then there is some sort of cohesion to Scripture, and thus a purely atomistic exegesis is in fact an implicit denial of the inspiration and authority of Scripture. That, in my view, is really frightening.
So in your estimation, Old and New Testament scholars ought to be at least good enough systematic theologians to see the unity of the canon.
Yes, absolutely. Not only does Scripture warrant you to construct some sort of system or cohesion, the system--whether you like it or not--is going to help you or hinder you in your interpretation of Scripture. In other words, the Christian who believes that Scripture teaches the deity of Christ does not have to prove that point every time he or she comes back to the text--that's part of the given; whereas a naturalist interpreter of Scripture denies that point and therefore will inevitably not see what other people see in Scripture. So your systematic theology needs to be good because--again, whether you like it or not--it is filtering your reading of Scripture. There is a sense in which Scripture shapes your systematic theology, and that is the direction in which things should ultimately go; nevertheless, your theology--how rigorously and carefully it is constructed, the baggage you bring--is your systematic. Whether it's a nicely thought through systematic or not, you bring baggage. And this helps you or hinders you in your interpretation of Scripture: the questions you put to a text, the kinds of answers you give, your knowledge of how the text has been interpreted in the past by other Christians and so on--all of these filter into how good an exegete you are. And I would want to argue that ideally, provided we still let Scripture speak and the ultimate authority base is in Scripture, responsible knowledge of historical theology and responsible knowledge of systematics will enrich our exegesis of Scripture rather than limit it.
You mentioned a sort of neo-fundamentalism on the right as a problem initially. Do you think when it comes to this question of systematic theology, there is a suspicion for different reasons both on the left and on the right of systematic theology--that the suspicion on the right is something close to what we generally refer to as biblicism, where certainly anybody who thought that just by finding a doctrine taught on the surface of a cluster of texts is the only way you could justify believing in a particular doctrine? You run into problems with the Trinity. You run into problems with the two natures of Christ. Here you have to engage in a synthetic operation where you're taking the fruit of exegesis and analyzing it in its logical connections. Do you think this is too little understood, that there are so many assumptions, such as belief in the Trinity, that are really the product of the church's reflection on the implications of what is taught in Scripture, rather than a lot of direct references?
Where systematic theology tries to bring together what is genuinely taught in Scripture to make sense of them, then you're talking about the implications of Scripture. So it is important to see that in any systematic system there are different levels of authority base grounded in Scripture. In other words, I think I should always be open to thinking afresh about how some bits can be put together, just as I should always be open to correction in exegesis. It is what Scripture says that has the final voice, rather than precisely how I've got the bits together.
There is a good analogy from computers. You want the direct line of flow to be from Scripture through biblical theology with input from historical theology to construct your systematic theology. But the fact of the matter is, there are also feedback loops--information loops that go back and reshape how you do any bit of it. Now, you don't want the loops to take over the final voice. But at the same time, those loops do shape you whether you like it or not, and therefore you need to use them intelligently.